A Twist in Time (21 page)

Brad stood still while Casey paced the sidewalk. His head ached with the noise. Or maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t sleeping. He couldn’t stop thinking about what a fool he’d been with Lucy. Why had he been so obsessed with her? A bookseller, for God’s sake, when he deserved someone as brilliant as he was himself. She wouldn’t take up science. She wouldn’t run marathons with him, even though it would have made her leaner. She wasn’t his ideal of a woman at all. Who knows what some hulk from the past saw in her?

He wasn’t the only one upset. The hospital administrator was livid. Especially since no one would tell him exactly why the machine in the parking structure was so important that hospital routine had been shattered, or how it had gotten there if it was too big to fit through the entry.

Patients had to park two blocks over in the public lot. Employees were walking five blocks. Only ambulances were allowed to use the driveway and even they had to pull in about fifty feet from the ER doors and run their gurneys up the sidewalk. Cops manned the barriers out at the street where gawkers milled.

And now the engineer said it was going to take three or four days to get the machine out.

Casey stopped in front of Brad, fuming. Casey looked worse than Brad felt. “I need a cup of coffee,” Casey muttered in a normal voice, which meant Brad had to read his lips.

Brad followed, squinting, as though to shut out the noise.

The hospital felt as silent as a tomb after the din of construction, in spite of intercoms and conversations and heels clicking on the linoleum floors. Down in the cafeteria they filled Styrofoam cups with sludgy coffee and paid the cashier before finding a table by the window.

An elderly woman was crying in the corner. A father tried to keep a boy of about seven from zooming around the room like an airplane. Casey didn’t even seem to notice. He stared out the window at a little courtyard garden, ignoring his coffee.

“Any news of them?” Brad blew on his coffee. No use burning his lips.

Casey turned cold blue eyes on him. “What do you think?”

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Brad just sipped his coffee. It burned in spite of his efforts and he sputtered.

Casey ignored him and turned those eyes out to the garden again. “Won’t get anything useful out of her shop assistant now, because she’ll say whatever we want to hear.”

Brad shuddered. He didn’t want to think about why.

“They didn’t use cabs,” Casey continued. “No hotels. No other hospitals. We’ve checked surgeons and primary-care doctors to see if they had anyone showing up for aftercare for shoulder surgery. Nothing. We’ve got the pictures and the artist’s renderings spread out over airports from San Diego to Seattle, BART and Amtrak stations. We’re blanketing the surrounding counties.”

“That sounds . . . promising,” Brad offered. Casey’s eyes were scary cold.

“No, it doesn’t,” Casey snapped. “It’s as if she and the Viking disappeared into thin air.”

“So . . . uh, the Stanford guy confirmed the guy is Viking?”

Casey seemed to notice his coffee for the first time and took a gulp. It must have been hot enough to scald, but he didn’t register pain. Casey was one big callus. “Hard to tell. Clothes are tenth century. Sword is Saxon workmanship, but the etching on the blade is in Danish runes.

Apparently, it says: ‘I was made for the son of Valgar, for whom the world waits.’ ”

“What the hell does that mean?” Anger welled up in Brad’s throat.

“It means the guy has a high opinion of himself.”

Lucy had a high opinion of him, too.
Stupid bitch. She falls for someone with empty boasting on
his sword
. Brad only realized his grip had tightened on his coffee cup when the Styrofoam broke and hot coffee spewed over the table and onto his lap. “Jesus!” He jumped up and grabbed napkins from the dispenser on the table to scrub at his Dockers.

“Maybe the landlord is the key,” Casey muttered. “If you expect to get into your apartment after four months of not paying rent, you’ve got to have an in with the landlord. She was probably boffing him, too.”

Brad swallowed. That couldn’t be. “Maybe the damage made the machine bring her to the wrong time. Maybe she didn’t know she was four months late.”

“Then she’d be surprised she couldn’t get in. And where might she go?” Casey dripped condescension. “Landlord’s lying about not having seen her. We’ll work that angle.” Casey rubbed his jaw. “Then we have the problem of how they got away from the building, landlord or no. They didn’t take a cab. There’s no car missing from the parking lot.
We
have her car, and they can’t have walked with him in such bad shape.”

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“Rental car delivery?”

“Checked that.”

“You need a witness. Maybe there was a homeless person outside her apartment.”

Casey stared back at the garden, jaw working. Okay, he’d checked that. Brad resolved not to offer any more suggestions. But Casey wasn’t giving him a choice. “There’s got to be something about her we’re missing . . . some skill, some . . . something that might tell us where she was.”

He looked at Brad.

“I told you everything I know months ago. She hangs out in libraries and bookstores. She walks—a lot. She knows lots of languages.”

“Okay, that’s now. What about things she did as a kid?”

“Well, she used to sail, and I think she had horses once.”

Casey’s eyebrows rose. “You never said she sailed. That has possibilities.” Brad was relieved he’d said something useful. “Jensen find any diamond big enough to substitute?”

Brad shook his head. “There’s a new one from India about the right size. But it’s still in the rough. The cutters in Amsterdam are studying it before they take a chisel to it.”

“I’ll tell them to get on with it.”

“It isn’t that easy. They have to eliminate the flaws by using them to split the stone. By the time they get it cut down, it may not be big enough.”

