Mygatt waves to us from one of the tables along the side road as we walk up. “I told them to expect you. Just give Greta my name.”
Greta turns out to be the woman at the counter. She’s probably around my age and looks to be part Hispanic. She’s both friendly and clearly in charge, which makes me think maybe she’s the owner.
Once our drinks are ready, we join Mygatt.
“I know it’s a busy day for you so I appreciate you giving me some of your time,” he says as we sit.
“Thank you for the coffee, Mr. Mygatt,” Jar says.
“Yes, thank you,” I say.
“No need for any of that mister stuff. You can call me Curtis.”
Jar and I both take sips from our cups.
“How long have you two been in town?” He asks this as if it’s small talk, but I have no doubt it’s one of the questions on his list.
I’d like to tell him we’ve been here a while, but it’s a question he probably already knows the answer to from the cop last night, or our landlord.
“A day,” I say.
“You mean to say yesterday was your first day here?” He is a mediocre actor at best, the surprise in his voice achingly forced.
I nod.
“Wow. That’s quite the welcome. But don’t you worry. Most days around here are a lot quieter than that.”
“I hope so.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, what brings you to Mercy?”
I do mind, but again, he won’t be the first we’ve told. I give him the web designer story.
“So, what you’re saying is, you’re giving us a test drive.”
“You could say it that way.”
“I hope you don’t let last night weigh too heavily in your final decision. Mercy’s a great place. A lot of good people. Good values, you know? Family. Community.” He glances at Jar. “We even have a few Asian restaurants in town. I’m sure you’ll like them.”
Nothing like a little casual racism over coffee.
Jar’s time in the States has been limited, and from her non-reaction, I’m guessing her being called out as “different” has gone unnoticed.
But it pisses me off, and I have to rein myself in when I speak to keep my ire from showing. “You said you had some questions?”
I know he’s already started asking them, but I’m pretending I don’t realize that.
He leans forward. “I’d love to hear about last night from your perspective. Starting from when you spotted the fire.”
I shrug. “Not much to tell. Kara saw it first and we went to find out if there was anything we could do.”
“What were you doing out there in the first place?”
“Just driving around. Getting a feel for the area.”
He nods. “And when you got to the house?”
“The woman, um…”
“Carla Wright.”
“Yeah, Ms. Wright told us her brother had gone inside.”
“Missus,” he says, as if that should have been obvious. “Did she say why?”
“He wanted to make sure the house was unoccupied,” Jar says, speaking for the first time since we sat down.
“Did he see someone?”
“You’d have to ask him,” I say.
Mygatt nods again. “So that’s when you decided to go inside?”
“Shouldn’t you be writing this down?” I ask. “Make sure that you don’t forget something or misquote us?”
If he catches my dig at the lack of accuracy in this morning’s article, he makes no sign of it. Instead, he taps the table next to where his phone is sitting. “Recording everything. Easier that way. When I used to take notes by hand, conversations wouldn’t flow as easily.” He pauses briefly. “You don’t mind, do you?”
I most certainly do mind, but what I say is, “I guess not. But you really should tell people before you record them.”
“You’re right. It’s just that some people get a little uptight about it.” He brushes it away with another one of his smiles. “You were going to tell me about deciding to go into the house?”
“We couldn’t just leave him in there.”
“Carla said something about a blanket?”
As I start to tell him about the blanket and the water, Jar pulls out her phone, acting as if she’s just received a text, and starts tapping on the screen. I’m pretty sure there is no text.
Mygatt asks me about the rescue and I describe that, too. By the time I finish, Jar has returned her phone to her pocket and is focusing on the conversation again.
Mygatt asks a few additional questions, trying to tease more details out of me, but I don’t give him anything worthwhile.
“You’re very modest,” he finally says.
“I don’t know about that.”
“See, there it is again. It’s a good quality. Means you’re a good person, Matthew. Not that there was any question about that.”
Saying thank you would be weird, so I keep my mouth shut.
“Where do you two call home?” he asks. “I mean before coming here.”
“California. The Bay Area.”
“San Francisco?”
“Not too far from there.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It is. It’s just expensive.”
“That’s why you’re looking for someplace new?”
“One of the reasons.”
He continues to ask about our lives for a few more minutes, and I continue to give him vague answers. When he runs out of questions, he picks up his phone and says, “May I take a picture of the two of you?”
“Why?” I ask.
“I’d like to do a profile piece on you guys,” he says as if he’s giving us a gift. “You’re new to town and you’re heroes. People are going to want to know about you.”
Holy crap. No, no, no, no, no.
“Wow, that’s very nice of you,” I say. “But we’d rather you didn’t.”
He looks confused, like he can’t conceive why we wouldn’t want the attention.
“We’d like to get to know Mercy on our own terms,” I explain. “If you publish an article about us, like you said—people will know who we are. That’s not going to make it easy for us to settle in.”
