Chapter 278: One Barbecue Special Please.

There were lots of advantages in the brain link thingie. I could research the Internet by just thinking that I wanted to do it. That night the advantage was different. It was that there was no busy signal, when I decided to ask for help. There were controllers on duty 24/7. If I needed something above their pay grade, they just sent the request along. The duty officer usually could make the decision. I had no idea how many things the duty office had on his plate, and I didn't give a shit.

All that said, I sent a request via data line for an animal capture dart gun and drugs. More drugs than I would need for this one mission. Since I was going to be creating the theater of the dead more than just once, it seemed logical that I would need to control the actors. Also do it without leaving large amounts of trace evidence. The drug I hoped for would be harder to detect in a normal ME tox screen. I was looking for an animal tranquilizer that created paralysis, not unconsciousness. I thought that I remembered from some of the animal shows that they didn't always want them to go to sleep, because they would forget to breath, or some such crap.

I was prepared to camp out in the foreclosed home for days until the farm made a decision. Being gone from home for days was going to make it difficult for me to come up with an alibi, if I ever needed one. I trusted that the Virginia Gentlemen Farmers could come up with something if I couldn't. If not I had a friend or two who were pretty understanding. Best of all would be a crime scene that didn't require investigation. At least no more than Blevins judging my reaction, when he told me Nanny cunt and boyfriend were dead.

The phone in my head went off an hour after I made the request. "There is a courier on his way to Florida. He will be leaving at first light. He will be carrying a package for you. Be in the parking lot of the race track convenience store on long street in Williams around 10am. Look for a bright red Ford Pickup truck. He will drop off the package. He has a photograph of you, so he will make visual identification. If you aren't there, he will not wait." It was a message not a conversational invitation.

Since there was no power on in the foreclosed house, I left to sit in a waffle house. The Waffle had coffee and lots of free electrons in the air. It took a little longer to charge fully since I was burning some energy just sitting up. That didn't count the energy used to drink and process coffee. The point was I sat there two hours, then move across town to an early morning cafe for more coffee and more energy. I could have plugged directly into the wall for a charge, but that would look a little strange to anyone drinking coffee across from me. If I hadn't made the decision to stay out of places the cops might be looking, after the bodies were found, I could have checked into a motel. Since I didn't do that, it was the slow charge of free electrons for that night.

I drove the thirty miles over to Williams and found the Race Track convenience store. I was about fifteen minutes early so I parked at the corner of the lot. I didn't want to block the business's doors or pumps. I hoped that I could avoid being noticed.

At 10:15 the red pickup pulled into the lot. I got out of my cruiser and waited. He drove up beside me looked at the picture he had of me. "Got the time?" he asked.

I looked at my watch, then said, "It's 10:22AM in Virginia." It was the universal authentication code.

He handed me the package and took my picture with a cell phone. A moment later he drove the bright red Ford out of the parking lot supposedly headed for Florida, but I doubted that was the truth. Lying was a way of life with those bozos.

I put the sealed box into the back of the cruiser and headed home. Since my power supply was only 62%, even after all the free electron charging, I stopped for more coffee well away from town. I really needed about half an hour plugged into the wall somewhere. It would be like the naps, which I took in my old life. The next best thing would be to park in the parking lot of power plant for a couple of hours. Then those things have security guards and camera. Not something I needed while I waited to kill someone.

I decided that I really wanted a full charge going into the night's activities. It would be nice, just in case I had to make a run for it on that bike. It took very little energy to drive the cruiser, but it took quite a bit more, as you can imagine, to pedal the bike ten miles. Which should explain why I used a combination of the two whenever I could.

So the question became, where could I plug in for half an hour without being seen. Preferably somewhere without security cameras. The less than obvious place was the public library. I know that sounds totally foolish right? Well with a little luck their computers would be setup to give the user some privacy. It would be pretty simple to remove the power cord and use it to tap into their power lines. The computer monitor would be off, but the library employees most likely wouldn't notice. If that didn't work, I had a USB cable I could use to connect. The power supply was very low voltage that way and it would take substantially longer.

If everything else failed I could hunt down a transformer substation and sit in my care within thirty feet of it and collect free electrons from it. That again looked suspicious, but in an emergency it was a way to power up quickly. those things were so poorly designed that electrons filled the air around them. It was almost as good as being plugged into the wall.

The library proved to be just the ticket. "Hi, I'm in town on business and my laptop battery died. Do you happen to have a computer I could use. Something with a little privacy?"