Chapter 5 - The Stalker in the Shadows
The next morning, the reality of our battle set in.
Although Chloe was cleared at school and Mom was suspended with pay—rather than fired—while the pharmacy corporate investigation took place, an eerie shadow fell over our neighborhood.
On Wednesday afternoon, as Chloe and I walked home from the bus stop, a dark silver sedan with tinted windows followed us three blocks down Duval Street. It drove at a crawling speed, engine humming quietly, idling at the curb whenever we stopped.
“Don't look back, Maya,” Chloe whispered, holding my hand so tight my fingers went numb. “Just keep walking toward the corner store.”
We ducked inside Mr. Habib’s corner bodega. Mr. Habib, a family friend who had lived in Hyde Park for thirty years, immediately noticed our pale faces.
“Girls? What is wrong?” Mr. Habib asked, stepping out from behind the counter.
“There’s a car following us, Mr. Habib,” I panted.
Mr. Habib grabbed an iron tire iron from under the counter and walked to the glass window. The silver sedan idled across the street for another minute before speeding off toward I-35.
When we got home, things got worse.
Mom’s phone began receiving anonymous text messages every twenty minutes from temporary internet numbers:
WE KNOW WHERE THE GIRLS GO TO SCHOOL. SIXTY THOUSAND DOLLARS BY FRIDAY OR WESTLAKE HIGH GETS A VISIT. TELL MAYA TO DELETE THE CLOUD DRIVE.
They weren't just coming from Garrett anymore. Big Sid’s debt collection network in San Antonio had realized that Garrett was broke and going to prison—so they were trying to intimidate my mother into paying off Garrett’s gambling debt using her apartment equity.
We sat around the kitchen table at 9:00 PM. The blinds were drawn shut. The new security system was armed.
“We can’t just hide in this apartment forever,” Chloe said, slamming her math textbook shut. Her eyes were sharp, filled with a fierce intelligence that made me so proud to be her sister. “Garrett thinks he’s smart because he used Mom’s keycard. But he left a digital trail. He’s not a criminal mastermind, Mom. He’s an idiot who thinks women are too weak to fight back.”
“What are you thinking, Chloe?” Mom asked, leaning forward over her tea.
“The video Maya took,” Chloe said, looking at me. “Maya, did you check the file metadata when you uploaded it to the cloud?”
I opened my phone and pulled up the original video settings. “Yeah... it records the exact GPS coordinates and network connection of the device when the file is rendered.”
Chloe pointed at the screen. “When Garrett snatched my backpack in the living room at 10:30 AM, his personal phone connected to our home Wi-Fi. But look at the secondary Bluetooth ping on the video file background.”
I zoomed in on the raw technical data log buried in the video file.
CONNECTED DEVICE: OBD-II DRIVE LOG - FORD F-150 (VIN: 4T1BF3EK...)
“That’s the commercial tracker Garrett installed on his truck last year for his insurance discount!” I gasped. “It syncs automatically with our home router whenever his truck is within fifty feet of the house!”
Mom’s eyes lit up. “Which means his location history for the last six months is saved on our home network account provider!”
“If we pull those logs,” Chloe smiled grimly, “we can prove every single location Garrett visited—including the illegal stash house where he was meeting his bookies to drop off the stolen pharmacy narcotics.”
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We didn't wait for the police to figure it out. We spent the next three hours downloading three hundred pages of route history from our router’s server portal, mapping every single stop Garrett’s truck had made over the last four months.
And right at the center of the map, tucked away in an industrial park near the Colorado River in East Austin, was a single address he visited every Tuesday night at midnight: Warehouse 14B, Springdale Road.
