“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Take me to your apartment and make me glad I’m a woman.”
He smiled at her. They stood and she buttoned his shirt. They emerged from the upstairs, and without a word to any of the revelers, walked out to his old Corvette, parked in the driveway next to Feng Lewinsky’s Ferrari. Pacino opened the door for her and Rachel climbed in, folding her long legs into the car. He smiled to himself as he climbed into the driver’s side and clicked the ignition, the supercharger whining as he gunned the engine.
“My place, right?” he said.
She smiled. “Yes, but first — don’t laugh — I am dying for a cheeseburger, with huge steak fries and a regular, old-fashioned, sugary Coca Cola.”
“Hell with Coke,” Pacino said. “After a run like this, I need an ice-cold beer.”
“Take us out of the subdivision and turn right toward the beach,” Rachel said. “I know a place.”
Pacino drove the five miles to a tumbledown diner that had seen better days during the Ford administration.
“Here? You sure?”
“This place has the most amazing cheeseburger you will ever taste.”
At the table, the waitress brought the plates. If she thought it odd that Pacino and Romanov were sitting on the same side of the table, she didn’t show it. Rachel’s hand on his thigh was heaven on earth.
“Coke for the lady. Corona with lime for the gentleman,” the waitress said, handing the drinks to them.
But mysteriously, as Pacino looked up at the server, she flashed in and out of an odd reality for a few fractions of a second. One instant she was simply a waitress in a diner. Then, for just a tenth of a second, she was a skeleton. Then she snapped back to being a waitress. Then, click, she was a skeleton.
He looked at Rachel to see if she’d noticed the strange phenomenon of the waitress. Rachel was wearing a tight red sweater, tight jeans, and tall brown boots. Which was a good thing, he thought. That meant she was real. In his dreams about her, she was always in starched high-collar service dress whites, with full medals. He looked up at the waitress, who still had her hand on his beer bottle, but now there was no sign of her as a normal person. Now she stayed a skeleton. In alarm, he looked over at Rachel, but now Rachel was wearing starched choker whites with her medals, her ceremonial sword, and officers’ cap on the table. He was opening his mouth to speak when she picked up the ketchup bottle and held it over his head while smiling at him. She flipped its lid and started pouring ketchup on his head, and strangely, it wasn’t room temperature, but warm. The skeleton server put down the beer and picked up another bottle of warm ketchup and started pouring it on his head as well.
Pacino spat to get the ketchup out of his nose and mouth, and it was in his eyes. He wiped his eyes and blinked, and he was in the dark. The diner was gone. The skeleton waitress was gone. And Rachel Romanov was gone. He coughed into the silent darkness, wiping what must be blood out of his eyes.
Then he heard Rachel’s voice.
“Hello?” he called. “Anyone awake?”
He struggled to his feet, feeling a dizziness threatening to toss him back down again, but he grabbed the safety bar of the command console, then noticed that the deck was tilted steeply downhill, and it wasn’t just the dizziness. They were pitched forward, at a crazy thirty-degree angle downward.
He was blinded by a renewed stream of blood in his eyes, and he wiped it away with his sleeve, then felt his forehead. A gash had opened up above his right eye and it hurt when he touched it. He grabbed a box resembling a box of tissues, but filled with paper towels—“Kim Wipes.” He wiped his head and face, dropping the soaking wipe to the deck while he pulled out a fresh one. He stuffed his pockets with the wipes. There was no time to deal with his head wound now. He staggered over to Dankleff’s panel, slipping on a blood trail that he was fairly certain had come from him. He grabbed Dankleff’s shoulder, shaking it.
“U-Boat! Wake up! Dankleff!”
