Dan stepped out onto the dark streets outside the Pearson. The DVD was tucked into his pocket, and after a mont's consideration, he flicked it into hamrspace with the rest of his valuables. Dan glanced at his surroundings. It was late, the streets were empty. The circumstances were nearly identical to when Bartholow had stood here.
What had the mad scientist seen?
Dan walked down the sidewalk and stopped roughly in the sa spot that Bartholow had. Then he turned on his heel, and glanced down the street. There were several more tall buildings lining the street, and a dozen businesses besides. An apartnt building, so high-rise condominiums, another hotel, a bakery, a post office, a print shop, the dinsional equivalent of a Microcenter, and a handful more that Dan couldn't make out in the dark.
At this ti of night, only the hotel and the electronics store were still open. Dan strolled towards the latter purely on a hunch. At this point, he was assuming that it was, indeed, Andros Bartholow who had hired him to deliver a bunch of half-eaten corpses. Dan still didn't understand why the man had chosen that particular route for vengeance, but he doubted that the mad scientist's motives were comprehensible to anyone sane.
The door to Earls' Electronics Emporium jingled as Dan pushed it open. The inside of the store was impressively designed to look like the guts of a computer. The carpet was a deep green, lined with thousands of circuitry lines that each lead to one of the many shelves dotting the store. Several of the shelves contained black plastic tubs, arrayed in neat rows, seemingly mimicking sticks of RAM. A large fan spun over a section of the store, where everything from Dyson fans to liquid cooling was partitioned away. The custor service desk was a perfectly square chunk of tal with a hollow center, shaped like the inside of a CPU. Dan was honestly pretty impressed by the effort put in. Looking at it from above must be quite a sight.
He approached the help desk, slipping his phone out of his pocket. The employee was a bored teenager with wild blonde hair, tanned skin, and a pronounced slouch. He stood at the center of the CPU desk, one hand in the pocket of his cargo pants, and the other holding his phone. His head was bowed, staring down at the screen as he scrolled past whatever social dia site teenagers in Dinsion A favored.
Dan rapped his knuckles against the desk, and the young man flinched so hard that his phone flew out of his hands. It clattered against the tallic surface, skidding towards the edge until Dan snatched it up. He passed it back without glancing at the screen—That was a rabbit hole he absolutely did not need to explore—and the younger man shalessly pocketed it.
"Welco to E-three," the teenager greeted, looking for all the world like he was in his own bedroom. His slouch dipped even lower, even as he t Dan's eyes. "How c'nuh help ya, boss?"
"Nice place you've got here," Dan comnted, glancing around. He squinted at the boy's na tag. "Waylon. Hi there Waylon."
"Hullo."
"You usually work night shifts here, Waylon?" Dan probed.
The teen frowned. "I s'pose."
Dan unlocked his phone and flicked through his photo gallery. So of his own Southern drawl slipped out as he asked, "Were you working, day o' the attack?"
Waylon peered at Dan with suspicion. "Why you wanna know?"
Dan found the picture. He put his phone down on the desk and spun it around. "This fellow was creeping on a lady friend of mine, day of the attack. Standing outside her window, looking in for almost an hour. Got a bit worried."
The younger man blinked at Dan, then glanced down at the picture.
"That's bad," he comnted.
"That's bad," Dan agreed. "I got him on video doing it, too. I'm thinking I can go to the police with it, but I need a little more than a video. A na, hopefully, or an address. Otherwise they can't do much."
"Ok," Waylon said, peering at the picture with a furrowed brow. "So what?"
"Well," Dan continued, "in the video it looked like he ca this way after he left. I was hoping you might recognize him."
"I dunno," Waylon replied. "We get a lot of people in."
Dan glanced pointedly around the empty store. Waylon shrugged, and Dan ntally translated the previous statent into 'I don't pay attention to the people who co in.' This was looking like a bust. It had been a long shot anyway. Bartholow would have had to be completely insane to co here after busting out of prison, rather than hiding out sowhere safe.
