Big City Villain | BOOK ONE

Chapter Sixteen: To Catch a Vigilante.

My door was thrown open suddenly and in came Ben with wide eyes, his skin pale and shock clear on his face. Oh boy, this ought to be good. "Coal, I need to talk to you."

I blinked. I was just about to open my mouth to confess my identity when Ben barged into my room. Talk about getting thrown off track. Regardless, this is much better than the alternative.

"Right." I grabbed the note Ellie showed me and got up quickly, suddenly very glad for a distraction, I guess Ben is good for something. "I'll be right back."

Ben grabbed my arm and pulled me to his room, where he closed the door and locked it. I shrugged his arm off me and gave him a look. "What do you want, Benjamin?"

He was quiet for a moment, he bit his lip and sighed. "I don't really know how to tell you this."

"Just tell me." Actually, stall why don't you? Maybe Charlie and Ellie will get bored waiting for me to come back and they'll get distracted and completely forget about my invisibility. Not likely, but hey a guy can dream, right?

"I've been running tests all day," Ben explained, leading me to his desk. Papers with different handwritings scrawled on them were spread across the desk, spilling over to his bed and even on the floor, with the death threat from CS sitting on top of the mess. He quickly typed in his super-secret-but-I-know-it-anyway password on his computer.

Pointing to the screen, he said, "So this is a scan of City Sweeper's note. On the left side of the screen is someone else's handwriting. I scanned these two papers several times, and each time they came up with the same result." To illustrate, he pressed the 'scan' button.

"Positive," I said, but I frowned because I know that handwriting, why didn't I see it sooner? Because it's impossible. It has to be. "Okay, so whose handwriting?" I asked, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it isn't who I think it is.

"That's the hard part," Ben said, zooming out of the scanned homework page and showing me the name written. "It's Charlie's."

Snap. Can I be the first to scream 'plot twist'? Thank you. Something isn't right here. In no way can Charlie be City Sweeper, they are two completely different people. Besides, how could City Sweeper be so careless as to not disguise his handwriting? Wouldn't he know better?

And there is no clear motive. Charlie hates Ben because Ben stole his cookies ages ago, that's hardly reason enough to murder someone. That's not logical.

"Are you sure?" I asked, scanning the computer screen and trying to find something to prove the computer wrong, which is impossible since my computer whiz of a brother designed his computer to be 99.99% accurate. But it's not adding up.

"Positive." Ben sat down on his desk chair and leaned back. "He doesn't like me."

"Apparently you stole a box of Oreos from him in kindergarten and told everyone he was the one who stole them from you. I hardly consider that motive," I said, picking up City Sweeper's note and holding it up to the light. "What I'm curious about is that whole part where he wrote that he knew your identity."

"What about it?"

"The handwriting is different, a lot more sloppy and kind of squeezed in there awkwardly," I mused. "Almost like they were trying to hide the fact that it's a different handwriting, or something they decided to add at the last second."