Beading sweat trickled down his forehead, where it collected on his brow. He spotted someone in the distance. A man dressed in a black jacket leaned up against a tree. Subtle hand gestures indicated that he was having a conversation with someone else on the other side of the tree, but it was too far to tell.
He jogged toward the man. Was it Stefan?
Now running, the branches and dirt crunching and pounding beneath his feet, he yelled, “Hey!”
The man turned his face slightly. Trevor ran faster. “Hey!”
The man disappeared behind the tree. Get back here! In his entire life and short career as a lawyer, he had never been so desperate for answers.
Just like that, the man was gone. Trevor suddenly found himself standing in front of the rocky peaks near the east beach, feet in a small babbling brook of sorts, leading a short distance into the Caribbean.
He couldn’t move. Invisible hands were wrapped around his neck and face, forcing him to look up at the rocks. Stay a while. It had no voice. It wasn’t audible, nor was in being said in his mind. It just existed. Among it, a high-pitched frequency was distant.
Stay a while.
Chapter Sixteen - Erin
She should have been weeping, but the anger was enough to prevent her from such poignancy.
Erin built up enough courage for self-torture and pulled out Trevor’s cell phone to examine the nude photos of Skye. She tried her best to pay attention to the background in which the photographs were taken. Tapping on the text conversation with Skye, she opened up the dialog that was filled with about ten pictures in a row, no words exchanged, other than winking emoticons from Skye. She highlighted one and began swiping through. The first few appeared to be in a bathroom, the glass sliding door of a shower in the background, then the corner of a mirror, then a bathroom sink. It looked very comparable to their duplex, but also similar to Skye’s place back in NYC with ordinary beige walls. After one final swipe, there was Skye, lying on her back on a bed, legs spread, hand covering between her thighs while her breasts were left exposed. She was gorgeous. No denying it. Erin’s legs shook as she continued to scroll through all of the photos. Skye’s beauty and raw sexual attraction was obvious, something Erin had always told herself she didn’t want or need for herself.
So much for having a best friend, and a boyfriend.
Skye’s stomach was flat and defined. The outline of her abs… Erin didn’t cry, she didn’t shout out in a fit of rage; she just felt empty, every single thing cleared out.
When she finally pulled her focus from the phone to check her whereabouts, there were two chairs in front of her. Up ahead was the same cross where they had found the blade.
Finding the most structurally sound chair absent of rot, she sat and looked up at the cross. She tried to find some sense of calm, but her moment was interrupted by a disturbing past memory; the one she had been dreaming about since her arrival to the island…
The warehouse. The piss. The cold air. Her breath visible. She looked up at the window frame she had gotten in through, seeing strands of light creep through the otherwise pitch-black nest for the homeless and drug users. But there were no others there, not that she knew of anyway. It was just her, her masked partner, and the pursuant.
The sound of a door creaking ignited the old empty building. The air was filled with rusted copper and stale cigarette smoke from days past. She looked to her right and could see the shining silver of a handgun. The man in the mask, Josh, had wide eyes staring at her for answers, answers that she didn’t have.
Pigeons startled them, fluttering up into the rafters, cooing continuously as if to warn them of their poor location choice. Did someone come in? We had enough distance separating us. They didn’t see us come in. She could now taste the rusted copper, the smell of urine increasing with each backpedaling step she took, deeper and deeper into the darkness, away from the moonlit window.
A footstep sounded. The grooves of a boot grasping at freed pebbles on the cement floor, sliding them across. The pursuant was near, and not giving up. Never. The silhouette of an armed person moving cautiously by the slightly illuminated portion of the warehouse sent a silvery cold to her already vibrating hands. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t believe she was in this situation to begin with. For a split second, she wondered what her masked partner was thinking. What did she hope he was thinking? Retreat? Forfeit? Attack? Surely the former.
They were moving in quicker; she could feel their presence stalking them like prey. The pigeons above fluttered again, creating a jarring reaction from the silhouette in the dark. Gun pointed skyward toward the birds, the figure was distracted, and her partner stepped forward with fearful eyes. Animalistic.
A gunshot rang out, and the figure dropped to the floor. Stripes of light revealed the lower half of the body.
Air trapped in Erin’s chest. She could not speak in time to prevent her partner from firing off another round into the defenseless person. By the time Erin could move herself out of the darkness toward the body, she knew what was already done. She was an accomplice to murder.
It was a woman. Her face had hard lines but was pretty. Her brunette hair was done back in a ponytail, a strand falling over her left eye, pupil dilated, fear transferring to acceptance. As blood expanded across the cold cement floor, her hand covering the bullet wounds to her stomach, Erin’s eyeline drifted from the woman’s face to her jacket. NYPD.
She probably has children… She does. She has children.
A hand touched her shoulder, launching her from her seat and down to the sand. She was greeted by a soft, kind-eyed woman who appeared extremely apologetic for her intrusion. “Sorry! Excuse me, dear!” The woman looked too young and attractive to call anyone dear.
She was middle-aged, tall and lean, with wrinkles under her eyes, but other than that she had a remarkable complexion, with skin that looked soft to the touch.
“I didn’t mean to startle you. Though, what did I expect?” she laughed.
“It’s okay,” Erin said while rising and dusting herself off.
“A hand to the shoulder in the middle of a remote island with a cross bearing down on you. Nice touch on my part.” She chuckled again. Even her laugh was pretty and charming. “Sorry, didn’t mean to be punny.” She radiated cool-mom vibes. The woman was looking up at the cross now. “Do you pray often?”
“Oh, I wasn’t praying. Just thinking.”
She smiled warmly while nodding understandingly. “Often the two are one and the same. Have you found your friend yet?”
“Still nothing.” How did she know about that? Moreover, who is this woman?
“That’s a shame. I’m sure there’s a good explanation for why he’s hiding out.”
“I sure hope so.”
“I’m Teresa.”
“Erin.”
Teresa caught Erin with a bewildered look on her face. Erin never was much for poker, nor being stranded on an island in the midst of an unequivocal identity crisis.
“I work here on the island. If you’re wondering…” She brushed her hair away from her face.
“Oh. Were you here before? With the previous owners?”
“Yes, I was. We were relied on more heavily then. It was basically ours.” She adjusted the slanted collar of her stained white shirt. “I look like a battered-down old farmer. I’ve been in my garden all day. You can probably smell me from there.”