Page 98 of Convict's Game
My mind spun. I recognised the name. Richard Yelland was a Deadwater businessman who had occasionally attended events I’d been to with my grandparents.
“Man in his sixties, bad teeth, stinks of cigars?”
Her shoulders rose and fell. “I’m so ashamed. Fuck you for making me feel it all again tonight. Are we done?”
I nodded, and Becky stormed away. I didn’t follow, for a moment, standing with my thoughts in the desolated retail estate where shadows wrapped around the edges, all the other businesses dark. It was a dead end. Men like Yelland would keep secrets to avoid implicating themselves.
The cold crept in around me. All of a sudden, I felt vulnerable, though Manny was close and the cars only twenty feet away. The hair on the back of my neck rose, and I peered around, searching the gloom beyond the Burger Barn’s slices of light. A litter-strewn hedgerow, a couple of cars and pushbikes further away on the expanse of tarmac. Nothing obviously wrong to explain my intuition.
Something shifted in the dark. Not a sound, not a shape, just a presence. Like the night itself had taken interest in me.
“Mila, call for you.” Manny approached and handed over his phone.
I raised it to my ear. If mine had rung, I hadn’t noticed.
“Don’t leave me,” Convict said down the line.
I turned away and clutched the phone tighter. “I’m not.”
“I’m on my way back. We’ll be there as fast as we can. Just hear me out. Let me make it up to you. I promise to be better.”
A faint noise reached me. A chill slid down my spine. The yellow patches of light from the restaurant cut out, plunging us into darkness.
“Mila,” Convict said again.
“I’m here. It’s just… Something’s off. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Get back in the car. Please, listen to me.”
A scream stopped my chance of a response.
From the shadows, a figure lurched and ran full pelt at me.
I didn’t spot the knife they threw until pain bloomed and blood flowed.
Chapter 33
Convict
A woman’s howl of anger came down the phone line, and Mila cried out in fear.
My heart stopped beating. “Mila? What just happened?”
“I’ll kill you for what you did to my Esther,” the other woman screamed. “You were supposed to be her golden ticket but you screwed her over, and now she’s dead. It’s all your fault. You deserve to die with her.”
A clatter sounded followed by the stranger yowling out like a deranged cat.
“Put your fucking foot down,” I ordered Arran and stabbed the call onto loudspeaker.
He slammed on the accelerator so we bombed into the dark night along the coastal road towards Deadwater. “What’s going on?”
“No clue. Mila, can you hear me?”
Gasps and wrestling made it down the line, then Manny’s voice returned. “Mila’s safe. I’ve put her back in the car and the threat has been neutralised by Tyler.”
“What threat? Who was it?”
“Where the fuck is my wife?” Arran snarled over the top of my words.
