When Rook disappeared into the men’s room, Heat dialed Noah Paxton. She had nothing to hide from Rook; she just didn’t want to deal with his preadolescent taunts. Or see that smile that chapped her ass. She cursed the mayor for whatever payback made her have to deal with him.
When Paxton got on the line, he said, “I located those life insurance documents you said you wanted to see.”
“Good, I’ll send someone over.”
“I also got a visit from those forensic accountants you were talking about. They copied all my data and left. You weren’t kidding.”
“Your tax dollars at work.” She couldn’t resist adding, “You do pay your taxes?”
“Yes, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Your CPAs with badges and guns look like they’ll be able to tell you.”
“Count on it.”
“Listen, I know I wasn’t the most cooperative.”
“You did all right. After I threatened you.”
“I want to apologize for that. I’m finding I don’t do well with grief.”
“You wouldn’t be the first, Noah,” said Nikki. “Trust me.”
She sat alone that night at the center row of the movie theater laughing and munching popcorn. Nikki Heat was transfixed, swept up in an innocent story and spellbound by the eye candy of digital animation. Like a house tied to a thousand balloons, she was transported. Just over ninety minutes later she carried the weight again on her walk home in the mugginess of the heat wave, which brought fusty odors up out of subway grates and, even in the dark, radiated the day’s swelter off buildings as she passed them.
At times like these, without the work to hide in, without the martial arts to quiet it, the replay always came. It had been ten years, and yet it was also last week and last night and all of them thatched together. Time didn’t matter. It never did when she replayed The Night.
It was her first Thanksgiving break from college since her parents divorced. Nikki had spent the day shopping with her mother, a Thanksgiving Eve tradition transformed into a holy mission by her mom’s new singleness. This was a daughter determined to make this not so much the best Thanksgiving ever, but as close to normal as could be achieved given the empty chair at the head of the table and the ghosts of happier years.
The two squeezed around each other as they always had in the New York apartment–sized kitchen that night, making pies for the next day. Over tandem rolling pins and chilled dough, Nikki defended her desire to change majors from English to Theater. Where were the cinnamon sticks? How could they have forgotten the cinnamon sticks? Ground cinnamon never flew in her mother’s holiday pies. She grated her own from a stick, and how could they have overlooked that on their list?