by Rachel Ford
“Jesus,” the other man said, his face turning very pale. “How long was I in for?”
“Not long. Someone…someone shivved you.”
“In the can?”
“In the chest.” Then, Alfred took his meaning. “Oh, yes, when you were in prison.”
Ray took a seat now, staring at the taxman. “This is…crazy talk. Time travel? And…” He shook his head. “Me going to prison? The City knows me. They know I don’t work for Tomassi, or any of those guys.”
Again, all the arguments against transporting someone through time with no warning – the arguments that might have stopped a wiser man – swarmed his mind. “I know it’s…difficult. But you saw us travel.”
The detective nodded slowly. “I did.”
It was then that Alfred’s phone rang, and it was so loud in the stillness that he yelped. “Sugar cookies.”
Ray was on his feet in a second, reaching for his gun. “What is that?”
“It’s just my phone,” he answered hastily. “I need to answer it. But…there’s no need for that.”
The detective relaxed his grip on the gun, slipping it back into the holster for the second time that morning, and Alfred breathed a sigh of relief.
Then, he got the phone. It was Nance, and she was initiating a video chat. Sugar cookies. Pivoting so that Ray was out of the frame, he affected his most casual tone and answered, “Nance.”
“Hey Alfred. I-” She cut off suddenly. “Is that…a fedora?”
The taxman glanced upward, his eyes reaching the brim of his hat. “Fudge muffins,” he said aloud, snatching it off his head.
Nancy laughed. “Alfred, what’s going on?”
“I…uh…” His mind raced. “I was…planning my Halloween costume.”
Her eyes widened. “You were?”
“Yeah. You said you wanted to do a couple’s costume.”
“I did.” She smiled. “Wow. Wow, that’s awesome Alfred. I know that’s not really your thing.”
He shrugged, feeling every bit a louse for lying to Nance like this. “I thought it’d be fun. Figured I’d surprise you.”
“It will be, babe. And, of course, I see you’re going with a familiar theme.” She grinned, adding, “But I’m sorry I ruined your surprise.”
“Oh, no worries. But, hey, what’s up?”
“We’re on break. And I just wanted to check and make sure you ate your breakfast.”
He frowned at her. “Of course I ate my breakfast.” Overate, considering all the Fat Sal’s pizza he’d scarfed down. She didn’t need to know that, though.
“Good. And have you been drinking water?”
Here, he paused. He’d forgotten that. “Not yet…”
She laughed. “Make sure you do. Hydration is important.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Okay.”
“How’s filming?”
“It’s great. I mean, we’ve shot the same scene fifty times, but there’s always some new angle, or-” She cut off suddenly, surprise registering on her features. “Oh. I didn’t realize you had someone over.”
Alfred glanced up at this, realizing with mortification that Ray had rounded the phone and was standing square in the center of the frame. He’d doffed his hat, but his eyes were fixed on the screen with a mix of awe and alarm. “Oh…uh…this is Ray…” Panic swelled in his mind even as he said it. He should have chosen another name. Nance had seen pictures of Ray Lorina, and though they’d been grainy black-and-white stills, he didn’t want to make any associations for her. “Raymond.”
She nodded. “Hey, Raymond.”
“He’s…uh, helping me with my costume.”
Nancy blinked. “He is?”
“Yeah. He’s…a master costumer.”
“Oh. Wow.” She seemed surprised, but no more so than Ray, who was staring at the taxman with a slack jaw. “You…you really are going all out on this costume, aren’t you?”
“Of course,” Alfred laughed nervously, shifting so that the detective was out of the frame. “Anything for you, babe. But, hey, we’re in the middle of stuff now. Can we talk later?”
“Of course. Sorry to interrupt.”
“No worries. Love you, darling.”
“Love you too. Bye.”
“Bye.” Alfred terminated the call and stood rooted to the spot, shaking with nerves. “Sugar cookies. At least, I don’t think she recognized you.”
“What manner of device is that?” the detective wondered.
“A phone.” This was going to be more difficult than he originally thought, he realized. There were decades, approaching a century’s worth, of technological advancements Lorina would have to be brought up to speed on.
“That’s no phone that I’ve ever seen. That was like…the movies.”
“It isn’t like phones of your era,” he conceded. “But our phones can do more than transmit voices. They can share images. Still images, like photographs, and videos.”
Ray took a seat again, the news seeming to stun in equal measure to the revelation that he’d been sold out and murdered. He stared with glassy eyes at the taxman.
Alfred wondered momentarily about his priorities, but then pushed the thought aside and pulled up a chair beside him. “I know this must be overwhelming. But the reason I brought you here was so that we could change things. In the original timeline – before I interfered – you died in prison. Now that I’ve brought you to my era…” He paused for a moment, collecting and sorting his memories. As before, he had two distinct sets of them: the originals, from the first timeline, and replacements, stemming from his intervention. “They said the mob whisked you away, protecting you from facing the music. Dorothy believed the Tomassis killed you.”
“Dori?” Ray looked up now, a kind of clarity spreading across his features. “Oh God. I just disappeared out of her life, then? Who knows what she thought? My poor Dori.”
