Jake was silent at that as he watched butter sizzle in the pan. Finally he turned to slap two slices of bread into the toaster. “You’re lucky you weren’t killed.”
“Galen nearly was. A fourteen-foot machine made of bronze gears all whirring that appears right in the middle of a battle is . . . distracting, I guess.” She gave a helpless chuckle. “This sounds insane on so many levels. I think he was protecting me from a guy with really bad teeth. Anyway, Galen was wounded. He fell against me right as the machine took off and we came back together. But the teeth guy hit the control lever of the machine with an axe just at the last minute and damaged it. I guess that’s why I’m four months late.”
“Where’d you get him patched up?” Eggs sizzled in the pan and he sprinkled some chopped Brie and avocado and scallions on top.
“We landed in the bottom level of the parking structure at the General. Can you believe it? Right outside the only trauma center in the city. I guess I was thinking he needed medical help or he was a dead man.” She chuckled. “You’d be proud of the lies I told. Boy, Richard Nixon has nothing on me.”
Jake’s eyes crinkled. “Let me guess . . . a reenactment.”
“Yup. I said he was a cousin from Denmark, or sometimes I said Finland.” She grimaced. “Okay, maybe I’m not a great liar. Anyway, the police took his sword. If he hadn’t been restrained and groggy from surgery, he would have fought them for it right in the hospital room.” She chewed her lip. “I took him out AMA to get him back to his own time before someone found the machine. But it’s broken. Brad is the only one who can fix it—”
“Don’t call him, Lucy.” Jake slid the omelet onto a plate and put it with . . . surprisingly, a big serving spoon in front of Galen. That seemed all right with Galen. He dug in with the spoon.
“Gd.” He pronounced around a mouthful of eggs. “Thonc to thu.”
“You’re welcome,” Jake said. He slapped another pat of butter into the pan and poured in another batch of eggs.
“I’ve got to get him back before his absence changes something. I’m not sure man was meant to mess around with time.”
“I guess we’re going to find out.”
“What do you mean? If Brad can fix the machine—”
“If Brad and the spook can fix that machine, you can bet they’ll use it. Whether or not they agree to send your friend home.”
“They might want to keep Galen for a while. But we can send him back to the exact time he disappeared and not change anything.” She stared into the night at the lights of the bridge. “Would it be so bad if Brad used the machine in some controlled experiments? It’d be amazing if you could go back to another time, just as a visitor, without changing anything, and solve mysteries. Like who really killed Kennedy. You’d like that. . . .” She looked up.
Jake stared at her, his eyes hard. “Don’t be naïve. You can’t just visit. You found that out. And that’s not what the spook wants with a time machine. You just think what he could do with it. He could go back and assassinate people he didn’t agree with. Maybe he doesn’t like the New Deal, so he goes back and assassinates Roosevelt. Or maybe he thinks he’s a ‘good guy’ and he wants to eliminate Hitler. Doesn’t matter. These guys are going to change history big-time.”
Lucy felt like she was sliding down a rabbit hole into the twisted warren of conspiracy theories Jake inhabited. “They don’t have the machine.”
Jake looked under his brows at her. She felt stupid. When someone found the machine in the parking structure they’d call the police. And the FBI or the CIA or whoever would have put out a call for information about it. Casey and Brad would have the machine back in no time. Though of course it didn’t work now. But they’d fix it and do what they wanted with it. And she’d made this possible. Would Brad let Casey use it for whatever he wanted? It was Brad’s project. But she knew in her heart that Brad was no match for Casey. Whatever Casey wanted, he’d do.
Jake sat at the kitchen table. “Let’s get serious. You call anyone since you been back?”
Lucy shook her head. “You’re the first person I’ve been in contact with. My phone doesn’t work.”
“You give your real name at the hospital?”
“Yeah. I listed myself as the responsible party, to be sure they’d give him surgery.”
Jake just stared at her. “Tell me you didn’t give them a credit card.”
Lucy’s blush answered the question.
“Then we don’t have much time.” Jake looked grim. “But you came to the right place. You can use my setup.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You and your friend here have got to go off the map for a while. New identity, the whole nine yards.”
Lucy blinked as she tried to follow his logic. Galen examined each of them in turn, alerted to the change in the tone.
Jake set his lips. “I know it’s a lot to absorb, Lucy. But our friend Colonel Casey is going to want to eliminate anybody who knows about his little project.”
“Eliminate, as in . . . kill?” She laughed. She had to remember it was Jake she was talking to here. “Jake, no one wants to kill me. I’m a bookseller, for God’s sake.”
But Jake didn’t laugh.
“They’ll want to find me, but not to kill me, just to get these,” she continued. “I’ve got the book.” She reached around to her bag and hauled out the book and set it carefully on the table. “And this.” She fished out the diamond slightly bigger than her fist.
“Shit, howdy.” Jake stared at the diamond. Lucy realized that for him, it was this impossibly big diamond that made the whole thing resonate in his gut as real.
“From the lever. Machine doesn’t work without it. They could get another one—”
“Those don’t grow on trees.” He glanced out the windows. The sky was lightening. You could see the stream of headlights from early commuters coming over the Golden Gate. Lucy could just make out the rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts far off to the left. “They’ll find you, take what they want, and then they’ll kill you both. Or maybe they keep him, while they question him about his time. Captivity isn’t much better than death. Take it from me. Nothing for it, babe. You got to take your Viking and disappear.”
“Brad would never let anyone hurt me.” Why didn’t her voice sound surer?
“Look.” Jake reached across and took her two hands in his. “I know you think I’m the crank down the hall. But it takes an ex-spook to know a spook, and I worked on enough conspiracies in Southeast Asia to know conspiracies are real. The world is filled with bad people, Lucy. Humor me on this one. Drop out of sight for a little while longer. Better safe than sorry.”
Lucy felt an actual pain in her stomach. If once you started seeing evil everywhere, pretty soon you’d be wearing huaraches and a serape and collecting guns. And yet she herself had already had doubts about turning Galen over to Casey. She started to shake her head.
“Okay, let’s do it this way,” Jake interrupted. “You said you felt it was your destiny to use the machine. You wanted to go to a time where magic was possible. So you travel through time and some wounded guy leans up against you and comes back with you. Sounds like magic to me. Or maybe destiny. Then again maybe not. But you land in the one place that can save him, then you come to the one guy in fifty miles who knows how to go off the map, which, believe it or not, you need to do. If that isn’t destiny, it sure is something. Ask your gut. Your gut knows.”
Lucy was about to protest or maybe just get up and go to the phone she saw hanging on the cupboard to call Brad. But she didn’t. Her gut, as Jake called it, was doing flip-flops. She looked around wildly for something to hang on to.
Galen raised his head, sensing her distress. He stared at her, frowning. Oh, those blue eyes. Even she was not immune. She steadied, searching his face.
Jake receded. The kitchen seemed far away. And she felt something . . . emanating from Galen, like he was his own vortex of true and right. Her stomach eased. A feeling of . . . she could only describe it as . . . as wholeness flashed through her and was gone. And its loss was the most devastating thing she’d ever experienced. Her eyes filled.