by Rob Cornell
Once he noticed the tail, he began taking random turns, circling blocks, cutting through parking lots. Eventually, the driver couldn’t keep up with Harrison’s chaotic meandering and either lost him or simply gave up.
Shaking the mysterious follower was bittersweet. Harrison didn’t appreciate finding himself on the opposite end of surveillance and was glad to have thwarted whoever the hell it was. At the same time, now he couldn’t get any answers—such as why anyone would be following him in the first place.
He mulled over possibilities as he returned to his trip to Midtown, but there wasn’t much to mull. A disgruntled spouse he’d caught in the act of cheating now wanting revenge for losing their custody battle? Seemed far fetched. A criminal he helped put away during his time with the FBI? That didn’t seem any more plausible. But after that, he was out of ideas. He hadn’t lived in the area long enough to make any new enemies.
He tucked the thoughts away when he arrived at the client’s office building. He went inside, delivered the goods, went over his report, answered a few questions, then was on his way again, back to the agency. He was pulling into the parking lot when his phone rang. Dylan’s number showed on the screen. Harrison answered as he turned into a parking space.
“Harrison,” Dylan said, breathless. “You gotta come home.”
Harrison’s gut tensed. “What’s going on?”
“I…I went out after you left. I called a cab to take me to get some art supplies.”
“That’s great, Dylan. I’m glad—”
“I just got home,” he cut in. Obvious panic made his voice crack. “The place is trashed. I think we had a break-in.”
Nine
Dylan hadn’t exaggerated. The house was a mess. But it took only a cursory look around to determine they weren’t dealing with a burglar. Things were knocked off shelves. Drawers were pulled and dumped. All the couch cushions in the living room were yanked off. Every cupboard door, from the ones in the kitchen to those in the vanity in the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms, hung wide, the contents swiped out onto the floors or counters.
The home office got the most attention.
Papers scattered. The desk ransacked. Filing cabinet riffled through, drawers left open. An old mug of coffee had tipped, spreading a brown puddle across the top of the massive oak desk that Harrison’s father had inherited from his father, a piece of furniture that predated Harrison himself. A stack of bank statements had soaked up some of the spill.
But all the electronics—computer, tablets, TV, Dylan’s Xbox—were untouched. And the few meager valuables they possessed, like Dad’s old watch or Mom’s heirloom pearls that had been in her family since World War II, were also left behind.
While Harrison looked through the house, Dylan dogged him at every step. Nervous tension gushed from him in contagious waves. At one point, Dylan followed so close behind, he accidentally stepped on Harrison’s heel.
Harrison spun around and put his hands on Dylan’s shoulders. “You have got to chill.”
“My studio,” he said, eyes welling. “I can’t go down there. I’m afraid they wrecked everything.”
“It’s okay. Give me another minute to check things out up there, thing I’ll go down.”
Dylan swallowed hard and nodded.
“Do you need to take a Xanax?”
“No. I’m good. I’ll start picking things up in the living room.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
It didn’t take long for Harrison to work out what this was all about. He had a theory going the moment he recognized the mess for what it was—a sloppy toss job done by someone in a hurry to find something specific. When a closer inspection of the den revealed that every one of the half-dozen or so thumb drives Harrison owned were now missing, he had a pretty good idea, at least generally, what that “something specific” was.
Problem was, he couldn’t think of anyone who would want the kind of files he kept on a thumb drive. Wasn’t like he had the secret plans to the Death Star or anything. Mostly personal files like pictures or electronic documents. He didn’t have any professional files at home. He kept all that stuff at work. Of course, whoever had searched the place might not know that. They had taken all the drives, maybe hoping whatever they were looking for was on one of them.
Harrison sat at the desk and stared at a blank spot on the wall for a moment, letting his thoughts chase their tails. Two weird events in one day was no coincidence. The house getting tossed had to tie in with whoever had been following him earlier.
Speaking of weird events, the tail and the toss were the second and third if he counted yesterday’s odd adventure with the purse snatcher. The woman had accused Harrison of taking something from her purse. Could this have anything to do with what she thought was missing?
He tried to picture the compact little woman conducting this kind of reckless search and couldn’t do it, no matter how fiery she’d seemed. Could it have been her following him, though? Anything was possible. Maybe she’d hired someone to do the search. Or had an accomplice.
Or had nothing to do with this at all.
Harrison sat up straight as he realized he’d overlooked a key element.
How had the intruder gotten into the house?
The front door hadn’t shown any signs of forced entry.
He hurried out to the living room. Dylan had replaced the couch cushions and was now on his hands and knees picking up a stack of Entertainment Weekly magazines that had been swept off the coffee table. His hair hung in his face.
“Did you remember to lock up when you left?” Harrison asked.
Dylan brushed back his hair and gave Harrison an annoyed look. “Yes. I’m not an idiot.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything, damn it. Just listen. When you got home, was the front door still locked?”
