23 Minutes (16 page)

The guilt for that choice will be solidly where it belongs: on her.

Daniel asks her, “What have we learned?”

What have we learned?

Besides that nothing works …?

“Oh!” An important thought crosses her mind. “He carries his gun in the right-hand pocket of his raincoat, not …” She drums her fingers in the area of her upper ribs, beneath her left arm, to indicate where, on his body, Daniel wears his. “That time you tried to stop him before he went into the bank, he managed to shoot you
because you tried talking him out of it and you waited too long to draw your own weapon.”

She means this as a cautionary tale, but, “Wow,” Daniel says. “This all sounds so …”

She's expecting him to say
far-fetched.

Instead, he finishes, “… incompetent of me.”

“Oh,” she says, and this time it feels as though her heart itself is ballooning out. “No. No, Daniel. You have been so brave.” She wants to say more, but her expanding heart closes her throat.

And Daniel gives a little roll of his eyes at what she
has
said.

She mentally makes her plan into A Promise: She will
not
let him face Wallace on attempt number ten. She swallows hard and continues speaking. “I think Charlotte the bank teller freaks out and hits the alarm button, which is why Wallace shoots when you're not there. When you
are
there, he recognizes you. The time I saw this happen, you didn't say his name, but he obviously knew you could identify him. You … kept him busy … and the bank guard killed him just as …” The image is still too clear. She can't speak it. “The guard killed him too late.”

She sees that Daniel understands perfectly well what she hasn't said.

Unexpectedly, he tells her, “Ricky Wallace isn't really that bad a guy. You've got to feel sorry for him.”

“
What?
” Zoe snaps. “No, I don't.
What?
”

Daniel says, “His wife hired me to prove he was having an affair. Which she guessed because he'd moved all the money out of
their
account into
his
account. Which she found out when she tried to do the same thing to him. The divorce cleaned him out, and then his girlfriend left him.”

OK. Well. “Still …,” Zoe says.

“Still,” Daniel agrees. Slowly, working this out in his head, he says, “So it sounds as though I need to go into the bank … try harder to talk him out of this plan of his … try to keep Charlotte calm … keep the bank guard informed …”

A voice she doesn't recognize demands, “Are you crazy?”

Daniel and Zoe both turn to look at the doorway of room 1C. Nosy M. Van Der Meer, Designer, has been listening with the door open a crack, and now he throws it fully open.

Zoe supposes that she
had
been crying rather loudly. It's no wonder she attracted his attention. She holds the folder up and explains, “Well, the doctors
thought
I was, but, really—”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard all that, sweetheart,” M. Van Der Meer says to her. This is the first time she's really looked at him. He's dramatic in both looks and speech, with red eyeglasses that absolutely do not complement his purple tux jacket. He tells Zoe, “I'm not talking to you.” To Daniel, he says, “Those things she said about you that she couldn't otherwise know? They're correct?”

Daniel nods.

“Fine. So she's got that part right.” He goes from reasonable and composed to strident. “So are you out of your freaking mind to actually consider traipsing into that bank? What are you, the poster child for second-party suicide?”

Daniel considers. “Well, not so much
traipsing
…”

“Whatever.” Van Der Meer dismisses Daniel's word-quibbling with a theatrical flourish of his hand. “This Wallace guy has it in for you no matter what? Bank robbery or no?”

Daniel says, “I really appreciate your concern—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Van Der Meer interrupts. He suddenly grins at
Daniel. “By the way, I
am
the stranger interested in picking you up that your parents warned you about. My name is Milo.” He puts out his hand and Daniel goes ahead and shakes it, though looking a bit tentative. “Have you at least considered wearing a disguise?”

Daniel starts, “There's no time—”

Zoe finds herself siding against Daniel. “Even if it just slows Wallace down a bit from recognizing you right away. At least take off the jacket. Wallace is all into thinking that you think you're better than he is because of your money.”

“My what?” Daniel asks.

“Your expensive clothes, your privileged background, your Ivy League education …”

The way he's looking at her, she can tell she's suddenly losing him.

She suspects she's gone from uncanny accuracy to totally wrong. She hastily explains, “That's what Wallace said. He's not right?”

Daniel shakes his head without explaining where, exactly, he feels Wallace's description to be inaccurate. But he does take off his jacket, which
is
an expensive one, with an Italian label. Of course, now his gun holster is in plain view.

“Here.” Milo takes off his purple jacket and trades it for Daniel's subdued gray one. “Even though,” Milo points out, eyeing Daniel appreciatively, “you're
much
broader in the shoulders.”

Daniel still looks apprehensive, but he slips on the jacket, which is snug, but not so much so as to call attention to it.

Milo hands over his red glasses. “They're not prescription or even readers—just plain glass, to make me look more professional. They should do a credible job of toning down your baby blues.”

Zoe has no idea why Milo thinks red glasses make him look professional, or why someone who wants to look professional would wear a purple jacket. But Daniel puts on the glasses.

They're kind of cute, in a geeky kind of way, making Daniel look younger, but studious. More relevant, they
do
somewhat obscure the blueness of his eyes. Hopefully Wallace will note the clothes more than the face.

