Page 39 of Blind Spot
“Same crew. Kieran’s in. Pratt and Sully. I talked to Rafe, and he might come, which means we have to teach him the whole thing. He’ll lose, but that’s fine.” A slight pause. “Do you think Rook would want to come?”
There it was. Heath was asking me questions about Rook again, like there was a reason I would know something about his preferences and his daily schedule.
Rook didn’t go to laser tag. He didn’t go to team dinners unless they were mandatory. Everyone on the planet knew Rook stayed home when he could.
Heath was holding the door open again. He wouldn’t ask directly, but he had it ready in case I wanted to walk through.
I looked at the note on the island again.BACK BY LUNCH.
“I doubt it,” I said.
“Yeah, figured. Tuesday then. Wear something you can move in. And Varga—watch the corner by the fog machine.”
“I will end Pratt.”
“Sure you will.”
He hung up. I set the phone next to the note, and the kitchen was quiet again. I sipped my coffee and waited.
Chapter ten
Rook
When I left a note, I always wrote a second line:gone to the rinkorpicking up takeout.Varga read those the way other people read tea leaves, looking for the meaning underneath. I told myself leaving it off would give him less to worry about.
So I capped the marker, set the coffeemaker to keep the pot warm for him, and placed the BACK BY LUNCH note near it.
I’d texted Kovac at four that morning, lying on my back in the dark with Varga breathing slow beside me.
Rook:Are you in the city this week? I’d rather do this part in person.
He’d answered inside four minutes.
Kovac:this morning if you can swing it, whenever suits you
He named a coffee shop in the West Loop, and I said nine. That left me with five hours to fill.
For two hours, I tried to sleep. It didn’t work. By the time I climbed out of bed, Varga sprawled nearly spreadeagle, taking up most of the space.
I left the house and drove. I took the Edens and then the exit toward the river, the same as any practice morning. It was an off day at the rink, which meant I’d be able to skate in relative quiet.
I geared up alone in a room built for twenty, hearing the scrape of my skate guards loud against the concrete. I stepped onto a fresh sheet of ice nobody had touched since the last Zamboni sweep.
I took the first lap slow, and built up speed on the second. By the third, my legs were into it—inside edge, outside edge, and the slight corrections your feet make without thought. I worked the blue line. I did pivots and edge work, hard stops that threw snow first one way and then the other.
I didn’t have a puck. It wasn’t necessary. I wanted the cold in my lungs, the burn in my thighs, and a mind clear of distractions.
It worked for about ten minutes. Then I thought about the phone.
Last night, on the couch, Varga had held it up to me with that open, pleased look—somebody wants to write about you and they came to me—and I’d looked at the screen and seen Kovac’s name on a message that wasn’t sent to me.
He’d gone around me. He texted Varga directly.
I timed my next stop wrong. The edge caught, and I had to put a hand down to stay on my feet. I stayed there a second, bent over my knees, breathing harder than the skating explained.
After one more slow lap, I got off the ice and showered. I barely felt the hot water and dressed on autopilot. Looking at myphone, I saw it was 8:30. My meeting was at nine, and the drive west would take twenty minutes if the Loop was in a good mood.
I left to meet the Daniel Kovac I’d feared for six years.
