Thunder in paradise (part 2)

As Mike wandered the beach going into every hut, he knew to be occupied he realised that each and every one of his ‘guests’ were awake watching the storm, the news about Patricia shocking them to the core. They all went to Mikes hut to see for themselves that indeed Patricia was dead. He tried to look at their hands to see if there were traces of blood, but came up short. The only one who didn’t go to see Patricia was Lucas, the hotel liaison.

Mike wandered aimlessly, his hands held palms up at his waist. They were covered in blood. He was rambling in incohesive sentences. Sean pulled him into the thatched roof bungalow out of the rain by his upper arms. The seven of them looked like drowned rats.

‘Where’s Lucas?’ asked Carol.

‘Do you think he did it?’ asked Robbie.

‘Yea,’ they all answered and bowed their heads over the loss of their friend.

‘Well we need to find him!’ Nicola said with some urgency, ‘we need to find him and have him arrested!’

Mike continued rambling on in gibberish. Sinead moved towards him and sat him down on the bed on the side that Patricias body wasn’t visible from. She rubbed his back as he cried. She pulled him in close and stroked his hair, something her best friend from boarding school did for her. She found it helpful then and hoped Mike felt it helpful now.

‘We should split up and look for him!’ Carol suggested, the rain still pelting down, hitting the roof of the hut like bullets.

‘I agree!’ said Sean.

‘Me too!’ said Nicola. ‘If we are going to catch this guy, we need to catch him before he does anything else to any of us!’

‘Hold on a minute!’ Robbie protested, ‘how do we not know that what happened to Patricia wasn’t an isolated incident? What makes everyone think that there is going to be another victim?’

Carol piped up, ‘how do we know there’s not?’

‘All I’m saying is why don’t we all take cover and wait for the storm to pass before jumping to conclusions!’

‘I have a little girl at home!’ Carol went into Robbie’s personal space and pointed her right index finger at him and said through gritted teeth, ‘I don’t do goodbye’s, I do see you later’s, and I promised my little girl that I would see her later!’

‘Whoa, Carol!’ Robbie moved back a step, ‘we all have people we want to get back to! But we have nothing whatsoever saying that what happened to poor Patricia is going to happen to anyone else! Not a thing!’

‘So are you saying we should just stay here like sitting ducks?’

‘No, I’m saying not to jump to worst case scenarios!’

‘That’s quite enough you two!’ Sean stood between the bickering couple. ‘You both have valid arguments, but I’m going to have to side with Carole on this one Robbie.’

‘What do you have to go home to Sean,’ Robbie crossed the line, ‘a wife who loves what was his name?’ Robbie looked upwards trying to reach for Sean’s wife’s lovers name, ‘oh yeah, Gary, isn’t it?’ Sean visibly looked defeated, ‘and didn’t you tell me that your kids think you’re a loser?’

It took three of them to hold Sean back. They had never picked him to be a violent man, but Robbie really pushed him too far.

The six colleagues talked over one another, pointing fingers in faces and throwing accusations when Mike suddenly found his voice.

‘ENOUGH!!’ he screamed, tears rolling down his pale clammy cheeks. ‘The last thing any of us wants is for another to be hurt, but the fact that Lucas isn’t here can’t be by coincidence. But we’re lawyers and we work with facts and evidence! The fact is that Lucas is nowhere to be found and the evidence is laying there in a pool of her own blood!’

They all looked towards Patricia and bowed their heads.

‘We came here to build the team up, not shoot it down!’ Mike continued, ‘yes Patricia is dead, but she will not die in vain! I will catch her killer if it’s the last thing I do!’ Mike said spittle coming out of his mouth as he spoke so passionately.

‘Robbie?’

‘Yes boss!’

‘You’re the private investigator on the team, so you get to say whether or not we go looking for Lucas. But I’m promising you now, that there is only one way that kid is leaving this damned island, and that’s in a box!’

Robbie felt pushed into a corner. He was given the choice of either searching for Lucas or not but he was under Mikes thumb and knew from his tone that he wasn’t messing.

