"No, wait," I finally got out.
I wanted to tell her what happened, that I had just run into the Jump Killer, but I realized I couldn"t. No way could I have contact with the police. Even after all this, I still had a chance of getting away from Peter.
"No, it"s OK," I said. "I broke up with my boyfriend. We"d been swimming a ways back there and when I came back in, he"d, uh, left me. True, I cheated on him last night with his cousin, but still. I"m down here without any money, and I was trying to hitchhike home. I guess I fell asleep," I said.
"Fell asleep? You make a habit of falling asleep on the highway, you"re going to wake up in a graveyard, moron. And you"re certifiable to be hitchhiking. Couldn"t you call your family?"
"My mom doesn"t even know I"m here," I said. "Please don"t call the police. She"ll throw me out if she finds out."
"Where"s home?" the woman said.
"Boca Raton," I said off the top of my head.
"Should I call the cops or not, Mary Ann?" the driver called down.
The heavyset woman stared into my eyes fiercely. "Don"t bother," she called back up after a second. Then to me she said, "We"re going as far as Miami. Would that help you out?"
If by "help out," you mean "save my life," I thought. "Thank you so much," I said.
The woman shook her head. "Well, c"mon," she said, boarding the truck and waving me up.
Mike, the driver, was bald and had a Hemingway-esque curly white beard. His head was down on the wheel, and he was breathing heavily when I entered the cab. And his agitated face was whiter than his beard.
"I"m so sorry, sir," I said to him.
He just shook his head as his wife closed the door.
"Told you this run to the Keys would be interesting, Mike," the woman said. "Keep your eyes peeled for any more youngsters napping in the middle of this G.o.dd.a.m.n road."
I looked out the window at the water as the truck crunched into gear and we rolled out. I couldn"t see anything along the concrete bridge wall. There was no movement in the water, no movement in the brush. The Jump Killer must have been hiding underneath the side of the bridge, I realized. Like a troll, I thought, still dizzy with panic.
After a minute, as the truck began to pick up speed, Mary Ann rummaged in the berth behind her and handed me a towel. Wrapping myself in it, I wriggled up against the pa.s.senger door and stared out at the stars sliding past. The lights of the road ahead curved out over the dark water like spots on a connect-the-dots sheet.
What would the next dot be? I wondered. More ruin, no doubt. More horror. More pain.
Because I was cursed, I thought. Wherever I went, death and craziness homed in on me. I seemed to emit a scent that attracted these things.
I tried to figure out why that was. Was it something in my nature? My inherent gullibility?
As we roared around a long curve of the Overseas Highway, out on the water to my right I suddenly saw a small, distant light. It was the tiny running light of a small anch.o.r.ed sailboat.
Or Ramon Pena, I thought as my ten-ton eyelids began to drop. It was the soul of the man I had run over and allowed Peter to sink in the ocean. Ramon was the reason for my bad luck, the reason why I would always be hounded. Peter wasn"t the only one with blood on his hands.
I deserved to be haunted, I thought, and then I finally, gloriously, pa.s.sed out.
Book Three.
NEW YORK NINA.
Chapter 50.
I SIT IN WHITENESS, getting ready for my wedding. I"m wearing a fluffy white robe and white curlers in my hair. Even the separators between my freshly polished toenails are a chaste virginal white.
I smile as I suddenly notice the white roses that cover the bathroom"s entire countertop. They glow almost painfully in the undiluted Florida light that fills the room.
As I put the finishing touches on my mascara in the makeup mirror, there"s a pounding on the door.
"Come out with your hands up!" Peter says through a bullhorn. "And those little panties of yours held high!"
I begin to laugh but stop as I hear the coughing sound of a gas engine being started with a rip cord. Is it a lawn mower? I think, turning toward the door.
Immediately bits of wood explode inward, spraying my face, and I see the tip of the chain saw as it cuts a slot in the door. As I watch, the spinning blade disappears, and through the hole a face appears, like Jack Nicholson"s in The Shining. I think it"s Peter, but it"s not. It"s the almost Asian face of the Jump Killer.
"How"s my fair Nina?" he says, flashing me his white capped teeth.
