Town at the Edge of Darkness

by Brett Battles

  “Like in Patterson’s notebook,” Ananke said.

  “Yes.”

  The order of information was different, but otherwise it was the same.

  “Duplicates?” Ananke asked.

  Rosario shook her head. “The dates are after the ones in the book. Perhaps Patterson had not had time to transfer them yet.”

  “We need to know what they mean.”

  “I’ll have Shinji help me work on that.”

  “Good.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Once again, Ricky was not ready to call it a night. The Bradbury Brewery wouldn’t be closing for another hour, and having a beer to make up for the one he’d had to leave behind earlier sounded like a great idea.

  He hiked through Patterson’s housing tract back to the highway. He’d left his motorcycle next to a building just on the other side of the main road, as the bike would have attracted too much attention if he had ridden it into the woman’s neighborhood.

  As he lifted his helmet to pull it on, he heard the deep rumble of a powerful engine. He looked north down the highway, in the only direction he could see, but the road was clear. He moved up to the corner of the building and peeked south.

  Headlights. A small convoy of them.

  He grabbed the binoculars from his bag.

  A police sedan led the parade. Behind it came a big rig pulling a trailer, another police sedan, and finally a pickup truck.

  The convoy neared his position, so Ricky pulled back around the side and watched it drive by. As soon as the lead sedan came back into view, he realized he’d made a mistake. Though it had roof lights, it didn’t belong to the Bradbury PD. Emblazoned on its door were the words SCOLAREON SECURITY.

  Huh.

  The big rig did not have identifying marks at all, nor did the trailer it was pulling. The third vehicle also belonged to Scolareon Security. Like the big rig, the white Ford F-150 pickup in the rear had no ownership markings. Four people rode inside it, and in the bed a tarp covered what appeared to be a giant, rectangular box.

  A late-night delivery to Scolareon? Perhaps. But why the escort? Did the company experience a lot of hijacking around here? That seemed unlikely, especially within city limits. And what was the deal with the pickup truck?

  Keep your eyes and ears open for anything weird.

  “Dammit.”

  He really wanted that beer, but the convoy was exactly the kind of thing Ananke would expect him to follow up on.

  He hurried to his bike, thinking he should be able to make sure everything was on the up and up and still get to the brewery in time for one last drink before closing.

  Best laid plans…

  Yates was annoyed.

  Everything had been going so well for so long. Schedules had been kept, product had been easily obtained, clients had been satisfied, and money flowed in. And then that Patterson bitch had snooped where she shouldn’t have been snooping. Thank God they’d caught her when they had, otherwise things would have gone into the toilet quickly.

  The stuff she’d copied onto that jump drive he’d found on her…holy crap. That would have earned Yates and his brother and their cousin some serious jail time, not to mention the repercussions for their clients.

  Yates had thought he’d been pretty sneaky hiding the docs on the Scolareon servers. Hell, for the last few years, he’d been right. How Patterson had figured it out, he had no idea. But she’d caused him to reconsider the setup, and within twenty-four hours of her capture, he’d removed everything and put it on a dedicated machine with no access to the web. It made work a bit more difficult, but they couldn’t afford someone else stumbling on everything.

  Patterson wasn’t the only problem. In the early hours of that very morning, he’d been informed about the sudden resignation of two of the project’s drivers. The thing was, no one resigned from the project.

  Yates, as the enforcing arm of the organization, had dealt with them himself, placing an incendiary device inside the cab and a second inside the trailer. As of 8:53 that morning, the drivers were no longer an issue. In most places, such a device would be discovered by investigators, but Yates’s dad—the chief of police—worked his state police contacts, and any traces of the device had disappeared.

  Patterson would soon be taken care of, too, just in a more practical, killing-two-birds-with-one-stone way.

  Yates checked the rearview mirror. The big rig continued chugging along behind him like it had been since they met up twenty miles south of Bradbury.

  Transfer night. When the project was most vulnerable. Which was why they usually did it in the wee hours of the morning. Not tonight, though. The loss of the two drivers that morning necessitated a speedup of the schedule so they could get this truck emptied and back on the road within the next hour. A situation that added to Yates’s annoyance.

  And if that wasn’t enough to up his blood pressure, his brother Slater wasn’t happy with the product the two dead truckers had brought in. That’s why Slater and his crew were following in their pickup, hoping the choices would be better on this delivery. If they weren’t, there could be problems at the trials and no one wanted that.

  When the convoy reached Scolareon, Yates pulled in first, stopping at the gate to the production building.

  “Harry,” he said with a nod to the guard.

  “Evening, boss. What do we have here?”

  “Hazardous materials shipment.”

  Scolareon security officer Harry Donovan swiped through some info on his tablet computer. “I don’t have—”

  “It’s early. Wasn’t supposed to arrive for another few hours, I believe.”

  More scrolling. “Ah. Okay, here it is. I’ll let Receiving know you’re here.”

  “Not necessary. Already called. The hazardous materials crew is the white truck behind us, so make sure they get through, too.”

