“Your Worthy? What the fuck, man. What have you been doing over there in the woods?”
“Shut the fuck up, Obediah. This is personal, not business. I need to find him, and I need him to be okay. Don’t give me shit or I’ll do it on my own.”
“Whoa, whoa, man! Slow your roll. You’re seriously pulling out my real name? Well, damn. Sorry, dude. I didn’t mean nothing, you know that. I didn’t realize you’re serious about this guy. I’m there in thirty, and we’ll track him down. Anything else?”
“Yeah, I’m taking care of this shit once and for all. We’re gonna find the fucker who hired these assholes and take him out. This ends now.”
“Okay, brother. I’ll see you in a few.”
I didn’t respond, just hung up and turned on the flashlight on my phone so I could get back to the cabin. I needed a shower and pain killers. This was going to be a long night.
* * *
Os gotto the cabin in record time. With his tracking experience, we followed their trail through the woods in the dark to a fire lane at the far edge of my land. I had hoped they would still be there, but it was a false hope. My blood boiled when I saw evidence of a struggle half way there. One of Worthy’s sneakers was on the ground, and Os found some blood drops on a couple of leaves and branches the rest of the way. I swore to every deity in the world, that if they’d hurt him, they would pray for death when I get them in my hands.
When we found where they had been camped, from the trash in the area, we could tell there were two of them. They’d been staking out the place for a while by the amount of garbage they’d left. My mind went back to the day I’d seen movement in the woods and passed it off as just a deer. I had felt uneasy but had been sure my place was secure. Now I knew it wasn’t.
I had no idea how they’d found me, but I’d make them talk. That was my fucking job, and I was good at it. I had several wildlife cameras in the area so I checked the recording from the one down the lane from where they’d camped. The recording didn’t go back but a few days, so I had no idea when they’d arrived, but I did finally find them leaving that afternoon. I couldn’t see the men, but I did see the car. They were in a black SUV with Nevada tags.
Got you!
“So we need to trace the tags and see if they’ve shown up on any surveillance cameras near here, right?”
Os was the best man I knew when you needed to find someone. He could track you in the woods, on the water, or on the web. Growing up in the Western North Carolina mountains helped with the woods and water, going to MIT helped with the technical abilities.
“Yeah, do that, but I also want you to trace this.”
I had gone into my bedroom and came back with a notebook in my hand. Opening it up to the appropriate page, I gave him the information I had recorded. He entered the code quickly, then as it dawned on him what it was, he stopped typing, turned on me.
“You did not!”
“I most certainly did.”
“Does he know?”
“Of course he doesn’t know.”
“How could he not know?”
I smirked at him.
“Because I’m fucking good at what I do. What’s one more cut when you have a body full of scrapes, cuts, and bruises.”
Os shook his head, smiling a goofy grin through his full red beard.
“Can’t believe you microchipped him, brother. That is next level shit right there. You gonna tell him?”
“Hell no, I’m not telling him. Don’t you dare tell him either.”
Os just shook his head. When he finally hooked into the signal, we were able to see they were moving south on I-5. His heart-rate was steady, and his vitals were good. He was okay and not being hurt. I had to hope that if they were hired to kidnap him, they wouldn’t hurt him too bad until they got the information they needed. I was still anxious to get to him, but I calmed a little knowing that if they were traveling in the SUV, and his vitals were stable, they weren’t be hurting him. It was time to move.
“Os, can you call Eagle and see if he’s available? I think he’s in Seattle this week, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he was yesterday for that press conference. Where do you want him to meet us?”
“Tell him I think they're heading to San Diego. See if he can come down and pick us up in the plane and we can all go together. We can continue to track him while we’re on the plane, right?”
Os laughed at me and my sorry technical skills.