Casey rose suddenly and drained the last of his coffee. “I’m going to get some sleep.” All eyes in the room followed him as he strode from the cafeteria. He looked like danger incarnate. Rumor had it that the last job he’d been on, a guy who’d reported Casey’s tactics to his superiors had gone missing. Well, all except a couple of fingers. Brad wondered if he should just go back to the lab and stay as far away as possible from Casey.

But if anyone could find the fugitives Casey could. Brad wanted to be there when he did.

Lucy dragged herself out of bed. She’d slept badly. Maybe it was the pepper spray under her pillow. He might have promised he wouldn’t try to kiss her, but you could rape someone without kissing.
Whoa. Cynical
. Did she really think he structured his promise so he could keep it and still rape her? The kind of guy that rapes a woman doesn’t care if he breaks a stupid
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promise. The problem was that deep inside she believed Galen was an honorable man. She might be losing it, but . . . but there was something about the look in his eyes . . . Maybe that was naïve. Too cynical or too naïve? The endless tape of uncertainty had played over and over in her mind last night. So, she took the pepper spray to bed. Cold comfort that.

Speaking of comfort, she couldn’t find any. And definitely not anything cold. Her thoughts, waking, and her dreams, asleep, all had a temperature north of a hundred, involving one raping, pillaging, and very attractive Viking. Not comfortable at all. Even now she was wet between her thighs, left over from the dream she’d had just before being wakened by thunder and the pelting rain of a fresh shower.

Maybe pepper spray wouldn’t protect her from what she really feared: that she was the one who would end up running her hands over his body, inviting a lot more than kissing.

He was
wounded
for God’s sake. That sure didn’t seem to stop him last night.

And he wasn’t her type.
Viking? Hellooooo
.

Well. She wouldn’t think about any of this anymore. The best thing to do now was take a shower, for a lot of reasons. She got up, hugging her arms around her fake-satin sleep shirt. It was emerald green, her favorite color. The boat was cold. The ports were fogged opaque, the rivulets of rain on the outside only faintly visible. She pulled out her jeans and some fresh underwear and T-shirts from the drawers under the bed. Best dress before the Viking was awake and rev up the electric heater. She’d forgotten all about dying her hair yesterday in her panic to do damage control with the guy at the Quik Stop. Now the guy at the Quik Stop and the kid and the brown, hard sailor on the other boats had all seen her red hair. If she dyed it now, wouldn’t that just scream that she and Galen were hiding?

She slipped out the door to her cabin on the way to the head. She was too late to avoid Galen.

There he was, in all his half-naked glory, limping out of his own cabin.

His eyes dropped to her bare legs, slowly. She was acutely aware that she was not wearing a bra and her too-ample breasts were free underneath the sleep shirt. He tore his eyes upward to her face. “Lucy, what day is today?” She hadn’t taught him “today.” It must be like so many other words—the same in both Old and modern English.

She had to think. What had they told her at the hospital? It was a quiet night because it was Tuesday. That meant today was . . . “Friday.”

“Friday.” His brow creased. “Danir take bath on Thorsday. I am one day late.”

“In there.” She nodded to the head. A shower would make him feel better. “No bath. Shower.”

He didn’t know what that meant in these times, even if he understood the word. “I’ll show you.

First take off the bandage. We have to see if your wound is ready for a shower.”

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He sat on the sofa and peeled at the tape. He was doing it wrong. He’d only pull too hard and tug at the stitches. She cleared her throat.

“Let me.” At least the bandage wasn’t wet with seepage. She peeled away the tape and gently pulled back the gauze, touching him as little as possible. It wasn’t little enough, of course.

The wound looked much improved. The edges had lost puffiness. He healed quickly. Still, no way would the stitches be ready to come out Sunday no matter what the book said. “The wound is good.”

He peered down at his shoulder. “
Ja
. I tell you this
bef ran
. I am mighty.” It was a mixture of what she had taught him and his own words, but it worked.

“Okay. You can have a shower.”

She turned away to get him a towel from the drawers set into the cabinet next to the head.

When she turned back, he had the plastic tubing at the base of his wound between two fingers.

“No,” she started . . . but under her shocked gaze he pulled it out with a grunt.

He looked up at her. “It is time.”

She sighed. Well, at least
she
didn’t have to pull it out. She took it from him. It was maybe three inches long. Was his wound that deep? She peered at the stitches. A little blood and the drain left a bit of a gap, but it was probably okay. She tossed the tubing into the trash compactor and handed him the towel, pushing past him toward the head.

Opening the narrow shower door, she turned one of the faucets. “Hot. Understand?”

He nodded.

“Cold.” She turned on the other one. “Soap.” She held it up. “Soap for hair.” She pushed open the top of the shampoo bottle and squeezed so he could see how it worked. If he couldn’t soap his hair with one hand, she’d have to do it in the little sink. “Be quick. The water tank is small.”

He looked blank. “Water?” He nodded. “Tank?”
Not getting that. What was sort of a primitive
tank?
“Barrel?” Yep.
That did it
. She could see it in his eyes. “Small? Little?”

“
Ja
.
Lyttle waeter byrla
. I be swift. Am swift,” he corrected.

She squeezed past him.
Much
too close. He seemed to fill the tight doorway. He stepped inside and stripped off his boxers without bothering to close the door.

“Do you
like
to be seen naked?” Without waiting for an answer, she pulled the door shut.

But she heard him say, “
Ja
, Lucy. I like naked.” Great, “naked” was the same word in both times. She might have guessed. He obviously had much less concern about his body than she did. Why would he? He must have about 2 percent body fat. Not that he was stringy. A better