The Sin Collector Read Free Page A

library. He was still there. Un-freakin-believable I shouted into my helmet as I flew by the lot. He picked one hell of a time to get a work ethic. The suspense was killing me, metaphorically speaking of course. Finally, I decided to go home or I was going to be the first immortal girl ever thrown into an asylum. After the stress of the day, it was nice to see the familiarity of my things and smell my spice candles, both welcoming me home.
     
    I went to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. I didn’t think my eyes looked one hundred and twenty years old. They looked emerald green with amber flecks. Then I stared harder at my overall appearance. My pale white skin showed no sign of wrinkles and yet it was as if I could feel them. My thick black hair was a mess. To call it helmet hair was an insult to my helmet. Again, there wasn’t a single strand of grey and yet I felt like my head was white with age. No laugh lines around my mouth, not that I’d smiled much. So frustrating to not have a single scar or wrinkle to mark the passage of time. Caught in the trance that was my own reflection, Valentine jumped up on the sink, breaking my concentration.
     
    “Thanks cat” I said as I smoothed his grey fur, “I needed that.”
     
    I paced back and forth through my living room for an hour, and then started to name the ceiling tiles. Around two in the morning I figured it would be safe to try the library again. The lot was empty when I passed it, but I wanted to park at least a block away. I wasn’t a crime buff, but I did own all the seasons of all three CSI’s and I knew my bike was very recognizable. It was dark walking to the library, no moon tonight. I went around to the back door that opened directly to Jimmy’s office hoping against hope that maybe he had forgotten to lock it. The door didn’t budge when I turned the knob. Damn it all to hell my brain screamed. I reached into my bag and pulled out a small leather case. I had never been especially good at picking locks. I had done it before for different reasons, but never in such a public place where time was an issue. I took a deep breath to calm myself. The suspense was making my hands shake. After about twenty minutes of fidgeting with the lock-picking pins and diving once into a pile of trash so a police officer didn’t see me, I was in.
     
    I walked cautiously through the cramped, junk filled office. I was afraid to disturb anything on his desk. Struck with the fear that Jimmy’s new work ethic had come with a free sample of “ power of observation” I all but held my breath. I was surprised to see the accounting folders on his desk; at least he had been telling the truth, that was a good sign. I looked through the filing cabinets for the student request slips and finally found a stuffed manila envelope. It took me an hour just to get through all the slips and none of them was the one I was so desperately seeking.
     
    I closed the blinds on the only window in the office and turned on Jimmy’s computer. There was nothing helpful on his hard drive so I went to his email. Luckily, Jimmy saved all his passwords so I didn’t have to try to profile his under - stimulated brain for access. There was a ton of junk mail. That’s what you get when your credit card belongs to a dozen porn sites. I sifted through his inbox and deleted emails, and ended up with nothing. I turned the computer off and sat in his chair completely bewildered. Maybe I should go, I reasoned with myself, just start over again in a new town. I hated doing that. Sure, there weren’t exactly loads of friends to miss, but I liked having a routine and I liked LA. I liked my bike and my apartment and the normalcy of owning a cat. I got up to open the blinds and stopped dead with my hand on the door. The garbage can. A million detective movies can’t be wrong. You always check the garbage can. I sat cross-legged on the floor and dumped the contents out in front of me. The smell of his