Into the Fire(9)

“Oh, don’t bother him,” Ida said with a dismissive wave of her liver-spotted hand. “He’s not interested in anyone but himself. Isn’t that right? You’re rushing up to your penthouse. No time to kibitz.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Evan said.

The haze of her potent lilac perfume permeated the lobby. “Too good for the rest of us.”

“No, ma’am.”

Lorilee Smithson, 3F, slipped a yoga-toned arm around Evan’s biceps. She’d been plastic-surgeried into a simulacrum of an attractive fifty-year-old, which might very well have been her age. She could also have been eighty.

“Ev,” she said, “I’m charged with paper goods for Wednesday night’s HOA meeting, and as such I need to volunt-ask you to bring some nibbles, okay?”

Ev? Volunt-ask? Nibbles?

Deciphering Castle Heights argot was harder than figuring out Cantonese inflection. Enduring it was worse than being waterboarded.

Evan cleared his throat, an uncharacteristic nonverbal tell, and said, “What?”

She repeated the request. Then added, “Something simple. Ya know, homemade cookies, maybe a crudités platter.”

“Crudités platter,” he repeated.

He looked at all those faces looking at him. Living outside the mainstream had left him ill-equipped for everyday interactions, but he knew that some kind of nicety was required. He cleared his throat, summoned the words. “Good to see you all.”

Mrs. Rosenbaum snorted.

Evan backed away, offering a little wave that he instantly regretted. He turned around in front of the elevators and found himself nose to nose with Mia.

She was brought up short as well, phone pressed to her cheek, bulging satchel briefcase in hand. Inexplicably, she was carrying a plaster of paris rendering of California in a pie tin.

After they weathered the awkward hitch and stepped into the elevator together, Evan said, “I’m told GPS is more reliable.”

Mia looked at him blankly. He gestured at the state sculpture. She looked down at it and then at him. She did not smile.

Instead she returned to her phone call with renewed vigor. “I don’t care if he has brunch with the mayor every Sunday at the Bel-Air Country Club. I don’t care if he owns the Bel-Air Country Club. I have a detective who’s not afraid to request a search warrant of his place of residence. It’d be nice if my own boss weren’t more skittish about blowback than I am.”

Her tone confirmed what he already knew: Mia was not a DA he’d want to tangle with.

“Look, Don,” she continued, “we don’t know how far the tentacles reach on this thing. I’m busting my ass every night. I have Peter in math lab after school and the sitter picking him up from there. I’ve been running around all day with a friggin’ state replica because the plaster of paris didn’t have time to set this morning, and am I complaining?… Okay. But I mean before this?… Right. All I’m asking is that you let me do my job.”

There was a time that she might have gotten off the phone when she saw Evan. There was a time when she might have smiled at him. Made direct eye contact, even.

Instead they stood side by side, eyes on the floor-indicator lights above. He could smell her lemongrass lotion and the clean scent of her shampoo. Her lush, wavy chestnut hair was clipped up messily, escaped strands falling across her left eye. The highlights showed through, blond and burgundy.

Not that he paid attention.

As Mia shifted under her load, the backs of their knuckles brushed.

They both tensed, and she took a half step away.

Evan could hear her boss talking through the phone, not the words but the drone of his voice.

She looked across at Evan, and for an instant emotion flickered through her eyes—something like wistfulness.

Then she focused on the call again. “I understand,” she said. “But I only have so much patience.”

Indeed, Evan thought.

The elevator reached the twelfth floor.

She gave Evan a cursory nod and stepped out. He listened to her walking away, the firm insistence of her voice. She’d head into 12B with a big grin. Her condo would smell of Play-Doh, some scented candle, and a trace of whatever the sitter had made Peter for dinner—probably chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs. There’d be laundry on the couch, dishes in the sink, at least one crayon stomped into the carpet. To Mia’s dismay and secret delight, Peter would still be up, wired on sugar, waiting for a bedtime story, a glass of water, an under-the-bed check. She’d kiss him on the forehead beneath the cowlick swirl of his lank bangs and tuck him into his race-car bed. Then she’d shower off the workday, listen to some jazz, maybe the Oscar Peterson Trio.

Slide into bed.

How odd life was to bring him and Mia so close to something they could never have.

He rose to the twenty-first floor, the smell of lemongrass lingering, and strode down the hall. When he closed his front door behind him, it met the frame with a weighty thud, sealing him in.

The dark penthouse yawned before him, hard surfaces, high ceilings, and glass. Not a crumb on the counters. Not a smudge marring the windows. Not a drawer left open an inch or a millimeter.

It was immensely comforting. And bereft of human warmth.

How odd that both things could be true at once.

After this mission was over, he’d have plenty of time to figure out how to integrate those opposites. Until then it was a waiting game, leaving him frozen between one chapter and the next.