  “Will do.” The guard opened the gate. “Have a good night.”

  “Thanks, Harry. You, too.”

  Yates led the convoy to the delivery dock at the back of the building. He parked off to the side, walked over, and sent the two guards in the other car to the front of the building, where they were to return to the security office. He’d rearranged the schedule so that they would be on monitoring-room duty during the transfer, ensuring the cameras in all pertinent areas would not be recording. Though he’d been able to hire several members of his and his brother’s secret organization into the Scolareon security department, not all the guards were his people.

  Yates entered the building through the loading dock and was met by three other project members who worked for Scolareon—another guard and two warehouse workers. They’d brought several long carts usually used to transport solar panel parts.

  “Status,” he said.

  “Not counting security personnel, only seven others in the building,” the guard said. “Two up in administration, and five maintenance crew. They’ve finished this section already.”

  “And security?”

  “Rounds have been altered per your instructions. We’re good to go.”

  “All right. Let’s make this fast.”

  Ricky caught sight of the convoy again right before it turned into the Scolareon lot, west side of the highway—the manufacturing side, according to Dylan and Liesel.

  He pulled off the road fifty yards shy of the business’s property line, and rolled the bike down into a gully where it would be hard to spot. He hurried into the woods, paralleling the fence along the side of the property and then the back, until he spotted the convoy again near a loading dock. One of the security vehicles was missing, but the other three vehicles were there.

  A man in a security uniform stood several feet away from the sedan, talking to two men dressed in jeans and light jackets. Every few seconds, the guard glanced toward the loading dock, as if waiting for something. Sure enough, a minute later, a guard exited the building and gave the others a signal.

  The trio broke up, each jogging in a differen
t direction. One of the men in jeans headed toward the big rig, the other to the pickup, and the security man to the loading dock where his colleague waited.

  The semi’s engine revved twice and the truck crept forward, until the back of the trailer faced the loading dock. With the security guards acting as guides, the big rig backed into place and shut down.

  This turned out to be the cue for the white pickup, which reversed into the space next to the trailer. Once it had stopped, all four men exited the crew cab. Two headed toward the rear, while the other pair jogged out in front of the semi-tractor. There, they spread apart and then stopped.

  “Okay, that can’t be normal.”

  Ricky took a closer look at the pair through his binoculars. What had caught his attention were the rifles each man carried.

  M4s. Serious hardware for a solar energy manufacturer.

  Who were they guarding against? The place was behind a high fence and a guarded gate. The only people they’d likely run into would be other Scolareon employees, right? And at this hour, there couldn’t be many of them around.

  Ricky took pictures of the guards and the two trucks.

  As he was switching back to his binoculars, one of the loading docks’ big doors rolled up halfway. Shadows began moving across the dock into the building, but the trailer hid what formed them.

  One of the men from the pickup truck moved behind the tailgate, reached over the side, and pulled up the tarp enough to expose the end of the box facing the building.

  “Come on, dude. Help a guy out.”

  All the guy had to do was push the damn tarp back another foot, and Ricky might have been able to figure out what it was covering.

  Obviously, they were going to take something out or put something in.

  He increased to maximum zoom, and waited.

  As always, the sleeping drug had been pumped into the trailer prior to its arrival at the plant, rendering its human cargo unconscious.

  Moving the bodies from the trailer to one of the carts was usually the job of the two warehouse workers, but since they were in a hurry tonight, Yates and the other guard lent a hand. Once all the product had been unloaded, Slater examined the haul.

  “This one,” he said. He placed a hood over the head of a young male, who appeared to be in relatively good shape, but not too good.

  The warehouse workers moved the selection into a waiting wheelchair.

  “Keep everyone else in the upstairs holding room,” Yates said. “The van will be here within an hour.”

  As the warehouse workers wheeled the carts away, Slater pushed the wheelchair toward the loading dock, followed by his brother.

  Without warning, the man at the back of the pickup stiffened, his gaze now on the loading-dock door. For a moment, nothing happened, then the older guy emerged, pushing a wheelchair toward the white truck.

  “Son of a bitch,” Ricky muttered.

  A bag covered the head of the person in the chair, but from the way he or she was drooping forward, the person had to be either unconscious or dead. Ricky raised his camera again, this time recording video. Upon reaching the end of the platform, the older guy locked the chair’s wheels, then he and the security guard who’d been following him lifted the person out of the seat. They lowered the limp body into whatever was in the back of the truck. When they finished, the young guy waiting at the back of the truck pulled the tarp over the rear again and shut the tailgate.

  You wanted weird, Ananke. I got weird for you.

  The guard and the older man talked for a moment, then the older guy hopped off the dock and climbed into the driver’s seat of the pickup. As his younger companion got in, the pair of armed sentries jogged over and did the same.

  Ricky slipped his phone into his pocket and hurried as quietly as he could back toward his bike, hoping to follow the truck. He could see the southbound highway for most of his return trip and knew the pickup had not gone that way. When he reached his motorcycle, he headed north.

