A deputy who was standing near the back of the fire trucks—Dalby, presumably—jogs over to one of the sheriff’s cars and climbs in.
As Jar and I get back into the truck, Carla Wright hurries over, waving her hand to get our attention. I lower my window.
“You’re leaving?” she says.
“You’ve got plenty of help here now. We’re just in the way.”
“I wanted to thank you for saving my brother.”
“You did already.”
“I did?”
I nod.
“You didn’t tell me your name, though, did you? If you did, I don’t remember it.”
I did, but there’s no reason to remind her of that, too. “I’m Matthew and my girlfriend’s name is Kara.” That’s part of the fake history Jar and I had fleshed out before we checked out the rentals. Since we’ll be living together, it’s either that or pretend to be married.
“You live in Mercy?”
“We’re staying in the area.”
“I’d love to drop something by to thank you for what you’ve done.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Please, I insist.”
“We’re just about to move into a new place. Why don’t you tell me where you live and I can drop by? Would that work?”
“Perfect. Thank you.” She gives me her address and I put it into my phone. She glances back toward the ambulance, which looks like it’s also getting ready to leave. “Better make it the day after tomorrow. I’ll probably be busy with Harlan tomorrow, making sure he’s doing okay.”
“Day after tomorrow it is,” I say, having no intention of paying her a visit.
“Late afternoon.”
“Sounds good.”
She hurries to the ambulance and climbs into the back, just before one of the EMTs closes the door.
We wait for the ambulance to leave first. As it heads for the driveway, I notice Mygatt standing off to the side, pointing his phone’s camera lens at the blaze. From the way he interacted with Olsen and the other officers, I wonder if he’s a fire inspector or someone like that.
Once the ambulance is speeding down the drive, I take my foot off the brake and get us the hell out of there.
During the drive to the Travato, I can’t help but think about the fire. Based on what Olsen said, this wasn’t the first case of arson. But why burn down an empty house, and a barn, and whatever that third building was? From what I’ve read, most people who purposely set fires are driven either by a love of flames or a love of money. Sometimes both. If you’re doing it for the insurance money, you’d want to do it so that it looks like it was caused by faulty wiring or something similar. You wouldn’t have burned your house down in such an obvious way.
All very strange.
But also not our problem.
The Travato is a welcome sight. This will be only our fourth night staying in it, but seeing it now feels a little like coming home.
Maybe I’m just overreacting to my experience at the fire. Which is kind of odd, given the more intense experiences I’ve been through in my life. Of course, it’s been almost two months now since we’ve had any work. I mean, on the day job. Obviously I’ve done a few things on my own—like dealing with Marco and Blaine and hoisting Evan off the side of the Grand Canyon. Still, the relative inaction must be playing with my senses, right?
The air inside the camper is only marginally warmer than it is outside. And with my clothes still damp and no roaring blaze nearby to fight off the cold, I begin to shiver.
Noticing my condition, Jar flicks on the heater, but it’ll take several minutes to warm up the place.
“Why don’t you take a shower?” she says. “That should help.”
The Travato has an adequate but small shower. We don’t keep the water heater on all the time, so it’ll take nearly as long as the room heater to warm up.
“In the house, I mean,” she says. “The water heater there is on.”
“You checked it?”
“You did not?”
When we did our walk-through of the house earlier, I did note that the power was on, but no, I didn’t check the water heater. Leave it to Jar to be even more thorough than me.
I grab a change of clothes, a bottle of shower gel and a towel, and walk to the farmhouse, where I use the shower in the master bath since it’s the largest. I stand under the hot stream, face upturned, as all the ways the evening could have gone wrong run through mind.
Fire is unpredictable. Fire does not care about anything. If you are in its path, fire will turn you into fuel at its first opportunity.
I don’t like fire.
It’s an enemy that takes great effort to tame, and often the only thing that can be done is to flee. If, that is, one has a way out.
I’ve been lucky in my career and have had to get up close and personal with fire on only a few occasions. Most of those instances were brushes with flames that didn’t last very long. Tonight’s interaction was one of the longest. There was a moment at the bottom of the stairs, with Harlan over my shoulder, when I wasn’t sure which way to go. I figured it out quickly enough, but I’d be lying if I said the potential of burning up with the building didn’t cross my mind.
Which is probably the reason it takes a bit longer than it should for my shivering to abate.
When it finally does, I wash my upper body and hair, and then reach down to remove my prosthetic right leg. The device is waterproof, which is great, but the sock over my nub is not. I keep the prosthetic in the shower with me so I can clean it, too, and toss the sock out. It lands on the floor with a wet thwack.
My right leg ends just below the knee, the visible reminder of an injury I received back when I was an apprentice. It almost ended my career at a point when my career had barely begun. If I’m honest, though, losing the leg has made me better at what I do than I probably would have been if it didn’t happen.
It focused me, and taught me to come up with solutions I wouldn’t have otherwise thought of for certain problems. It still does. I’m not sure someone can say this about themselves or not, but what the hell, I’ll throw this out there. The injury and its aftermath have made me not only better at my job but also a better person.
