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

The car belongs to Frances Peterson, a seventy-eight-year-old woman residing in an assisted living facility seventy miles away, in Pueblo. She is the mother of Paul Bergen, the friendly golf ball guy at the range.

A deeper dive into Bergen reveals he has not had the easiest of lives. After high school, he enlisted in the army and lasted less than two years before receiving an OTH discharge—Other Than Honorable.

That’s not good. We don’t have enough time right now to find out the reason but it’s easy enough to guess, given what happened to him next.

Nine months after leaving the army, Bergen was charged with possession of narcotics and sentenced to thirty-six months in prison, serving thirty before being released.

One of the conditions of his parole was participation in a drug rehab program. Though he completed it, it apparently didn’t stick, because a year later he was back behind bars, serving a six-year sentence for the same crime as before. No early release that time.

He either righted himself after his second stint or learned how to hide his activities better, because he’s managed to stay out of jail since.

Up until eighteen months ago, he’d lived with his mother and worked a series of odd jobs around town. Medical records show Frances was moved to the Pueblo facility due to a diagnosis of dementia, something that had been getting worse over the two years prior to her departure. Her doctors had been recommending for some time that she be put in a nursing home before Bergen finally heeded their advice.

Right after moving her out, he started the job at the driving range. It’s both the longest he’s lasted at a single job, and his longest stretch of full employment outside the army.

When I mention that I can’t imagine the job pays him enough to afford his mother’s nursing home, Jar looks up Frances’s account. Her social security payments have been rerouted to go directly to the home. While this covers a majority of her monthly bill, it still leaves a shortfall of nearly a thousand dollars a month, which Bergen has been paying. That’s more than half of what he brings home from the range.

“Does his mom have any money in the bank?” I ask.

“I found one account linked to her social security number. But it ran out of money last summer.”

“Maybe Bergen has a savings account.”

“He does. It has one hundred and fifty dollars in it.”

“Okay, then. What about the house? Maybe they’ve taken a second mortgage out on it.”

Jar checks the property records. “They do not own the house.”

“Who does?”

“Ronald Mygatt.”

“Mygatt?” It takes me a couple of seconds to place the name. “The newspaper guy’s name is Mygatt. Maybe it’s his brother or cousin.”

Ronald turns out to be Curtis Mygatt’s second cousin. He doesn’t live in Mercy but in Dallas, Texas, and inherited the house from his parents. The rent on the place is a surprisingly low seven hundred dollars a month. But even then, there’s no way Bergen can afford to pay that and the nursing home and still have money left to buy food and gas and whatever else he might need.

The picture this paints is pretty easy to see.

A former addict living at the breaking point and doing the best he can. His main job is not enough, which means he has to be bringing in cash from somewhere else. We’ve found no indication of a second job, however. Maybe he’s slipped back into his previous life and is selling drugs. Or maybe someone is paying him to do something not quite as aboveboard as shagging golf balls. Someone who knows they can take advantage of his situation.

I stretch and check the time, and am surprised to see it’s already after 4:30 p.m. We’ve been at this longer than I thought.

If something is happening tonight, it’ll be soon.

I close my computer. “We need to go.”

Chapter Twenty

The sky has grown darker since lunchtime, thanks to a layer of low, gray clouds moving in from the west, like an automated roof closing over a stadium. I have a feeling the storm will arrive sooner than advertised.

Jar and I are in the cab of our truck, parked at Timothy Morgan Elementary School on Schoolhouse Drive. Since I’m not exactly sure who we’ll need to follow tonight—it’s probably Bergen, but it could be Chuckie—we’ve chosen the school as our standby location, because it puts us at the approximate midpoint between Price Motors and the driving range.

If the two of them end up leaving their respective workplaces at the same time, we’ll have to flip a coin on who to follow. The good thing is we have tracking bugs on both their vehicles, so if we end up choosing the wrong guy, we should be able to locate the other one without much trouble.

My initial plan was to use the motorcycle tonight, which would make it easier for us to get around in a hurry, but the probability of rain put the kibosh on that. The upside of taking the truck is that Jar can use her laptop instead of her phone to track the Mustang and the Accord.

I glance at my watch. “Okay, that’s six p.m.”

If our assumptions are correct, we’ve now entered the time range when whatever is supposed to happen will happen. But apparently the plan is not for it to occur right at six, because neither of the glowing dots on Jar’s map has moved by the time the clock hits a quarter after.

In Chuckie’s case, this isn’t surprising. As we know, not once since we’ve been in Mercy has he headed home before seven. And lest you think we’re putting too much faith on the idea he will drive only the Mustang, Jar is also spot-checking the video bugs at the dealership on the chance he decides to switch cars. But he is still in his office.

As for Bergen, we have no idea what his normal routine is. According to the driving range’s website, the