As I turn to run, I trip on the lip of the tub. I grasp the edge of the shower curtain, but the rings pop off the rail one by one, and I fall backward into warm water. As I scramble up, I see it"s not water at all but blood, and in the tub beside me, spooning like a honeymooning couple, are the dead bodies of Elena Cardenas and Ramon Pena.
Covered in blood, I scream, flailing as I see that half of Ramon Pena"s face is missing, the white of his skull stark against the sea of red.
I woke up. Struggling to catch my breath, I looked up into darkness while my heart clubbed the inside of my chest. And I really thought I was going to have a heart attack when I saw a dark figure was hovering above me.
"Angel of Death," I spat out.
"Mom?" Emma said, clicking on my bedside lamp.
My eyes burned as she started shaking my shoulder.
"Wake up, Mom," she said. "We both overslept. I can"t find my new AE shirt. You know, the nice blue one? Jeez, you"re covered in sweat. Are you sick? Don"t tell me you"ve got the swine flu?"
I wish, I felt like telling my daughter as I pulled the sheet over my head. You could get over the swine flu. I mopped my clammy brow on the other side of my pillow.
My recurring nightmares, on the other hand, were the gift that kept right on giving.
Even after almost twenty years.
"Oh, I know," Emma said. "Too much champagne at my party last night. That"s it. You"re hungover."
Emma was teasing, of course.
"Ha, ha, wise girl," I said, lifting the cover and suddenly smiling. "Your blue shirt"s crisply ironed on a hanger in my closet, Little Miss Sweet Sixteen. And you"re welcome for last night"s party. It wasn"t like it was expensive or anything. I think it was worth having to eat cat food when I"m old, don"t you?"
Emma stuck out her tongue. I stuck out mine right back. Emma and I were close, like sisters and best friends put together, only better. We even shared clothes. Which p.i.s.sed her off. I guess it would p.i.s.s me off a little, too, to have a mother who could fit into my jeans.
"As if you"ll ever be old," Emma said, climbing into the bed and wrapping me in a headlock. "You know how many of my stupid friends" mothers asked if you were my older sister? Even some of Mark"s Collegiate buddies were checking you out. It"s really not fair. Isn"t Snow White supposed to be the fairest one of all? Come on, Evil Queen. Step aside already."
"Never," I said with a cackle.
Again, Emma was teasing. Due to a death-march regimen of treadmilling and starvation, at forty I was just still in the ballpark of merely pretty. Emma, who had inherited Peter"s dark, beguiling looks on the other hand, was already nearly six feet tall and a heart-melting beauty.
I wasn"t the only one who thought so, either. Every once in a while, she"d get legit offers for modeling from friends of friends. Which I told her that I"d let her do over my dead body, of course.
As much as we were friends, I was very protective of her. Probably overly so. I didn"t care. I knew what the world was like, how precarious, how quickly and completely destruction could follow from just one false move.
Emma was going to have a good life, a normal life, a safe life. It was all that mattered.
"The last thing I"d worry about is your looks, kiddo," I said, knocking on her head with a knuckle. "Now, that brain of yours, well, that"s another story."
I ducked as she swung my pillow.
"s.h.i.t!" I screamed as I finally glanced at my iPhone charging on the night table and saw the time. "Why didn"t you tell me we were so late!?"
Chapter 51.
IT WAS POURING RAIN four hours later when, umbrella-less, I decided to race from my triple-parked taxi toward the crowded Aretsky"s Patroon on East 46th Street. Not good. It was only a hundred feet or so, but I got completely and utterly hosed in the monsoon.
Of course, I thought, as I finally squished my way inside. It always rained when you were running late for your very first power lunch with your boss and forgot to check the weather.
To make matters oh so much better, there was a lithe and perfect Nordic hostess behind the podium inside. She acknowledged my sopping presence with a slight lift of her eyebrow. But then she smiled nicely.
"Welcome to Patroon. Name?" she asked.
I stood there as tall and regally as I could, doing my d.a.m.nedest to pretend that being as wet as a drowned rat was the new black.
"Nina," I said, flicking my ruined hair out of my eyes with a hopefully gracious and professionally competent smile. "My name is Nina Bloom."
I"d lucked out. My boss hadn"t arrived yet, so I was able to do some rehab work on my makeup and hair in the ladies" room before I returned to the discreet banquette where I"d been seated.
