So why didn’t she call?
She shut off the tap when the bubbles tickled her chin, and inhaled the scent of her childhood. Nikki thought about the delays, tried to imagine fulfilling purpose instead of needs, and wondered if this was what it would be like in, say, eleven years, when she hit forty. That used to seem like such a long way off, and yet the last ten years, a full decade of rearranging her life around the end of her mother’s, had blipped along like a TiVo on forward. Or was that for the lack of savoring?
She went from convincing her mother she should be a Theater Arts major to transferring to the College of Criminal Justice. She wondered if without realizing it she was getting too tough to be happy. She knew she did less laughing and more judging.
What had Rook said at the poker game? He called her adept at reading people. Not what she wanted on her tombstone.
Rook.
OK, so I was checking out his ass, she thought. Then the flutter came over her, probably embarrassment at being transparent enough to be caught in the act by The Grand Damn. Nikki submerged under the bubbles and held her breath until the pounding of her flutter got lost in the pounding of oxygen debt.
She broke the surface and palmed the suds off her face and hair, and floated, weightless in the cooling water, and let herself wonder what it would be like with Jameson Rook. What would he be like? How would he feel and taste and move?
And then the flutter hit her again. What would she be like with him? It made her nervous. She didn’t know.
It was a mystery.
She unstopped the drain and got out.
Nikki had her air-?conditioning off and walked her apartment naked and wet, not bothering to towel off in the humidity. The die-?hard soap bubbles felt good on her skin, and besides, once she dried off, she’d be damp in no time in the soggy air, so why not be damp and smell like lavender?
Only two of her windows gave views to facing neighbors, and since there was no breeze to obstruct anyway, she drew the shades down on them and went to the utility closet off the kitchen. Detective Nikki Heat’s miracle time-and money-?saver was to press her own clothes the night before. Nothing stopped the crooks in their tracks more than defined pleats and sharp creases. She drew the board down on its hinge and plugged in the iron.
She hadn’t overdone the alcohol that night, but what she had drunk had made her thirsty. In the fridge she found her last can of lemon-?lime seltzer. It was quite ungreen of her, but she held open the refrigerator door and moved herself close to it, feeling the cool air cascade out against her naked body, chilling her skin into gooseflesh.
A small click turned her away from the open door. The red light had popped on, indicating the iron was ready. She set the can of seltzer on the counter and hurried to her closet to find something relatively clean and, above all, breathable.
Her navy linen blazer only needed a touch-?up. Walking up the hall with it, though, she noticed that a button on the right sleeve was cracked and she paused to look at it, to remember if she had a match.
And then, from the kitchen, Nikki heard the seltzer can open.
Heat Wave
SEVEN
Even as she stood frozen in her hallway, Nikki’s first thought was that she hadn’t really heard it. Too many replays of her mother’s murder had embedded that pop-?top sound in her head. How many times had that snap-?hiss jolted her out of nightmares or made her flinch in the break room? No, she could not have heard it.
That is what she told herself in the eternal seconds she stood there, cotton-?mouthed and naked, straining to hear over the damned night noise of New York City, and her own pulse.
Her fingers hurt from digging the broken sleeve button into herself. She relaxed her grip but did not drop the blazer for fear of making noise that would give her away.
To whom?