No Safety in Numbers (10 page)

“Carvajal!” Mr. Seveglia’s hand waved Marco into the manager’s cramped office. “Can I sign you up for an extra shift?”

Marco switched off the monitor, hid the receiver in the bottom of the host stand, and approached. “Of course, sir,” he said. He could use the extra cash, given that he needed a new bike thanks to Mike the Moron.

“My man,” Mr. Seveglia said, patting Marco on the arm.

Of course, the extra work would cut into his stakeout time. He needed a map of the ventilation system. Maybe if he broke into the janitorial offices during his next break…

“Marco.” It was Trish, the bitchy hostess.

“Patricia.”

“Some girl at table fifteen asked for you.”

This was unprecedented. Marco was not good with people. Especially his peers. His peers tended to be assholes.

He glanced around the corner and saw that table fifteen was occupied by an old lady, a little kid, and the girl from the police cruiser.
Shay
.

Last night he’d blathered on like some drunk moron.
Now she expected him to talk with her again. He sighed. At least she was pretty.

He stalked over to her bench seat. “You wanted to talk?”

She looked relieved to see him. “Marco, right?”

Her grandmother said something in a foreign language—not Spanish. The little girl laughed. Shay blushed and made a face at the little girl—Marco assumed that they were sisters.

“Sorry,” Shay said. “My grandmother doesn’t speak any English.” She seemed to brace herself slightly, as if she’d borne the brunt of sarcastic comments at her grandmother’s lack of fluency. Perhaps they had more in common than Marco had thought.

“My grandmother’s lived here for thirty years and speaks less than ten words of English,” he said.

Shay’s face brightened. “So you know what it’s like?”

“Shopping with her outside of her neighborhood in the Bronx can be described as a cultural experience at best.” Marco ventured a smile. He was not attractive—his sisters had dubbed him scarecrow for his lankiness, and his mother often said that he’d grow into his features, meaning
sorry you’re hideous now
—but he looked better when he smiled.

“So how did you two meet?” the sister asked in a sing-songy, playground-taunt voice. Marco responded viscerally to the tone.

“Can you show me where the bathrooms are?” Shay interjected, eyes flicking toward the sign like she knew where they were and just wanted to get away from the table.

“This way,” Marco said, stepping as far from the sister as possible.

“Running off with yet
another
boy?” the sister mocked.

Shay flashed her sister a withering glare and followed Marco around the corner. Once hidden from her family’s view, she slumped into the nearest empty chair and dropped her head onto the tabletop.

“How can you seem so normal?” she said. “Knowing what we know.” Her voice was muffled by her folded arms.

“What, that we’re caught in a death trap?”

Shay glanced up at Marco like he’d bitten her. He decided to holster his usual mode of response. He wanted to talk to this girl.

“Having the job makes it easier,” he said, sitting opposite her. “Keeps my mind off things.” He would not say anything about his spy operation.

“My job isn’t helping me at all.” She waved her hand up, then let it flop back onto her arm.

“Job?” Marco asked.

“Taking care of my grandmother and sister,” Shay said. “My grandmother’s diabetic. She needs insulin shots. And my sister is just, well.” Shay looked at him, eyebrows raised. “You have a little sister?”

“I’m the little brother, so you’ll get no sympathy from me.”

Shay smiled and in that moment, Marco would have sworn that she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen—in magazines, movies, anywhere.

“There were cops in the food court asking about sick people,” she continued. “Have the cops come through here?”

“No cops,” Marco said. He hadn’t seen a cop since being let out of the squad car. The four guys who first arrived
on the scene had grilled him for a few hours, but had finally accepted that Marco was not some lone bomber looking for publicity by ratting out his own terrorist attack.

“People pointed at my grandmother,” Shay said. She stared at the wall. “I had to get her away from there. Why are the cops asking about sick people?”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Marco said, trying to bring back that glowing smile. “The cops were probably just making a routine check.” He didn’t want to upset her more by telling her that if it was anthrax, Grandma would be dead in forty-eight hours.

“Yeah,” she said, obsessively running her nail across the table. “I guess. But we
are
being quarantined; that means something.”

“Probably just bureaucratic bullshit. They’ll let us out soon.” An awkward silence descended. “You go to West Nyack?” he asked, taking a stab into the discursive darkness.

“No, Stonecliff.”

“I didn’t think so,” he said. “I’d have noticed you.”

Shay gave him a raised-eyebrow look like she could smell him coming from a mile away. Was he actually flirting?

“You like it there?” he said.

“We just moved here,” she said. “Figures I move somewhere just in time to end up in a terrorist attack. Do you think whoever did it is still in the mall?”

“Sure. The guy probably planted the bomb, then went shoe shopping.” He just couldn’t turn off the sarcasm—Shay did not look amused. He forged ahead. “Where’d you move from?”

“Jersey,” she said, without adding more. “Why hasn’t the bomb blown up already?”

“Maybe it did and we’re all dead,” he said.

