WINDOW OF TIME (2 page)

“No, he’s not.” Dusty unzipped the medic’s case.

“Why would a normal person do that when there are perfectly good stairs?” Christina pushed open the door and peered out into the corridor. “Did security grab her?”

“She got away,” Johnny said with a half smile. Dusty wrapped a nylon cuff around his bicep and began to squeeze the rubber bulb, inflating the cuff with air until Johnny’s fingers felt fat and swollen.

“You look satisfied about that,” Dusty said.

Shaking his head, Johnny muttered, “She had to get away before—” Catching his fellow firefighter’s concerned gaze, he asked, “How’s my pressure?”

Dusty pressed a stethoscope’s chest piece to the inside of his elbow before slowly twisting the release valve. It didn’t take long before the familiar throbbing in his arm grew weaker, and his friend soon tore the velcro closure apart and removed the cuff from around his arm.

“You’re okay,” Dusty said with a frown.

“You don’t look convinced.”

Tossing the stethoscope and cuff into the bag a little harder than required, he said, “I’m not.” Dusty leaned in. “You looked like crap a few minutes ago, and I want to know why.”

Johnny couldn’t tell him what he had seen in his head. Clenching his fingers around the handbag, he realized he needed to track down the woman from the stairs. The whole bizarre event seemed to revolve around her.

“I think maybe I need to take the rest of the day off and go home.” He watched as his friend’s gaze dropped down to the handbag tucked next to his thigh.

“So, you’ll go home?”

There wasn’t any use lying to him. He’d been on the same squad with Dusty Rhodes for eight years. He couldn’t even bluff him at poker.

“Eventually.”

“Uh-huh.”

Taking a deep breath, Johnny lifted the corners of his lips and gave his friend his best lighthearted expression. “I promise to hit the gym with you tomorrow before shift change. Okay?”

Dusty stood up and stepped back, holding his hand out. Johnny grabbed it, letting his friend pull him up from the sofa.

“No skipping out this time. Six a.m. sharp.”

Johnny walked toward the break room, groaning when Dusty slapped him on the shoulder. Not from the pain the heavy impact caused, but the thought of committing to the daily self-inflicted torture of rigorous exercise was too much.

In the empty break room, Johnny paused at the door long enough to lock out any interruptions before dropping onto the chair behind the table. He pushed aside a few emergency medical journals and set down the small handbag. As he reached for the tiny metal zipper, his fingers began to tremble. He folded his hands together and placed them on the table’s edge, staring at the brown leather bag.

Why should it bother him so much to look inside? The bag wasn’t anything special. It was really more of an elongated wallet than a purse. He ran his fingers along the worn exterior, feeling the soft leather beneath his skin.

Lifting the end of the strap, he saw that the metal loop holding the bag and the strap together had pulled far enough apart that the strap had slipped out. Johnny reached into his pocket and took out his Leatherman tool. He slid the strap’s end back through the loop, and using the pliers, bent the metal closed again. It was an easy fix.

He finally opened the zipper. Inside he found a smaller wallet with an Arizona driver’s license inserted in a clear plastic pocket on the outside.

“Lucille S. James.”

He blew out a deep breath, remembering when he first caught sight of her coming down the stairs. She’d looked so pretty with her straight, chestnut brown hair hanging around her shoulders. Her dark blue eyes had shone as brightly as her beautiful smile when she stared at him.

Johnny opened the wallet to check for pictures when he found her work identification.

“Huh! You’re CIA,” he said, running his thumb along the edge of the card. “That would explain some things.” He looked through a couple of other pockets searching for papers, anything that might tell him where she lived. Her driver’s license had an Arizona post office box for an address. Setting the wallet aside, he lifted the edges of the handbag and dumped the rest of its contents onto the table, spilling out a lipstick, a lip balm, a local hotel keycard—that would be the place for him to start a search. There was also a receipt for the water department in her name with an address in Los Angeles, and a letter-sized, white envelope stuffed to overflowing with hundred dollar bills.

