Natural Selection Read online

  Connor looked at Paige for a moment, then shook his head. “Whatever. You have anything I can clean his ankle with?”

  She stomped over to her backpack and pulled out the first aid kit. As far as she was concerned, Wade could be in as much danger as they were. She handed Connor the kit and pushed Wade out of her mind.

  “So, why didn’t the trap do more damage?” she asked.

  “Look at it.” Connor jerked his head toward the trap. “The spring has been altered so it wouldn’t close completely. Otherwise, his leg or foot would have been crushed.” Connor began cleaning Alex’s ankle. “I can’t think of why they’d do that unless they wanted someone injured, but not badly.”

  Not being a trapper, she didn’t know much about traps, but even she could see where the spring had been cut short. “This doesn’t make any sense. There aren’t any animals large enough for this trap in the Caribbean. And it had to have been placed recently because there’s no rust on it.”

  “So, now they’re trapping us and hunting us?” Ty sneered.

  “You have a better explanation for this?” Paige asked.

  “I already told you what I think. We should go back to the place we were supposed to meet Wade. Maybe we could still stay in the competition.”

  “But Paige is our Team Leader,” Aleisha protested. “And she thinks it’s safer to get away.”

  “Well, if Paige is right about all this, then her being Team Leader doesn’t count. She’s only Team Leader because Wade said so.” Ty crossed his arms over his chest and glared at Paige.

  “You know, Ty, you seem to have a real hard-on about being Team Leader.” Paige had had about enough of his attitude. She didn’t really care who was Team Leader, but Ty would take everyone back to where they were supposed to meet Wade, and her gut told her that was a really bad idea.

  “How about we fight for it?”

  “What?”

  “A fight to see who should be Team Leader. This is all about survival of the fittest, isn’t it? Well, let’s see who’s really fit to be Team Leader.”

  Paige stared at him, wondering if beating the crap out of him would make him any easier to deal with. She looked at the others. Worry was etched on Aleisha’s delicate features. Paige didn’t think Aleisha wanted Ty to be the leader of anything. Nick hung back, interested but detached, still probably feeling like he didn’t have a vote. Alex gritted his teeth, trying to stay quiet while Connor bandaged his ankle. Paige could ask everyone to vote and she would probably win, but Ty would still be a problem. Besides, beating the crap out of Ty was beginning to sound better and better.

  “Name your rules,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  “OPEN HAND, SINCE YOU’RE A GIRL. No headshots, nothing below the belt, no weapons. Whoever gets both shoulders pinned first loses.”

  “Done. But don’t hold back because I’m a girl.”

  Nick and Aleisha moved next to Connor and Alex as Ty started to circle around Paige. Although she was almost as tall as Ty, he had a good fifty pounds on her. She would have to finesse her way around his strength.

  Ty lunged for Paige, and she sidestepped, her hand closing around his forearm and pulling, redirecting his momentum past her. He stumbled a couple of steps before turning around. He learned from that mistake, and his next lunge was much more controlled.

  Paige knew her best shot at pinning him was to wear him out first. Let him do all the fighting until she decided to make her move. When his eyes flicked to her hand, she knew he expected her to make the same move again. Then he’d grab her hand.

  Paige had been trained to watch her opponent for signs of what he would do next. Ty seemed to be the kind who expected his opponent to make certain moves. That was to her advantage. She could use his expectations to trip him up.

  She started the move when Ty lunged. Before he could grab her hand, she dropped into a low crouch, spinning around to catch the back of his ankles with her right leg. His feet flew up, and he landed on his back with a thud.

  Hoping to end the fight quickly, Paige jumped on top of him and tried to pin his shoulders. He lifted her body, slamming a knee into her side and sent her flying. Paige tucked and rolled with the motion, coming up on her feet.

  Ty stood and they circled each other again. He lunged a few times, and she sidestepped to the right each time. On the next lunge Paige knew he would expect her to step to the right again. He made a quick feint and then spun to his left. She stepped in the opposite direction and kicked him hard in his knee.

