Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 78076 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 390(@200wpm)___ 312(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78076 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 390(@200wpm)___ 312(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
But I did sleep badly. Every time I tried to sleep, the image of Santoni placing a bullet into that man’s skull haunted my thoughts.
I’d seen my share of squalor and misery, but never witnessed a cold-blooded murder. Never seen the life leave a man’s eyes… until yesterday.
I should have left earlier when I realized the innocent old woman I was staying with and whose kindness I abused was in fact the great-aunt of one of the most dangerous criminals in Nice.
I knew exactly who Santoni was because my father had told me to stay far away from guys like him. So when I found him quietly drinking his coffee in the garden with Mrs. Barale, for a moment I thought my time had come. I immediately thought I’d made a mistake. That I’d made one mistake too many and it had put me on the mobster’s radar. What surprised me was when Madeleine told me this man, who wore a cold and calculating look except when he was talking to her, was in fact her great-nephew. What a coincidence.
From that day on I avoided Santoni at all costs. I did everything to make sure Madeleine wasn’t suspicious. After all, I didn’t want to wake up one morning with her dear Bruno’s gun pointed at my head.
As luck would have it, until the day of the murder, I’d done nothing for him to complain about, except maybe the late payment of rent Madeleine charged. I knew she had told him the lie I used to hoodwink her. That I was a poor orphaned literature student with no money who was struggling to make ends meet, and whom she, as a good Christian woman, had taken in. Except for the last part about her, none of that was true. I was neither an orphan nor a student. When it came to money, I wasn’t starving, but I did have to be careful. I knew everything could change overnight, and I preferred to be one step ahead in case things turned ugly.
The cell lock squeaked, and I sat up on my bed. I was hoping someone had come to bail me out. Okay, I borrowed a car without permission, but my original plan was to phone the used-car salesman a few hours later once I’d abandoned it. I did have some manners.
There would be nothing wrong with it, perhaps a slightly emptier fuel tank. I had even told the police I’d pay for the gas.
“You have a visitor,” someone told me, entering the cell.
A visitor?
I knew there was no one on this Earth who would want to visit me in here, even if they knew I’d been arrested. I wasn’t the kind of person to have a lot of close friends, let alone family members.
This didn’t bode well.
I was escorted to the room where they had questioned me earlier. A man was already in there. I recognized him immediately. It was the cop I’d briefly spoken to before escaping out the window at Madeleine’s. He seemed much less friendly than yesterday.
“Sit down,” said the police officer accompanying me.
I complied and presented my wrists, which had been handcuffed to move me down the corridor. He looked at the officer opposite me, and after a silent exchange, the man nodded.
How cool of him. It wasn’t like I could jump at them and run away. There were more officers per square foot here than there were syntax errors in a TV program.
Once he’d freed my hands, the first officer left. I was alone with the tough-looking police officer. Short brown hair, a carefully-picked-out bad boy look of jeans, a t-shirt, and a leather jacket. I knew what guys like him were like. They acted like they didn’t care about anything, but in fact, they were the worst. It was them who left no stone unturned to reach their goals. I was sure that even his silent-game act was thoroughly thought out.
We continued staring at each other for a while. Well, if that was the game he wanted to play, I could play it too. I shared my cell for most of the night with a vomit-scented drunkard without flinching. So, a handsome guy who smelled clean? I could sit here and look at him for hours.
I finally broke the silence. As nice as the situation was, I was curious.
“Go on, fire off the questions. I’m sure you didn’t come all the way from Nice just to admire my jail-cell hairstyle.”
I crossed my arms and glared at him.
“Very well, Angélique... or should I call you Jenny?”
Damn, he already knew that one.
“How did you…”
I didn’t finish my question, as it didn’t matter how. But he replied, “You left your fingerprints all over Mrs. Barale’s house.”
I sighed.
That was one of the moments when I regretted not being born in another era. Gangsters in the twentieth century didn’t know how easy they had it. DNA, digital fingerprints, and digitized files didn’t exist back then, nor cooperation between services.