“Yeah,” she said after the awkward intrusion. “Gotta go. Love you, Gret.”
“Love you, too.”
Tara hung up and, heart heavy with dread, went back to the car. Before getting in she looked up at Greta’s window one last time. It was still dark.
Nick remained silent as stone while Tara settled herself and tried to figure out what was going on. Her mind kept looping back to concern over her friend.
“Something’s wrong. There’s no light in Greta’s window. I would have thought she would look out when you honked the horn. That’s why you did that, right?”
“Did you hear the horn on the phone?”
“Huh?”
“If she was nearby you would have heard the horn honking through the phone.”
Tara thought. It was hard to separate the sounds.
“No. No, it wasn’t coming through the phone.” She looked up at Nick. “Now will you tell me what’s going on?”
The mountain man took in a deep breath and let it out as a long soft sigh. He looked more hesitant to answer her question than he had been in killing two men.
“She lied to you about where she was. She’s probably at your apartment. She knew we were heading into Lawrence a few hours before we got there. Time enough, if they were ready and good, which they are, for Hamilton and his men to set up surveillance. I’m sorry, Tara; Greta’s in on this.”
The young photographer sat in the dark of the desolate street and stared at her knees as though just staring could move the world that was closing in on her away and give her a much needed break. Eventually she started pulling herself together, thinking she now knew what it felt like to be dead. She never, ever wanted to move or do anything ever again.
Nick, however, was not at all accommodating.
“This is good news though,” he finally said. “We can use this.”
“Use this?” She looked over at him as though she didn’t recognize him. In the dark, with his wild mane of hair and bushy beard, his face was just a fuzzy outline.
“We can put Hamilton’s men--this Cirq--where we want them. That gives us an advantage. We can use that.”
She continued to stare at him as he put the car in gear, did a u-turn and headed back to the studio.
“We’ve got maybe a half hour or so to set up an ambush before his men arrive to set up their own.”
“Greta wouldn’t…I mean she’s my best friend. She wouldn’t…why would she…” Then heartbreak robbed her of the ability to speak.
All too soon they were back at the too-dark studio. When Tara looked at it, instead of seeing their life's work, a beacon of hope and promise, the place looked like a monster that wanted to eat her soul.
“I don’t know, Tara,” Nick said, picking up on her words from minute earlier as though she’d just spoken. “ We don’t know enough. But at least we know how they were able to find us. It’s possible that she’s not doing it willingly.”
Tara’s head shot up.
“She sounded stressed, like maybe she’d been crying. You think the people from Cirq are holding her hostage or something?”
“It’s possible.”
The desolation of betrayal was replaced by fear for her friend. It was a small upgrade.
“Nick…” She put her hand on his arm as he started to get out. “I…when she called me at the airport to say she wasn’t coming…she sounded stressed then. We had been looking forward to this camping trip all year. Do you think..?”
The man quirked his mouth in thought but said nothing, just continued to get out. Tara let it go and joined him on the street to lead him to the back entrance of the studio, just a little way down a narrow cobblestone alley.
“You need to think about places I can hide the car,” Nick said as he stood behind her scanning the street while Tara keyed the lock. “This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”
CHAPTER 30
They came, not with the crash of glass or the squeal of crowbar, but the simple beeping of a keypad. Well hidden up in the rafters, Nick by her side, Tara knew she was safe and was able to focus on breathing and taking note of the men and where they went. She was also, with cold comfort, bolstered by the knowledge that they had already trashed her studio so they couldn’t do any more harm to her soul.
Nick leaned in so close his breath tickled her ear and whispered so low even she could barely hear him.
“The second man…he was at the restaurant. That’s good. That means they are recycling, which means they have a limited bench.”
Tara nodded, unable to take her eyes off the men who, she was sure, had hurt her friend.
The men tore through the studio, their actions making it clear they had been there before. Finally, the first one, tall and angular with long dark hair like an 80’s rocker, spoke.
“They ain’t been here. Let’s set up. You get behind that photo machine. I’ll get behind the door. Then we wait.”
“Now, I ain’t sure. Are we just gonna shoot ‘em and get this over with, or does Hamilton still think he needs to talk to ‘em?” said the second man, shorter, with a shaved head and built like a fire hydrant.