“She always maintained you were innocent,” Alfred said, hoping that, at least, would lessen the sting.
The detective ran a hand through his hair. “Oh Dori.” Now, he looked up at the taxman. “Is she…dead too?”
“Yes. But she lived a long life.”
He nodded at that. “Good. Good. And…was it a happy life? Did she get married and have the family she always wanted?”
Here, Alfred fidgeted. “Well…um…the thing is, Ray, she…didn’t.”
“What?”
“She never got married. Or had kids.”
“Because I disappeared?” The detective shook his head, as if he was fighting the news. “No. You’ve got to take me back. Don’t you see? She must have believed I’d be back someday, Alfred. You’ve got to take me back to my own time. Even if I die again, at least she’ll know what happened. I can’t – I can’t let her live her life like that, not knowing, waiting for something that will never happen.”
“Ray…she didn’t get married in either timeline. Even when she knew you were dead. She…she never married, when she lost you.”
“Oh God.” He buried his head in his hands. “What have I done?”
The taxman cleared his throat. “I’ve got a plan. A plan to fix this.”
Chapter Fifteen
It had taken a few minutes, but Alfred was able to get through the other man’s despair and bring him around. “What’s your idea, taxman? We’ve got to fix this.”
“It’s simple. In your day, the mob was too powerful to take on. Boyle and all those cops? They were probably on the take. Hummus, they even had an IRS agent on their payroll. So of course they got you before you got them.
“But nowadays, it’s different. Most of the old crime families are gone, and the ones that remain don’t have the power they used to.”
Here, at least, Ray perked up. “Really?”
He nodded. “Really.”
“God, it seemed like it was a fight we’d never win. Every time you cut off one head, two more would spring up to take its place. Like a hydra.” He shook his head. “Y
ou’re saying, we do win?”
“Yeah. You do. It costs a lot of lives, and takes a lot of courageous people willing to risk everything. But organized crime is beaten back, off the streets, into the shadows again.”
Ray whistled. “Hell. Sounds like I died right before we found heaven on Earth.”
“Not quite,” Alfred cautioned. “There’s still a world war about to happen, and…well, quite a few other wars on the way after that one. And decades of racial prejudice and social unrest and wealth inequality and class exploitation…” He shook his head. “Which is neither here nor there. Point is, trust me, there were still plenty of problems to solve outside the mob.”
“A world war?” Ray wondered. “That damned Hitler, I suppose?”
“That’d be the one.”
“I knew it.” Now, he glanced up at the taxman. “We do win, right? We beat that son-of-a-bitch?”
Alfred scoffed. “Of course.”
“Good. And Mussolini?”
“Yup.”
“Good.”
“Definitely. But, uh, about the case?”
“Right. The case. You were saying the mob had infiltrated the department.”
“Right. My thinking is, we prove your innocence now – get the evidence that exonerates you in this era, where we can find it without worrying about dirty cops.”
“And chopper squads,” Ray put in.
“I have no idea what that is,” Alfred admitted, “but it doesn’t sound good.”
“A group of guys, come to…” The detective mimed a man with a machine gun, even providing rat-tat-tat sounds. “Chop you down.”
“Oh.” He shivered. There was something simultaneously charming and blood curdling about early twentieth century slang. At the moment, he was feeling the effects of the latter more than the former. “Well, uh, fortunately, we don’t have those either nowadays.”
Ray nodded. “Exactly.”
“So we get the evidence without alerting any dirty cops, or machine gun squads.”
The detective nodded again. “Okay. I like it so far. Then what?”
“Well…to be honest, I haven’t fully thought that part out. I was hoping you’d be able to help.”
“Me? I don’t know anything about time travel.”
“No, but for this to work, we have to take the evidence back to your time. We have to prove, in your day, that you were innocent.”
Ray pondered this for a moment, then nodded again. “Alright. So, say we figure that out…you have a way to get me back home, right?”
“Of course.”
“So I get back home, I prove I’m not a grifter, and we take Sal down?”
Here, Alfred chuckled nervously. “Well, uh, that part probably isn’t necessary anymore. Technically, anyway.”
The detective frowned at him. “Of course it is. You don’t know Fat Sal, taxman. He’s as evil as they come.”
“I don’t mean that. I just mean…well, he’s dead.”
“Dead? In my time or yours?”
“They’re all dead in my time. But in your time, he died that night. February 3rd, 1940.”
Ray blinked. “Died? How?”
Alfred shifted in his seat. “Um, it’s not easy to explain, actually.”
But the detective was quickly forming his own ideas of what had happened, and something like respect crossed his features. “You?” He laughed triumphantly. “You actually took down Salvatore Tomassi? Son-of-a-bitch. Good work, taxman.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Alfred protested quickly.
“You didn’t?”
“Not…directly. It was actually…” He sighed. He was half afraid the other man wouldn’t believe the truth. Then again, could it be any crazier than time travel? “It was my cat.”
Ray blinked. “Your cat? You mean…you’ve got a partner?”
“A partner?” Alfred was confused. “Well, yeah, Nancy.”
“That dame on the horn?” The detective’s eyebrows rose in surprise, but his tone was impressed. “She took down Salvatore?”
