by Rex Bolt
Contents
Chapter 1: Open Window
Chapter 2: Less Than 48
Chapter 3: Deep Posts
Chapter 4: Reliable Witness
Chapter 5: Free Reign
Chapter 6: Modern Dance
Chapter 7: Identifying Henry
Chapter 8: Additional Hovering
Chapter 9: Fresh Parts
Chapter 10: Pounds Heavier
Chapter 11: Disguise The Fact
Chapter 12: Little Re-Direction
Chapter 13: Blue Tunnel
Chapter 14: Did You Play
Chapter 15: Traces of Human
Chapter 16: Shiny Blazers
Chapter 17: Yoga and What
Chapter 18: Accentuate It
Chapter 19: For A Mom
Chapter 20: Reading Me Wrong
Chapter 21: Swim Choice
Chapter 22: Dangling Out There
Chapter 23: Level Of Homicide
Chapter 24: Protein Shake Jobs
Chapter 25: Gear And Sprint
Chapter 26: Rodgers Sighting
Chapter 27: Farmhouse Circa
Chapter 28: Choir Came On
Chapter 1
December 10, 2016
Beacon, California
The block was full of two-story wooden row houses, and you got the sense that most of them were apartments, one upstairs one down. Pike assumed Jack was parked in front of where he was having trouble, but it was quickly obvious there was commotion coming from the house next door, the lower unit, in the back.
There was banging and yelling, as Jack had described. A little worse element than he had conveyed though, as there was this unpleasant-looking dude with no shirt on alongside the house yelling up into it through a ground-floor window. Combined with another more muffled voice that was coming from inside, that meant two guys who were apparently, for some reason, currently disturbed by Hannamaker.
As Pike got closer, he could pick up a female voice as well, slightly hysterical, asking the angry guy inside to please stop.
The one voice he couldn’t hear was Jack’s.
Pike tried to process just what the heck was happening here. What really was going on was impossible to know, it all seemed too bizarre, but either way it seemed more complicated than he would have thought, and Jack apparently wasn’t exaggerating.
Pike called Jack’s number, let it ring until it went to voice mail, which wasn’t entirely surprising if Jack was occupied holding back some door. So, keeping his eye pretty carefully now on the guy outside the house, Pike yelled out, “Yo - Hannamaker!”
The inside voices stopped and the outside guy turned to Pike and gave him his full attention.
“Can I help you with something?” the outside guy said, and he flashed a wicked smile that was missing an upper incisor.
Pike tensed up, fearing a confrontation. If you answered a guy like this you were damned if you do, damned if you didn’t, so Pike figured what was the point, he might as well ignore the idiot.
The guy was moving slowly toward him now, still with that smile, but where was Hannamaker?
“Jack!” Pike tried again, and this time there was a response, which sounded far away but maybe wasn’t if Jack’s mouth was busy resting against some door he was trying to hold back.
“PK! It’s me! Right here!” Jack sounded desperate. And right where, exactly?
Pike walked past the guy coming toward him, which seemed to amuse the dude, and he reached up and tapped on the window the guy had been eyeballing. “Here?” he said.
“Yeah, man!” Jack said, his voice clearer.
Right about then was when the guy clocked Pike on the back of the head, with something more substantial than his fist.
Pike went halfway down and was able to catch himself in a kind of squat position before he hit the ground, and then he straightened back up and looked around. The guy’s smile was gone, replaced by a slightly disbelieving look. He had some kind of metal rod in his right hand.
“What, you pulled that out of your shirt or something?” Pike said.
“My trousers,” the guy said, almost absentmindedly now.
“You gonna try it again, is that your deal?”
The guy didn’t answer. He looked increasingly concerned that hitting someone upside the head with his metal rod hadn’t done anything.
So Pike said, “If you’re not going to try it again, then be a good sport and open the window for my friend, and we’ll be on our way.”
“Open the window how?” the guy said, his eyes big. “That’s what I was doing before you showed up, trying to get him to open it.”
“Oh,” Pike said. “So you could smack him with your handy piece of steel?”
“That was the idea, yeah.”
“Why? What’s the problem, where you need to get violent?”
“Why’nt you ask your ol’ buddy in there,” the guy said.
“I will,” Pike said. “First you need to open the window and let him out.”
“Asshole,” the guy said, “I already told you--”
And Pike bearhugged the guy and flipped him end to end, head down, feet up . . . and using the feet-end first, he pile-drove him up and through the window, the glass shattering and the guy disappearing into the apartment with a pretty substantial thud.
A moment later there was Jack, diving out the window, and right behind him was the first guy from inside, who Pike had apparently been holding the door against.
The three of them were standing alongside the house now and there was a female’s face looking out the broken window, and then with her the dude appeared who Pike had thrown through it, though he didn’t look too good.
The outside guy seemed to be sizing up what just happened, and he waited for the window guy to say something, and after a minute the window guy said, “Lou, let it go.” There wasn’t a whole lot to his voice.
That was good enough for Pike, and he started walking down to the street, and Hannamaker was right with him, though he walked backwards the whole way, keeping an eye on Lou.
