Center
The second part of Nico’s little favor took me halfway across town, a tidbit of information he’d completely forgotten to mention when he was blowing me off. I had to call Karen to bail on lunch, but I was all the way to the hospital and she still hadn’t picked up. A sign outside said I couldn’t have my phone on once I went in, so I’d been waiting in the rain for ten minutes before I finally got her on the line. I was going to be late.
“You have to cancel,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Karen. Really.”
“Don’t sweat it,” she said. “It’s just lunch; we’ll go tomorrow or something.”
“It’s just something came up. Nico’s got me doing this thing, except it’s not at the Federal Building. It’s off somewhere else across town, so I had to go right over there.”
“That’s good, though, right? You get paid by the hour, don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know. It feels like he’s using me sometimes.”
“Zoe, it’s work you get paid to do,” she said. “He’s not using you. He’s contracting you.”
“I guess.”
“He does that because you get results. Plus you’re working with him. That’s one of the best ways to get to know someone.”
She had a way of making things seem better than they probably were. I guessed what she said might be true, but I was still ticked off.
“He ditched me today. I’m doing this totally on my own.”
“He trusts you,” she said. “He knows you can come through on your own.”
“Maybe.”
“Here’s what you do; instead of us going to lunch tomorrow, you take him to lunch tomorrow instead.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Zoe, it’s been, like, two years. You’re never going to get him if you don’t even try.”
My face got hot when she said that. It was easy for her to say. Guys stared at her all the time; they never looked at me that way. It wasn’t the same.
“It wouldn’t work anyway,” I said. “He’s hung up on someone else, I think.”
“You always say that. You always say ‘That wouldn’t work anyway.’ You’re just afraid to try.”
“Look, if you’re so smart about guys, then how come you’re still hooked up with that loser?”
“He has a name,” she said, clipped. “We’re not talking about that right now.”
“Yeah, I know. You always say that. He’s bad news, Karen. I know he’s bad news.”
She didn’t say anything for a minute.
“Just …go do whatever you have to do,” she said. She sounded pissed.
“Fine.”
“I’ll talk to you later.” She hung up.
I shut my phone off like the sign said. First I was late getting into work; then those jerks made fun of me when my back was turned. I had to miss my lunch, and now Karen was pissed at me. Plus that woman …
She was in the green room. In the elevator I thought she was going to punch me. How did she remember me? Back then, I made her forget. How did she remember?
Shaking off my umbrella, I closed it and went inside, where a bunch of people were sitting like they’d been waiting there forever. A big, round woman in a flowered shirt sat behind the main desk.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Jan Holst,” I said.
“Visiting hours resume at one,” she said. “You can have a seat and wait if you like, or you can come back.”
“I’m not here to visit. I’m here to do an interview.”
“Interview?”
The room got brighter, and I stared at her until her fat face went slack.
“Just tell me where her room is.”
“Sixth floor. Room 6E7.”
“Go back to what you were doing and never mind me.”
I stopped pushing her, and she looked back to the computer screen.
Alone in the elevator, I hit the button for the sixth floor. The inside of the door was mirrored, and in it I looked like a drowned rat. My hair was frizzed and tangled, and my face was blotchy. My ears were bright red.
As the car went up, I thought about that woman back at the FBI, Alice Hsieh. She had the same abilities I did —I was sure of it. For the first time, it occurred to me that if I noticed her, she must have noticed me too. If that was true, she must have known how I got the information out of the guy in the wheelchair. She must have seen too when I got the information out of Vesco, but she didn’t try to stop it or ask me about it after. She just left, and never said anything about it at all.
The memory wormed its way in, pushing the other stuff out. Vesco joked about Nico having sex with me. Then he and his friend laughed about it. Nico being interested in me physically was actually a joke in the office. It was something to laugh about.
My reflection got blurry, and I wiped my eyes. Any second the elevator door was going to open and I’d be standing there crying. I took a deep breath, but my reflection stayed blurry. I blinked hard a couple times and rubbed them, but it didn’t go away. It was like I was looking through a haze or something, or like heat was rippling the air. The elevator floor creaked and I turned, but nothing was there. When I looked back, my reflection was normal again.
When I saw things, it happened out of nowhere and it didn’t matter where I was. I couldn’t afford some kind of episode in the middle of a hospital, when I was supposed to be doing an interview. I took a few deep breaths and tried to calm down. The antsy feeling I got up and down my spine when I really wanted to drink was kicking in big time. The last thing I needed was some kind of panic attack….
The bell dinged and the doors opened up. No one was waiting for the car on the other side. I smoothed down my hair and wiped my eyes one more time, then stepped out. The door clunked behind me, then slid shut.
I found the right room and went inside, where a man in a white lab coat stood next to a hospital bed. I peeked past him to see the woman who was lying there. There was a bandage across the front of her neck, covered in gauze tape. After a minute, she noticed me and looked past the man in the coat. When she did, he looked over.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Jan Holst.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Zoe Ott.”
“You’re with the FBI?” He said it like he couldn’t believe it.
“Yes.”
I fished my contractor’s badge out and held it up so he could see it.
“Okay,” he said. He turned to the woman. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”
She nodded, still looking at me. She looked pretty beat-up, but she smiled, just a little.
“You’ll have to leave,” I told him. He frowned, and I felt a little surge of anger come from him.
“Look, Miss Ott,” he said. “This wom—”
He stopped in midsentence as I concentrated and the room got bright. As the colors drained away from everything except the light around his head, out of the corner of my eye I saw the woman’s smile get a little bigger. I pushed back the spike of red light that had been forming until it disappeared back into the blue.
“I need privacy,” I told him. “If anything happens, I’ll get you.”
He nodded. In the doorway, he looked back at her one more time, then left, closing the door behind him. The
