Bad Choices (Hypernaturals 8)

The Night

It was a dark and stormy night...

OK. I lie. It is just dark.

To humans.

It is night.

My brain making jokes to avoid thinking upon what comes next.

We moved into the warehouse at noon, the day of the meeting. Scents in the air told us that we were right to suspect someone coming out to the warehouse a day ahead. Once inside, we saw chairs formerly stacked now set up and facing the stage. No one is here now.

There are a shockingly large number of chairs set up. Seven rows of ten, five on a side with a center aisle. Holy crap, that is going to be a lot of perverts in one place. There is now a podium on one side of the stage that had not been there before.

This means someone was here and may have noticed the way the emergency exits were NOT blocked with piles of garbage. Crap. All our planning and we missed that detail: Should have blocked them before now. Time for plan B on that.

We studied the doors and the way that the push-bar works. Ultimately it came down to non-obvious blocking of the push-bar with wood. It would not hold up for long against a determined person, but in theory, we are after anyone that is trying to escape. If they get outside, that's an ugly chase scene. One less person inside dealing with the group. Nothing can be left to chance. This may not be a Crew operation, but it needs to run like one, with nothing left behind. I wish Denise, Anne, and Carol were here. At the same time, I am glad they are not: no point in spreading the mental burdens of premeditated murder.

At least with this solution, we are not having to move dust and dirt around to make it look like that junk was always there.

Once all the emergency exit doors are secure, the outside chains on the regular people doors were examined. The side doors locks are corroded and their quality is garbage relative to the lock on the front door. That worked in our favor since these locks would have to be cut off to get a door open. We do not have to do anything.

We piled all the roll-up door keys into the back of a drawer in the kitchen as if someone was just meaning to store them all there rather than in the locks themselves. Power was also easy to interrupt in a non-conspicuous way. We flipped off the breakers for them in a central panel. They were even marked inside the door of the panel. Sixteen doors and sixteen breakers. Easy.

"You two get gone. Lock the front door back up when you leave. See you tonight at 9." Rachel told Morgan and I.

"Yes, Ma'am." I said.

We rolled on out. We have the monster Ram pickup with us on this trip. The other car is parked safely away from here and Morgan was very careful to stay on gravel so as not to leave any readable tire tracks. It is unlikely anyone would care about tire tracks in an abandoned building parking lot, but again: leaving nothing to chance. We already screwed up the door blocking.

The rest of the team now has the entire day to waste inside that dank place, and we have an entire day to waste out and about in the town. We have Marvin with us, so our usual distraction, making love someplace fun, is out. No opportunity to take Morgan behind the Cafe and return her favor. Hopefully, she would not still be counting. We left Galveston, so that reset the counter. Right?

The three of us rode the car ferry to Boliver, and went and looked at where the 'witches' had once been. There are deep tire tracks in the sand where a very large truck had backed in to haul the Avion away. Morgan told them the thing was going to be hard to move, so I am sure they brought all sorts of special things to get it up on a flatbed or something. That would have been interesting to see. Hell, maybe they just brought good tires?