“What did you say?” I shouted, cupping my hand around my mouth. “I can’t hear you over this wall.”
He mouthed something back to me and did a mime-trapped-in-box routine, which made me laugh. Thenhelaughed, and we were smiling at each other a little too hard, and for a moment it felt like that first afternoon in the rain. Breaking the spell, I looked away and hoped he couldn’t read my feelings on my face.Calm down, Birdie, I told myself. This wasn’t a date, for the love of Pete.
After a moment of awkward silence, he whipped out his phone. “All right, so, anyway. Let me just get some car music going, and then we can leave.” Soft light beamed up at his face as he scrolled through songs. “I’m on a major David Bowie kick right now. Like, full-blown crush.”
“Oh?”
“He was so brilliant and revolutionary, a shape-shifter of music. You want pop? Avant-garde? Rock? Soul? Gender-bending alien glam? He did it all. Right now I’m mostly listening to his earlier stuff.Hunky Dory,Aladdin Sane, the Berlin trilogy. Also, the last album he made before he died,Blackstar. He knew he was dying of cancer when he made it, so it’s a swan song. And the whole thing is trippy and depressing and defiant all at the same time. Like me.”
Depressing? Daniel was the most cheerful person I’d ever met.
“How about someZiggy Stardust? It’s a perfect album.”
He pressed his phone screen and put the car in gear. The speakers shook out fuzzy, guitar-driven cinematic music that sounded as if it started on the ground and rose up into the night sky.
It rattled around in my rib cage as he sped his car down the dark street, all the way through Belltown and up into Queen Anne, the most elevated neighborhood in Seattle, whose affluent streets were loaded with big, old Victorian houses and big, old leafy trees.
He pulled the car over near a curb and parked. Apart from the occasional passing vehicle and distant siren, it was quiet up here. Nothing but sleepy homes on one side of the street and a well-known public space sitting on a hill over the city.
Kerry Park.
The park itself was smaller than small—just a couple of narrow stretches of grass divided by a nondescript urban sculpture and bordered by a handful of benches. But as we approached a short retaining wall, I realized why people said it boasted the best view in the entire city.
A classic view.
I could see Seattle’s city lights from the beach in our backyard on Bainbridge Island, butthiswas the skyline you saw in photos and postcards. Jagged tops of skyscrapers jutting up from the black basin. A hint of the Olympic Mountains in the distance behind them. And in the middle of it all, the iconic flying-saucer-topped Space Needle, symbol of Seattle.
“Look at that,” Daniel said, not bothering to hide the awe in his voice. “Isn’t it fucking amazing?”
“It certainly is,” I murmured. At night, from here, downtown looked as if it were wrapped in Christmas lights—white and rose gold, twinkling and shimmering against the black bay water.
He turned around and surveyed the park. At the far end, a professional photographer had set up a camera on a tripod and was preparing to take pictures of the skyline. Another couple ambled down the sidewalk.
“Should be easy enough to spot a pudgy asshole with two bulldogs,” Daniel said, sliding onto a slatted wood bench seat built into the wall. “Wish I’d brought some coffee.”
“Coffee?” I said, glancing at his bouncing leg as I sat on the bench next to him. He whistled softly and gestured to his other side. It took me a moment to realize he was trying to get me to sit on his “good” side, so he could hear better. We swapped places, and I said, “I thought you were already intensely caffeinated.”
“Well,now, sure. But what if we’re here for hours?”
“Dawn’s not that far away. If he shows up when the record-store guy said he should.”
“True.” He rested an elbow on the wall as he craned his neck to look out over the city. Then he said, “Hmm. Need a way to pass the time.”
I glanced at his face.
His eyes flicked to mine. “Notthat.”
“I wasn’t implying anything,” I argued as my pulse went a little haywire.
“Good, because I don’t think most detectives do that on stakeouts. Maybe Nick and Nora.”
“Well, they’re an exception,” I said, chuckling nervously.
“I was thinking more in terms of a game.”
“What kind of game?”
“How about,” he said, mouth curling up at the corners, “we play a little Truth or Lie?”
