He came in like a cannonball blur of blue and green, erupting off a low ridge just in front of the group and slamming bodily into Mr. Hamilton, knocking him down like snapped bamboo. With a thick smack Nick’s body stopped as he slammed into the human meat mass that had been handling Tara.
Tara thought she heard something snap as the big man toppled backwards. Nick landed deft and catlike on his feet in a low squat. Tara, already halfway to her knees, got a good look into his green eyes.
Goosebumps trilled up and down her spine. The feral killing rage in them was more terrifying than the pseudo-priests with guns.
Then Nick was springing back up, launching himself towards the gaunt man who was just beginning to bring his semi-automatic gun around.
The mountain man pressed in close, got under the gunman’s arms and, too quickly for Tara to track, was behind him, his arms twined around the skinny arms and neck.
Nick gave a short, powerful spasm-like jerk. Tara heard a sharp ‘Pop’, then the gunman, the most dangerous of the men kidnapping her, slid bonelessly down to the ground.
Tara collapsed onto her side, unable to process that she had just witnessed a callously cold, brutal murder.
Nick, standing before her, letting the lifeless body drop to the ground, seemed unaffected. Instead, his eyes darted to the priest he’d knocked over. The man was struggling to his feet. Gun, amazingly, still in hand.
Tara waited for Nick to tell the man to stand down, to threaten him somehow.
The words never came.
Nick rushed the much thicker, heavier man as he got to his knees. The two men slammed against one another, an immovable force against an unstoppable object. They grappled a moment, then the priest got Nick in a bear hug and squeezed.
The mountain man let out a cursing gasp of pain and suddenly Tara realized the snapping sound she’d heard earlier must have been one of Nick’s ribs cracking as he’d tackled the larger man.
Acting on impulse, with no weapons at hand and no training for fighting, Tara did the only thing she could think of--she darted behind the priest and went down on all fours.
She never knew if Nick saw her, or if it was just happy accident, but a moment later the man was toppling over her landing hard on his back, the jarring change in angle allowing Nick to struggle free and roll, panther-smooth to his feet while the priest struggled like a turtle on its back for just a moment.
The struggling stopped immediately when the mountain man stepped quickly in and pressed his booted foot onto the man’s throat.
The thuggish man looked balefully up at Nick, then opened his mouth to say something. The words were never allowed to out.
Without pause or warning Nick shifted his weight onto the downed man’s throat. Tara heard the faintest of snaps, like a twig. Then she heard gasping, gurgling sounds that made her skin crawl and her stomach turn. She looked away, cringing as she heard the sounds of a large body begin to struggle and flop about.
She began crying when there were no more sounds at all.
The priest’s cold-eyed killer pivoted away from the dead man and stepped over to her. With a hiss of pain he knelt down and, lifting her from her under her elbows, brought the shivering weeping woman to her feet.
“Their leader ran off,” he said, his body draped over her like a shield of muscle. “You’re okay now.”
Still half-crumpled and weeping, Tara didn’t resist, and, in fact, hardly noticed as Nick guided her gently towards the treeline.
She had just barely finished crying when the sounds of a helicopter lifting off became audible. Nick pressed them back further into the foliage as the flying machine came into sight, hovered for a moment, then moved away.
“You’re safe.”
Tara let out a mad giggle. She’d been kidnapped at gunpoint by mad priests to be used as bait to lure Nick out. Then her life had been saved by the same man, but at the cost of two others. She didn’t think she would ever feel safe again.
“Y-you killed two men with your bare hands,” she finally said, unable to uncurl herself, shivering at the memory of the unadulterated bloodlust in his eyes.
“Says the woman who used a trick from ‘The Three Stooges’ to save my life.”
“Little Rascals,” Tara said wiping her nose and finally finding the spirit to right herself.
“Pardon?”
“I saw it on an episode of ‘The Little Rascals’, not ‘The Three Stooges’.”
“I stand corrected.”
Tara looked up at the man. He seemed entirely normal…for him. The same man she’d seen sitting serenely by a lake only 24 hours earlier.
“Y-you’ve killed people before,” she finally said.
He pressed his lips tightly together and scanned the treeline a long time before answering.
“Yes.”
