The Last Second by Robin Burcell Read Free Book Online Page A

the gray-­haired man turned, looked right at her. She realized then that he was not the same person at all, and she chided herself.
    How stupid to think they’d send out detectives over a pack of smokes, and she wondered why these men were here at all. This time of night, everything in the area was closed.
    Drugs? Probably not. They didn’t look the type.
    Since none of them seemed interested in her, she ignored them, crossed the street, and opened the cigarette pack, thereby discovering it contained a few cigarettes and a lighter, which was probably why it felt heavy.
    Waste of talent, she thought, then pushed open the door of her friend Bo Brewer’s shop. Bo fixed things for a living. Today it was copy machines. Tomorrow it would be something else, depending on what he bought from the government surplus auctions. In the most recent lot, he’d purchased seven copy machines, all the same model, all in various states of repair. The fact he was able to buy perfectly good office equipment for so cheap was, in his opinion, why the government was broke. He’d quickly fixed two machines by swapping out parts, estimating that he could sell the pair for what he’d paid for the lot, which meant that he’d already recouped his investment.
    Bo looked up as she walked in. “Hey,” he said, then bent back down over his keyboard, typing something into his computer.
    “You realize there’s two guys sitting in a car out there? Some guy talking to them. Kind of strange, don’t you think?”
    “Saw it there earlier. Probably the cops. I think the auto repair shop next door is dealing in stolen car parts.”
    “Doesn’t look like a cop car.”
    “If they’re undercover, it wouldn’t.”
    “I brought you something.” She set the cigarettes and lighter on his desk.
    “Who’d you steal that from?”
    “Some guy on the bus.”
    He went back to work.
    After a long stretch of silence, she said, “Let’s go somewhere. A movie.”
    He didn’t answer. It wasn’t that Bo was ignoring her. It was more that he was intent on what he was doing. A week ago after he’d finished breaking down the remaining machines, determining which could be used for parts and which would be repaired, he made the unfortunate-­for-­her discovery that the federal government had left the hard drives in the copy machines. The moment he tapped into a few, he’d become obsessed with reading what was on them. Especially one machine from the San Francisco FBI office because it had something on it besides the usual reports on bank robberies and white-­collar crimes. A page filled with nothing but a list of numbers. Bo figured it was a code of some sort. Because he was a semidecent computer geek, it was now his mission in life to learn what it was, and he’d searched every which way on the Internet, even running it past one of his geekier friends.
    He balked when the guy wanted to see the whole thing. He was paranoid. Nothing was safe on the Internet in his opinion, and so he never showed the entire list.
    He did, however, give it to her to read, but it meant nothing to her. Numbers just sat in her head, literally and figuratively like dead weights, refusing to go away.
    And tonight, he was still at it. Piper watched him for a few minutes, bored to tears, hoping he would have moved on. She liked him, a lot, but he didn’t seem to notice the attraction. In fact, the only time he seemed to pay attention was when he needed her to memorize a list. Like the stupid numbers.
    Piper had an eidetic memory for anything she read, including long strings of useless numbers, the result of an injury to her left hemisphere at the age of twelve. Unfortunately all it did was turn her into a novelty when anyone found out, especially at parties. Bo was the only one who seemed not to be fazed. Until he’d found this list.
    “Bo, you promised we’d do something tonight,” she said.
    “We will. Soon.”
    She sat on the edge of his file cabinet, eyeing the computer