Burning Blue

else could you want?”

“Plus I’d get to be around Daddy more.”

“Hell, that mop. You really are a punk.”

“Pete, do me a favor, don’t tell Pop I stopped by?”

“What’s up, kid?”

“Maybe I really will take you up on the internship thing.”

“Your old man would love that. Only natural for a father to want his son to walk his walk. He always said he thought you’d be great at the paper business.”

“Seriously?”

“‘Jay has a special sensitivity,’ he said. ‘That and his natural inquisitiveness, he’d win a Pulitzer.’”

Took me a second to absorb that, a compliment from my father, albeit indirect. “Then let’s let the internship be a surprise.”

“Whenever you want to start, let me know. Another Nazzaro at the Clarion. I wonder if the paper can survive it.” He slapped my back.

I dropped my board and kicked away from the diner as fast as I could. I forced myself not to look over my shoulder, but I felt them on me, Detective Barrone’s eyes.

I docked my phone to my laptop and downloaded everything I’d stolen from Barrone when I put my Nokia on the diner table next to her BlackBerry and let it sip her drive. I almost puked when I saw it in her Calls Made list: my father’s cell number. Call duration: twenty seconds. Long enough to leave a message, maybe something like, “Call me back. I’d like to talk with you about your son.” Then again, she’d called him the previous Saturday, two days before she and I met. Whatever Barrone’s reason for reaching out to my father, he didn’t call her back.

He was horrible with messages, rarely checked his voicemail or texts. And when he was on the road he kept his phone off to save the battery, too lazy to bring his charger, which was tangled up in knots with the rest of the wires strangling his desk. Sometimes he’d forget the phone with the charger and wouldn’t notice it was missing until he got home. Art critics get e-vited to shows, go, have a couple of drinks, write their bit and post it, done, no need to talk to a soul, which got me thinking that maybe being an art critic wasn’t such a loser thing to do after all. He was due back from Philadelphia Saturday, and he’d get the message by then, if not before. I had at most five days to figure out why Jessica Barrone was calling my father. Did she know I had leaked those two emails the Recluse sent to Mrs. Marks?

It didn’t seem possible. I had safeguard after redundant safeguard in place to prevent detection. I’d cracked an FBI server once, as a test, and gotten away with it. If the NJ police were onto me, they would have hit me right after my first hack into that server, in the middle of the night, and seized my computer-and me. I was gaining an appreciation for how Nicole felt now: hunted. I called her. She picked up with, “Jay Nazzaro, I was just thinking about you.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Could be either, depending on whether or not you know how to play tennis.”

“As in Wii?” I said.

“As in meet me at the East Gate Tennis Club in half an hour. And Jay? Tell me you don’t have Wii.”

“PS3, thank you very much.”

“Thank you very much, nobody plays Wii tennis anymore, or at least they don’t admit to it. Not unless they’re six years old and wear pigtails. Actually, you would look cute in pigtails.”

TWENTY-THREE

“I want to see if I can still see the ball.” She was wearing this knockout tennis suit, and here I was in my black jeans and army jacket. I was getting nasty eyes from many elderly, almost uniformly svelte model types who had gotten lost on their way to the L.L.Bean catalog shoot.

“Feed me,” Nicole said.

I eyed her hands. She was wearing golf gloves. “You sure?”

“You ever swung a racquet?”

The lady at the counter had given me one that had never been picked up from lost and found. I hadn’t held one since before my mother died. Mom was terrible at tennis, but she liked to take me up to the public courts and swing and miss and laugh at herself. We’d end up playing stickball. I pitched the ball to Nicole instead.

Her forehand was off. She kept grounding the ball into the net. She didn’t get down on herself. She made adjustments until the ball cleared the tape. She kept checking her long bill cap, pulling it low to hide as much of the bandage as she could. Her backhand was better than her forehand. A couple of times she really drove the ball. I threw it right to her, so she wouldn’t have to run to get to it, but she didn’t last long anyway. She took a break every three hits or so, then every two, then after every ball.

“Your hands?” I said.

“My wind.” She peeled off her gloves. Her hands weren’t nearly as bad as I thought they’d be, four or five blisters on her left, a couple on her right. All had healed or were close to skinning over. We went to get a drink from the vending machines. She was pale. “Amazing how much you lose in a month. Can’t wait to get back to running. Not as dizzy today, though. Skipped my meds.”

“Not good,” I said.

“You take yours?”

“Course not.”

She put up her fist for a pound. We bumped knuckles. Her phone buzzed. It had been buzzing every few minutes. She checked it and frowned.

“Dave?” I said.

“No,” she said. “You can take a deep breath now.”

“Dave benches three hundred eighty-five pounds. Would you like to be caught sneaking around with his girlfriend, even if you and I are just friends, if we are in fact.”

“You doubt that?”

“Maybe you just needed somebody to throw you a few balls.”

“Right, because they don’t have machines for that, ones that can’t judge me as I’m making an idiot of myself, trying to play tennis with one eye open.”

“I’m not judging you. I think you’re awesome.”

“Shut up. Anyway, I’m not sneaking around. I have nothing to-” Her phone buzzed again. “I’m AWOL. She won’t stop calling till I pick up.”

“Then pick up.”

She turned off her phone and tucked it into her little tennis skirt.

“Did the doctor clear you?” I said. “Like for strenuous physical activity?”

“He said as soon as I felt up to it, I should get moving.”

“Moving isn’t tennis.”

“Would be pretty boring if it weren’t.”

“But what if the ball hit you?” I said.

“So? It happens.”

“In the face, I meant.”

“What am I supposed to do, be a statue for the rest of my life? Never sweat again? Hungry?”

I grunted.

“This means ‘Man want food,’ one grunt yes, two grunt no?”

“You speak Cro-Magnon?” I said.

“To imply the Cro-Magnon were lug heads is wrong. They exhibited a cranial capacity approximately sixteen