Chapter Fifty-Two
At the end of the meeting, as everyone was leaving the classroom, Garcia quickened his pace to get to the parking lot before everyone else. The plan was the same as it had been from the start – hang out outside in plain sight, giving other group members a chance to approach him, if they so wished. But as Garcia exited the back gates onto the school parking lot, he paused, his eyes narrowing at something that he hadn’t noticed before – a truck that was parked about four spaces to the left of his Honda Civic – a dark-colored, twin-cab, Dodge RAM pickup truck. The reason why he hadn’t noticed the truck before was because it wasn’t there when he’d arrived, ten minutes before the support-group meeting was supposed to start. Whoever was driving that truck had gotten to the meeting after he did.
Garcia turned to look behind him – no one else was coming out of the school building yet. He got to the truck as fast as he could and rounded it to check the model badge at the back of it. He needed to be sure.
Garcia’s heart stuttered.
He was looking at a black Dodge RAM 3500 pickup truck – just like the one that Randy Douglas had seen up on the 7th Street Bridge on the night that they saw Terry Wilford’s body drop to the ground.
Garcia looked up to check the school building again. A couple of people had just come down the stairs, but neither seemed to be making their way toward the pickup truck. One of them had paused to light up a cigarette, while the other had turned left, tucked his hands into his pockets and disappeared down an alleyway. Due to the poor lighting at the parking lot and the fact that Garcia was looking at them from behind the truck and through its twin-cabin, he couldn’t tell exactly who either of them was, but Garcia didn’t panic. After all, his car was parked just there. It wasn’t as if he was about to get caught red-handed, as he snooped around somewhere he didn’t belong. He straightened his body, casually walked over to his vehicle and got inside.
Every evening, for the past two weeks, as they were both done with their support-group meetings, Hunter and Garcia would either text or call each other, just to let each other know how their meeting had gone. Their texts, though in plain English, read like some sketchy drug-dealers’ code – ‘no juice tonight, see you tomorrow’ or ‘no oddly shaped fingers all night. Catch you in the morning’.
Garcia wasn’t one hundred percent sure if George, or whatever his name really was, had fully noticed the kind of attention that Garcia was paying him throughout the meeting, but the one thing that Garcia knew for sure was that people spooked easily… and guilty people spooked even easier. Right then, Garcia had a feeling that if George left that meeting without Garcia tailing him, neither he nor Hunter would ever see him again.
Garcia was just about to type out a message to Hunter, quickly explaining that he needed to tail a suspect, when he sensed a presence just outside his driver’s door.
Garcia never saw him coming – as if that tall figure had just materialized out of nowhere, spawning right out of the dark shadows to be by Garcia’s car, giving him no time to react.
Buzz.
Garcia felt a sharp sting at the base of his neck, immediately followed by a jolt of electricity so powerful he felt as if his flesh was being cooked right under his skin. Garcia’s body jerked violently in place. His cellphone flew up from his hands, hitting the windshield and the dashboard, before landing on the passenger seat. His head slammed backward against the headrest hard, and just as he was about to pass out – just as his eyes rolled up and into his head – Garcia heard the man outside his car say:
‘Looking for me?’