“I don’t suppose you’re hungry,” Pike said, as Jack got into the Bronco.
“You’re messing with me, right?” Jack said. “I mean is the Pope Catholic?”
“What do you say stuff like that for?” Pike said. “It’s not funny, and I don’t really get it, how it applies right now.”
“That’s ‘cause I’m smarter than you. More up-top.”
“Yeah, you really demonstrated that,” Pike said. He saw that Lou had gone back inside. “Why didn’t you call the police, like a dumb person would do?”
“I don’t know.”
Pike digested it for a second. “In-n-Out?” he said.
“I’ll see you there,” Jack said.
Chapter 2
It was after 11 by the time they got there, and the place was hopping and it took a while to get their food.
“What I hate,” Hannamaker said, “is your number is like 106, but then you hear ‘em say ‘Guest Number 108’ and even ‘110’, and you keep wanting to stand up, but it’s a false alarm and you’re still sitting here starving.”
“That’s ‘cause you get the Animal Fries,” Pike said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Don’t do that, it screws ‘em up back there. Keep it standard.”
“Well don’t forget it’s Saturday night,” Jack said.
“Thanks for reminding me. I left Jocelyn stranded at the mall.”
“You mean shopping?”
“The movies . . . I had to hightail it out of there when you called all hysterical, like the world was coming to an end . . . I gave her 20 bucks for an Uber in case she couldn’t get a ride home. How ridiculous is that? . . . Don’t put me through something like that again.”
&nbs
p; Jack said, “I like that complex they got there, the way they re-did it. Now you have, what, like a dozen of ‘em to choose from?”
“Something like that,” Pike said. “Okay that’s enough, you running your mouth, dancing around this shit . . . What the hell was going on there?”
“I made a mistake,” Jack said. “And listen, you coming by and all--”
“Forget that.”
“She get home okay, by the way? Jocelyn?”
“See?” Pike said. “You keep changing the subject.”
“I just wanted to make sure, if you took your truck and all, and she’s sitting there with her popcorn.”
“Yeah she did . . . But before we get to your thing actually . . . how’s my relationship with her? In your opinion?”
“Fine. Why?”
“Nah, I was just wondering how things look . . . you know . . . from the outside.”
It wasn’t something you were going to explain to Jack, or even could explain to him if you wanted. The fact was, he’d known Jocelyn for less than 48 hours, even though they’d apparently been going out for a month. He’d gotten back from Chico Thursday afternoon, returned her texts Friday morning, and then met up with her at lunch in the quad. He had to go on Facebook before that to find out what she even looked like.
Jocelyn smiled a lot and seemed nice enough and Pike figured the smoothest way to go was play along. There were the usual awkward moments, like you’d expect, where he’d ask her a basic question and then she’d stare at him weird, narrowing her eyes slightly, like how could he not know that?
But it wasn’t the worst thing to have a date on a Saturday night, which admittedly hadn’t happened a whole lot since he started traveling and threw everything haywire.
“Of course,” Jack was saying, “you’re the only one who would know if she’s floating your boat.” Giving him an obnoxious wink.
And it was strange to hear Jack use that expression, since that’s what Pike had told him about Cathy in the last reality, that her boyfriend may not be floating her boat, and then son of a bitch, Jack acts on it right away and starts dating Cathy.
Even stranger now was the concept that Cathy was with Foxe, of all people. And Jack was with Alicia, who Pike dated once upon a time, on the rebound after Cathy dumped him because she couldn’t handle knowing his secret, which like an idiot he told her. Not the time travel stuff, but the super-strength part.
Speaking of Alicia . . . “Nothing doing tonight for you?” Pike said. “Other than Lou and the other dude?”
“Yeah, well that was my fault,” Jack said.
Pike wondered for a second if his travel had set something in motion there too, by altering Hannamaker somehow . . . But he got rid of that thought, deciding enough was enough, stop overthinking it, that Jeez, you’re not people’s nurse maid.
“Yeah?” Pike said. “Your fault how?”
“Okay man . . . don’t think bad of me, all right? . . . There’s this chick, goes to the JC . . . I was messin’ around with her.”
Jack didn’t want to rehash the experience and was hoping that was all he needed to say. Pike wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easy.
“Well what’s her name?” he said.
“Tammy.”
“So where’d you meet her?”
“In town. At the ice cream place.” Another coincidence, since that’s where Pike met Jack, not for the first time, but when they actually became friendly, which led to the construction of The Box.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yep . . . So . . . you want to go to the karting place? Stillman works there, so we’re in free.” And of course another small wrinkle, since it was Marty Clarke who worked there and let them in free in the pre-Chico world. Both Stillman and Clarke from the football team that Pike and Hannamaker played on, the season wrapping up last month.
“Not so fast,” Pike said. “So you go back to her place . . . except then Lou and the other guy show up.”
“Something like that . . . The other guy’s her boyfriend. Lou, I don’t know his story.”
“You went there knowing that might happen?’
“I figured it was a possibility, but I didn’t expect it. I mean would you be worrying about it?”
