Page 61 of Hunter's Hidden Camera
“Riverside? We need to leave now. Stake out the place before anyone arrives.” I close the laptop. “I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t want him to know where I am.”
“As long as it’s shut down like that,” says Sruthi, “it can’t be tracked. You’re fine now, as long as it’s powered off.”
“That’s a relief.” I pick up the laptop. “Sruthi, Carter T. Douglass: thank you so much.”
“That was the most fun I’ve had all year,” says Sruthi.
Oscar cocks his head. “Seriously?”
“Thanks for the softball tips,” says Carter T. Douglass.
Soon, Oscar and I are walking quickly down the sidewalk, back to my car. We’re both looking over our shoulders, looking all around us, to see if anyone’s watching us, if anyone’s following us.
When we turn the corner, we see a college-aged guy with a pervy mustache standing near my car on the sidewalk.
Oscar and I slow down. We glance at each other.
“That dude looks like he molests,” says Oscar.
Then, a girl about his age comes out of a sandwich shop. He’s standing between my car and the shop. It looks like he was just waiting for her.
“What took you so long?” he asks her.
She says, “There were two other people waiting for the bathroom.”
“Oh,” he says. “I thought you were dropping a deuce.”
She slaps his arm. “Billy!”
They laugh, as they walk away.
Oscar and I get into my car and get the hell out of town.
27
Stakeout
Google Maps on Oscar’s phone has navigated us to a city in Riverside County, which is almost an hour east of where we live. We’re in what looks like an industrial area, surrounded by factories and warehouses that are probably pretty active during the day and that spit out smokestacks into the sky. However, it’s now 8 p.m. and dark out, on a seemingly moonless night, and there are not a lot of cars on the street and absolutely no one walking the sidewalks.
“We’re two blocks away,” says Oscar.
“Well, we can’t just drive up to the front,” I say, as I pull the car over to the side of the road, next to a junkyard full of busted-up vehicles. “We’re an hour early, which gives us a head start. We’ll walk over there and stake it out.”
“I live in a sketchy neighborhood,” says Oscar. “But evenI’mkinda scared to be out here.”
“You wanna wait in the car?” I ask.
“Nah, man, are we bros or are we bros?” Oscar gets out of the car.
We start walking.
After a few minutes of rushing down the sidewalk undetected (nobody has passed us at all), we see a dilapidated building, three stories high, across the street from us. Some of the windows are boarded up, the paint is peeling, and the walls are tagged with graffiti.
The front door to the building is wide open. A white balloon filled with helium is attached to the doorknob. Written on it, in black marker, are the letters “P” and “S.”
I mouth the words, “Perpetual Sunset.”
The balloon sways back and forth.
