Chapter 23

Just before noon the next day, Samantha and I arrived at the City offices so she could pretend to apply for a job.

I'm fairly sure our blind act was good enough as none of the auras flared with suspicion. Hell, there weren't even any of the lust flairs I was used to seeing when one of the girls were guiding me, but then, she was in full uglified regalia.

It took forever. I'm not sure what I expected but it was a government office and they can't even hand out job applications efficiently. I did get what we came for when the Human Resources Supervisor came in to talk to one of his underlings. But then I had to wait for Samantha.

We were late getting home and Kirsten had dinner on the table. Tiffany was there too but neither one of them were eating.

"Have you heard from Mike?" Tiffany asked in a rush the moment we were through the door. "We were supposed to meet for lunch but he never showed. He's not answering his phone." There was a tone of desperation in her voice.

"I checked the hospitals," said Kirsten, "and they don't have anyone matching his name or description."

"Didn't he leave about two hours before we did?" I recalled. "Did he say where he was going?"

"No, just that he had some errands to run." Tiffany was near the point of crying.

"That's not like Mike at all." Noted Samantha, then she moved to sit next to Tiffany and put her arm around her friend's shoulder. "We'll find him, Tiff ... we'll find him."

She looked to me, pleading with her eyes.

"Alright, if something happened to him, I doubt he would have driven away. We all know his car so we fan out. Kirz, will you be okay with just Tramp?" She nodded, "Take him, start at the campus and work your way out. Tiff, you and Sam take Lady and you know what sort of stores he would go to, check every one you can think of and cruise the mall. I'll go downtown. Whatever happened was likely around one of his usual haunts and if we find his car we'll have a starting point."

"Make sure you take a charger for your phones," Instructed Samantha, "I want everyone to check in with anyone you're not with at ten minute intervals. Let everyone know where you are and where you're going next. If someone doesn't call, the rest of us will know where to go."

The house erupted with activity as the dogs were loaded up and we all gathered what we would need.

Before we split up I went to the gun safe and grabbed four nine millimeter automatics.

"Here," I said, passing them out, "take these and a couple extra clips. Don't take any chances." I didn't think they would be needed, I hoped the wouldn't, but I was trying to consider every eventuality.

They handled the guns with careful familiarity. Everyone had been instructed and engaged in at least two practice sessions a month at a private gun range.

The weapons quickly vanished.

I went downtown and worked my way methodically out from the center. I checked every parking lot and alley but saw no sign of his car.

It was several hours later that I got an unscheduled call from Tiffany.

"We found it!"

I could hear Samantha talking to someone else, I guessed Kirsten.

"Where are you?"

"The Blueberry Hill Shopping Center, Jim's Sporting Goods, it's the place that Mike says doesn't have a very good selection but has good prices."

"I know it, I'll be there in twenty minutes."

The stores were closed and Kirsten was already there when I arrived. We walked through the large parking lot, around and behind the strip mall. We didn't see any signs of a struggle, whatever those would be in an environment that was all asphalt and concrete. Okay, there were no obvious blood stains.

But it was Tiffany who noticed what was there.

"There are cameras in almost all these stores," she said, peering through the plate glass of the closed sporting goods store, "That one looks like it has a good view right out this window. I'll bet if we check enough stores we can see the whole parking lot."

"Good thinking, Tiff." I said, my hand on her shoulder, "do you want me to break in? I can do it without damaging anything or setting off any alarms."

"No, we'd just end up breaking the law on camera. Unless we stole all the recorders – and Mike told me a lot of places hide them. The store opens at nine." She looked at the time on her phone. "That's only ten hours."

The panic in her voice said it all.

Leaving Mike's car, because I didn't trust Tiffany to drive, we went home.

No one slept. No one ate. No one even wanted to fool around. We spent half the night sitting at the kitchen table and the other half sitting in the living room. The television was on, but no one watched it.

We were back at the shopping center at eight.

As I thought, employees began showing up for most of the shops. We met the assistant manager of the sporting good store at the door just after eight thirty.

He let us in, showed where the digital video recorder was and how to play things back. He was very helpful, though he also had no choice. There was no credit or debit card slip with Mike's name on it so he either never made it into the store, or whatever he'd bought he'd paid for with cash.

We toyed with the video for about fifteen minutes before finally deciding to start at the time of the missed lunch date and play it backwards. It took a while because we could only run it at about double speed – any faster and we wasted time going back every time a person flashed across the view too fast to tell if it was him or not.

"There!" Exclaimed Tiffany, "That's him!"

I stopped the reverse play and played it forward at normal speed.

Mike walked out the door and headed for his car. He was looking off to his left when he suddenly stopped, watched in the same direction for a few seconds, then walked off that way.

"Okay," I said, "Let's go next door."

Luckily, the place next door, a mid-range jewelry store, had a camera watching the parking spaces in front of their store. The manager at that store was just as involuntarily cheerful and helpful as the previous manager and, since we knew exactly what time we were looking for, it didn't take long before we were watching Mike walk across the field of view. He was still moving left, but also away from the building.

The next store was a ladies' clothing place that had one camera that had a decent view out the front window. Wouldn't you know it? The manager there was also very glad to see us and had absolutely no problem with us taking a look at yesterday's video.

We saw Mike moving towards a couple, a man and a woman, while the man was unlocking the side door of a windowless white cargo van in a sparsely occupied area of the lot. He was smallish with black hair and she was a fit young woman with a nice figure and long brown hair.

