Page 55 of Not Quite Dead Yet

She hooked her arm through Billy’s, dragged him away.

‘We were looking at the wrong street,’ she hissed, heading for the exit. ‘Maybe Andr– th-the killer turned the phone off, then headed down North toward the construction site. Didn’t continue along River like we thought.’

‘You think itisAndrew, then?’

‘Well, he’s connected to that location.’ Jet glanced back at the man, sitting in shadows, seeing off his glass of whiskey. ‘Probably doesn’t know we have the phone data, that we can see it was turned off there, the idiot.’

‘And if it’s not Andrew?’

Jet gave Billy his arm back. ‘If it’s not Andrew, if someone else killed me, then maybe it’s not about the killer’s connection to that site. Maybe it’s aboutmine.’

Billy stopped by the door, a glint in his eye as he paused to ask: ‘To North Street?’

‘To fucking North Street,’ she answered.

13

Here it was. Fucking North Street.

The road stopped abruptly in front of them, choked up with vans, some white, some branded with theMason Constructionlogo. A low growl of heavy machinery, shaking the ground and Jet’s truck with it, as a yellow digger rolled up the hill toward all that mud. A rickety wire gate pushed off to the side, two signs attached to it:CAUTION: Construction AreaandDANGER: Hard Hat Area.

They couldn’t get any closer than this, parking behind a tree less than fifty feet away from her phone’s last known location. Jet cut the engine and the truck sighed as she stepped out, Billy on the other side. The sound of their slamming doors was lost in the uproar of clanging metal.

Jet picked their way through the vans and sleeping machinery, heading toward the site, through the open gate.

‘There used to be two houses up here?’ Jet asked Billy, eyes ahead.

‘Apparently.’

Now it was just a field of mud and men in silly yellow hats.

They moved past a cement mixer, spinning and churning, being fed by the spadeful, one man doing all the work, another just watching.

‘This must be Luke’s big project,’ Billy said, scanning the chaos, avoiding a track of the sloppiest mud. ‘Sophia was telling me about it at the fair. His first project that’s all him, not your dad. That’s why he’s so stressed about it, needs it to go well.’

Jet shrugged. ‘Luke’s always stressed.’ The same thing she’d said to Sophia at the fair, shrugging her off too.

‘Well, this one’s important, Sophia said. Apparently, construction was already delayed a while back, a floor collapsed or something, so Luke had to change his plans. Decided to demolish, start again. I guess combining it with the lot next door. I get the impression that this is his baby.’

Jet wrinkled her nose; it didn’t look like much. An outline of wooden trenches carved out of the mud, buttressed by planks. The new foundations. Fucking hell, Luke, this was going to be a stupidly big house, look at the size of that. Most of it was just an empty track right now, only one small section at the front filled with concrete. Looked like they were getting ready to fill the rest.

‘Maybe that’s why he was being extra assholey at the fair,’ Jet said.

‘Yeah, Sophia said he was nervous because they were starting on the foundations – no going back now.’

‘And yet, according to Andrew Smith, Dad isn’t even going to let Luke have the company.’

Billy chewed his lip. ‘Well, I don’t think Luke knows that.’

No, he definitely didn’t. And it probably wasn’t even true.

‘Hey!’ a voice cut through all the noise. Uh oh, they’d been spotted.

A man was hurrying toward them, in a neon jacket that clashed with his hard hat, waving his arms. It wasn’t a hello, but Jet made it one, waving back with a grin.

‘What are you doing here?’ the man yelled, catching up to them. ‘You can’t be here. This is a construction area.’

‘Yeah, I saw the signs,’ Jet told him.

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