“He wants to talk to the woman. The guy that’s with her though, Lily and Hamilton say he’s dangerous. Kill him. Take the girl if we can. They think she may know more about Mr. Hamilton’s meeting with that Mayhew guy than the other bitch did. Anyway, for all we know she had copies of stuff stashed somewhere we ain’t looked.”
“Why would she stash them? She didn’t even know what she was looking at, did she?”
“I dunno. You don’t know. No one knows what she saw or figured out. Hamilton ain’t taking any chances Paying off a government official and backing him to be the mayor of New York City ain’t something you take chances with. Now shut up.”
From their perch in the rafters Tara could see the tops of both men’s heads even after they hunkered down. She realized they’d chosen their ambush spots well. Anyone coming in through the front door or the alley entrance would not be able to see them.
Then the waiting began.
CHAPTER 31
“Fuck! I’m gonna call Hamilton; they ain’t gonna show,” 80’s Rocker said, coming out from his spot behind the door. As he moved towards the studio’s front windows he was lit by streetlamps. Tara saw he wore the same priest frock that other thugs from Cirq had worn.
She let out a sigh of relief as he pulled a phone from his pants pocket. Her right leg had long since gone numb and she was not sure if she would be able to walk on it any time soon. She was not looking forward to the pins and needles torture she was going to experience once she was able to climb out of the rafters.
“Well, hold on, what are we gonna tell him?” the other man said as he came out from behind the printer.
“That something’s not right. Sudden change in plans, then not showing? I dunno. Maybe they stopped for a fuck. Maybe the cops pulled them over. We got the other bitch; sooner or later Miles will call her again. We leave the thinking to Hamilton and Lily.”
The men came together in the middle of the studio and scanned the dark room one more time.
“That woman scares me,” the squat one said. “I’d rather deal with Hamilton any day.”
“No shit,” Rocker-man said. They exited through the alley door, Rocker-man speaking quietly into his phone. Moments later the sound of a car pulling out could be heard in the midnight silence.
Nick unwound himself from around Tara and, with his mesmerizing grace, climbed out of the rafters. He stood on Greta’s desk and put a hand up for Tara. Already missing the close warmth of his body, she reached down and let him help her.
“They’re after you,” he said, hands on hips as he stood over the wincing woman while she pounded her leg to get the pain of the returned blood flow to shut up.
“They have Greta. They’re gonna hurt her.” She couldn’t look at the man she loved at that moment. All she could think about was her easy-going, fun-loving friend being kidnapped
, threatened and possibly even tortured just to get to her.
“We can’t address that until we know what’s going on. They think you saw something, a pay off or something. This has all been about covering it up.”
Tara shook her head. She had no interest in politics and could not imagine she would been privy to a clandestine meeting. Then she stopped, the pain in her leg nearly forgotten. She looked up at Nick, her bolt-shock actions drawing his attention away from the front windows of the studio.
“She tried to tell me. She tried to point to it. Is it safe to turn on the lights?”
In response Nick stepped over to the wall and flicked a switch. Tara went over to a huge filing cabinet, rifled through the folders quickly and, when she didn’t find what she was looking for, began checking around the mess of papers and photographs strewn all over the floor.
After long minutes of searching, Tara, weary to the bone, finally stood and headed for the back door, certain she would never want to return to FullMile Photography Studio again. Nick followed her out, silent as a shadow.
They were in the car, the bullet-proof car, driving aimlessly through town for a long time before Tara could finally find the strength the speak.
“I was doing a series of photo shoots,” she said, then chuckled bitterly. “Candlelight 101 was one of them. Basically, downed planes on U.S. soil. Ghosts. Husks. Memories. Candlelight was a transport plane on its way back from delivering supplies to South American villages that were devastated by storms and local war lords. It went down on the way back…”
“Yes,” Nick interrupted her. “October 1989. Pilot and three crew members. The plane was missing for days. All aboard died. The pilot was still strapped into his seat when they finally found it. Because of where it was, it took them almost a month to get the bodies out. It was an unsanctioned flight done by civilians who didn’t care about politics or borders, just helping people that needed help.”
