WINDOW OF TIME

by DJ Erfert

  “Idiot!” Lucy cupped the grip of her gun in the palm of the left hand, holding it steady—and she took aim. The end of the man’s antique weapon had a three inch opening, just about the size of the bull’s eye she’d routinely shoot out at target practice.

  Lucy slowly let out her breath and squeezed off a round, sending a bullet into the end of the rocket launcher. The old shell loaded inside exploded in the face of the man-in-gray, taking him out as well as the men standing beside him. The corner of the building caved in on top of them. But she was too close to the explosion.

  The world suddenly spun when the blast pushed Lucy to the earth. Sharp pain pulsed through her chest as dirt, gravel, and tiny pieces of unknown debris rained down from the sky.

  “Lucy! Lucy!”

  Johnny’s frantic calling through her earpiece added to the ringing in her head. Lucy felt the wonderful icy sign roiling in her chest, cooling the intense pain in her body. Total darkness washed over her as she whispered, “It’s been changed.”

  ~*~

  An explosion rocked the foundation of the building Sunny, Helga, and Klaus were lying on. Was it the C-4 Lucy brought? The gunfight had stopped. After she heard Johnny yelling for Lucy, Sunny couldn’t stay hiding in the back hallway any longer. She looked from around the front doorway into the swirling dust where Dusty and Johnny crouched over someone, with Herman standing beside them holding a rifle toward a flattened building. Helga and Klaus pushed her from behind.

  “That’s Lucy. She must be vounded,” Helga whispered.

  Sunny’s training took over. Their medical bags were piled near the door. She grabbed the two she brought, but dropped of one of them when pain shot through her arm. “Helga …” she moaned, as she clutched her arm against her stomach. The German scientist didn’t hesitate before helping. They ran out into the courtyard together, each carrying a med bag.

  “Don’t move her,” Sunny ordered as she dropped to her knees next to Johnny. He had a firm grip on Lucy’s hand.

  “We need to get out of here,” Dusty told them.

  Sunny pressed her fingers against Lucy’s neck, quickly assessing her patent, and she was surprised at the temperature of her skin. “She’s ice cold again.” When her skin suddenly heated up, Sunny didn’t pull her hand away, but leaned over her face and waited for her eyes to open. She had a theory forming about her having psychic premonitions. And she waited.

  Sunny looked up at Johnny. “Why isn’t she waking up?”

  Johnny glanced at Dusty, shaking his head. “The blast knocked her down.”

  “Shrapnel,” Herman said.

  Using her good hand, Sunny pulled down the vest’s zipper and attempted to pull it aside. “One side is stuck. Give me some light.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” Dusty said. “We’re still in the enemy camp.”

  “We’ve got to move her,” Johnny said. “Dusty, carry her to the truck, just …”—he blew out a deep breath—“be gentle.”

  “I don’t like this.” Sunny lowered her voice. “If there’s shrapnel embedded in her chest, then depending on where it is, moving her might kill her.”

  “What do you suggest? Operate on her here?” Dusty asked with sarcasm. He didn’t wait for an answer before sliding his arms beneath Lucy’s shoulders and knees. “Help Johnny to the truck so Herman can keep us covered. Helga, can Klaus help Adam to the truck?”

  “What? What’s wrong with Johnny?” Sunny kept her hand on Lucy as Dusty lifted her up.

  “He’s been shot.”

  “Oh, damn!” Sunny shifted her attention. “Where’d you get hit?”

  “My leg …” Johnny slung him arm over Sunny’s shoulder.

  “I need to check it out—”

  “Not now, doctor!” Dusty ordered. He walked ahead of them to a big truck parked in front of a gate and stood at the bumper, waiting. “Lower the tailgate.”

  Johnny used his free hand and pulled the latch. The heavy tailgate came crashing down, and Dusty climbed inside before laying Lucy on the bed of the truck. Sunny waited while Johnny scooted up behind them. His hand was clamped down on his thigh, blood shining over his fingers as he moved beside Lucy.