Robbie went to take the map of the island from its picture frame that was hung on the wall directly beside Patricia.

‘Excuse me love,’ he said as his foot stepped into her blood as he retrieved it, really meaning the sentiment. He took the map out of the frame and grabbed a pen and paper from the nightstand.

‘Ok,’ Robbie thought aloud, ‘ok. Well we are here where this giant arrow is pointing and I remember reading online before we left that the island is 500 meters wide and 1.5 kilometres long.’ He looked around, the whole room was hanging on his every word, so he continued, ‘it looks like the majority of the island is covered in either these trees that are very much like forest or by beach.’ He pauses and they all look at him.

‘Guys, this isn’t a big island at all! We can easily cover every inch of it if we work together!’

‘So now you’re changing your mind!’ Carol piped up.

Robbie wipes the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand and then pinched the bridge of his nose. He hated when Carol was right about something.

‘Yes! Ok!’ he looks at her dead in the eyes, ‘yes, I think we can find Lucas!’

With everyone in agreement, they split up into two groups of two and one group of three;

• Robbie, Carol and Mike
• Nicola and Sean
• Pablo and Sinead

 

Mike began to take charge, the first one everyone suspected to do the job. He turned to Pablo, ‘Do you understand what were doing?’ he asked.

‘Jes, we look for Lucas!’ Pablo nodded his head.

‘Good! Now we don’t know what were up against but like Robbie said, the island isn’t big and we can easily find Lucas if we work together as a team!’ it was another one of them locker room talks they had all begun to secretly love. ‘There is no way of communicating but I’m sure if we yell loud enough, we will be heard by the others. If you do hear a yell, high tail it to its origin because we will need all the man power possible to take the scrawny little git down!’

He got no feedback.

               ‘So are we doing this?’ he asked with gusto.

               ‘Yes Sir!’ the crew said emphatically and nodded their heads.

‘Right, well the rain is beginning to stop, so I say now is the best time possible!’

‘Jes sir,’ Pablo said with gusto. Then he started to blush when he realised that he was the only one saying it.

Mike pointed to him, ‘I like your gumption!’ and they broke off in their groups.

 

Pablo and Sinead were complete opposites of each other. Pablo was living in a hostel while he scraped some money together for a security deposit in a house share, whereas Sinead was daddy’s little princess and only wore designer clothes. She didn’t have to work, she chose to. For Pablo on the other hand, work was a necessity.

Pablo came to the country from Ecuador seven months ago and has been with the firm since they got the new office / converted house, six months ago. Mike saw the need to hire a cleaner when they moved to the bigger place and was so impressed with the young man’s work ethic that he asked him if he would be an office assistant as well as his cleaning gig. Pablo jumped at the chance. His English was appalling but the whole practice helped him out on that.

Pablo was gunning for a cigarette, but he had been off them for six months now and didn’t want to tarnish that personal best. He gave them up before but could only hold out for only a couple of months at a time. Since he started with the practice, he decided that he would give them up as all of his money was going on them as they were much more expensive in Ireland than Ecuador.

Sinead started at the firm the very first day Pablo did and they didn’t need English to communicate…they had chemistry.

They had been volunteering to stay late every chance they got so they could hook up. Pablo had that Latin charm that Sinead really loved. He was able to make her feel things she never thought to be possible. He was two years younger than her, but had obviously a lot of experience in the bedroom. The only catch was that he lived in a hostel so she couldn’t spend the night at his, and he couldn’t spend the night at hers because her room mate was her sister who would have tattled to daddy had she found a Latin stranger bringing ecstasy to her sister on a regular basis. They were between a rock and a hard place.

‘I admit, I uh happy to match you!’ Pablo said and Sinead blushed. He caught a stray piece of her hair and wrapped it around her ear. She touched his arm.

