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

better than the Masked Vigilante. And while her suggestion to call Staggs was a joke, I can’t deny the idea has a bit of appeal.

Nickname aside, I’m agitated. I guess I should be thankful no one has linked the Masked Vigilante to the larger missions I’ve undertaken, like the one in Northern California, but that knowledge does nothing to ease my stress.

I’m pretty sure the only thing that will eventually make me feel less paranoid is if I stop.

Not just doing projects in the Los Angeles area, but doing them altogether.

As soon as this thought enters my head, I sense Liz nearby, frowning.

I’m not saying forever, I tell her. I’m just saying for now. Lie low for a while. That’s all.

Not long ago, I would have said the words aloud, but now that Jar’s living here, too, I keep my conversations with Liz in my head. I’m not sure how Jar would react if she knows I receive visits from my dead girlfriend now and then.

Ghost Liz is the one who pushed me into doing these projects in the first place. I know that sounds crazy. Mainly because it is.

I know she’s not real. She’s just my subconscious talking to me in her voice.

With her mannerisms.

And knowing things I don’t actually know.

Hold on. What I mean is, she tells me things I think I don’t know but probably do on some level.

Except when there’s no way I could have known.

Ugh, this is why I don’t like thinking about it too much.

The bottom line is, it’s time to take a break.

Whatever you wish, Liz tells me, then disappears.

Her words aren’t the comfort I’d like them to be. I know Liz. She doesn’t give up that easily.

Which is why my shoulders are still tense.

“How about some Overwatch?” Jar suggests.

I shrug. I know she’s trying to distract me, but I’m not sure I feel like doing anything other than crawling into a hole and burying myself alive.

With a little more prodding, though, she wins me over. She even grabs me a beer while the videogame is booting up.

Two hours later, I’m still annoyed but my stress level has dipped into the almost normal range, and I finally feel like maybe I can sleep.

We turn off the console and I give Jar a hug goodnight.

We’ve gotten into the habit of doing that before going to bed. For a person who isn’t great with physical contact, she’s become good at hugging.

What we’ve never done is kiss. I’m not saying the urge isn’t there for either of us, but I think we both know we’re not quite ready to take that step yet. By the same token, we sleep in separate rooms, Jar downstairs in one of my guest rooms, and me up here in the master.

We’re a couple.

But we’re not.

But we are.

It’s confusing, I know. Especially with Liz still hanging around. But it’s working for us so we roll with it.

I gotta say, not my best night of sleep ever.

Not only did I lie in bed for a couple of hours before I slipped under, but after I did, I didn’t stay that way for long. My sleep was like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake. Asleep for a bit, awake for a bit, asleep for a bit—you get the idea.

At 5:40 a.m., after staring at my closed eyelids for about thirty minutes, I realize I’m finished for the night so I get up and take a shower.

When I walk into the living room, Jar is sitting on the couch, drinking a mug of coffee and watching Back to the Future. This is not a surprise.

A: She doesn’t sleep much.

B: Coffee is like water to her.

And C: Back to the Future is one of her favorites. I’ve pieced together from odd bits of conversations that she watched it a lot when she was teaching herself English, so it’s like comfort food to her now.

I shuffle into the kitchen, pour a mug of coffee for myself, and take a seat beside her. On the screen, Marty has just left the prom and is in the town square with Doc Brown, about to travel…well, back to the future. The movie’s almost done, which means Jar’s been up for a while. Again, not surprising.

She leans against me, her eyes never leaving the screen, and for a few minutes, I forget all about the news reports from last night.

If you didn’t know Jar, you wouldn’t realize what a minor miracle it is for us to be sitting here like this. I’ve mentioned it already but it’s worth noting again. Human contact is not one of her strong suits. Also on that list would be: small talk; lying (even the tiny white lies people tell every day), with the exception being when a job calls for it; and understanding why people ask questions with answers that are—to her, anyway—obvious.

She only recently turned twenty-two, but before she was even a teenager, she’d experienced more hardship than most people who live into their nineties. That and the fact she’s somewhere on the spectrum caused her to self-insulate, if you will. It’s only been a little over a year that she’s started to let others in. Basically, since she started working with me and my partners on the day job.

We work in intelligence, on projects that take us around the world at a moment’s notice. At least we did. We’ve been suspended for the last—what is it?—whoa, almost two months now. We didn’t do anything wrong. We just happened to be on a job that went sideways through no fault of our own. But until the investigation is complete and we’re cleared, we’re on hiatus.

On the screen, the movie comes to an end in a flash of headlights and the rolling of the credits to the music of Huey Lewis and the News.

I’m about to ask Jar if she’s hungry, thinking I might whip us up a couple of omelets, when she picks up her phone, unlocks the