The first thing Lana noticed was that she felt much worse than she had before the first aspirin. The second thing she noticed was the door back to the main office was locked. She jiggled the handle. Nothing. She pressed her shoulder against the door. It pressed right back at her: sturdy, implacable, uninterested in her plight.
She heard the pop of a car backfiring outside. The high-pitched whine of an airplane. Everyone was going places except her.
She banged on the door with her right hand. The heavy door absorbed her fist, deadening her thumps and crushing her hopes of being heard. And then a blaring siren erupted all around her.
Lana jumped back from the door, slipped, and fell to the floor. Had she tripped some sort of spy wire? What kind of operation was Victor running?
She used the closest armchair to hoist herself up to standing. All was well. No broken bones. No eco-warrior SWAT team. But still the screeching wail continued, pounding at her skull, making it impossible to think.
Above her, she spotted a red light flashing from a plastic disk tucked into a crossbeam overhead. Fire alarm. Terrific.
She shuffled back to the door and tried to make sense of the situation. Was the door locked or just jammed? There was a keyhole in the door handle, but Lana couldn’t see a bolt in the frame. Not that it mattered. She couldn’t get out. She tried yelling, but she couldn’t even hear herself over the damn alarm.
Lana decided her best option was to return to her chair, press her left ear to the cover of one of Ricardo’s binders, clamp her right hand over her other ear, and wait for someone to make the shrieking stop.
The alarm scattered Lana’s thoughts, shooting off sparks in different directions. Did someone intentionally lock her in? Wait, was that a fire engine?
Lana unclamped her right ear. She could now hear two sirens, the initial screech and a lower tone, overlapping in an earsplitting cacophony. Lana crossed to the window and pulled back the curtain. The air smelled acrid, like a hair straightener left on too long. She couldn’t see any people, but when she craned her neck toward the street, she saw a huge fire truck blocking the driveway to the parking lot next door. When she turned her head the other way, she saw something worse: a bright orange eucalyptus tree behind the building, flames racing up its papery bark.
She needed to get out of there. She could try calling 911. But the fire truck was already outside. Why hadn’t they come to get her? Presumably the firefighters would do a sweep of the building. But if no one alerted them that she was inside, they might not come looking until the fire was out. And that might be too late.
For the first time, Lana found herself wishing she’d said yes when Beth tried to foist one of those “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” emergency responder buttons on her when she first got sick last fall. But even thinking about that sent a surge of adrenaline through Lana. She wasn’t going to die of cancer. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to burn to death in an office of evacuated environmentalists.
It was definitely getting warmer now. Lana inspected the window in front of her. She was on the ground floor, which was good. But the window didn’t open. Which was bad.
She rapped her knuckles against the glass. It didn’t seem to be that thick, but she wasn’t exactly a karate master. She scanned the room for something she could use to break the glass—a brick, or a ceremonial ax hanging on the wall to commemorate the last tree ever felled in an old-growth forest. No luck. All she saw were maps, books, and binders. She tried to lift one of the armchairs, but the best she could do was flip it over on its side. It fell on the floor with a loud clunk, knocking five books off the wall and half the wind out of her lungs. Dizzy with effort, she bent over her knees and sucked in oxygen. Her forehead dripped with sweat from the exertion. Or was that the fire getting closer?
After one more desperate glance around the room, Lana had a flash of inspiration. She bent down and took off her shoes. She picked up one in her right hand, running her fingers over the metallic spike heel, remembering when Jimmy Choo himself had kissed her hand at Nobu one glittery night. She fished her sunglasses out of her tote bag. She slid on the shades and wrapped her fingers around the stiletto. She pulled her arm back, took a deep breath, and swung with all her might.
Crack. A tiny spiderweb fractured the glass where she’d hit it. She slammed it again, and a second set of cracks bloomed, as big around as a fist. She did it again, and again, plunging the metal spike heel into the shuddering glass until it splintered and rained down around her.
Jackpot.
She didn’t have time to admire her work. Thick, gray smoke poured in through the now-open window, and she had to keep moving. After stuffing her shoes in her bag, she leaned toward the bookshelf with her right hand, reaching for a heavy hardcover book. “THE BARK BEETLE BIBLE,” it said on the worn leather cover. She hoped it wasn’t a rare first edition. She used it to clear as much glass as she could from the window, until she had a crude opening the size of a trash chute in front of her. Then she ripped out fistfuls of pages and used them to line the sides of the ragged hole in the window so she wouldn’t slice herself on the way out.
Lana looked at her handiwork, panting. She’d done it. She had chiseled her own escape route. Now all she had to do was use it.
In theory it should be simple: put one paper-wrapped hand on the crumbly windowsill, then the other. Swing one leg over. Then the other leg. The bottom of the window was only a few feet from the ground, three at most. No problem.
Reality, however, was riddled with problems. Lana’s left leg was still tingling, and her left arm was doing its best impression of a wet noodle. She figured she’d have only one shot to lift each bare foot clear of the glass-strewn floor and out the window, and she didn’t trust her balance, let alone her ability to hurdle a jagged windowsill. It was entirely possible she’d crash back down onto the shards tiling the library floor and bleed to death in a blazing inferno next to an open window.
Lana shuffled back, away from the broken glass. She dragged one of the armchairs to the window, crawled onto the seat, and peered out. The fire was coming around the building from the back, licking its way toward her. Over the screaming alarm, the cracks and rumbles of the fire echoed around her, trapping her in a storm of heat and fear. Her feet were bleeding, and pain shot like sparks up her legs. She could feel the fire filling her nose, pounding at her heart.
It was now or never.
Lana placed her tote bag on the windowsill, creating a buffer between her and the broken glass. She rose from the chair, sat on the bag, tucked her knees to her chest, and started sliding toward the parking lot.
Midway through her slow-motion slide over the broken windowsill, Lana remembered she still hadn’t canceled her membership at Body by Pilates Beverly Hills. For four months now, Fritz had been charging her to lie in bed three hundred miles north of the studio while he yelled at other women to raise their pelvic floors. But maybe Pilates worked through osmosis, because she could feel her obliques flexing, her abdominal muscles straining in synchrony with her hamstrings. In her head, she heard Fritz demand one more thrust, and she toppled all the way out the window.
She landed with a curse and a thud on the asphalt.
Freedom; it hurt like hell. She could already feel the bruise forming on her right butt cheek. Her hands were scraped, her face bleeding. And her wig was missing. She glanced up and saw it hanging like a hostage from the broken window. But the fire was just a few feet from the window now. She had to get out of there.