Milo steps forward and musses Daniel's hair, to try to further change his looks. “Ooh, good hair is good hair,” Milo laments. “Maybe we could cut it, shame as that would be …”

For that, there's definitely no time. Zoe sees that it's raining, and she has no idea how long ago that started.

“The card shop across from the bank,” Zoe says, “they sell caps. What time is it?”

“Don't you have a cell phone?” Daniel and Milo ask simultaneously.

She growls at them in exasperation, though Daniel can have no idea how often he's asked her that question. He informs her, “One twenty-four,” sounding a bit bewildered at her strong reaction to what must strike him as a totally reasonable question.

“Wallace pulls up in his car at one twenty-eight,” Zoe tells them, “and enters the bank at one twenty-nine. After that, we only have ten minutes.”

Both men nod at her, acknowledging the necessity to get moving.

“Thank you,” Daniel says to Milo, though Zoe suspects he still has his doubts. “Give us three minutes, then call the police and tell them you overheard someone talking about a bank robbery.”

“Come back safe,” Milo says, blowing an air kiss at them.

Well, Zoe suspects—at Daniel.

They don't bother with an umbrella this time. But they
do
bring their papers, which might make the two of them look like legitimate bank customers. Her folder is pretty sodden by the time they get to the card shop, and Daniel's trust fund envelope isn't doing much better.

Zoe goes to the display of Erie Canal caps and grabs the first one her hand touches, a blue one that proclaims
Sam Patch Packet Boat.

The older man who appears to be the manager of the store glances their way disapprovingly, since Daniel is trying on the hat with wet hair, but he doesn't actually protest.

“Fine,” Zoe tells Daniel, tucking his hair under the brim so it doesn't show.

Daniel takes out his wallet as he approaches the counter, but the woman who was leaving the store the first time Zoe went in, all those many lifetimes ago, is having something wrapped. And now she asks, as the manager is about to seal the box, “Did you take off the price sticker?”

“I believe I did,” the manager says.

“Are you
sure
you did?” the customer insists.

Daniel glances at the other clerk, the one close to Zoe's age, who's fully engaged in showing the woman with the hair rollers the difference between the white teddy bears with the brown
I
Rochester, NY
t-shirts and the brown teddy bears with the white
I
Rochester, NY
t-shirts. In any case, there's only one cash register.

While the manager is disassembling the tissue wrapping to demonstrate to the customer that there's no price sticker on the gift
she's purchasing, Daniel rips the dangling price tag off his cap, then tosses thirty dollars onto the counter, which would cover the price even if New York State's sales tax were thirty-five percent. Which it isn't. Yet.

The manager is annoyed. “If you could just wait your turn for two minutes …,” he starts.

“I can't,” Daniel tells him, taking hold of Zoe's arm and marching her out the door.

The man's voice follows them, complaining, “This is too much.” He couldn't sound more irritated if he were saying it was too little. “I'll get your change
once I
—”

And then the closing of the door behind them cuts him off.

Zoe mutters, “Consider it a tip for outstanding service.”

But she does remember how he tried to ensure the safety of everyone in the store, the time she announced she could see Wallace had a gun.

Still on the card-shop side of the street, Daniel tells her, “Stay here.”

She wants to. More than anything else, she wants to huddle safe in the doorway of the card shop and
not
get shot.

“You need me,” she tells Daniel. “And,” she adds as he starts to open his mouth to protest, “don't waste time arguing. We've discussed this. Twice already.”

Well, they have.

Sort of.

Daniel shakes his head. But accepts what she's said.

The two of them cross the street and walk up to the bank, with Daniel still holding Zoe's arm. No doubt he can feel her shaking.
“What's your name?” he asks her, and she realizes she hasn't said, not this time. She hopes she hasn't left out any other, more crucial information.

“Zoe,” she tells him. Then, for the first time, she adds her last name. Not that she has real hopes for this relationship to continue past this crisis. She only hopes
they
can outlast this crisis. But … just in case. “Zoe Mahar.”

“Zoe,” he starts, looking directly at her, which she fears—red glasses or not—makes her IQ drop twenty points. But something sidetracks him, causes him to change intention before finishing what he was about to say. Instead, he suddenly asks, “How old are you?”

She hesitates, then goes for the truth. “Fifteen. Almost sixteen,” she tells him.

And then—after all the wildly fantastical, impossible-seeming things she's told him through all these versions of this long, long afternoon—
then
he looks skeptical. He says, “OK.” But he says it just the tiniest smidgen of a bit too slowly.

“I
am
,” she protests. “Have I
ever
lied to you?”

Unexpectedly, he out-and-out laughs. “
Ever?
” he repeats. “Isn't the whole point of this that you can remember, but I can't?”

Zoe does not laugh. She answers her own question. She says, “I have not.”

That immediately wipes the grin off his face. He nods and says, “I'm sorry.” But she isn't clear whether he means he's sorry he doubted her, or he's sorry she's only fifteen. Both would be nice. But she suspects the first is all she can really hope for.