All Chapters of The Vision She Hid: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

My humble abode above the bakery kept the day’s heat like a jar with an air-tight lid. The fan moved air from one corner to another and called it cooling work. I pulled the curtains half-closed and set the night-vision camera on the sill covered in dead flies. The glass was streaked with flour dust. I wiped a patch with the heel of my palm and left a clear oval and a smear across my hand. It smelled faintly of yeast and felt good. Well, definitely better than rotten fish at the docks.The hill house sat across my window, a black shape cut out of the darker sky. A line of trees marked the lemon grove. The wall ran under them, old stone and newer unsighty patch, the kind of repair you get when money shows up late.In the square below me, the last voices faded. Chairs scraped the pavement. A scooter coughed and went quietly away. The bakery clinked and hissed under my feet, then settled to a slow breathing—trays in, trays out, oven door, TV chatter. The old woman sang a bar in the wrong

Our helicopter climbed until the town went flat and the Sicilian lemon groves turned into dark plates with neat black seams. The pilot killed the lights and held the nose steady. Nobody was in a mood for idle chat. We had the thump of the blades, the hiss of air through the vents, and the thin metal whine that files at your teeth. The oldish wireless printer sat bolted under the console with a separate battery pack, like somebody’s bad joke about office work on the run. I though it was rather handy joke. I thumbed through the settings until it coughed itself awake. It hesitated, thought it over, then spat pages into my hand! Gianni’s ledgers, neat stack of them, slid into my plastic sleeve like fish in the net. The paper smelled of disinfectant and burned coffee. Ink had bled on the first sheet and then made up its mind to be professional. The numbers looked odd. They’ve ran in Anatole’s tight, crabbed style. He wrote things as if someone was watching and he didn’t plan to make it ea

There was an obscure modern building on the edge of Buenos Aires. It felt the way a bad idea sits at the edge of a man’s mind—half in shadow, half pushing him to do stupid things. That white container building used to be a language school. You could still see the painted vowels under the sun-bleached posters for “Phase II: Community Renewal.” A row of white plastic chairs lined the clean enough corridor, the kind you find in underfunded government offices. They creaked despair even when nobody sat on them.Inside, the fluorescent hummed like old men bad dream. The white tiles were cracked in the lazy way tiles crack when nobody expects the flooring to make a good impression. A woman in a blue hairnet pushed a mop around without bending her back too much. She’d seen better messes; this didn’t scare her off.Room 4 smelled of antiseptic and sweat. The fan on the ceiling spun slow and lazy. A man in his thirties sat on the metal cot with his hands clenched between his knees. His legs sho

I caught myself thinking that even if Elky was right, and “they” were really fighting with pens, “they” seem to excel in it. That morning Palermo had the kind of heat that didn’t come from the sun. It came from very old grudges and even older engines and the kind of air that took its time crawling off the warm water. You walked through it like through a sauna room. Even the seagulls looked fed up.Elky and I had been pretending to rest in the hotel lobby — the sort of lobby that smelled of too new leather. The hotel staff accustomed to talk softly because the walls had been known to have particularly good hearing. We sat in matching, fancy brown armchairs that probably had names. Mine felt like it didn’t want me there.The receptionist was a small girl with dark Sicilian hair and soft brown, old-soul eyes. She approached us with a practiced smile that was all tact and polish but somehow felt like a fruit that’d gone bad on the inside. She held a cream envelope between two fingers with

I have to say, the conversation got kinda more exciting. It wasn’t getting any friendlier though. The toro sat on Lucia’s plate like a bribe nobody wanted to take. The champagne sweated in the bucket. Lucia watched me over the rim of her glass. And the two lawyers watched Lucia like two beta males watching their alpha making a fool of himself. Elky, too, watched the space in front of him like someone had taken his past and hung it there for inspection.“Ok, ok. Since you’re in an evidence mood,” Lucia said at last, “we might as well look at the ghost you’ve been chasing all this time.”She turned her head a notch. The French lawyer got the signal and reached somewhere behind his chair. He lifted a slim black tablet case with his two pale fingers, the way you handle something contaminated with deadly poison. He laid it on the table between us, rotated it so it faced me, and tapped the screen.The tablet woke up. A familiar header slid into view. Δ-12 ADVERSE EVENT SUMMARY. Underneath,