Watching her. She could feel his breath like a firm,
invisible grip. Turning her head, she saw no one familiar in the crowd. Was
it just her imagination?
Stepping
into the entrance way, Kim ran after Mallory and Addison.
His voice
echoed in the marble hallway and carried over the music. “Just scandalous,” he
said again. “Scandalous!”
Before
midnight, Kim accepted a dance with the Congressman. She was graceful and light
on her feet. But there was an awkward distance between them.
Mallory
had found The Gunz on the dance floor. Their bodies
meshed together so completely they could have been one person. Kim watched
them, then smiled as Addison once again pried them apart and yanked Mallory
from the ballroom.
The
countdown began ten seconds to midnight. Everyone on the dance floor stopped.
Laughing and toasting, their voices counted down together, like one loud
amplifier.
Ten...
Nine... Eight...
Kim
smiled at the Congressman. Around them, waiters were handing out glasses of
champagne. He took two and handed one flûte to Kimberly, then they locked their arms together and joined in the
countdown.
Seven...
Six... Five...
Kim's
eyes searched the ocean of people for Mallory. She was standing beside Addison
as he was counting loudly with the crowd. Mallory noticed the well-endowed
blonde from the powder room and shot her a dirty look. The blonde stuck out her
tongue.
Kim
wasn't paying any attention. It was the end of the nineteen-nineties, and the
end of the Twentieth Century. And she couldn't believe she was spending the New
Year's Eve of a Lifetime at the most exciting party in town, locked arm in arm
with one of the most charming, celebrated bachelors she'd ever met. Their eyes
locked with the final seconds. Still she wondered where Ross was.
Four...
Three... Two...
“ONE!” Kim
screamed just as the Congressman wrapped an arm around her and brought her
toward him. With one swift movement, he removed the reading glasses from her
face and kissed her. When their lips parted, he beamed and yelled, “Happy New
Year!”
She could
barely hear him over the cheering and screaming. Balloons fell from the ceiling
as confetti floated in the air. The music was blaring. And Kim noticed she had
once again spilled her champagne down the front of his tuxedo. He shrugged it
off and brought her close to him, tightly squeezing her.
Kim
turned so that her cheek rested on the Congressman's shoulder. They slow danced
amid the celebration around them, and she gripped his right hand in hers.
Still,
her eyes wandered the room. She thought about the shrink and wondered what
happened to him. Had he really stood her up? Then she thought about
Ross, and if he was here somewhere, lost in the crowd, watching her. Pushing
the thought further from her mind, she wrapped an arm tighter around the
Congressman's waist.
There was
a throbbing pang of alarm somewhere deep in her temples. More
than just a dull headache. She could feel it. Something was about to
happen.
* *
* * * * *
From the
shadows of the ballroom, a man blended with the crowd and watched Kim and the
Congressman hold each other, slowly rocking back and forth. He imagined what
they were talking about. He could see them whispering into each other's ear.
Stepping
away from the pillars in the corners, he moved across the dance floor, hidden
among bodies, unseen and unnoticed. Moving into the hallway, he slipped up the
large carpeted staircase and disappeared into a room upstairs.
“If you
forget me,” he said. “There's something I want you to know.”
3
Dead Man’s Time
Saturday,
January 1, 2000
2:03 AM
Twenty
miles north of Tampa, a semi truck pulled into the parking lot at the Flying J
Truck Stop, grumbling loudly as it rolled past the frail phone booth. A teenage
girl, no more than sixteen, came out of the store carrying a Big Gulp in one
hand and a suit case in another.