Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero Read Online Free PDF Page A

changed his clothes when Paige had asked them to get moving earlier. He usually shut it though. His hand reached for the door knob, then he thought better of it and pulled his hand back.
    Tibbs, he thought. Just get this over with.
    He narrowed his eyes and used the end of the bat to push the door open slowly.
    The room was dark, but nothing stood out as abnormal. His bed and nightstand were against the left wall. His two bookcases stood against the back wall next to his closet. The closet door hung open, and all there was to see inside was shadow. On the right was his desk, sitting under a large corner window, beside his dresser. His laptop sat on the desk. Other than that, the desk was empty except for a small cigar box.
    He kept the room spartan, clean, as empty as possible, everything with a function and everything in its place. Even his bed was made, as his mother had drilled the habit into him growing up. The only light coming into the room was the moonlight from the window. At ease, Jonathan stood in his doorway and let the bat come to rest next to his leg.
    “Your book collection is somewhat of a mystery for a man your age,” said a calm voice from the darkness.
    Jonathan jumped, startled. Even coming up here looking for an intruder he’d never actually expected to discover one, and the voice had spoken the moment he’d dropped his guard. The bat shot back up into its ready position so suddenly he’d almost hit himself with it. The jump back was no less graceful and he nearly lost his footing. Luckily his free hand had instinctively reached for the wall behind him to keep him from falling.
    Leaning against the wall, Jonathan frantically searched the dark shadows of the room for the source of the voice. He saw now why he’d initially missed the figure. He was standing beside one of his bookcases, framed by the blackness of the closet. As the man turned his head to face Jonathan his movement gave him away. His pale skin and blond hair standing out in contrast to the dark, no longer hidden by the black fedora.
    The blond man from the bar stood looking back at him, studying him.
    “I did not mean to startle you, Jonathan,” he said.
    The man’s face looked sorry, genuinely apologetic. Jonathan found it unnerving to have such an expression under the circumstances. The man turned with a snake-like smoothness, as though his body was gracefully transitioning to look in the direction that his eyes were already facing.
    Jonathan felt rigid and still, failing to think of words to speak and unable to move his mouth to form them. His mind raced to sort out the situation, and with alarm he realized the man had used his name.
    The stranger began to come closer, walking toward him with slow calculated steps. Jonathan fought to retreat, to will himself to move against the adrenaline locking him in place.
    “Textbooks, non-fiction, true crime, yet all the novels you own were printed fifty years before you were born. Aren’t you odd?” the stranger asked, seeming to look at Jonathan as though he were the question.
    As the intruder drew closer, Jonathan finally found control of his legs and began to back away, keeping an unchanging distance between them. When the man stood before him in the doorway he paused.
    “I’m sorry I’m here, waiting in the dark like this, Jonathan. I had to be sure I could slip away if you were not alone. Of course, I doubt a statement like that would put anyone at ease,” he said. “I often get curious about people, I find bookcases revealing, usually. Though, yours somehow makes you cloudier.”
    His eyes darted up and down the man. The stranger stood a foot taller than him, and Jonathan was a solid six feet himself. He seemed to still be waiting for Jonathan to answer, and grew thoughtful when he didn’t.
    “You aren’t a talkative one,” the man observed. “Also curious, also different. I’d have expected rage, an instinctual territorialism, yet you hardly seem to want to use that