I have multiple prosthetics. The two I use the most are the one I wear when I go for a run, and the one I think of as my everyday leg. It’s the latter that I’ve been wearing today and just took off. It’s surprisingly comfortable, and makes me look like I’m not missing a limb at all—except, of course, when I’m wearing shorts. It also has five built-in secret compartments. For example, the one on the outside of the calf contains a specially built knife for unexpected situations. In the other compartments, I can hide things like IDs and cash and whatever else I may need to stash away, as long as it’s not too big.
When I finish, I towel off, get dressed, and head back to the Travato.
Jar has warmed up the burgers and fries we picked up before we left Mercy. I’m not sure they taste any better than they would have if left cold, but I wolf them down anyway.
“Maybe we should wait until tomorrow,” Jar says.
She’s talking about the task we’d planned on doing tonight, before we knew I’d be running into a burning house.
Still…
“I’d rather not waste the time,” I say.
“You look tired.”
“Since when has that stopped us from doing anything?”
The frown she gives me is…let’s call it dubious.
I glance at my watch. It’s only a little after nine p.m., so we still have plenty of the night to work with.
“How about this?” I ask. “I’ll grab a nap and we can go in a couple hours.”
She still doesn’t look convinced, but she also doesn’t put up an argument.
I set the alarm on my phone, as I’m pretty sure Jar has no intention of waking me. Then I lie on the bed and within moments am asleep.
Chapter Nine
By midnight, I’m awake
and ready.
I’ll never admit it to Jar, but when my alarm went off, I really had to fight the urge to roll over and sleep the night through.
We head back to Mercy.
At this time of night, the place is a ghost town.
The only businesses open are a few gas stations, though none of them seem to have any customers. The few bars we pass are closed. I assume that’s due to the pandemic, though maybe operating hours for places like them are different here in Colorado than they are in California.
The only other occupied vehicle we see is a police sedan that crosses through an intersection three blocks ahead of us. As soon as it disappears from view, I turn down a side street and park at the curb, just in case the cop decides to circle back and check on us.
Sure enough, half a minute later, the sedan drives through the intersection behind us, down the street we were on earlier. But neither of the two officers inside looks our way.
I give it another two minutes, and then we’re moving again.
Taking side streets, we work our way to a road about halfway between our duplex rental and the Prices’ house. I find a spot to park that’s not directly in front of any house. Though all the windows of the nearby residences are dark, Jar scans them with our binoculars to make sure no one is watching us.
“We’re clear,” she says, and lowers the glasses.
From her backpack, she withdraws our comm gear and hands me a set. Once our radios are in place, I open my door as quietly as possible and slip outside. Jar climbs across the cab and exits the same way.
Our goal tonight is to get an up-close look at the Prices’ house, and hopefully figure out how I’ll get inside it to plant our bugs. While I don’t expect to actually enter tonight, I have an array of audio and visual bugs with me on the chance that opportunity strikes. It’s a limited supply, probably enough to cover the house, but not much more than that. Vacation, remember?
Staying in the shadows, we work our way to the street that runs by the side of the Price property, where the entrance to the driveway the Winnebago used is located.
The neighborhood is as quiet as if we were in the middle of the deserted countryside, which means we have to be extra careful to not make a sound. One moderately loud misstep and we’d probably wake up a half dozen people. Thankfully, there are no streetlamps on this particular block, though one does sit on the road that runs in front of the Prices’ house, just across the street from their front door.
This does not mean the side street is completely unlit. An outdoor light on the back of the Prices’ house illuminates the space between the building’s rear entrance and the RV.
I doubt someone forgot to turn it off. Chuckie doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d put up with that kind of error. I have a feeling it’s on because he wants to deter anyone from trying to mess with his Winnebago. Which is kind of paranoid for a small city like this. While I’m sure things go missing now and then here, motorhomes are hard to hide, and I’d be willing to bet that the number of vehicle thefts in Mercy per year can be counted on one hand.
Using the binoculars, Jar checks the windows of the house for signs of life. The Prices, like most of their neighbors, appear to have turned in for the night.
Once she gives me the okay, I sneak across the road to the gate that closes off the driveway. Unlike the picket fence that separates the rest of the Prices’ property from the public sidewalk, the gate is made of chain link. It’s also high enough that I can’t just step over it.
I give it a gentle shake, thinking maybe I can hop it. The chain link feels tight to the frame, but not tight enough to be soundless. So much for going over the top.
I’d rather not go over the picket fence, either. As I’m sure you can understand, I like to avoid pointy things between my legs whenever possible.
Thankfully, I have other options.
The easiest of these is via the backyard of the neighboring house behind the Prices’.
The fence between the two places is six foot high, made of wood, and looks solid. This same fence encloses the neighbor’s entire backyard, and while it’s taller than the picket fence, it’s less spikey, and as a bonus, includes an unlocked gate next to the house. Before I open it, I toss a few pebbles into the yard to wake up any sleeping dogs. When nothing happens, I lift the latch and push the gate open.
