Mercy (The Night Man Chronicles Book 3), Brett Battles [best books to read in your 20s TXT] 📗

An uncomfortable look crosses her face. “It…fits the sounds we heard.”

“Play the rest.”

The conversation that follows the offer of a beer is strictly small talk—questions about the Prices’ recent vacation, comments on the high school’s decision to cancel the upcoming graduation ceremony, and general scoffing at how some people are overreacting to a virus that, in Chuckie’s words, “isn’t any worse than the flu.”

Idiotic stuff, yes, but none of it shines any light on the exchange of the paper, nor does it touch on anything else that might be of interest to us. That is, until In Shape says, “We should be getting back. We don’t need people wondering where we’ve been.”

It’s not a lot, but it confirms they don’t want anyone to know what they’re doing.

“Here, I’ll take those,” Chuckie says.

We hear bottles clinking together and then crashing into what I assume is a trash can. The door opens, and we hear the Winnebago groan as the three men exit.

“Just one other thing,” the old guy says.

He’s outside now, so his voice is not only muffled but fainter, due to him being farther from the bug. Jar turns up the volume before he speaks again.

“The weatherman mentioned a storm coming through midweek. Do not let it slow anything down.”

“Before and after?” Chuckie asks.

A pause. “Right after.”

“Understood.”

“Good.”

“Better if we don’t all return together,” In Shape says.

“You guys go ahead,” Chuckie says. “I need to grab a couple of chairs anyway.”

From the moment they stepped out of the RV to this point in the conversation, I saw them through the binoculars. So when we hear Old Guy and In Shape moving away, I tell Jar, “You can turn it off. There’s nothing else.”

If I’m right about the exchange of a piece of paper, I’m betting we can see Chuckie do something with it when he gets to his house. Before I can mention it, Jar opens the feeds from the Prices’ house in a grid pattern, and sets the playback time to when the family arrived home from the barbecue.

We see Chuckie enter the house first. He stops at the light switches next to the door and flips the one for the outside light down and back up, then looks into the yard. When he sees the light is still out, he marches through the house into the laundry room.

“The fuse box is in there,” Jar says.

We don’t have a camera in the laundry room so we can’t see what Chuckie does. We only see him exit a minute later and go over to the kitchen window. When he looks out from there, the light is back on. I’m sure he’s wondering why the breaker went off, but he’s not doing anything about it now.

Instead, he heads to his office, which he unlocks, enters, and locks again.

Alone now, he reaches into a pocket of his shorts and pulls out a folded piece of paper. (Yay, me!) He opens it and looks at it.

I’m hoping he’ll set it on the desk so that we might be able to make out what the message says, but when he does set it down, he’s already folded it again.

He unlocks one of the four-drawer filing cabinets—because of course he keeps them secured—and pulls out the second drawer from the top. It contains files stuffed with papers. He reaches for the file at the very back, but instead of removing it, he pulls it and all the files in front of it toward him, creating a gap between the last file and the back of the drawer. From there he removes a manila envelope that has been folded several times, creating a package about the size of a stack of money.

For a moment, I think that’s exactly what’s inside, but when he unfolds the envelope, he pulls out a smart phone.

I look at Jar, raising an eyebrow. “You didn’t find that?”

She grimaces. “No. But I should have.”

“Relax. I’m just giving you a hard time. I’d have missed it, too.”

This does not seem to make her feel any better.

Chuckie holds down a button on the side of the phone until the screen lights up. The device wasn’t just asleep; it was completely off. Once it’s booted up, he opens one of the apps and begins typing. Though we can see the screen, it’s tilted in a way that makes reading what he writes impossible. We also can’t see which app he’s using, though I’m willing to bet it’s some kind of message app.

Once he’s done, he shuts off the device, puts it back in the envelope, and returns the package to its hiding place in the drawer.

From his desk, he retrieves an unused business-size envelope and places the folded piece of paper in it. He sticks a piece of tape on each end of the envelope, opens the bottom drawer on the other filing cabinet, and tapes the envelope to the underside.

The guy has obviously watched too many bad spy movies. If I’m looking for hidden documents, the bottom of a drawer would be one of the first places I check.

None of what we’ve seen proves Chuckie’s up to something nefarious, but it sure feels that way. And while it doesn’t seem directly related to his behavior toward Evan and the rest of his family, anything that can give us leverage over him is fair game.

So, do I want to see what’s in that envelope?

Yes. Yes, I do. Very much.

But just as important is that phone. If we can clone it, we can track what’s being sent and received.

“We have to go back in,” I say.

Not surprisingly, Jar is on the same wavelength.

Chapter Fourteen

When I wake at six a.m. the next morning, it feels like I’ve slept in.

Last night, Jar and I stayed up for a while, working out our next steps, but were still able to get to bed at a decent hour. At least I was. Who knows what time Jar turned in?

It’s Sunday, and I’m hoping we’ll have the opportunity to get