"Well shit," Dan said, scratching the back of his head. "Thanks for your ti, I guess."
"Sure."
Dan stepped back, then paused. He cocked his head. "Say, y'all don't sell surveillance equipnt, do you?"
"Caras and shi— stuff?" Waylon clarified.
"Yeah. And whatever else you'd need to set it all up."
"Sure," the teen replied. "What'choo looking fer?"
Dan tried to recall what he'd seen. They were all just wires and caras to him. "I don't really know. Anyone bought that kinda thing recently?"
The employee shrugged his shoulders apathetically. Fuck's sake.
One last try. He glanced around the store. No manager, no other people. This was really the person they'd left in charge of the store's graveyard shift? Screw it, then.
"Mind if I look at your security tapes?" It couldn't hurt to ask.
Waylon stared at him in confusion. "What fer?"
That wasn't a no.
"I want to see if that stalker ca in, or even just walked past the window. It'd really help." The caras seed to cover a fairly wide arc. If Bartholow strolled past they should have caught it.
Waylon seed to swell up with indignation. "Only s'posed to help custors," he insisted, planting his fists on either side of his waist. "You ain't buyin', you leavin'."
Dan frowned. He reached for the first thing that ca to mind. "I'll buy a security cara, but first I need to check the quality." He jutted his chin at the store's security caras. "Two birds, one stone."
Waylon seed to sluggishly mull it over. The boy didn't seem slow, so much as profoundly disengaged. After a long minute of contemplation, he shrugged.
"Sure. But you gotta buy sothin' afterwards."
Huh.
Dan blinked.
Well then.
Waylon led him into the small backroom where they kept the security footage. It was little more than a closet with a desk and a computer in it. A single, unoccupied chair was planted beside the desk. It looked... weathered.
Dan glanced around the tiny room. "So it's just you at night? No security guard or... anyone?"
"Well, there's Burl," Waylon offered. "He's the security guard."
Dan glanced at Waylon, then at the empty chair. "Uh huh?"
The young teen stared at Dan, slowly chewing on sothing that he'd fished out of his pocket. He swallowed, paused, then blinked.
"Oh, wait," he said, in the tone of a man having an epiphany. "Burl quit."
"Is that so?" Dan asked, his skin beginning to crawl. There was sothing seriously wrong, here. He ntally 'loaded' a ball bearing, letting it accelerate through the void of t-space.
"Yar," Waylon's head bobbed up and down like a fishing lure. "Quit after that big ol' gang war. Musta' spooked him or sommit."
"You don't know?" Dan asked, morbidly fascinated by the person in front of him.
Waylon's face scrunched up in thought. He seed to struggle to rember for several seconds, before his entire body went slack. He shrugged.
Dan took a slow step away from him. "I'm just gonna queue up the tape, if you don't mind."
Waylon shrugged again, and casually slouched against the door fra.
Dan glanced at the security recordings. It was a fairly intuitive system, almost identical to the Pearson's. It was a work of minutes to find the correct day. Dan rembered the ti stamp from Margaret's footage, and quickly fast forwarded to it. The video showed Waylon flitting about the store, rearranging displays and putting out product. In the corner of the store, on a thick stool, a hefty fellow in a security outfit lounged with a newspaper. The ti stamp ticked upwards. Ten seconds until Bartholow left the Pearson.
The video skipped. The screen flickered, and went black. The ti stamp vanished. Dan stared at the empty screen. He clicked the rewind button, and it started right back up. Playing it forward again, produced the sa result. Empty, blank, nothingness. Gone.
Soone had deleted the footage for the rest of the day.
Dan glanced back at Waylon, who had returned to his phone. He compared the laconic, lackadaisical teen in front of him, to the energetic, engaged one on screen. He looked at the security guard, his unconcerned attitude, despite the day's violence, preserved forever on video. The security guard who had apparently up and quit the next day out of fear? Dan's 'fucky' senses were tingling.
He pulled out his phone, and called Cornelius.
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