ANGEL BLUE [1]

LEAD 5: dead ringer

      Banks sits next to me, swinging in her chair. It makes an annoying clicking noise every time she moves too far. She’s trying to see what I can. Around us, the Desk Squad catalogue and file, it all seems so superficial, so boring. My view on the world has drastically changed, and I was originally right, the Diablo gene explains so much but yet so little.

      After Snag’s insightful speech in the morgue yesterday, I’m more aware of my condition than ever before. I mean, at least it explains why I never did well in school―the school was never on par with my capabilities, hidden away behind my subconscious. The memories of being picked on just because I talked back to the teachers, talked to them like we were equal, flood my mind.

      “Y’know if your hands keep spasming like that, Jax is going to notice,” Banks observes, her brows concave as she watches me watch nothing in particular.  

      “Y–yeah I know,” my words are uneven, as if I’m struggling to speak. My eyes frantically flick around to see Jax smirking towards our side of the Desk Squad, I simply give a smile and flip him off. His lips purse and goes back to filing.

      I have to hold onto my sanity, I have to hold on as long as I can―for Snag. I clench and relax my hands on top of the handwriting samples from the Kitsune waitress, Mitsudome Ishizuma. There’s no match from the creature list or the riddle, but apparently Henry Nikita lurked around on the day before and after Officer Pike was at the restaurant. My best guess is that Henry is indeed involved.

      “Akira,” Banks claps her hands over mine to stop my fingers from trembling against the file. She looks at me with her large brown eyes, “I think you need to take your tablets, you haven’t had any all day.”

      “I–I ca–can’t take them,” I turn away from her. I can’t think straight, the whispers are nothing but a dull hum, but the thoughts of everyone else takes their places―it’s their thoughts or what I think they’re thinking.

      “Why? The doctor’s told you to take them, you’ve been doing on meds,” Banks says.

      “I think it’s time we process your locker,” I avoid the topic completely.

    “How are you gonna do that, we’re not CSI’s,” Banks raises an eyebrow and follows me when I get out of my chair. “Besides, whatever evidence was there could probably be gone now.” 

      “There’s always going to be trace left behind, all we have to do is create a time line,” I say. “Dad has a kit at the bottom of his filing cabinet, but I need you to distract him when he comes out for a coffee.”

      “And how am I going to do that?” Banks lifts her cap.

      I shrug.

      For the next fifteen minutes, Banks and I create a plan on how to keep Dad out of the office for the amount of time needed to grab his CSI kit. He usually gets one of the Desk Squad to bring him a coffee with the same order: large, black, two sugars. He always orders one at twelve o’clock sharp to keep him going for the next twelve hours. It’s Dad’s weird ritual to not have coffee at the start of the day, but half way through it.

      Our plan of attack is set in three stages. There’s no guarantee that it’ll work, and I’ll most likely get fired, but all I can do is try.

     Banks and I try to look productive, shuffling paper into neat columns, well at least that’s her job since I’m no longer a member of the Desk Squad―I simply watch Dad through the open-slit shutters for phase two to be put into action. The second stage of my plan is for Banks to lure Dad from the steps of his office by saying that Snag wants to see him in the morgue, giving me the time to slip into his office and squirrel through his stuff. And finally, step three is to get the hell out before Dad gets back fuming.