Page 52 of On Fire

My head is throbbing. The meeting in Rockland went well. Everyone was so tense you could feel the anxiety though. My Unit B will cover the southern part of Main Street, parked near the fish market. Two plain cars will be parked there and radio channels will be cleared for full communications. The feds will station their own team of six undercover agents, walking the stretch of the parade path with two more at the staging areas and another four on the street with food trucks. The entire downtown would be crawling with police: some highly visible and armed, others undercover.

In my gut, I feel this is not enough.

When I pull up to the house the Lexus is there, but Nic is not. I shower with castile liquid peppermint soap, the only thing that takes the acrid smell of smoke out of hair and off of skin. Well, that and Irish Spring, but I can’t do that. It’s enough to put it in the veggie garden to keep the deer and squirrels out.

Coming down the stairs, I catch a whiff of Indian food, and then Nic steps in through the front door. He’s covered in sweat, recovering from a run, and still panting lightly. His running shorts are high and tight, his torso bare and wipes his forehead against a white and blue striped wristband.

“You okay?”

I nod.

“I heard about your day. I’m sorry. Those kids all right?”

“Yeah. How soon can you eat? I’m starving?”

He wipes his face. “Do I have time to hose off?”

By the time he makes it back downstairs, he’s toweling off his hair and I’ve reheated the food. He hangs the towel outside on a banister railing on the back porch and then lets himself back in. He’s still only wearing shorts and a tank top.

“No suit?”

He shakes his head. “I just ran sixteen miles. You?” he asks getting ready to plate my food.

I nod. I don’t think anyone’s plated food for me since I lived at home. Maybe Chloe during our lessons.

“What about you?” I ask.

“What about me, what?”

“What was your day like—other than running in ninety-degree weather.”

“I got another reaming out by Sessions.”

“What the fuck.”

He shakes his head and lifts a forkful of chicken saag. “It’s fine. He was at Weavers when I stopped in for coffee.”

I start to say something.

“It’s not worth discussing.” He gets up to grab a napkin and touches my shoulder. I must have winced.

“I’ll give you a rub down after this,” he says motioning to the plates with his fork. “Are you worried about tomorrow?”

That’s the big question isn’t it. But it doesn’t matter, and that’s my answer. “It doesn’t matter what we all think—all the worry in the world won’t change the outcome.”

“That’s exactly right. The one thing you worry about, the scenarios you go over in your head are the worst predictors of what will actually happen.”

“Well, that’s not helpful.”

“Oh, but it’s true,” he says. “Beer? I bought more. I’m just having one. I need to be in Rockland by five tomorrow morning.”

The cold beer feels good in my hand.

“It’s what we always tell clients—worrying about something that might happen is useless because you can never predict what will happen.”

I think about those poor parents who were approached outside a movie theater to find their house had burned to the ground and their twins nearly killed. They didn’t think about that when they left the house. If they did, they would never go anywhere—never do anything.

Nic forces himself into my gaze. “Hey—I can always tell when you’ve left the building. What’s going on?”