  He crumpled to the ground with a moan, holding a hand up to keep her at bay. She grabbed his hand with both of hers, dropped to the ground and shot her legs around his arms. With one foot in his armpit and the other against his neck, she held his foot in a lock and twisted.

  “Okay, okay!” Ty cried.

  Paige dropped his foot and stood up, turning away from him. Suddenly her head snapped back as he jerked on her braid, pulling her up against his chest, wrapping an arm around her neck.

  Nothing pissed her off more than having her hair pulled.

  “You didn’t pin me, bitch, and you aren’t going to!” His arm around her neck loosened when he grabbed her shirt, spun her around, and threw her to the ground. She fell backwards, her foot shooting up and catching him squarely in the crotch. He doubled over in pain, and she punched him on the chin. His head spun around, and he dropped to his knees, then to his side.

  Paige leaped on him, pushing him to his back; her hand found the knife she carried on the back of her belt and pressed it to his throat.

  “Hey, you’re not fighting fair.” Ty gasped for breath. “We had rules.”

  “You think this is a game?” Paige demanded, her face just inches from his. “You think these men are going to hunt us down like animals and be fair about it?” She got off him and stood up, tucking her knife into the sheath.

  “You go ahead and play by their rules, Ty. Personally, I plan on staying alive.” Paige marched over to where Alex lay with the rest of the group standing around him.

  “How bad is it?” Paige looked at Alex’s foot, swathed in bandages, elevated by a backpack.

  “Well, no foot races for a while, but I think by tomorrow I’ll be able to walk on it if I use a stick.”

  “Good. We’ll need to move on tomorrow.” Paige was relieved that Alex wasn’t going to be a baby about his foot. She knew from looking at it that it must really hurt. But she couldn’t let his pain slow them down too much.

  “Then what?” Ty asked. His voice had lost some of the belligerence she was used to hearing. “If you’re right that they’re hunting us, they aren’t going to just stop because they can’t find us.”

  “Dear God, this is a nightmare.” Aleisha’s voice trembled. She sank down next to Alex. “We’re never going to get away from them.”

  Paige glanced from Aleisha to the others. Bleak faces etched with despair stared back at her. The last thing she needed was all of them giving up hope. “We have to get off the island,” Paige said and turned to Connor. “We need to get to your plane.”

  “Or their boat,” Connor said.

  “They have a boat?”

  “When I landed with the supplies there was a motor yacht docked at the pier.”

  “So they got here by boat, and that’s how they’re planning on leaving.”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking.” Connor nodded. “I’ll need to take a look at the plane to see what they’ve done to it. I’m assuming they’ve disabled it to keep us from using it.”

  “That would make sense,” Paige agreed. “But what about the boat? Wouldn’t they think we’d try to take the boat?”

  “I’d like to think they forgot about that, but I’m betting we’ll find both of them disabled in some way.

  “Let’s hope they haven’t done any permanent damage to the plane, otherwise we’ll be building a raft to get away from here.” Paige poured herself a cup of water and paced around the edge of the clearing. Somet
hing was niggling at the back of her mind. She’d been so busy getting the group to a safer place that she hadn’t had time to stop and think.

  Obviously, the men had planned this carefully. To get a group of people on an uninhabited island and hunt them like animals. It took a sick and twisted mind to come up with something like this. Aleisha was right. It was a nightmare. For a brief moment, she wondered if it really was just part of a game show. Maybe they really weren’t in any danger at all. She glanced at Alex’s swollen, bleeding foot and shook her head. No, these men were serious. Dead serious. She’d seen people do a lot of weird stuff when she was a police officer. These men were simply doing it on a higher level. That begged the question of who the men were. She really wanted to know because when she got out of here—and she would—she wanted to track them down and make them pay. Her mind shifted into detective mode.

