The Chosen by Theresa Meyers Read Free Book Online

recuperative sleep? She glanced out the big glass windows to the street below, watching the people, horses, and carriages go about their business before the air got stiflingly hot.
    The scratching of an ink pen against paper was all the noise that came from Jackson’s office. Casting a quick glance through the open door, she crept over to the trash bin and fished out the crumpled telegram.
    Jackson hadn’t lied. It had been from Colt.

    WATCH YOUR BACK STOP DON’T TRUST MCGEE STOP GET A DIFFERENT THIEF STOP SUSPECT SHE DOUBLE-CROSSED ME STOP CONTACT MARLEY WHEN YOU RETURN FROM BISBEE STOP COLT

    A little pang ached in the middle of her chest. China flung the telegram back into the trash and crossed her arms over her chest. Somehow knowing Colt didn’t care if she got out of jail made things worse.
    Remington—she refused to think of him as Jackson now that Colt had angered her—sat in his office in silence, scratching away at something for another hour. Which gave her time to try all the drawers on the desk and use her special tools to pick open the ones that were locked. She only found a fountain pen and a few gold dollar coins worth taking. A good thief always looked for items that could be useful.
    Rather than grow antsy, she decided to try and relax. She propped up her dirty cowboy boots on the reception desk and watched a fat fly buzz in lazy circles along the glass of the window. It was still shady and cool in the adobe office building, but come afternoon, the sun would shift enough to bring in the heat.
     
     
    Remington listened intently the entire time he worked. He knew that she’d peeked at the telegram from Colt. He knew she’d rummaged around in his desk drawers. God only knew what she’d taken, but he didn’t expect any less. As long as she was occupied it gave him time to analyze the page she’d taken from Diego’s safety-deposit box.
    While crude, it was the gross approximation of a map. An unlabeled map, but certainly one he could follow if he could decode the string of seemingly random numbers listed on the back right hand corner of the page. It had to be a code of some type. Hunters used coding for anything that could be potentially intercepted. And something that could lead to a hidden piece of the Book of Legend was far too valuable to leave uncoded.
    He worked through the string of numbers again, adding, then subtracting, multiplying and dividing them to see if he could come up with something that made sense. He tried to see if they matched up with letters in the alphabet as some kind of alpha-numeric code.
    Remington scraped away with his Waterman fountain pen at the paper he’d set beside Deigo’s page. Sometimes doodling gave his brain a chance to think. He drew a globe and began to criss cross it with lines. His eyes drifted back to the numbers. Perhaps the numbers weren’t related to the alphabet at all. Perhaps they weren’t coded as he thought. But it couldn’t be as simple as longitude and latitude, could it?
    Then again, Diego obviously never intended anyone to look this page over and realize first, that it was a map with no names, and second, that the locations on the map indicated here and there by dark blobs of ink, were directly related to the numbers scribbled in the corner. If the numbers were what it thought, the hodgepodge of lines and dots looked like a trail from Tombstone down into Mexico and then further down the coast nearly to South America.
    His thoughts were interrupted as downstairs the door to the building opened and closed and footsteps came clomping up the stairs.
     
     
    She’d just begun to drift off, letting herself dream of exactly what she might buy for clothes once Remington was done with his arrangements, when the sound of approaching footsteps on the floorboards outside the office snapped her eyes wide open.
    The knob on the office door turned, and the door creaked inward. In walked Colt.
    Her heart gave an extra beat as his gaze slid quickly over