objects in the mirror are closer than they appear
Jack knew precisely where he was. Or at least, where he had decided to believe he was. Unless he was dead or dying—always a possibility—he’d seen An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge when he was just a kid but it had stayed with him—but if he wasn’t dead or dying, then the view out the window told him that he was sitting in the backseat of his grandfather Clete Redding’s detective car.
How he had gotten here he had no idea, but, in some weird way, he had been expecting something like this ever since he saw Diana Bowman’s face in a picture that was sixty-one years old.
They were parked on Bay Street, across the road from the Monterey Court Motel—Mr. and Mrs. W. H. McLain, Proprietors—and the time was probably going to be 1430 hours on the afternoon of Saturday the twenty-fourth of August in the year 1957. Clete was shooting the surveillance photos that he and Pandora had been looking at—seconds ago?
Or sixty-one years in the future?
He did have a trace memory, fading fast, of a long curved tunnel, pools of light on a glass floor that seemed to be made of stars, and a great green gate with silver letters... but even as he thought of it, the image shimmered into a curved space in the air and was gone from him.
And he didn’t care.
How this could be?
That all this should have happened, and he didn’t care? Tell you in a moment...
* * *
Jack sat in the backseat of the Ford, accepting all of this, in a way savoring it, mostly because his life back in the future had been a terrible burden ever since last Christmas, a crushing weight of grief that was driving him into the ground, so much so that a grave seemed like a fine and private place, and he had spent far too many nights thinking about the .45 in his gun belt.
Thinking about that gun brought him to Pandora, whom he had loved, before Barbara, and whom he was beginning to love again, after Barbara, and he thought about her for a while, what a loving heart she was, and he was sorry that he had lied to her about the way the gun had been calling to him.
He hoped she was okay—last time he’d seen her she was shooting very well, like the Valkyrie she was—maybe she’ll turn up here too—or she might be dead, killed in that gunfight—he deeply and passionately wished that this not be true, and that she was safely back in the future right now, picking through the pockets of several dead men and talking on the radio to Mace Dixon.
But then he might be dead too—and since he had no power over any of this, or even to tell if any of it was real at all—perhaps it was all a vivid dream—he let it all roll over him.
So he sat there, feeling the bake-oven heat, hearing the mutter and growl and hiss of motorboats and sailing ships and cruisers out on Matanzas Bay, hearing the far-off cry of gulls shrieking and wheeling, and the roaring of the Atlantic far away in the east, beyond Conch Island. Was it real, or just the last few seconds of his life bleeding away? Again, he didn’t care.
One thought ruled him now.
It filled his mind and drove out every other consideration. And it was this: if this really was the past, and not the last flickering sparks from his dying brain, then the future hadn’t happened yet. And Barbara and Katy, not yet born, were not yet dead. So he was going with that.
He was going with hope.
* * *
Clete looked into the rearview mirror. The guy was still there. Then he turned around and looked into the backseat, and the guy still wasn’t there. He decided not to do this a third time because it was just going to make him feel like an idiot. He looked at the guy in his rearview, and after a moment gave him a sideways grin.
“Okay. I’ve had too much to drink. Right?”
Jack shook his head.
“No. You haven’t. I mean, maybe, but that’s not why I’m here.”
“I’ve had a stroke? I’m dead and you’re some kind of fucking butt-ugly angel?”
“Pretty sure I’m not.”
“Then...what the fuck are you?”
“What do I look like?”
Clete considered him in the mirror.
“That’s a uniform. You’re Florida Highway Patrol. A sergeant.”
“Yeah. I am.”
“That a nameplate, on your tunic?”
Jack had forgotten about it.
“Yes. It is.”
Clete leaned into the mirror, changed the angle.
Sat back, rubbed his hands over his face.
“‘Redding.’ It says ‘Redding.’”
“Yes. It does.”
“And that’s your name. Redding.”
“Yes.”
“Are we related?”
“We are.”
Clete sighed, blowing his lips out, watching the cars go up and down Bay Street for a while.
“Do I want to know how?”
“I don’t know if you do. I’m still trying to work out the complications myself. I’m not real sure what the hell is going on here either.”