  “Where’s the key to the truck?” Dusty asked as he searched Lucy’s pants pockets. He pulled out a set of keys from the first place he looked. “Found them.” He quickly jumped down and lifted Sunny up in his place before loading Helga and Adam in beside them. Herman crawled up next to Adam, his rifle still aimed at the crushed building while Dusty closed the tailgate.

  “Klaus, you’re with me.” Dusty dropped the two medical bags by Lucy’s feet and rushed to the driver’s door.

  “There’s a padlock on the gate’s chain. How are you going to unlock that?” Sunny asked through the cab’s back window.

  The powerful engine turned over quickly. “Hold on,” Dusty said. “We’re going through.”

  Sunny did as he said and leaned over her patient, holding on while the truck bolted forward. He drove the big truck into the gate, easily pulling it from its hinges with a high-pitched scream of metal tearing apart and flattened it to the ground.

  “Where’s Lucy phone?” Sunny tried in vain to keep her balance in a vehicle bouncing fast down a bumping road. Her injured arm couldn’t take any pressure, and trying to diagnose Lucy’s injuries in the dark was impossible. Fear kept her from asking for a flashlight, but she could see enough in the moonlight to know Johnny was working on wrapping a bandana around his wound.

  “In her vest,” Johnny told her.

  “Can you slow down a little?” Sunny asked loudly. “We’re being bounced around back here.”

  “No,” Dusty said. “We’re getting the hell away from this place.”

  No doubt about that. The only thing Sunny could do was hold herself up over Lucy to keep from falling on top of her—until an arm slid around her waist and held her tight. Under normal circumstances, Adam’s attention would’ve been very unwanted, but at the moment his strong physical support created just what she needed to search Lucy’s vest. Of the three phones that she found, one had been crushed by shrapnel and one was vibrating. She quickly answered it, not knowing who it was.

  “Hello?”

  “Doctor, is Lucy alive?”

  “Jim? How …” Sunny looked up at the stars and shook her head. Of course, he had a satellite pointed at them. He had witnessed the gunfight and the explosion. She leaned back against Adam’s chest, exhausted and in pain. “Yes, she is, at least for the moment, but I can’t examine her under these conditions. But she is wounded—badly—and unconscious. Mr. Cartwright is wounded. Agent …” What was their pilot’s last name? “Adam is wounded.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m …” Sunny took in a shaky breath. “I was stupid, and I’m sorry. I thought I was helping, but I made things worse.”

  “We’ll talk about that later. When you reach the plane, have Mr. Sizemore fly you to Nassau. I’ll make arrangements for ambulances to meet you at the airport. Who are those other people with you?”

  Sunny glanced at Helga. “Dr. Helga Von Strauss, Dr. Klaus Fleischer, and Dr. Herman Klemple. Their colleague was killed to gain their cooperation. Lucy was going to blow up the compound—”

  “Yes, I know. Did she plant the C-4?”

  “I’m pretty sure she did, but I’m not sure that it’s what exploded.”

  “No, I don’t think so either,” Jim told her. “Kate’s already on the phone with Cooper Steele. His men will clean up the place. They’ll deal with hunting down the C-4 and find survivors, if any.”

  A shudder coursed through Sunny’s body when she thought about all the dead. The sudden movement sent a sharp pain surging in her arm. She cried out and dropped the phone to clutch her arm. Adam squeezed her tighter. It was her fault that they were hurt so badly. The only reason he hadn’t died was because Lucy saved him—she had saved them all, and in the end it might be Lucy who would die, all because of Sunny’s misguided interference.

 
Thirty-one

  “Assistant Director Brockway, Mrs. Brockway, welcome!” Agent Blakeley stood at the bottom of the jet’s steps and waited with his hand extended.

  “Thank you, Agent Blakeley.” Jim quickly shook the young agent’s hand and tried not to stare at his casual clothes or at the too long length of his blonde curly hair. He watched his wife’s disapproving frown when she greeted the young man. She liked the agents to keep a professional look about them at all times after she’d seen one too many go rogue when they went too far undercover and got submerged in an unhealthy lifestyle.

  “Nice to see you again, Katie,” Blakeley said, taking Kate’s hand as she reached the bottom of the steps.

  “How are my agents?” Jim asked.

