Page 5 of Tank
CHAPTER THREE
Nadya
I hated being stuck in one place. I was lucky in that my jobs took me all over and gave me the freedom to never be tied down. My home was my bike. My nineteen ninety-three Harley-Davidson Dyna Low Rider, to be exact. In purple. You could say that she was my baby. I’d had her for five years and she’d never let me down.
Okay, there was that one time she’d left me stranded a good ten miles from the nearest town, but it wasn’t too bad. And it led me to a dive bar and hot sex with a cowboy wannabe.
I liked to be on the road. I was used to never staying in one place for too long. It was how I was raised, and even though I tried to break away from my upbringing as much as possible, parts were still ingrained in me. I got restless easily and I hated people. So I was not one for wanting to settle down, buy a house with a picket fence, and meet my neighbors.
But currently, I had been stuck in a nowhere town for over a month.
When I took this job I was told it could be a long one. I just didn’t think it would bethislong. And, unfortunately, it didn’t seem like it was going to end anytime soon, seeing as my target, whatever target that might have been, hadn’t even shown up. Yeah, I knew when I agreed to this that I was going to hate it. Why I still took it? I didn’t fucking know. I was offered a shit-ton of money, and after my last job got fucked up, I figured it was best to take it given the chance that I could lay low for a bit. Maybe even get my name off of the shit list. One fuck up and suddenly no one was calling.
I was amazing at what I did. Discreet when needed to be and the opposite when they wanted to send a message. It didn’t matter to me as long as I got paid and kept moving. Not to brag, but I was at the top of the list of who to call. After all, I’d been doing it for ten years and at twenty-eight, I had worked my way to the number one slot. Sure, I was in a temporary lag but I knew after this job, I would get back there.
The thing was, there were outside forces that I had no control over with the last one. Yet, there I was paying the price for it. But then again, the decision to not pull the trigger was all mine.
Anyway, I’d been in the small tourist town of God knows where Tennessee. It was in a valley. On one side was a fancy resort built halfway up the mountain. On the other side was cute little rental cabins that sprinkled the whole side of the mountain. In between was little shops and restaurants. The further you drove along the road the more townie it became.
That was where I had taken a job. I hated sitting around and so I had found there was a need for a bartender at the local hole-in-the-wall bar. It also happened to be where I was staying. The upstairs had a small one-room apartment. It was still mostly an empty room. I’d bought a twin mattress, which was stuffed into the far corner on the floor. I’d also found a coffee table and an overstuffed chair at a consignment shop. Toss in a couple of lamps and that was my current home. It was all I needed. A place to sleep and a seat for me to read in my downtime.
The door to the outside was beside what you could call the kitchen. There was a narrow and rickety staircase that led down to the gravel parking lot at the back of the bar. I had two street-side windows on the opposite wall from the door. They might have let in decent light during the day, but the last time they had been cleaned had to have been before I was born and I didn’t care enough to touch them.
The bar was empty. No surprise, being that it was only four in the afternoon. I was mindlessly counting the bottles in the cooler when my phone vibrated in my back pocket. Pulling it out, I saw it was my only friend. My best friend, you could say, even though we’d never actually met in person.
“Eyes,” I answered calling her by the nickname I had for her.
She was a shut-in, never left her apartment. She was also a hacker who spent all of her time watching her many, many computer screens. She had eyes on everything I swear. We never much talked about what it was in detail, but I had an idea. She watched life sitting back in the dark while hers just went by.
“You know every time I hear that I feel like I’m in some sort of a spy movie.” She laughed. I always felt a heaviness from her and I loved to hear her laugh. I knew the lightness was only temporary, but I would give it to her any chance I could get. “Anyway, you answered, so I’m going to assume you haven’t died of boredom.
“So close,” I said through gritted teeth and it wasn’t far from the truth. My insides tightened the more my feet were stuck in one place. “I wonder how much longer until I see some action.” My trigger finger twitched at the thought.
“He didn’t say anything more about it?” she asked, referring to my employer.
“No. Guy wasn’t a big talker,” I said with a huff. “Didn’t even show up to the meeting. He sent some lackey to deal with me. That guy was kinda sexy, though, he had that biker bad boy thing going on. But he didn’t say much, either. Not even a small smile.” She laughed again. It was muffled like she was trying to cover it up.
That was about as far as we went with shop talk. I didn’t offer details and she didn’t ask. She knew what I did and who I was. And I knew she did things that were on the side of less legal, too. But we never went into too many details.
“Have you checked the feed lately?”
“No.” I shrugged even though I knew she couldn’t see it. “The alert hasn’t gone off, so I figured what’s the use. I got tired of always looking only to find the same dead space.”
She would always send me the equipment I would need for a job, the tech stuff anyway, and would walk me through the set-ups. I knew she could tap into the feed as well but I was never worried about what she would see because I knew she would keep my secrets. Also, it was always good to have someone watching my back. Even if it was from miles away.
“Alright,” she said and I could hear her typing away on her keyboard. “I gotta go. Don’t start offing patrons just to have something to do.” She laughed and I huffed out a chuckle.
“You know me…” I managed to get out before the line went dead. I didn’t take it personally. I knew when something came up her focus was lost on anything else.
Sighing, I pulled up the app on my phone that showed the cabin I needed to watch. I flicked through the ten cameras I had set up inside.
Setting them up had been easy. There was no one around for at least a mile. I watched the place for a day before I realized that no one was even there and it didn’t seem like anyone would be showing up anytime soon.
The place was dusty and plain. It didn’t look like the typical rental. Most of the time they had cute mountain charms with some kind of stupid, cheesy theme spread throughout. But this one looked like a bunch of lumberjacks threw in whatever they could find. Like ugly plaid couches that didn’t even match. The kitchen was empty save for a few utensils and an iron skillet. A huge flat screen hung above the fireplace. There was a basement that had been turned into a game room with a pool table and a couple of dart boards. The third floor held a few bedrooms that were sparsely decorated exactly the same as the two bedrooms on the main level.
I pulled my thick hair over one shoulder, my rings catching on a few tangles as I leaned my elbows on the bar. I flicked through the rotation of feeds hoping to find something.
Nothing. Not a mouse. Or a gust of wind. Hell, at this point I would have taken a ghost sighting.
