by Avery Ford
“I know.” Hale sighed. “I’m reading, and I’m going to keep searching, but I just thought that we were on to something. It seemed like such a promising lead.”
“Don’t give in until it’s over.” Austin reached the advertisement section at the back, where townspeople paid a small fee to promote their businesses, post goods for sale, or list job openings. “If we don’t find anything, we’ll figure something else out. That’s all.”
He was about to turn the page when he stopped. One of the words on the listing had caught his eye.
Quarter.
Austin dropped the page he was about to turn and lifted the paper up, examining the listing more closely. It was short and sweet, but the more he read, the more it tripped his alarm bells.
Looking for help.
Need dependable young man for manual labor job at warehouse. Payment as discussed. Quarter down, the rest will be due swiftly. Contract terms to be negotiated.
There was no phone number or address, nor was there a name. It was the strangest listing Austin had ever seen, but when it was planted in with all the other advertisements, it blended right in. If he hadn’t been looking for something suspicious, he would have written it off as an ad by a scatterbrained individual who’d forgot to include their contact information, but the wording of the message combined with the wording from Michael’s note left him feeling like there was something more to it than what met the eye. “Hale, what did the note Michael leave say?”
“‘Grind at eight. Don’t forget. Quarter down, or they will come.’”
“Look at this.” Austin slid the newspaper across the counter to Hale and pointed out the block of text he’d just read.
Hale read the ad. When he was done, he looked up at Austin with widened eyes. “Holy shit.”
“I think that it has something to do with the note Michael left you,” Austin said. “It doesn’t say who’s posting this, or why, and it’s shady as hell.”
“What warehouse are they even talking about? There aren’t any warehouses in Hidden Creek… well, none except for the abandoned one.” Hale’s lips tightened. “Do you think that Michael might be somewhere there? It feels too coincidental for it to be a coincidence. The paper is from three weeks ago, right?”
“Yeah. Right around when you said he disappeared.”
“There’s no way that it’s a coincidence, then. Something is going on.” Hale grinned. “I can’t believe we actually found something!”
“I thought you were banking on it,” Austin said flatly. He narrowed his eyes as he scrutinized Hale. “You weren’t lying to me so you could come back here, were you?”
“Of course I wasn’t,” Hale chirped. It was impossible to tell if he was lying or not—his enthusiasm was off the charts, and his happiness drowned out any superficiality he might have playfully injected into his speech. “It’s just… it doesn’t feel real now that we’ve seen it. How could someone do that in plain sight? This is the local newspaper, you know? I’m pretty sure no one ever reads it, but… it just feels so brazen. Something’s going on in Hidden Creek, isn’t it?”
“At this point, I think you might be right.” Austin didn’t want to admit it, but Hale seemed to be onto something. Michael’s disappearance did seem awfully suspicious now they’d discovered the ad. “What do you want to do about it?”
“What anyone would do in a situation like this,” Hale said. “We’re going to go on a stakeout and check out the warehouse. If anyone’s been using it, we should be able to see signs of recent activity—and if Michael is in there, maybe we can get some answers about what the hell is going on, and why he’s dropped off the face of the earth for the last three weeks.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
“I know.” Hale beamed. “It’s because I thought of it.”
Austin rolled his eyes, but on the inside, he was laughing. If he kept his up, his abs were going to be made of steel.
For as pesty as Hale could be, he’d brought energy back into Austin’s life that hadn’t been there before, and Austin was grateful for it. He’d help Hale out to the best of his ability if it meant keeping him around a little longer. He liked the way Hale made him feel whole again.
The warehouse was just outside of Hidden Creek city limits, off I-45. The road itself looked like it had been in a fight with a jackhammer and lost. As Austin drove it, he had to dodge perilous pothole after perilous pothole. If someone else had come down here unprepared, they’d likely put their car through hell.
Austin parked before they reached the warehouse, tucking his car as best he could off-road to try to keep it out of sight from anyone heading to or from the warehouse. Hale, who looked a little too comfortable in the seat next to him, unbuckled his seatbelt and set his hand on the door handle. Before he opened it, he spoke. “You remember the plan?”
“Watch silently and wait,” Austin said. “It’s not hard.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it. Your phone is on silent?”
“Yep.”
“So is mine. Okay. I think we’re ready. You good to start our stakeout?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Then let’s go.”
They left the car together, closing the doors carefully so as not to make too much noise. There was a chance that whoever was in the warehouse had heard the car approaching, but Austin hoped that he’d parked far enough away that it wouldn’t be an issue. Besides, even if someone found his car, it wasn’t like they were staying near it. With any luck, they’d know that they’d been discovered before they were actually found, and it would give them some time to prepare for what was to come… if there was anyone here to begin with. There was still the distinct possibility that the place was empty and that the ad really was just a coincidence.
The only way they’d know for sure was through investigation.
