The Chase Read Online Free

are more my thing.”
    “I suppose we’re taking a boat to Kilmarny. I can’t picture you hiking through the wilderness.”
    “We’re catching a ferry from Mallaig harbor. It’s about a forty-five-minute trip across Loch Nevis. I’ve called ahead to arrange a crossing.”
    It was pouring rain when they arrived at Mallaig, a busy little fishing port overlooking Loch Nevis. The waters of the loch were choppy, and the Kilmarny ferry, a modified fishing boat, bobbed on the whitecaps that slapped against the pier. Nick and Kate were the only passengers.
    By the time the ferry reached Kilmarny the rain had eased into a cold drizzle, and Kate squinted through the rain at whitewashed cottages tucked between steep green hills and the white-sand shoreline of the loch. Several weatherbeaten fishing boats were tied up at the ferry dock. A single road ran through the small village and up into the hills. Kate could see a farmhouse and, beyond that, the ruins of a castle in the mist.
    Nick followed her gaze. “That’s Kilmarny Castle. This town was built for the workers who tended to the land and cattle in the days of yore.”
    “Yore? Are we having a conversation, or are you narrating
The Hobbit
?”
    “We’re in Scotland now. I’m fitting in.”
    “I’m pretty sure the Scots don’t say ‘yore’ either,” Kate said, though all she knew about the Scots was what she’d learned from watching the Travel Channel.
    “There are maybe forty people living in Kilmarny full-time. The rest are hikers and nature-loving tourists,” Nick said. “There’s only one store, one hotel, one restaurant, and the Hideaway, the most remote pub in the U.K. Duff owns it and lives upstairs. He’s the unofficial mayor of this place.”
    Kate picked out the only building that could possibly be a pub. It was a low-slung, lopsided two-story cottage that hunkered down on a barren patch of land at the edge of the village. Several rustic picnic tables and benches had been placed out front. Smoke curled from the chimney.
    “Not exactly Beverly Hills,” Kate said.
    “And Duff isn’t Cary Grant.”
    The path to the pub was uphill and slick with rain, but it wasn’t a far walk. Nick pushed the heavy wooden pub door open and they stepped inside. A massive fireplace with a stone hearth dominated one wall. A fire was roaring in the fireplace, and the surrounding wall was black with soot. Clearly the flue didn’t always work perfectly. The ceiling was low, with exposed beams supported by posts that were squared-off tree trunks. The tables and chairs were hand-carved from thick blocks of wood that had been smoothed by centuries of use. The bar seemed to have been constructed outof found objects, a mix of stone, brick, bottle glass, and mortar topped with a shiny, varnished wood counter. The temperature in the room was tropical, and the air was heavy with the smell of charred applewood.
    There were three men in the room, two sitting at the bar and one standing behind it. The men looked like found objects themselves, as rough as the countryside, their skin weathered and tough from years of being lashed by the wind and sea. The man behind the counter, whom Kate judged to be in his late sixties, looked like the result of an insane scientific experiment to cross a Scottish terrier with a man. His brown eyes and bulbous nose peeked out from bushy eyebrows and a grizzly, overgrown mustache and beard, all of which combined to practically cover his entire face with hair. She figured this had to be Duff MacTaggert.
    “Nicolas Fox. You’re the last man I ever expected to see walk through my door,” Duff said in a heavy Scottish accent. “I can still feel your knife in my back.”
    “My God, you’ve become a fat, hairy old bastard,” Nick said, dropping his bag by the door and closing the distance to the bar.
    The two men at the bar tensed. They were big and brawny, with hands like baseball mitts. Kate could see the faint bulge of guns tucked into their