Clete spent a few minutes fooling around with the camera and the film cases, stowed them in the passenger foot well, opened the glove compartment and pulled out a small bottle of Southern Comfort, turned to offer it to the man who still wasn’t in the backseat, stopped himself, and took a short sharp pull on it. Sighed again.
“You’re sure I’m not having a stroke?”
“Yeah, I think so. Try not to have one now, okay?”
“I’ll try. What the fuck are you, then?”
“I’m as real as you are.”
“That’s a slick way of saying one of us is hallucinating.”
“But we’re not.”
“Okay. Tell me as much as you can. I’ll figure it out from there.”
“Well, I have a couple of conditions.”
“Rules, you mean?”
“Yeah. Before I get into this, just to check the boxes. This is Saturday, August 24, 1957. And we’re in St. Augustine, Florida. It’s around 2:30 in the afternoon. And you’re Clete Redding, and you’re a Detective First Grade with the Robbery Homicide Division of the Jacksonville Police Department.”
Clete tugged out his gold shield, held it up in the mirror. Then he tapped the dashboard clock. The time was 2:35. Jack nodded.
“Okay. My name is Jack Redding. Now, brace yourself. Okay?”
“I’m braced.”
“I’m your grandson. Your boy, Declan, is my father. A couple of minutes ago I was sitting in your house in Crescent Beach—”
“Yeah? Gimme the address.”
“Thirty-Two Avenue A.”
“Phone number?”
“904-233-6630.”
“Wrong,” said Clete, pouncing on it.
Jack realized Clete was talking about the phone number back in 1957.
“Right...right...it was... Jeez, Clete, that was sixty-one years ago!”
“Number.” A bark, just like a drill sergeant.
Jack racked his mind...
“It was...JA something...9...something...”
“Number.”
“JA for Jacksonville 9...6630! Just like it is now.”
“What tattoo have I got on my right biceps?”
“You don’t have a tattoo on your right biceps. Far as I know, you don’t have a tattoo anywhere.”
“Okay, smart guy. What was I doing on September 15 seven years ago?”
“You were in Korea. Going ashore at Inchon with the Fifth Marine Regiment.”
Clete was studying him in the mirror.
“You’re from sixty-one years in the future? So I’m probably dead by then. When do I die?”
“Maybe you’re not dead then either?”
Clete worked out the numbers.
“Fuck that. I’d be ninety-seven. I’ll never make ninety-seven. No male in our family ever got past seventy-five. My heart’ll give out long before that.”
“Maybe. Anyway, I’m not going to tell you.”
“Why not?”
Jack patted his pockets for a cigarette and then remembered he didn’t smoke. He used to, but he quit back in 2001. Which meant that in 1957 he hadn’t quit yet. But then he wasn’t born yet either, so there was that. Maybe he’d buy a pack of Lucky Strikes. And then he patted his pants pocket and found a battered pack of Lucky Strikes where he was pretty sure they hadn’t been a second ago.
And a flip book of matches.
On the cover was a logo for a place called the Blue Dahlia Bar. That made him smile.
A very nice touch. Whoever or whatever was running this show—the Timekeeper?—had a very wicked sense of humor. He flipped it open, but there was no Lenox phone number written inside it.
Still, Mace Dixon would have been delighted.
He pulled a cigarette out, lit it up and exhaled the smoke. It was better than he remembered.
The Blue Dahlia Bar.
That matchbook was a signal on someone’s part—a warning maybe—but he had no idea who might be trying to warn him, or about what.
He did get the idea that reality was going to be a negotiable issue when you were time shifting. So maybe that was the Timekeeper’s message.
Clete was still waiting for his answer. He smiled at Clete through the cloud.
“Why not? I’ve been thinking about that. From what I remember about time travel, if you change the past you can really fuck up the future.”
Clete thought that through.
Sighed again.
“Okay. You’re my grandson from sixty years in the future—”
“Sixty-one.”
“Okay. Sixty-one. I take it Declan grows up and gets married and has kids. Good for him. Frankly I didn’t think he had it in him. He’s sort of a pantywaist. I mean, I love him and all that shit, but Mary Alice runs his ass. So when he’s older I get a chance to toughen him up?”
“Dad never really toughens up, Clete. But he’s a good guy, in his own way.”
“Glad to hear it. I hoped he would come out okay. But you. You turned out to be a cop too?”
