by Blink, Bob
“I’ve been scared by more than one bear up here,” Nate countered. “I doubt we’ll see any Rangers out here, and it’s easy enough to hide if we do.”
“You might want to be careful once we get to the lake. There will be more people and could be a Ranger there,” Zack advised.
Jake didn’t know how he felt about his friend bringing the gun. It was a park, which made the gun illegal. Usually they hiked in the forest, which changed the rules. He also knew that bears could be a problem. There had been an attack outside the park earlier this year already. His thinking was skewed he realized, because he knew he had a means to avoid an attack after it had happened. Nate didn’t have that luxury.
The wood in the campfire snapped and spit, the resin in the pinewood not the best for a fire. They were in an approved area, a short distance away from the main campground where a number of other groups had gathered to spend the night. No one else was in this smaller area, and their fire was in a rocked enclosure well away from the trees and brush that would burn so well if ignited. As an extra precaution, they kept the fire small, just enough to heat the water they needed for the tea and the freeze dried food and to give a little heat and light as they sat on logs set around the fire pit.
“How did you happen to see those kids this morning?” Zack asked when the conversation lagged. “If you hadn’t gone after them they probably would have gone over the falls. Happens every year, and the water is seldom this high. You probably saved their lives.”
“Random chance,” Jake replied, waiving off the suggestion he’d done anything.
“If they’d got into that current it would have been all over,” Nate added. “There would have been nothing anyone could have done at that point.”
Jake suddenly realized he might have a chance to feel out his friends. Throwing caution to the winds, he asked, “What if someone knew what was going to happen? Would it be right to interfere?”
“What do you mean knew?” Zack asked. “You mean someone could see what was going to happen. Of course they should. That’s kind of what you did.”
“No, I mean someone had solid knowledge that a future undesirable event was going to take place.”
“A premonition?” Nate suggested.
“Like that, but a somehow proven knowledge.”
“Someone who knew the future,” Zack said getting into the game. “Should someone who somehow knew the future, try and change events? Is that your question?”
“I guess that’s basically it,” Jake agreed.
“Wouldn’t that mean a lot of complications to future history?” Nate asked.
“That’s what we think because the question is normally posed in the context of someone traveling a significant distance back in time to modify the past. But suppose an event, say those kids, were to happen where they were swept over the falls. They are dead. But someone has the ability to send back a warning and stop it. The future is now that they are alive. Not much has changed if we believe the future isn’t deterministic. It hadn’t had time to progress very far.”
“I’ve never thought of it that way,” Zack admitted. “The future would be different from that point on, but that would be the case if Nate suddenly decided to pull out that hogleg of his and shoot one of us. The future would change suddenly there as well. Alternate paths for what hasn’t happened yet are always available.”
“Given that line of thought, it seems to be it would be the right thing to do,” Nate said.
“What if someone had to be killed?” Jake said, treading on more dangerous ground.
“Killed? Why?” Zack asked.
“Take one of the mass killers. One of those nuts that runs amok and kills twenty or thirty people. If someone could shoot him before he did the killing, would it be justified?”
“Absolutely,” Nate said without hesitation. “I think it would be cool. Surprise, asshole! Bang!”
“Wouldn’t it be better to simply let the police know?” Zack asked, a bit more pensively. “Seems our hero here could be getting into uncertain territory. I can’t see how he would be able to prove or justify to anyone that he was saving people rather than committing murders.”
Zack looked at Jake intently. “How’d we get onto this anyway? Why would you be thinking about it?”
“Something about those kids,” Jake answered. “I just started wondering about what-ifs.”
“I’d say he should be very careful,” Zack said in a quiet tone that gave Jake a chill. “I think it would be something this person would have to keep very secret.” It was as if his friend realized there was something more than idle curiosity at stake here. Then Zack changed his tone and the direction of the conversation. “Cheryl wants to know if you are going to pop the question to Karin one of these days soon. She has the sense you’re about ready.”
“I almost did a couple of weeks ago,” Jake admitted, glad to have the topic he shouldn’t have raised dropped, even if the new subject was this one.
“What happened?” Zack wanted to know.
Yeah, what happened? Jake thought, knowing he was no closer to an answer to his dilemma than before.
Chapter 6
Karin placed a finger inside the cover of the dog-eared paperback she was reading and arched her back before sliding her butt around on the hard padded bench in the waiting room trying to find a comfortable position. The angle of the seatback was wrong somehow, and no matter how she tried to position herself, her back started to ache under her shoulder blade before too long. The seat had a long slash from front to back a few inches from where she sat. She ran her finger along the cut, then looked around the small room with its smell of over cooked coffee and wondered how much longer it would be before her car was ready. She needed two new front tires and had come in to get them replaced, electing also to get the oil changed and a general tune-up performed. That was probably a mistake. It meant her car had to go through two mechanics rather than just one, and was more than likely why it was taking so long. Normally Jake would have seen to her car, but given the sudden distance she sensed in their relationship, she had been somehow reluctant to ask him.
