for some time. Jack was glad to have gotten his interest and attention if nothing else.
His hard eyes narrowed, and at last, he began to growl a response. “Every one of these marks carries a meaning. They each represent an event or a person of great significance to me.”
After that, there was no stopping him. He pointed to a tattoo and described at length the symbolism and the meaning that it held for him, then another. Nothing that he said directly identified any particular person or place. They all were tales of violent struggle and brutal conflict, or of deep family bonds and betrayals.
Several involved sudden death, sometimes more than one. To Jack they sounded like Greek tragedies.
Jack ate his breakfast, drank his coffee and came away having learned precisely nothing specific at all. The man gave away almost no details about himself or anyone associated with him, and he told all of his stories through a smoke of almost biblical-sounding myth. Jack hardly knew any more about him than he had before they met.
What he did know was that he had a lethally bad attitude, but the NOAA probably knew that. They might have known who he was, too, since they likely tracked him as a weather system, but Jack still had no idea. He didn’t ask Frank on the way out, either, and Frank didn’t offer to tell him.
Jack had done what the kidnappers had told him to do but, as his Mercedes swept out across the empty lot and out onto the freeway, the whole thing made no sense at all to him. All that mattered right now was to save Tiffany. Then, afterwards , he thought, Then there will be a reckoning .
Chapter 10
Crouched again by the door, she heard a phone ring, then ‘Jax’s end of the conversation.
“Hey… yeah? He went? … And? And you’re certain they met. … Anyone been able to talk to Iron?”
Iron? Who was that?
“No? So he’s got no idea… Must have been some surprise for him with his breakfast. … No, I bet he didn’t. You got no idea how he is then? Yup… Yup, I bet. Okay, good work.”
Then he was talking to Mace.
“We’ve got what we need.”
Mace said, “Not until the morning, bro. Not till it’s done. But he took the meet?”
“He went, yeah. He met him and they talked. Chatted away for about fifteen minutes over breakfast.”
“And we have a reliable witness?”
“Not only, we got pictures.” Now the two men were up on their feet. Tiff flinched each time a step came closer, knowing she should get away from the door but unable to move, desperate to wring whatever she could out of their conversation. They paced around as they talked. One of them opened the refrigerator. Tiff heard the fizz of cans as they popped open.
Mace said, “I wonder what they discussed over their coffee.” His chuckle was a dry rasp. “Must have been a regular country club morning meeting.”
“It’s done, Mace. We have it.”
“We’ll see tomorrow.”
The creak of a boot came towards the door and she jumped back for the bed and under the cover.
The door opened and Mace stood in the frame, his eyes narrow. Tiff kept her eyelids almost closed. She was sure he couldn’t see that she was watching him, but it was hard to keep her eyes relaxed so they didn’t flutter. His lips tightened and he closed the door again. She couldn’t make out what he said as he strode back across the floor of the other room.
Was it Daddy they had been talking about, meeting someone called ‘Iron’ over breakfast? And this ‘Iron,’ whoever he was, had no idea about it? What did it mean? It was hard to keep all of the details straight when she had so few fragments of information to go on.
Chapter 11
Tiff was dozing when she heard the noises in the next room. She woke up fast when ‘Jax’s voice raised. “Someone gets killed, you’ve made me an accessory.” His menacing growl went on, “If you do that, Mace, I swear,” boots clomped and thudded around the next room as he paced and talked, “I
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