The last picture surprised me the most. It was another candid shot, but of me and Kellan. We’d gone on a camping trip one weekend years ago, back when Kellan had first started living with us. Mom had been out of hospital at the time, and somehow Dad had convinced Kellan to come along with us. The four of us had spent two nights out in the wilderness, and on our way back to the car, I‘d hurt my foot tripping over a rock. Kellan had ended up lifting me up and giving me a piggy back ride for the rest of the walk. I had my arms around Kellan’s neck in the picture, my legs around his waist, as he carried me like I was a makeshift backpack. Dad was visible in the picture, walking a few feet behind us. I hadn’t realized that Mom had snapped a picture of us.
“Don’t have all day, ballerina,” Kellan called out again, impatience ringing in his voice.
I hurried out of his room, feeling a jumble of confusion and pleasure at the fact that he had a picture of me in his bedroom.
* * *
On our way to the house, we stopped by Pete’s Diner at my suggestion. Poppy ambled over to us as we slipped into a booth, wide-eyed as she looked at Kellan.
“Hey, hon,” she said, smiling at me. She’d been an angel these past few weeks after I’d returned to work. Not only had she provided me with free coffee and donuts whenever I’d wanted, she’d also always been around with an open ear to talk to. “You’re looking good.”
She scanned me over and then turned to look expectantly at Kellan. She didn’t ask if there was any news about Dad anymore, realizing that I crumbled a little inside every time I had to repeat that that there was nothing new.
“Hey, Poppy. This is my… this is Kellan,” I said, mentally kicking myself for that idiotic statement. Kellan glanced at me, looking amused, before politely shaking hands with Poppy.
“What are we having today?” she asked brightly, shooting me a discrete wink when Kellan turned to study the menu.
I gave her a warning look. I knew how it looked. Me, grabbing breakfast with some guy she’d never met. If only she knew just how I’d spent my night. It would have wiped the big grin right off her face.
After giving her our order, she left to see to some other customers.
“So, what’s the plan?” I asked when Kellan didn’t say anything. “There is a plan, right?”
He hesitated.
Just when I was about to tell him that he was crazy if he thought he was keeping me in the dark after last night, he spoke. “I thought I’d look through Mario’s study today while the windows are being repaired. See if I can find anything that the guys that broke in last night missed. They were pretty sure that there was nothing else to be found, as they stopped searching straight after finding the flash drive, but I’m not leaving anything to chance. Something that may have been insignificant to anyone else looking, might hold some answers for us.”
“And Uncle Luke?” I asked, swallowing.
The pause was longer now. Conflict warred in his eyes as he looked at me. “I think it’s best that we don’t mention the flash drive to him. Just for now. Just in case.”
The reason for the omission was left unsaid, but it hung heavy in the air between us.
* * *
“So what are we looking for?” I asked, going for the first filing cabinet a little while later. We were in Dad’s study, ready to begin our search.
There was still remnants of the powder the cops had used to dust for fingerprints on the desk, cabinet, and some folders. I’d have to get the vacuum out later.
There was a lot of stuff tossed around, Dad’s belongings thrown carelessly on the floor. I shivered a little, thinking about those guys in here last night, manhandling Dad’s things, violating his privacy. Were we were doing the same thing by going through his things without permission? But we needed answers – desperately.
“I don’t really know,” Kellan admitted, looking around the room. “I guess we’ll know once we find it.”
“If we find it,” I said, skepticism clear in my voice.
And so the search began.
It was twenty minutes later that I pulled out a folder labeled ‘finance’. Sitting back down on Dad’s office chair, I opened it, not expecting much. I flipped through the statements, not really taking them in, but paused when my eyes latched onto a number on one of the bank statements.
Account balance: $10,000
Ten thousand dollars? There had to be some mistake. Dad didn’t have that kind of money saved. We’d spent practically every last cent when we’d bought this house a few months ago, and we’d still had to take out a huge mortgage to be able to afford it. What was Dad doing with ten thousand dollars sitting idly in the bank?
I flipped back to the start of the folder, and this time looked through all the transactions with a closer eye.
I was left stunned and completely confused by the time I reached the final page. There was no more debt. We were in the clear. Dad had made the final payment two months ago.
“What?” Kellan asked. I looked up and noticed that he was watching me. I vaguely wondered how long he’d been doing it.
“Here.” I handed him the statement, and began pacing the small space of the study.
We’d been knee-deep in debt just over a year ago. Dad would have had to have arrested hundreds – if not thousands – of fugitives to rake in the kind of money on his bank statements. Not only had he paid off all of the hospital bills, he’d bought this house without getting a mortgage. The amount of money he’d made in the past few years was staggering.
There had been nothing in the statements about where the money had originated, but my mind flashed back to the transactions we’d found on the flash drive last night. I had this small, unpleasant thought in the back of my mind that a man named Tony had been the reason behind the sudden turn in our finances.
I felt a little sick just thinking about it. I’d decided only this morning that I wouldn’t believe Dad had anything to do with the crime ring until I had concrete proof.
