Shifting (18 page)

24

The streets were unusually empty for midafternoon and the desert sun blazed down on the top of my head and seared my bare arms. Bridger couldn't drive me to work because he had to help Alex with some sort of crisis, and I didn't want to bother Mrs. Carpenter for a ride.

Even though I was sweating like a sinner at confession when I walked into the air-conditioned restaurant, I had a smile on my face.

“Maggie Mae,” José said as I entered the kitchen. “Have you been out in the sun? You look rosy! Healthy!” He waggled his bushy eyebrows. “You look like you're in love!”

My face started to burn and it had nothing to do with the fact that I'd gotten a sunburn walking to work. He chuckled and started singing in Spanish, something about
amor.

Naalyehe put his dishcloth down and peered at me over his shoulder. His eyes focused on my wrist, on the bracelet, and he frowned. “I need to talk to you,” he said, voice barely audible over José's opera. I followed Naalyehe out the back door and into the rear parking lot. Even standing in the shadow of the restaurant, the air was searing hot.

“Everything okay?” I asked, wondering how twenty seconds ago I was blushing about an accusation of being in love, but now felt like snakes were wrestling in my stomach.

“That man,” Naalyehe said quietly. “Remember the man who was looking for you?”

A chill ran down my spine. “Yeah, I do. Is he back?”

“He's been in the local jail. A deputy mentioned it today at lunch.”

“Really? Jail? Did you catch his name?”

Naalyehe nodded. “I also got a picture.” He pulled a three-by-five photograph out of his back pocket and handed it to me.

It was a mug shot, a man standing by a ruler, holding a black plaque that had writing on it. I studied the words but couldn't make them out.

“The deputy gave this to me to see if you might recognize the man. His name is Rolf Heinrich. When he was arrested, the police did a thorough background check and found an outstanding warrant.”

“Rolf who?” I asked, squinting and studying the unfamiliar face. I was absolutely certain I had never seen the man before.

“Heinrich,” Naalyehe said more slowly. “He is American, but his name is foreign.”

“Hmm. I have no clue who he is,” I said, handing the picture back with unsteady fingers. I thought of the afternoon I'd been mountain biking with Bridger, when someone had been in the woods. I opened my mouth to tell Naalyehe about it, but then thought better of the idea. No use worrying the man.

Back inside, I put on an apron.

“Business has been slow,” José warned as I pinned my name tag into place. “But any day now the tourists will be coming to town and it will pick back up.”

“Well, thank goodness for that,” I said distractedly and hurried to the dining room.

Bridger came in for dinner that night—alone—though he came earlier than his normal eight o'clock. It was half past five when he strode through the door like a restless wind and sat down in the booth by the window.

“You're early and you forgot your shadow,” I said, instantly aware that my hair was slipping out of its ponytail and framing my face in a wispy mess. I tucked the loose strands behind my ears and smiled. He smiled, but it hardly touched his eyes. “Everything all right?”

“No. My dad called this afternoon. We had a huge fight.” The muscles in his jaw clenched and released. I wanted to put my hands on his face and steal away the tension. His eyes met mine and anger was replaced with concern. “I'm sorry. Don't worry about me. I don't deserve your worry.” He made a second, much more convincing effort at smiling.

“Are you hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Then why are you here?”

His eyes met mine and held. “I needed to get away from Katie, and I need someone to talk to.”

It took a minute for his words to make sense. When they did, I couldn't help but smile.

“Since I'm here, I might as well eat, but I need a change. How are the nachos?” That was possibly the only thing on the menu he'd never eaten.

“I've never had them. They look good, though. They're made with stone-ground blue corn.”

“That's what I want. And a Coke.”

“I'll be right back with that.”

As José had predicted earlier, business was slow. Penney and I were running the dining room. Actually only Penney was—I didn't have any customers besides Bridger, so when I brought his nachos out, I sat across the table from him. He was so consumed with something other than hunger that he didn't notice me, or the plate of food steaming beneath his nose.

“Bridger? Earth to Bridger!”