There was no doubt that something had changed in her relationship with Jake. He had been remote of late, and much of the lightness and spontaneity seemed gone. It had happened suddenly, and Karin was immensely bothered by the situation, but each time they were together she had been reluctant to ask for fear that she wouldn’t like the answer. She hoped he wasn’t thinking of breaking off with her. She knew that she loved him, and thought he felt the same. So what could it be?
Karin was certain the first hint of the problem had been the night several weeks earlier when Jake had taken her out to one of their special spots for dinner. When he had asked her to go, she had sensed a certain excitement in him, and she had thought at the time that he might be planning to propose to her. The place had been right and certain signs over the past months had indicated he might be thinking along those lines. But when the night arrived there was an awkwardness and uncertainty between them she hadn’t been able to explain. Jake seemed haunted, almost saddened by something, and the night had gone poorly. Even later, when they had made love, their coupling had lacked the zest and spontaneity she had come to expect. When he had left her place the following morning she felt almost as if he was walking away from her life. Since then she’d only heard from him infrequently, and they had been together only once.
Had she done something to precipitate events? Was there another woman? Karin thought the answer to both questions was no. She had considered long and hard their time together the past couple of months and there was nothing that came to mind that might have put him off. As for another woman, Jake wasn’t the type. If there were someone else he would be up front about it. She would know how to recognize those signs in any event. She would bet her last dollar that there was no one else.
Perhaps Jake had a problem that he felt he couldn’t share with her. It saddened her to think that might be the case. After the
many months they had been intimate and the private matters she had shared with him, she had hoped he would feel he could tell her everything. She couldn’t imagine anything she wouldn’t be able to understand and deal with. Still, there had always been a small part of Jake that she felt was closed off to her. He had a certain air of mystery and occasionally she had detected a hardness to him that surprised her. It didn’t fit with the man she thought she knew. He was a scholar and one of the nicest guys she had ever dated. She hoped there wasn’t a dark side that she didn’t know about and which might be responsible for his distraction. Perhaps something from his past that he’d kept hidden and was now surfacing.
They needed to sort it out. If they continued this way Karin feared the rift would widen and perhaps cast them apart. Maybe it was simply a matter of time. Her girlfriend Ellen wanted her to go away for a couple of weeks on a girl’s vacation. They’d make a run to Los Angeles and then San Francisco for shopping and sightseeing. She’d almost decided to say no, and not just because it would tax her limited budget, but maybe some time away would be good. It might give Jake the space he needed to sort matters out. On the other hand, it felt to her like she would be running away when he needed her. If only he would open up.
Cheryl might know something. Jake had taken a few days to go hiking with his two best friends. He might have confided what was on his mind to Zack, who in turn might have told Cheryl about it. While they weren’t the closest of friends, Karin was certain Cheryl would confide in her if there were anything that would help the relationship. She knew Cheryl thought she was good for Jake, and having known him since grade school along with her husband Zack, she tended to look out for his interests. Karin decided she would call her when she got home.
Karin also decided she would plan an intimate evening at her place. Jake liked her cooking, and a special meal and a night of intimacy might break down the barriers and resolve this before it became more than it should. She wasn’t going to give up without a fight.
Chapter 7
Jake listened as the air hissed out of the last of the tires as he knelt by the right rear of the battered old sedan parked haphazardly on the dirt and weed covered front yard of the run down dwelling. Shorty, apparently an abusive and disagreeable old drunk, lived here and was inside sleeping off his latest binge. Jake had just finished flattening all of the tires in the man’s car, something the owner wouldn’t be able to deal with until he was fully sober once again. Even if he tried to drive the vehicle in its current condition, he wouldn’t be able to get up much speed.
The car settled down onto the last of the airless tubes of rubber as Jake scanned the neighborhood for signs of anyone watching. The hour was still early, the remnants of the night slowly giving way to lighter skies as dawn peeked over the small hills on the edge of town. At worst he would be in for a vandalism charge if caught, but he’d much prefer not to draw any attention to himself because of his other activities. Still, this was a far easier correction than most, and hadn’t required any major involvement on his part.
He’d back-tracked a couple of days to take care of this. Shorty had apparently lost control of the car a few hours from now as he drove to the local liquor store for replenishment and had run over and killed a five year old girl as a result of his impaired reflexes. The girl wasn’t anyone Jake knew, nor had he heard about the incident on the news. He wondered momentarily how many deaths occurred daily that never reached the media. The dead girl had been a playmate of Nate’s brother’s daughter, and the loss had been traumatic for her. A combination of crying for the loss of her friend and a personal concern for her own welfare which made the girl abnormally fearful about everything since the event. Jake had learned about the incident by sheer chance when he and Nate had gone out to the range tomorrow for some target practice. On the drive back, Nate had brought up the topic as a side note to something else they had been discussing.
The trip to the range had been precipitated by the recent purchases each had made at the Reno Gun Show a little more than a week earlier. Nate had a new C-More sight he was trying out on a Springfield Comp gun, this one a .45 auto. Nate had an impressive collection of firearms, many of them carefully tuned and accurized. He was mostly into handguns, although Jake knew he had a small collection of rifles. Each of the rifles was a custom job, and could produce groups that Jake could hardly imagine.