Now that it was in front of me, every cell in my body rejected it.
I wished Dad was here. I needed an explanation. I needed someone – anyone – to tell me that I was jumping to the wrong conclusions.
Why on earth would he work for these guys? We would have managed. We didn’t need the money that badly. We would have pulled through. Dad never needed to have gone to such extremes.
My mind struggled to comprehend everything that had come up in the past twenty-four hours. All the secrets. All the lies. I never wanted to believe that Dad would lie to me, that he was even capable of it, but the truth was in his bank statements. The childhood illusion that my father could do no wrong was gone.
I stared out of the window. I had so many questions for him. The more time that passed, and the more days that went by, the more my fears grew that I’d never see him again. At times I was so sure that he was gone forever. Others, I had hope that I’d see him again, because the thoughts of never seeing him smile again, never hearing his exasperated sigh after I’d done something he didn’t approve of, never getting any answers… it was unimaginable.
Kellan cleared his throat, pulling my attention away from the window. I turned to look at him, blinking away tears. “He wanted to save money for you, for college–“
“He did this because of me?” I felt my face drain of color, the thought that I was to blame shooting straight to my heart.
“No. No! That’s not what I’m saying at all.” He shook his head empathically. “I’m saying that one thing I can say for sure about Mario is that he was never motivated by greed. He would have had a reason for all of this. I just know it. Besides, I searched that flash drive for hours, and his name wasn’t on any cash transactions in that folder.”
I felt only mildly reassured. “Maybe…” I trailed off when I saw something odd on the floor. Bending down, I snatched up a folder that had a faint, but distinct, partial footstep on it. “Look at this!”
Kellan rounded th
e desk, a furrow passing across his brows as he looked at the folder. “That wasn’t there yesterday. This is one of the folders the police dusted for fingerprints.”
There was indeed white powder on the folder, interrupted by the imprint of the footstep. Someone had stepped on this folder after we’d left.
“Do you think… Uncle Luke? He was down here alone for a bit.”
“I don’t think he stepped inside the study. He was outside, working on boarding up the windows,” Kellan said, his eyes darkening. He didn’t like this at all. I could see his shoulders tensing, his jaw working. He eyed the room like something dangerous was about to be unleashed.
“Then… what? Do you think someone came back after we left?”
“That’s exactly what I think.” His eyes were full of intensity and a fierce protectiveness that caused a flutter in my stomach.
I glanced around the room, feeling unsafe in my own house. It hurt. The house no longer felt like an accomplishment, the product of Dad’s hard work. It was tainted now by the knowledge that it had most likely been purchased using illegal funds. It wasn’t the same.
Nothing would ever be the same again.
* * *
We left the house a few hours later. The window repairman Kellan had hired hadn’t been able to finish fixing the French doors today like we’d originally hoped. As we weren’t replacing the windows in the French doors, but getting new, ordinary doors fitted in, it meant that custom-fit doors with the same measurements as the French doors would need to be ordered in.
The window repairman had estimated that it would take at least five working days to get the doors, and then he’d call to arrange a time and day to come fit them in. It looked like I would be staying at Kellan’s for at least a week.
We called Uncle Luke in the car on the way back to Kellan’s apartment.
“I’ve been here for about eleven hours now, and I haven’t seen a glimpse of Chambers,” he said through the loudspeaker. Bounty hunters had to be sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the fugitive was staying in a place before they could legally enter it. He’d have to wait until he saw Chambers with his own two eyes.
“Any news on the fingerprints they lifted last night?” I asked him.
“I just called the team a little while ago. The fingerprints didn’t match anything on our databases. It looks like they’ll be closing the case since nothing was actually taken. I’m sorry, April.”
I’d expected as much, but couldn’t help feeling a little discouraged. And a lot worried. Those guys hadn’t acquired the flash drive after all. Would they try to break in again?
“I understand,” I told him quietly.
“I’ll keep you posted on Chambers,” he promised.
My eyes met Kellan’s, both of us wondering if we could trust the man on the other side of the line.
* * *
Later that evening, I sat cross-legged on Kellan’s couch, strumming my guitar. I’d packed some more clothes to bring back with me, but hadn’t given my guitar a second thought. It was Kellan who’d found it and put it in the trunk of his car while I was unaware. I was incredibly grateful for it now; my idle hands very much needing something to do.
“Thank you,” I’d told him when he’d appeared with it a little while ago, feeling touched by his thoughtfulness.
He’d shrugged. “Just stop rearranging my furniture.”
And that was that.
He’d been listening to me play for over an hour, though he tried to look engrossed in the laptop in front of him. He’d spent most of the afternoon combing through the flash drive.
I glanced up, my fingers relaxing against the string, as I finished the song. It was only then that I noticed how still Kellan was. He stared pensively out of the window overlooking the front of the apartment complex.
Just as I opened my mouth to ask him what was wrong, he moved, so quickly, I might have missed the movement if I’d blinked, and pulled a gun out from seemingly thin air. I sucked in a breath at the sight of it. “What the–“
“Shh,” he whispered, pocketing the flash drive. He moved stealthily towards the window, keeping the gun low.
