TARN & BECK Read Online Free PDF Page B

him, angry. “Carroll, of course, or at least some of his crew. They’ve been following you and the coin.”
    Tarn groaned. “Oh, hell, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. How could they have found me?”
    Nutmeg shook her head and examined her office and the wreck it had become. “Well, it did. It’s going to take me weeks to clean all of this up and reorganize my research. Valuable information has probably been lost.”
    “I’m sorry. I’ll help, any way I can. I’ll go get the constables.”
    Nutmeg turned to him. “Never mind that for now. They took the coin and a wizard was with them. He cast a tracking spell on the coin to find the rest of its collection. You didn’t tell me there was more.”
    Tarn was horrified. “Are they trying to find--Beck! That spell would lead them right to him!”
    “I don’t know who you’re talking about. But the spell apparently sent them to Willow Street in the Outer Ring neighborhood. To The Duke Boardinghouse.” Nutmeg said.
    Tarn was panicking, thinking of facing Carroll again after all these years, and another innocent person being caught up in this web of death and destruction that seemed to surround him. He didn’t know if he could handle all of it alone, but he was still trying to reason things out.
    “That must be where Beck lives. He probably took the coins there.” Tarn said.
    “If you want to try helping your friend before Carroll and the rest of his gang do, then you should probably go there now.” Nutmeg said.
    Tarn nodded and ran for the office door, but he stopped in the doorway to turn back to Nutmeg. “Thanks for telling me about this. I’m so sorry about this mess. I’ll do anything I can to repay you one day. Thanks!” Tarn waved good-bye to her and ran off, his footsteps soon fading.
    Nutmeg sighed and examined the wreck of her office. “What am I going to do? The thanks I get for trying to help a friend out.”
    Tarn and Nutmeg had been friends for a couple years now, ever since Tarn first came to the city of Silvo and tried to sell her some counterfeit artifacts for the museum. Not the most promising start to a friendship for an archeologist and scholar like her, but he was understanding, intelligent, compassionate, charming and knew a lot about the black market and artifact thievery, which made him a good informant.
    Sometimes they went months without seeing each other, usually when Tarn was pursuing a job elsewhere or she went out on a dig. But they met up every now and again to exchange stories, information, and news and have polite, general conversations with each other.
    It was usually a nice, friendly meeting between them, although Tarn would sometimes get distracted or lost in his own deep, dark thoughts, his mind wandering. She would have to snap him out of it or else he might get lost in such a fugue state.
    She wondered what had happened to him in the past that he never spoke about. He told her a little about Carroll and his days as a thief and highwayman in Carroll’s gang, but he never said anything about his life before then and his recollection of the years since he left Carroll’s gang were splotchy at best.
    In any case, she knew that he had suffered a lot in the past, but she hoped that he was happy in his life now. Maybe he might find some more friends, besides her and the graveyard guard Ralph, to help him out in his troubled state.
    She knew nothing more would come out of their friendship, beside the camaraderie they shared. His heart lied in a different direction, perhaps buried in the past as well, and she was busy, so they weren’t compatible with each other. But it was still nice to have a friend like Tarn, even if only for a brief while.
     
    At that moment, down on Willow Street, Beck carried several bags of his worldly possessions, including one small bag that noticeably jingled with the gold coins, to a postal coach waiting at the corner across from the Duke