Read No One Lives Twice (A Lexi Carmichael Mystery) for Free Online Page A

kitchen. I sat at the table, pushing aside the silverware that had been dumped from a drawer. I gingerly set the mailer on the table.
    I sliced open the top with a knife and shook the package a bit. Some papers slid out onto the table. I picked up the top sheet. It was a note hurriedly scrawled in Basia’s messy handwriting.
    Dear Lexi,
    Keep these papers safe for me. Hide them somewhere no one will think to look. I’ve got to go away for a few days to help a friend. I’ll be in touch soon and explain everything. Be careful and look closely.
    Basia
     
    That was it—a strange cryptic message from my best friend. I flipped through the papers, but found no further explanation of what these papers were or why two people had already accosted me at gunpoint for them.
    Shaking my head, I set the note aside and picked up one of the papers. It looked like a bunch of legal documents in a foreign language I didn’t recognize. I thumbed through the rest and counted seven neatly typed pages. I could see letters with a bunch of funny accents and wiggly lines both above and beneath the letters. I recognized the Roman alphabet in play here, so the language wasn’t Arabic or Russian. That narrowed it down to a few dozen.
    I glanced over the papers again more carefully and managed to pick out an address. The city read Warszawa. That meant Poland. No surprise here. Polish was Basia’s first language and she did a lot of translation work in the language. But why had she sent them to me for safekeeping? And why were two armed men desperate to get their hands on them?
    “What’s this all about, Basia?” I murmured aloud.
    There had to be a clue somewhere. Determined, I studied the papers again, this time more closely, line by line. Not that I knew what I was looking for, but I had a hunch.
    Then I saw it. At the bottom of page three, someone had penciled in something so lightly, I almost missed it.
    I squinted and held the paper up to the light. It looked like a phone number.
    (138) 518-1514
    I didn’t recognize the area code. However, it definitely looked like Basia’s handwriting, and I was sure it was important.
    I snatched a piece of paper from a kitchen drawer and scrawled down the number even though I had already committed it to memory. Then I located the phone book amid the mess in my kitchen and searched through the listed area codes. There was no such U.S. area code as 138.
    It could be a foreign number, but it was missing the critical country and city code. Besides, despite the layout, it just didn’t feel like a phone number to me. I tapped the pencil against the table, studying the number. My mind searched through several possibilities before I realized I was breaking a code. It took me less than a minute. Each number represented the position of the letter in the alphabet and when I was finished I had written down one word on the paper: Acheron.
    I had no idea what the hell that meant, so just to be on the safe side, I tried several other, more complex, codes. But nothing else made sense and the amateur code felt right to me because I was pretty sure it came from Basia. While she was a whiz with languages, writing code was definitely not her forte.
    I looked carefully through the rest of the papers once again in case I missed something, but saw nothing else of interest. Of course, I couldn’t read the other pages, so I could have been missing something incredibly vital. I was about to put the documents away, when I looked again at the page with the bogus phone number at the bottom. Without even knowing why I did it, I grabbed the pencil and erased the number. Call it instinct, call it long-distance telepathy between best friends, but I was sure that the number, whatever it meant, was for my eyes only.
    I gathered the papers and put them back in the mailer. For a minute, I sat at the table, my chin in my hands, thinking what to do next. The phone number Mr. Middle Eastern Guy had scrawled on my arm seemed to blink under