Hale led the way, picking through the brush and forging a path through the trees. When he came to a stop, Austin came to a stop, too. Hale gestured forward, then crouched down behind a bush and started to get comfortable. In the distance, Austin saw the warehouse. It wasn’t anywhere near as frightening as he’d expected an abandoned warehouse out in the middle of nowhere to be.
The metal doors were down, and while they weren’t shiny and new, they weren’t rusted, either. The signage on the front had been stripped away, and there was a dark outline on the face of the building where it had once hung. Apart from the state of the road and the surrounding asphalt and the fact that the windows were boarded up, the warehouse looked like it could be functional, but there was nowhere else Hale could think to go, and Austin didn’t think that he was wrong about his hunch.
“I think we should go investigate,” Hale said in a quiet voice after several minutes of watching. “We’re wasting time sitting here.”
“You’re the one who wanted a stakeout,” Austin whispered back hotly. “We don’t know what’s going on in there. We just got here. The place might be crawling with mobsters, for all you know.”
“You think the mob is involved in this?”
Austin pinched the bridge of his nose. This wasn’t the place to have a conversation. “No, I don’t think the mob is involved in this, but the thing is, we’re not going to know for sure unless we give it some time. The very first thing we need to do is establish that there’s no threat to us if we get in there—that means waiting long enough that we feel confident there’s no human activity here.”
“I’m confident.”
“Well, I’m not.” Austin made a face. Hale needed to learn to be patient. “We’re going to wait here until we know for sure that there’s no threat to us. I want to help you, but I’m not going to put my ass on the line because you want to get this over with quickly. I’m not going to get shot at.”
“The fact that you think we might get shot at is troubling.”
“Why else would Michael not come home for three weeks if he wasn’t goofing off somewhere?” Austin didn’t want to think about it. H
e’d been thrilled to find the lead, but he was less than thrilled to think that they could be in actual, legitimate danger. It was his duty to make sure that those he was working with stayed safe, and he wasn’t about to let Hale run into trouble head-first.
Both of their asses could be on the line.
“We didn’t prepare for what to do if we get caught in a gunfight,” Hale murmured. He kept his voice hushed, thankfully, but Austin would have preferred that he keep his silence. If there was someone here, and they had security cameras with audio set up…
“If we get caught in a gunfight, you’d better run and pray you make it out alive. That’s about all the advice I have for you right now.” Austin looked Hale in the eyes, trying not to let himself be swayed by them. Hale touched him in a way that no one else had before, and he found himself increasingly weak against him. “Now can we please stop talking? The less noise we make, the less attention we draw our way. The less attention, the more likely it is we make it out alive if something vile is going down.”
“Got it,” Hale said with a nod. “My lips are sealed.”
“You can text me if you need to,” Austin said. “As long as your phone is on silent and is muted, then we should be fine, at least until the sun goes down and the light source gives us away.”
“You think we’re going to be out here for that long?” Hale asked, aghast.
“I don’t know. We’ll deal with that if it happens. For now, let’s zip it, okay? We’ve got a lot of waiting to do, and I’d prefer to do it without getting caught.”
Chapter Eleven
Hale
Stakeouts were five hundred times more exciting in movies than they were in real life.
It’s lucky I didn’t decide to become a spy. What a snoozefest. Not even secret codes are worth boredom like this…
The only thing that made up for what a bust the stakeout had become was the fact that Hale got to spend it with Austin. They’d decided that it was safer to stick together, so they’d taken up residence behind the same bush, and as time wore on, they’d gotten comfortable together on the forest floor. Hale was stretched out on this belly, arms folded in front of him, chin resting on his forearms, while Austin lay next to him. Every now and then, if the wind blew right, Hale picked up the scent of Austin’s cologne. It was rich and spicy, and while it wasn’t overpowering, and definitely subtle enough not to give them away, it stirred his fantasies and drew his thoughts from their tiny private space in the woods to an alternate reality where the situation between them was…
Hale bit down on his bottom lip and stole a look at Austin.
Well, it was certainly different than how things were unfolding now.
Hale imagined a different set of circumstances, namely, where Austin was actually gay and totally into redheaded twinks, and the action was much more interesting. The warehouse was still a dead-man’s land, of course, but their space behind the bush was red-hot with activity. Austin’s lips on his, one of Austin’s hands down his pants, stroking him toward orgasm, the other rooted in his hair to tug just the way Hale liked it…
His eyelids drooped, and he let a dreamy smile spread his lips. He buried it against his arm.
Fantasies weren’t hurting anyone, and if it meant relief from his boredom, then he could totally get behind it.
Or in front of it. He didn’t know how Austin liked it in bed, but Hale was up for experimentation.
For a long while, they lay behind the bush and watched while nothing happened. There was no noise apart from the birds in the trees and the insects all around them. No one came or went. As far as Hale could tell, there were no lights on in the warehouse, and he didn’t see signs that it had recently been used. They’d been at it for hours, and had nothing to show for it but bug bites, and in Hale’s case, an erection. He was about to ask Austin if he wanted to go see if they could get in through the doors, since the place was obviously deserted, when a noise distracted him, and he froze. At his side, he noticed Austin tense.
