Juju put on the lights and sure enough, their mark appeared.
“Phone it in to Lima,” Juju said. “Roust them.”
They followed the guy at a more than safe distance, not paying much attention when another car passed them and then, when a light went from green to yellow and then immediately red, pulled into the lane in front of them, right behind their target car.
“You see that?” Delta said. “That light was only yellow literally for less than a second.”
“Weird,” Juju said. “Maybe it’s a timer glitch.”
* * * *
Shasta was glad she didn’t have to be at work early tomorrow morning. She was going to follow Stu and figure out what the fuck was going on. When she heard him get up and leave the house around three a.m. Thursday morning, she threw on clothes and quickly bolted out the door after him, almost losing him before she remembered the damn signal app on her phone.
Fuck it.
She set a light just ahead of Stu to go red and, sure enough, it did. She’d had to whip around an SUV to get right behind Stu, but she breathed a sigh of relief that she hadn’t lost him.
She drove a small, black car, a Honda that wasn’t new, but still ran great and was paid for. She wasn’t sure Stu could even pick her car out during the daytime, much less following him at night when he expected her to be sound asleep in bed.
Letting him pull away from her, she eased back, not wanting to be right on his tail and even letting the SUV she’d passed get around her as she slid into the right-hand lane when it was obvious the driver was going to stay on her tail. Thinking ahead, she kept the traffic lights from letting Stu get too far away from her.
She would thank Paul for the app if it hadn’t creeped her the hell out so badly.
Another case of something really wrong was going on.
Stu drove for another twenty minutes, finally pulling into a shopping center where several stores were open all night. She drove past where he turned to the next entrance, pulling in and parking in front of one of the stores but where she could still see Stu.
He got out and into another vehicle, a plain, white panel van with no windows on the side. She prepared to follow that vehicle, but then after ten minutes, Stu got back out and into his car.
She noticed the black SUV had pulled into the shopping center, too, parked on the far end, but also with an apparent line of sight to Stu’s car.
When Stu left, she pulled out to follow him and noticed the SUV did, too. Ten minutes later, when she realized it looked like Stu was retracing his route home, she had a thought.
He couldn’t beat her home or he might know she’d followed him.
Dammit.
She finally turned off, taking a different and more direct route, unashamedly using the signal app to help her make better time and to slow Stu’s progress.
She was in her bedroom when she heard his car pull into the driveway and then heard him enter the house a few minutes later.
Now she was kicking herself that she hadn’t got the license plate on the panel van he’d met up with.
Fuck.
She could try pulling up traffic cameras tomorrow and see if they showed anything. They had a seven-day immediate memory, older stuff accessible through a data pull upon request.
She looked at her phone.
Or, I could try pulling them up now.
She logged into the app and, yes, she could access the feeds. It took her a little while, but she finally found the panel van and was able to make out a license plate, noting it.
She’d have to add that to her research.
Tomorrow.
Well, technically today.
Right now, she needed to get back to sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
“That’s the subject’s sister,” Lima said through the radios, now that he was awake and him, Oscar, and Yankee were racing back to join them. “Well, it’s the sister’s car. No telling who’s driving it.”
Juju had radioed Lima the license plate, not wanting Ax distracted from tracking their suspect.
When the guy finally arrived at a shopping center and then got into a white panel van, Juju was ready to fall into pursuit.
But…they didn’t go anywhere.
The sister, Juju noted, pulled in at the far side of the parking lot and sat, waiting.
She obviously didn’t realize they were also following her brother.
“I think she’s following him,” Juju said.
Delta concurred. “That’d be my guess.”
“But why? Does she know what’s going on?”
“Maybe she doesn’t,” Delta said. “Maybe that’s why she’s following him.”
Juju coordinated with Lima. “We can’t see the license plates on the other vehicle from here. When you come in, cruise by. It’s a white panel van parked right next to the subject’s car.”
“Roger roger.”
A moment later, Lima replied. “Registered to a—surprise, surprise—Saudi company with a PO Box here in Houston…Oh, here’s an even bigger shocker, not. The PO Box address is one digit off from the address we have for the Church of the Rising Sunset’s stronghold here in Houston.”
“Well, we’re on the right track, at least,” Juju said. “That was easier than I thought it’d be. Looks like Kant doesn’t need to go fishing again.”
“Not going to call that off yet,” Lima said.
A few minutes later, their subject got out of the van, returned to his car, and headed out of the parking lot in the direction he’d come from.
The sister’s car started following.
“You guys stay on the subject,” Lima said. “We’ll follow the panel van.”
“Roger roger.” Juju stayed close enough behind the subject that they wouldn’t lose him. From what little he could see, it had appeared to be a woman in the sister’s car, although he couldn’t tell for sure.
But then, suddenly, she veered off.
Delta turned. “What the hell? Where’s she going?”
