He snorted. “Like you had no doubt that I should skip the LAX connection?”
“Yes, just like that.”
“That makes me feel better. Kind of. I don’t know why.”
“I don’t know why, either. But I appreciate the vote of confidence, and—”
She stopped. She’d heard something, loud and very close to where Grady Merritt was sitting—a hard, fast noise that echoed through the cell phone’s connection. In the background, people started shouting.
An alarm went off. Then another.
“Mr. Merritt?”
He said something, a single syllable. She thought it was “God.”
“Mr. Merritt? Are you all right? Is everything okay?”
With his mouth a little too close to the microphone, he breathed, “I gotta go.”
“Wait—was I right? Is something wrong? Did something happen? Mr. Merritt? Are you okay?”
The call dropped.
Leda held the phone out and stared at it, blinking at her own reflection in the screen. She spun half a circle in her office chair, all the better to face her best friend. Then she said, “He hung up on me. I mean, I hope that’s what happened.”
Niki Nelson didn’t look up. She smiled, though. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
In high school, Niki had been Nicole-Marie, then Nickie, then Nicki, then Nikk, and then Niki—partly because she liked the look of it and partly because none of the other two dozen Nicoles at school ever spelled it that way.
Together, Leda and Niki had been the two most semi-famous weirdos at South Lake High. Not the only weirdos by any means, but the only girls who got suspended for breaking into the abandoned boathouse of an old yacht club because they’d heard it was haunted. They hadn’t done any damage. They hadn’t done anything at all except get inside, trip over a family of raccoons, and run into the cops as they fled the scene screaming.
No charges filed. No raccoons harmed, merely startled. Best-friends-forever status, cemented. Fifteen years later, plenty of other things had changed—but not that.
A couple of weeks previously, Niki had slipped on an errant lime garnish at work, so she was on medical leave from the bar at the top of the Smith Tower downtown. Her plastic bootie was propped on the edge of Leda’s desk, where it took up a lot of space and frankly smelled a little weird.
When Leda’s phone rang again, a chorus of chipmunks singing Sia’s “Chandelier,” Niki laughed. “You need a new ringtone.”
“I do not. But, hey, look. It’s Mr. Merritt again.” She accepted the call. “There you are, sir. I’m sorry, but we seem to have gotten disconnected. Are you all right? Please tell me you’re all right.”
In reply, she heard sirens, and people hollering, and something that sounded like radio static—but wasn’t. After waiting another minute or two, she ended the call.
“I think he butt-dialed me.”
“Where did you say he is?”
“Orlando International.”
“Um. Leda.” Niki frowned and refreshed her timeline. “Hang on. There’s a…”
“What? Give me your… What are you looking at?” She reached for Niki’s phone, but Niki swatted her hand away.
“You’re not going to believe this. A plane in Orlando skidded off the runway on takeoff just now. It… it’s on fire. Everything’s on fire.” She turned her phone around to show Leda a grainy video shot by somebody in the airport.
“Holy shit,” Leda said. She closed the booking site on her laptop and opened a new window. Five seconds of searching and there it was, flight 2661 to LAX. No doubt delayed indefinitely due to its giant fireball status. Leda leaned back in her chair and put her hands over her mouth. “Oh my God.”
“That was his flight, wasn’t it? The one he was supposed to be on in the first place?”
Leda nodded. “Yup.”
“Did you know that was going to happen?”
“No! Obviously!” She pushed her chair back until it hit the wall behind her, but it wasn’t far enough to escape the live footage of the burning plane. “If I’d known, I would’ve told everybody. I would’ve spray-painted it on the side of the airport, I would’ve gotten a bullhorn, I would’ve maxed out my credit card with skywriting!”
“No. You wouldn’t have.” Niki knew Leda was only talking. Her friend had learned the hard way that warning people about tragic misfortune could lead to restraining orders, at best—and at worst (just the one time), a ride in the back seat of a cop car. Because sometimes a frantic heads-up sounds like a threat. Apparently.
“I would’ve at least called in a fake bomb threat or something.”
“Now you’re talking. Keep it low-key.” Niki put down her phone and put her heavy, plastic-bound foot back on the floor with a thud. “So what happens next? What are you going to do?”
“What can I do? The plane’s already crashed. I can’t undo it; I can’t fix it; I can’t save anybody.”
“You saved that dude.”
“Accidentally!”
“Still counts,” Niki insisted. “You did a good thing. Stop freaking out.”
“But hundreds of other people might be dead because I’m ninety-nine percent worthless as a psychic!”
“And one percent super useful. If it weren’t for you, this Merritt guy would have been on that plane. I bet he’s feeling pretty good about being in the one percent right now.”
“Oh God, what if he tells people that I saved him? What if he goes on TV to talk about his close call and the cops come arrest me because they think I did something to the plane? What if somebody calls Homeland Security? What if they think I’m some kind of domestic terrorist? They’re going to send me to Guantánamo.” She scooted her chair forward again, all the better to collapse facedown onto her desk.
“I don’t know if Guantánamo is even open anymore, and you need to calm the hell down.” Niki knew better than to try a more formal intervention; Leda’s freak-outs ran hot and loud, but they burned out quick. “You haven’t been anywhere near a plane in the last two months. I’m sure somebody, someplace, can prove it.”
Leda raised her head. “I sure as hell haven’t been anywhere near Florida,” she said thoughtfully. “I haven’t even talked to anybody in Florida, except for the rental-car place. Mr. Merritt’s boss wanted him to have a rental car so he could come and go from the event without running up an Uber bill. Mostly I dealt with someone on this end from”—and here Leda’s voice ticked back up again—“the crime lab. Oh my God, I think he’s a cop. He must have hired me with cop money.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.” Her hands fluttered over her desk. “But that conference had something to do with modern forensic methods in law enforcement.”
“Okay, so he might be a cop. The question is, did he sound like a crazy person to you? Because if he goes on TV and tells the world that a psychic travel agent saved his life, he’s going to sound like a crazy person to literally everybody else—and he will not be a cop for long.”
“Even though it’s true?” Leda squeaked hopefully.