The flat tone of his voice reassured her in an odd way. It was clearly not something he relished or took lightly.
“A lot,” she managed to continue, the words coming out breathy. “No one can do that so….easily… if they hadn’t done it a lot.”
She felt him stiffen. He pushed her away.
“I did what I had to do. Life isn’t complicated. People make it look complicated because they think it’s actually easier than doing the hard things. You are a good person. They weren’t. They were going to toss you out of the helicopter whether they got me or not. It would look like you fell while hiking.”
Tara was torn. Part of her wanted to be close to the man who had saved her life--twice--while risking his own, but at the same time she saw he was consumed with a fearsome darkness. The annoying arrogance he displayed before seemed like a child’s mask.
“Why were they after you?”
He continued scanning the skies for a long moment before answering.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. But the problem with dealing with leaders of groups--mafia, gangs, militia, warlords, whatever--is ego. It gets the better of the leaders most of the time, and they will throw resources, bodies, lives, money at a problem just to win. If they have a lot of those, then they will keep throwing them.”
“So, you’re saying you think they will send more men after you?”
“Yes.”
“Who were those men? How did you know they were going to throw….” Tara found she couldn’t finish the sentence for how horrible the image was.
“I heard the leader…Hamilton…on the radio.”
“But…you must have been very close by, and….”
“And speak Croatian? Yes. Fluently. And yes I was very close by.” He looked down at her, said nothing, then looked out at the wilderness again.
Tara wanted to sit down. She wanted to rest. She wanted none of this to have ever happened. She wanted to think of Nick as just a grouchy mountain man recluse that happened to have a great butt.
But the one thing she found she didn’t want was to be away from him.
“What next?” she finally asked.
“We get you off the mountain. To them you’re just bait. You’re not part of whatever game they’re playing unless you’re connected to me. We will get you off the mountain, get you away from me. Let you disappear back into the world. Not only would they not care about you, they couldn’t even find you if they did.”
Tara saw a flaw in the logic, a big niggling flaw, but getting off the mountain, down into civilization seemed like such a wonderful idea that she didn’t bother mentioning it. At least not then.
They stood like that, under cover of trees for a long time while Tara regained her physical, mental and emotional strength. Nick seemed to sense it and gently pressed her away.
“Stay here. I have to take care of something. You may want to head into the woods a bit deeper. When I am done we will head down to Warrenton. It’s a decent-sized town, lots of tourist trade. We’ll get things worked out from there.”
Nick, sure-footed as a mountain goat, went back down to the trail where the two dead bodies lay cooling in the mid-afterno
on sun. When he began stripping them Tara had to look away. She looked back again when she smelled smoke and saw that he had gathered the clothes and belongings up in a small pile to burn. He stayed near the melted stinky mass until he was sure the fire was out, then headed back up to her.
“I want to make it as quick and easy as possible for the animals around here to dispose of the bodies for us. In a day or two it will be almost impossible to identify them. It’ll probably be weeks, maybe even months, before anyone even comes this way.”
“Won’t the other guys….”
Nick cut her off with a sharp shake of his head.
“They had the trapping of some kind of religion, but I would say, given their actions, they were more like a cult. I don’t know a lot about stuff like that, but I don’t think they mourn their dead. They celebrate them as fallen martyrs and come back even harder in their honor. The good news is they wanted to kill me anyway, so nothing has really changed.”
Tara let out a macabre laugh.
“Come on.” He brushed past her, moving smooth as a shadow through the light undergrowth. Tara, even fully clothed and with reasonable footwear, was hard pressed to keep up.
CHAPTER 12
“...his U’s were too short, and he didn’t fully pronounce his R’s.”
Tara was shaking her head as they tromped down a narrow path.
“But…how could you tell that? You only heard him yelling, and what has that got to do with…anything?”
He stopped abruptly; so abruptly, in fact, that she ran into him. She didn’t mind as much as she thought she might have. He turned and listened to the woods; then, without comment, continued on.
“I was next to the cabin for most of the time.”
“Y-you were? But they had that guy on guard...” She was quiet for a moment, thinking. “He was right; it would have been dumb to attack when they were in the cabin. I guess you are good at a lot of things, but not real good at throwing rocks.”
