Free Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) by Jay Stringer Page A

media scandal that would hurt his father’s career.
    My mind slipped so easily into the shadows now. Understanding the ways powerful people schemed and manipulated had become so effortless. Had it always been that way, or was it something I’d learned along the way?
    Had I learned to swim with the sharks, or had I become a shark?
    I’d learned to spend as little time in my own head as possible to avoid these very questions. I knew I wouldn’t like the answers.

Looking into Jelly’s sex life hadn’t turned anything up, so I went for his wallet instead. I knew just the man.
    Matt Doncaster.
    Back in the day, when I was working at the bottom of the food chain, Matt had been another of the people I leaned on for information. And he’d been close with Jelly. Mostly because Jelly leaned on him even more than I did.
    Matt was easy to find these days. He worked for me.
    I drove out to Whitmore Reans, a neighborhood northwest of the city center, on the other side of the ring road. This part of the city was heavy on immigrants, students, and irony. The terraced houses that lined the streets had gone unchanged for decades, but urban regeneration projects had filled in the unsightly gaps with new galleries, university buildings, and car showrooms. Little had been done to bring any wealth to the families who lived there, but plenty had been done to put shiny things in front of them.
    In the heart of the area was the Community Center. Gaines had financed the square structure of metal and breeze block a few years before. Inside it had space for indoor football, plenty of seating for people who wanted to watch a game, and changing rooms. Making it a sports facility had been Veronica’s idea, but once it had been built, she’d given me free reign to run it on my own terms, coaching local kids at football and keeping them off the streets.
    Since its opening, the place had expanded. Community grants and more of Gaines’s money had added extensions and upgrades to the building. She’d invested good money in quality equipment. There was a small gym, an Internet café, and a large common room with a television and sofas. Wolves, the local football club, sent their coaches and players to work with the kids a couple times a month, and adults from around the neighborhood came to volunteer their time.
    The place had outgrown me. My name was still on all the paperwork as the manager, but my other work for Gaines took up too much of my time for me to stay involved with the Community Center. The grants and the media exposure generated plenty of paperwork; we needed qualified social workers in senior roles. At first, we’d gotten around this by offering internships to social work students from the local university, but we’d eventually been forced to hire two full-time staff members. One of them, Becky, had around a million qualifications in guidance counseling, social work, and healthcare. She was a middle-class bleeding heart, and somehow seemed oblivious to where the funding came from. She never even asked what her boss did with his time. Which worked for me.
    My other full-time employee was Matt Doncaster. My project.
    Our lives had run in parallel; as my life had fallen apart, so had his. He had once been a law student, one of the brightest and best at Wolverhampton University. He’d been one of the young hopefuls they parade out to smile for the press, pose in brochures, and talk at local schools. His developing drug habit had been a minor problem at first. Universities allow a certain margin of error among athletes and high academic achievers. Let kids be kids. But then Matt was cut loose when a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl blamed him for the baggie she was found with.
    By the time we’d met, he was a drug dealer on the bottom of the food chain, living mostly on the streets and sampling more of his own product than he sold. He’d been quite happy sliding downward until something had stopped him, and he’d turned up at my door at