Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(19)

Nothing matters anymore.

I want to do it again.

I want to make the choice again.

I want to watch someone else die.

I want to feel someone die.

I want to make someone die.

Yes. It can happen again.

It can happen—it will happen—whenever, wherever, to whomever Jamie chooses.

But right now, it’s time to rest.

With a deep sigh, Jerry sinks his aching head back against the pillow.

There have been many long, terrible days in his life, but this was by far the longest, and the most terrible.

He’s lived in New York City all his life. This is his home. And now . . .

Look what they did.

He closes his eyes, squeezing hard, but he can’t shut out the terrible scenes he encountered today. Smoke, and fire, and firemen dying, and all those people jumping out the windows, falling through the sky . . .

Fallin’.

The song, his song, still echoes through his head.

It was playing in the background just a little while ago when at last, at last, Kristina said the words he’s been waiting so long to hear.

Not the part about being sorry for saying no when he asked her out. That was nice to know, of course—that she hadn’t meant to hurt him.

But it was the rest of what she said that resonated with him.

He could hear the heartfelt passion in her voice; passion that made her words quaver and her pitch much higher than usual.

“Jerry, I love you!” she told him. “I’ve always loved you, and . . . and . . . and I always will. I just wanted you to know that. Okay? Okay? Oh God . . .”

She was crying, he realized. Was it because she was upset that she had hurt him when she’d turned down their date? Or because of all that had gone on today in the city, their city, the city where they’d fallen in love?

Or was she simply so overwhelmed by her feelings for him that she was sobbing with joy?

He doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter.

“I love you, too,” he told Kristina, over and over, until Jamie said it was time to say good-bye.

But maybe that wasn’t a good idea. Maybe he shouldn’t have listened to Jamie.

Maybe he should go see if Kristina’s okay. Because the more he thinks about it, the more certain he is that she’s not.

Allison was at the Liz Lange fashion show when it all began to unfold this morning. Someone said that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center, and a buzz of confusion rippled through the Bryant Park tent, but the show went on as planned.

As gorgeous pregnant models strutted the catwalk in designer outfits, Allison put the plane crash out of her head and focused on the task at hand.

Afterward, alarmed by the smoke rising in the blue sky over lower Manhattan, she tried to call the office from her cell and couldn’t get through.

“Don’t bother,” a scurrying stylist called to her. “The phones are down!”

Unsettled by the growing sense of panic on the street around her, she made her way back to her office as fast as she could walk in a pair of pointy Christian Louboutin stilettos.

The lobby security post, usually manned by a joyful Rastafarian named Henry, was eerily deserted.

Upstairs, she found everyone in her department glued to a conference room television, where the alarming truth was made clear at last.

“How many people were in there?” she asked Luis, a production editor and her closest friend at work.

“Tens of thousands.”

“How many died?”

Luis shook his head. She saw that he was holding an orange plastic prescription bottle, tapping it like a maraca against the open palm of his other hand.

Seeing her looking at it, he passed it to her, a silent offering.

“What is it?” She was already twisting off the white safety cap, noticing—and not caring—that the label bore an unfamiliar name.

“Xanax. My sister’s shrink prescribes it for her but she doesn’t take it that often so she gives it to me.”

“You carry it around with you every day?”

“I keep it in my desk drawer. I thought this job was stressful but—” Luis’s brown eyes flicked to the television screen, with its doomsday images. He murmured something in Spanish, then said, “Go ahead—take it, Allison. It’ll calm you down.”

She knew, only too well, what Xanax does. She knew because it was one of the many drugs her mother used to take back in the grim old days in Centerfield.

Centerfield—if she were there right now, she wondered, would she feel safe?

Was there anyplace in the world where she would ever be able to feel safe again?

Allison—who grew up seeing what drugs, even prescription drugs, can do to a person, and swore she’d never touch them—swallowed two Xanax.

That made it better, but she still wasn’t insulated from the horror—not by any means.

Trapped in her midtown office building—well aware that any one of the landmarks around her could be a target—she could only watch the ruins burn, on TV and out the window. The subways weren’t running, the bridges and tunnels were closed. Manhattan island was truly cut off from the rest of the world.

Someone told Allison that Helene, the magazine’s formidable art director, had earlier received a hysterical phone call from her sister, trapped on a high floor of one of the towers. Allison couldn’t wrap her fuzzy head around the fact that sophisticated, intimidating Helene had reportedly lost her composure when the tower collapsed, sobbing openly before her husband showed up to escort her off to wherever the families of the victims were gathering.