  Blakeley opened the passenger doors of the SUV. “After twelve hours of surgery, Special Agent Lucy James McKenzie is finally settled in ICU, after which Dr. Pettigrew consented to be treated. An x-ray showed that her left arm has a hairline fracture, and Dr. Stanton put it in a soft cast. Besides having a slight concussion and a body full of bruises, she seems otherwise healthy.”

  “And my pilot?”

  “Agent Sanderson’s patella is fractured like a jigsaw puzzle. His jaw is broken, and he’s got over a dozen cuts and bruises, but his spirits are particularly high every time a pretty nurse enters his room.”

  “Did Cooper Steele send his men?” Kate asked as she climbed into the back seat.

  “He sure did. Mr. Steele had six men here inside of an hour. He might even be here, but I don’t know what he looks like, so I can’t tell you for sure.”

  “When I called the executive secretary and told her you wanted a protection detail for Lucy to go along with the clean up of the compound, Coop got on the line and said he’d take care of the arrangements personally,” Kate said enthusiastically. “He probably knew Gabe Greene.”

  “He has men positioned around our people at the hospital.” Blakeley pointed to the E-190 sitting next to the open hangar containing the silver DC-3. “According to my contact in the flight tower, a dozen more men flew in six hours ago, but I haven’t seen any of them.”

  Jim studied the black and gray Embraer jet. “You won’t see any of his people unless they want to be seen.”

  Kate leaned closer to Junie. “Lucy should have taken a few of Coop’s men with her on that mission. The end result would have been different.”

  “Maybe,” Jim said. “His people are known to be aggressive and very dependable.”

  “And obviously very well trained.” Kate watched as they sped by the huge jet.

  “How is Lucy doing?” Junie asked.

  “Agent Mackenzie is still unconscious, but she’s holding her own.” Blakeley shook his head. “It was a good thing for her she was so close to Nassau or she might not have made it.”

  “What do you mean she might not have made it?” Kate asked.

  Blakeley glanced over his shoulder. “Agent Mackenzie lost a lot of blood. In the forty minutes it took to fly from their mission target to the airfield in Nassau, Cartwright and Rhodes stopped the bleeding and gave her IVs, pumping up her blood volume, and that kept her alive long enough to reach the hospital where Dr. Stanton took over her treatment. Her pneumonia was confirmed, and Dr. Pettigrew agreed that surgery was necessary to remove the four pieces of shrapnel lodged in her chest. Dr. Pettigrew has to sign-off on everything Stanton does or it doesn’t get done.” He laughed. “I’ve never seen a woman fight as hard as Pettigrew trying to stay in control.”

  “I know why,” Junie said. “Sunny feels it’s her fault Lucy is wounded.”

  “It is her fault,” Jim said, crossing his arms over his chest. “She snuck off on a mission she had no business going on. Now I have a pilot who can’t fly for who knows how long, a civilian with a bullet hole in his leg, and a very special agent who still might not make it. I really should fire her.”

  “But you won’t,” Junie said, patting his arm. “And you know it.”

  “No. But when Lucy gets better, Sunny may wish I had.”

  ~*~

  “Sunflower …”

  The sultry whisper of Dusty’s deep voice sounded like music in the memory of Sunny’s mind. Over the past twenty hours since Rocky had landed the Belle in Nassau, she hadn’t been able to catch a minute’s sleep. Between Lucy’s surgery, to making sure Adam’s knee had been stabilized and ready for transport back to LA, to making sure Johnny had been treated, she had been running on pure adrenaline. Sunny hadn’t been able to think about much else besides her injured agents. Finally, after the attending physician threatened to have her removed from the hospital if she didn’t get some rest, she finally laid down in her own room.

  Still, sleep eluded her. Disjointed flashes of the mission kept intruding into Sunny’s subconscious, and she’d jerk awake, frightened all over again. Being caught and beaten, the close psychic calls, the found prisoners, the shootout—all that made the night surreal.

  “Sunflower?”

  Sunny opened her eyes and saw Dusty’s smiling face leaning over her. The dark room cast everything in suspicious grays. Not knowing if it was another illusion her exhausted mind decided to play on her, she moved her hand and felt … whiskers. “Dusty?”