Tara shut her mouth.
“Not a lot of people know all that,” she said. “I didn’t until I did my research in preparation for the shoot.”
Nick shrugged, but Tara couldn’t help but feel something had changed in him in that moment.
“An early one I did, one of the series, was a downed military supply plane. Pilot error; went down near a river in upstate New York. They salvaged most of the contents, but the plane was too old and damaged for anyone to bother to retrieve it. Over the years it’s become a destination for hikers.”
Nick nodded, eyes on the road.
“I usually spend all day on a site. I get there before dawn to make sure I get every flavor of natural light that I can.” She lost herself in the love of what she did and found her strength of will returning. “For this one, Mecca-42, I was taking some wide angles and checking my light when a couple of men showed up. I guess that would have been maybe 10 o’clock. They didn’t come together. The one man, my god, it might have been Hamilton, got there ahead of the other one. I hate having people around, it disturbs the energy. So I stayed back in the brush, took the shots that I could and waited for them to leave. After they left I got back to work.”
Nick looked over at her.
“That’s it,” she answered the questioning look on his face. “That’s all. I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t care about the men, other than they were an annoyance. It’s been the best selling of the series though, and the series itself has been my most successful. That’s the one Greta was talking about on the phone when I called her from the diner.”
Nick glanced at her and nodded. She saw by his eyes he was putting the pieces together.
“The other man must have been Charles Mayhew. I read about him because he is a dark horse candidate running for mayor of New York City. Back then he hadn’t thrown his hat in.”
Nick nodded.
“Somehow someone in Mayhew’s staff, or the Cirq, saw the photos,” he mused. “If the date was on them...”
“Year and month, that’s standard.”
“But if someone…someone paranoid, dug a little deeper…”
“They might have assumed I took photos of the meeting.”
“And they really want to keep that under wraps,” Nick finished.
“But I didn’t take any pictures of the men.”
“They don’t know that. The higher the stakes the more paranoid people get. They would have to assume that you had undeveloped photos that would show collusion between Mayhew and an edgy religious movement that is making a power play for New York .”
Tara nodded.
“But there aren’t any photos with the men in them,” she repeated.
“Yeah. Trust me, warlords are warlords. It doesn’t matter if it’s a tribe with spears, a drug cartel or a cult leader. The cost of selling your soul to power is a voracious hole that can never be filled. An itched that can’t ever be scratched. A special kind of madness and paranoia comes along with that.”
Tara had no response.
When he spoke again, Nick’s voice was surprisingly warm and sympathetic.
“Your friend, Greta, she means a lot to you?”
Tara was embarrassed to admit the truth, but, for Nick, she did.
“I love my parents, and my brother, but if I had to choose, I’d choose to save Greta from a burning building first.”
Nick nodded. “I get that.”
She relaxed. The tone of his words told her he did.
“So, what’s next?”
The ex-mercenary was silent for a long time.
“First, we get Greta away from Hamilton. We have no leverage as long as she is their hostage.”
“Leverage,” Tara echoed hollowly. She felt as if she had just stepped through a doorway into a chilly alternate reality.
“It’s not good, Tara, but it’s necessary. Think of everything, everyone, as a resource. They have no value as a human, just as a tool. We need to disarm Hamilton and this Cirq cult of their tools. At this moment the only one we can get at is Greta.”
“At this moment?”
Passing under a street lamp Nick’s nearly invisible features were starkly lit and Tara could see the tight press of his lips.
“After right now comes next,” he said as if organizing, or coming to grips, with his thoughts even as he spoke. “That means going to New York.”
Tara’s breath froze in her lungs.
“You mean you want to confront the Cirq cult head on?”
“No,” the man said tersely. “If they are as powerful and well organized as you say, I wouldn’t get in the front door. I have resources in New York that I can bring to bear on the problem.”
A mad laugh was eaten in her throat. Saving their lives and the life of her best friend was a ‘problem’.
“More resources than you have now?” She swept her hand to indicate the specially-made car, and by association every other seemingly impossible thing Nick had pulled off since she’d known him.
He let out a mirthless chuckle.
“Oh yes,” he said quietly.
CHAPTER 32
The Heart's Dangerous Trek Page 12
