Up top, Sylvia left them for the Barnes & Noble, singsonging her thank-yous to Heat, Rook, and the gangsta, who had quietly gone his way in the opposite direction, toward Juilliard. Nikki noticed he had a clarinet case over his shoulder.
Walking through Dante Park where Broadway crosses Columbus, they saw a small band of demonstrators rallying under the Philip Johnson Timesculpture shouting warnings of doom to them about the omen of the quake. One shook a homemade sign at Nikki as she passed. It read, “The End Is Near!” Crossing the street to the restaurant, she paused to look back at the words on the sign and hoped so. Then Jameson Rook took her elbow and escorted her back to the beginning.
The P.J. Clarke’s at Lincoln Square had only opened for business two years before but already vibed old New York saloon, the sort of joint where you could get a great burger and a brew or order something icy fresh from the raw bar without a health care card. The original P.J.’s, which opened on the East Side more than a century before, was where Don Draper and his fellow mad men hung out, as did real-life throwbacks like Sinatra, Jackie-O, and Buddy Holly, who proposed to his wife there on their first date. When Nikki Heat followed Rook across the distressed wood plank floor to their table, she only spotted one familiar face. He wasn’t a celebrity but he made her knees go weak.
Carter Damon might have retired from the NYPD, but a cop’s habits run deep, and he sat with his back to the wall so he could monitor the room over his Bloody Mary. He stood to shake both their hands but kept his gaze on Nikki, even as he gripped Rook’s. Something broken lurked in that look; something that, for her, read sadness or awkwardness or, maybe, vodka. Perhaps all of the above.
“You grew up,” Damon said as they all sat. “I just got older.” Sure, he had more salt in with the pepper of his brush cut and cop-stache, and some pouches had begun to swell his eyes, but Damon, at fifty, still had the lean body of a guy who kept himself in shape. He fit perfectly into the image frozen in her head from the first time she saw him on the worst night of her life.