Page 60 of Trouble Comes in Threes

“And you took photos of him doin’ it?” Neely Kate asked.

He nodded.

“And the flash went off?” she asked. When he nodded again, she said, “Wouldn’t video have been better?”

He hung his head. “Probably, but I wasn’t thinkin’ right.”

“Obviously,” Neely Kate said under her breath.

I shot her a look, and she shrugged as though to say, I’m just stating the obvious.

“Let’s have a look at those photos,” I said, holding out my hand.

“They ain’t any good,” Austin grumbled as he pulled his phone out of his pocket and entered a passcode. After a few swipes and taps, he handed it over. “I only have a few.”

The first image was a blur of white light with black in the background. There were no discernable people. If you used your imagination, you could see trees on the sides, but they could as easily have been Bigfoot.

“That’s the one with flash,” he said. “The others are worse.”

“Worse than that?” Neely Kate asked in disbelief as I lowered the phone so she and Dermot could see.

I swiped to the next photo, which was pitch black. The next five photos were exactly the same.

“Now you see why I used the flash,” Austin said.

“I guess,” Neely Kate said.

I swiped again, and a selfie of Austin and a little girl appeared. Both had wide smiles that made my heart swell.

Austin quickly reached over and took his phone back. “That’s all I have.”

“Was that your sister?” I asked. “You look like you’re very close.”

He nodded, but his silence was proof enough that he didn’t want to talk about it. He was protecting her.

“So when they saw you, you took off running?” I asked.

“Yeah, they started shooting at me, but I took off running through weeds on the land next to the plant, and I kept low so he was shootin’ blindly.”

“Good thinkin’,” Dermot said.

The boy seemed to bask in his praise.

“So after you got away, what did you do next?” I asked.

“I walked for a long time, then I called a guy I know from school. He told me I needed help from the Lady in Black and that I should find a guy named Bruce Wayne who worked for a landscaping company. So I looked it up on my phone, and someone posted on social media that the landscaping company was working on their house this week. I looked them up on the internet and found their address and started walking.”

“The plant is at least ten miles north,” I said.

He nodded. “I walked all night, stopping to sleep some when I found an empty shed.”

We were all silent for a moment before Dermot asked, “Why do you think they know who you are?”

Austin looked up at him, terror on his face. “I went back to the building to get my stuff—it’s all I’ve got—but when I got there, none of my stuff was there.” He paused. “I’d left my car keys there, and they were gone, but worse, they took my wallet.” He swallowed hard. “They have my driver’s license. They know who I am.”

Chapter Thirteen

We were all silent for a moment before I said, “We need to call Joe.”

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