‘We alone!’ he smiled that charming smile that Sinead couldn’t help but kiss. One kiss led to another which led to them abandoning their team and having sex against a tree covered from the rain by a canopy of leaves. Pablo put a hand over Sinead’s mouth as she began to climax because they weren’t ready for a relationship, they just wanted a workplace fling, and Pablo couldn’t run the risk of the others hearing her scream out and come rushing to find them entangled in each other.

When they were finished, just as Pablo was fixing his pants, they heard a real scream sending Pablo running to the origin, Sinead following closely behind him.

As soon as Pablo caught up to Nicola, who had let out the scream as she mistook the body of a dead antelope that’s species was being protected on the island, for a real body.

Pablo looked behind him but there was no Sinead. There was however another crack of lightning and the rain began to hit the foliage above them like bullets. It was like they were in combat in Iraq, the raindrops so heavy and frequent.

The ground was slippery and full of exposed tree roots. Sinead caught her foot in one of them and an unmerciful crack from the bone of her ankle coincided with the lightning, her screams muffled by the boom of the thunder.

She looked up, tears falling from her pericline cheeks, her blonde hair stuck to her head from the heat.

‘Oh thank God!’ she said and smiled up at her rescuer, but instead of untangling the mangled ankle from the tree root, she saw a shiny silver object glisten like diamonds in the light. She gasped.

‘Did you kill Patricia?’

She knew her fate there and then…it was her time to die.

She let out a moan as the blade penetrated her abdomen and screamed as it was twisted inside of her, but no one heard because of the storm. She looked into her killers eyes and said, ‘I never thought it would be you!’ Before the life expired from hers.

 

Pablo looked around as Mike, Carol and Robbie joined the gang. Mike went over to the animal and confirmed that it was in fact dead. Robbie joined him and said it looked like it had been stabbed.

‘Where Sinead?’ Pablo called out.

‘Sinead! Sinead!’ the group all looked at each other and followed Pablo’s lead.

They asked him from which direction had he come but he was unsure.

‘All same, everything same!’ Panic was in his voice. His ears were ringing. He tried to retrace his steps from where he had left her but was unable to gather his bearings. He began speaking quickly in Spanish to himself. No one knew what he was saying, but could make out that he was trying to retrace his steps.

Once he saw the one tree that he had almost made contact with, he pointed in that direction and everyone followed.

‘Sinead! Sinead!’ they repeated over and over until they found her laying in a cluster of overgrown tree roots, the knife still in her stomach.

Carol took one look at her and moved away to vomit. Sean went over to her and rubbed her back. Everyone else looked to Pablo who was crying and speaking in Spanish again, but more quickly this time. He had his hands on top of his head pulling at tufts of hair.

Mike took him to one side and asked him what had happened.

‘I go and Sinead,’ Mike nodded and let Pablo continue, ‘I hear scream. I run Sinead uh….’ He clicked his fingers as he was trying to find the right English word for the Spanish one, he was trying to say, ‘…. follow! Sinead follows!’ Mike urged him to continue. ‘I look and uh Sinead gone! Poof! Gone!’ He began to cry and Mike tried to comfort him but Pablo wouldn’t let him.

‘My fault!’ he said over and over, ‘My fault!’

Carol started to have a conniption, ‘I want off of this death trap immediately! I have a little girl, she needs her mother!’

‘You only want off the island because you did it!’ Robbie piped up again.

‘You think I……’ she held her hands close to her chest, ‘…. I could never! I was with you the whole time anyway genius!’

‘Ah but we took different routes to the scream!’ he pointed out.

‘What happened to Lucas doing it?’ she asked. ‘After all he still isn’t here!’

‘All the finger points to yo….’

‘STOP IT!!! Mike bellowed, I’ve had enough of the bickering between you two. I want you to stay in separate corners until we figure this out before one of you says something they can’t take back!’

Carol was grateful to Mike as she was about to say something she was going to regret.

The six of them took on the gargantuan task of untangling Sinead from the tree branch. It had cleanly broken both her tibia and fibula. Between the six of them they were able to carry her back to camp, the rain pelting down on them as they left the shelter of the trees.

They lay her down on the Posturepedic bed and closed her eyes!

And then there were six!!