Hell on Wheels (Black Knights Inc. #1)(19)

Shit.

“Thanks,” Ali said, dragging his attention back to the subject at hand. “That makes me feel better. I really thought I was going nutso there for a while. And this is probably going to sound strange, but I’m kinda glad you guys found all those bugs on me. Now I know I’m not losing my mind.”

“So you get home from work and you know someone’s been in your place,” Ozzie prodded. Like usual, the kid’s brain was flying about ten steps ahead, gathering information and cataloging it into recognizable patterns. “What happened next?”

“Nothing,” Ali lifted a shoulder and unconsciously slid a little farther down in her seat. The woman was on the short path to going horizontal. “For a few days, that is. I thought maybe I was just being paranoid, thought maybe my personal radar was going haywire because of Grigg’s passing.”

Passing.

Frank hated the euphemisms people used while talking about death. What was so wrong with that word? Death. Dead. Die. It was direct, simple, so much more succinct than, say, giving up the ghost or kicking the bucket, or, his personal favorite, pushing up daisies. Though technically more accurate than the previous two, that last one sounded far too happy and sunny in his opinion. Maybe it was because he’d dealt in and with death for most of his adult life, but he preferred to call a spade a spade.

Grigg was dead. It was as simple and as complicated as that.

“But about a week later,” Ali continued, “I walked into my classroom early one morning and…same thing. That feeling like someone had been there. But this time I had proof. When I went back through the history on my computer, I saw someone had logged on to my machine around midnight the night before.”

“Could you see what they were looking for? What files they accessed?” Ozzie asked.

“No…I, uh, I’m not that tech-savvy. And I guess, looking back, perhaps I should’ve called in one of those companies…the Geek Squad or whatever, to see if they could figure out what’d been done to my PC, but then school let out for summer break and I started to see him and I completely forgot about my computer.”

“See him?” Dan “The Man” Currington asked the question they were all thinking.

“Yes,” she made a helpless gesture, “sort of.”

“Any way to clarify that?” Dan pressed.

Ali took another deep breath and slipped a little farther down in her seat. She rested her head on the back and blinked rapidly at the ceiling, then she suddenly pulled herself upright again.

That-a-girl, just keep it together a little while longer.

“Okay, again, you have to understand I thought I was going crazy, but I kept seeing this guy out of the corner of my eye. Never full on. Just a glimpse here or there. In the parking lot at the grocery store, a few cars behind me at a red light, walking into the ice cream shop across from the place I always get coffee. It’s like I’d catch a glimpse…then he’d be gone. But yesterday, right after some big brute of a guy tried to mug me,” she waved everyone off when they started making noises of concern. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t hurt, and the big jerk didn’t get my purse, thanks to the help of a giant bumblebee and a loaf of French bread.” Again, she sliced her hand through the air. “Long story for another time. Anyway, so right after my mugger ran off, I see the guy who’s been following me for months come out of the deli across the street.

“Now, my adrenaline was pretty high because of the mugging, so I call to him and guess what he does?”

“What?” Becky asked, eyes bright with excitement. The damned woman loved trouble, lived for it and, much to Frank’s chagrin, too often found it.

“He took off!” Ali exclaimed. “Just jumped in his SUV and burned rubber. Headed in the same direction as my mugger, mind you. I started after him—”

There was a collective gasp heard around the table.

“Yes, yes,” she rolled her eyes and pressed forward before anyone could throw in their two cents about what a colossally dumbass move that had been. “I know. Stupid, right? But I was so sick of feeling like I was going crazy. Don’t worry, though. One of the guys who helped me fight off the mugger kept me from following.”

Ozzie whipped open a paper-thin laptop, tense fingers poised above the keys like a snake getting ready to strike. “Vehicle make, color, model?”

Young Einstein had dropped his charmingly affable facade. Now he was all business. This was his specialty. Give the kid a few scant bits of information, and he could use his crazy-mad computer skills to find you the remaining pieces of the puzzle because, according to Ozzie, everything could be accessed through the World Wide Web and the lightning-fast fingers of a clever hacker. And Ozzie was as clever as they came.

“Sorry,” Ali shook her head. “I’m about as good with cars as I am with computers. It was black, I can tell you that much. Black and big. Like a Ford Explorer or a Chevy Tahoe.”

“So it was a domestically made SUV?” Ozzie asked, already typing away on the keyboard while his eyes remained glued to Ali’s face.

Mad skills.

Frank congratulated himself for about the thousandth time over his decision to recruit Ethan Sykes away from the Navy.

Again Ali shook her head. “I’m not sure. But I did get a picture of the license plate.”