Mercy (The Night Man Chronicles Book 3)

by Brett Battles

  As soon as Jar joins me, I whisper, “What’s he doing here?”

  “He says he wants to talk to you.”

  “I meant, how does he even know we’re here?”

  She shrugs again, this time it’s of the more common I-have-no-idea variety.

  “Did you ask?”

  “I asked.”

  “And?”

  “He only said that he would wait for you.”

  “How long has he been here?”

  “Since about three minutes before I texted you.”

  “You could have let me know then that he was here.”

  “True. But it would have changed nothing. And it is more fun this way.”

  “Fun?”

  A third shrug. It is what it is.

  I take a deep breath and say in a calmer voice, “So he came to the door and asked for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you let him in.”

  “It seemed like the right thing to do.”

  “And the only thing he’s said since then is that he wants to talk to me?”

  “He said, ‘Thank you,’ after I gave him a bottle of water.”

  “Now you’re just trying to be cute.”

  “I was not aware that I needed to try.”

  It takes an act of God to prevent me from rolling my eyes. “Well, I guess we should go see what he wants, then, shouldn’t we?”

  I stash the duffel and my suit in the back bedroom and we return to the living room. We have only the one additional chair, which Jar claims, leaving nothing but the floor for me.

  I think she’s enjoying this.

  Instead of sitting, I head into the kitchen to grab myself a bottle of water.

  As I described before, the duplex isn’t that large. The kitchen and living room are a single space, divided by a counter above which cabinets hang.

  As I walk back into the living room, I say, “So, um, nice to see you again.”

  The words are barely out of my mouth when he asks, “What are you doing here?”

  “We live here.”

  His mouth tightens in annoyance. “I don’t mean this house. I mean Mercy.”

  “Same answer.”

  “That’s not true. I would have seen you before.”

  “You haven’t seen us because we’re new here. We came for work.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “We’re web developers.”

  “You’re doing that here?”

  “The internet is everywhere,” I say, sounding as disarming as I can.

  He thinks on this for a second or two, and frowns. “Then it was complete chance you camped near us at the Grand Canyon?”

  “Complete chance,” I say, which might be the most honest answer I’ve given him.

  He studies my face, eyes narrowing. “That’s kind of hard to believe.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. Until we saw you that first time, we had no idea you and your family even existed.”

  “You didn’t follow us here?”

  “Did you see us following you?”

  A downward glance and a shake of his head.

  “Then how could we have done that?”

  He looks at the floor. At first, he seems a bit lost, but when he returns his gaze to me, the intensity in his eyes has ratcheted up tenfold. “Okay, then. Why were you in our RV?”

  This is the question I’ve been dreading, but there’s no way he would leave it unasked. I have no good answers to give him, so I have little choice but to be at least semi-truthful.

  “We were worried about you.”

  His eyebrows converge on each other. “What?”

  “We saw what your father made you do at the Grand Canyon,” I remind him. “That’s not…normal. You seem like a good kid. When we realized you live here, we wanted to make sure the situation hadn’t gotten any worse.”

  “He didn’t do anything wrong,” Evan says. It’s a practiced line, a variation of something I’m sure he’s learned to say a lot.

  I can’t come out this week. I have homework.

  It’s my fault I’ve been grounded.

  I was clumsy and tripped. That’s all.

  He was even able to put some conviction behind it, though not enough to convince anyone who’s met Chuckie.

  Calling him on it isn’t going to help our current situation, so I say, “I’m glad to hear that.”

  Seconds pass without any of us speaking, the tension growing. I don’t want to be the one to break the silence. The less I say, the better.

  To my surprise, it’s Jar who speaks first. “It was a mistake.”

  Evan cocks his head. “What was a mistake?”

  “Hiding under your camper. That was my idea. I wanted to make sure you and your brother were okay.”

  A defensive flare races through his eyes. “My brother? I can take care of my brother myself.”

  “He is on the spectrum, is he not?”

  “Leave my brother out of this.”

  “I only say this because I am as well.”

  He looks at her as if she’s spoken a foreign language. “What?”

  “Your brother and me—we are the same.”

  “You mean you’re…”

  “Yes.”

  Evan doesn’t seem to know what to make of this, which is a feeling I share. Jar has never talked directly to anyone about the way her brain is wired. Not ever. Not even to me.

  “You don’t seem the same,” Evan finally says.

  “Every person is unique. Even those like your brother and me. He does have something that I do not, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A brother to watch over him.”

  Evan looks surprised by her response. “I’m-I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing for you to be sorry about. None of us can change the past. We can only affect the future. Which is why, after we realized you and your brother were here in Mercy, we checked on you. I’m sorry that my friend surprised you. But even if hiding in your camper was a mistake, I am not sorry that we did it.”

  Man, I could not have tied up that story better. And all of what she said is true.

  Still, the explanation leaves plenty of questions unanswered. Like, how did we find out Evan and his family were in Mercy at all? How come we live so close to where they live? Why is there no real furniture in our house? Not to mention a dozen other loose threads that if tugged on would expose the fact there is more to why we’re here than we’re letting on.

