Chapter 2 School homework

Despite the fact that this time I only looked at him with a pair of eyes with very slight Asian features and an athletic demeanor, he caught my attention. I couldn’t look at more of her face at the moment, because he had him helmet on, but I memorized the only thing that I could see of him.

He didn’t seem to be a bad guy anyway, besides he was riding one of the motorcycles of that company that transported shipments and made deliveries in the city, so he didn’t need to wear a vest to identify him, it was enough Seeing the model of the black motorcycle and one should already take for granted what they used it for and what the pilot did.

“Are you going to take it or not?” an adult, punctual and manly voice tore me out of my musings.

“Ah—yeah.” I took another step towards him after taking my gaze away from his eyes.

I took the helmet as best I could and clumsily put it on my head because my hands were full with the folders, while he started the motorcycle and when I felt ready I went up, just as clumsily, to the part that corresponded to me.

But what was he thinking?

With one hand I grabbed some place on the bike that was left behind me and with the other I clutched the folders to my chest, turning up to see the window, where my father was still watching us through the glass.

The motorcycle started and I kept my mouth shut, the helmet that I had put on was a little simpler than the one that the man in front of me was carrying, I remained pensive, imagining that an event could occur on the road in which you will need a helmet.

I swallowed, feeling afraid, on motorcycles it was always more unsafe to go somewhere, accidents were common, the sudden irruption of a car, a bad maneuver that crashed the vehicle against a wall or at least common, that it caught fire, that it caught me, anything could happen.

I was then distracted by the strong shape of his black leather jacket, this man looked like he was from a youth magazine and his perfume… to earn a living, perhaps just doing errands on a motorbike, he was wearing one that would have to be very expensive, because you could recognize by smell.

We stopped at two traffic lights, we crossed streets, we turned corners and I looked at the lights of the city from a different perspective than the window of my own room, everything was more beautiful in the center of Sevilla, a city in Spain, my country.

Maybe we only lasted forty or fifty minutes on the road, but my hand was already numb, the one with which I was holding onto the back of the motorcycle, like an old woman scared of risk.

We stopped at the end of a street, just at the intersection with another, we would already be quite far from my home, when it stabilized with its feet on the ground and turned its face to one side.

“Your father told me that he was in this area of the city,” he said again, his voice velvety, even though he was drowning inside his helmet. “But he did not specify the street.”

True, my father, although he half knew my class schedule and the teachers that corresponded to me for each subject to study, he did not know exactly where they lived, he only had an idea. So I understood that we had been marching without the pilot knowing where in the city he should take me.

“Sure,” I replied, and then I told him the address.

The time since then happened quickly, at least to get to my teacher’s house, who lived in a more or less good area of the city; because it should be noted that I always lived in a very poor and criminal neighborhood of Seville.

Current moment.

Now I am not seventeen years old like that afternoon when I saw Joshua Park for the first time, I am twenty-three and I am very close to graduating as an investigative police officer, everyone says that I am young for this, but I already have several expeditions in my experience, added to my professional history, although my participation had not been specifically excellent, but it did stand out among my peers. Among these we can count the successful persecution of murderers, sellers of illicit substances, extortionists and the rescue of a kidnapping that, if I remember correctly, ended up forcing me to shoot in the head one of those who had that girl, In self defense, of course.

I drank more coffee from my personal cup in that police headquarters, I remember that before I didn’t even like the smell of drinks like this, but she was basically a girl, she was very young. And I suppose that since then many things have changed, some in my physical state, many in a psychological level and the place of residence. Because I am no longer part of the population that remains in the Three Neighborhoods of Sevilla, well, Madrid is now the city that watches my adult life develop.

“Hi, pretty,” the voice of someone I don’t have to see to identify says to me.

Meanwhile, I continue with my eyes on a game of wits that I have on my mobile, while I have my back reclining in my seat, next to the monitor, waiting for the system to process a file that I am downloading to the PC.

I remained silent and brought the porcelain cup back to my lips, sipping a little more of that strong, dark coffee with little sugar.

“I—brought you coffee,” he speaks in the past tense and I barely raise my eyelashes, rolling my eyes to see him, there, standing next to me, with two cardboard cups; he then looks at my coffee pot. “I didn’t know you had one of those, since when do you have your own coffee maker?"

“You knew that and you would stop seeing my face at all times and for a moment you would look at the things that we have around us,” I said unaffected.

“You don’t have to be mean,” he says patiently, trying to be nice, I guess. He looks down at one of the glasses and then he offers it to me. “I asked for you one with plenty of milk and sugar.”