Dylan paused in thought. A slice of his hair fell loose from where he’d tucked it behind his ear and dangled over one eye. He absently tucked it back. “Now that you mention it? No. It wasn’t. But I know for a fact I locked it on the way out.”
To cover every possibility before jumping to any conclusions, Harrison checked the back door (still locked) and every window (also all closed and locked since they had been running the AC non-stop since the beginning of August).
He rejoined Dylan in the living room.
Dylan stood now, clean-up forgotten for the moment, and gaped at Harrison. “What is it?”
“If the house was locked up tight, then whoever did this knows how to pick locks.”
“Does that matter?”
“It tells us we’re not dealing with an amateur.”
“Which means…?”
Harrison looked around the room.
The drawer in the end table by the couch lay on the floor among the items it had contained, the kind of random junk collected over a lifetime. An old remote to a DVD player they didn’t own anymore. A stack of cardboard coasters. A deck of cards with a missing king of hearts. A tangled clump of rubber bands.
Thankfully, the intruder hadn’t tried to force open the ceramic urns containing Mom and Dad’s ashes. They still stood side-by-side on the mantle above the fireplace. They were a little off center, though, not lined up neatly like they had been. Some of the pictures on the mantle had been knocked flat, and one lay on the hearth, the glass cracked in the fall. A picture of Dylan and Harrison as kids with Dad, after a fishing trip the year they had canoed down the Au Sable River.
That ache to return to a time and place too many years out of reach hit Harrison low in the gut. He’d felt it a lot since returning home.
“Harrison?”
He looked up at his brother. “I’m not sure what the hell it means.” He crossed the room to Dylan and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Let me go check the basement.”
The intruder either didn’t have time or didn’t think it necessary to search the basement. Dylan’s things were mercifully undisturbed. Once Harrison delivered the good news, all that vibrating en
ergy in his brother dissipated.
Crisis averted.
But now what?
Harrison contemplated filing a police report, but since nothing of value was stolen, he didn’t see the point. Still, he couldn’t let this intrusion stand without some kind of response. He could kick himself for shaking that tail this morning. Thinking it through, he realized once the pursuer gave up following him, they had probably headed back to his house. With Dylan out, they had seized the opportunity to toss the place.
No point dwelling on it, though.
It was highly unlikely that the intruder would find whatever they were looking for on the flash drives they took. Once they realized that, they might start following him again. If they did, he would be ready for them this time. Then he’d make damn sure they left him and his brother the hell alone.
Ten
The next day, Harrison spotted the beige Camry in his rearview again.
“That didn’t take long,” he muttered to himself.
He was on his way into Ferndale again, this time from the office. He would have to stop going there if he kept running into purse snatchers and shady pursuers. He couldn’t handle another break-in. Or, more accurately, Dylan couldn’t.
Poor Dylan hadn’t slept last night. He insisted on cleaning up the mess their intruder had left behind, no matter how many times Harrison had told him it could wait. The moment of calm after learning his art studio hadn’t been ransacked had only lasted until after dinner. Harrison suspected Dylan had swung into a manic state. When he found Dylan still awake that morning in front of the TV, most everything put back in place, suspicion turned to certainty.
Once he spotted the tail, Harrison changed course, heading east, and called Kamille.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve grown a tail again.” He’d told her all about the tail, the break-in, and the possible connection to the purse snatching over coffee and a bagel that morning.
“Same car?”
“Yep.”
“Doesn’t sound all the professional to me.”
“He’s doing a decent job keeping an appropriate distance, playing it cool. But, no, I don’t think surveillance is a top skill.”
“Get any sense of the driver?”
“Pretty sure it’s a male. On the big side. But he hasn’t gotten close enough for a better look.”
“How do you want to play it?”
“I need words with this guy. Care to assist?”
“Where you at?”
“I’m headed to Oakland Mall. I’m going to see if I can draw him out on foot.”
“I’ll call when I arrive.”
Harrison pulled into the mall’s south parking lot off of 14 Mile Road and pulled into a spot as far back from the main entrance as possible without going into the lot that belonged to the Chili’s restaurant. Of course, there were plenty of spaces open closer in the middle of the day on a weekday, but he wasn’t here to shop. He wanted to see how his pursuer would react.
The pursuer wasn’t a complete idiot. When he arrived at the row Harrison had parked in, he cruised by and turned up the next one. Harrison watched him for as long as he could before losing sight of him behind the other cars in the lot between them.
Harrison gave the tail a little extra time to get situated before getting out of his car and strolling toward the mall. After all, the object was not to lose the tail this time. He wanted to make it as easy as possible for the guy to follow him inside on foot if he wanted.
Since Harrison hadn’t had a good look at him, he risked not recognizing his pursuer outside of the Camry. Still, he avoided trying to catch him getting out of his car on the way up. Keeping his head on a swivel would look too suspicious. He didn’t want the pursuer to know he was looking for him, spook him into backing off.