  “Hey, sleepyhead—”

  “What are you doing here? I mean—I haven’t seen you since we landed. I thought you left me, that you had flown home.”

  Dusty ran his fingers along her jawline. “I couldn’t leave you without knowing how you were. No one would tell me a thing. I even tried to sneak a peak at your chart at the nurse’s desk, but one of Steele’s men stopped me before I could lift it out of the rack.”

  “It’s the privacy laws; you know that. They couldn’t tell you because you aren’t my husband.”

  He ran a finger along the edge of her sling. “Is your arm broken, then?”

  “Uh-huh, a hairline fracture, just like we thought.”

  Staring up into Dusty’s blue eyes, she could see them shine with raw emotion even in the room’s low light as he gently touched her bruised face. “All the time you were gone, I was so worried about you, wondering what was happening, and wishing you’d just get back so … so we could start our dating and never be apart again. I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I should’ve gone with you instead of Adam. I could’ve protected you. You needed a Marine with you, not a pilot.”

  “No—no!” Sunny ran her hand up his muscular chest. “I couldn’t have taken them hurting you like they did Adam. I would’ve told them everything—anything to keep you safe.”

  “I wouldn’t have let them take us.”

  “You mean you would’ve started shooting?”

  “I would’ve been armed, yes.”

  Sunny pushed him away. It didn’t take much pressure—he didn’t resist, and she sat up. “Would you have been able to shoot our way out like Lucy did?”

  Dusty scrubbed his hand over his chin and shook his head. “I couldn’t have predicted that many men coming at us.”

  “But Lucy predicted it, didn’t she?” Sunny got up and went to the window. The louvered blinds opened with an easy twist, letting in the bright Bahaman daylight. She wanted to see Dusty’s reaction when she asked her next question.

  “Has Johnny talked to you about Lucy being psychic?” When she heard Dusty make a deep snorting gag, she rushed back to the bed and sat down beside him. “Remember when Johnny found that gas leak on our way over to the meeting with the assistant director?”

  “Uh, sure I do.” Dusty took her hand and loosely held it.

  “Did you believe his story?” He hesitated too long in his answer. “Well, did you?” she asked again.

  “Of course not.” He let out a heavy breath, but he wouldn’t hold her gaze. “It didn’t make sense when I found Mr. Sanchez unconscious on the couch with a pillow under his head. If he knew he was in trouble enough to try to get attention from the street, then he should have passed out on the floor next to his window. Common sense tells me that he fell asle
ep on the couch as the room filled up with the gas. If we hadn’t had reached him when we did, he would have died from asphyxia. Worse than that, though, I saw Johnny turn off the gas water heater, and I realized that if it had clicked on …” Dusty took in a shaky breath and said, “The room would have exploded in flames. He stopped a major fire from happening.”

  “I think it was Lucy who knew about it.”

  Dusty’s blue-eyed gaze moved up to her eyes. “What else do you suspect?”

  Sunny sat up straighter. “You believe me? Tell me what you know.”

  “What we’re going to talk about,” Dusty said, quietly, “is just between us, or I can’t tell you anything. I promised Lucy and Johnny.”

  “I promise.”

  “You have to swear, or you know Lucy will shoot me,” Dusty said with a minute smile.

  Sunny kissed his grin away. “I’ll never let that happen. I swear.”

  Listening to the events about the racing cars chilled Sunny with excitement. Then, when Dusty told her about Lucy’s body temperature falling to nothing when she passed out afterward, it confirmed Sunny’s suspicions about Lucy being psychic and that her icy body temperature had something to do with her having an episode.

  “So, it was Lucy who knew about the gas leak.”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Her body was cold after the explosion. She knew that gunfight was going to happen.” Sunny touched her cast. “Lucy saved us, didn’t she?”

  “No doubt about it. Have you been debriefed yet?”

  Sunny shook her head. “Not yet. I’m expecting Jim to do this personally. He said he was flying down. He’ll probably be debriefing Adam, Johnny, and you as well.”

  Dusty lifted her chin up with his fingertips. “You aren’t going to discuss this with your boss, are you?”