“Heaven’s a bit of a disappointment.”

“Yeah, and the food sucks.”

She smiled. She got his gallows humor. He felt suddenly grateful for having been trapped in the squad car for all of yesterday.

“I can’t believe we’re joking about this,” she said, sounding more relieved than angry.

“Ha!” he said in a fake accent. “I laugh in the face of death!” He felt giddy, talking so much.

“I knew it,” she said. “You’re a theater nerd.”

“Film nerd,” he corrected. “Different species entirely.”

“Too bad.” She flipped her hair, exposing the faded brown lines of leaves curving around her collarbone. “I’m a theater nerd.”

He felt a great urge to run his fingertips along the lines of those leaves. “Maybe we’re not so different after all.” It took all the forces of his will to keep from touching her.

The mall speaker beeped and it was announced that cots were available in the open spaces of the first floor. Marco wondered if Shay might be more comfortable bunking in a booth with him. He wondered how to broach the offer.

“Shaila!”

The sister’s voice shattered the moment. Shay jumped from her chair, banging her knee, and bolted around the corner. Marco followed. The grandmother was slumped forward in her seat. Shay slid in beside her and began rubbing her shoulder. She mumbled something in her language,
but that old lady did not need to talk. If it really was diabetes, she needed insulin. Or juice. Frida had diabetes, so Marco knew it was one of the two.

Marco ran into the kitchen and poured some OJ from the dispenser. He brought it back to the table.

“See if she needs juice,” he said, pushing Nani upright. The skin over her cheekbones was dark as if it were bruised.

Shay leaned back, allowing him to reach over and dribble juice into Grandma’s slack mouth. Nothing.

“Why isn’t it working?” the sister whined.

Time for Plan B.

Marco stood on a chair. “Excuse me!” he shouted. “There is a patron in this restaurant in need of insulin. Does anyone have insulin?”

The room went silent. People looked at each other like they weren’t sure whether insulin was a bad thing to have. When some people refused to look at him, he decided those were the ones who probably had it. He hopped off the chair and raced to the nearest coward.

“If you have insulin, give it to me.” He pointed to where Shay sat with her grandmother. “That woman could die.”

The man hunched his shoulders over his triple-decker burger. “I don’t have any insulin, so bug off.”

Marco felt the old anger well up inside. He knew this guy had insulin. The jerk just wouldn’t help.

Before he had a chance to explode all over this asshole, a young woman stepped forward. “Here,” she said, handing him a vial and needle. “I got some this morning from the guards.”

Marco took a deep breath. “Thanks,” he said. He looked
down at the jerk, who was stuffing a bite of burger into his mouth. “At least some people aren’t entirely selfish.”

He raced back to Shay’s table. “Get up!” he shouted. Shay slid out of his way. Marco jammed the needle into the bottle and withdrew the dose Frida took—he had no idea what this old lady’s scrip said, but hell if they had a lot of time to figure that out.

Marco knelt next to the old lady, lifted the flimsy fabric of her wrap, and jammed the needle into her upper arm. He watched her face, waiting for a sign that she’d revived. But then someone grabbed his shoulders and pulled him away from the woman.

Marco was dropped into the next booth by a person—man, woman, who knew?—in a blue, plastic hazmat suit. Some people in the restaurant screamed. Marco glanced around for where Shay was. She and her sister were being held by two security guards.

“Everyone, stay calm,” the hazmat person said, sounding disturbingly like Darth Vader. “I am from a federal emergency medical team. We will evacuate this woman for treatment.”

A fork dropped onto a plate. Otherwise, the room was silent. Marco was fairly sure everyone’s brains were processing the same thought: Why was a dude in a hazmat suit in the Grill’n’Shake? But Marco knew exactly why this person was in a suit. He was from the Outside; he had not been contaminated by the bomb.

Shay screamed. “No!” She wriggled in the guard’s grasp. “She’s just diabetic!”

A guard rolled in a gurney and, with the others’ help, hefted the grandmother onto it. They pushed it down the
aisle and out of the restaurant. Shay and her sister stumbled, sobbing, after them.

Once the medical team cleared the entryway, people went back to eating as if nothing had happened. Amazing, the herd’s ability to forget the disturbance of their peace. Some patrons even congratulated Marco on saving the old lady’s life. How blind were they? Grandma was in some serious shit—exactly what kind of shit was the mystery in need of solving.

Marco found Mr. Seveglia in the kitchen interrogating the line cook about supplies.

“Sir?” Marco asked. “The girl who left with that old lady is a friend. Can I go see what happened to her?”

Mr. Seveglia glanced up at the clock above the freezer door. “We got the dinner rush starting in five,” he said. “Get your tables cleaned and ready. You can find her when you’re done with your shift.”

Marco felt that anger inside him once more, but tamped it down. He couldn’t blow up at the manager. He needed his job. He’d try to find Shay after closing, around eleven. It wasn’t like she could go anywhere.

MONDAY