“Yes. Sergeant in the FHP. Just like—”
“Just like what?”
“Sorry. Can’t tell you that.”
“Got a kid of your own?”
That came in like a kick in the gut, and it showed on his face. Clete saw that clearly.
“Okay. Yow. Bad question. Sorry I asked.”
“Yeah...well...”
“Kid died?”
Jack just nodded. It was all he could do.
“Hey... I’m...I’m so sorry. When?”
“Last Christmas Eve. Car accident. My wife too.”
On the same Matanzas Inlet your wife dies on in six days.
“Jeez. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
A heavy silence, and all they could do was wait it out.
* * *
Clete looked out the window, checked the dashboard clock. A little after three. He’d been sitting here with the guy for thirty minutes. And now they were both depressed as shit.
On one level he was still convinced that this whole man-in-the-rearview-mirror thing wasn’t real and that he maybe was having heatstroke or a heart attack and hallucinating the whole thing.
And on another level, he had seen a lot of strange things in his life—like the ghosts of dead men standing on blood-drenched snowdrifts in the Chosin Reservoir—and he was ready to take life as it came. This seemed pretty real, so what the hell. He was going with it.
He sighed, took another hit on the Southern Comfort, set it down and said, “Well, this sounds like a rat fuck from the get-go. Can you get out from behind that mirror?”
“I don’t know. So far I haven’t done much but sit around and bullshit with you.”
“You’re a big motherfucker, I’ll admit. Maybe the rearview mirror is too small to get through. What if we go look for a bigger mirror?”
“This isn’t Alice in Wonderland, Clete.”
“Hey, I took Declan to see that movie. He loved it. Anyway, fuck this. I need a drink, and you sure as hell need a drink, and there’s a big old antique mirror behind the bar at the Alcazar. Waddya say?”
“I’m in.”
Clete grinned at him.
“Well, you don’t have too much fucking choice, do you? What’s your first name, anyway?”
“Jack.”
“Jack? Declan named you Jack? I woulda thought Chauncey or Cornel or Lester.”
“Nope. Jack.”
“Okay. Jack. Let’s see if we can get you pulled through the... What was it? In the movie? Alice in Whatever.”
“The looking glass?”
“Yeah. The looking glass.”
* * *
There actually was a huge mirror behind the bar at the Alcazar Hotel, and the problem of being stuck in the rearview mirror seemed to resolve itself, as Jack more or less got shifted—how or by whom he didn’t want to ask—from Over There to Over Here.
The place was packed, and a kid on a stool was pounding away at a guiltless Steinway Grand, doing some serious damage to “Begin the Beguine.” The bartender, a pencil-necked boy who looked about eleven, wearing a red silk vest and striped black pants and a boiled shirt with a black bow tie, the collar about two sizes too big for him, pulled up short in front of them and asked what he could bring them.
Clete appeared to know the kid pretty well, calling him by name—Freddy or something like it—it was hard to make it out over the music and the crowd chatter. The kid blushed and looked pleased to be remembered by Clete Redding.
Jack didn’t think they’d have Barefoot Pinot Grigio on the list, and anyway he didn’t want to risk ordering a glass of white wine with his grandfather sitting on the next barstool holding a gigantic boilermaker and watching him in a considering way, so he ordered one too.
When it came, a big glass mug of India pale ale and an oversize shot glass full of whiskey, Clete took the shot glass, dropped it into the mug of beer, tipped the frosted mug to Jack with one raised eyebrow, said, “Here’s to family,” set himself and drained it to the bottom in one go, his throat working and his eyes closed. Jack and Freddy, the kid behind the bar, watched this ceremony with interest.
Clete set the glass down, sighed deeply and looked at Jack expectantly. So did the bartender. Jack had never tried a boilermaker, but he had never tried time travel either, so what the hell.
He dropped the shot glass into the mug—it went down like a depth charge—and then he lifted the mug—it was as big as a toaster and weighed a ton—and he drained the thing at one go, set it down and sighed the same sigh as his grandfather had just sighed, which seemed to satisfy all three of them.
Freddy went away to get two more, and they sat there side by side on the red leather stools, looking at their reflections in the long bar mirror, and after a while spent in quiet contemplation of just how totally nuts this situation was—and two more boilermakers for each of them—Clete got around to the central point.
