Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(26)

But everything is not okay—not here in New York City.

Allison knocks again, calls her friend’s name again.

Is Kristina in there? Is she pushing replay every time the song ends?

That doesn’t seem very likely—yet is it any more far-fetched than anything else that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours?

“Kristina! Come on, if you’re there, just tell me you’re okay!”

As she waits in vain for a reply, she goes over the last conversation she had with Kristina in the laundry room the other day, trying to figure out if there’s any chance she might have been in the towers yesterday, or on a plane.

Kristina mentioned she’d just started a long-term temp job. It’s in midtown, though—not downtown. Allison is certain of it, because Kristina commented on how crowded the uptown trains had been during rush hour all last week.

“I just hope it gets better,” she said, “because I can’t stand and hold on to a pole all the way to midtown and back every day. If I could at least get a seat . . .”

Allison, who takes the same subway line, shook her head. “I wouldn’t count on that.”

“Well, hopefully I’ll get back to waitressing soon. Or dancing—as soon as my leg heals and I can get back to auditioning. Because let me tell you, this rush hour subway schedule really bites.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Allison said with a grim smile.

At this particular moment, though, she would give anything to be on the subway, wedged shoulder to shoulder with hordes of fellow New Yorkers, riding to the office to begin a normal workday.

Instead, the city lies in smoldering ruins around her, thousands of its citizens murdered.

Is it possible Kristina Haines was among them?

She works in midtown, Allison reminds herself yet again. There’s no reason she’d have been in the World Trade Center. Still . . .

Allison tried calling her friend before she came up here, and she actually managed to get through. The line rang, anyway. But only once, and then the answering machine picked up.

“Kristina, it’s Allison,” she said. “I’m just calling to check in. You know, after . . . yesterday. Call me as soon as you get this and let me know that you’re safe.”

She hung up, wondering if Kristina had a cell phone, and how she could find the number.

She went through the motions of an ordinary day, taking a shower, blow-drying her hair and pulling it back into a rubber band. She dressed in her softest, most threadbare jeans and an old T-shirt, finding a measure of solace in pure physical comfort—the only kind to be found on this grim day.

In the kitchen, she made coffee, poured a cup—and then let it grow cold on the counter as she paced in bare, still-sore feet. She concluded that she wouldn’t be able to breathe easily until she knew that everything was okay upstairs.

Obviously, it isn’t okay.

Staring at Kristina’s closed door, she presses fisted fingers to her mouth, resting her chin on her palm, wondering what to do next.

Maybe she should go back down and get her key to Kristina’s apartment. But it would be wrong, wouldn’t it, to go barging in there?

Allison glances at the other closed doors in the hallway.

There are three apartments on every floor in the building. The tenants in apartment 5B moved out at the end of August and it’s still vacant. But maybe the elderly woman who lives in 5C will at least know whether Kristina was home yesterday afternoon or evening.

Allison goes down the hall and knocks on that door.

No one answers.

She knocks again, waits another minute, and gives up. The woman’s grown daughter visits every afternoon; she probably came yesterday and got her mother out of here. Especially if there was no power in the building.

A lot of people who live in the building probably stayed someplace else last night, put off by the barricades and the soldiers and the dust and debris and smoke.

So then what am I doing here? Allison wonders as she turns away from Kristina’s door.

The answer is simple. She has no place else to go.

Clearly, Kristina did. Maybe she left the music on before she left for work yesterday morning, and accidentally pressed the auto-replay button.

No—the power went out for a while after the attacks.

Well, maybe that triggered some kind of electronic problem with the CD player.

The CD player she said she didn’t even have.

For some reason, the thought keeps nagging at Allison, and she’s not sure why.

Aiming the remote at the television set, Jamie channel-surfs with one frustrated thumb click after another.

Wall-to-wall coverage of yesterday’s attack, and not just on the local stations. But none of the networks—not even the cable news—have been airing any of the graphic images anymore.

Yesterday, they showed it all. Yesterday, you saw raw footage of people dying right there in front of you, in real time, in real life—and then again, later, in endless recaps.

Today, though every channel is still playing and replaying the same scenes—the planes hitting the towers, the towers falling, the dust cloud chasing down and enveloping hundreds of people running for their lives—the blood and gore have been edited away, like a movie made suitable for a PG–13 audience.

Lame. That’s what it is.

Jamie wants to see it all again—the jumpers falling through the air, the bloody pulverization on the sidewalks, the body parts . . . death. How glorious it would be to see death again, right up close.