Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 87395 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 437(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87395 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 437(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
He dumped his bags on the bedroom floor to sort through his new things. The sheets went up onto his loft still in their packaging and he piled his scant groceries on top of the dresser. He ripped the cardboard padding off his small safe, skimmed the directions and warnings, and pushed everything else aside to get his bag. It took work to get the drawer open, since his duffel was such a tight fit, but he finally pried the duffel loose and dropped it in front of him. He unzipped it in one long move, folded the flap out of the way, and froze.
On first glance, his bag looked undisturbed. Everything was still in there in the same order he'd left it in, folded but crinkled from recent rough treatment. But Neil got his paranoia from his mother and he packed his clothes in a very specific way. Even a cautious thief would be fooled, since Neil folded everything the same. Neil's code was in the tags. He always bent the tags twice on a shirt in the top layer.
Someone had gone through Neil's things and put it all back—the same order, the same layers, the same neat folds—but the tags were all pressed flat by a too-careful hand.
Neil yanked his clothes out and threw them, digging frantically for the binder buried underneath it all. From cover to cover it looked like a stalker's journal. Plastic sheet protectors were stuffed full of newspaper clippings, photographs, and anything else he could find on Kevin and Riko. The clippings were glued to computer paper, which Neil put back-to-back in the plastic slips to create a hidden inner pocket. In those pockets were Neil's most important possessions.
Most slips hid money: certificates for five-digit amounts he could cash out when he needed them, numbers detailing where he and his mother had hidden money while on the run, and rubberbanded stacks of bills. A list of emergency contacts, coded as an immature nursery rhyme, was toward the back. Only one of them lived in the United States. His mother married into an American crime family, but she'd been raised in a British one. Her brother, Stuart Hatford, gave her the list when she ran away from her husband. She in turn gave it to Neil when she died.
Stuart's phone number was on the next page, buried in a sheet covered top to bottom with random numbers. Neil could only find it using his birth name. It was down as many rows as there were letters in his first name and over as many as there were in his last. Neil had never called it, and he hoped he never had to. There was no point in running away from a murderous family if he just ran into the arms of another one.
The last slip in his binder contained a forged optometrist's note. Neil didn't need a prescription, but he couldn't buy colored contacts without a measurement of his eyes' diameter and curvature. Tucked in with it was a box of brown lenses.
Neil thumbed through the money and did the math in his head. He came up with the right amount, but that didn't make him feel better. If someone had gone through his things and found this binder, then found what it was hiding, how was he supposed to explain himself? Just in cash and certificates Neil was carrying a quarter of a million dollars.
The fact someone had deliberately come in here and dug through his bag made his stomach hurt with hot anger. The smart thing to do was pretend to not notice anything amiss and wait for the thief to come to him. That was what his mother would do. Unfortunately, Neil had inherited his father's temper, and he'd finally had enough.
It could have been Matt, but Neil doubted it. It wasn't that he trusted Matt; Neil didn't trust anybody, especially not a man he'd just met. Timing cleared Matt because there was no way he could get to the airport and back, help the girls get their things upstairs, and still have time to unpack and repack Neil's bag. That left one obvious suspect.
Neil slipped a finger into the spine of his binder and pulled out the two thin needles that remained of his mother's set of lock picks. He held them between his lips so he wouldn't lose them and set the lock on his safe. He stuffed his binder inside, slammed it closed, and hooked a second lock through the safe's handle. He gave the handle a couple fierce yanks to make sure the locks caught and shoved the safe under his pile of clothes. He spit the picks into his palm and stormed out of his room, slowing just long enough to lock the door behind him.
Neil checked Andrew's door and was unsurprised to find it locked. Neil crouched and got to work, but it didn't take long. It was a cheap lock and easier to handle than the one at his old locker room. Whoever built the dormitory hadn't counted on people like Neil and Andrew, it seemed. Neil rose to his feet, stuffed his picks in his pocket, and shoved the bedroom door open.
Andrew's group was scattered around the living room. Aaron and Nicky were half-sunk into matching beanbag chairs as they played a video game, Kevin was reading a magazine at one of the desks, and Andrew was sitting on the desk closest to the window so he could smoke. They all went still when the door opened and stared at Neil.
Andrew was the first to react. He flicked his cigarette out the window and smiled. "Try again, Neil. You're in the wrong room!"
Aaron paused the game with a stab of his finger and looked at Nicky. "We locked that," he said in German, not quite a question.
"Last I checked," Nicky answered. He switched to English to offer Neil a friendly, "Hey, sounds like Matt's back. You meet Dan and Renee yet?"
The double deceit in their words and Nicky's smile just further infuriated Neil. If the cousins were going to keep using German thinking they could go behind everyone's backs with it, Neil would keep his fluency a secret until the last possible moment. That didn't mean Neil couldn't hit back, so he switched to French and focused his anger on Kevin.