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

It had been clear they were referring to the storm. Which means the card must be about the event happening before the weather turns bad.

Though Lyman might have been our mystery man in the baseball cap, I doubt it. The man we saw early this morning didn’t seem as broad or tall as Lyman. An assistant from his law firm, perhaps? Or some rando he threw a few bucks at to deliver the note?

The marks on the postcard indicate the initial event is going to happen on a Tuesday, probably sometime after six p.m.

Today is Tuesday, and tomorrow comes the rain. Unless we’ve completely misunderstood everything, the event will occur this evening, no earlier than six.

I would very much like to witness whatever they have planned. Which means we have about eight hours to find out where we need to be and get there.

Instead of returning to the duplex, we head out to our Travato at the farm. Chances are Evan isn’t planning on paying us another visit today, but I don’t want to be around if he shows up. The fewer distractions we have, the better. (And yeah, I haven’t forgotten he’s grounded, but Chuckie’s at work, and I have a feeling Evan’s mother might be willing to stretch the rules if he asks nicely enough.)

After a week of staying in town, it feels nice to be back in the RV again. I have the sudden desire to get on the road and just drive and drive and drive. What we do instead is sit down at the table, open our computers, and get to work.

Our first task is to determine if Robert Lyman is indeed the person to whom Chuckie passed the note. While the drone footage caught the handshake between the two men, it neither confirms nor rules out an exchange occurred. The driving range parking lot is not covered by any security cameras, so we don’t have alternate footage to fall back on. The best we can do is try to find a strong link between the two men that would indicate they’re doing business together.

After an hour and a half of diving through legal records, email correspondence, and the Mercy Sentinel’s database, we are no closer to that point. The two men have crossed paths plenty of times, but that’s to be expected in a town the size of Mercy. We find nothing that even hints at them ever doing anything together beyond showing up at the same functions. Even if they’re hiding a connection, I’m sure we would find something. There are few people in this world who can cover their tracks a hundred percent of the time.

I still consider Lyman to be our prime suspect, but without proof we are forced to spend some time investigating the two driving range employees—Travis Murphy, the manager; and Paul Bergen, the ball guy.

As we’ve already learned, Bergen has known Chuckie since at least high school, when they were on the same football team. Other than that, we find even less to connect the two men than we did for Chuckie and Lyman.

With Murphy, it’s not just less, it’s almost nothing. Chuckie is a member of Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Lion’s Club. Murphy is not a member of anything, not even a church, as far as we can tell.

I’m starting to think that the idea Chuckie left the note for someone else to find later is what really happened. If that’s the case, I have no idea how we’re going to discover who that was.

Needing to clear my head, I grab my jacket and step outside into the cool afternoon. The sky is mostly filled with a layer of high clouds, the advance team for tomorrow’s storm.

I walk around the barn, struck again by the emptiness of it all. So much land, and so few people. This is not an insult to those who live in places like this, but I think if I had to stay here permanently, I’d go crazy. We’re all built differently, I guess. Me, I was put together to be surrounded by millions of others.

The quiet, I think, is what would be the worst. It’s nice at first, but after a while it gets to you. Right now, other than the chirps of a few birds, I can hear nothing else. Not even the sound of a car driving by on the road.

I stop in my tracks.

A car on the road.

I stare across the nearby field, seeing nothing as I follow the thought. Could I be misremembering things? There’s only one way to find out.

I hurry back to the Travato.

“Can you send me the drone footage from the dealership?” I ask as soon as I step inside. “I only need the part starting when the guy with the card showed up.”

She shoots me a link containing an anchor that starts the video right as the visitor walks into the shot. I speed up the footage, rushing past his approach to the building, his delivery of the card, and his exit back to the street, then return to normal speed just before the car that drove by enters the frame.

It’s on camera for a total of four seconds. One hundred and twenty frames.

I play the sequence at half speed, but this only serves to blur the video. I go back again, but instead of hitting PLAY this time, I advance the clip frame by frame. Again, most of the frames are blurry. It isn’t until I reach the fifty-seventh one that I find a clear shot.

It’s a Honda Accord, the model at least a decade old. It’s hard to tell the color since it’s a nighttime shot, but it’s definitely a light shade, maybe tan or gray or a pale blue.

When I played my memory of this shot through my mind outside, the car felt somehow familiar. Now that I’m looking at it on my laptop, the feeling is even stronger.

I screen-capture the frame and open it in my