“Holy crap!” Johnny sat back and dropped his hands. “Are you a rogue agent?”

Sixty-seven seconds passed by before she regained consciousness. Lucy knew exactly how long her fainting spells lasted; she’d timed them on several occasions, out of necessity more than curiosity. She also knew how desperately vulnerable she was during those precious seconds. For the past two years she’d been on her own.

She held her breath as every nerve in her body screamed danger. Lucy heard men speaking in a language she recognized but couldn’t understand. They stood only a few feet away from her. The voices moved momentarily closer, their arguing growing more heated. She stayed completely still. Perhaps a minute passed before the sound of their heavy footfalls retreated away from her. Lucy lifted her head and peered around.

From her vantage point, she couldn’t see much. Two vagrants holding bottles wrapped in paper bags shared a conversation farther down the alley. Passersby on the sidewalk either talked on cell phones or looked straight ahead. Fortunately, it seemed Lucy was being completely ignored. She continued lying still under enough boxes to conceal her body while she let her mind drift back to the man in uniform with the dark brown eyes.

They’d been watching each other when she’d had her “window.” The moment he thought she was in danger, he had sprung into action to save her. His compassion intrigued her. Any man who would choose to spend his career in a field exclusively helping others must be very special, and a little bit of a risk taker too. Fighting fires wasn’t for wimps.

Lucy wished she knew who he was, but her chances of having a normal conversation with him now seemed impossible, even if she did run into him again. She’d thrown herself off a staircase. How could she ever explain that without telling the truth—a truth he certainly wouldn’t—
couldn’t
—believe?

Lucy lifted her feet and kicked the boxes away in frustration. As she brushed away the dirt from her jeans, her heart sank when she discovered her purse was missing. “Cripes! No, no,
no
!”

A thorough search of the surroundings turned up nothing besides trash. Lucy peered around the corner of the building and studied the street before backtracking to the office staircase. After looking down from above but unable to see through the dense leaves, she climbed up the same ficus tree that facilitated her escape just a half hour before, hoping to find the bag hanging on a limb. Besides getting some odd looks from a few people in the lobby, nobody stopped her. All she found was a piece of her shirtsleeve stuck on the end of a thin branch. Lucy pushed up her torn, short sleeve and looked at her skin.

The small cut next to her shoulder hadn’t hurt at the time, but now her arm throbbed at being injured. Lucy leaned back and sat in the tree for several minutes, trying to figure out what to do next as the leaves stirred softly around her. The sound gave her the willies. The huge ficus grew inside a building where the natural wind didn’t exist. The air conditioner caused the movement instead of God. In the shelter of the thick leaves, she heard the whisperings of her close call.

She’d almost been killed.

The window had included Lucy. That was something that had never happened before. Although she hadn’t seen herself, she’d seen that man aim his gun in her direction.

He was going to shoot her, of that she had no doubt. If she hadn’t escaped, he’d have shot five other people in a public building to get to her, and it left Lucy fuming. Such an open display didn’t make any sense. And if that wasn’t bad enough, those men-in-gray had ruined her perfect track record.

She was a high-level courier, and the package she was to deliver to the Information Center at the LA branch of the agency tomorrow had been in her handbag’s built-in false bottom.

Lucy was upset at herself that she’d lost the “game” because of two foreign agents too stupid to blend into the crowd. More than that, though, she was angry that she hadn’t noticed she was being followed before she reached the staircase. They’d probably found her purse and her hidden package, if they could navigate the secret compartment that is. To top it off, she didn’t even have cab fare.

“Excuse me, lady?”

A city cop stood at the bottom of the tree staring up at her. From the half-grin he wore, he wasn’t taking his present call very seriously. He motioned at Lucy with a quick point of his finger from her to the floor. She waved and then dutifully complied.

