Page 109 of Loverboy
On the monitor in front of me I watch Geoff walk up a flight of stairs. The tiny camera is so good that I can see dust motes in the air when he walks past a window.
Come on, I inwardly beg.Let’s see a terrorist in high rez.
Geoff pushes open a door, then arrives at another one. He presses a buzzer to ask for admittance.
Nothing happens. He presses the button again.
Geoff waits, and I age about three years.
Then he reaches out and tries the doorknob. I see it turn in his hand. I’m holding my breath as he opens the metal door.
It’s brighter inside than I’m expecting. Sunlight blazes into the camera, dappling everything with a bright white light. So it takes me a moment to register what I’m seeing.
An empty room. Nothing in it. Nothing on the walls. Nothing on the desks. All the file cabinets are standing open.
Geoff makes a startled noise.
Our terrorist is gone, along with all the evidence that he was ever here.
When I turn to look at Max, his head is in his hands.
33
Posy
I spendforty-eight hours at the hospital before Max orders Duff to take me home to rest.
“You don’t want to get me in trouble, do you?” Duff asks, batting his eyelashes at me. “Go home and get some sleep, or you’re gonna get me fired.”
Since I’m asleep on my feet, I succumb to this bit of trickery.
The next morning, though, I get up and shower before heading out to go right back to the hospital.
The blood is gone from the front vestibule of my building. Max’s guys swooped in and cleaned it up, along with the broken glass and the lethal poison gas in my basement.
This time I didn’t even blink when Max said he’d take care of everything.
Gunnar is in stable condition now. According to the text on my phone, his leg has good vascular flow, which is supposed to be good news. But as I step out onto the street and scan for a taxi, it’s not comforting enough.
I need to see him open his eyes, and I need to hear his voice. It’s been two and a half days since he was gassed and shot. They don’t know yet how else he might have been affected. His lungs. His eyes. His sharp mind. It’s all a big question mark.
“Posy!”
Still jumpy from the other night’s horrors, I whirl around. But it’s only Teagan, sticking her head out of the door of the pie shop. My heart still pounds as I ask, “Is everything okay?”
“Fine,” she says. “But I wanted to send you off with some donuts for Gunnar, just in case he’s ready to eat today. Here.” She holds a bag toward me. “There’s a half dozen in here. Plus two very hot lattes, courtesy of the new guy that Max sent in. You can share the other one with whoever’s on duty.”
“Thank you,” I say quietly.
“Text me if there’s any news.” Teagan is full of remorse. She feels terrible that she brought trouble to my door, and that Gunnar is fighting for his life.
And I’m trying to be civil about the whole thing. “I’ll let you know if he wakes up.”
“Please. I’ll be thinking of both of you.” She gives me a wave and disappears inside.
In between raging at the medical staff, Max sat me down and told me as much as he could about Teagan and her boyfriend’s troubles. “Geoff is at a safe house now, until I can find him a job on the West Coast, under a different name,” he’d told me.
But the terrorist they were hunting has left New York anyway. Max has a source who told him the guy slipped out of a private airport in Pennsylvania. So Teagan and Geoff are probably safe.
