Nobody walks in Los Angeles. If Jacob Riser had been walking, he would have looked suspicious. But Jacob Riser was not walking. He was running, which was a certified heart-healthy activity, and was therefore perfectly acceptable—as well as eminently ignorable—even at three in the morning.
Jacob’s lungs burned as he gasped for air in the oxygen-deficient atmosphere of the big city. It might have gone easier for Jacob if he’d done more running in his life, but it had been twenty years and several thousand cigarettes since his last sprint.
Most people ran because they wanted to live longer, and that was certainly true in Jacob’s case as he rounded a corner blindly, his second-hand Florsheims desperate to find traction on the concrete.
Several yards into a narrow alleyway, Jacob squatted behind a dumpster, willing his heart to slow, his wheezing to silence. He glanced at the opening to the alley through a narrow aperture afforded between the back of the dumpster and the brick wall it abutted.
As he began to let himself believe he had escaped, that his pursuer had been evaded, he opened once more the manila folder he had been clutching to his chest. It was proof—proof, damn it!—that he was right this time, that he’d finally pegged that bastard after so many mistakes. But, oh God, how could the man be this evil? He had to be insane. There was no explanation, no reason, no profit in this. It staggered the mind.
Fingers shaking, Jacob fumbled in his jacket pocket for his cell phone, thumbing through the directory for the first person he thought might listen to him.
The sound of the phone warbling on the other end echoed like a klaxon in the alleyway, and Jacob quickly cupped his hand over the speaker, his heart swelling up into his throat.
A dozen rings later, an older and decidedly crabby voice came on the line. “Who the hell is this and why the holy hell are you calling me at the ass crack of dawn?”
“Schultzie,” Jacob whispered into the phone. “Schultzie, it’s me. It’s Jake. From The Clarion. Remember?”
“Jake?” There was a groan in his voice that said Schultzie would have much rather been awakened by a telephone solicitor. “Aw, holy cripes, Riser, is that you? I thought you were out west stalking celebutantes for crotch shots.”
“Schultzie, listen,” Jake persisted. “I got him. I finally got that son of a bitch.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. “Jake, if you got me up just to give me another cockamamie conspiracy on…”
“This is real, Schultzie! It’s unbelievable, but…”
“Yeah, well, after the last time that doesn’t really surprise me.”
Jacob closed his eyes and took a breath. “Okay. Okay, I deserve that. But listen…”
“No. No, you listen, Jake,” Schultzie interrupted. “I stood up for you last time. I put my friggin’ reputation on the line, you remember that? I stood up and I told that editorial board, ‘Jake’s a decent guy and a hard working reporter. If he says there’s monkey business going on, then by God you better believe there’s monkey business going on.’ I pushed for you!”
“I…I remember, Schultzie.”
“I was lucky—damn lucky—that they didn’t shitcan me when it all hit the fan. Damn lucky they didn’t decide to include me in that lawsuit, though they might as well have. I’ve been paying for your screw up ever since! You’ve been a shit stain I can’t wash out.”
“Schultzie,” Jacob pleaded. “This isn’t like that! I swear.”
“Jake, honest to God, I don’t care if you have pictures of him in bed with farm animals. You burned me once. You’re not going to do it again. Call someone else.”
“There isn’t…” The phone showed the call had terminated. “…anyone else,” Jacob finished weakly to the dead connection.
He slipped the phone back into his pocket. He’d stayed in one place too long already. He needed to keep moving. With complaints from both knees and a sharp stitch in his side, Jacob pulled himself into a standing position, just in time to see his pursuer standing silhouetted against the streetlight at the opening of the alley.
Jacob wheeled and sprinted down the alley, wheezing as every fiber of his being struggled for survival. He’d gone about twenty paces when the bullet cut through his lower spine and burst out his gut. His legs lost all the signals from the rest of his central nervous system, and inertia face-planted him into the pavement with all the mercy gravity could muster, which was none. The cartilage of his nose popped like a balloon filled with raspberry jelly.
Jacob lay there, unable to move, unable to see beyond the fireworks on the back of his eyelids. He heard the unhurried, measured footsteps of his killer approaching, heard the click of the .38 snub-nosed revolver’s hammer being pulled back, and heard the pop of the bullet leaving the barrel as his body jerked once more. Each labored breath expulsed thick, viscous fluid now, and every nerve in his body screamed in pain.
He felt the manila folder pulled free from beneath his body as his killer tugged at an exposed corner. If Jacob had it in him to care at that moment, he would have pondered how his impending death was only going to be the insignificant first of so many, many more, and not long from now.
“Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble; but he shall be saved out of it.” His killer’s voice was soft but sonorous, practiced from years of public oratory. “And another prophecy is thus fulfilled. I thank you for that, Mister Riser.”
Jacob burbled as he felt a hand slip into his back pocket and pull out his billfold. His killer availed himself of the forty-two dollars inside, letting the emptied soft leather fall conspicuously to the ground beside Jacob’s prone body before walking calmly away.
A short distance away, he heard a female voice. “We would have done that for you, honey,” the voice said. “It would have been faster.”
“I couldn’t let you do that,” the killer said ruefully. “My soul’s already damned. I don’t have the right to condemn yours.”
Five minutes later and three blocks north, a homeless man with a sign declaring he could not find a job, an education, or a meal, yet who had no difficulty in locating a clean piece of cardboard and a magic marker, found himself suddenly blessed with two twenties and two singles, and readied himself for a breakfast of liquid gold.
As Jacob’s mind began to shut down, his fingers reached outward, grasping for the cement foundation of the wall beside him. His fingers slick with blood, he had neither the time nor the cognition to leave a detailed message, or even a name, for whoever would find his body. Instead, he painted the last solid fact he could focus on, the single-most important thing he had ever learned: 1:49. And then his arm fell, as Jacob’s last breath rattled past his lips, blowing one final bubble of blood.
But who could decipher the meaning of the numbers in time? Who could possibly stop the coming apocalypse?