Page 36 of Cosmo

He’d read A Tale of Two Cities in prison and loved it. He’d had to read more than a couple pages more than once to decipher them, but that was the only classic he’d read.

Moby Dick, The Raven, Catcher in the Rye and more lined the shelves. As he was reaching for The Raven, Goldie came in and said, “What are you doing?”

He jumped like he’d been busted stealing jewels. “Shit! Scared me.”

Goldie walked over quickly and laughed a little tensely. “Sorry.”

“I was stretching, then saw these. Abs and me, we were trying to figure out our things.”

“Your things?”

He was laughing, and Liam knew how it sounded. “You know, yours is working out, Hippy’s is music or something, you know.”

“Oh, your things! I thought Abs’ was being dark and mysterious.”

He and Liam got a good laugh from that. “He…looks dark, but mysterious is a bit of a stretch.”

“Tell me about it. So, what did you guys come up with?”

“Abs is gonna try doing more makeovers and stuff, and mine is boring, but I like reading.”

“Reading’s not boring. I like to read too. You get a library card?”

“Yesterday, yeah. But there are these too, so I was looking.”

Liam noticed Goldie getting a little fidgety, but he did not know what the guy was like before a workout. “Should we get started?”

“Yeah, definitely,” he said with a long sigh.

As Liam went to stand by him, he felt a tug back to the books. Maybe it was because of the way Goldie’s eyes kept darting over to the bookcase. Maybe it was just his same paranoia. Either way, it made him nervous.

Having it on his mind for the rest of the day, once the pub quieted, and Goldie and Murphy were busy downstairs serving the few customers that had come to drink, he sneaked back to the basement.

He looked around, finding the two big rooms to the left of the entrance filled with extra booze, boxes of napkins, cleaning supplies, extra glassware. Things anyone could expect to find in the storage room of a tavern.

When he’d satisfied part of his curiosity, he had nowhere to go but to the books. His eyes scanned over them again, seeing the same classics and a few reference books, like an old thesaurus. Nothing was out of the ordinary. They were just books.

If he didn’t quit with his paranoia, he’d have to get a shrink, and he hated fucking psychologists. Before he turned away, he saw a book that caught his eye. Fall of the House of Usher. He’dheard about that book from one of the old timers in prison. He’d said it was good, but hard to read too. Took him over two months to get through it.

Liam took the book from the shelf and turned it over in his hands. Plain hardcover, no dust jacket to read. He hated that.

After taking out his phone, he looked up the summary, and once he read it, he realized it might take him a long time to read it too. Figuring he should get through those he’d borrowed first he pushed the book back into its place on the shelf.

It didn’t seem to want to go all the way to the back, so he pushed a little, and he heard a soft click, then he watched in awe as the bookcase swung open into a hidden room.

He stared, shocked, not sure he was even seeing what he was seeing. This was something out of a damn book, not real life! There were no hidden rooms, not really!

He pushed the bookcase a little more, and he felt along the wall for a switch, finding one quickly. Lighting the room, he saw it was little more than a big space with cinderblock walls and a concrete floor, like the rest of the basement.

There was a long table with less than a dozen metal chairs, some white boards hanging on the back wall, and a stack of tablets on a small table in the corner.

Then he saw that wasn’t the only room. Through an arch was another room, filled with the most sophisticated computer setup he’d ever seen on the right hand wall, another smaller desk on the back wall with another computer, and on the wall that was opposite the other room was a huge whiteboard with lists.

Finnigan’s stamp collection- Payout five hundred fifty grand.

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