As I waited, I kicked back for the first time and drank in the vista. Carefully seated inside the modern power-lunch mecca, big-hitter media elites in bespoke tailoring were cutting deals beside Botoxed A-list fashionistas. Among the bottles of San Pellegrino, I spotted Ivanka Trump and Anderson Cooper chatting it up.
Well, it was more like I studiously ignored Ivanka and Anderson, like we were currently not speaking. I had picked up on one or two things living in Manhattan for the last couple of decades.
After a moment, I smiled and raised my own gla.s.s of sparkling water toward the room of power players and took a sip. Given my arrival in New York in 1994 with nothing but the clothes on my back and Emma in my belly, I had good reason to toast myself.
Most of all just for surviving.
I thought about all the craziness of those first few years. The skeevy dive bar around the corner from Madison Square Garden where I worked until I started to show. The place in Chinatown where I got my first fake ID. The s...o...b..x of an apartment in Spanish Harlem that I brought Emma home to after giving birth at Lenox Hill Hospital.
My "big-shot career," as Emma called it, came later. After some extremely creative resume writing and a New York Career Inst.i.tute cla.s.s and a whole lot of luck, I"d scored my first non-waitressing job as a paralegal at Scott, Maxwell and Bond, one of the most powerful corporate law firms in the city.
I thought working at a law firm would be just a way to make a little more money, but from the get-go I found myself enthusiastically drawn to the work. There was something so exciting about being even a small part of the cases and issues and war room strategizing. After the chaos that had been my life up until that point, I found comfort in the law, its authority, its rationality, its calm and inherent n.o.bleness.
The luckiest thing of all was that after I proved my usefulness in a cla.s.s action suit, my boss, Tom Sidirov, a legendary litigator and even better person, practically demanded that I go to City College and then Fordham Law School on the firm"s dime.
It had taken almost ten years of work and night school, and thousands of logged hours on the New York City subway, but I eventually pulled it off. I became a lawyer. I"d even pa.s.sed the New York bar exam on my first try.
Over the last three and a half years, my career had steadily started to pick up speed. I wasn"t in line to make partner anytime soon, but I had my own cases now, my own clients, even my own personal a.s.sistant.
All my hard work at the office and as a mom was starting to reap some pretty plush dividends, I thought, as I sat in the tastefully done restaurant. There weren"t supposed to be second acts in American lives, but I was giving it a pretty good go. I was finally starting to come across things I"d never dreamed I ever would again.
Stability. Fun. Dare I even say its name?
Hope.
It seemed that after two decades and a thousand miles, maybe I"d finally run far enough. For a moment there among the high-rent chatter and clacking crockery, I think I actually felt safe.
That"s what made what happened next so wrong, so utterly unfair.
Because as I sat there toasting myself, it wasn"t just my boss who was on his way.
As I sat cozy and dry and warm and stupidly proud of myself, my rude awakening and reckoning was already hurtling toward me, bigger and badder than ever before.
Chapter 52.
"IS THIS SEAT TAKEN?" my boss, Tom Sidirov, said five minutes later.
Bald and short, even in his signature Brioni navy chalk stripe, my slight, sixty-plus mentor looked more like a retired bus driver than one of the country"s most successful litigators. Which couldn"t have tickled the cunning summa c.u.m laude Columbia Law School grad and tenacious former Golden Gloves boxer more.
"When you say lunch, you don"t mess around, do you, boss?" I said.
"Well, when it comes to bribing my protegee," Tom said, twisting an imaginary villain"s mustache, "I pull out all the stops."
"Protegee?" I said. "Wow, here it comes. I"m almost afraid to ask. What"s this urgent new project you wanted to discuss?"
"A multifirm pro bono initiative is starting up," Tom said as he spun his BlackBerry on the tabletop. "I don"t know too much about it except that it"s called Mission Exonerate, and I"m the partner who was supposed to find the volunteer for it, yesterday. Which I"m praying to Saint Anthony might be you. It starts Monday."
"What about ProGen?" I said.
For the last month, I"d been on a team putting together the contracts and prospectus for a biotech merger. To fall asleep at night recently, instead of counting sheep, I"d go over the alphabet soup of reagents, genomics, proteomics, and cell therapies.