28.
Jamal
“Those sandwiches are pretty good,” Augustus said, crunching down the last of a roast beef and fontina panini as we sat in a parking lot, staring out across a few empty rows. Walmart was off to our right, but we were parked a ways out from the store, staring across at the Chuck E. Cheese on the end of the little shopping plaza. I was still slowly working my way through a roasted chicken hoagie, wondering how long it was going to take Spiegel to show up, because I was pretty sure I’d already gotten a read on Charles Custis. He was in a Cadillac Escalade about two hundred feet away, vehicle facing the opposite direction. I’d tagged his plates using the security cameras all around the parking lot, and now was avoiding touching the local network, because I could feel someone else moving around at the edges of it with the same electrical skills I boasted.
“Uh huh.” I’d been mostly ignoring my brother the last few hours for the sake of avoiding argument. Also, the sandwiches were pretty good.
“I hate surveillance,” Augustus said after a few seconds of silence.
“You don’t say,” I muttered under my breath, not taking much in the way of pains to hide my irritation. I think I was at my breaking point with him, too, after all this time and effort at being civil and carrying his rash-acting ass through however many near-misses with death.
“Hey, man,” he said, a flash of his own irritation showing, “if you like sitting your ass in this car for hours, you could do it by yourself. You don’t need me for this part.”
“Yeah, maybe you should have stayed back at the hotel,” I said. “Chill with wi-fi, catch up on The Crown on Netflix.”
Augustus bristled. “Hey, that’s a good show, all right? It’s got real elegance to it.”
“Far be it from me to suggest otherwise,” I said, concentrating on my phone. Spiegel’s Prius came cruising up and stopped next to the Escalade, and a moment later, he got out, nodding at Custis.
Custis dismounted his big SUV a few seconds later, and together he and Spiegel wandered out in front of their cars. He’d picked a row out near where the Walmart shoppers tapered off and the next store over, a CrossFit studio, didn’t have quite as much of a crowd, so the place where they’d parked was pretty empty. They were standing in the middle of a field of concrete without a single sound sensor for a long ways, if you didn’t count Spiegel’s cell phone. Which I did count, because I backdoored it and then projected the sound through my own speakers, while recording it for posterity. Or law enforcement. One of those.
“That going to stand up in court if they say anything incriminating?” Augustus asked, eyeing my phone as Spiegel and Custis exchanged tense pleasantries.
“I doubt they will, but probably not,” I said, shrugging. I wasn’t a lawyer, but I was more interested in using anything bad they said to light up the press about their misconduct versus actually trying to burn them in court. This was a war for the truth about Sienna, not me building a careful criminal prosecution. After all, these people weren’t officers of the court, and if the Custis family did have evidence of Sienna’s innocence, I didn’t think they were even compelled to share it by force of law. They were total dicks if they were hiding it, but I doubted it would be illegal.
“It creeps me out you can do that,” Augustus said, staring at my phone as though it had a visual attached to it.
“Pretty useful, though, right?”
“Pretty invasive,” Augustus said. “You ever do that to me?”
“Why would I want to know what you’re doing in your off time?” I shot out before I really thought about it. “I don’t even want to be spending time with you right now, you think I’m going to waste my off-time digging so I can hear you and Taneshia talk about—I dunno, dumb British royalty shows?”
“I told you, The Crown is—”
“I. Don’t. Care,” I said, trying to spell it out for him.
Augustus’s eyes glimmered as he looked at me. “You telling me you’ve never been curious about what I say about you behind your back?”
I started to issue an angry denial but stopped short. “Why, what do you say about me behind my back?”
“Nothing,” Augustus said, suddenly withdrawing.
“No, no, no,” I said, “you don’t just toss that out there like bait and expect me not to bite on it. You’ve been talking shit about me?”
“Not shit, no—”
“What the hell—”
“I—”
“You son of a—”
“She’s your momma, too, watch it.”
“I—”
We both stopped as the conversation between Spiegel and Custis took a strange turn. “What the hell is th—” Custis was asking.
“Oh, shit,” Spiegel said. “That’s Augustus Coleman. They must have followed me. He’s got—”
I blinked. How had they seen us? We were a decent distance away, and I could see them turned, looking in the opposite direction of us. Someone was standing on top of the Walmart awning, and they had a massive piece of rock over their head. While I watched, they threw it, a boulder the size of a mini-fridge, and it shot through the air like it had been launched out of a jumbo slingshot.
“Look out!” Charles Custis said, leaping out of the way and behind the Cadillac.
Ray Spiegel, though …
He froze.
The boulder came launching through the air, like a car speeding down the freeway, toward him—
“Stop it!” I shouted.
“I can’t!” Augustus shouted back, hand extended almost to our rental car window. “It’s—”
The rock splattered Ray Spiegel all across the parking lot, tearing him to shreds before our very eyes.
And there was nothing we could about it.