“Probably wants to beat him home,” Juju said. “If he didn’t know she was following him—which it looks like he didn’t—she’d want to make sure she got home first.”
“True.”
They held back, driving past the guy’s street when he turned off. A few minutes later, they cruised by the house and found both cars parked in the driveway.
Juju drove down two blocks and pulled over, parking on the street where other cars were parked along the curb.
Delta started to get out.
“Hold up,” Juju said. He turned to the back. “We have a tracker with us?”
Ax nodded and dug one out of his bag, activating it and handing it across the seat to Delta.
He jumped out and made his way back to the house.
When he returned a few minutes later and got in, he said, “Both cars, their engines are hot. Second car now tagged.”
Juju called Lima on the radio. “Both cars back at subject’s house. We stuck a tracker on the other one, too.”
“Good. Catch up with us, if you can. We can swap off.” He gave Juju their location and current direction of travel. Ax pulled up a map on his tablet and started guiding Juju.
It took them the better part of thirty minutes, but they caught up with, then passed Lima and the others as they fell back so Juju could pick up the tail.
Which, it turned out, was a waste of time. The panel van turned into a parking lot at a warehouse building near the shipyards, with a manned guard shack.
They continued on, Delta noting the address as they passed.
By the time they’d rendezvoused at a parking lot several blocks away, Ax had summoned his own electronic juju and had found out information about the building.
“Supposed to be a plasma lab, whatever the fuck that means.”
“It means it’s a front for a medical lab,” Lima said as they gathered around the hood of Juju’s SUV and looked at Ax’s tablet.
“Did anyone see if the guard
was armed or not?” Oscar asked.
No one had.
Lima glanced up at the sky. “It’s going to be dawn pretty soon. I’ll get on the line to Bubba and see what kind of sat surveillance he can pull up for us. No way in hell we’re going in there blind, or even without knowing for sure if it’s the right place.”
“Back to base?” Juju asked.
Lima nodded, scrubbing at his face. “Back to base. You three can grab some rack time while I get some intel feedback.”
* * * *
When Shasta’s phone alarm went off at ten Thursday morning, she wondered why she felt so exhausted.
Then she remembered the pre-dawn drive and sleep fled her system.
She knew her parents were gone, but when she looked out the front window, she spotted Stu’s car still parked in the drive.
Which was odd, because according to his “schedule,” he’d be gone today.
Weird.
After her shower and starting a load of clothes, she decided to cook herself brunch. She walked over to Stu’s door and knocked. “I’m going to scramble me some eggs. You want some?”
No response.
She fought the urge to just bust in there on him. He wasn’t a child, he was a grown-ass adult, no matter how irresponsible she thought he was being.
She knocked again, a little harder. “Stu? You want breakfast?”
Still no reply.
One more knock, and this time, she tried the knob.
Locked.
Shit.
Unlike her and her parents, he hadn’t switched out his doorknob. He still had a regular old interior knob, with the little hole in the outside that you could poke something through to pop the lock open, like an ice pick or a small screwdriver.
The bad feeling had returned with a vengeance. She made a fist and pounded on his door. “Stuart. This isn’t funny. Answer me, dammit!”
Nothing.
She pounded again, then finally made up her mind. “Fine! I’m coming in there. You asked for it.”
She stormed into the kitchen and rooted through the junk and catch-all drawer in the kitchen until she found a small screwdriver that would fit through the hole. Seconds later, she’d popped the lock and threw open the door.
The room was dark due to the curtains being drawn. Stuart lay in bed, curled up on his side under the sheet, with it pulled all the way up over him.
When she flipped on the light, he still didn’t move.
As she stared at him, she realized her feet were refusing her brain’s command to walk forward. She could barely see his face from the way he’d burritoed himself in the sheet, but from what she could see, he wore a beaming, peaceful smile.
“Stu?” Her voice came out a whisper now, terror chilling her soul.
Never before in her life had she ever felt so scared.
“Stu, hey, little bro. Wake up.” She realized she was clutching the screwdriver so tightly now in both hands that the end was poking into her right palm.
No no no no no!
She didn’t know how long she stood there until she finally forced her brain to make contact with her feet and coerce them through threats of violence to take her forward to the side of her brother’s bed.
He looked happy, blissful. Like he was asleep in the greatest dream in the world.
Happier than she’d seen him…ever.
“Stu?”
Her vision blurred and she realized she was crying.
Kneeling down, she slowly reached out and touched the backs of her fingers to his forehead.
His flesh felt cool, not even…real.
“Oh, Stu.” She held her hand in front of his nose and felt…nothing.
Reaching under the covers, she pressed her fingers against his neck, the way they’d taught them time and again in the CPR refresher classes at work.
No pulse, and his skin felt cool there as well.
His color was wrong, too, waxy.
“Fuck!”
She got up and left the room exactly as it was, retrieving her cell phone and calling 911. An ambulance and deputy arrived within seconds of each other just a few minutes later.