  Evan doesn’t seem to be thinking of any of that, though. From the tears gathering in his eyes, I know Jar’s words have resonated with him. I think he isn’t used to people seeing his brother and their relationship as being something other than a nuisance or a burden. It’s almost certainly the way his father sees things.

  He wipes his eyes before the tears can fall. After a glance at Jar, he looks at me. “You shouldn’t have done that.” He means hide in the Winnebago. “He could have caught you. That would have been bad.”

  There’s no question about who he’s referring to. Part of me wants to use his words as an opening to question him about his father. But to do so would draw him into our conspiracy, if even just a little bit. So instead I say, “I promise it won’t happen again.”

  A bit of his defensive tone sneaks back into his voice when he says, “We’re fine. Everything is fine. You…you don’t need to worry about us.”

  “Good,” Jar says. “That is a relief.”

  Whatever fight is left in Evan seeps away. He takes a deep breath and stands up. “I should get back home.”

  “Thank you for coming by,” Jar says. “It is good to clear things up. If you ever need a place to get away to, you are always welcome here.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Anytime. Day or night.”

  “Thanks.” I can tell he’s not really sure what to do with that information. But hopefully, if a time does come when he needs a hideaway, he’ll take us up on our offer. We won’t be here forever, but we do pla
n on staying until he and his brother are safe, after which a place to run away to should no longer be necessary.

  “I wouldn’t mention to anyone that you saw us,” I say.

  A quick, humorless laugh escapes his lips. “Are you kidding? Who would I tell?”

  We walk him to the door. The whole time I sense he has something more he wants to say but is having an internal debate as to whether he should or not. Apparently, the or not camp wins out, because all he says as he steps outside is “good night” and then he’s gone.

  After I close the door, I say, “I don’t understand how he knew we were here.”

  “I think I know,” Jar says.

  She returns to the card table, opens her computer, and starts typing without elaborating.

  After a few minutes, she looks up from her screen. “It was my fault. I walked over to Central Avenue to pick up dinner, between five and five thirty. At the same time, Evan’s mother sent him to the market. He must have seen me and followed me long enough to find this place.”

  She shows me the footage from the Prices’ house of Evan’s departure.

  “You didn’t notice him?” I ask. I’m not accusing her; I’m just surprised. Jar is normally very good at knowing when she’s being watched.

  “I did not.”

  Again, I get the feeling Evan’s life under Chuckie has taught the boy skills most people never fully develop.

  Jar plays another scene on her laptop for me, this one of Evan sneaking out of his house late at night, the only light on the one in the Prices’ backyard. “He knocked on our door four minutes after this.” She pauses. “Maybe it’s better that he knows we are here.”

  “Maybe.” Speculation from Jar is a rare thing, so I don’t want to discourage her. But I’m not sure what to think about him knowing we’re here. The one thing I am sure of, the sooner we can do something about Chuckie, the better.

  Jar shares the progress she’s made on the things she’s been looking into, after which I brief her on my trip to Denver, then retrieve the bag of goodies I picked up from Dave.

  Jar looks through it, nodding as if mentally checking items off a list.

  When she finishes, she says, “Should we go now? Or do you want to wait until tomorrow night?”

  It’s been a long day and I could really use some sleep, but that’s never stopped me from working before. Besides, now that we have the additional bugs, waiting twenty-four more hours to install them means we’d be needlessly throwing away an entire day of potentially useful information.

  “Let me grab a quick shower first. Then we can go.”

  Price Motors stretches for an entire block. To be fair, it’s not a long block, maybe sixty meters at most. The business consists of two basic areas—a car lot, which even at this hour is flooded with lights; and a rectangular building, with a big, glass-sided bulge in the center. The bump is the showroom, which is dark but for a few security lights inside. In the floor-to-ceiling windows at the front hangs a banner that reads: PRICE MOTORS—WHERE YOU’LL ALWAYS GET THE BEST PRICE. I wonder if Chuckie considered WHERE THE PRICE IS ALWAYS RIGHT. That seems snappier. But what do I know about marketing?

  Jar and I are in the pickup, parked across the street about a half block away. Central Avenue is dead quiet, not a moving vehicle in sight in either direction.

  Jar lowers the binoculars and hands them to me. “Looks clear to me.”

  I scan the lot, then focus on the windows of the showroom. The big question is whether or not the place has a night security guard. My money is on not. While I’d expect to see one at a car dealership in someplace like Los Angeles, in a small town like this it would be a waste of money. And if Chuckie is indeed having financial issues, he’s not going to spend cash he doesn’t have to.

  “I don’t see anyone, either.”

  Jar lowers her window, sends the drone into the sky, and gives the controls to me. I fly the device over the car lot, the camera pointed straight down. This allows me to see if anyone is hiding behind a vehicle. Once I determine the lot is deserted, I lower the drone so that it hovers four meters in front of the showroom windows, its camera pointed inside.

  If there is a guard on the premises, he’s in a back room, maybe even asleep.

