Leslie Glass - Burning Time

Twelve o’clock was shift change in the precinct. She wondered what was happening in the squad room now. Probably everybody, except Mike and her, was cleaning things up, typing reports, congratulating themselves for getting the hostage out unharmed. Blaming them for the damage. April was upset because the car she had signed out was a blackened burned-out wreck. But that was the least of it.

She turned her head toward the window. The shade was down, so she couldn’t even see what side of the building she was on. She knew she was in Queens, had been taken to the nearest hospital. Her mother had been notified and, driven by the need to scream at her for a while for being a cop and not a smart one, had managed to find her way to the hospital.

Why did April have to get blown up, Sai Woo had wanted to know. A smart cop would have been outside, not inside. No way to tell her that the hostage had been inside, so inside was where she had to go. Sai Woo left her daughter some oranges in a string bag, even though it was clear April couldn’t use her hands to peel them.

She closed her eyes agianst the memory. Moments later she heard a shuffling in the doorway but didn’t turn her head, in case it was a mouse.

“Hey, querida.” It wasn’t a mouse.

“Wrong room, buster. Beat it.” April tried to sit up higher, turning her upper body toward the door. Then she sank back in shock.

What the—? The man who stood in the doorway was wearing paper slippers, pale blue hospital pajamas, and a matching robe. Half of his face was swathed in bandages.

“Oh God, Mike, is that you?” April said softly.

“As far as I know. How are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I shouldn’t even be here.…” The words trailed off. He could walk, but he looked bad. “They can give you something to make you sleep,” she said slowly. “The nurses don’t tell you, but there’s lots of stuff you can have.” He had called her querida . He must be in a lot of pain.

He lifted his shoulders, then winced. “An ugly little guy told me they’re real good with plastic surgery these days. I wondered if he was an example of their work.… Anyway, my eye’s all right, and the rest of the body still works.”

April guessed he was more worried about his looks than he was about the pain. She didn’t know what to say.

He shuffled over and sat in the chair. “How do you feel?”

“I want to go home. Can you get me out of here?”

“And miss spending the night with you, are you kidding?” He leaned over, searching for the TV monitor.

“Forget it. It’s not hooked up. You have to give them a certified check or something.” April wanted to put her hand out on the bed, maybe touch him.

Sanchez had put his body in front of hers. He had saved her face. Her human face and her Chinese face, too. Now she would always see him lunging through that curtain of smoke, through the fire, coming back for her, risking his life to get her out of the way of what hit him. Then he told her it was nothing. It was what a rabbi does.

So now Sanchez was her rabbi as well as her supervisor. And he called her querida . No one in her whole life had ever used such an endearment in connection with her. She believed the word meant darling or sweetheart. Sanchez probably had a fever.

“I’ll order out, we’ll watch a little TV … maybe fall asleep after a while. Then tomorrow you can tell the world you slept with me.” He laughed, then grimaced.

“Anybody ever tell you you can’t sleep with the person you’re supervising?” April murmured. “Rabbi-ing.”

“Nope.” He punched the button and the TV came on.

“I thought it wasn’t—”

“Stick with me, I have special powers.”

“Oh, come on, Mike, I don’t want to watch TV, I want to go home.”

He checked his watch. “Tomorrow, maybe you’ll go home. Tonight we’ll watch this.”

He pushed the buttons, looking for the station he wanted. April allowed her eyelids to droop. Suddenly a voice she knew came out of the speaker.

Her eyes popped open in time to see Sergeant Joyce’s image jump out at them from the screen. She was standing with Arnold Diaz in front of the smoldering wreckage on Hoyt Avenue, surrounded by a gawking crowd. Powerful lights had been turned on the area, but it was impossible to see very much except for the sergeant.

“Look at her!” April shrieked. She couldn’t believe it. Joyce’s hair was combed and she looked extraordinarily good. Her voice was confident and professional and warm as she told the tristate area how she personally had located the abducted actress, Emma Chapman. How her detective squad’s operation from the Twentieth Precinct on Manhattan’s Upper West Side had succeeded in freeing the hostage unharmed.

“Miss Chapman has been reunited with her family and is reported to be in good condition,” she said, smiling widely, implying that New York’s Finest were very, very fine.

She did not mention Emma’s body art, but just before the microphone was whisked away from her face, she did take a moment to mention the hospitalization of two unnamed squad detectives for the minor injuries they sustained during the rescue of the abducted woman.

The two nameless detectives were happy to hear that the hospital had listed them in stable condition and that they were expected to be released soon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leslie Glass is the author of HANGING TIME, LOVING TIME, TO DO NO HARM, JUDGING TIME, TRACKING TIME, and STEALING TIME. She divides her time between New York and Sarasota.

Turn the page for an exciting preview of Leslie Glass’s suspense novel starring N.Y.P.D. detective April Woo and psychoanalyst Jason Frank!

LOVING TIME

Look for LOVING TIME by Leslie Glass in paperback from Bantam Books.

Raymond Cowles died of love on the evening of his thirty-eighth birthday. It happened on Sunday, October 31, after a long battle for his soul. As with many bitter conflicts, the end was abrupt and unexpected. In the same way as love had come on him unexpectedly and caught him by surprise after a lifetime of loneliness and despair, death crept up on Ray from behind without his even knowing that his release from ecstasy and anguish was at hand.

Since his twenties, Ray had flipped past the passages about love in the books he read. The movie versions of passion and lust seemed stupid and unbelievable to him. Love was supposed to happen to men like him when scantily dressed, big-breasted women flashed the look that said “I’ll do anything. Anything at all.”

Lorna had looked at him with those eyes; other women had, too. Many other women. Sometimes Raymond had even thought he’d seen it in the eyes of Dr. Treadwell. He never got it. Love to him was like a foreign language for which he had all the clues but couldn’t figure out the meaning. And he had learned to live without it as his own personal cross to bear, like a dyslexic who could never really read, or a patient with a terminal illness that wouldn’t go all the way and end his misery for a long, long time.

Until six months ago, Raymond Cowles thought he had all his problems solved. He had made work the focus of his life, tried to find the same satisfactions in his personal life other people experienced in theirs. He wanted to feel what other people felt, and when he couldn’t, he acted as if he did.

Then, six months ago, Ray Cowles finally understood what life was all about. He fell in love. The paradox was that real love, the kind that smacked into one so hard it turned a person all the way around, didn’t always happen as it should. The great passion of Raymond Cowles’s life came too late and was spiritually messy. Even though he was a man experienced at battling demons, Ray’s new demon was the worst he’d encountered.