She’d already called her parents and told them they had to come home, that it was an emergency, but not why.
As she sat on the couch, in numb shock, the deputy questioned her as to what had happened, how she’d found him.
She discovered herself leaving out the part about the early morning drive.
And it didn’t take her long to realize why, exactly.
She wanted revenge.
Thinking about the license plate number she now had, and the gun in her glove box, she knew exactly what she’d do.
“When was the last time you saw your brother alive, Miss Myers?” he asked.
She took a deep breath, wadding up the tissues in her hand, her tears still rolling down her cheeks under her glasses. “Last night when I went to bed. He went to bed and I heard his bedroom door close.”
“And your parents?”
“They went to bed before we did.”
One of the EMTs emerged from the bedroom and shook his head. Then, he crooked a finger at the deputy.
“Excuse me.” The deputy followed him into Stu’s bedroom. When he emerged a moment later, he had something in a baggie.
An empty syringe.
“Was your brother a drug user?”
She nodded. “He went to the VA pain clinic. He swore he was clean. He’d been doing better the past couple of days. Said he was in some sort of trial program there, working there part-time.” She wouldn’t tell them any more than that. That was the story they’d told her parents.
Not like Stu would argue with her. And the cops wouldn’t know she’d lied about it. They’d think her brother had lied to her.
The deputy noted all of that. Then she realized the EMTs were packing up and preparing to leave.
“Where are they going?” she asked.
Another deputy arrived and walked in as the EMTs were leaving.
“We’ve got the Medical Examiner coming to pick him up,” the deputy said. “They’ll have to do an autopsy on him and then you can have a funeral home take him.”
She nodded.
“Is there anything, any information you can give me about his drug habit?”
She shrugged. “The past week or so, he really seemed changed. We thought whatever it was he was doing, it was working.”
“And this was a VA program?”
Playing the grief-stricken, distraught older sister wasn’t very difficult right now. “Yeah. That’s what he told us. We didn’t want to question it because he really seemed to be getting better. Why? You don’t think he was lying to us, do you?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. I’m not even sure what substance this is yet. There aren’t any markings, and there wasn’t any medicine around. It looks like he had a pre-filled syringe. Have you seen him taking anything?”
“No. We threatened him the first time he had to go into rehab. We told him, me and my parents, that if he brought drugs into the house we’d turn him in to the cops. We didn’t want any kind of trouble like that around here.”
“Do you mind if we search your brother’s room, or other parts of the house?”
“No, not at all. Go ahead. I’ll open our bedroom doors for you.” She was slow getting up, the second deputy catching her elbow when she hooked her foot on the coffee table and nearly face-planted into the carpet.
“Thank you…” She burst into tears again.
“It’s all right, ma’am. We know this is difficult for you.”
He kept a steadying arm on her elbow as she walked down to her bedroom door, unlocked it, and then opened it for him. Followed by her parents’ bedroom door.
Three more deputies had arrived, and then her father was racing through the door.
“What’s going on?”
She stopped him in the living room and shook her head, now really crying, sobbing against his shoulder as he wrapped his
arms around her and held her.
One of the deputies spoke to him and Shasta tuned out the world for a little while. When her mom arrived, they still hadn’t taken Stu’s body away yet and together, the three of them cried and said their good-byes once they’d gotten him loaded on a gurney.
“Do you think whatever that was you found is what killed him?” her father asked.
Shasta hated hearing the pain in his voice and hated even more that, right then, she wasn’t strong enough to be more for him than his daughter. To be the strong one in the family, the way she usually was and had been ever since their dad got hurt.
“We don’t know, sir. We’ll have to test it and wait until the autopsy is done.”
Her father had to sign some forms, and then, at some point, they were alone again.
She couldn’t call in to work, either. There wasn’t enough coverage for her to miss it.
And she needed to numb herself out in the only way she could.
As their parents started notifying what few relatives they had, Shasta sat on the couch and tried to sort through the toxic stew of emotions filling her from the bottom up.
Stu had hoped this was a change. A real change for him. That she believed with every ounce of her being.
And she would absolutely make the fuckers pay who’d given him the drugs.
Chapter Fifteen
“Well, fuck,” Delta said from where he and Lima stood a short distance away from a group of neighbors who’d gathered around to watch what was going on. “Now what?”
Ax had been able to hack into the police scanners and figure out that the deceased certainly seemed to fit the description of the man they’d been following.
“Awfully coincidental he meets with someone last night and is dead this morning, isn’t it?” Lima posed.
“Yeah. So our lead is that warehouse.”
“Our only lead.”
Juju scratched at his chin. “The sister, though. She followed him last night. You think she told the cops about that?”
“Don’t know,” Lima said. “If she did, it might mean the place is under surveillance and we can’t get near it without outing ourselves.”
“So now what?” Delta asked again. He was tired of taking two steps forward and one back.
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