“I catch some of my meals by throwing rocks,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Then how come you missed with that first one. It went right in between me and that horrible man.”
“Marko.”
She nodded, thinking it strange that he not only knew the man’s name, but made a point of speaking it.
“Yeah. If you were such a good aim why didn’t you just plunk him?”
They came to a trickling of a waterfall and neither spoke as he helped her across. Once they were on the other side she bent down and dusted mud off his jeans, briefly reliving the thought of him in her mouth. When she rose her face was flushed.
“If I’d ‘plunked’ him, they would have begun firing indiscriminately in my direction and would have stayed in a line. I made him back away. They were not feeling as threatened so they didn’t have the knee jerk reaction to shoot. It gave me time to move position and throw another stone at the leaders.”
“Which didn’t do any good,” she pointed out.
“Except it made them circle up.”
Tara stopped as her mind made an intuitive leap.
“It forced them into a circle so when you attacked you got all three of them at once,” she said in a breathless gasp of understanding.
He stopped, looked back and smiled. Tara thought for a moment, that, perhaps…if the man shaved off the god-awful beard and smiled more, he might be reasonably handsome.
“Tara Miles, you may not know much about wood-skills, but you are a quick learner,” he said; t
hen, at double pace, continued on.
CHAPTER 13
Nick insisted they stay on the large outcrop of rock for almost an hour as he scanned the town below.
“Nick, please, there’s nothing unusual going on. We’re on the shadowy side of the mountain, it’s already cold. Can we PLEASE head down into town. There has to be somebody who will give us a room for the night there…somewhere.” Tara found her eyes longingly looking down at the four -story hotel in the center of town.
The man had reverted to his mute, stony silence as soon as they had cleared the treeline. It was as if she ceased to exist for him as he began carefully surveying the town.
“They are going to assume one of two things. That we headed here where we’d be more comfortable and could get out of the area more easily, or that we went deep into the woods. Which would you assume if you were them?”
Tara barely had to think about it.
“They would assume you’d stay in the woods. You have the upper hand there. “
Nick looked back at where the exhausted woman sat. The march down had taken a lot out of her. Truth be told, he had been more than a little surprised and impressed she had held up so well. Not only that, she had not complained once.
“I agree,” he said curtly.
Tara could only manage a weak smile and, with a groan, got to her feet. Nick didn’t move.
“So…we are going down, right? It’s just a sleepy little town. Too late in the season for summer campers and hikers, too early for snow bunnies.”
“Yes.”
“So we can head down?”
“In a minute.”
Tara was sure that Nick’s minutes were by no means 60 seconds.
“Why are we waiting then?”
“Because,” he said, his voice giving her chills, “sometimes I’m wrong.”
CHAPTER 14
The waitress did a double-take as the disheveled couple pushed through the door of Edna’s Diner. They stood for a moment surveying the nearly-empty eatery as the sound of the little bell above the door faded away.
Tara was immediately self- conscious of how they must look. Nick especially.
Then the waitress broke into a huge smile.
“Nick!” she practically yelled. “Good to see you! You’ve cleaned up some!”
Tara gagged on a woof of disbelief as the woman rushed forward. For a moment the shocked photographer thought it was to hug the burly man, but, eyeing Tara, the woman stopped short and stuck out a hand for a very warm shake.
“Cleaned up some?” Tara said quietly. She felt, rather than actually saw, the mountain man smile.
“Hi, Lonnie. Yeah…you know me. A haircut and a trim once a year whether I need it or not.”
The waitress, Lonnie, smiled again then turned her attention to Tara.
“Welcome to Edna’s Diner, sweetie. Washroom is around the side. I’ll get you some towels. If you’ve been on a tromp with this one you’ll need a little freshening up.”
Tara knew right off the kindness was sincere and nodded gratefully. She watched the tall, full- figured-but-healthy woman stroll away, noting a sway to her hips that would magnetize any man’s eye.
“I’m thinking you've been here before,” Tara muttered.
“I need breaks from my break,” Nick replied and Tara noticed, bristling a little, that Nick was no different from other men when it came to Lonnie’s backside. “I’ll take a booth in the back and we’ll talk while we eat. I have to make a phone call,” he finished.
The Heart's Dangerous Trek Page 5
