I could work around here, yeah. Assuming this wasn’t just some recruiter’s office, or … Nerves surfaced again, and got shoved down. Come on, I chided myself, hoisting my bag more firmly over my shoulder, you faced off against a cave dragon when you were nineteen … how much more difficult could this be?
I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer to that, actually.
Pushing the appropriate intercom button in the foyer got me buzzed in through the lobby doors. There was no camera lens visible, so either they were really trusting, or they were using current to watch the door. I couldn’t sense anything, but that could just mean that it was subtle—meaning well-done. The office was on the top floor, just to the right as I came out of the elevator. From the hallway, it looked as though there were two office suites on each side. I went to the correct door, marked by a brass 7-C, and turned the handle.
Walking into the office itself was reassuring; the space was clean, well lit, and surprisingly large. It was also filled with people.
All right, four other people. Three guys and another woman, seated on what looked like almost-comfortable upholstered chairs. None of the usual waiting-room coffee tables filled with out-of-date magazines, thank god. In fact, no coffee table at all, although there was a coffee machine and a bunch of mugs on a counter against the far wall, along with what looked like a working sink and a mini fridge. Nobody else was drinking coffee, although one of the guys had an oversize travel mug with him.
I let a flutter of current rise, and it got one, two, three, four equally polite touches back in response. Everyone here was a Talent, nobody was masking, and nobody was going to make a fuss about it. The fact that there were other people there was both worrying—competition for the job—and comforting—it probably wasn’t a setup or sideways attack on J after all. But that left the question: what the hell was it? I had no idea what the percentage of Talent was to the entire human population, but even in New York it had to be single digits. This was either deliberate selection, or a massive coincidence.
Based on the backlash last night, I wasn’t counting on coincidence.
I lifted my hand in greeting. “Hi.”
“Hello.” The woman responded first, giving me a once-over that reminded me eerily of my old junior-high math teacher. Not that this woman was old or stern or anything, just … assessing, that was the word. Tall, blond, and cool, with curves that could probably stop a truck. I let my eyes linger, I admit it. “I’m Sharon. That’s Nick.” She pointed to the one with the travel mug, a dark-skinned moose of a guy who barely fit into his armchair. He nodded, his expression not changing from one of resigned boredom. If he hadn’t played football at some point, maybe even college level, I’d tear up my people-watching skills and eat them without sauce. So, was he muscle, or was there something in the brainpan, too?
“That’s Pietr.” She pointed that finger at the second guy in line, a slender guy in khakis and pale blue button-down shirt matched to a screamingly expensive tie, and with a profile that would make a classical sculpture cry in envy. He was almost pretty, with skin as pale as mine, but something about the way he held himself kept the impression in check; like a serpent—shiny, but not cuddly. He met my gaze evenly, his pale gray eyes possibly the sweetest things I’d seen in weeks, and a smile flickered and was gone. Oh, he was trouble, you could tell it right away. And not all good trouble, either.
“And that’s Nick, too.”
No problem telling them apart—if NickOne was a jock, then NickTwo was a nerd. Short and scrawny, brown hair and brown eyes, and totally unimpressive in the same kind of khakis Pietr was wearing, but a less expensive-looking shirt and tie. NickTwo was the kind of guy you’d either ignore … or pick first for your team. I didn’t know which yet, but I was suspecting the latter. That probably meant that NickOne had brains, too, because whatever this gig was, I was starting to get a feeling they weren’t hiring for sheer meat-power.
They were all dressed more formally than I was, but only Sharon looked like she actually belonged in an office, with her tailored blue skirt and suit jacket, and stylish, low-heeled pumps. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, or it was applied so well you couldn’t tell, and with simple gold jewelry on her fingers and in her ears, she could have just come from a meeting where she wasn’t serving the coffee. She was also, I guessed, older than the rest of us, by anywhere from five to ten years, so make her maybe thirty.
“I’m Bonnie. You guys all summoned by a nameless message on your answering machine?”
Four nods; obviously they’d exchanged more than names before I got there.
“Anyone know what this is all about?”
Four headshakes.
“Great.” Talkative bunch. “Anyone want some coffee?”
Nobody did. “All they have is skim milk,” NickTwo warned me, and I nodded. Fine by me, so long as it wasn’t powdered nondairy crap. I went to the counter and pulled out a mug, pouring a dose of black tarry stuff I wouldn’t feed a rat, and adding as much sugar and milk to it as I could, to try to make it palatable. Didn’t really help, but it was something to do.
Sharon went back to her newspaper, and NickOne stared into space, as if he was having some in-depth conversation with space aliens. That left NickTwo and Pietr as possible conversationalists. I sat on the only remaining chair, balanced my mug of coffee on my knee, and waited. Time passed. Finally, bored out of my skull, I turned to Pietr on my left. “So why are you here?”
“My parole officer said I needed to prove I’d gone on a job interview, to keep from going back to jail.”
NickTwo blinked—I guess they hadn’t gotten around to that topic of conversation yet—but Pietr looked dead serious, so he was either dead serious, or a better joker than I could ever manage. Or, possibly, both.
“Seriously?” NickTwo asked, his brown eyes going wide and kidlike in awe.
“For serious, yes.” Then he cracked a smile, and shook his head. “Nah. But it was strongly suggested to me by persons of importance that I get a job to keep me out of trouble. So when this call came I figured, what the hell.”
“I think they’d need a lot more than a job to keep you out of trouble,” NickTwo said, leaning back in his chair with a vaguely disgruntled look. Looked as though I wasn’t the only one to have pegged Pietr straightaway.
He didn’t take offense—just the opposite, actually. “You’re probably right. What’s your excuse for being here?”
NickTwo shrugged, his skinny arms rising in a very Gallic shrug. “I graduated, got a part-time job that pays pretty well, doesn’t eat my life … and it’s boring the hell out of me. The message I got said I’d find this of interest. So …. I’m waiting for them to interest me.”
“Same here,” Sharon said, raising her head from the newspaper without even pretending that she hadn’t been eavesdropping. “I’m a paralegal. Good money, no future, boring as hell. My message told me that, if I wanted to stop wasting my life, to show up here, at this time.” She folded the newspaper and put it on the floor next to her chair. “How ‘bout you, big guy?”
NickOne blinked and came back to us. “Nifty.”
“What?”
“My teammates call me Nifty.”
I mentally patted myself on the back. Teammates, yep. Point to me. And ohmahgawd and holy shit. “You’re Nifty Lawrence.” I didn’t mean for my voice to squeak, but it did anyway. I’d dated a guy in college who was totally into football, not the pros but the college games, and Nifty Lawrence was supposed to be hot enough for the first round of the draft when he graduated, which would have been last year. “Hands like a god, could catch anything on the field, including low-flying seagulls,” my ex had claimed. So why the hell was he here, instead of sweating out the coaching appraisals and counting his cash?
“I am.” He looked sort of embarrassed by that fact, and tugged at the sleeve of his navy jacket as though he’d just realized he was wearing it and wondered how that happened. “And before you ask, I looked around, and decided that maybe just being good enough to go pro wasn’t reason to do it. I mean, I’m good but I didn’t love it. Getting my MBA and finding a corner office somewhere seemed smarter than spending five or ten years getting my head knocked to the turf. Only it takes money to pay for grad school, even with loans. So, I need a job, too.”
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.
