Callum turned away and blindly went over to the coats. He had no need for one, though, so he just rifled through the puffy-tufties.
“I’m going to go check on your friend.” He walked over to the stairwell and put his forefinger on the reader, knowing damn well he’d get the number combination for the keypad wrong if he tried to punch it in. “Are you coming? Or not.”
Overhead, the toolbox trundled off to the side, exposing the garage above. The scent of motor oil and fresh night air rolled down to his nose, and he breathed in deep.
Putting his foot on the first step, he said over his shoulder, “As you like to say, what you decide doesn’t matter to me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Talk about too much firepower for the situation.
As Vishous and his sister leveled a pair of forties at whoever was entering the back of the pharmacy, he was prepared to make a Rorschach test out of the fucker. Except instead of alesser-like fighter, a shadow who operated like Rubber Man, or a human looking to steal what was left, a little old man waddled through the door and stopped dead when he saw the two guns pointed at his head.
His palsied hands lifted above his straggly-cap of white hair. “Hello?”
Like this was a cocktail party written by Stan Lee and he’d just met the bad guys in the story.
V got into that mind real quick, shutting down any bright ideas—because while he didn’t mind shooting humans who got in his way, he’d prefer not to have the heartburn that would come with popping someone’s grandpa off to his royal reward.
“They don’t know who did it,” V said as he started to go through the man’s memory banks. “They have no leads. This is the owner, but his son’s the pharmacist now—”
When he stopped, his sister glanced over. “What. What’s wrong?”
V shook his head. “It’s hard to make sense of what’s in there. His mind… it’s gone.”
“He has amnesia?”
“No, he’s got… holes in his memory. He has pieces of the present, but not a lot to go by.”
The past was solid, though. There were all kinds of very distinct memories from the fifties and the sixties, back when there had been an ice cream counter, with banana boats and milkshakes… then later, they’d served French fries and hamburgers. But the good ol’ days hadn’t lasted. As the town’s population had thinned out, the food service part of the store had been replaced by grab-and-go groceries and home goods. Now the building was pretty on the outside, thanks to a federal grant for small towns, but the business’s finances were hanging by a thread.
“Why are you back?” the old man asked. “Did you forget your medication?”
“No,” Payne answered gently. “We didn’t. We’re sorry we bothered you.”
“Oh, it’s no bother. I’m happy to help you.” The old guy went over and flipped a switch. “Don’t know why the lights are off. They’re on now, though.”
As the fluorescent boxes in the ceiling flared, the wan illumination of the security lights was blown away, and the chaos of what should have been order was exposed in a glare.
“So what are you looking for tonight?” The old man stepped by Vishous and got firm. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to move out from behind the cash register. It’s store policy.”
Vishous put his gun back in his holster and shuffled around the guy. Down on the floor proper, he glanced around, taking note of a bank of empty shelves.
“Were you just driving by?” Payne asked the owner.
The old man’s answer was a ramble that started back in nineteen seventy-two. As he described the house he and his wife had moved into with their sons, and the options the developer had given them for the kitchen, V went to the aisle that had been completely cleared out. Bending over, he picked up a box of surgical gauze that had been stomped on.
All the wraps and the tape, the pads and the Ace bandages, in the pharmacy were gone. And when he went to the next set of shelves, the hydrogen peroxide, the alcohol, and the distilled water were also wiped out.
V headed back to the ramblin’ man and his sister. The way Payne was looking at the guy was intense, and when V tapped her on the arm because there was nothing else to do here, she didn’t look over.
Fine, whatever; he could wait. He was more convinced, rather than less, that this robbery was tied to the camp; he just had no concrete evidence and no idea how to connect it to the new location.
“So you go walking at night?” Payne was saying.
“It’s hard to sleep.”
“And does your family know where you are?”