The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
Episode One
"She's stabilized, Mr. Stetson. She'll be all right."
The paramedic who had given Amanda the atropine necessary to counteract the muscarine Hollander had given her had moved aside to give Lee and Amanda some privacy and Lee had dropped to his knees beside the gurney.
"I – I guess this one got a little rough," he'd said. "I'm sorry. You did a hell of a job, you really did. You might even make a decent agent someday."
When she responded with a murmured, "Thank you," he'd almost panicked. She wasn't supposed to have heard those words, wasn't supposed to know just how much seeing her lying on that bed in Delano's house had frightened him. Lee Stetson, the Scarecrow, wasn't supposed to have those sorts of emotions – in fact, he wasn't supposed to have any emotions at all, especially when it came to divorced mother of two who was as far from his usual 'type' of woman as it seemed possible to be.
He'd told himself firmly that it was just because the situation had gotten out of hand, and what should have been a simple, no-risk assignment had turned potentially deadly. He blamed himself for not foreseeing the possible hazards and sending in someone with more experience, more training, but time had been short, and James Delano already knew and liked the woman he knew as "Victoria Greenwich".
The atropine had effectively counteracted the muscarine, but Amanda was by no means well enough to go home, so Lee had directed the ambulance to take them to Galilee General, where Amanda was admitted to the Emergency Department for observation. Once he was sure she was in good hands, Lee had left; there was work to do at the Agency, and Billy was expecting him. A few hours later, they got word that Amanda had been released from the hospital and driven home, since she was still in no condition to drive herself.
Before the night was over, Hollander and Delano had both been arrested and charged – another case successfully concluded.
"Go home and get some sleep, Scarecrow," Billy had said. "The report on this case can wait until Monday."
Lee hadn't argued. He'd gone home, poured himself a nightcap, and gone to bed, waking only when Sunday was well advanced. Several times, he thought about going over to check on Amanda, but each time, something stopped him. On Monday, he was in the office by eight, raising not a few eyebrows, most notably Francine's.
"Well, well, did somebody decide to turn over a new leaf?" she asked.
"Can it, Francine," he grumbled.
"Well, whatever you did over the weekend, it certainly didn't improve your mood."
"What I did? What I did was come too damn close to getting Amanda killed," he snapped. "Now, if you're finished with the snide remarks, I have a report to write."
He walked away without another word, leaving her looking after him open-mouthed. He didn't even notice when she crossed the bullpen to step into Billy's office.
He wrote the report in what was record time for him, making sure to include praise for the way Amanda had handled the situation, including showing presence of mind enough to hang her evening bag on the balustrade so he could find her again, and then he wrote, "As the agent of record in this case, I strongly suggest that Mrs. Amanda King, civilian, not be given further field assignments until she has received adequate training in preparation for those assignments."
He finished typing the report – it was slow going, since he was a two-fingered typist – took it out of the machine and looked it over. Satisfied with the wording, he signed it and took it to Billy.
"My report on the Delano/Hollander case," he said, and dropped in Billy's 'IN' box before returning to his desk. A few minutes later, Billy called him in.
"Scarecrow, finish what' s on your desk or hand it over to someone else by 1700; you're leaving for MacDill Air Force Base in Florida on a hop out of Andrews at 2200."
"A Florida vacation? Why, thank you, Billy!"
"Stow it, Scarecrow! Tampa is just the first stop. From there, you're flying to Venezuela; we're hearing rumbles of trouble from La Ruta Iluminada again."
La Ruta Iluminada, or The Lighted Way, was a homegrown Marxist terrorist group patterned on El Sendero Luminoso, The Shining Path, in Peru. Lee nodded; this kind of mission was what he did, and he did it very well. He sat down.
"What's the mission?" he asked.
Half an hour later, he had all the information he needed. He finished what he could, handed over what he couldn't, and left the office at 1700. Packing wouldn't take long, and he'd already decided to go over to Amanda's and check on her that evening. He stopped in at his favorite Chinese place, Four Seasons Szechuan, for dinner; the fortune cookie that came with his meal said, "Good friends are found in unexpected places".
"Yeah, like Amtrak stations," he thought, as he tucked the bit of paper into his wallet. He paid his bill, said goodnight to his hosts, who were part of his 'family' of informers, and turned the Porsche toward Arlington and Maplewood Drive.