“Twelve-thirty sounds great. See you there.”
Sorry, Gina. Can’t make it until twelve forty-five. Didn’t want you standing around.
—but when it was finally answered, Casey got his third surprise.
“Uh, hello?”
Casey’s heart dropped into his stomach at the sound of the male voice. “May I speak t-to Gina?”
There was a long pause, as if the other man was figuring out what to say. Then finally, “Sorry, buddy. I think you’ve got the wrong number. This is a pay phone.”
And the surprises just kept rolling in.
“THERE’S SOMETHING I WANT to talk to you about,” he told Gina when they were settled into their booth and had their sandwiches in front of them. He’d ordered a mushroom melt but it had gotten cold when Gina had changed her mind about sitting at an outside table and they’d had to wait for one inside. He didn’t argue the point; she was probably afraid of being seen and what he wanted to say was dipping into that arena of things she wasn’t supposed to disclose but had.
At his statement, Gina’s eyebrows raised a bit but she didn’t look particularly concerned. “What’s that?”
Casey opened his mouth, but the rush of words and emotion that spilled out startled even him. “Are you kidding me, Gina? Don’t you read the papers? You can’t tell me you didn’t hear about Glenn Klinger, the man you sent me to save last Friday!”
“I never sent you to do anything, Casey. I just told you about him.” She took a bite out of her sandwich but her pretty brown eyes were focused steadily on him. He stared at her in amazement and when she swallowed, she said, “And no, I don’t read the papers. I don’t have time for that. I do watch the late night news, but I must’ve missed it. You’re so upset—did he die in the hospital or something, because of another seizure? Maybe he had some kind of brain cancer.”
Casey leaned forward so far that his shirt almost touched his food. “Christ, everyone’s talking about it. He went to work on Wednesday, and then at the end of the day he went into the office part of his factory or whatever it was and shot everyone. Killed them all, Gina, and then committed suicide.”
“Really—wow. That’s terrible.”
“Terrible?” He grimaced. “It’s beyond terrible. It’s my fault. If I hadn’t gone to the subway and kept that guy from getting killed, none of that would’ve happened. Eleven people are dead, twelve if you count Glenn Klinger himself.”
“That’s kind of a paradox,” Gina said calmly. Too calmly, Casey thought. “He would have already been dead if you hadn’t saved him from that subway train.”
“Are you saying he doesn’t count?”
“No, of course not.” Gina wiped her fingers on a napkin, then reached across the table and nudged him backward. “You’re going to get your shirt dirty.”
Casey looked down at his shirt, then back at her. He felt kind of . . . numb. “I don’t understand how you can be so unconcerned about this.”
She looked at him, and he was relieved to see nothing cold or distanced in her expression. “It’s just that there’s nothing we can do about it. Don’t you understand that? What I said about poor Glenn Klinger isn’t the only paradox. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. You had no way of knowing he would go insane and do something like this. I didn’t, either. What are you going to do, stand by and watch someone die because you can’t see if he’s going to be a good guy in the future?”
Casey was silent.
“There is no rewind button on life, Casey. There’s only moving forward and trying to do better next time. There’s no arguing that the first time didn’t turn out very well. But what about the second? And the third?”
He looked at her, startled. “The third?”
She nodded, then glanced around like she always did before she was going to tell him something she shouldn’t. Despite himself, and despite the guilt he was feeling over what Glenn Klinger had done, Casey felt a tickle of excitement in his belly.
“When?” he asked. He pushed his sandwich aside, all thoughts of lunch gone. “What’s going to happen?”
“A young woman,” Gina said in a near-whisper. “Today, right in the middle of rush hour, on the Clark Street Bridge.” She glanced away again, then looked sideways at him. “You can swim, right?”
Casey’s mouth dropped open. “She’s going to jump?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m not completely sure,” Gina told him. She looked stricken. “Sometimes what I see isn’t real clear, you know? It’s foggy, like I’m seeing it through a wet window, or through someone else’s eyes.”
He swallowed. “So what can you tell me about her?”
Gina tilted her head. “She’s with a group of people, I know that much. And I don’t think she’s very old, only a teenager.”
Casey ground his teeth. A teenager? After reading about Klinger, he’d told himself he wasn’t going to do this anymore. Who was he to change someone’s destiny? It was chaos theory, like what happened in that old Ray Bradbury story, “A Sound of Thunder”—change one tiny thing and somewhere else in the world a war breaks out, or an earthquake strikes. That’s what Casey had done with Glenn Klinger when he’d saved his life, and as a result, the entire course of history had been changed. It might sound like an exaggeration, but who really knew? Even if the eleven people who’d died were unremarkable, what might their children have been like? Or their children’s children?
“I—I don’t know,” he finally said. “I’m not so sure it’s a good idea anymore.”
Gina looked shocked. “You would let her die when you might be able to save her? You wouldn’t even try? Casey, she’s just a kid!”
