The instant the branch cracked, the man turned.
His eyes pinged to a spot about three feet from where she was.
Shit. Oh, shit.
Instinctively she went for cover, to the tree she’d been using before, her back to it, her hands flat to the trunk, her heart in her throat.
Suddenly her lungs were like lead.
She could hardly breathe.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to hear him, but he was on the trail, not in the undergrowth like her, and the trail was mostly grass and hard mud.
He wouldn’t make any sound.
Run.
You need to run.
She looked up the slope, in the direction she’d descended. Out that way was the beach. From there, she had a quarter-mile sprint back to the car. Could she make it without being caught? What would happen even if she did? They’d know she was alive. They’d know she was –
Crack.
Her body locked.
The noise had come from the other side of the tree, from the bottom of the gully. It was him. He was looking up in her direction.
Barely ten feet from her.
‘What is it?’
He was so close, Rebekah could hear the caller again.
‘Have you found something?’
Torchlight washed across the ground immediately to Rebekah’s right. She didn’t move. She watched out of the corner of her eye as the light began to sweep from her right, across the back of the tree she was hiding behind, to her left. As it did, she saw that a tree on that side of her had split, and part of it had toppled. The man’s headtorch lingered on it, as if he was trying to figure out whether the tree had made the noise – or something else.
‘Are you there?’
‘Yeah,’ Green Eyes said softly.
‘What’s going on?’
His silence felt like it went on for hours, pictures forming in Rebekah’s head again: him creeping up the slope, her not even being aware of him, a hand coming out of the darkness and grabbing her by the throat.
‘Nothing.’
His voice was still the same distance away.
She let out another breath.
‘We’re not coming back here in the daytime.’
‘Why not?’
‘Didn’t you listen to anything I said on the way down here? This whole area is patrolled by feds. It’s a major coke route.’
‘So?’
‘So if they catch us here, it means questions.’
‘We can just lie.’
‘No, we can’t just lie. We don’t even have a permit to dock here – day or night. At least at night we got the dark. In the day, we got nothing. We can’t lie our way out of being spotted and not having a permit. And, anyway, lies mean more questions. More questions mean more cops. I already got rid of one problem for that asshole. I don’t need this thing escalating into another. Shit, why didn’t you just bury her like I told you to?’
‘It was complicated. Things went wrong. I ran out of time.’ The man sounded feeble, even to Rebekah’s ears, and must have realized it because then he came back stronger: ‘You don’t know. You weren’t there.’
‘No, I know I wasn’t. That’s the problem.’
‘Her and her brother …’
Rebekah stiffened at the mention of Johnny, anger swamping her fear. What did you do to my brother?
Did you kill him?
‘Things just went wrong,’ the man said finally. ‘That’s all.’
‘No shit.’
‘I’ll make this right,’ he said, and hung up.
Rebekah stayed exactly where she was, looking up the slope. But then she heard him, further out along the trail, clearing his throat as he walked. Eventually, she found the courage to lean out and take a look: he was so far away from her now that the darkness was swallowing him whole.
She replayed what she’d just heard.
Why didn’t you just bury her like I told you to?
Maybe he would have done if she hadn’t been at the bottom of a gully, even steeper and more inaccessible than this one. Maybe he would have done if he hadn’t been working against the clock and had Johnny to deal with.
She tried not to linger on the idea of her brother being dead. The truth had fluttered in and out of her thinking ever since she’d been left behind and had started to coalesce after she’d spent so much time searching, fruitlessly, in the forest for him. But, perhaps, there was still hope. Did the fact that she couldn’t find him mean he might still be alive? Could he, too, have escaped after they’d become separated? She’d found no body and no grave among the trees, and the man had said on the phone that things had gone wrong. Maybe Johnny really did make it out.
Reality dragged her back. If he was still alive, why couldn’t she find him? The forest was dense, and maybe a couple of miles across at its widest point, but the rest of the island was a narrow, empty husk: fifteen square miles of broken buildings. There were no hiding places. And if he’d made it off, if that was why she couldn’t find him here, why hadn’t he raised the alarm?
She shut her eyes.
Forget it and concentrate.
She tried to imagine who the second man – the caller – was. He’d said cops patrolled this area, and maybe they did, but until tonight Rebekah hadn’t seen or heard a boat in a week, so if there were patrols out on the water, they were far away. That scared her, too, because it really did mean a rescue wasn’t coming. Although there was one tiny crumb of comfort: the men were worried about being spotted on the island, even in the middle of the night. And if they were worried, it meant they wouldn’t want to stay here long.
Lies mean more questions, the caller had said. More questions mean more cops. I already got rid of one problem for that asshole. I don’t need this thing escalating into another.
She looked down into the gully again. What was the problem they’d got rid of? And who was the ‘asshole’?
Rebekah still had no idea why someone wanted her dead, but she understood why they would have chosen this place. The man with the green eyes had called the forest a maze, and he was right: it was compact, crowded, easy to get lost in and incredibly hard to navigate once you were off the trails. He’d been right about something else too: if she’d been killed, if her body really was out here, by the time anyone found it – if they ever found it – she’d probably be bones. It would be a minimum of five months before any corpse was found, most likely more when you factored in how few people were on the island, even in season. That meant insects and animals would have finished their desecration long before anyone discovered her.
Except none of that mattered because she wasn’t dead.
They just thought she was.
And, tonight, that gave her an advantage.