George was nowhere to be seen.
But Garcia already knew from when he’d arrived that the closest bathroom was just down the corridor and around to his left. As he rounded the corner, he saw the bathroom door closing. Garcia chose not to wait, in case George had decided to split before the meeting resumed.
This was an all-girls’ school, so there were no urinals in the bathroom. Five toilet stalls lined the south wall, with three washbasins positioned directly across the room from them, on the opposite wall. George wasn’t washing his hands. Garcia turned to face the stalls. Only one of them was occupied. He looked left then right to make sure that he was alone, before bending down a little to peek under the stall door, but the gap wasn’t wide enough and he couldn’t quite make out the person’s feet. For him to get a proper look, he would have to kneel down and bring his face to just an inch or so from the floor. He paused and gave it a moment’s thought.
If he tried properly looking under the stall door, there was a chance that someone could walk in on him, or worse, George, if he really was the person inside the stall, could all of a sudden open the door and catch Garcia as a peeping Tom – definitely nota good look. But all Garcia really wanted to do was to take a peek at George’s hands and fingers, not have an intimate conversation with him – and what better way to do that than being right at the next washbasin, while George washed his hands?
Garcia quickly decided on a plan of action. He would wait at the second washbasin – the one in the middle – pretending to be checking his reflection in the mirror. Once George left the stall, he would only have two choices – both of them right by Garcia’s side.
So Garcia did exactly that – stood facing the mirror, pretending to be checking something in his right eye, for almost two minutes before he finally heard the stall door behind him unlock. But the person who’d been locked inside the toilet stall wasn’t George. It was droopy-eyelids man, who gave Garcia a half-embarrassed nod.
They both quickly washed their hands and returned to the support-group meeting. George was sitting back between the two women, arms crossed in front of his chest, hands tucked away under his armpits.
Where the hell did he go?Garcia wondered, as he got back to his seat.
When Garcia’s turn to share came up, he gave them the story that, by then, sounded so natural coming out of his lips, he felt he could ace a polygraph. As he delivered his tale, his sad tone of voice and seemingly aimless head and eye movement were nothing short of perfect, and he made absolutely sure that at the exact moment that he said the words – ‘the next thing that my friend remembers was the sound of his son screaming in pain because, somehow, a couple of his fingers were broken’ – he had casually leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and his gaze had panned right, in the general direction of George.
That was when he saw it.
Not George’s hands and fingers, but the look in his eyes… the muscle that involuntarily twitched on his lower jaw… the way inwhich his crossed arms clearly tightened their grip on his chest, as if to hide his hands even more.
Garcia wasn’t sure if George had noticed that Garcia had picked up on how discomforted he looked, but this time, it was George’s eyes that darted away a little awkwardly.
Garcia felt a lump come to his throat.
Once he finished telling his story, Garcia sat back on his chair and made no new attempt to peek at George’s hands and fingers again.
He didn’t need to.
His gut was telling him that he was right.
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 coupleof 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, immediatelyfollowed 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?’
Fifty-Three
