The sounds of Cole’s screams were muffled against the rag that Jez had forced inside his mouth. The tape that had been wrapped across his face and around the back of his head pulled at his hair. No amount of struggling could free his hands that were bound behind his back, because he was lying on top of them inside the wooden box.
Jez had been sick enough to tell Cole the details of how his brother had met his death out in Spain. He’d been a cheeky bastard with the wrong person and it had resulted in him taking a beating. Jez had said that he’d tried to stop the guy from doing it, but it was too late so he’d had to get rid of the body. It wasn’t personal, it wasn’t planned. It had just happened. But then twenty years later, Cole had come along and stolen a substantial amount of Jez’s money.
‘It’s funny when you think about it, really. Such a small world. You come out to find your brother, start working for me and decide that you want to take my cash to hire a private investigator to find out what happened to him, when the whole time you were working for the guy who did it. Well, the guy who helped get rid of him. I told you I’d find you, Cole. I always achieve my goals,’ Jez had said as he’d dug out the grave for Cole. ‘You know the thing that gets me the most, Woods? It’s not the money. It’s the ring. Why did you take it? What possible need would you have with a dead woman’s ring? To pawn it for money? I tell you, it’s a good thing I got it back, otherwise your death wouldn’t be so fucking kind.’
Tears streamed down the sides of Cole’s face as he listened to the grit and soil thundering down on top of his coffin. There was no point in fighting, no point in hoping. This was it. He was going to die at the hands of the same man who killed his brother twenty years ago.
He’d been inside the box for what felt like an eternity. He was tired, sore and broken, barely able to breathe. The sound of soil packing him deep into the ground stopped after a while.
Maybe this was karma for all the things Cole had done over the years. The drugs he’d dealt, the deaths, the blackmail. Maybe this was his punishment for those crimes.
Cole closed his eyes and slowed his breathing. If he was going to die like this, then he wanted it to feel like he was falling asleep. But it didn’t matter what he thought, how he tried to calm himself.
Cole Woods couldn’t stop himself from screaming his way into death.