Danielle Steel - The Apartment

“Until six A.M.”

“I’m going to send two of my men upstairs with you, and I’m sending them home with you. I want two cops with you at all times until further notice, and we catch the killer.”

“Can they be in plain clothes?” He thought about it for a minute and nodded. It would be better that way. “Good. I want them in hospital scrubs while they’re here. I don’t want to be the talk of the hospital, trailing policemen behind me.”

“You can thank your sister for that,” he said tersely, and Sasha nodded.

“I know.”

He assigned two policemen to her, and she had them change into blue surgical pajamas before they went upstairs. Their weapons showed under the thin scrubs, and Sasha had them put white doctors’ coats over the scrubs. It worked, and the lieutenant laughed when he saw them.

“Just like on TV,” he teased his men. “Try not to get sued for malpractice—the department won’t pay for it.” They followed Sasha back upstairs then. And miraculously, no women in labor had come in. The two policemen in costume followed her around, and sat in the doctors’ lounge with her, while she dozed. They were on their feet at full alert, the minute Alex came through the door to check on her. He took her into a corner of the room to talk.

“What’s with the two guys in costume?”

“They’re here to protect me,” she whispered. “I may need them for a while.” She realized that she was going to need permission from the head of the residency program. Her sister had put her in a hell of a position. And when she left at six o’clock with Alex, the two cops followed them home, ready to stand at the door of the apartment. She invited them in to have coffee at the kitchen table. The Great Dane looked up with interest, lifted his giant head, and went back to sleep. Alex and Sasha said goodnight, went to her room, and went to bed. He was worried about her and didn’t like what was going on.

“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked Sasha. She didn’t want to lie to him.

“They’re afraid the shooter may go after Valentina, if they think she can identify him.”

“Shit. And you look just like her.”

“But they don’t know that. No one in that crowd has ever seen us together. I met Jean-Pierre once. No one is going to come after me. They just don’t want the guy to run into me by accident, and mistake me for her.”

“So what are they going to do?” Alex asked grimly.

“Disappear her, until they find the killer, maybe with the help of an informant. And I told them I can’t go into hiding, so they may change my looks for a while.”

“How? With a clown nose?” He was not amused and had never dealt with anything like this before. Nor had she.

“I don’t know. They’re going to tell me tomorrow.”

“What a fucking mess,” Alex said, lying on the bed with an arm around her, worried sick. “I may kill your sister myself.”

“I hope it teaches her a lesson. She needs to clean up her act. This better be her last bad guy forever.” He nodded, and they lay there together until they fell asleep, with the policemen sitting in the kitchen.

At eight o’clock, Sasha got up quietly, to call her parents in Atlanta to tell them what had happened. Her mother sounded cool about it, although Sasha could tell she was upset, and their father was panicked, and offered to fly to New York. She told him she’d let him know but thought they were going to spirit Valentina away pretty quickly to a safe location.

She talked to Valentina after that, on the hospital line, and she sounded awful, and was crying over Jean-Pierre.

“He was selling nuclear weapons,” Sasha said in an angry tone.

“He was wonderful to me,” Valentina cried.

“He was killing other people. You have to wake up after this. They could have killed you too.”

“I know,” she said sadly. “They almost did. The doctor said if they’d hit an artery, I’d be dead.”

“Exactly. Did you see the guy who shot him?”

“No. We were making love. I had my eyes closed, and then he was on top of me, bleeding everywhere. I couldn’t see anything. What are the police going to do with me now?”

“I think they’re going to take you somewhere to keep you safe.”

“My agency will be pissed,” she said, sounding worried. “I have two shoots next week with Bazaar. ”

“I’ll be more pissed if they kill you,” Sasha said, and promised to come and see her later, if the police let her.

The policemen in the kitchen had changed shifts, and Alex got up two hours later and found Sasha talking to the lieutenant who had come to see her, with three police intelligence agents, specialized in undercover work. They were looking her over carefully, her bone structure, her hair, her eyes. It took them an hour to decide what they needed to do. And they made their recommendation to the lieutenant while Sasha listened with a sinking heart. It didn’t sound good to her.

Her long blond hair had to be cut short and dyed brown. They had contact lenses to change her eyes from green to blue. They wanted her in flat shoes and loose clothes, nothing tight and sexy like her sister, which she didn’t wear anyway, and they didn’t want her to appear as tall as Valentina, who always wore heels. They thought the hair color and length and blue eyes instead of green would do it. There wasn’t much else they could do. They wanted her to be nondescript instead of striking like her sister, but Sasha was still a pretty woman. And they were debating brown contact lenses instead of blue.

Sasha cried when they cut her hair, and dyed it brown. They cut it short in a boyish cut, which actually suited her, but Alex looked upset. He loved her hair.

“It’ll grow back,” she told him, and then learned how to put the contacts in. They settled on the blue ones, and they were all shocked at the difference it made. She really did appear like a different person, and nothing like Valentina now, or herself. When Abby and Morgan came in for breakfast, they were amazed, and she told them what had happened the night before. Lieutenant O’Rourke left a little while later with his crew. Two plainclothes officers wearing jeans and T-shirts with baseball jackets to conceal their guns stayed behind. And Sasha felt like her life had been turned upside down. The lieutenant told her she couldn’t visit her sister—they didn’t want anyone to see them together. And Valentina would be removed from the hospital before noon, to an undisclosed location, until they found the man who had shot Jean-Pierre.

The three women and Alex were sitting at the kitchen table discussing it, and the two policemen had retreated to a discreet corner of the room and were playing with the dog. It had been a hell of a night. And Sasha had to see the head of the residency program to explain it to him before she went back on duty that night.

Morgan went to work at the restaurant then, and Alex went out for a while to get some air and pick some clothes up at his apartment. He was going to stay at the loft with Sasha until the killer had been found. He was back later that afternoon and went for a walk with the dog, while Sasha slept and Abby worked at the computer.

And at five o’clock, Claire came home from San Francisco and was confused. There were two men she didn’t know hanging out in the kitchen. Sasha looked like someone she’d never seen before, and there was a dog the size of a horse snoring on the couch.

“What the hell is going on here?” she asked Alex, who looked at her ruefully.

“Good question. Valentina turned our life to shit last night, and nearly got herself killed.” Sasha explained it to her, and Claire was stunned. It was the worst story she’d ever heard. And on a lighter note, she couldn’t believe the size of the dog Abby had brought home, but she admitted that he seemed sweet. And he held out a paw to her too, and then licked her hand with a tongue the size of a ham. She sat down on the couch after a while and laughed.