Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - BOOCarz

light, eyeing it like a jeweler. “This ain’t our key,” he
growled, then slipped it into his own pocket. “Now tell
me what you really want up there—and this time, don’t
lie!”
I felt my face go hot. I’d never been called a liar by a
nonrelative adult before. “I told you already. We rented
those rooms! Just ask Kev if you don’t believe me!”
“I don’t know no Kev, and I don’t fancy bein’ fed
stories,” he said coolly. “There ain’t any rooms to let
around here, and the only one lives upstairs is me!”
I looked around, expecting someone to crack a
smile, to let me in on the joke. But the men’s faces
were like stone.
“He’s American,” observed a man sporting a
prodigious beard. “Army, could be.”
“Bollocks,” another one growled. “Look at ’im. He’s
practically a fetus!”
“His mack, though,” the bearded one said, reaching
out to pinch the sleeve of my jacket. “You’d have a
helluva time finding that in a shop. Army—gotta be.”
“Look,” I said, “I’m not in the army, and I’m not trying
to pull anything on you, I swear! I just want to find my
dad, get my stuff, and—”
“American, my arse!” bellowed a fat man. He
peeled his considerable girth off a stool to stand
between me and the door, toward which I’d been
slowly backing. “His accent sounds rubbish to me. I’ll
wager he’s a Jerry spy!”
“I’m not a spy,” I said weakly. “Just lost.”
“Got that right,” he said with a laugh. “I say we get
the truth out of ’im the old-fashioned way. With a
rope!”
Drunken shouts of assent. I couldn’t tell if they were
being serious or just “taking a piss,” but I didn’t much
care to stick around and find out. One undiluted
instinct coursed through the anxious muddle in my
brain: Run. It would be a lot easier to figure out what