He looked at me, puzzled; then a grin split his face and wiped the worry from his eyes. “Sorry.” He looked at his food and his eyes fogged over again.

“Bridger?” He didn't respond. I rolled my eyes and stood. If he was too distracted to hold a conversation, I'd leave him alone with his thoughts.

Quick as lightning his hand shot out and grabbed my wrist. “Don't,” he said, the brooding back in his eyes.

“Don't what?” I asked.

“Please don't leave.”

I sat back down and he let go of my wrist. He passed his half-full Coke to me and leaned back with his arms folded across his chest to watch me drink.

Just then, an older couple entered the restaurant. I passed Bridger's half-empty Coke back to him and jumped up to seat them.

“What can I get you to drink?” I asked the couple as they sat down in a corner booth.

The man opened his mouth to speak, but I didn't hear the words that came out of it. My ears were muted, as if blood had pooled around the eardrum. My skin became sickly hot and clammy all at once, and I had the sudden urge to flinch. A flash of memory assailed me, of a hand with a gold class ring on the finger flying toward my face. I gasped and touched the scar in my eyebrow.

I ignored the customers staring at me as if I were a moron and strode to the kitchen. The feeling stayed with me, hot and heavy. I peered through the window on the kitchen door. The couple that'd just entered the restaurant was talking animatedly to Penney, scowling and pointing toward the kitchen. My gaze swept over the dining room and jerked to a stop on Bridger. I hardly recognized him. He sat leaning forward, as still as granite, his hands balled into fists atop the table. Only his eyes moved as they made their slow way to the kitchen door and met mine. They lingered there, devoid of all expression, and I had the sudden urge to shrink away.

A hot hand grabbed my shoulder. “What you looking at,
mamacita
?”

I practically jumped out of my skin. “Tito! You totally freaked me out. What are you doing?” I put a hand over my stuttering heart.

Tito tilted his head to the side. “Slow night. No dishes to wash.”

“Mmm,” I agreed, shrugging his damp hand off me. He leered at me and grinned. Taking a deep breath, I went back out to the dining room. Bridger was putting a chip into his mouth, totally focused on his food. If he noticed I'd come back out, he didn't acknowledge it.

As I went about work, things slowly returned to normal—no more crawling skin. Yet I could feel Bridger's preoccupied stare. He followed my every movement, and each time his restless eyes caught mine, they were filled with doubt.

After he sat at his table for an hour without taking more than two bites of food, he waved me over. “I'll pick you up later,” he said quietly, pulling car keys from his pocket.

“Are you sure you're all right?”

He shrugged and walked out of the restaurant. On the table was a crisp twenty-dollar bill. I put my hands on my hips and shook my head. Twenty dollars for an eight-dollar plate of nachos that he'd hardly eaten? I had asked Bridger to stop tipping me. Of course, he didn't listen. He always tipped me, and always too much.

My heart was heavy after he left, and the lack of customers did nothing to raise my spirits.

“Wow, nice shirt,
chica
,” Penney said during a moment when only one customer was in the restaurant. I don't know if she meant it, or if she was just trying to make small talk, because Penney never seemed interested in anyone's clothes but her own. “Where did you get it?”

I looked down at the shirt—a black, lace-trimmed short-sleeve sweater that was a little tighter than what I usually wore.

“It was Bridger's sister's.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “The jeans, too? That brand costs over one hundred dollars a pair.”

I looked at my jeans, slightly too long, with a whole new respect. “And the sandals,” I clarified.

“So are you and Bridger dating, or what? Because Maria said Walt says that Alex told him you are, but Kat told him you aren't. And you've never mentioned it. And I thought he didn't date local girls.”

“We're friends. And you can tell Maria to tell Walt to tell Alex that.”

She raised her eyebrows again. “You sure about that friend business? You and Bridger seem tighter than double-D's in a C-cup. And I see how he looks at you when he comes in for dinner—like you're the entrée … a bit more than just plain
friendly
to me. If any man ever looks at me the way Bridger looks at you, I'll kiss him so thoroughly he won't know what hit him. Because if we have chemistry, we'll be set for life.”

