Paul Griffin - Burning Blue

“Do you think you’ll catch him, her, whom ever?”

“Not my case.”

“Whose is it?”

“Can’t say.” Her phone beeped. She checked it and put it back down on the table. “How is your dad?” she said.

I shrugged. “Fine.”

She nodded as she stared at me just a hair too long. Suddenly the diner was way too hot. Barrone sipped her coffee. “Drop a hello on the old man for me.”

“Definitely.” I pretended my phone beeped, checked it, put it on the table. The lights flickered, except they didn’t. I was dizzy. “I have to pee,” I said.

She smiled. “You’re not under arrest. . yet.”

We all laughed. Yeah, so funny. I went to the bathroom and shut myself in. The zigzag lightning. The aura. Everything going fish-eye. I sat on the floor in case I seized. The aura didn’t always mean an attack was coming. Most times it just came on its own.

It passed.

I splashed my face with water I wished were colder and hung out in there for about as long I would have needed if I really had to pee bad. When I came out, Barrone was looking at my hair. I realized only then I’d run my wet hands over it. I wondered if this was some kind of tell, a show of my guilt. Was she onto my hacking?

Pete was standing now. “Thanks for your time, Detective,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

“Pete said if I give you twenty bucks you’ll get a haircut.”

“Might just blow it on meth too.”

“Trying to build a sheet, huh?”

“It’s tough, but I’ll get there.”

She winked. “What’d I tell you about not trying to charm a cop?” Then to Pete: “I like this kid.” Back to me: “Don’t forget your phone.”

“I’m an idiot.”

“And don’t forget to tell your old man Jessica Barrone said what’s up.”

I nodded and hoped my smile didn’t look as fake as it felt. She was really hammering this say hi to Pop thing.

When we were outside, Pete said, “Come on back to the office. I have those Velcro tennis paddles.”

“I gotta go.”

“Don’t be such a stranger. I mean it. You look good in a newsroom.”

“Threatening to make me your intern for real?”

“Make my coffee light and sweet, shine my shoes, pick up my dry cleaning, all for not a single penny: What 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.”

“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.”