  What did she know about these men? They had to be wealthy to have set this up. Wealthy and indulgent. Looking for a new thrill? That was one possibility, but was there another reason? And how did they choose each of the contestants? They were all in reasonably good shape, but that was to be expected in a group of active twenty-and thirty-year-olds. Perhaps their professions?

  “Why us?” Paige looked at the group. “Each of us was approached individually for this show, right?”

  Ty frowned in thought. “Wade said he noticed me at the construction site. Said he was scouting for some people to do a new reality television show.” He shook his head. “I didn’t really question it, seemed like a good way to make some money. I don’t work much in the winter, so fifty grand comes in real handy with two kids to raise.”

  “Wade recruited me at the gym,” Paige said.

  “Yeah, Wade approached me at the gym, too,” Aleisha said. “The weird thing is that it’s the gym in my office.” She shrugged. “I didn’t really think much about it at the time. He said they were looking for attractive, athletic females for the show.” She blushed at referring to herself as attractive.

  “Where do you work?” Paige asked her.

  “Eastland Industries in Portland.” She sat up straighter, eyes wide. “In fact, Barry works for Eastland, too. We were talking on the way over here. He works in the Colombian office.” Aleisha looked at Paige. “Do you think Barry’s all right?”

  “I don’t know.” She didn’t want to think that Barry was dead, but it was possible. Hell, it was probable.

  “I was investigating a missing person who used to work at Eastland.” Paige frowned, wondering if that was a coincidence.

  Alex nodded his head quickly. “Eastland is one of our clients. Wade saw me on the loading docks getting a shipment ready and asked if I wanted to be on the show.” Alex grimaced and moved his foot to get more comfortable. “The cargo company I work for ships parts that Eastland manufactures in Colombia back to the States.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Ty raked his hand through his hair. “My wife, Ellie, was investigating the murder of an Eastland executive when she was killed.”

  “Ellie Sullivan?” Paige’s stomach tied into a knot at the sound of that name.

  “Yeah,” Ty nodded, his eyes clouded. “She was killed last year.”

  “Was it an accident?” Aleisha asked, concern shadowing her brown eyes.

  “It was on the job. She went to meet some informant about the case and they found her the next day in an alley with a bullet in her head.” Ty’s jaw tightened. “The jerk even took her St. Michael’s medal that the kids gave her for Mother’s Day.”

  “My father was working that case with her,” Paige said.

  “Samuel?” Ty asked. “I met him once, nice guy.”

  “I never met Ellie, but Dad spoke very highly of her.” Paige took a shaky breath. “He was killed two weeks after your wife.” Ty and Paige looked at each other for a moment of shared grief.

  “I didn’t know that,” Ty said. “They never found who killed Ellie. I still check about once a month, just to keep the case alive.”

  “Same with my dad. I keep going over the case, looking for a lead, but I haven’t found anything yet.”

  Everyone was silent for a few minutes while they thought about the connections they all had. Paige turned to Nick.

  “What about you? How did they hire you?”

  “There was an ad on-line.” Nick shrugged. “Said they wanted a cameraman who liked camping and hiking and roughing it. Then the application asked all kinds of unrelated questions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Lots of questions about relatives, friends, hobbies. Stuff like that. I thought it was weird, but they were offering a lot of money for this. I thought it’d just be a paid vacation.”

  “You have any friends or family who’d miss you if you disappeared?” Paige asked.

  “Well, friends, sure. No family though.”

  “Girlfriend, fiancé, wife?”

  “No one special. I see a couple of different girls, but it’s not serious.” He grinned. “In fact one of them broke up with me when I told her I’d be going away for a month this summer.”

  “What about you?” Paige asked Connor.

  Connor shrugged. “Wade found me through an ad I’d placed for my airline. That’s what he said, anyway. He offered me a lot of money for this job. I needed it to bail my airline out of the red, and I took it. Josh was one of the pilots I was going to lay off, so I brought him along as co-pilot.”