Pike knew what he was getting at, how your emotions could dominate your brain in certain situations.
“Well what about the cops?” he said. “What was up with not calling them?”
“Nah. This Tammy person, she tells the boyfriend when he shows up, that I was helping her write a paper but then I tried to put the moves on her. That’s when I scrambled into that back room and tried to lock the door.”
“That’s not bad actually,” Pike said. “Quick thinking.”
“Thanks.”
“Not you with the quick thinking, I mean her.”
“Anyway . . . so from that angle, I wasn’t real excited about getting the police involved . . . What do you say we get out of here?”
“And Alicia . . . that mean you’re screwing around on her now?”
“Come on man, what do you think I am? Her and I, we’ve cooled the jets.”
“Wow . . . just since Thursday?” That was when Jack dropped Pike off on Audrey’s corner after he got back from Chico. Jack had been in a hurry, on his way to Alicia’s.”
“Things happen,” Jack said. “You got a problem with that?”
Pike said, “A JC girl like that--is she, I don’t know, different at all?”
Hannamaker laughed. He seemed more relaxed now that he’d come clean about tonight’s incident. “You mean compared to the limited options we got at Hamilton?”
Pike hadn’t thought of it that way, he was thinking more that she was a couple years older and how did that work out, but maybe Jack had a point.
“I’m kidding,” Jack said. “You’re taking me too serious.”
Pike said, “Jumping around for a second. Sort of on that subject but not exactly . . . You ever know any Milburns? . . . Two sisters? . . . One would be our age.”
“No,” Jack said. “Why?”
“No reason. Just double-checking.”
Pike had been trying hard to push Audrey out of his mind these last couple days, but he couldn’t help asking, just in case.
Chapter 3
Pike slept until almost noon on Sunday, the best rest he’d had in a while.
Taking a jog wasn’t something he usually did voluntarily, though he’d been doing plenty of it involuntarily lately, but it sounded kind of appealing to go for one now.
It was crisp and clear out, the 11th of December, probably in the low 40’s which was about as cold as your daytimes got in the central valley of California. Pike hung a left out of the driveway and headed the opposite direction from downtown and out to Old Orchard Park, which was one of the original landmarks in Beacon before they’d jammed it up with tract housing and too many stoplights.
The park was a couple miles away and he took it easy, which gave him a chance to think.
Where did everything stand?
You had Mitch down in New Mexico--check that, Arizona now, since he said he was paying a visit to that Lucy woman who claimed to be connected to a 1956 UFO sighting . . . Whatever.
Thinking about Mitch though, there was that issue Pike had told him about, Dani’s online friend whose husband may have had Pike’s and Dani’s powers, but who died and donated his organs. Mitch said it was something to keep an eye on, and it didn’t sit well with Pike either.
Then you had Dani herself, who Pike had avoided getting back to these last couple days. She’d texted him when he was away in Chico, which couldn’t be real good, since the last time he spoke to her she was highly concerned about the police in Palm Springs. He’d have to contact her today and find out what was up.
There was Henry, who gave him the ride after Pike had experimented and traveled back one day and accidentally ended up at Bellmeade High School in Uffington, an hour away. The problem was not Henry, but his brother, who’d been paralyz
ed years ago in a football game and was losing motivation to live, it sounded like.
He had his own dad of course, who Pike had made a point of not talking to much, since Audrey’d revealed from her mom’s diary that her mom and his dad had had an affair. How far back in the past, and whether or not it was all over by the time Audrey’s mom got run down was unclear.
But Audrey’s revelation confirmed an uneasy feeling Pike had about his parents’ relationship. The question now would be, with Mrs. Milburn seemingly out of the picture and therefore never having been a romantic option for his dad--how was his dad behaving? And how had he been behaving all these years?
It was something Pike didn’t feel like addressing. His guess was his dad was screwing around elsewhere, either now or in the past or both. You didn’t just change, did you? At least your inner nature didn’t, Pike was pretty convinced. Mrs. Milburn herself, the 20-year-old version, kind of proved that in Chico, didn’t she?
Pike got to the park. There were families out, and a few picnics going on, some soccer, a men’s softball game with a barbeque fired up on the sidelines. Past all that was an old field with a cement track around it and a wooden grandstand, where, according to the sign they used to play polo with horses back in the day. It was peaceful there, just a few walkers and bicyclists on the track, and Pike took a seat halfway up the grandstand in the sun.
It seemed okay right now to let himself wonder about Audrey . . . Where did they go? Her dad’s trucking company left Chico and moved to Iowa, that was a fact, and Pike even let it slip to Mr. Milburn back then that that was going to happen. Maybe they moved there with the company, there was some logic to that, and Audrey and her sister Hailey were born out there and had grown up with midwestern accents. Though Pike wasn’t sure they even had accents in Iowa.
But speaking to Mr. Milburn back then when he was young, and even once when he was on old guy, Pike didn’t get the impression he loved his job, not the way you usually needed to if you were going to make a career out of it. Somehow he doubted the Milburns had followed that trucking company to Iowa.