A half minute later, I’ve hopped over the back fence and am now standing in the Prices’ yard, hidden from the house by the Winnebago. I crouch here for a whole minute and wait to make sure my arrival has gone unnoticed, then I creep along the RV to the front end and peer around it.
A deck juts out from the house about five meters and runs nearly the length of the structure. The rest of the yard is covered with grass that’s in the early stages of making a comeback from a dormant winter.
The only entrance into the house that I can see is a sliding glass door at about the midpoint of the deck. Curtains are pulled across the glass, but it’s a pretty fair guess that a living room is on the other side. From the other windows, I determine the kitchen is to the left of the glass doors, while immediately to the right is a bathroom. On the other side of the bathroom, two more windows belong to what is probably a bedroom or den. It, too, has curtains closed. Along the second floor are multiple windows—another bathroom and what I assume are two bedrooms, if not three.
I creep onto the deck and step up to the sliding glass door. From my pocket, I remove my phone and a wand-like device and attach them to each other. After opening my alarm detection app, I move the wand along the frame of the door.
The house has an alarm system but it’s a standard model, used by a lot of home security companies. Which means it’s well known to my software. I tap a button on my screen and thirty seconds later, the red warning that reads ACTIVE ALARM switches to a green INACTIVE ALARM.
Again, the purpose of this trip is not to actually go inside. But now that the detector knows the way into the Prices’ system, the next time I tap DEACTIVATE, the delay will be a second or two at most. I turn the alarm back on.
Sliding glass doors are among the easiest to break into. Which is why a lot of people put something in the tracks to block the door from being opened. Glancing through the glass at the bottom of the frame, I’m not surprised to see the Prices have done just that. Looks like an old broom handle. Problematic, but not impossible to deal with. As for the door’s lock, I’ve dispatched dozens like it with ease in the past. If I go in this way, the lock will not be the problem.
“Someone’s coming down the street,” Jar whispers in my ear.
I glance back at the picket fence but don’t hear anything from that direction. “Car?”
“On foot. Sounds like one person. From the west.”
That would be from somewhere beyond the neighbor whose backyard I passed through. I listen for footsteps but can’t hear any.
“How close?”
“A block and a half.”
“Copy.”
Someone out for a midnight stroll, I’m guessing. If the person continues in this direction and glances into the Prices’ backyard, he or she will likely spot me if I stay where I am, so I sneak off the deck and move around its north side, farthest from the street.
A few seconds after I’m hidden, I finally hear the steps. They’re light, either of someone who is small or someone trying to avoid making too much noise.
Since Jar isn’t giving me an update, I’m guessing the walker is near her.
The area I’m in is dark enough that I can look around the end of the deck without worrying too much about being seen.
The steps are getting close, and I should be able to see the person any second.
When I do, the walker is a lot closer to me than I expected. In fact, the person, who is wearing a hooded puffy jacket, is on the sidewalk right next to the Prices’ fence. My next surprise comes when he or she stops at the long gate and looks at the house. I can’t help but think the person knows I’m here. But there’s no way
that’s possible.
Nothing to see here, I mentally project toward the walker. Keep it moving.
The person stirs as if hearing me, and for a moment I’m impressed with my telepathic powers, but my self-esteem takes an immediate hit when the walker moves over to the picket fence on the other side of the gate, removes three of the pickets as if they were being held in place by tape, and slips through the fence into the Prices’ backyard.
What the actual hell?
After the pickets are put back in place, I watch the walker approach the house for as long as I can before I pull back out of sight. I don’t hear any steps moving onto the deck, and realize I must be hiding where the walker is headed.
Seriously?
I do the only thing I can and squeeze under the deck, no more than five seconds before the person comes around the end of it.
It’s Evan.
He continues past me for a few more steps, then stops and looks back, as if sensing he’s not alone. When he doesn’t see anyone else, he disappears into the area between the house and the detached garage. Though I can’t see what he’s doing, it sounds like he’s climbing up the side of the building.
I want to take a look, but that would entail sticking my head out from under the deck, so I resist.
When the climbing stops, I hear a faint scraping sound, followed by more movement, and finally a repeat of the scraping. After that, the night goes silent.
“Are you all right?” Jar asks. “Were you seen?”
Evan has probably moved out of earshot but I don’t know for sure, so I click my mic once to let her know I’m okay.
After another fifteen seconds, I allow myself to crawl out from under the deck.
Evan is indeed gone.
A trellis, lightly populated with vines, runs up the side of the house, stopping less than a meter below a pair of second-story windows. These are the only windows on this side of the house. Clearly, Evan climbed up the trellis to one of them. I’m curious about how the structure can hold his weight. It doesn’t appear to be strong enough.
I move in closer and give it soft tug. I’m right. The whole thing should have pulled off the wall before Evan made it halfway up.
Mercy (The Night Man Chronicles Book 3) Page 11