Page 13 of Wrong Way

Miles looked at the dark window sign, the violet and gold glass cold and colorless without power. There wasn't a clean answer to the question that didn't require the killer to provide it himself. They had a method, a note and a victim, and from those things they could build a partial profile: advanced electrical knowledge, access or ability to gain access to commercial premises, a philosophical framework around light and authenticity that had been pointed in a specific direction. And it seemed that neon was their element of voice.

But partial was the keyword. The profile had shape without specificity, and specificity was what they needed to find the next target before the next target became a crime scene.

"We wait on the transformer trace," he said. "We do the Lone Star Neon visit. We see what Sarah pulls from the client records." He moved toward the front of the shop and looked out to the streets, slightly darkening as afternoon gave way to evening.

As they took one last look around the store, they both seemed to understand where they currently stood. The honest version was that the killer's identity was going to remain a mystery until he gave them more to work with, and the next thing he gave them was going to come at someone's expense.

CHAPTER NINE

The last customer left at 11:47, and by midnight the bar reached a stage of quiet often found in small venues after a concert—a silence that somehow still held the pressure and slight echo of the noise that had been filling it only minutes ago.

But Derek Song was in no hurry. He never was, after these nights. He picked up a stool that someone had knocked over near the back wall and set it back in place, then started moving glasses from the nearest tables to the bar top where the staff could get to them.

This was not his job. Nobody had asked him to do it. He just found that his hands worked better when they were doing something, and he genuinely liked the wind-down after karaoke nights. It was the strange and low-level satisfaction of restoring a room to its neutral state. It was one of the things his sponsor had told him early in sobriety, back when idle time was a problem: find the task that needs doing and do it. The advice had outlasted the circumstances that prompted it by several years.

He was still running a little warm from winning the gift card. A hundred dollars to the bar's kitchen, which was not a place he ate often but would now eat considerably more often. He had won it for his rendition of Whitesnake’s "Still of the Night.” He had given it everything, and the crowd had responded with the real, unguarded kind of applause rather than the polite kind. The bartender had announced him as the uncontested champion of the night, and Derek had accepted the title graciously.

He had been running karaoke nights at Austin bars for three years as part of his outreach ministry. He was usually nursing a club soda at the back while everyone else drank, and he still felt that small, uncomplicated pleasure every time a room responded to him. Karaoke was not everyone's idea of ministry, and Derek understood that. His senior pastor had raised an eyebrow the first time Derek had proposed it. But Derek's position was that you met people where they were, and where a lot of people in their mid-twenties and early thirties in Austin were on a Thursday night was in a bar with bad acoustics and a touchscreen song catalog. He didn't preach at anyone, and he didn't hand out literature. He showed up, sang his songs, stayed for cleanup, and made himself available for conversation in the same uncomplicated way he made himself available anywhere else.

Some weeks nothing came of it. Other weeks it mattered. And when it mattered, it usually mattered a lot.

Earlier in the evening he had sat with a young woman at the back table for nearly forty minutes. She had come in alone and spent the first hour nursing a drink and watching the stage with the careful attention of someone working up to something. Around 9:30, she had come over and asked without much preamble whether he was the pastor someone had mentioned to her. He had said he was, more or less, and she had said she wasn't sure she believed in anything anymore, and he had said that was a reasonable place to be. They had talked until the karaoke contest started. She had given him her number at the end of it and gone home looking slightly less like she was carrying the full weight of the evening by herself. He had texted her his number immediately, so she'd have it when she was ready to continue the conversation.

That was why he did this. That was the whole of it.

He hummed a few bars of something that had been stuck in his head for the last hour and moved another cluster of glasses to the bar. As he did so, the neon signs in the front windows were flickering.

There were four of them arranged along the window bank facing the street: a Lone Star Beer sign in red and blue, a green cactus shape with the bar's name looped above it in cursive, a yellow OPEN sign that was still running even though the bar had closed, and a fourth piece in orange that read LIVE MUSIC in block letters. Derek had barely registered them all evening, the way you stopped registering the light in a room you spent a lot of time in.

But the flickering was hard to ignore now. All four signs were doing it simultaneously, a rapid and stuttering irregularity that didn't match any normal fade or power fluctuation he had seen before.

He set down the glasses he was carrying and walked toward the window.

The flickering continued as he crossed the room. The yellow OPEN sign dropped out entirely for a second, then came back at a slightly different intensity. The cactus sign was cycling between full brightness and near dark in a way that made the green light pulse against the window glass in a rapid, unsettling rhythm.

Derek leaned in to look more closely at the nearest sign. He rested his left hand on the window frame as he bent forward to peer at the base of the Lone Star Beer sign where it met its mounting bracket. He was not an electrician and had no particular expertise in neon, but he was a practical person. His instinct when something appeared to be wrong was always to take a closer look before deciding it was someone else's problem.

He reached out…and the current reached him before any other thought completed itself. It was total and instantaneous, moving up through his palm and forearm and into his chest in a single violent event. His body stopped responding to him entirely. The room swung sideways in his vision and the bar and its quiet and the stacked glasses on the counter became things that were happening at a great distance. And then they were not happening at all.

He was flung back from the window, and the world went dark before he reached the floor.

The neon signs continued their flickering for a few seconds more and then stabilized. They settled back to a steady glow as though nothing had interrupted them. The bar was very quiet and noting moved.

The glasses Derek had carried to the bar top sat where he had left them. The gift card envelope was still in his jacket pocket, folded once, and the OPEN sign burned yellow and steady in the window.

CHAPTER TEN

Miles and Vic had checked into the hotel exactly one hour and two minutes before Kowalski called. Miles knew this because he had looked at the clock on the nightstand when he set his bag down, partly out of habit and partly because he was calculating how long he could reasonably sleep before waking up tomorrow. He had his jacket off, and his shirt untucked, with one hand on the bathroom door when his phone went off on the bed behind him.

He listened to Kowalski describe the new scene, at a bar not too far away from the hotel. Miles sighed, buttoned his shirt again, and went off to get Vic. They plugged the address into the GPS and drove to East Sixth Street. Miles was already pretty sure what they'd find when they arrived.

Kowalski was standing on the sidewalk outside when they pulled up, talking to a man who had his back to the street and his shoulders drawn in tight. A friend of the victim, Miles gathered, or someone who had been with him earlier in the evening and was only now hearing the news. Kowalski saw them arrive and raised a hand but stayed where he was, still working through it with the man. Miles and Vic ducked under the tape and went inside without waiting.

The bar was a mid-sized room with low ceilings and a stage along the far wall still set up with the karaoke equipment—monitors, a microphone stand, and a projection screen with the service logo frozen on it. The body was near the front windows. It had been covered and was positioned a few feet back from the glass on the hardwood floor.

Austin PD officers were stationed near the entrance and at the back of the room. A lone crime scene technician was working methodically along the near wall. A man that Mile assumed to be the bar manager was a heavyset man in his forties, standing near the service bar. When Miles and Vic identified themselves and showed their badges, he moved toward them with visible relief.

“Paul Garrett, good to meet you,” he said in a bit of a grumble. He didn’t look shocked, but very confused. It was almost as if he was waiting for someone to rush out and tell him that this was all a big, elaborate prank.