“Well, this afternoon has been instructive as hell, if it really happened, which I doubt, but if it did, what the fuck does it all mean?”
Jack looked in his pocket for his iPhone, pulled out a battered notebook instead, one he had never owned in his entire life.
He looked at it for a time, thinking about the Blue Dahlia matchbook cover and the Lucky Strikes in his shirt pocket and wondered—briefly—what other messages the Timekeeper had in store for him.
He flipped the notebook open—another nice touch here too because the pages were filled up with his own handwriting—and found an entry that corresponded, roughly, with what he and Pandora had found out about the woman calling herself Diana Bowman.
“You’re doing surveillance on a woman who’s banging Tessio Vizzini.”
Clete found this professionally intriguing.
“How the fuck do you know that?”
“It’s one of the things I can’t tell you about. I have to let you run things your way.”
Clete didn’t like it, but he let it go.
“Okay. Yes. I am.”
“Well, so am I.”
“You’re onto this DiSantis broad too?”
“I think so.”
“But, this broad is thirty-four years old. There’s no way she’s somebody you’re looking at sixty-one years from now.”
“But that is exactly what I’m looking at.”
“Same name?”
“No. She’s calling herself Diana Bowman.”
“Okay. And what’s the beef?”
“Murder, kidnapping, robbery. She left three people to die in a storage locker, she kidnapped two young girls and got one of them shot and murdered the other while she was in Protective Custody—”
Clete snorted into his beer mug.
“Jeez, kid. How the fuck did that happen?”
“She put cyanide into the kid’s medicine. We were stupid enough to let her take a hit of it while she was in the hospital room.”
Clete gave him a look, and Jack took it.
“Yeah, yeah. I know. I know.”
“You happen to have a picture of this Bowman woman?”
“I don’t know. I might.”
He ruffled through the notebook, and a photo fell out. It was the digital shot from the Carousel Bar, only now it was just a color snap with rippled edges. But it was her.
Clete took the shot, held it up to the bar lights overhead.
“Jeez. That’s her. That’s Aurelia DiSantis. When was this shot taken?”
“Sixty-one years in the future, at the Monteleone in New Orleans.”
“At the Carousel Bar, I see. So, like, a relative, a granddaughter?”
“What do you think?”
Clete studied the shot for a while.
“Fuck relative. That’s her. That’s Aurelia DiSantis.”
“Thank you. I think so too. So far there’s only two people who believe me. You’re one of them, and a lady cop named Pandora Jansson is the other.”
“And where’s she?”
“Back in the future.”
Clete took a long drink.
“Okay. So what we’re saying here is that this DiSantis chick is the same chick who is calling herself Diana Bowman sixty-one years from now and who you want for assorted felony murders and robberies and all that nasty shit?”
“Exactly. It’s what this woman does. She finds somebody vulnerable, isolates the target, gets control of the money, like a parasite on a host, sucks the victim dry, kills the host and moves on.”
“And she’s been doing this for...?”
“No idea. At least sixty years.”
Clete looked at the shot.
“Fucking Spider Lady.”
“Yes.”
“And I’ve got a pretty good idea that sucking a vic dry is exactly what that DiSantis broad is doing to Tessio Vizzini.”
Jack let that go by, although it was sorely tempting. Clete picked up on that.
“I meant her MO. Jeez, clean up your mind.”
“Hey, I said nothing!”
“You were thinking it. So what you’re telling me, is this woman can slip around in time, go up and down the time chute, and right now she’s popped out of the chute right here in St. Augustine? And you came down after her?”
“Looks like it.”
“You maybe shoulda thought this through a little better, kid. I mean, I’m all for a good police chase, but I think I woulda pulled up short when the chute opened up on me.”
“Maybe next time I will.”
“What makes you think you’ll get a next time? Look around you, Jack. This is where you are.”
Jack took a breath, let it out, took a hit of his boilermaker, let the reality of the Alcazar Bar roll over him.
