Insidious by Brett Battles

Author:Brett Battles [Battles, Brett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

I’m almost back to Vallarte’s when the dot on my tracker app begins to move.

It’s about damn time.

It appears to be headed to the very freeway I’m already on. What I don’t know is which direction it will go. If this were any other time of day, I would exit and wait near the on-ramps until I know the answer. But it’s 4:34 p.m. and I’m crawling along, trapped in the early stages of Phoenix rush hour. Staying where I am seems as good an option as waiting on a side street. Potentially better, if the dot ends up going in the same direction, and I don’t have to get off and on again.

Unfortunately, the traffic gods look unkindly upon me, because getting off and on again is exactly what I end up having to do. By the time I’m able to head in the correct direction, the dot has passed by me and is now nearly a mile ahead.

That might sound like a lot of ground to make up, but the traffic actually helps. Individual drivers can be unpredictable, but a traffic jam, taken in its totality, tends to follow certain patterns and tendencies. (I call it the Hari Seldon psychohistory rule of traffic. I know, you don’t get it, but it’s funny to me.) If you understand these tendencies, you can exploit them. I spent an entire month doing just that when I was an apprentice operative and have continued to sharpen those skills ever since.

I move up through the pack, playing a real-life game of Frogger, slowly cutting the distance between me and the dot. After about fifteen minutes and a few angry honks, I see the Durango ahead and soon I’m settled three cars behind it.

It’s another forty grueling minutes of moving at the speed of annoyance before we get off the freeway.

Interestingly, we are back in Goodyear, home of the recently departed Juan Sanchez. We do not, however, end up going to the same working-class neighborhood. Instead the Durango leads me south, past all the housing developments and over a ridge. According to my map, I’m still in Goodyear, but there’s a hell of a lot of open desert between where I am now and the last buildings I passed.

After coming down the other side of the ridge and turning onto Estrella Parkway, I’m suddenly in what appears to be an entirely new town. But it, too, is technically still part of Goodyear. There’s even a manmade lake, with docks and boats and some kind of resort or club at one end.

When the Durango turns again, I keep going straight so its occupants won’t get suspicious. I work my way through a couple of the cookie-cutter neighborhoods that seem to have sprouted up like weeds all over Phoenix, and stop only a few streets away from the SUV.

As I close in, I enter a neighborhood decidedly not like the others. Here, large houses sit on giant lots, with wide strips of open land between each dwelling.

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.