  “What about anyone who would question your disappearance?”

  “Sure. Family, friends. But they’re in Alaska. They wouldn’t even know I was missing for a while.”

  “What about you, Kevin?” Ty asked. Kevin was sitting a little apart from the rest of the group, and Paige was reminded how he’d kept himself separated since the beginning.

  “What about me?” Kevin asked.

  “How did you get recruited?” Paige asked.

  “Oh, same as everyone else.” Kevin shrugged. “Wade asked me if I wanted to do it.”

  “You have any connection with Eastland Industries?” Paige could hardly hide the impatience in her voice.

  “Not directly. I work for a delivery company, and I remember delivering to Eastland a couple of times. But I deliver to almost every place in Portland at some time.”

  “Still, it’s a connection,” Paige said.

  These men had planned carefully. Nick had no one who would raise a ruckus if he was missing. Connor and Josh were from far away, and no one knew exactly when they were expected back. All the contestants had been told to keep the entire thing a secret. By the time anyone thought something was amiss, there’d be no one to look for and nothing to find.

  Paige had a headache. She was hot. She was tired. She had a twenty-inch dirty braid hanging down her back. And she had to come up with a way to get these people off this island.

  “Let’s get some sleep. I want to be on the move early tomorrow.”

  “Where to?” Ty asked.

  “I don’t really know,” Paige admitted. “We need to find a place they aren’t likely to look for us until we can check out the condition of Connor’s plane.” Everyone looked exhausted, confused, and afraid. “Mostly, we need to stay alive until we find a way off the island.”

  “One more thing,” Connor said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You keep insisting that Wade is innocent in this.”

  “Actually, I keep insisting that we don’t know that he’s involved with these men and their plans.” Paige didn’t care for the tone Connor was using. Or what he was implying.

  “Then why was Wade the one to contact all of us?”

  “What?” The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

  “Isn’t he supposed to be the host of the TV show?” Connor asked. “That means he’s an actor. Why would he be the one recruiting all of us?”

  His constant harping on Wade being involved was starting to piss her off. Couldn’t he at least give Wade the benefit of doubt?

  “And you’re an exp
ert on how television shows are run?” Paige asked.

  “No.” Connor shook his head. “I’m just comparing it to other reality TV shows.”

  She scowled at Connor because she really didn’t have anything to say that made any sense. She didn’t want to believe Wade was involved, but she honestly couldn’t say that wasn’t just wishful thinking.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  WADE CULVER FOUND THE THREE EASTLAND executives in the front room of the house when he got back from the jungle. They were going to be pissed, but no more than he was.

  “They’re gone,” Wade said, dropping into a chair. He leaned his head back to catch the slight breeze from the ceiling fan on his face.

  “What do you mean, they’re gone?” Martin asked.

  “Just that. They weren’t where I told them to be. There was evidence that they’d made camp there, but nothing else.”

  “You think that pilot found them?” Dennis asked.

  “Of course I think the pilot found them. Why else would they leave?” Wade rubbed his forehead, trying to ease a blossoming headache. “I should have seen to nailing that board up myself, I guess.”

  “Well, I thought I had it right.” Nathan frowned. “How was I to know the nail missed the stud? Who knows that shit anyway?”

  What a useless piece of humanity, Wade thought. “No point in going over it. He got away. Evidently, he found the others and convinced them they were in danger.”

  “Did you follow their trail?” Martin asked.

  “As far as I could. At some point, they crossed a river. There was no trail for several hundred feet on either side of where they crossed.”

  The ringing of Martin’s satellite phone interrupted their conversation. “Hold that thought,” Martin said, picking up the phone.

  Wade went to the kitchen for a glass of water while Martin talked on the phone. This whole idea was beginning to be a lot more work than he’d counted on. But they were in too deep to back out now. He splashed water on his face and washed his hands. If it were up to him, he’d just get it all over with now.