All around them there was music—the kid on the stool was now pounding the stuffing out of Glen Miller’s “In the Mood”—and the smell of cigarettes and the cheerful talk of the crowds. Now twelve years after the end of World War II, the boom times of the fifties really starting to roll, people in baggy suits and big ties, the women in flared skirts and cashmere twinsets and pearls at the neck, the bartenders in red vests and striped pants, moving up and down the bar line, smiling and mixing and smiling, the room full of smoke and perfume, and under it all the vague remnants of the sulfur reek of the pool that used to be right in the center of the casino years ago, still there, embedded in the wood paneling and the marble arches.
“Yeah,” he said, reaching for his beer. “Here is where I am.”
“So, what do you want to do?”
“Well, we’re both cops, and we’re after the same woman. So—”
“So, let’s go be cops.”
“Yeah. Let’s. What do you have on Aurelia DiSantis?”
“What I have is she’s calling herself Aurelia DiSantis, but I think it’s an alias. I tossed her room here at the hotel.”
“She’s staying here. At the Alcazar?”
“Yes. Has a suite. Seems to have some money.”
“And of course you had a warrant?”
“Don’t be a putz.”
“What did you find?”
“ID in her name—DiSantis, Aurelia, age thirty-four, date of birth fits—a Louisiana driver’s license in that name, with an address at the Pontalba Apartments in New Orleans, about fifteen grand in cash, mixed bills, some Mexican scrip, some old photos of an apartment interior somewhere, a snub-nosed Colt .38 with a box of shells.”
“What’d you make of all that?”
“Looks legit enough, except for the Colt. But something ain’t right about her and I can’t quite nail it down.”
“Why her in the first place?”
“Waddya mean?” Clete said, a wary look flickering in his eyes.
Jack knew he was on dangerous ground here.
“I just mean, if she’s legit, then what brought her to the attention of the Jacksonville Robbery Homicide Division?”
Clete looked at him for a long time, and then down at the half-empty mug of beer between his rough-skinned hands.
“If you’re really from the future, maybe I’ve already told you about this shit?”
Jack waited awhile before he answered.
“If I say yes, you’ll know you lived long enough to tell me a lot of things.”
“And did I?”
“You figure it out.”
“The Rules?”
“Yes. The Rules.”
Long silence.
“Okay. Here goes,” Clete said, eventually. “Back in the car, you asked me if this was Saturday the twenty-fourth of August in 1957. Which means that date was important to you. It also means that, from where you were sitting, you recognized where we were. Which means that the photos I just finished taking a couple hours ago made it through sixty-one years, so you could be sitting in my beach house looking at them. Because that’s the view in the shots I took, and that’s the same view out the windshield. And you knew it when you saw it. You knew exactly where you were. Am I right so far?”
Jack was impressed.
“You are.”
“Okay. So if you’re sitting looking at these pictures way out there in the future, there was something in those pictures that you were trying to figure out, but I wasn’t there to tell you about them.”
“Or you were alive but you wouldn’t.”
Clete’s head came up.
“Why the fuck wouldn’t I tell you?”
“You tell me.”
Clete’s face went red.
“You think I wasn’t doing surveillance for the PD. You think I was checking out Tessio Vizzini’s new punchboard for Tessio himself.”
“Clete, I work in the same kind of job you do. We have gangs and syndicates there too. And sometimes you gotta do...what you gotta do.”
“Like doing sideline shit for a Mafia capo?”
“Absolutely. I’d do it too, if it gave me better information. You can’t work the streets without making some risky moves. I do it all the time. If you were checking out Aurelia DiSantis for Tessio Vizzini, you were also doing it for the Jacksonville PD. Because you are the Jacksonville PD. You follow this?”
Clete was silent but radiating a slow burn. Jack wondered how the Timekeeper would react if his grandfather knocked him off a barstool at the Alcazar Hotel. Finally Clete seemed to work something out, and he softened up a bit.
“Kid, this is Florida in the fifties. We have the Five Families here. We have Cuba across the way. We got this asshole Castro making all sorts of trouble out in the countryside. Meyer Lansky—you know him?”
“Yes. I know all about it.”
“How?”
Jack shrugged.
“It’s history now. Or will be.”
“Well, Lansky opened up Cuba, for now anyway, unless Castro and this Guevara guy actually take the country, and now there is some serious fucking money flowing up and down this coast, and across to Cuba, and back again, and all we can do—the PD—is try to keep the worst of things from getting the better of...”
“The best of things?”
