The Book of Fate - Brad Meltzer [18]
In return, Nico just had to wait. The Three had told him so on the day he pulled the trigger. Redemption was coming. Just wait. It’d been eight years. Nothing compared to eternal salvation.
Alone in the restroom, Nico closed the toilet seat and kneeled down to say a prayer. His lips mouthed the words. His head bobbed up and down slightly . . . sixteen times . . . always sixteen. And then he closed his left eye on the word Amen. With a tight squeeze of his fingertips, he plucked an eyelash from his closed eye. Then he plucked another. Still down on his knees, he took the two lashes and placed them on the cold white slab of the closed toilet seat. The surface had to be white—otherwise, he wouldn’t see it.
Rubbing the nail of his right pointer finger against the grout in the floor, he filed his nail to a fierce, fine point. As he leaned in close like a child studying an ant, he used the sharpened edge of his nail to push the two eyelashes into place. What the doctors took away, he could always put back. As The Three said, it’s all within him. And then, as Nico did every morning, he slowly, tenderly gave a millimeter’s push and proved it. There. One eyelash perfectly intersecting with the other. A tiny cross.
A thin grin took Nico’s lips. And he began to pray.
7
Palm Beach, Florida
See that redheaded mummy in the Mercedes?” Rogo asks, motioning out the window at the shiny new car next to us. I glance over just in time to see the fifty-something redhead with the frozen face-lift and an equally stiff (and far more fashionable) straw hat that probably costs as much as my crappy little ten-year-old Toyota. “She’d rather die than call,” he adds.
I don’t respond. It doesn’t slow him down. “But that guy driving that midlife crisis?” he adds, pointing at the balding man in the cherry-red Porsche that pulls out around us. “He’ll call me right after he gets the ticket.”
It’s Rogo’s favorite game: driving around, trying to figure out who’ll be a potential client. As Palm Beach’s least-known but most aggressive speeding ticket lawyer, Rogo is the man to call for any moving violation. As my roommate and closest friend since eighth grade, when he and his mom moved from Alabama to Miami, he’s also the only person I know who loves his job even more than the President does.
“Oooh, and that girl right there?” he asks as he motions across two lanes of traffic to the sixteen-year-old with braces driving a brand-new Jeep Cherokee. “Pass the bread, ’cause that’s my butter!” Rogo insists in a wet lick of a Southern accent. “New car and braces? Choo, choo—here comes the gravy train!”
He slaps me on the shoulder like we’re watching a rodeo.
“Yee-hah,” I whisper as the car climbs up the slight incline of Royal Park Bridge and across the Intracoastal Waterway. On both sides of us, the morning sun ricochets off glossy waves. The bridge connects the communities of working-class West Palm Beach with the millionaire haven known as Palm Beach. And as the car’s tires rumble and we cross to the other side, the well-populated, fast-food-lined Okeechobee Boulevard gives way to the perfectly manicured, palm-tree-lined Royal Palm Way. It’s like leaving a highway rest stop and entering Oz.
“Do you feel rich? ’Cause I feel silver dollar!” Rogo adds, soaking up the surroundings.
“Again, yee-hah.”
“Don’t get all sarcastic,” Rogo warns. “If you’re not nice, I’m not gonna let you drive me to work for the next week while