Conspiracy Theory by John G. Hartness

Author:John G. Hartness [Hartness, John G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Falstaff Books
Published: 2020-10-13T05:00:00+00:00

23

I fucking hate this,” I said to no one in particular. Nobody replied, but I knew they heard me. How could they not, with the four of us crammed into the back of a Sprinter van outfitted with more monitors and listening equipment than most recording studios. We had a monitor feed of the outside of The Dive, a battered white clapboard two-story house with all the non-load-bearing walls and beams ripped out to make as much floor space as possible. That came from a camera on top of the van, which was sitting in the Park N’ Ride lot across the street from the bar.

Another monitor was shaky cam footage coming from a pinhole camera built into Jack’s glasses. The fisheye lens distorted things a little but gave us a nice broad view of the interior of the club. Which looked like it lived up to every letter of its name. The floors were bare plywood, the ceiling was normal household drywall ceiling with graffiti sprayed and Sharpie’d everywhere, and the walls were covered with bumper stickers and posters from punk and garage metal bands. The place wasn’t very full, but it was early yet, barely ten o’clock.

Jack hadn’t protested much when we told him he was elected to go in and be our eyes inside the bar. After a couple hours setting up the pickup of the surveillance van and scheduling delivery of all the gear for just after sundown, everyone had turned in to get some sleep. We’d all been up all night, and aside from Luke, for obvious reasons, and Becks, who was too keyed up to sleep after quitting her dream job, the rest of us were exhausted.

That didn’t mean I got much sleep, because as soon as we were back in our apartment, Becks headed straight for the fridge, pulled out two beers, and came over to the sofa. She passed me a beer and popped the top on hers. I sat down across from her and said, “Okay, tell me the rest.”

She gave me a mock innocent stare and said, “What do you mean?”

“Inside your head, remember. I know there’s more to it than what you told us in there. What’s the rest of the story behind you quitting? Because you’re one hundred percent a ‘work from within the system’ kind of chick, not a ‘burn it all down and walk away’ type. That’s more my style.”

She took a long pull off her beer, kicked her shoes off, and put her feet up on the coffee table. She leaned her head back against the couch and stared up at the ceiling for a long moment before she spoke. “Chief Putnam made it abundantly clear that even if he didn’t bring Strunin in, and he was almost certainly going to, that I would never be sitting in that, or any other, chair higher than the one behind my detective’s desk. He told me point blank that he did not see me progressing any higher up the ranks within the department than detective.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.