by Ramy Vance
The gunman shoved his hip against Martha to keep her from fighting him while he cut off her air supply, and Rueben saw her bite her lip to avoid giving him the satisfaction of letting him know he’d hurt her. “Pretty little young thang, ain’t she? Would be a shame for her to die a death of ‘friendly fire,’ now wouldn’t it?” Martha’s assailant made eye contact with one of the security guards. “You would know about that, wouldn’t you…Lieutenant Roberts?”
The security guard’s face turned white. “Fuck you. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” His shaking voice betrayed him.
The gunman laughed maniacally. “Don’t I? Tell me now, what really happened out in Kabul?”
The security guard gulped and deflated. Everyone turned to look at the guard, who simply holstered his weapon beneath his jacket and left the restaurant.
Whoa.
Rueben took advantage of the distraction. He held the steak knife up high, and with a good running start, slammed it into the man’s back. It tore through the man’s white hoodie and penetrated the thin, form-fitting metallic body armor beneath. The blade stabbed into muscle, and the gunman grunted with pain. That was all the satisfaction Rueben got.
Even with his running start, the knife didn’t go nearly as far as Rueben hoped. At least Rueben now knew that the man’s hi-tech body armor deflected bullets but not blades.
Hoodie Man let Martha go, and she gasped for air, but then he reached behind him and ripped the knife out of his back. The blade dripped red drops onto his boots and the black concrete.
Rueben expected to see a manic fury in his assailant’s eyes. Instead, he saw an eerie calmness that fury slowly swallowed. Was he hyped up on drugs?
He laughed at Rueben. “Is that all you could think of? A steak knife? What am I? Chopped liver? Or maybe a nice sirloin?” He scoffed. “Clearly, you haven’t repeated this enough times. What is this, your first trip back? Maybe second?”
Oh shit, he’s a time warper.
He approached Rueben with the red-tipped knife, and Rueben knew this guy was capable of anything. From behind them, a bar patron screamed, and Rueben scrambled with the rest of the crowd, but the man was faster. He grabbed Rueben by the shirt and slung him face-first against the wall.
“How about I do you a solid and give you a chance for some more practice? You know what they say. Try, try again…” he sang. “If at first you don’t succeed.”
Then with a harsh laugh, the man slit Rueben’s throat.
Serrated blades aren’t for slicing—they’re for sawing—but Hoodie Man needed only one powerful jerk. Internally screaming at the excruciating pain, Rueben’s head lolled to the side, his eyes landing on his smartwatch as his consciousness faded.
Then he died.
Friday, May 19, 10:32 p.m.
Martha was sitting at the table in the bar with Buzz, Aki, and Rueben. Suddenly, she was struck by an uneasy feeling of déjà vu, as if she’d already relived this moment. But she hadn’t. She’d never been to this bar in her life until tonight.
Oh shit. Unless Rueben had died and warped back to this spot, and now she remembered bits and pieces.
It usually didn’t hit her so strongly. Hell, during the Pout mission, the déjà vu had mainly involved her remembering a van she’d seen in a previous timeline.
She turned to her friends. Aki was saying something, and Martha turned from her to Rueben, who suddenly looked very confused, then frustrated.
Maybe it was nothing.
Buzz’s eyes shot wide. “A Raider Warlock pinball machine!” He jumped up and started toward it. “Those are collector’s edition. I can’t believe they… How did they...” For all Buzz’s intelligence, sometimes he seemed like he was ten.
Now it was only the three of them, and Rueben was muttering something to himself. Now it was Aki’s turn to look confused.
Shit, shit, shit. If this was a time warp thing, she’d find out soon enough. She pulled up her email on her phone, but she didn’t see an automated email from Buzz’s computer alerting her to a time warp. Then she remembered they’d agreed to discontinue the email method to give Rueben some privacy.
She sighed.
Life had changed a lot for her since February when they’d busted Pout. For the first time in a long time, she was happy.
Work was good.
She had finally made it off “The Tampon Squad.” Now the douchebag post-jocks at work listened when she talked. As a matter of fact, she thought she’d caught a look of intimidation on some of their faces, at least from time to time. She tried not to make much of it.
Her boss kissed her ass these days, which was a far cry from a few months ago when he told her to get a massage and let the veteran cops handle the big cases. Things with her work partner Jake had gotten a lot better, too. He worked with her instead of trying to work around her whenever he thought she was chasing aimless leads.
All in all, she had become a hero in her own right. And everyone had noticed.
