CHAPTER 16
When Nick Dawes didn’t call the next day, it was kind of a shock to Jane’s system. Like she was waiting for that call. Expecting that call. Missing it when it didn’t come.
Thing was, she needed him to call after making such a fool of herself the prior night. Just to know that he wasn’t disgusted by the revelation that she . . .
That she what?
That she wasn’t always as cool, calm, and collected as she projected? That she had a breaking point? Sounded like he did too, and it’s what got him into this mess.
That she cared? Oh, god. Don’t care too much, Jane. You know how that goes. You won’t be in his life much longer.
Jane wasn’t sure how to process all the new information. It was all starting to make sense, every last crazy detail. The only reason she was in Nick’s house with Nick’s pets sleeping in Nick’s bed was because he couldn’t come home because he was at the Armory trying to figure out how to avoid being killed.
She lay there with her cell phone in her hand. Yeah, she could pretend it was because she wanted to make sure she didn’t miss a call from her boss. But now she was worried about him. She wanted him to call, not so that he could make sure the animals were okay, but so she could know that he was okay.
And something about that was really not okay.
Why had she snapped at him when he asked about Bill and the money? God, how embarrassing. He probably wanted to fire her. A weird lump formed in Jane’s throat. Yeah, it was definitely personal. Her feelings for Nick Dawes had jumped the track at some point.
She certainly wasn’t sharing this with Nana. Because, strike number one, HE’S YOUR BOSS. Strike number two, you don’t get close to someone who’s being hunted; in his line of work, he had to know that better than she did. Strike number three . . . Jane tried to think of a third reason why falling for Nick was stupid and/or ridiculous. She curled up against Rochester passed out on the edge of the bed, in deep puppy sleep probably dreaming of that fantastic romp on the floor with Nick.
I’d like a romp on the floor with Nick, thought Jane.
Maybe I should call him. Apologize for being sharp with him. Maybe I should just stay in my lane. But maybe he wants me to call. Maybe he wants to call me, find out how the dog is, the fish . . . but maybe he thinks, Oh, I just saw her last night, and she also yelled at me and acted weird, so I’ll call tomorrow.
Still no strike three. Jane picked up her phone. Hesitated . . . and then hit “Favorites” and then “Mr. Dawes, Sir.” The phone rang.
He picked it up on the second one. “Hi, Jane. You okay?”
“Yes, sir. Um . . . just checking that you’re safe.”
He chuckled, didn’t answer right away. There was a swishing sound, like maybe he was getting comfortable on his bed at the Armory. Do not think about it, Jane.
“I’m always safe here,” he said.
Good. “I also called to say that I’m sorry that I lost it last night. I think I’ve been having this feeling that life is unfair. Every now and then I forget to suck it up like everybody else does. Gotta, you know, rage at the world. Get it out of my system. Ha ha . . . heh . . .” Sigh. This sounded worse on the phone than it did in her head. He must think I’m a lunatic.
“It’s good to hear your voice, Jane,” was all he said.
“Likewise, sir.”
“Do you have a question?” Nick asked.
Jane took a huge breath. We’re back to that, are we? Fine, I can roll with that. Um . . . “Yeah, so how long does your neighbor usually leave Rochester with you? I only ask because I’m getting hugely attached.” And when I look at him, I get flashes of you rolling around on the floor with your shirt creeping up.
“She spends a lot of time in Europe. Back in a month, maybe.”
“To the average person, it sounds a little strange to be so vague.”
“Yes, but she knows how much I love that dog.”
Okay, it was really hot to hear Nick say that. Just . . . really hot.
“If it’s a problem, I can ask Roth about—”
“No! No, it’s great. He’s sleeping like a log. I think he misses you, though. I mean, I’m never going to roughhouse with him like you did. He’s going to be so happy when you come home.” Man, I sound like a girlfriend.
Nick laughed. “I keep meaning to get my own dog. I haven’t had one in a long time.” His voice trailed off, sounding wistful.
“Would you get another golden retriever?”
“Always,” he said.
“You had them growing up?”
“I did. I . . .” There was a long silence, and then Nick said, “Growing up in Chicago, it was not a great scene. My mother left early on. My father was around some, but he wasn’t tuned in to me, you know. Had a lot of . . . let’s call them ‘bad habits.’ By the time I was sixteen, we were more like roommates who didn’t want to be in the same room.”