“I know, I know.”ubbed at his eyes, trying desperately to sort it all out. Was it the right thing to do? What if the world was in some kind of balance or something, and him stepping in just pushed it all out of whack?
“Casey, if you’re thinking something bad is going to happen because you save this girl’s life, that’s ludicrous. That thing with Glenn Klinger—it was just a coincidence, that’s all. He was crazy, or there was something messed up with his head.” She tapped her forehead for emphasis. “He probably had a brain tumor, you know? It’s not like the general public would ever be told if he did. With all the crap that goes on in the world today, by tomorrow the newspapers will have forgotten all about the guy. Front-page news will be something Obama said and the latest on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and any leftover space will be devoted to who’s playing on Navy Pier.”
Casey still didn’t say anything. Although he felt immensely guilty about what Glenn Klinger had done, Gina was completely correct in that there was nothing he could do about it now. But the future . . . well, he couldn’t really do anything about it, but he could just let it go on as it was, perhaps, meant to.
“And what if you’re wrong?”
Casey jerked his attention back to Gina. “What did you say?”
“I asked you, what if you’re wrong?” Gina stared at him without blinking. “Let’s say you decide not to do anything with what I’ve told you. You just go on home and leave her to whatever the universe or God or fate has in store.”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“But that’s not the point, Casey.” She sounded like she was talking to a particularly trying relative, and that’s the last thing he wanted. She had relaxed a little during their conversation but now she sat forward again and her fingertips gripped and tensed on the tabletop. “Do you really want to take that chance?” she demanded. “Do you really want to be the person responsible for some pretty little teenager having her life cut short when she’s barely had a chance to do anything—can you live with that?”
“No, of course not.” The words slipped out of his mouth before he could think about them, but they would have been the same in any case. “No one who’s responsible does something like that.”
“Nor would someone who has a good heart,” she pointed out. “Someone like you.”
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His nails found a dent at the edge of the table and he poked at it. “You’re betting an awful lot on me when you don’t know anything at all about the real me.”
“I know enough.” Suddenly she reached over and covered his hand with hers. “You’re a good person, Casey. You’ve shown that twice already. Self-doubt is an insidious thing. It twists up everything, turns everything you think you’ve got figured out upside down.”
Casey nodded, but suddenly all he could think about was that she had touched him—was still touching him.
Gina pulled her hand away, then folded her napkin. She looked at his uneaten sandwich and frowned. “You haven’t even touched your food, but I really have to get back to the office.”
Casey stood when she did. “It’s all right,” he said. “I guess I just wasn’t that hungry. Too much stress.”
“Don’t let it get to you.” She gave him a reassuring smile. “There are great things ahead, Casey. No one can tell you that more than me.”
He nodded automatically, but before he could think of anything to say, Gina stepped forward, put one hand on each of his wrists, and kissed him full on the mouth.
Casey was so stunned that his mind went blank—all the thoughts and all the things he might have been going to say simply just disappeared. All he could do was stand there and experience it—the feel of her warm, soft lips pressed against his, the way her fingers were lightly wrapped around his wrists, the fact that there were only a few inches between his body and hers. Yes, they were in a crowded, noisy restaurant on LaSalle Street at the end of the lunch hour rush, but all of that felt like it was gone, too. He wasn’t so geeky that he hadn’t had a girlfriend or three in his life, kissed them, slept with them.
But Gina . . .
He didn’t know what it was about her, but she was special somehow. He’d known it the first time they’d had lunch and the feeling had just grown ever since. And this kiss just confirmed that—it was . . . all-encompassing, surpassing his hopes, his expectations, his dreams. It was everything.
She stepped back and smiled at him, then her hands slipped away from his wrists and she merged into the line of people headed out the door. Casey stared after her, still frozen in place, until someone finally broke him out of his daze by saying, “Hey, man—are you leaving? Can I have this booth?”
He blinked, then focused on the speaker, a guy about Casey’s own age who was wearing a shirt and tie, just another face among Chicago’s millions of white-collar workers. A young woman peered over his shoulder, waiting for Casey’s answer. Girlfriend? Maybe, and Casey wondered briefly if through the eyes of someone else he and Gina looked like these two.
“Uh, yeah. Sorry—let me get my stuff.” He wadded up his lunch debris and tossed it in the trash as he left. He was almost all the way back to his building before he realized he’d never asked Gina why she’d called him from a pay phone.
AH, THAT KISS. THAT handy and oh-so-damning kiss.
Jashire sat on the toilet and looked at her prisoner. After a couple of days of contemplation, she’d settled on calling him her “little monkey” rather than “knight.” He just wasn’t worthy of that kind of title, and even “pawn” would have been exaggerating. At this point, most of what he did was grunt inarticulately—and never mind that she had a rag tied all the way around his head—and occasionally jerk around in a vain attempt to free himself. She supposed it wasn’t his fault that his capabilities were limited right now, being as he was thoroughly tied to a chair in the bathtub and the gag made it possible only for him to take in liquids. Still, somehow she had expected better, humans being so prized and everything by God Himself. She certainly wasn’t seeing anything notable here.
