Peter supposed the man could have gotten his tabs in person at the DMV, but to do that, he’d have to show a legal ID. Which would defeat the purpose of the elaborate fake registration routine. Circuit Rider must have been up to some nefarious shit to want to go to all this effort to hide the vehicle’s ownership.
At the far right end of the storefront was another entrance door, a steel security model. The knob had been replaced by a metal cover plate. He wasn’t getting in that way, either. But the door had a mail slot. Peter pulled open the flap and bent to look inside. A modest scattering of envelopes and circulars littered the floor. Somebody was still getting mail here.
He turned left, walked past the vacant neighboring building, then turned right and around the corner. Ahead was the fenced-off railyard. But first came the entrance to a narrow lane that ran behind the row of attached storefronts. He walked into the alleyway, the railyard fence to his left, rain pattering down on his jacket hood, boots crunching over weed-heaved blacktop and broken glass.
The back of the building was in worse condition than the front. Dense weeds grew waist-high along the cinder block, which had stairstep settlement cracks big enough to fit his finger. Two old steel divided-light windows flanked a single loading dock guarded by a roll-up door. The windows were covered by steel exterior security bars and the glass had been painted from the inside. He stepped into the wet weeds with his stomach against the cement lip of the loading dock, then put both hands on the corrugated metal door and pressed upward. It didn’t move. And now his pants were wet.
Again, if he had his tools, Peter could have gotten inside. He stepped back into the alleyway to survey other possibilities, shaking his head and thinking this trip to Tacoma was a fool’s errand. Until, looking at the roll-up door again, he realized it had no handle. So there was an electric opener on the inside. Where would the button be?
The most common location was directly beside the door. Most people were right-handed, he thought, so it would most likely be on the right side. Viewed from the outside, it would be on the left. For reasons of building code going back at least forty years, the controls should be mounted forty-eight inches off the finished floor.
Glancing around to make sure he was unobserved, he bent and picked up a rock the size of a golf ball. The loading-dock lip was roughly four feet off the alley pavement. He eyeballed four feet above that, picked a pane on the left, stepped back, and threw—and was rewarded by the musical chime of breaking glass. The kid’s still got it.
The lip of the loading dock was less than a foot deep with no handholds. It took him several tries to climb up and keep his perch. Finally he stuck his arm out and gingerly plucked the remaining shards from the crumbling window putty. When the twelve-inch opening was clear, he reached through, hooked his elbow, and began to feel around inside.
There. A familiar rectangular shape, with three square buttons. The top two would be green, the bottom one red. His dad’s shop had one just like it. Hoping the power was still on, he pressed the top button.
With the creak of breaking rust and the rattle of poorly lubricated rollers, the loading dock door rose. Peter took the .357 from under his jacket, took a deep breath to calm the static, then stepped carefully inside.
40
The air was cold and smelled of mold. He was in a storage room. Empty shelves lined the walls. The concrete floor had a broad, shallow puddle in the center. He looked up and was rewarded with a drip of water in his eye. The roof was leaking, the ceiling stained black with mold. The noise of a passing diesel locomotive drowned out all sound.
The light from the open loading dock door was dim and watery. With vacant commercial buildings, the owner would usually pay for light and heat until the space was rented again, although this place felt like it had been vacant for years. He glanced around for a switch, found one on the far wall and flipped it. Nothing. He looked up and saw that the fluorescent overheads had no bulbs.
A tiled utility room in the corner stood open. Along with the furnace and water heater, it had a toilet, a stained slop sink with a cheap saucepan in the bottom, a handheld shower fixture attached to thesink spout, and a floor drain. Above the sink was a shelf of ancient cleaning supplies and a shriveled bar of soap.
At the back of the storage room, a passage led to the rest of the building. The door had been removed from its jamb. On the far side was a drywalled hallway painted a bright sunshine yellow, the bottom half spotted with mildew. He found another light switch, but again it didn’t work. He turned on his phone’s flashlight and stepped forward, still holding the .357. Halfway down the hall was a closed door, probably an office. At the far end he could see a large front room with a soft glow filtering through the gaps in the plywood over the windows.