There was a thunk, like the sound of a shoe hitting the floor.
“School was rough. I was screwed because I really loved math and poetry and . . . being smart or caring about school was not cool. So I really loved school, and you know how that goes. I spent most of my time in the school library, in part because the librarian snuck snacks to me from the teacher’s lounge and in part because people didn’t fire bullets in the stacks.”
Thunk.
Jane started at the sound and then rolled her eyes. The other shoe, Jane.
“I was one scrawny dude,” Nick said, “and I barely saw the sun, and the only way to not get my ass kicked on a regular basis was to stay out of sight and not attract any attention.”
“It’s very hard for me to imagine you like that,” Jane said.
“Well, it’s true. It was like a war zone, and you were supposed to pick sides, and I didn’t want to pick a side. I wanted to graduate and get the hell out of town.”
He stopped talking. Jane sat up on the bed in alarm. “Are you okay, Mr. Dawes?”
“Yeah, it’s . . . strange to talk about this. It never comes up or the words never come or . . . I don’t know,” he said.
“I’d love to . . .” Jane swallowed, suddenly feeling awkward. I’d love to get to know you better. I’d love to be the one person you can talk to. I’d love to . . .
“You’re a good listener, Jane,” he said, generously allowing her to not finish her sentence.
Something intangible seemed to pass between them over the line. Words unspoken, feelings unsaid. A sense of trust, a sense that they could reveal any secret and still be safe. Jane desperately did not want to kill the moment, no matter how long the silence, no matter what. And finally, finally, Nick began to speak again.
“She—the librarian, I mean—she seemed so much older than me then. Thinking now, she was still young, but I thought of her like somebody’s mother.” He paused again and added, “Like she could be my mother. Technically, she could have been. I think back and I remember she said she was around thirty. I didn’t have anyone who gave a shit for a long time, and then she did. Brought me books she thought I’d like, gave me advice, solace.” He laughed softly and added, “Made me feel normal about quoting poetry with an emo expression on my face. Her name was Jemilla. I called her Ms. Johnson, of course, but after a while, it felt like I was saying ‘Mom.’”
Tears welled up in Jane’s eyes.
Nick cleared his throat. “Eventually, she brought her dog in, asked me to watch over him. I set up in a back room, made a little study space, almost a living space. Sometimes I’d fall asleep. Me and Shakespeare, her golden. Eating Ms. Johnson’s staff-room Christmas cookies, huddled in a pile of quilts with a warm dog, doing my homework in a secret room in the library is my perfect childhood memory.”
It seemed like he was done, and Jane did not want him to be done. He was opening up. Out of nowhere he’d raised a window that had been stuck shut. She turned on her side on Nick’s bed and curled her legs up to her chest, the phone still pressed against her cheek. “Ms. Johnson sounds way better than any of the adult examples I had as a child, except for my nana.”
“She’s your closest family?” Nick asked.
“Closest in every way,” Jane said.
Nick sounded like he was going to say something or ask a question, but he hesitated.
“What?” Jane prompted, desperate for this window of opportunity to stay open.
“You’re such an easy person,” he asked. “You take everything in stride. Why aren’t you close to your family? How does that happen to someone like you?”
How does it happen to anybody? How did it happen to you, Nick Dawes?
“Well, let’s just say it’s not me, it’s them,” Jane said. “It’s sort of like they were surprised to become parents and then eventually lost interest and stopped showing up for the job. I can’t even count how many times they accidentally left me at random places around whatever town we were living in. During the times we lived near Nana, I started calling her directly to come pick me up, and after that, I just made her my primary caregiver.” Jane bit her lip. “Sounds like Jemilla Johnson was your ‘Nana.’”
“Oh, yeah? Then I’d like to meet your nana.”
Jane’s eyes widened. Yeah, I’d like you to meet her too. In another version of our reality. Where you have a guaranteed life span, and you aren’t my boss.
“Sometimes on her lunch break, Ms. Johnson would come in and say, ‘Nicholas, let’s chat.’ And we’d sit at the desk, and she’d ask me how school was going, and she’d ask me what I wanted to be in life, like it was obvious I was going to be something. Not one other person, place, or thing ever made it sound like me getting out of the shithole of my youth was a forgone conclusion, but Ms. Johnson acted like it was obvious I was made for better things.