Jake had purchased a pair of upper receivers for his Rock River Arms LAR-8. The LAR was a .308 version of the popular .223 AR rifles. Like a number of his firearms, he had a pair of these. The rifle he had with him was the unregistered version, and could potentially be used to solve the special problems he dealt with. He’d wanted to sight in the new uppers. In the event he needed to use the rifle, the upper receiver used for the correction would be subject to the same fate as the barrels in his Sig pistol. They were easy to replace, and once gone, all ability to trace fired rounds to the rifle was lost, even if he didn’t retrieve the spent brass. The factory barrel he never used, keeping it with the rifle while it was stored in the safe. The replacement units were readily available without requiring any records to be filed. He’d had a choice of more than a dozen at the last show. If he’d been using the more popular .223 upper, there would have been hundreds to choose from. He’d chosen a pair with the heavy twenty-six inch bull barrels, and they were proving every bit as accurate as he’d hoped. The only change he’d made was to thread the end of the bull barrels to accept the commercial compensator he was using. He’d finished calibrating the first assembly earlier, and was just about done with the second.
While he sat on one of the hard stools with the rifle sitting on sand bags so he could check the impact point at various ranges out to three hundred yards, Nate stood comfortably at the concrete table off to his right casually popping off rounds at his twenty-five yard target. The paste-on bullseyes that Nate had placed on his target changed color when hit and showed how well his friend shot. Each of the paste-on bulls was now a ragged outline with the centers torn out as Nate pumped round after round downrange.
“You’re pretty good with that thing,” Nate observed a bit later as he checked Jake’s group with the spotting scope. Jake had just finished a five-shot two-inch group at his two hundred yard target.
High praise from the master, Jake thought. “The new barrels are as good as I’d hoped,” he replied. He’d checked them with a bore scope before buying, and they had looked smooth and perfect. Now he wished the man had had a couple more.
“Are you finished?” Jake asked, noting his friend had packed up his stuff while Jake had been finishing up the last group.
“I probably should have brought more ammo,” Nate admitted, “but I have been remiss on my loading. My supply of .45 auto is exhausted. Mostly I’ve been loading for the .38 Super of late.”
“Let me finish up at the three hundred yard target, and then I’ll be done,” Jake said.
“No hurry,” Nate agreed. He took off his ear protectors and set them on the hard concrete surface of the bench as the range master called for a break to check targets. “I’ll put my stuff in the car, then help you with your brass while you move your target. I can spot your next target while you finish up.”
Jake smiled as he stood and stepped quietly back onto the sidewalk and walked away from the disabled vehicle. The shooting trip hadn’t happened yet now, and he would be going out tomorrow with Nate. He knew where the rifle would shoot with the two barrels, remembering the settings he had carefully determined. It would make the effort go much faster this time, so perhaps he should bring along one of his own pistols for some pleasure shooting.
The accumulation of additional hardware was somewhat at odds with his current thinking. Over the past several weeks he’d seriously thought about curtailing his future efforts. When he thought about it, there were so many deaths that he had no chance of affecting. The few cases where he took action were such a tiny percentage of what were out there, he wondered if it mattered at all. And the cost to him
was potentially significant. His own happiness counted for something, and it was obvious to him now that he couldn’t continue as he had been and hope for a future with Karin. Maybe he should restrict himself to matters like the one he’d just handled, or go back to contacting the authorities and hoping they would deal with the matter.
His relationship with Karin was clearly reshaping his thinking. The first weeks after he’d attempted to disclose to her what he’d been doing had been extremely difficult for him. He smiled as he recalled the evening he’d shared with Karin just over a week ago. It had been like old times, and had brought back much of his positive outlook. It had also started him thinking along the new path. Of course, part of him didn’t believe what he was considering. Otherwise why had he been intent on building up his supply of special arms?
With their relationship somewhat stabilized, Jake had been able to think clearly once again and had managed to complete the software project for NASA which he had sent off earlier in the week. He had declined another assignment they had offered, at least for now. To keep himself occupied he had started on a small iPad App, but hadn’t gotten beyond the first level blocking out of the project.
Zach and Cheryl had invited him for dinner this coming Friday, making him promise to bring Karin along. Jake was certain that Cheryl had known of the rift that had been building between him and Karin, and was doing her part to be certain it was patched up. More than once Cheryl had dropped hints his way that he should be careful and not let Karin get away. She had become more open in recent months and clearly was adding a little push to move the relationship between the two into something more permanent.
His only partially thought through plan to curtail his correction activities had left him undecided whether to pursue another fake identity. He’d been using the current one longer than he liked, but if he were really to stop, he wouldn’t need another. Credit cards were less of a problem, and he had several different accounts loosely linked to the identity. The ID’s required him to seek the kind of sources he wasn’t fully comfortable with. Getting a card with an identity that wouldn’t bounce on the first check was necessary, and difficult.