“It's totally not like that with Bridger and me. He made it clear that there would never be anything more than friendship between us,” I explained, but the thought of kissing him so thoroughly he wouldn't know what hit him made my breath come a little faster.

“I know what I'm talking about. I'm older than you. I've dated a lot of men, and not one of them looked at me the way he looks at you. If they had, I wouldn't be single,” Penney stated. “Believe me or not, but he is totally hot for you.”

“I wish,” I said under my breath.

“No way! You're in love with him, too!” she exclaimed, grabbing my hand.

“I try not to be,” I said stonily, wondering what I had gotten myself into. Penney had a tendency to blab gossip around the restaurant like she was a tabloid. And if she told Maria I was in love with Bridger, Maria might tell Walt. And what if Walt spilled the beans at one of our Ultimate games? “Please don't tell anyone!”

“Oh, honey. You play your side of this pretending not to care a whole lot better than Bridger does. I had no idea! And I won't breathe a word,” she said, her Spanish accent thicker than normal. She studied me for a minute. “You know, next time you're real close to him, look him right in the eyes and just lean in halfway, like you are about to kiss him. If he goes the other half, you'll know that I'm right.”

I laughed weakly.

“Tell me when it happens,” she said and hurried off to refill a drink.

At eight o'clock, José stuck his head out of the kitchen and hollered for Penney and Tito to go home. Tito strode out of the restaurant before José closed his mouth. Penney and I looked at each other and then at José.

“Magdalena hasn't spilled a single thing tonight,” he explained at our matching looks of shock. “She's gotten every order right. I think she can handle things on her own tonight.”

“That sounds good to me!” Penney said. “My back is killing me.” She slipped her feet out of her stilettos and turned to me. “Remember what I said about halfway.”

“I am sure it will be on my mind all night.”

Even with Penney gone, I never had more than two tables at a time to worry about. To kill time, I washed the front windows, wiped down chairs and booths, swept the floor, anything to make the night pass more quickly. While doing these mundane tasks, I couldn't help but glance at my watch every few minutes, counting the seconds till closing time.

“Watching time pass is watching death approach,” Naalyehe said. I looked up from the dustpan I was using, surprised to see him out of the kitchen. He tended to avoid the dining room. “If you are an orphan, what happened to your family?” That was the last thing I expected him to say.

“They all died before I was six—aunt, cousin, parents—and then I was alone. A foster child,” I said without thinking. I had told that so many times, to so many people, for so many years that it popped out of my mouth in a dainty prewrapped package.

“That man who came looking for you—he said you were a foster child. How could he know that?”

“Well, it wouldn't be hard to find out. It's not like it was a secret or anything,” I said sarcastically. “What did they arrest him for, anyway?”

Naalyehe's dark eyes twinkled. “José reported him for loitering. But the warrant I mentioned earlier is keeping him in jail.” Naalyehe began wiping a table. A table I'd wiped down five minutes earlier.

I dumped the full dustpan into the nearly empty trash can, then went back to stand beside Naalyehe. We stared at the dark night through the front window.

“So, what was his warrant for?” I asked, struggling to find anything to talk about with a man I had absolutely nothing in common with.

Naalyehe turned to me. I shrank away from the intensity in his wrinkle-lined eyes. “He was caught trying to smuggle the skin of an endangered species into America.”

“What kind of animal?”

“A cheetah.”

My blood turned to ice. “A cheetah?”

Naalyehe's gray brows furrowed. “No, not a cheetah, a tiger. A Siberian tiger. The police believe Rolf is a big-cat poacher.”

My stomach lurched. “What do you think, Naalyehe?”

“I think the police are wrong. They also found this in his car.” He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was a worn envelope with an address and stamp on it—an address I knew well. I'd lived at it for nine months. I knew the handwriting, too. It was mine.

With trembling fingers, I slid the letter out, but I already knew what it said.