Page 63 of Not This Place

"Confirmation?"

"Negative. Waiting for visual."

"Stay down, Rae. Don't engage."

"Negative."

An army of lawyers. Infinite resources… But he’d come out into the woods. He’d had his shot. Now it was her turn.

She lowered the radio, hooking it back onto her belt. And then she began to move, keeping low, quiet, sticking to the shadows, her eyes never leaving the ridge.

He was up there… she just needed to find where.

***

Lazarus, he called himself. A man who'd returned from the dead.

As he crouched in the dark, on the ridge line, his fingers massaged his neck, touching the ridges where he’d once been bled…

They'd left him to die. He could remember that night nearly thirty years ago.

The cold edge of a blade against his throat, the wet trickle of his life draining out onto an unfeeling concrete. He'd been in the wrong alley, caught by the wrong men. Vicious men who dealt not in law but power. Two sharp words had slipped from their mouths, "Sherlock Hargreaves". His name, a sentence in itself. Then they'd left him in the filth and shadows.

They’d known who he was. They’d been sent, he’d found later, by a small business rival.

His pulse had echoed, slow and deadly, in his ears. The world around him fading to black as he fought against the darkness. Then silence. Nothingness…

But death hadn't claimed Sherlock Hargreaves that night. He'd clawed his way back from the precipice of the void, fueled by rage, thirst for vengeance, and a resolve stronger than steel. He’d survived.

And it had taught him the law of the jungle.

Power was the only real currency.

Power and loyalty.

And the disloyal?

They paid the price in blood.

He scowled towards the darkness below, searching for movement, for motion.

And then he spotted it. A shift of a figure in the dark, darting from one tree to the next.

He lowered his rifle, exhaling. He’d hunted in African Safaris. He’d hunted big game.

He knew how to pull a trigger when the time was right.

He waited, watching the figure through his lens.

Who was it?

Simon?

No… no, the flash of a thin figure darted from tree cover, taking shelter under the ridge-line.

It was that damn ranger.

He’d looked into Rachel Blackwood.

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