“Yeah. Yes. And to do that...”
“You do what you gotta do.”
Clete looked at his grandson then, and some kind of deep pain seemed to lighten inside him, just a little, but enough. Jack’s heart went out to him, but then it always had. He loved the man.
“Lot of people, kid...lot of people...especially the fucking civilians...they judge... You know what I mean?”
“I do. Easy for them. They have no skin in the game.”
“What?”
“They have nothing at stake. No dog in the hunt. They’re in the bleachers. You’re down in the arena.”
“Yes. We are. Thing is, kid, inside, I’m straight. Always was straight. In Korea, it was easy to be straight. The Rules were...clear, you know? Us, the Corps, and them, the Dinks. But here on this coast, it’s hard to always know what straight is. Tessio Vizzini is a mob guy, but if what he’s doing is so bad, how come so many ordinary people are buying whatever he’s selling, and how come so many city officials—state people too—are taking money to help him operate? Things get...bent. People get bent.”
The bartender—Freddy or whatever—came back, but Clete waved him away, signaling for the bill.
“So my main worry... Jack... I wouldn’t want you to judge. You follow? And Mary Alice, she doesn’t know about any of this. She’s...she’s good, Jack...she’s good all the way down. If something were to happen to me, I would never want to see her...hurt. Stained.”
Jack put a hand on his grandfather’s massive shoulder, left it there for just a second, feeling the heat coming off him. The crowd noise went away.
“I can tell you this, Clete. It’s against the Rules, but what you’re afraid of? Mary Alice ever being ashamed of you, or stained by you?”
“Yeah?”
“It never happens. It. Never. Happens.”
A lot of things flickered across Clete’s rough-cut face, but the main one was relief.
Jack didn’t have the heart to tell him why.
Or maybe he had too much heart to tell him that, if everything ran the way it ran in the history books, Mary Alice Redding had six days to live.
Unless he did something about that.
Presuming he could do anything about it at all.
The Rules.
Freddy came with the bill, a careful look on his young face. Clete looked at the bill and saw that it was for zero dollars.
“Compliments of the gentlemen across the way, sir.”
Clete and Jack looked out into the crowd. A group of lean and shiny men in too-sharp suits were sitting around in a red leather banquette, a silver bucket of champagne in the middle of the table. They were looking at Clete, smiles as wide and dangerous as sharks. They raised their glasses to him, smiled again, drained them and waved at him. They all had French-cuffed shirts with diamond links that glittered as they moved. Clete turned away abruptly, his mood darkening.
“Who’re those guys?” Jack asked.
“The one with the slick black hair, that’s Anthony Vizzini, Tessio’s son. He’s next in line for capo if Tessio ever dies. He’s hungry for it, but Tessio isn’t going anywhere for a long time. Unless Anthony finds the balls to cap him, which isn’t likely. The balding guy with the scars is Sergio Carpo, the Vizzinis’ main enforcer. Very bad guy. Likes to use pliers. And the big guy with the face like a beefsteak is Salvatore Bruni. He runs the Cuba drug trade for Tessio. The other two guys I don’t know. Probably a coupla button men new in from Sicily. Tessio’s making some moves against the Traficantes—the Five Families aren’t happy about that, so I guess he’s bringing in some troops in case it all goes to shit in a fucking hurry. They’re all holed up in Tessio’s compound down the shore, gated up and bunkered like Fort Knox.”
“Going to the mattresses?”
Clete looked at him.
“What?”
Jack felt like an idiot.
“It was in a movie—The Godfather.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Never mind. They look pretty happy here.”
“The Vizzinis have a forty percent share in the Alcazar. The Bonnanos and the rest own another thirty percent.”
Clete turned around on the stool, picked up the bill, held it up so the men at the table could see it, crumpled it into a ball and threw it on the ground, then he stood up, stepped on the crumpled bill, peeled a hundred off a roll—a damn big roll—from his pocket, tossed it on the bartop.
“There you go, Friday. Keep the change.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Friday—not Freddy—with a nervous glance at the five men in the booth, who were all staring at them, faces white and mouths tight.
