Dropped

4. Communication

“I don’t like this,” whines the shinigami on the back of the bus, where she was sitting next to Near, who is chewing distractedly on a thumbnail. The higher the level of stress, the more they all tended to emulate L, though of all of them, only Matt noticed it. Mello took another bite of his chocolate, across the aisle.



“I don’t like this,” echoed Near, blandly, looking straight at her and then at Matt. A woman nearby looked over her shoulder at the three of them and then away, disapprovingly.



“It won’t be for much longer,” Matt says, sort of desperately, “we just need to find somewhere to stay.”



Mello snorts



“Somewhere cheap,” Matt forged on, because this was where the plan fell apart. At the part where three children under the age of fifteen had to forge their way essentially across the globe to find a person who specialized in not being found.



None of them had once said it was impossible. Because it wasn’t.



It just wasn’t going to be easy, either.



“The jolts are hurting my wings,” whines the shinigami, as they crash over a pothole at high speeds.



“The jolts are hurting my back,” Near is almost whispering, and Matt tries to see past the echoed complaints, to

guess how he’s really doing. Mello isn’t helping, he’s looking out the window, expression murderous. Probably at being stuck with Near.



Who really is a genius. Matt wouldn\'t have been able to answer an \'invisible\' person on a public bus otherwise, but he can certainly talk to Near. Which is far more polite than ignoring Sighurd.



Only Matt seems to remember that Near is fucking twelve, and under all that passivity and intelligence and scheming quiet, he is like the rest of them: deeply fucked up, probably suffering abandonment issues and all other sorts of pleasant neurosis, evidently at least mildly agoraphobic and probably not going to let on when he needs help. Probably has been smarter than the psychologists all his life, so never really got any, either.



The whole thing is already giving Matt a headache.



“Why couldn’t you own a car, like the rest of the humans?”



“Why couldn’t you own a car?”



Matt snorts.



“I’m fourteen. I wouldn’t be legal to drive it anyways.”



Mello blinks at him, and says, “hey, I’m older than you.”



“Since when has that made a difference?”



“I’m older than you?”



Matt gets his shoulder punched, and Near smiles, distantly when Matt snickers and says “Numbers aren’t everything. But seriously. We need to make a plan. We can’t just sit here and ride.”



“Why not?” asks Sighurd, which is rather a change of tune, but she’s taken up pulling the cord that requests a stop repeatedly, leading the busdriver to think that it’s broken, and is apparently very amused by his swearing.



“Because this is our stop.”



All of them look at Near, who’s climbing to his feet and making for the door. There’s a sign that says ‘internet cafe.’



Matt swallows, and lifts the wallet out of the pocket of the man coming on the bus as they get off. With a few stolen credit card details and any luck, they’ll be at the airport in the morning.





5. Scam.

It’s pretty risky, because he’s the least socially on-his-feet one of them all, but they get Near to do it because, as Matt puts it, ‘he’s got the teddy bear thing going on.’ Near smiles, beatifically, and Mello gets the impression that this isn’t the first time he’s taken advantage of this.



When the wallet Matt stole turns out to have nothing but a few tens in it, and a debit card (‘That won’t work for internet booking. Shit.’) they head over to the MacDonalds across the street from the cafe and get hamburgers while planning their next move. Mello gets a chocolate milkshake with his, Matt gets an apple pie, and Near gets a happy meal with a little toy superman who attacks and conquers his french-fries, while the older two and the shinigami debate the next move.



Mello can’t do it, because no one would trust him as far as they could throw him, dressed all in black with a long coat and nailpolish, all baby-prima-donna. Matt can’t do it because, as he points out, ‘I was the one that stole the wallet in the first place, okay? And shopkeepers have like, a nose for people like me. They’re psychic.’ So that leaves Near. Who has the teddy bear factor.



They send him into the most expensive store on the strip. One for camping supplies and the like, and straight up to the cash register and he says, all quiet and polite,



“Excuse me, Miss?”



The elderly woman at the register actually has to lean forwards to get a good look at him, over her counter.



“I’m sorry to trouble you, but my mother thinks she left her credit card here when she stopped by earlier, and she’s pulled up outside and I was wondering if you’d found, um, a lost one?”



He sounds nervous. But that’s good, thinks Matt, who’s lounging outside the glass of the convenience store next door, ostensibly examining the shelves of cigarettes. Maybe he should take up smoking.



“We have two,” says the woman kindly, “what’s your mother’s name, sweetie?”



“Marsha Gillespie,” says Sighurd, sounding bored, from behind the woman’s back, “or Lola Vasquez. There has to be some kind of rule against this.”



“Mrs Marsha Gillespie?” Near steps up the cute with a watery smile and a nervous sort of stutter. The card changes hands, and he scampers for the door, calling “thank you, ma’am,” over his shoulder, like Matt told him to, so she doesn’t get suspicious and the card doesn’t get cancelled.



Mello snatches it from him, and slides it into the pocket of his black jeans, giving Near’s hair a ruffle because he knows he hates that.



“Alright,” says Matt, “we can do this.”



Back in the cafe, they pay for their time with the leftover change from Macdonalds, and book three tickets to...



“To where?” asks Mello, curious, and Matt looks up at him, fingers flying across the keyboard.



“It’s where L is. It’s the district where Kira was, so that’s where the investigation came from.”



“You know where L is?” asks Near, sharp, fingers tugging in his hair and hand curled around the superman toy like it’s a lifeline.



“No,” admits Matt, “I don’t. But L is going to be as close to Kira as he can get. So what we’ve got to do is think like he would, right? After the thing with the newscaster, we as good as know for sure that this is where Kira lives. That L figures he’s probably a student, given the times the deaths have been taking place, probably very intelligent, if he’s still giving L trouble, so... top universities, high schools, and colleges from this district. Mello, there’s paper in my bag, write these down.”



Mello goes for the paper, and Near tugs his hair. After a moment, he offers his input:



“We can narrow this down more.”



He reaches out, and touches the name of one of the universities on the screen.



“I consider it likely that the Kira suspect is recently graduated from school to college, or to...” his finger taps the glass “...or made some other sort of life transition. There has been a percent increase in the rate of killings, indicating a schedule change. Not one drastic enough to suggest the spare time an adult would possess, but it is more likely than not that the suspect’s grades have either plummeted, or he is in a new setting. The fact that he is likely to be a perfectionist suggests to me the second.”



Matt nods, but Near continues.



“An intelligent, perhaps borderline obsessive-compulsive perfectionist. This is the most prestigious of these institutions. Drawing the hypothesis out this far weakens its strength.”



Mello snorts, and writes down the address. “It’s either that or fucking go alphabetically. Now if we get to a bank machine, we can call a taxi for the airport.”