My opinion of his brains went up, considerably.
“So what about you?” he asked me. “Boredom, or desperation, or something else entirely?”
“All of the above, I think. A whim? I was curious to see what the deal was.” I looked around, suddenly struck by a thought. “You guys all had messages—did they all say 2 p.m.?”
“Yeah,” Nick said, and Nifty nodded. Sharon frowned, obviously thinking the same thing I was, but Pietr was the one who said it. “Who schedules five interviews all at the same time?”
“More than that,” Nick said, pulling out a battered old-fashioned windup pocket watch and looking at it. “It’s almost 2:20, and we’re the only ones here.”
Four heads swiveled as though we were pulled on a string, to look at the closed door behind us, leading into the rest—I presumed—of the office.
The door remained closed.
“Anyone know the protocol of how long you wait before you assume you’ve been blown off?” I asked, and like we’d rehearsed it or something, the four of us looked at Sharon, who was the only one who seemed as if she might have a clue.
“What, I’m mother hen now?”
“Cluck, cluck,” Nick said, unabashed when she glared at him. Nifty laughed, and she split the glare between the two of them. Oh, Miss Blonde did not like being mocked, even gently.
I’m not much as peacemaker—I never got the hang of being soothing, and while I can dance around the truth I’m crap at lying—but it looked as if it was gonna be my job anyway, just to keep things nonviolent. “Look, I’m straight out of college, don’t know a damned thing, and I know Nifty’s the same, considering he’s only a year older than I am. I don’t know what Pietr’s background is, but getting anything straightforward out of him is impossible. I know that already, after ten minutes.” He made a seated, ironic bow in response. “You and Nick, on the other hand, already have jobs, so you must’ve gone through this successfully before, and I’d trust your opinion over Nick’s on something like this.”
“Hey!” Nick sounded like he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to take offense or not. I did say peacemaking wasn’t my thing, right? But it seemed to work, because I could practically see the hackles under Sharon’s chignon subside, and she gave a grudging nod.
“By now, I would expect someone to at least check on us, see who was here, maybe call one of us in,” she said. “Unless they have this room on closed-circuit camera … “
“They don’t. I checked.” Nick sounded quite certain of that. “And anyway, the bunch of us in one small room, nervous or anticipating, and a seeing-eye camera? Would last about ten minutes.”
“Speak for yourself,” I told him. “Some of us have actual control.”
“I don’t,” Nifty admitted. “Local stations stopped interviewing me before a game, after their cameras kept fritzing.”
Probably another reason why he decided against a career in pro football. He wasn’t going to make it as a sportscaster, either, with that handicap. Corporate America was definitely a better bet.
“So by now,” I said, “someone should have come out to count noses?”
Sharon nodded. That’s what I had thought. My nerves were starting to hum again. Was anyone even back there, behind the closed door I’d been assuming was the main office? If not, then who had let us in? “And nobody’s had the slightest urge to get up and walk out, despite the fact that we don’t know crap-all, and this mysterious voice has kept us waiting almost half an hour already without any explanation?”
“I thought about it,” Sharon admitted. “I’m still thinking about it. But … “
“Yeah,” I said. “But.” But we were all there, anyway.
The five of us sat there in silence, uncomfortable now, for another ten minutes. The time ticked by in my head, each tick louder than the last, and finally I’d had enough.
Stubborn, I am, yes. Also curious enough to kill a dozen cats, and not really good with the patience thing. When I think about something, I have to follow it all the way through to the end.
“Hell with this.” I put my mug of coffee—still undrunk, because it really was disgusting—on the floor and stood up. “I want to know what the deal is.”
“What, you’re just going to barge in there?” Nick looked somewhat taken aback, but Pietr had a gleam in those eyes that made me think he’d been about three seconds behind me. He liked trouble, yeah. Being in, or causing, or both, I didn’t know. I had a tiny tremor of precog that I was going to find out, though.
“Yep,” I said in response to Nick’s question, and I marched my boots over to the door, knocked once soundly, and waited.
No answer. Not even the sound of someone shuffling around on the other side. That wasn’t good.
I knocked again, and then tried the door handle, fully expecting it to be locked.
It wasn’t.
My current swirled once, deep inside me, then went still. I could Translocate out of here now, if I wanted to. I could yelp for J, ask his opinion. I could …
I pushed the door open and stepped inside, hearing at least one person get up and move behind me. Nice to know someone had my back. I was betting on it being Pietr.
The door opened up into a larger room, done up like your basic office—beige carpeting and walls painted to match—and furnished with a large wooden desk with a leather chair behind it, two upholstered visitors’ chairs, a bunch of framed inspirational-looking prints on the walls, and basic white blinds on the windows, two of them, on the far wall. There was one sickly looking plant I immediately wanted to rescue, and a couple of photos on the desk, facing away from us, but not much personality otherwise.
The body sprawled facedown on the floor next to the desk didn’t contribute much to the room’s decor, either.
four
“Holy shit.” The words came from my throat the moment they hit my brain. Maybe not the most articulate of reactions, and I don’t have much of a filter, sometimes, but … hello? Dead body. A little freaked-out. I think I could be forgiven.
Sharon looked over my shoulder to see what I was reacting to, and then slid past me while I was still standing there, trying to take it all in. She knelt by the guy with careful precision and lifted his wrist, I guess to try for a pulse. I almost snorted. Not much point; even from the doorway I could tell he was dead. You didn’t lie facedown that way if you were just sleeping, not even if you’d passed out. Trust me, I’ve seen a lot of people passed out.
“Holy shit,” I said again.
There was a dead body in the office. We’d been sitting there, just talking, drinking coffee, and there had been a dead body in there all that time.
“I guess the interviews are canceled?” a voice said in my ear, and I dug an elbow into Nick’s side. Not that it wasn’t funny, in a sick way, but it didn’t really seem … respectful. Or something, I don’t know.
Did I mention the freaked-out part? Dead body. There. My current was very still, deep inside me, and I stirred it just to reassure myself that it hadn’t suddenly disappeared. I didn’t carry a lot of mojo around with me—why would I?—but touching it was like having a blankie or a stuffed bear; the need for comfort was a natural human instinct. I’d place even odds everyone else in the room was doing exactly the same thing. Like checking for your wallet after someone else’s been robbed: maybe stupid, but almost impossible to stop yourself.
Nifty moved past us, too, nowhere near as smoothly or gently as Sharon, and that made me think maybe we should get out of the way—or at least stop standing in the doorway before someone