Mercy (The Night Man Chronicles Book 3) by Brett Battles (most inspirational books of all time TXT) 📗

“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