Clete and Jack walked out of the Alcazar and into the sidelong light of late afternoon. The air was hot and thick and smelled of salt water and car fumes. It lay against the skin like a hot wet towel. The Ford was right there in the circle, just as they’d left it. Jacksonville PD parked wherever they damn well pleased, including the roundabout in front of the Alcazar Hotel.
“Where are we going now?” asked Jack, as they powered out into the crowded cross streets of old town. Clete looked across at him.
“You up to a road trip?”
“I have all the time in the world,” said Jack, which made them both smile.
“Okay then. We’re going to New Orleans—”
“How we going to get there? Isn’t it all country roads? It’ll take days.”
“No. It isn’t. We have actual paved highways, even way back here. Like Highway 90, which takes us all the way to New Orleans. Six hundred miles, so it’s an all-nighter. We can split the driving. You got any money?”
That was a new thought to Jack. He checked his wallet, and of course there were no credit cards in it. Just his Highway Patrol ID and his badge. And no cash either. Apparently the Timekeeper didn’t do cash advances.
“I had some credit cards—”
“What? Credit what? You mean like a Diners’ Club card? Who’re you? John Jacob Astor?”
“Never mind. Nope. I’m busted.”
“Well, I’m not. We’ll get you some gear on the way out. You got spare autoloaders for that Colt?”
Jack realized he hadn’t thought about his weapon at all. He’d been aware of the weight of a gun at his waist, but he was so used to it he hadn’t checked his belt, and there was a weapon in the holster, but not his Kimber .45. He tugged it out and turned it in the dashboard light, a blue steel Colt Python, shimmering in the glow.
Clete looked over at it.
“Yeah, the .357. Same as mine. I got ammo in the trunk, so we’re good. Just got to get you some kit.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
“Who owns my beach house back there?”
“You do,” Jack lied.
“Bullshit. It’s yours, right?”
“Yes. You gave it to me.”
“Left it to you, you mean?”
“Quit it, Clete. I’m not telling you anything about stuff like that. What about grand—what about Mary Alice and Declan? Can we just drive off and leave them?”
“Yeah. They’re down the shore, other side of Matanzas. Rattlesnake Island. She had relatives down there. I sort of sent them away. Wanted them out of the line of fire.”
“You expecting some?”
“Yeah. This thing between the Traficantes and the Vizzinis, it’s going to get bloody. My guess is soon. In the meantime I gotta look into this DiSantis dame. And now it seems, so do you.”
“This is true.”
“Okay. Good. So, working on the idea that this isn’t all just a bad dream fueled by too many boilermakers, what I got today, looks like she has some background in New Orleans. Figured, fuck it, let’s go look. Check out her place at the Pontalba. See if anybody there knows anything about her. Okay with you? Since we’re both on the same case?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of going straight at her, since she’s got rooms right here at the Alcazar.”
“Yeah? And do what? Cuff her and pop her back into the time chute? You got any idea how to do that?”
“No. I don’t. I just meant, now we got her close, why don’t we just go ask her some questions? See what she has to say?”
“Ask her questions about what? Crimes she’s gonna commit sixty fucking years in the future? She’ll call the house dicks on us. No, we gotta go dig into her past, see what comes up. If we’re gonna take her down, we’re gonna have to build a case right here, where we are.”
Jack took that in, couldn’t see any other way, and he was silent for a while as Clete wound his way across the bridges that led to the highway.
The sun was sliding down over the mainland, and stars were beginning to show. The heat was leaving too, which was nice. Jack cranked the side window all the way down and let the breeze cool him off.
“The bartender, is Friday really his name?”
“Sort of. I call him Friday. After that show Dragnet with Jack Webb.”
“Joe Friday. Yeah. Does he want to be a cop?”
“No. He’s putting himself through college. And the Friday thing started off because Friday’s his last name too. Well, not actually Friday. It’s spelled like the Krauts do it. Freitag.”
Jack looked over at Clete, Clete’s face lit up ghostly green by the dashboard lights.
“Freitag?”
“Yeah. Freitag.”
Jack was quiet for a while, his heart hammering against his ribs. He went carefully, as one does when crossing spring ice.
“You...happen to know his first name?”
“Yeah. Anton or Antoine or something.”
“Anson, maybe?”
“Yeah. Could be.”
“He’s saving for college?”
“Yeah.”
“For what?”
“Med School. He wants to be a doctor.”