Careful not to move the blinds, he peered outside. I tried to look over his shoulder, but he waved me away, batting at me like I was a pesky fly.
I stepped back, but not before I caught sight of a dark figure dashing across the street, headed for the apartment complex.
“We need to move,” he said urgently. Spinning around, he ushered me down the hall and into his room, locking the door behind us.
“What are you doing?” I asked in alarm.
“Listening to my instincts.” There was a storm brewing in his eyes, a tenseness to his tightly coiled frame. He moved swiftly, lethally, and for the first time that night, I felt genuine fear. Something had caused this drastic change in him.
The doorbell rang, and Kellan kicked at a space on the wall beside the window. To my surprise, the plaster gave away easily to reveal a hole in the wall that I’d assumed would be filled with bricks.
Kellan’s arm disappeared into the hole and he pulled out a hefty looking backpack, more plaster crumbling to the floor as he tugged it out. I stared at him open-mouthed.
“C’mon, we need to climb down the water pipe.” He moved towards his window.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little paranoid? It could be anyone!” Did he really have such a shortage of visitors that he assumed the worst when someone came over? It could be the sultry unnamed married woman from last night back to try her luck again.
The doorbell rang again, and this time, I heard a rattling sound coming from Kellan’s front door. Kellan looked at me, his eyes saying, ‘trust me’.
I moved without hesitation, climbing out of the window. I placed one foot out onto a ledge that protruded out only a few inches from the wall beneath the window. Kellan helped me get my other leg out, and once both feet were on the ledge, I began to shuffle my way towards the pipe.
The ratting of the door stopped for a second, before it sounded like someone had bulldozed into it. The sound ringing in my ears, I kept a tight hold on the water pipe and began slithering down it as fast as I could.
It sure sounded like Kellan had been right. In the future, I wouldn’t question his instincts again. Ever.
Kellan was fast behind me, moving as though he climbed out of his bedroom window on a regular basis. The pipe creaked ominously, and I worried that it wouldn’t withhold our combined weight.
I pushed myself even faster, shimmering down the pipe, so glad that Kellan lived on the third floor of the apartment complex and not right at the top.
There was silence in the apartment, and I could only assume that someone had managed to break down the door. It had been mere moments since the doorbell first rang, but it felt like forever. My heart was pounding in my chest, sweat dampening my upper lip.
A gunshot went off. Startled, I dropped the final few feet, landing painfully on the balls of my feet. Fear shot straight to my heart. They were shooting at us.
“Don’t shoot, you stupid fucker. The neighbors will call the cops,” a gruff voice said from inside the apartment. I recognized it from the break-in last night. It was that guy. Slade.
“My car,” Kellan panted, grabbing my hand. His black Camaro was parked towards the side of the building, and we ran towards it.
It was dark out, the only light coming from the streetlamps. I heard a heavy thump, and guessed that one of the guys had jumped out of the window. I didn’t look back, but kept running towards the car. The heavy sound of footsteps appearing behind us let me know that the two guys that had been in the apartment were giving chase.
Another man suddenly appeared several feet in front of us, and I realized that he must have been waiting by the back exit. Kellan cursed under his breath, but I didn’t have enough air in my lungs to say anything.
Thankfully, we were a few feet closer to the car than the guy
in front of us. We dove into it. My hand feeling cold and the rest of me completely vulnerable as Kellan’s hand left mine, and he shot to the opposite side of the car to get into the driver’s seat.
I shivered at the coolness of the black leather seats on my bare legs. I yanked the door shut, ducking as a bullet hit the car. “Oh my god,” I gasped in fright, my breath exiting me in short pants.
Kellan didn’t even cringe at the fact that a bullet had hit his very sleek, very expensive car. He gunned the engine, tires screeching across the road as the car shot forward.
My heart continued to beat erratically even after we put some distance between us and the apartment, adrenaline still cursing through me. I’d never in my life been shot at before.
Those guys back there could have killed us.
If it wasn’t for Kellan’s quick thinking, I had no idea where we’d be right now.
Kellan made a sharp turn at the end of the road, the momentum throwing me against the car door. I put my seatbelt on hastily, terrified that we’d end up wrapped around a tree. Kellan was a good driver, but he was driving well beyond the speed limit.
“What are we going to do?” I asked him, panic bubbling close to the surface. “We can’t go back to my house. We can’t go back to yours. We should go to the police.”
Kellan didn’t comment for a minute, his face dark and forbidding as he stared out of the windshield. He exhaled heavily, glancing at me sideways.
“I think it’s safe to assume that your break-in last night, and the men at the apartment tonight, are all part of the same crime ring. You saw yourself that cops are involved – that they’re on this Tony person’s payroll. It’s likely that those men came here looking for the flash drive. They would have found out that you were in the house during the break-in due to the police report. They would have deduced that you have the flash drive, even though you didn’t mention it to the cops that interviewed you.”
“There must be good cops out there. There has to be someone we can trust,” I said, not willing to completely let the idea go.
Above all Else Page 11