“‘Nicholas,’ she said. ‘By the time you’re my age, I want you to be living the life you were meant to live.’ Because she talked like that, like a motivational poster on heels. But she believed all that shit. She told me to keep studying and learning, and to practice elocution so that nobody would judge me. And one day when I came in with a black eye after being jumped because being smart was uncool, she told me that I needed to focus on my body in the gym as well as my mind in the classroom. She wanted me to build up some armor.”
“It’s a little crazy that a school librarian would have to recommend that to a student as a survival mechanism,” Jane said sympathetically.
“Yeah, right? But she was counting on me for the long haul. To get out of town, make something of myself. Be a good man. Make a good life,” Nick said. “She always said, ‘Use your brains, but swing hard when your brains don’t cut it.’”
His voice took on an amused tone when he added, “There was also the really awkward day when she told me not to go and get any girls pregnant. She told me to wait for my star, and that I’d know her when I found her.”
“Do you stay in touch with her?” Jane asked.
“No,” Nick said, the lightness in his voice gone again. “I don’t.” And then, “That was all such a long time ago. I should . . .” Here he trailed off. Jane wondered if his face looked like he sounded. Pained.
Jane remembered the picture of Nick as a kid, tucked behind the books. “The picture in the living room on the bookshelf. Is that you with Shakespeare?” Jane asked.
Nick took an audible breath. “She gave him to me.”
“Do you have a picture of Ms. Johnson?”
There was a long silence. “There’s one of her in my office. Bottom desk drawer.”
“Maybe you could look her up. I’ll bet it would mean a lot to her to know what she meant to you.”
“It was a long time ago,” Nick said dismissively and then abruptly took a detour: “You’ll stay until Rothgar comes, take care of the kids, won’t you, Jane, if something happens to me?”
Jane’s eyes unexpectedly flooded with tears. “Yes, sir,” she choked out.
“Good. Thanks. If it matters, sometimes I want to rage at the world too.”
For some reason, the quiet way that he said it made Jane’s heart pound faster. “I wish you were here. I mean, I wish there was something I could do for you.” She suddenly wondered if she’d overstepped, and added, “Mr. Dawes, sir.”
There was such a long silence that for a second Jane thought he’d already hung up on her. “Actually, there is,” he suddenly said. Jane sat straight up. Rochester opened one eye.
“I got a notification that my PO box is full. There’s a key in the false bottom of the drawer under the concierge phone. If you were willing to meet me halfway with the mail, that would be helpful.”
“No problem, sir,” she said. I want to see you too.
“I’ll text you details,” Nick said. “I was thinking around one p.m.”
“Perfect,” Jane said. “I’m supposed to be at Nana’s at three.”
“Good-bye, Jane.”
She waited for him to disconnect, but he waited for her to answer, and she said, “Good-bye.”
And then he disconnected. After the good-byes, Nick texted the address of the Hudson Kings safe house.
Bottom desk drawer, he’d said. That was pretty specific. As in, a license to go look. She climbed off the bed and walked through the kitchen, looking up at the video camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling. With a shrug, Jane put her cell phone down on the island and headed to Nick’s office. It wasn’t locked, which would have surprised her at one point, but not since she figured he would have removed anything personal. Sure enough, it was startlingly clean.
The office was a small room at the back of the apartment. It was like its own little wing. Jane opened the door and stepped inside. Oh, wow. Whoever had reinvented the rest of the rooms hadn’t stripped this one. Floor-to-ceiling built-ins housed rows of cloth- and leather-bound books. Lots of poetry, lots of classics. This was where Nick Dawes kept his romantic heart.
The desktop was nearly bare—only an unplugged mouse suggested a laptop had once lived here. Jane ran her hand across the surface and came away with a thin layer of dust. She pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk, and right on top, right in plain view where you’d see it every time you went to fetch evergreen stamps or envelopes, was a picture of a neatly dressed young woman in a white blouse and navy skirt, accessorized by a big smile, an afro pulled back from her face by a wide headband . . . and a golden retriever. A news clipping was paper-clipped to the photo.
