Mercy (The Night Man Chronicles Book 3) by Brett Battles (ebook reader with built in dictionary txt) 📕

Grand Canyon. Still, the relative inaction must be playing with my senses, right?

The air inside the camper is only marginally warmer than it is outside. And with my clothes still damp and no roaring blaze nearby to fight off the cold, I begin to shiver.

Noticing my condition, Jar flicks on the heater, but it’ll take several minutes to warm up the place.

“Why don’t you take a shower?” she says. “That should help.”

The Travato has an adequate but small shower. We don’t keep the water heater on all the time, so it’ll take nearly as long as the room heater to warm up.

“In the house, I mean,” she says. “The water heater there is on.”

“You checked it?”

“You did not?”

When we did our walk-through of the house earlier, I did note that the power was on, but no, I didn’t check the water heater. Leave it to Jar to be even more thorough than me.

I grab a change of clothes, a bottle of shower gel and a towel, and walk to the farmhouse, where I use the shower in the master bath since it’s the largest. I stand under the hot stream, face upturned, as all the ways the evening could have gone wrong run through mind.

Fire is unpredictable. Fire does not care about anything. If you are in its path, fire will turn you into fuel at its first opportunity.

I don’t like fire.

It’s an enemy that takes great effort to tame, and often the only thing that can be done is to flee. If, that is, one has a way out.

I’ve been lucky in my career and have had to get up close and personal with fire on only a few occasions. Most of those instances were brushes with flames that didn’t last very long. Tonight’s interaction was one of the longest. There was a moment at the bottom of the stairs, with Harlan over my shoulder, when I wasn’t sure which way to go. I figured it out quickly enough, but I’d be lying if I said the potential of burning up with the building didn’t cross my mind.

Which is probably the reason it takes a bit longer than it should for my shivering to abate.

When it finally does, I wash my upper body and hair, and then reach down to remove my prosthetic right leg. The device is waterproof, which is great, but the sock over my nub is not. I keep the prosthetic in the shower with me so I can clean it, too, and toss the sock out. It lands on the floor with a wet thwack.

My right leg ends just below the knee, the visible reminder of an injury I received back when I was an apprentice. It almost ended my career at a point when my career had barely begun. If I’m honest, though, losing the leg has made me better at what I do than I probably would have been if it didn’t happen.

It focused me, and taught me to come up with solutions I wouldn’t have otherwise thought of for certain problems. It still does. I’m not sure someone can say this about themselves or not, but what the hell, I’ll throw this out there. The injury and its aftermath have made me not only better at my job but also a better person.

I have multiple prosthetics. The two I use the most are the one I wear when I go for a run, and the one I think of as my everyday leg. It’s the latter that I’ve been wearing today and just took off. It’s surprisingly comfortable, and makes me look like I’m not missing a limb at all—except, of course, when I’m wearing shorts. It also has five built-in secret compartments. For example, the one on the outside of the calf contains a specially built knife for unexpected situations. In the other compartments, I can hide things like IDs and cash and whatever else I may need to stash away, as long as it’s not too big.

When I finish, I towel off, get dressed, and head back to the Travato.

Jar has warmed up the burgers and fries we picked up before we left Mercy. I’m not sure they taste any better than they would have if left cold, but I wolf them down anyway.

“Maybe we should wait until tomorrow,” Jar says.

She’s talking about the task we’d planned on doing tonight, before we knew I’d be running into a burning house.

Still…

“I’d rather not waste the time,” I say.

“You look tired.”

“Since when has that stopped us from doing anything?”

The frown she gives me is…let’s call it dubious.

I glance at my watch. It’s only a little after nine p.m., so we still have plenty of the night to work with.

“How about this?” I ask. “I’ll grab a nap and we can go in a couple hours.”

She still doesn’t look convinced, but she also doesn’t put up an argument.

I set the alarm on my phone, as I’m pretty sure Jar has no intention of waking me. Then I lie on the bed and within moments am asleep.

Chapter Nine

By midnight, I’m awake and ready.

I’ll never admit it to Jar, but when my alarm went off, I really had to fight the urge to roll over and sleep the night through.

We head back to Mercy.

At this time of night, the place is a ghost town.

The only businesses open are a few gas stations, though none of them seem to have any customers. The few bars we pass are closed. I assume that’s due to the pandemic, though maybe operating hours for places like them are different here in Colorado than they are in California.

The only other occupied vehicle we see is a police sedan that crosses through an intersection three blocks ahead of us. As soon as it disappears from view, I turn down a side street and park at the curb, just in case the cop decides to circle back and check on us.

Sure enough, half a minute later, the sedan drives through the