Liberation Day - A Thorn Byrd Novel

Mini-cooler in hand, Thorn walked away from the docks and toward the employee parking lot in the far back corner of the grounds, thankful his second night on the job had been better than the first. One of just a small handful of employees working the graveyard shift, he walked alone toward his Explorer tucked along the back row. Scads of day workers passed him in the opposite direction, none paying him any mind.

  “Not even going to stop and say hello?”

  The voice was recognizable in an instant, drawing Thorn’s gaze up from the ground at his feet, pulling him from his thoughts. His face remained neutral as he found its owner sitting on a bench along the chain-link fence encompassing the lot, her brother by her side.

  Thorn waited until he’d covered the ground between them before saying anything, his face still betraying no outward response. “Come down here to watch the boats again did you?”

  A rising of the eyebrows was Iggy’s only response, a non-verbal cue that she understood, but didn’t necessarily find the humor in, his comment.

  Pushing himself to a standing position, Nio extracted a clear plastic case from the side pocket on his cargo shorts, holding it by the bottom corner with his thumb and forefinger. “I know you haven’t been to bed yet, so we’ll keep this short.”

  He handed the disc across to Thorn, who accepted it by the opposite corner, his dirty hands smudging the new casing.

  “Okay,” Thorn said, his voice even. “What am I looking for on here?”

  “You’ll see,” Iggy said, pushing herself to full height behind her brother and stretching her hands up high overhead.

  A dozen thoughts about what could be on the disc passed through Thorn’s mind, each as unlikely as the one before it. Looking down, he rotated it over to examine the bottom side, no identifying marks of any kind visible.

  “Why are you giving this to me?” he asked, keeping his gaze on Nio, Iggy in his periphery.

  The faintest hint of a smile pulled at the right side of Nio’s mouth as he started to drift away, his sister matching the movement. “Like I said the other night, I still get the impression you’re not just a security guard.”

  Once more Thorn glanced down at the item in his hand before looking up, turning at the waist to watch the siblings depart, though making no move of his own to join them.

  “And if I need to talk to you afterwards?”

  The question slowed their pace just a bit, Nio crossing his left foot over his right in an exaggerated gait. “What time does your shift start in the evening?”

  “Eight,” Thorn said, his eyebrows pinching together just slightly.

  “What a coincidence, that’s the same time we usually like to have our evening coffee,” Nio said, raising his palms by his side, a smile on his face.

  Chapter Twenty-Four