Harrison looked straight ahead, not so much as glancing around until he reached the long glass awning over the mall’s main entrance. As he pulled open the door, he made a casual scan of anyone else approaching. Spotted two. A woman in a pair of cut-off shorts that were so small on her, they looked like they belonged in the kids department. Hopefully, she had come to the mall to shop for clothes that fit her properly.
The other person was a man in his late fifties with a crew cut wearing a navy blue suit with the coat buttoned. He had a thick neck and hands that looked like they could shovel concrete. The closed coat pinged Harrison’s spidey sense. While a breeze from the east cut the humidity some, the temp was still in the mid-80s. If he had longer to study the man beyond a quick glance, he bet he would notice a small hump under one side of the man’s coat where he carried a gun.
Harrison went inside without pausing.
He wore a pair of jeans and a short-sleeve button-up shirt without a t-shirt underneath. (It was just too damn hot for any layers.) But the sudden chill of the mall’s air-conditioning sent a shiver through his body as if he had on nothing but a pair of shorts and a tank top. When the lady with the super-short shorts came in, her legs might turn to ice. Poor lady.
Harrison tucked his hands in his pockets and set a leisurely pace through the mall. The food court was to his left. The mix of scents from places like Panda Express, Subway, and Sicilia Pizza formed an amalgam of deep-fried peppery sweetness that added to the distinct mall smell at large. The smell of suburban capitalism, ladies and gentleman.
He waited until he reached the end of the corridor where it opened to a central courtyard with those little huts that sold hot pretzels, screen-printed t-shirts, or cell phones. He turned into the Kay Jewelers that occupied the corner and pretended to study the necklaces under one of the glass counters.
From the corner of his eye he saw the man surveying the food court as if trying to decide where to eat lunch.
For the next twenty minutes, Harrison continued his trip through the mall, stopping here and there to peer in shop windows, browsing through the Sharper Image, smiling at the kittens through the glass in the pet store. He had just ordered a strawberry banana smoothie at the Orange Julius when his phone buzzed.
“I’m outside Macy’s,” Kamille said. “There’s a loading area around the corner to the left as you’re coming out.”
“Okay. I’ll see if I can lead him out that way.”
As he took his smoothie from the woman behind the counter, Harrison dared a glance behind him. The man with the shovel hands stood a few steps into the GNC across from the Orange Julius. He was pretending to look at a storefront display of multi-vitamins.
Harrison thanked the woman for his smoothie and went on his way through the mall to the Macy’s. On the way, he passed the Pretzel Peddler. The smell of warm pretzel dough made his mouth water. He slurped on his smoothie and kept walking, proud of his massive willpower.
He took his time going through the Macy’s by pausing once in a while to look something over, working to make his progression toward the exit appear natural. But he barely remembered anything he looked at. His focus had turned inward, preparing himself for the coming confrontation. Turning the tables on this guy could prove dangerous. Even if he didn’t have a gun under his coat—and Harrison felt pretty confident that he did—the guy looked like he could hold his own in a fight, if it came to that.
Harrison was glad to have Kamille backing him up.
Stepping outside had the reverse effect of when he’d entered the mall. The heat killed the coolness his skin had absorbed from the air-conditioning almost instantly. The west side of the mall didn’t get the breeze coming out of the east, and with the noon sun straight up in the sky baking the pavement, the air was probably ten degrees hotter here than at the south entrance.
Harrison cringed at the heat’s touch. He sucked down the dregs of his smoothie and tossed the cup in the trash can by the door, then he turned left and followed along the face of the building toward the freight area Kamille had mentioned.
The freight area opened up on his left, the concrete on a slight grade down toward a set of three steel roll-up doors. An industrial-
sized trash bin sat parked in the space, but it was otherwise currently not in use.
Harrison kept walking past the space, ignoring the sight in his peripheral vision of Kamille posted around the corner. He reached the shade of a tree in a large planter on the far corner of the freight area before he heard the sound of someone getting the wind knocked out him.
He turned around and found his pursuer on his hands and knees, Kamille standing at his side, looking down at him.
“Careful,” Harrison said as he made his way back. “I’m pretty sure he’s armed.”
“You mean this?” Kamille said and raised the Glock .45 she held in her hand for him to see.
“Damn, you’re fast.”
“And you sure did take your dear sweet time getting here.”
She had her Tigers hat on again, the curved bill casting shadow across her dark complexion. Instead of a jersey, she wore an oversized white t-shirt that hung almost to her knees, completely covering the shorts Harrison assumed she wore underneath. The shirt had a picture of a glittery unicorn printed on the front, framed under a rainbow arch. Her black combat boots went perfectly with the outfit.
“I had to make it look good. Didn’t want to spook him.”
The guy made a grab for one of Kamille’s ankles.
He never got close. Instead, he got a kick in the ribs.
“Oof.” He thumped onto his side.
A young woman pushing one of those double strollers toward the Macy’s entrance stopped to gape at them.
Kamille held the gun behind her back and waved with her free hand. “Mall security, ma’am. Carry on.”
The mom hesitated a second, shrugged, then continued on her way.
“Let’s get a little cover,” Harrison said.