“We both had our ordeals. Not the first. I have a feeling it won’t be the last.” She shrugged and stroked the hair off his forehead with her fingertips.
“That’s my tousled look you’re messing with,” he said. “Part of the ruggedly handsome persona I work so effortlessly to maintain.”
Nikki laughed at that, then he nestled his cheek into her and spoke into the soft space where her neck met her collarbone. “It’s good to hear you laugh.”
“You always get me out of my serious self. That’s why I keep you around, if you didn’t know.”
“Not the sex?”
“Part of the package.”
“Pardon your pun.”
“Writer boy. Always on the clock.” After a minute or so of silence, feeling his chest rise and fall against her breast, she said. “I really did panic that I had lost you. I thought, what if we’d seen our last snowfall together? Or would I ever again watch you do your butt dance Saturday mornings to the WBGO Rhythm Revue?”
“That sweet soul music puts a shake in this moneymaker, for sure.”
“Or would we ever make it to Nice on a vacation?”
“Hold on,” he said. “I thought you said I’d permanently tainted Nice by having a rendezvous there with Yardley Bell.”
“And you think I want Yardley Bell dominating my life like that? Removing geographic leisure options?”
“Hey, here’s an idea. What about Nice for our honeymoon!” Then he read her. “Right, that would just be creepy.”
Scooting up on one elbow, Nikki looked down at him in the duskiness of the bedroom. “Anyway, all this is what put me in such a tailspin the other night. I don’t need Joni Mitchell to tell me to appreciate what I’ve got before it’s gone.”
Rook frowned. “Canadians. Always so earnest and introspective. I think it’s the long winters up there. I prefer to be less about the talk, and more about the action.”
“I noticed,” said Nikki. “My turn.” She rolled him onto his back and got on top.
After her morning shower, Heat dressed to Eyewitness News, the local ramp to GMA, and the lead was the same as it had been for most of the week: the cyber attack that had left municipal services in chaos. The new wrinkle was the leak from an insider in the city’s Management Information Systems Division who said the feds, admitting complete frustration, had brought in black hatters—unreformed hackers—in a desperate attempt to find the elusive solution to the crisis. Echoing what the FBI had told Nikki days before, the unnamed source said that every time they thought they had a fix, the attack would shift, putting them back at square one. “Sounds like Whack-A-Mole to me,” said one coanchor to the other.
Meanwhile, even though Damascus continued to disavow any responsibility, the secretary of state was seen arriving in Paris, purportedly for off-the-record talks with the Syrians. “A long way to fly for the reiteration of a denial,” said Rook when Heat recapped the story for him. “They should just tell everyone, whatever they need, just go to the local branch of their public library.”
She poured herself a cup from what was left of the pot he’d made an hour before, and asked, “What the hell are you doing there—working out a system for Powerball?” Before him on the dining table in the great room Rook had spread sheets of paper upon which he had been scrawling numbers before crossing them out and starting a new page.
“If you must know, I’m trying to remember the phone number I saw that mouth breather from the barge use to call Black Knight.” He slapped his pencil down in irritation and drew a deep sigh. “It’s driving me batshit.” He brandished some of the pages, which replicated digits from the phone keypad of a cell phone—some of the digits. Each page had gaps and sloppy cross-outs. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing. It just looks a little—”
“Mad?” he said with wild eyes. She couldn’t tell if he was goofing or not. She knew that obsessed look from the times when he couldn’t get the modem to reset or locate a phantom high-pitched mechanical whine in the alley below his office window.