  With each passing mile he drove without catching up to the other vehicle, his frustration grew. When he hit the ten-mile mark, he pulled to the side of the road.

  Either the truck had turned off the highway, or was driving too fast for him to catch up.

  Ananke fell into a deep sleep moments after climbing into bed, and was floating through a house that looked similar to, but not completely like, her home in Boulder. Birds chirped, and Emma Peel, full to the brim, told her the latest gossip on the neighborhood.

  The knock on her door wrenched her back into consciousness. She grabbed her pistol off the nightstand, tiptoed to the door, and peeked through the spy hole.

  Ricky stood in the hall, glancing back and forth nervously.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” she whispered.

  He leaned toward the door and said in a low voice, “I know, but I got to show you something.”

  “Email it to me.”

  “That would take too much time. Come on. Open up.”

  Worried their conversation might wake other guests, she opened the door and yanked him inside.

  “This had better be damn good,” she snarled.

  “I’m not sure good would be the right word.” He moved past her into the bedroom and sat on the bed. As he pulled out his phone, he said, “You’re going to want Rosario to see this, too.”

  The anger she’d felt when she first saw him subsided quickly in light of his no-nonsense demeanor. She tapped on the common door and Rosario opened it within seconds, holding her own gun.

  “I heard noise,” she said.

  “We have a visitor.” Ananke nodded toward her bed.

  Rosario took a step into the room and lowered her pistol when she saw Ricky. “He’s not supposed to be here.”

  “I mentioned that.”

  “Should we shoot him?”

  Ananke pretended to think about it. “Not quite yet.”

  Surprisingly, Ricky acted like he hadn’t even heard them.

  Rosario raised a questioning eyebrow, and Ananke replied with a shrug. They walked over to the bed and sat down on either side of Ricky.

  “I was gonna grab a beer after we talked, you know?” he said. “Just to relax before coming back here. But then, well, I saw something weird.”

  “Something else weird?” Ananke said.

  “I know, right? I’m like a weird magnet.”

  “What did you see?” Rosario asked.

  “A parade of trucks and Scolareon security sedans.”

  “A parade?” Ananke said.

  “Well, two trucks and two sedans.”

  “That’s not a parade.”

  “Matter of opinion. But it’s not important. It did seem kind of odd, though, so I followed them.”

  “And what did you discover?”

  He grinned, held out his phone, and hit Play.

  Ananke’s eyes widened at the sight of the person being wheeled out and loaded into the back of a pickup truck.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Ricky said, “but that doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a solar panel plant would produce.”

  “Tell us exactly what happened.”

  He did.

  “Do you know where the pickup went?” Ananke asked.

  “I tried to get back to my bike in time, but I wasn’t fast enough. I never found them.”

  “There might be satellite data,” Rosario said. She hurried into her room and returned a moment later with her laptop.

  While she set to work, Ricky said to Ananke, “I want you to take a closer look at this.”

  He played the video again, this time zooming in on the back of the trailer. While that reduced the image quality, it wasn’t bad enough to make a big difference.

  He pointed at the shadows moving across the ground just beyond the trailer. “My first thought was that these were the people unloading contraband. You know, like drugs or who knows what. What I think now is that the cargo is people.”

  “And…what? They’re storing th
ese people at Scolareon?”

  “Could be.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “If they were a food manufacturer, I’d say Soylent Green.”

  No one laughed. Not even Ricky.

  Rosario let out a breath and looked over at Ananke. “No luck. The only nearby satellite with the correct capabilities will not be in position for another ten hours. The best I can do is set up an automatic search for when it is overhead to look for white vehicles parked in the open.”

  “Do it,” Ananke said, though that would be a crapshoot at best.

  Rosario returned her attention to her computer.

  “I took pictures of the men,” Ricky said. “They were a little far, but maybe we can get IDs off them.”

  “What about license plates?”

  Ricky showed her a picture of the pickup. No plates. “The big rig had one, though.”

  “Send me everything,” Rosario said. “I will pass it along to Shinji.”

  Ananke tried to put all the pieces together. Human cargo. Patterson. Harris. Kyle Scudder. Scolareon.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Ricky said.

  “You have no idea what I’m thinking.”

  Smiling, he leaned back and crossed his arms. “Oh, I know exactly what you’re thinking. You’re thinking we should go inside and have a look around.”

  He was right. It was exactly what she’d been thinking.

  Chapter Seventeen

  2:55 a.m.

  Bradbury was dead asleep, the only people out and about being Officer Harris and one other cop on patrol. And of course Ananke and her team.

  According to the tracker, Harris was driving through the southeast part of town, while her colleague was doing the same up north in Green Hill Estates. Both were out of the way.

  Ananke drew two parallel rectangles in the sand, with a line representing the highway running between them, and then looked at Ricky, Dylan, and Liesel. “Both buildings have the same camera setup.” She dotted the dirt at the appropriate spots on each rectangle, the data collected from her and Ricky’s recon before the other two arrived. “The only difference we saw was with the guard situation. The west building has four patrolling outside on foot, plus one at the main gate, while the east only has two and one.”