It seemed Mike was going to walk right past the pair, he was about a dozen feet or so from them. Just as he got to a point were he was directly behind the man, he turned quickly towards him. The man turned his head and saw him before he'd managed to close the distance.

Mike started a lung but stopped dead in his tracks and the man said a few words while he opened the side double doors wide. Both Mike and the woman climbed into the van, the man closed the doors, went around and climbed into the driver's seat.

We watched them pull away, but couldn't make out the license plate.

"Well, what the fuck?" said Tiffany after a few moments.

"That was definitely a Psychic." I noted.

"But how would Mike know?" Wondered Samantha.

"I think I know." said Kirsten, "but we have to go back to the jewelry store."

Trusting her, we headed back. As we walked there she pointed out into the lot.

"Right there, that blue two door with the dent on the back fender. It was there when we were here last night and I think it's in the exact same spot. I'm pretty sure it's also the same car I noticed earlier."

It only took a few minutes to replay the jewelry store's video.

As we backed through the tape, Kirsten noted, "Look there, there's a purse all alone on top of that blue car."

We watched Mike walk backwards through the frame, finally getting to the same time Mike had walked out of the sporting goods store. We hadn't seen it the first time because we had started watching at the time Mike had walked out of the other video.

Sure enough, we saw what Mike had been watching.

The woman was just getting to her car, she put her large bag on top and fiddled with her keys to unlock it.

The man approached her, said only a few words then they both walked away and out of frame, she leaving her purse sitting on top of the car.

"Mike would have known that no woman would walk away from her purse like that." Said Tiffany, "Someone else might have noticed but just wondered what in the hell she was thinking, but Mike, knowing what he knows, figured out that she wasn't thinking at all, at least not for herself."

Then her eyes flashed angrily, "But what the fuck did he think he was doing?"

"He was thinking that he wasn't going to let some mind fucker get an innocent girl." Samantha said as soothing as she could. "He was being the good and caring guy you fell in love with."

"But if he knew the guy had powers what was he going to ... God Damn Him!"

"He almost did it," said Kirsten, "it looked like he was pretending to walk past, and my guess is he was going to jump him when he was in the guy's blind spot. I wonder what made him turn? Jake, those guys can't sense that sort of shit can they?"

"No, we can get really strong emotions without a link, but Mike knew that, he wouldn't have let himself get that worked up, and even if he did, he'd have to be fairly close. I don't think there's anyway that mind fucker would have figured out that fast what he was getting and where it was coming from."

"We gotta get that video of the van pulling out." said Tiffany. "We can get someone to enhance it so we can read the license plate."

"It's not enough, you saw what it looked like when we tried zooming in. Even enhanced it wouldn't be readable, there's nothing there to work with. I don't know this stuff like Mike does, but I know enough. Those are older analog cameras, if they were the newer high def IP type like this jewelery store has, we might have a chance. With the ones from that clothing store all we'd get is a bunch of enhanced blotches."

"We have to to do something! My God, he could already be dead!"

Samantha put her arm protectively around her friend, "I don't think so, Tiff. You have to ask yourself why the guy took him with them when he could have just blanked Mike's mind and recent memories and left with the woman."

"He has plans for Mike," agreed Kirsten, "I don't think it was just to kill him. That wouldn't make sense. Even considering twisted fuck wad logic, it just doesn't make sense."

"He may not be having the greatest time ever," I noted, "but I'm sure he's still alive."

"We have to find him, Jake" Tiffany said, looking at me with steely resolve, "So I can kill that mind fucking bastard myself, and then beat the shit out of Mike for being so Fucking Stupid!"

She'd put up a good fight in the few minutes we had known what happened to her husband, but now she lost the battle and began to cry.

Samantha and Kirsten put her between them and guided her back out to our car. Samantha crawled into the back seat with her while Kirsten, using a spare set of keys, climbed behind the wheel of Mike's car and met us back home.

We talked about what to do next, our options were pretty limited.

Then, Kirsten pointed out something obvious.

"You know, it didn't look like that guy had followed the woman, I think he just happened upon her, like that fucker in the coffee shop."

"Okay, he happened upon her and Mike happened upon them," said Tiffany, miserably, "what does that get us?"

"Do you think he lives or works somewhere in that part of town? Maybe we could find the van."

"A white van? Do you have any idea how many fucking white vans I see every day? There are thousands of them out there and this one didn't even have a sign or anything on it that could point us in a direction."

"You're right," said Samantha, suddenly excited, "there was no logo on that van. Of all the white vans like that you see, Tiff, how many of them have some sort of sign or logo on them?"

"Pretty much all of them."

"So one without," I joined in, "will stand out. And we all got a pretty good look at the guy. Tiff, I don't think we're dead in the water just yet."

I was hesitant to split up again, so we rode in one car, Tiffany's Subaru Outback. She and Kirsten sat in front, Samantha and I in back and dogs rode in the cargo area.

We started at the strip mall and worked our way out. It was slow going as there was a residential area not too far from there and we had to cruise every side road and alleyway. If Tiffany had her way, we would have been peeking into every garage and questioning every person, with me making sure they weren't lying or forgetting something.

After two days of not sleeping, barely eating and driving around endlessly, I was beginning to think she was right.

That's when my phone rang. I didn't recognize the number.

"Hello? ... MIKE?"

"Gimme the phone." said Tiffany slamming on the brakes and turning to snatch the phone from me.

"Baby, are you all right? ... Are you safe? ... tell me where you are, we'll come get you ... what about the mind fucker? ... we saw that woman ... who? ... I don't understand ... Okay baby, you sit tight and we'll be right there."