I can see my words starting to take effect.
“If you really want to do a story about us, maybe it could wait a few weeks,” I say. “Give us the chance to see if we like it here first.” There’s still some wavering in his eyes, so I add, “If you do that, you’ll be able to include our decision on whether we stay or not.”
Now he’s starting to tip in our direction. “‘Fire Heroes to Permanent Residents,’” he says, trying on a headline. “I’ll have to work on that, but I like the idea. How long are we talking?”
“Four weeks?”
“How about we check in with each other in three?”
“Sure. Three will work.”
When Jar and I are back inside the cab of the truck, I ask, “The recording?”
“Corrupted,” she says.
“Nice work.”
As I suspected, that text she pretended to receive was actually cover for her to hack into Mygatt’s phone and destroy the audio file of our conversation. Mygatt will be annoyed when he finds out but glitches happen, and as far as he knows, he’ll be having a follow-up conversation with us soon enough. Hopefully that will be enough to keep him from getting too mad.
We will not be having that follow-up, however.
Chapter Eleven
The biggest item on my to-do list is to install those bugs inside the Prices’ place, but over the next few days, the house is always occupied.
Not by Chuckie, of course. He goes to work around seven every morning and doesn’t come home until seven in the evening, when, in the grand tradition of the 1950s, he expects dinner to be on the table and everyone seated and waiting for him. We know this from conversations we’ve picked up via the bug. It’s limited in how much it can detect but at least it’s working.
Kate and Sawyer are the ones who haven’t left. Evan is home most of the time, too, though he did go out once on Wednesday to the grocery store, on his bicycle.
I’ve been hoping he’d sneak out of the house again. Though that would mean I’d be going inside while the rest of the family is home, I can work with that. Evan’s escape route has remained unused, however.
But today is Friday, and I can’t help thinking that Evan, like any true teenager, will see sneaking out of the house at the start of the weekend as a birthright.
We are monitoring the Prices from our duplex. Chuckie’s running a little late tonight and doesn’t arrive home until 7:42 p.m.
This does not change the routine for the rest of his family. Like on the previous nights, Kate has apparently been watching for him from the window. Before he’s even pulled into the garage, she yells out, “Dinnertime! Hurry up! Hurry up!”
Jar and I hear the boys coming downstairs, followed by the now familiar sound of dining room chairs scraping on the floor as they sit.
When Chuckie enters the house, Kate greets him with the same, “Welcome home, honey. How was your day?” she says every night. If he responds, our bug doesn’t pick it up.
The next five minutes are dotted with the occasional sounds of movements but little else. Finally, after the creaking of another chair, Kate says grace, and the sound of silverware clinking signals that the family has started to eat.
I don’t know about you but when I was growing up, our dinner table was always filled with conversation. My parents are talkers, and they believe in making sure everyone is involved in the discussion. When I was young, my dad especially liked coming up with hypothetical situations and asking my brother and me things like, “Pretend you’re out hiking and you find an ancient city. What does it look like?” and “If you could invent something that hasn’t been invented yet, what would it be and how would it work?” and “What if a spaceship landed in your backyard and you were the first person on Earth to meet beings from a different planet? How would you communicate with them? What would you talk about?” Sometimes we pretended we didn’t want to play along, but secretly I really enjoyed it and I’m sure my brother did, too.
My point is, meals were—and still are—noisy affairs at my house. The opposite seems to be true for the Prices, albeit this is based on a small sample size.
I don’t know how they stand it. It feels unnatural. Oppressive, even. The worst part: no one’s allowed to leave until Chuckie finishes eating.
I know we’ve already established that he’s not a good man, but I feel it bears repeating.
This guy is a supreme asshole.
The sound of eating finally tapers off. Unsurprisingly, it’s Chuckie who speaks first. Every night since we’ve been listening, it’s gone this way. On Tuesday, he said, “The steak was a little well done.” On Wednesday, “Go finish your homework.” And yesterday, “I’ve got work to do. No one bother me.”
Tonight, it’s “Barry called. He wanted to make sure we’re bringing your potato salad tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Kate says. “What’s happening tomorrow?”
A long pause before Chuckie says, “The barbecue.” The tone is very are-you-an-idiot.
“They’re still having it?”
“Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they?”
“No reason,” she says quickly, a forced lightness to her tone. “I just hadn’t heard anything, that’s all.”
“Well, it’s on, and we’re going.”
“Great.”
A chair pushes back from the table.
“I’ll be in my office,” he says.
Chuckie walks out of the room, and a few seconds later we hear the faint sound of a door closing. The den, I’m guessing.
“All right, let’s get this cleaned up,” Kate says.
I sit back. If the pattern remains unchanged, very little else will be said in the house for the rest of the evening.
“They should not be going to a party,” Jar says.
“No, they shouldn’t.”