Tires crunched on the small pieces of asphalt that had broken off from the rest of the road, and the purr of a motor joined the buzzing of insects and the chirping of birds.
Someone was coming.
The car arrived moments later, moving slowly. It crawled across the paved section in front of the warehouse and came to a stop near one of the large metal loading bay doors. Hale narrowed his eyes as he watched, and he took a second to open his phone and text himself the car’s license plate number before turning off his screen.
A man with slicked-back black hair stepped out of the driver’s seat. He was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, and wouldn’t have looked suspicious at all had he not just driven up to an abandoned warehouse.
He was talking to someone.
“Get out of the goddamn car and let’s get going, okay? There’s still a lot of shit to do and the last fucking thing I need is you dragging your sorry-ass heels and prolonging the inevitable. You’d think that I’d asked you to kill the fucking Pope or something.”
The passenger side door opened, and another man stepped out. This time, it was someone he recognized.
Hale’s eyes widened.
It was Michael.
Chapter Twelve
Austin
Michael.
Austin recognized him even from a distance. Michael looked the same as ever. His short, dark brown hair framed a boxy face, and his broad shoulders stretched the soft cotton of his T-shirt. He closed the car door and stepped around it to join the black-haired man, but Austin read into his posture, and he knew Michael wasn’t happy about it.
Something really is going on here. Michael, what the hell have you gotten yourself into?
Austin turned to look at Hale, hoping to talk with him quietly to come up with a plan, but when he turned his head, he was surprised to find that Hale was already there. There was an overjoyed expression on his face, but Michael only saw it for a second, because in the next moment, Hale had latched onto him and kissed him deeply. A jolt shot through Austin, not entirely unpleasant, and brought with it a barrage of feelings.
Arousal, first and foremost. His dick twitched, and his body naturally wanted to pin Hale to the ground and kiss him back ferociously.
Behind arousal came guilt. Austin wasn’t gay, had never claimed to be gay, and had never fantasized about a man in any way. Hale was cute, but that was where it ended for him. It wasn’t like he found his eternal optimism and endless energy charming. He enjoyed spending time with Hale, but in platonic, innocent ways that had nothing to do with how his dick was now rock-hard, and his lizard brain was urging him to tug Hale’s pants off and fuck him senseless.
Then, behind the guilt, there was anger and sorrow. Anger, because he didn’t understand what his body wanted from the man who was kissing him, and sorrow because he knew that Hale wasn’t kissing him for no reason—he’d probably just excited himself over finding his missing cousin, and needed an outlet. It wasn’t like Austin was special. To Hale, he was a convenience, that was it.
When Austin reasoned that out, the sorrow grew stronger and clouded his judgment. He pushed Hale away, selfishly pinning him down under the guise that he wanted the kiss to end.
It wasn’t natural to feel this way for another man. He didn’t like it, and he didn’t want anything to do with it.
“S-Sorry,” Hale whispered. His eyes were partially lidded, and his lips were glossy from their kiss. He looked so damned cute that Austin wanted to take him by the hair, hold his head in place, and show him what a real kiss was like.
Not that he would.
It was just an urge—a totally natural sexual response to being sexually stimulated. Once he got over the initial pangs of lust, troublesome thoughts like that would fade, and life would go back to normal. At least, that’s what he was banking on. Now that they had visuals on Michael, and they knew the warehouse was in use, they had to pay more attention than ever before.
“Get inside and for the love of god, don’t complain
about it.” The man Austin didn’t recognize pointed at the door by the metal loading bay. He fitted a key inside and tugged it open. Michael said nothing as he stepped inside. The man followed and closed the door behind him. Austin heard nothing more.
“That was Michael,” Hale admitted in a tiny voice. Austin realized he was still pinning him—he rolled off and gave Hale his space. “He’s alive!”
“I don’t like the looks of the guy he was with,” Austin admitted. “He was carrying.”
“Like, a weapon?”
“Michael wasn’t comfortable being there with him, but he listened without arguing or talking back. There’s no way that some random stranger could force Michael into doing something he didn’t want to do if he wasn’t armed. Whoever Michael is with is dangerous, and after what I saw, I’m pretty sure that they’re holding him hostage or using him for something.”
“I… What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to do nothing,” Austin said. “We’ve got the information we need. We have license plate numbers—I memorized it.”
“I sent it to myself in a text,” Hale said. “But what is a license plate number going to do for us? We can’t go to the police. If the police get involved, those people, whoever they are, are going to hurt Michael.”
“I don’t want to argue about this right now, okay? This is not a good place for argument. Can we agree that, now that we know where Michael is, we need to rethink our plan and come up with a new one?”
“Yes.”
“Then what we need to do is get out of here.” Austin glanced at the warehouse and strained his ears for any sign of approaching traffic or other activity, but detected nothing. “You need to follow me quietly. Remember not to slam the car door. We’re going to try to get out of here without being caught or otherwise found out, okay? For Michael’s sake, we need them to think no one knows about this place.”
