Sachs strode past him, flung the door open and hurried up the hall. Her hands started shaking, her breath was coming fast.
His voice, nearly a scream, followed her down the hall. "I'll remember your shield. I'll make some calls. If you ever come back to my precinct again, you will regret it. Young lady, did you hear me?"
U.S. Army Sergeant Lucy Richter locked the door of her old Greenwich Village co-op and headed
into the bedroom, where she stripped off her dark green uniform, bristling with perfectly aligned bars and campaign ribbons. She wanted to toss the garment on the bed but, of course, she hung it carefully in the closet, the blouse too, and tucked her ID and security badges carefully in the breast pocket, where she always kept them. She then cleaned and polished her shoes before setting them carefully in a rack on the closet door.
A fast shower, then, wrapped in an old pink robe, she curled up on the shag rug on the bedroom floor and gazed out the window. Her eyes took in the buildings across Barrow Street, the lights flickering between the windblown trees and the moon, white in the black sky, above lower Manhattan. This was a familiar sight to her, comforting. She used to sit here, just like this, when she was a little girl.
Lucy had been out of the country for some time and was back home on leave. She'd finally gotten over the jet lag and the grogginess from a marathon sleepfest. Now, with her husband still at work, she was content to sit, look out the window and to think about the distant past, and the recent.
The future, too, of course. The hours we have yet to spend seem to obsess us far more than those we've already experienced, Lucy reflected.
She grew up in this very co-op, here in the most congenial of Manhattan neighborhoods. She loved the Village. And when her parents moved across town and became snowbirds they transferred the place to their twenty-two-year-old daughter. Three years later, the night her boyfriend had proposed to her, she'd said yes but with a qualification: They had to live here. He, of course, agreed.
She enjoyed her life in the neighborhood, hanging out with friends, working food service and office jobs (a college dropout, she was nonetheless always the sharpest and hardest worker among her peers). She liked the culture and the quirkiness of the city. Lucy would sit right here, looking out the window, south, at the imposing landscape of this imposing city, think about what she wanted to do with her life or think about nothing at all.
But then came that September day and she watched it all, the flames, the smoke, then the horrible absence.
Lucy continued her routine, more or less content, and waited for the anger and hurt to go away, the emptiness to fill. But they never did. And so the skinny girl who was a Democrat and liked Seinfeld and baked her own bread with organic flour walked out the front door of this co-op, took the Broadway train uptown to Times Square and enlisted in the army.
Something, she'd explained to her husband, Bob, she had to do. He'd kissed her forehead, held her hard and didn't try to talk her out of it. (For two reasons. First, a former Navy SEAL, he thought the military experience was important for everyone. And second, he believed Lucy had an unerring sense of doing the right thing.) Basic training in dusty Texas, then she shipped out and went overseas--Bob went with her for some of the time, his boss at the delivery company being particularly patriotic--while they rented out the co-op for a year. She learned German, how to drive every type of truck that existed, and a fact about herself: that she had an innate gift for organization. She was given the job of managing fuelers, the men and women who got petroleum products and other vital supplies where they were needed.
Gasoline and diesel fuel win wars; empty tanks lose them. That's been the rule of warfare for one hundred years.
Then one day her lieutenant came to her and told her two things. One, she was being promoted from corporal to sergeant. Two, she was being sent to school to learn Arabic.
Bob returned to the States and Lucy lugged her gear to a C130 and flew off to the land of bitter fog.
Be careful what you ask for. . . .
Lucy Richter had gone from America--a country with a changed landscape--to a place with none. Her life became desert vistas, searing heat from a hovering sun and a dozen different kinds of sand--some of it abrasive grit that scarred your skin, some fine as talcum that worked its way into every square inch of existence. Her job took on a new gravity. If a truck runs out of fuel on a trip from Berlin to Cologne, you ring up a supply vehicle. If it happens in a combat zone, people die.
And she made sure it never happened.
Hours and hours of juggling tankers and ammunition trucks and the occasional oddity--like playing cowgirl to wrangle sheep into transport trucks, part of an impromptu, voluntary mission to get food to a small village that had been without supplies for weeks.
Sheep . . . What a hoot!
And now she was back in a land with a skyline, no livestock outside of delis or Food Emporium counters, no sand, no burning sun . . . no bitter fog.
Very different from her life overseas.
Lucy Richter, though, was hardly a woman at peace. Which is why she was now staring south, looking for answers in the Great Emptiness of the changed landscape.
Yes or no . . .
The phone rang. She jumped at the sound. She'd been doing this a lot lately--at every sudden noise. Phone, slamming door, backfire.
Chill . . . She picked up the handset. "Hello?"
"Hey, girl." It was a good friend of hers from the neighborhood.
"Claire."
"What's happening?"
"Just chilling."