He had perked up after she’d stuck him and his chair in the tub and given him a good cold shower. The day before yesterday, she’d gone to the corner store, a dark little Mexican place that smelled of bad meat and pine cleaner, and come back with a couple of chicken tamales. By the time she’d gotten back, his teeth had been chattering and his toes were almost blue. This was in the ninety-degree heat in the apartment—Jashire had forgotten just how cold the tap water, supplied by the chilly waters of Lake Michigan, could be. Hey, at least she’d given him a drink, and he hadn’t complained when she’d shut off the water, yanked off his gag, and impatiently stuffed big bites of tamale into his mouth.
If she’d had a heart for it, she might’ve felt a little sympathy for this cold, hungry human she’d snaed up and held captive for the past ten or eleven days. Compassion, however, was not one of her qualities—she had no such thing, period. At least not for the humans. Someone else might point out the red lines of blood poisoning that had spread upward from the stump of his missing finger and note that he was barely breathing; Jashire thought that if points were being counted, she’d get a big bonus for not just killing him outright. After all, he wasn’t a nephilim or an angel, or even a demon. He wasn’t special at all. He was just kind of a . . . talking monkey. And he wasn’t even very good at the talking part.
As she sat there staring at him, she saw his eyes open just a bit. “Oh, excellent!” she said, delighted. “I wanted to talk to you, and here you are, acting like such a good little boy.” She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees so that she could look at him more closely. “I want to tell you all about what happened at lunch today. And then I want to describe to you how it ended, in detail.
“With a kiss.”
Thirteen
“Bird,” Danielle said. She pointed to the pigeon on the other side of the Clark Street Bridge railing. “Over there.”
“That’s nice,” Miss Anthony said, but she didn’t look in Danielle’s direction. She was too busy rounding up the kids, five of them—Danielle could count that many because that’s how many fingers she had on one hand—before they could be bad and run off down the sidewalk. “You’re supposed to be helping me with the children, Danielle,” Miss Anthony called. “It’s a workday and that’s why I brought you along.”
“Okay,” Danielle said, but she made no move to go and do anything. She didn’t like working, and she didn’t particularly like Miss Anthony, who, Danielle thought, bullied her too much because she’d had more birthdays than the other kids and was bigger. That wasn’t her fault, and even though it wasn’t a pretty day like yesterday—it was too cold—she could still think of a whole lot of things she’d rather be doing than working. Like eating ice cream, or playing with a doll—
“Danielle,” Miss Anthony said again, more sharply this time. “If you don’t get over here, I won’t bring you out on field trips anymore.”
—or trying to catch that bird.
“Okay,” Danielle said again. “I’m coming.”
It sounded like Miss Anthony was getting mad but Danielle didn’t care. Miss Anthony got mad all the time but she never did much about it; there might be a lot that Danielle didn’t understand, but she did know that Miss Anthony couldn’t hit her, not like her dad sometimes did when she threw a tantrum. Danielle didn’t do that so much anymore at school although lots of times she wanted to because Miss Anthony wouldn’t give her stuff. Miss Anthony said that Danielle was supposed to act like a grown-up and be a good example to the other kids, but Danielle didn’t actually want to do that. Miss Anthony and her mom and dad said she was older than she had fingers enough to count, but Danielle knew that wasn’t possible. That made the three of them liars, and that was not a good thing. She knew this because they’d all told her that lying wasn’t good, and yet here they were, doing exactly that.
One of the smaller kids—Danielle couldn’t remember his name even though it seemed like he had been in the class with her for a really long time—tried to run away, shrieking about a bee trying to sting him. Miss Anthony forgot about Danielle as she chased after the boy, shooting furtive glances over her shoulder at the other four kids to make sure they were staying where they were supposed to. Danielle was the biggest (and supposedly the oldest), so she should probably go bac
k and stand there or something, but again, she didn’t want to. They were brats and they made a lot of noise, and sometimes, like she used to do when she was their size, they hit and kicked and bit. The last time one of them had kicked her, she had kicked back. That night at home Daddy had said he didn’t care how big she was, and he had spanked her really hard. Mom had cried but had drunk her beer and let him do it, so Danielle figured he was supposed to. She wasn’t so stupid she didn’t understand that if she hurt someone smaller than her, someone bigger than her would hurt her.
“Bird,” she said again, but of course Miss Anthony was way out of earshot, and so were the other kids. They were standing around, looking up at all the tall buildings and not doing much of anything else. One boy was picking his nose. Danielle was glad she wasn’t like them anymore. She was bigger and smarter, and if she wanted to go get that bird—she thought it was called a pigeon—then she could. It was just sitting there and looking at her, with its feathers all ruffled up as it cocked its head from side to side.
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