“Do you have ID?” the officer asked, as he carefully looked her over.

“I would if I hadn’t lost my purse,” Lucy said. They had protocols for situations like this. “If you’ll call my work, they’ll tell you who I am, and then I’ll get chewed out later.”

“Okay,” he said, chuckling. “Tell me your name and your supervisor’s number.”

The slight sarcasm she heard from the officer while he took out his cell phone wasn’t surprising. She didn’t trust anybody, so why should a man who routinely dealt with criminals trust her? “I’m Special Agent Lucy James, and my boss here in LA is Assistant Director Candice Bancroft.”

After she gave him the phone number, she waited and watched his light brown eyes as he heard the operator greet him. Lucy let the phrase, “Central Intelligence Agency, how may I direct your call,” run through her mind and paired it with the officer’s changing expression.

The deep dimple creasing his left cheek might have shown his initial disbelief, but it disappeared as he listened. His brows rose higher as his stare locked onto Lucy’s. He might have been impressed with what he was being told, or maybe he was intimidated. Sometimes Lucy couldn’t tell the difference between the two. After an extremely brief and mostly one-sided conversation probably with Kate Laurence, her boss’s executive assistant, the officer closed his phone and let his gaze drift down over her once again.

“Agent James, if you want to climb the tree again, I’ll stand by and wait until you’re done ... communing.”

Lucy sighed. “No. I’m good. Thanks.”

~*~

Lucy headed back to her hotel to report the loss of her package via her laptop computer. It took over an hour to walk back to the Hotel Shelter Island. By the time she reached the front desk, her feet hurt and her shirt, soaked with sweat, clung to her back, leaving her well past irritable and deep into cranky. She should have asked the cop for a ride.

“Miss James, you look like you could use a drink,” Ken, the hotel’s desk clerk said.

Lucy flexed her neck to the side until she felt it crackle and tried to smile at the clerk, but she just couldn’t quite get her lips to cooperate. “You’re right, Ken, but what I need more is a new key to my room. I lost my purse.”

“I can do that for you right away.” He placed his open bottle of water on the counter top and slid it closer to Lucy, but as thirsty as she was, she’d rather have her tongue swell to triple its size and choke off her breathing than drink from his used bottle. His hair had so much oil in it the individual strands had plastered into a single coconut-scented shell, and his pencil-thin mustache looked seven decades out of place. His trimmed sideburns actually came to points like something out of a Star Trek movie.

He clicked a few buttons on his machine before sliding a blank card key through the slot. “I understand you’ll be leaving us tomorrow,” Ken said as he held the replacement key out to Lucy’s waiting fingers.

“That’s right.” She tried to take the card from his hand, but he
wouldn
’t let go. A less than civil thought flashed through her mind. By pinching a nerve at the base of this thumb and index finger, Lucy could create such intense pain in his hand that it would render him incapable of holding onto the card. Actually, his ability to hold onto anything for the next hour would be gone as well.

Ken smiled. “I think this would be the perfect time for us to have an intimate dinner together,
Lucille
.” Leaning closer, he said, “I know the head chef at The Top Floor, and we can arrive any time you’re ready.”

Her eyes drifted down to his scrawny neck. A quick blow with her fist to the base near his shoulder would stun him long enough for her to extract the key from his hand, casually walk to her room, and bolt the door. “Thank you, but no, Ken. I, uh, already have dinner plans.”

He let go and held out his hands. “Ah, but you don’t know what you’re missing.”

Lucy smiled when she said, “And lucky for you, you don’t either.” As she turned toward the stairs, Ken said something surprising.

“Miss James, a man came to the desk asking for you about forty-five minutes ago, but I don’t think he waited for you.”

A sudden burst of adrenaline surged through her veins at the unexpected news, prickling the fine hairs on the back of her neck in alarm. After flexing her fists a couple of times to dispel milding finger tingling from the excitement, Lucy walked away from the desk as she scanned the lobby.