Though the pandemic hasn’t hit this area hard yet, there have been a few cases, so it won’t be long before it spreads as widely as it has elsewhere. Unfortunately, following CDC recommendations to limit social gatherings doesn’t appear to be high on a lot of people’s priority lists around here.
Their bad choice is our good fortune, though. “If they’re all going to be gone, it’ll be the perfect time to get inside,” I say.
Jar frowns. “Not perfect. It will be daylight.”
She means the neighbors problem, but I have an idea for how to deal with that.
After I tell her what it is, Jar thinks about it for a few seconds and says, “That might work, but it is still risky.”
“I’m open to other ideas.”
At the moment, she has none.
She sets up her computer to alert us if anyone at the Prices’ house says anything else, and we make our dinner—a best-we-can-manage version of pad see ew—then settle in and watch Samurai Gourmet on Netflix.
At 11:48 p.m., after we just started the eleventh and penultimate episode in the series, Jar’s computer bongs with an alert.
I pause the video while she picks up her laptop. It’s kind of late for conversations at the Prices’ and I figure it must be someone saying goodnight. But upon looking at her screen, Jar bolts upright.
“It’s Evan,” she says. “He is leaving.”
She angles the computer so I can see it. On it plays the video feed from the bug I left in the tree across the street from the house. He’s sneaking along the back of the house, toward the picket fence.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s see where he goes.”
We rush out of the house, Jar bringing her backpack and laptop, me bringing jackets for both of us. After I pull the truck onto the street, Jar hands me a set of comm gear. I shove the earpiece into place and tap the mic to activate it.
“Check, one, two,” I say. “Check.”
“You’re good,” Jar says.
“Evan?” I ask.
“He is almost done removing the pickets from the fence.”
We’re still two blocks away, and I’m worried he’ll disappear into the night before we have him in sight. I gun the engine and race faster than I should down the residential streets.
Just ahead, the corner with the street that runs past the side of Evan’s house comes into view. It’s the same street Evan used when walking home on the night I watched him climb up the side of his house. Which gives me an idea.
I pull to a stop just short of the curb. “Follow him. I’ll track your phone.”
Without hesitating, Jar jumps out of the truck, leaving her laptop behind for me. I pull out again and speed to the corner, then turn so that I’ll drive right by Evan’s house. It’s dark enough on this block that he shouldn’t be able to see my features if he looks, but I’m betting he’ll keep his head down until I’ve passed.
That is, if he’s still in the area.
I keep an eye out for him as I drive by but the street looks deserted. I drive past his house and continue for another block before I turn left.
I want to pull to the curb and wait for Jar to report, but I also know if Evan was hiding somewhere as I passed by, it needs to sound like I’ve driven away, so I go three blocks north before stopping.
“Anything?” I ask over the comm.
Two clicks, which means no.
Crap.
Did we miss him? If we did, then I have a feeling we’re out of luck, because I doubt we’ll spot him again until he returns.
I begin counting off the seconds. When I hit thirty, I’ll go pick up Jar.
Jar clicks her mic three times as I reach seventeen. Something’s happened.
“Evan?” I ask.
One click. Yes.
I snatch up Jar’s laptop and type in her password. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person on the planet who has reached this level of trust with her. I open the tracking software
and select Jar’s phone from a set of potential devices, which includes all the phones belonging to our colleagues at work. It’s a way we can keep track of one another when necessary.
A map of the surrounding area appears, and on it a red dot showing me where Jar is located. The dot remains stationary, about a dozen meters from where I let Jar out. Then it starts to move, going west down the street that runs by the side of the Prices’ house.
I take a road that runs parallel to the one Jar and—presumably—Evan are on, heading in the same direction. When I’m two blocks behind them, relatively speaking, I slow to avoid getting ahead of them.
After relaying my new position to Jar, I say, “Give me three taps if he turns toward me, and four if he goes the other way.”
She taps once to acknowledge my instructions.
Three minutes go by without any change. Even at my reduced speed, I am still gaining on them, and have closed the two-block gap to less than one.
“He’s getting into a car,” Jar whispers in my ear, her words coming in a rush. “Come get me.”
I whip the truck around and double back to the intersection I just passed, then take that road to the one Jar is on. Before I reach the corner, I kill my headlights and make the turn.
About a block and a half in front of me, I see the rear lights of a sedan speeding away and assume it’s the one Evan is in. Jar steps out from between two parked cars ten meters ahead. I stop just long enough for her to swing the door open and jump in, then we’re off again.
I nod toward the sedan’s taillights. “That’s them, right?”
As she says, “Yes,” the sedan turns right and disappears.
I flick on my headlights and race ahead.
“How many were in the car with him?”
“Three.”
“Were you able to see them?”
She nods. “The dome light came on when he opened the door. Teenagers. Two boys and a girl. I have never seen any of them before.”
Mercy (The Night Man Chronicles Book 3) Page 13