Jane unfolded the newspaper. An obituary. Jemilla Johnson, the same woman in the photo, dead at thirty-three. Jane read the contents and then put it away without snooping around anything else in Nick’s office. Then, with tears in her eyes, she picked up her phone and checked in on Nana.
Nick pocketed his phone and headed down the hall to the war room. After hanging up with Jane, he’d stared up at the ceiling for longer than a healthy person probably should. Flynn and Chase liked to give him shit every so often about “going emo.” In this case, they’d be right. Part wrung out from all that talking and part—hell, part elated from the experience of having someone understand him on such a deep level—hell, yeah, he was fucking going emo.
I’m starting to feel like I have a real reason to fix my situation. There’s something to look forward to here, if I can work everything out with Sokolov.
Even now, walking through the Armory, pushing open the door of the war room to talk business, Nick could not get Jane out of his mind. He could not get the intensity of her drunken meltdown over his situation out of his mind. He also could not get the fragments of Jane’s body and the memory of her lacy night shorts out of his mind.
He could not ignore how much he enjoyed talking to her on the phone, when having that personal of a conversation with any other human would feel as enjoyable as dental surgery.
He could not ignore the fact that she was the only person in the world he’d told about Ms. Johnson and what she meant to him. If he didn’t tell her how she’d died and how something inside him died with her, it was only because he’d never, ever found it possible to say those words out loud. Bottom line was, he looked forward to having an excuse to call Jane MacGregor’s phone more than anything in his day.
“Hey, Nick,” Missy said. “C’mere.” Nick settled into a chair next to her. She was putting together a bunch of papers for the next team meeting.
“Rothgar hasn’t made any assignments yet, but this is seriously right up your alley. You still tight with your Wall Street buddies even though you’re technically on sabbatical?”
Nick shrugged. “I make it a point to check in with those guys. They’ve been bugging me to rejoin the drinking and whoring. So, yeah.”
Missy held up a copy of an invitation. “So, do you have an organic way of getting one of these?” Nick looked more closely. It was a party invitation from the Russian consulate. He leveled narrowed eyes on Missy. “You taking the piss?”
She gave him a look that suggested he was insane. “Not at all. Why would I do that? I just have a notion . . . two birds, one stone. If Rothgar’s cool.”
Nick blinked. “Thanks, peanut. Nice of you to think of that.”
“Do you think it will help?” Missy asked. She moistened her lips. “Listen, we’re all trying to pretend we’re not concerned, that we know you’ve got this. But do you ‘got this’?”
“I’m working on it,” Nick said.
She studied his face, clearly not satisfied with his answer. But all she said was “Just to be straight, if you call me ‘peanut’ again, you’ll be looking for your balls in the cocktail mix on top of the bar.” With that she got up and retrieved a piece of paper from the bottom of her clipboard, which she handed over. “Per last night’s request, one William Temple. CEO of a packaging company. A lot of money, some looks, no charm. Address. Resume. Bank accounts. Printer’s gone shitty, so the picture’s low-res, but you get the idea. No criminal record. Just a basic guy being an asshole to his ex-girlfriend.”
“She can do better,” Nick said.
“I think so,” Missy said, watching Nick’s face a little too closely. “But I’m kinda biased.” They both looked down at the paper in silence. “He was her boss, you know,” she added. “What a jerk.”
Nick looked for a sign that her statement meant something, but she didn’t follow up, so he thanked her and took the information to his computer. Here was a little puzzle. A small thing, an easy thing, but it had been too long since he’d put his skills—his talents—to good use. The Russian mission Roth was focused on didn’t involve too much in the way of finances at the moment, and with Nick off freelance jobs and lying lower than usual at the Armory, he realized how much he missed staying busy, using his brain.
Maybe that’s why I’m so hung up on Jane. I’m bored, I have nothing else to do, and she’s the only thing that’s going on right now. Maybe in reality it’s nothing more than that.
Right, Nick? Hell. It would’ve been nice if that were true, because the last complication he needed was to bring a woman into the middle of a life that had suddenly gone haywire.
It took him an hour to accomplish what he wanted with good old Bill Temple. Afterward, he started a new file, found himself writing “Jane MacGregor” on it, and liking the way the pen felt in his hand writing out the letters in that order until he’d made her appear under his fingertips.