He stopped looking at him and I rolled my eyes a little lower, taking in the brown color of the long glass that he kept holding out to me.

“Whenever I have bought prepared coffee, in your presence, you have seen how I prefer it. Why then do you do this?”

“Sometimes it’s good to try new things,” he shrugs, and seeing that I’m not willing to take his offer, he withdraws his hand.

I turn back to my mobile screen.

“I like the routine better.” I say to him.

Then he again takes the confidence to get closer, place the glass of coffee on my desk and grab another chair that was nearby, dragging it to place it half a meter from me and turn it around to sit astride it.

“I like the way you are.”

I raise my eyebrows without enthusiasm, not even bothering to look up to give him my full attention.

“Uh,” I mutter. “I understand, I like it too. What coincidences, right?” I say in a bored tone on purpose.

“You know that no matter how much you deny me your attention, I won’t be willing to give up, right?” He says, looking at me.

I feel his eyes on me like two cold slugs, but I keep paying more attention to the question that I can’t answer in the game of wits that my mobile screen shows me.

“And what do you expect me to do about it?” I speak again with boredom.

With my peripheral vision I dimly notice how she shrugs and shifts in place of her.

“It wouldn’t be bad for you to agree to go out—”

“No,” I interrupt him without changing my tone or taking my eyes off my own business.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t have time for those things, I already told you,” I answered more wearily than ever.

I turn my attention away from the mobile screen to turn to see the monitor screen and then I take the mouse to click a few times and save the recently downloaded document in my personal files.

“You always say you don’t have time,” he began to remember like an insistent, complaining little boy. “I remember hearing the same thing the last five times I’ve asked you out. Even when we have a day off that matches our schedule.”

“If I were you, I had dignity. I mean, out of respect for myself. If you already know that they will say no to you, then don’t be a pain in the ass.”

“You’ll see, Celine. Someday you will tell me yes. I promise you,” he says as if taking it for granted. “You will invite me, even if it is to have a little of what your coffee pot makes. I will not lose hope.”

I do not stop to see the silly smile that I would surely have, because I am immersed in questions and answers about the game on my mobile and apart from that in the content that the document that I had just downloaded may have, placing another one at the start of the download and deciding to wait a little longer.

“My coffee pot is mine, you buy yours,” I tell him, just as an attempt to scare him away.

But this one looked like a zombie, pushy as he could only be.

“What things do you download?”

“Books that I was ordered to,” I lie.

“Can I order you books too?”

At that moment I turn to look at him, once again looking at his sapphire blue eyes with a childish shine, which look at me from under his thick eyelashes, under thick black eyebrows.

“Could you give me a moment alone?” I ask, still trying to be nice. “I need to focus and you’re out there hovering around me.”

This time he does seem to be bothered, but really, my patience is usually short. I then notice a new presence in the office and I immediately roll my eyes towards the entrance, seeing that someone has stopped under the threshold and is looking towards us.

I snort a very short laugh and lacking in its fullness of sense of humor, I look away from the blonde who is holding some folders in her hands and I keep paying attention to the game.

“Looks like somebody are finding you,” I muttered sarcastically.

I notice that he turns towards the place and after becoming more uncomfortable, he stands up and calmly walks away from me, walking towards the door, towards the woman that we all knew there was giving him signals to pay more attention to her, of the no professional.

Yes, some blonde always trying to screw up my time and at the same time free me from what doesn’t suit me. I already have a history with blondes and they almost always end up leaving me with a bad taste, a bad mood and a desire that I could have had the superpower to snap my fingers and make them disappear.

But the positive thing is that she took it with her, now I have more privacy to return to what required privacy, I turn back to the screen to see that the second document, because it is lighter, downloaded more quickly. Well, these two will be enough for me, I’ll have reading for two or three nights, during which I have to stay on special duty at the barracks.

I open the first one and I find a lot of protocol lines, in which they describe the university institution and prosecutor’s offices in which the holders who created the report work, among other mentions that I read quickly, because I want to start digging deeper into a subject that has been circling my head like crows, since I started in this world of weapons and black uniforms.

I manipulate the mouse and go down to the next page, reading introductories, until I get to his name. To the name of the most wanted man currently in all of Spain.

Joshua Park. A renowned mobster, leader of extortionist gangs, white-collar thieves who used to operate on the low profile. But not far from the knowledge of police institutions and official criminal investigation bodies; among which was me, waiting for the moment to cross the line and go for that son of a bitch.