  I send the drone upward until it is twelve meters above the building and turn on sentry mode. Until this function is cancelled, the craft will hover where it is, its camera scanning the building and surrounding area for signs of movement.

  As I’m doing this, Jar has been hacking into the dealership’s security system.

  “How’s it going?” I ask.

  “Almost there. He has several security cameras. Just creating loops.”

  Her keyboard clacks under her flying fingers as she creates video loops for each camera, ones that will show scenes with no one in them. She will feed these into the system so they will be recorded instead of the live shots while we are on the premises.

  A minute later, she says, “We are good to go.”

  Leaving the truck’s lights off, I put the vehicle in gear and drive us over to the side street just north of the dealership. There, I park and kill the engine.

  The backside of Price Motors sits along a dark alley, the only light coming from a single flood positioned above the car entrance to the service department. The wide roll-up door is closed, as are the two pedestrian doors along the back. One of these doors is next to the roll-up, while the other is much closer to us. A sign above this last entrance reads: EMPLOYEES ONLY. I pick the door’s lock and we step inside.

  There’s something invigorating about entering a place uninvited.

  Hold on—now that I’ve shared that thought, I realize how that sounds. We’re not criminals. Well, I mean, I guess we are trespassing. Breaking and entering, really. Which sounds worse. Plus, we’ll illegally bug the place and likely look through a few drawers.

  Um…

  You know what? I’ll just be keeping some thoughts to myself from now on.

  The entrance has put us into a hallway about seven meters long. In addition to the door we’ve just come through, the corridor has four others—one at the far end, one on the right side, and two on the left. The last two are the men’s and women’s restrooms, both of which are empty. The door on the right opens into an employee break room, also unoccupied.

  We walk to the end of the hall and carefully open the last door. To our right is the showroom, currently featuring a pair of SUVs, a pickup, and a sedan. Between us and the vehicles are several cubicles that I’m guessing are used by the salesmen. To our left are glass-walled offices for the higher-ups, like the sales manager and probably Chuckie if he doesn’t hold that position himself.

  We creep out of the hallway and make a quick sweep of the space to confirm we are alone.

  In the far back corner near the service garage, we find Chuckie’s office. Its walls are mostly windowed but covered by closed blinds. On the door is a plaque with the words CHARLES PRICE • PRESIDENT carved on it. Unlike with the other offices, this door has a dead bolt on top of the doorknob lock. Neither provides me with much of a challenge, and we are soon standing on the other side of the door.

  I place four cameras in his office, aiming them to cover every inch of the space. While I am doing this, Jar hacks into his computer and inserts a program that will run in the background and allow us to see everything he does on the machine.

  We spend a few additional minutes searching his desk and filing cabinets. I’m hoping we’ll find another secret phone, but if he has one here, he’s hidden it well.

  After we finish with his office, we scatter additional cameras and some audio-only bugs throughout the building, placing them in a way to prevent any dead zones in the coverage.

  As you can imagine, that’ll be a lot of data. And there’s no way Jar and I will be able to go through it all on our own. Instead, a monitoring program developed by Jar and one of our colleagues will do the work for us. It will notify us of sections it thinks we should hear. It d
oesn’t always get it right, but it should be sufficient for our needs.

  I’ve just finished putting a camera in the service department waiting area when Jar appears at the other end, next to the cubicles, and signals for me to get down. I drop into a crouch and move over to her.

  She has the drone feed up on her phone. In the corner, a red exclamation point blinks rapidly, indicating movement has been detected. A scan of the screen reveals a person standing on the sidewalk in front of the dealership, facing the building.

  I’m pretty sure it’s a man, though I could be wrong. The angle is nearly straight down, and the person is wearing a baseball cap.

  “Where did the drone pick him up?” I ask. What I’m really wondering is if he’s had the chance to spot us.

  “When he was a block away,” Jar says.

  “How long has he been standing there?”

  “Only a few seconds.”

  Which means it’s unlikely our mystery guest has seen us moving around. Thanks to the cubicles between us and the glass walls, he definitely can’t see us now. The problem is, we can’t move anywhere else without risking exposure.

  For another half minute, the person remains motionless, facing our direction. Then the bill of the baseball cap swivels left and right. When it returns to center, the person steps onto the car lot.

  Crap.

  I don’t think he works here. If he did, why worry so much about being seen?

  Any hope that he’s just here to steal one of the cars disappears as he walks right by them, heading for the south side of the showroom, his gaze never leaving the building.

  Staying low, I move along the cubicles to the corner nearest the showroom’s south wall, then pull out my phone and attach the gooseneck camera. After pressing the video record button, I darken my screen so that it won’t give away my position, and slide the gooseneck’s lens around the corner, aiming it toward the door.

  Jar has moved in next to me. Her screen is still on, though she’s turned down the brightness. On it, we watch the visitor walk up to the entrance only five meters away from us and stop. I use this information to adjust the aim of the gooseneck camera, trying to get a look at the person’s face.

  On the drone’s camera, the visitor unzips his jacket and puts a hand inside. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he does work here, because I can’t help feeling he’s about to pull out a set of keys and unlock the door.