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

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 doesn’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.

But it’s not a set of keys. It’s a piece of paper or perhaps an envelope. Hard to tell.

The bill of the cap moves back and forth again. Another check of the area. The person then moves close to the door.

We can’t see what happens next because the visitor’s body is blocking the drone’s camera, but we can hear it.

The soft squeak of a hinge, a long scrape of paper, and then the sound of something light hitting the floor inside the showroom.

After a dull bang of metal, we see the visitor turn away from the door and hurry out of the lot. Thirty seconds later, he’s moved beyond the drone’s camera frame.

Jar and I remain where we are, in case he decides to make a return trip. The sidewalk in front of the dealership remains empty, but a minute after the visitor disappears, a car drives past, heading north.

It looks like an old Honda Accord but I can’t be positive.

“Try to get the license plate,” I say.

It’s possible the car does not belong to our visitor, but I think chances are better that it does.

Jar sends the drone after it, but the car speeds out of the craft’s range before she can get a good angle on the plate.

“Sorry,” she says, annoyed with herself.

“It’s okay. I couldn’t have done any better.”

She returns the drone to its previous position and sets it to sentry mode again. We check the