The taxman had literally no idea how Ray had come to this conclusion. He’d barely understood half of the words that came out of the other man’s mouth, these last few sentences. So, he tried again. “No, not Nancy. Satan.”
Ray crossed himself quickly, and Alfred sighed. “Not literal Satan. It’s just…a nickname. Because he’s annoying.”
The detective seemed as confused as he was. “I don’t think I follow.”
“My girlfriend’s cat.” He glanced around, and was, for probably the first time in his life, grateful to see the little menace, sitting on the back of the sofa and watching them. “There.”
“I see the cat. I don’t understand how it is important. Or where the devil comes in.”
“It’s annoying. Like a little devil.”
“Oh. Okay. But…how does that pertain to Tomassi?”
“Because the cat killed Fat Sal.”
“The…cat?”
Alfred ran through a brief summary of what happened, starting with his first trip through time and Fluff’s stowing away. Ray was in turns astonished, amused, and mortified.
“So you’ve done this before, then? This traveling through time bit?”
“You…didn’t realize he was dying?”
“My God, the great Salvatore Tomassi, taken down by a three pound ball of fur.”
In the end, he settled on pleased. “Well, I’m not for taking the law into your own hands. Paws, I guess,” he corrected, scratching behind Fluff’s ears appreciatively. “But this was hardly vigilantism. This was more…the good Lord working in mysterious ways.”
Very mysterious, the taxman thought, since it was through a cat named Satan. Aloud, though, he murmured his agreement. “A real New Testament kind of miracle.”
“Exactly.”
It was only with effort that Alfred was able to draw Ray back to the case. “We really do need to figure this out and get you back to your time before Nance gets home.”
The other man frowned. “That’s something I don’t get.”
“What?”
“Why lie to your girl? You think she might be working for them?”
Alfred blanched. “God, no. Of course not.”
“Then why call me…what was it? A costumer?”
He laughed nervously. “Well, see…the thing is…she doesn’t know I went back to get you.”
“Oh. And she wouldn’t approve?”
“Technically, no. We’re not supposed to use the device.”
“Why?”
“So we don’t contaminate the time stream.”
“Contaminate?”
“You know, like I did with Fluff and Sal. I mean, that one worked out alright. But it’s easy to change things without even trying. And you never know what the repercussions might be.”
“So…you weren’t supposed to go back to Fat Sal’s?”
“Nope.”
Ray considered this for a long moment, then shrugged. “It makes sense, I suppose.”
“It does?” Considering the circumstances, he’d not expected to hear that. Not from this man, in this situation.
“Well, we talked about Hitler and Mussolini. I did wonder, since you’ve got the power to do it, why you didn’t just go back and kill them. You could put old Adolf in a Chicago overcoat before he ever became chancellor.”
Alfred wasn’t sure what that meant, but he had a feeling it wasn’t a desirable outcome, from the wearer’s point of view anyway. “And what if I failed? What if I ended up getting killed before I could finish the job? What if – worst of all – Hitler ended up with the ability to travel through time? Not just backwards, but forward, to any era, to grab whatever inventions or technological advances he wanted?”
Ray nodded slowly. “It’d be a disaster.”
“It’d be the end of freedom. It’d be genocide on a scale like nothing we ever imagined. Hell, it might be the end of the human race.”
“The best laid plans of mice
and men, eh?”
Chapter Sixteen
His curiosity reasonably sated, Ray Lorina focused on the case. The first thing on the agenda was reviewing the case files, to bring him up to speed on the intervening decades since his disappearance.
The taxman found his mind wandering. He’d seen these files a thousand and one times, and he knew the story well. But Lorina dove in like a bloodhound on the scent, his focus undivided.
It took every bit of willpower not to distract him with questions, but Alfred managed. After awhile, he got up and began to pace in the other room, hoping Ray’s reading would wrap up soon.
It didn’t.
Minutes turned to hours, and before long it was afternoon. Alfred settled into a comfortable chair in the living room, ostensibly to read. Before long, though, he was catching up on some of the sleep he’d missed the night before.
He woke awhile later to the detective asking through a yawn, “Hey, you got any Joe?”
“Huh?”
“Coffee? I don’t suppose you men of the future still drink it?”
Alfred snorted. “Drink it? We practically inject it into our veins.”
Ray blinked. “That’s a yes, then?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Okay. Could I get a cup? I know it’s only afternoon here, but I’m closing in on an all-nighter.”
“Yeah, of course.” He’d forgotten about that. It had already been night when they left. “You take any creamer or sugar?”
“Just black. And strong enough to float a battleship.”
Yawning, the taxman drew himself out of his chair and headed for the kitchen. Dumping more coffee into the filter than he felt was probably safe, he got it brewing.
Satan, meanwhile, had followed him into the room, yowling. Refreshing his water and kibble, he fished through the cupboard for the bag of cat treats. “You’re a good little monster, aren’t you?”
Finally, the coffee finished, and he poured himself and the detective mugs full. In his own, he added milk. Taking a sip, and nearly gagging, he drained about half the contents into the sink, then added more milk and lots of sugar.