Chapter 2 - A Car That Remembered
The emergency room doctor said Leo was lucky. The word made Mark want to break something.
Lucky meant a deep scrape instead of a broken kneecap. Lucky meant a helmet instead of a skull. Lucky meant a car had come within inches of his son and the family would be expected to return to ordinary life because the damage could be cleaned with antiseptic and gauze.
Leo sat on the examination table while a nurse wrapped his knee. He kept staring at the hallway.
“Is he going to come here?” Leo asked.
“Todd?”
Leo nodded.
“No. Officer Ruiz made sure he couldn’t.”
“He said the camera didn’t belong to us.”
Mark reached for his hand. “He was trying to scare us.”
“It worked.”
Mark had no answer for that.
He had spent years telling callers that fear was information, not instruction. Fear told you where the danger might be. It did not get to decide what you did next. But when Leo leaned against him, Mark felt his own rules become harder to follow.
They went home after sunset. The apartment smelled of tomato soup, the dinner Mark had started before rushing to Whitcomb. Leo left his backpack by the door and sat at the kitchen table while Mark cut grilled cheese into squares, as he had when Leo was five.
“I’m too old for squares,” Leo said.
“You’re injured. Injured people get squares.”
“The doctor said I’m not injured.”
“The doctor did not see you fall from a moving car.”
Leo looked down at his plate. “Can I stop biking?”
Mark set the knife aside. “For a while.”
“What if he does it to someone else?”
“He won’t.”
“How do you know?”
Mark wanted to say because I’ll stop him. Instead he said, “Because there are cameras, witnesses, and police.”
The answer sounded thin as soon as it left him.
At 9:12, Mark received a call from Priya Desai, the overnight systems coordinator at Meridian Response. Priya had worked beside him for seven years and could identify a bad camera feed by the silence in the background.
“You asked for a preservation hold,” she said.
“I did.”
“The Whitcomb footage is intact from four ten to four twenty-three.”
“Good.”
“Except for the archive copy.”
Mark stood. “What about it?”
“It has a forty-seven-second gap.”
He looked toward the living room, where Leo was watching a nature program with the volume low.
“The original feed is intact?”
“For now. The archive copy is the one police usually receive. Somebody cut the segment before the system replicated it.”
“Can you restore it?”
“I can preserve what’s left. I can’t tell you who touched it.”
“Run the access history.”
Priya hesitated. “Mark.”
“Run it.”
“I already did. The request came through a maintenance credential assigned to Argus Civic Systems.”
Argus maintained most of the traffic cameras in the city. Their contract was controversial because the company had recently proposed replacing the public network with a predictive security platform. Mark had dismissed the proposal as expensive surveillance dressed up as safety.
“Does Todd Keene work for Argus?” he asked.
“His name is in the vendor directory. Field operations.”
The kitchen seemed to narrow around him.
“The sedan?”
“Leased to an Argus subsidiary. Silver 740S, temporary fleet plate. It was supposed to be at a maintenance yard today.”
Mark looked again at Leo. “Was it?”
“The vehicle log says yes.”
“And the camera says no.”
“The camera says a silver sedan struck your son.”
“Same thing.”
“Not if somebody wanted it to be somewhere else.”
After the call, Mark checked the locks. He checked them twice. Leo saw him from the hallway.
“Are you worried?”
“I’m being careful.”
“That’s what worried people say.”
Mark sat on the edge of the couch. “Your mother used to say that.”
Leo’s expression softened. His mother, Sara, had been dead for three years, but she remained present in the apartment through small habits: the blue mug Mark never used, the basil plant she had started, the way Leo folded towels because she had taught him to make corners meet.
“Mom would be mad at Todd,” Leo said.
“She would be very organized about being mad.”
Leo almost smiled.
At 11:03, Mark’s work phone chimed from the kitchen. It was a message from an unlisted number.
YOU ASKED FOR THE CAMERA. NOW ASK WHO WAS WATCHING YOU.
A second message arrived before he could screenshot the first.
STOP REVIEWING THE SOUTH GRID.
Mark stepped toward the window. Across the street, beneath a dead streetlamp, a silver shape sat at the curb.
May you like
He blinked.
The car was gone.
