The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [7]
Some of this information was important. Most of it was not. But if English Judson were the person Truman was waiting for, as Canada suspected he was, then her stakeout would be over as soon as the valet took temporary custody of that Porsche and Judson glanced around the uncrowded restaurant for confirmation that he was being noticed. If he spotted her, he would take this meeting somewhere else.
After placing a pile of singles next to her half-finished Diet Coke and lemon, she walked to the ladies’ room where she washed her hands, counting slowly to ten as the warm water rinsed away liquid soap. She smelled her wet fingertips—Rosemary—and looking into the mirror, she assessed the young woman she saw there. She counted that woman’s friends, which took less time than washing her hands. She counted her failed romances, which took slightly longer. She counted the one-night stands—longer still. She counted her personal and professional prospects, which took literally no time at all.
“NAH-duh,” she whispered.
For all the details Nada’s remarkable senses were able to track, the most salient aspect of the world she observed was that she was not in it. For this reason, she often found mirrors comforting. Leaning this close to a big mirror, her breath fogging and refogging the glass, she could make the universe small. In the mirror she could create a world inhabited by no one but Canada Gold.
A small flat screen inside the mirror murmured incessantly, as all televisions had for several weeks now, about the plane crashes in Florida. Two airliners, a United flight destined for Houston and an American flight en route to Boston, leaving within minutes of each other from the Fort Lauderdale airport, had crashed shortly after takeoff, their overlapping debris fields providing shocking panoramas for news helicopters and widespread nightmares for TSA investigators neck-deep in the swamp. Every airport in the nation had been shut down for twenty-four hours and no flights were planned out of Fort Lauderdale until they pieced together the still-smoldering puzzle on the ground. Saturation news stories were a special torture to Nada, the minutiae of tragedy replayed over and over, indelible details scribbled on top of themselves again and again and again.
After her father’s murder, she saw a therapist, who had asked about her special gift. Nada replied that it was more like an unforeseen consequence. A side effect. A superpower. Even now, less than a mile away in her new and almost empty apartment, somewhere among her few possessions, was a treasured reprint of The Amazing Spider-Man #1. Her own story wasn’t unlike that of Peter Parker, who was bitten by a radioactive arachnid and subsequently discovered he possessed odd and useful abilities. She and Peter were both afflicted when they were in their teens, and Nada’s spider still had its teeth stuck into the back of her head.
And like Peter, her powers came packaged with complications.
She calculated the time. She had followed Phillip Truman into the restaurant at 11:46, meaning the reservation was probably for noon. Another thing she knew about Judson: He was never late. She had been in this bathroom exactly five and a half minutes, and by now Judson should have taken a seat across from his client, with his back to the bar. She dried her hands with a thick paper towel.
Nada closed the restroom door with a soft click and returned to her chair. Judson was seated as she’d hoped, but he was facing her, settled into the booth next to his client. Like a lover, she thought, perhaps only because Judson would find the idea so offensive.
He spotted her and stretched his thin lips into a delighted line as he pulled his napkin from the table and dropped it across his tiny lap. Exposed and defeated, Nada clutched the icy glass that held her drink and raised it to him in sarcastic surrender.
Judson leaned into Truman, his face square to Nada’s.
“Have you been talking on the phone since you arrived?”
“No,” the rapist replied.
“Good.” Judson pointed toward the bar. “You see that attractive young