The Uncharted Tales

Chapter 21

Part 2: Drake's Fortune

Victor Sullivan

"She worked in this little bar in the Philippines... Oh man, she had a smile that'd melt your heart."

"Do you ever shut up?" His guard groaned, flicking loose ash from his cigarette, while the other one leaned his head back in a show of exasperation.

Sully grinned at them. "It's not the first time someone's said that to me. So anyway, as I was sayin' before..."

He had already sent Navarro and Roman off on some made up errand, claiming he found a few leads, one of them tracing to the mausoleum. That left him with only two mercenaries watching over him, and they had long since grown tired of his stories, all of them rolling into one after another. Ideally, he would have taken his guards out by now, but there were more outside, laying in wait in case Nate somehow worked his way through the jungle to their location. The odds weren't stacked up in his favor. Yet.

That was, if the kid even decided to show up. He hated to admit it, but Roman's words were eating away at him, and the longer he sat with those intrusive thoughts, the more he regretted some of his life decisions since meeting that scared, little runaway.

He didn't deserve Nate's loyalty, not really. He had practically dragged his partner ever-deeper into a career of crime, had taught the kid most of his tricks to make a life for himself. Someone better, a decent person, maybe, wouldn't have let it go this far. They might have set the fifteen-year-old up with a normal life, let him grow and thrive in an environment that didn't encourage criminality when he had so much more to offer the world than petty tomb robbing.

So, his rambling stories became more than just a means to bore his captors into a state of weary complacency; if he stopped, the cloud of dread would close in on him, and he was desperate to cling onto hope that Nate would surely understand.

"But oh, I swear to God, she'd just as soon as kill you as kiss you if she caught you steppin' out. Just a wee bit of a thing. She couldn't have been more than four-eleven. They called her a spinner because she-"

"Will you shut up, old man?" One of the men snapped. "You told us that story a dozen times already."

"Oh yea, right." Sully let out a good-natured chuckle, flicking through the pages of Drake's diary as he shot them another smile. "'Course I did. Memory's not what it used to be."

"What the hell's taking so long, anyway?" The shorter of the two men got up from his perch and jabbed a finger at the tall stack of tomes on the surface of the desk.

Sully flipped the journal shut and shot the mercenary a frown, flourishing the object in his hand at the walls lined with decaying books. Oh, he had certainly found some interesting tidbits of information, between picking out phrases in sixteenth-century Spanish and studying Drake's findings. He just wasn't going to tell anyone about it. As far as he was concerned, anything he came across was for the kid alone.

"Maybe you hadn't noticed, but most of these books are half-rotten, and written in Spanish."

"Yea, well," the man drawled, "hurry it up. The boss is waiting on you."

Yea, and he's gonna keep waiting. He already an inkling of where to start looking...

He turned back to his research, twisting the cigar between his fingers, and just as he prepared to begin telling another story of the barmaid from Lima, the mercenary farthest from him shouted, "Hey, up there!"

Sully turned sharply, eyes narrowed, catching a glimpse of two figures kneeled behind the railing of the upper floor, and heard a familiar voice shout out, "ah, crap!" as gunfire exploded from beside Sully.