He figured it was a former showroom of some kind. All the fixtures had been stripped, leaving holes in the walls and gaps in the floor tile where some kind of counter had once been. There was nothing to identify the business that had been here. Here, too, the floor was puddled with moisture and the ceiling discolored from another leak.
Tucking the .357 into his waistband, he walked to the front wall to scoop up the pile of mail from the floor below the delivery slot. By the light of his phone, he flipped through the envelopes, circulars, and catalogs. Office supplies, janitorial services, warehouse equipment, generic stuff. He was hoping for something that might provide a clue to Circuit Rider’s identity, but it was all addressed to “Office Manager,” “Owner,” or “Occupant.”
So much for the mail. At least he’d figured out how Circuit Rider could pick up his vehicle tabs. Maybe he was a former tenant who’d kept his keys? It would be a reasonably safe mail drop. From the condition of the place, Peter figured the owner hadn’t set foot in this property in years.
He left the mail in a pile and headed for the back room. In the hallway, he passed the closed door and tried the knob. It was locked. On closer inspection, both knob and door were newer, and of decentquality. There was even a deadbolt. Peter didn’t get it. What was the point of replacing this knob and locking this door when the place was boarded up and the roof was leaking in two places?
Only one way to find out. Peter walked through the storage room, hopped off the loading dock, and scanned around for something heavy. He saw a large chunk of broken concrete lying in the weeds at the base of the fence to the railyard.
He needed two hands to pick it up. It weighed about as much as a sack of Quikrete. Peter had carried hundreds of those sacks in his life, and would no doubt carry many more. He hoisted the chunk onto the loading dock floor, climbed inside, picked it up again, then returned to the locked door. Mindful of the location of his toes, he swung the massive chunk directly at the deadbolt.
The door popped open on a dark room. He dropped the concrete chunk on the tile floor, then reached through the jamb and felt around for a light switch. Expecting nothing, he flipped it on and was surprised when a bank of fluorescent overheads lit up, nice and bright.
He’d thought it might be an office, filled with some remaining inventory or supplies worth protecting. Instead he saw a pair of metal bunkbeds with thin mattresses, an electric space heater, a mini-fridge with an ancient hot plate on top, and what he assumed was the door to the back room set over sawhorses and used as a worktable. On the wall over the table, attached with a thumbtack, was the same glossy brochure for Resilient Systems that he’d seen in Reed’s apartment, folded in the same way. The same face stared out from the glossy paper with those same penetrating eyes that somehow seemed to look right inside you.
Peter looked down at the contents of the worktable. Scattered snippets of wire with insulation in a half dozen colors, the remains of several rolls of tin solder, spent tubes of epoxy, and a paper plateholding a random assortment of machine screws. Someone had been repairing something. Or building something.
The paper plate sat on a book. He moved the plate. The book was a cheap printing of the Unabomber Manifesto, well-thumbed with underlined passages on every page.
The Unabomber was a former mathematics professor turned Montana hermit who had railed against the industrialization of America. His bombing campaign had lasted from 1978 to 1995, killing three people and injuring twenty-three more. He was finally caught whenThe New York Timespublished his so-called manifesto and his brother recognized the writing style. The Unabomber Manifesto had since been republished many times. It was a touchstone for many disaffected oddballs and school shooters.
Aw, hell, Peter thought. This just gets better and better.
He looked up at the brochure again. Despite the slightly bulging eyes, there was something about that face, something warm and compassionate.Garrison Bevel, Founder of Resilient Systems.
He reached across the desk and pulled the glossy paper free from the thumbtack. It was a single legal-size page, folded in half and printed on both sides to make a simple four-page booklet. Bevel’s photo was on the second-to-last page. The paper had softened and the gloss had dulled at the edges, as if it had been taken down and handled frequently.
Folding the booklet back to its intended form, he flipped through from the beginning. He saw stock images of downed utility lines, smiling customers, and rooftops covered with rectangular black panels.Solar power with battery backup. Live in comfort through even the longest power outage.