Her social life had improved. Only a few months ago, her best friends were old college chums who had turned into what Bridget Jones would call “smug married couples” who wanted to talk about their pregnancies and their Lamaze classes. Her nights were spent with Jimmy Fallon in LCD and harmless flirting with the takeout guy.
Now she had a ragtag group of friends that, while a little odd and quirky, were turning out to be a good bunch. That, of course, was what happened when you made a score as they had. They had bonded while preventing a national crisis and countless deaths, and they had also put Alister behind bars.
Trying to smuggle in and detonate an experimental microwave weapon…
Martha shuddered. If Rueben had time-warped, surely the situation this time wasn’t as grave as that.
They wouldn’t have prevented it without Rueben and his time warp ability. She still didn’t understand it, but now she believed it. Aki didn’t know about it. Buzz loved it and damn near pissed his pants every time anyone brought it up.
Now, in the bar, Buzz stood in the corner hunched over a pinball machine, getting ready to insert a coin to play.
“I’m, uh, gonna go catch up with Buzz,” Rueben hurriedly told Aki as he stood. “Find out about the Raider pinballs.”
Aki laughed. “There’s a dirty joke there.” She didn’t notice that he cocked his head at Martha, motioning her to the pinball machine with him. He exaggeratedly blinked as if sending her a coded message.
Then Martha knew. Yep, this was a Rueben time warp thing.
She glanced around the room and didn’t see much to worry about. Everything seemed normal. Of course, she was more than a little drunk at the moment.
Rueben turned to Aki, placing a tender hand on top of her hand. Even though she was inebriated, Martha’s cop instincts saw through Rueben’s hollow smile to the somber expression beneath. “You cool to chill here?”
Aki didn’t notice. “Sure. Don’t be too long.”
He winked, and both he and Martha left the table. Martha pretended to head toward the bathroom. As soon as she was out of Aki’s line of vision, she hurried toward the pinball machine. She wore heels about twice a year and had never learned the art of running in them. How did Carrie Bradshaw ever do that?
Buzz and Rueben were already in conversation at the pinball machine—which now resembled the miniature whiteboard of a college physics class marked up by the frantic scrawl of dry erase marker in Buzz’s hand.
Martha tapped an equation full of Greek letters and angle markings. “What is it this time?”
Buzz gave Martha an irritated look before turning back to Rueben. “It’s not like we haven’t already discussed the possibility of multiple time warpers.”
“Yeah, but right now?” Rueben threw up his hands. “And I think he’s connected to Pout.”
Pout. Martha raised her eyebrows. Not only had Rueben warped, but it might be connected to Pout.
Turning away from Rueben and Buzz, she let her eyes wander over the bar’s interio
r until they landed on a guy standing near the back entrance, wearing a white hoodie. A white hoodie with stripes on the shoulders.
“Man in the white hoodie.” The words slipped from her mouth, and Rueben nodded uneasily.
“That’s right. Um, déjà vu?”
Martha nodded, then felt at her neck. “What does he do?”
Rueben studied her for a few moments. “I think I know what set him off. You recognized him, probably went after him. Then he…”
Now Martha grabbed Rueben’s wrist. “What happens? What does he do to me? Shit. Does he kill me?”
Rueben swallowed. “He chokes you until you black out.”
“Egads,” Buzz blurted.
Rueben continued. “We’ve got about seven minutes before Hoodie Man starts shit and people start getting hurt.”
She had learned to trust Rueben, but it was never easy to think or hear about these things without thinking she was in some sort of Bizzaro World. For God’s sake, she was a cop. A practical thinker. There was nothing practical about how time travel worked.
Buzz stroked his chin. “All right, what’s the plan, then? We take him down?” He pulled out some sort of homemade weapon, and Martha stared at it.
“What is that?”
Rueben was quick to answer. “It’s a homemade taser, and it’s not going to work.”
Buzz frowned as Rueben tossed the device behind him. “Shit. There went three days of product design at the lab.”
“No, no, no, it works. It just won’t save you. This dude is the badass to end all badasses.”
Martha scowled. “There must be something we can do.”
Rueben ran his tongue over his teeth in thought. “That’s what we have to figure out. And we have less than seven minutes to do it.”
Chapter Five
Friday, May 19, 10:46 p.m.
At the behest of Rueben’s hasty instructions, Buzz, Aki, and Martha headed for the bar’s entrance. On the way toward the door, Rueben “borrowed” a steak knife from a patron’s plate and slid it into his pocket.
Outside the Exit Bar, Friday night in New York City was in full swing. The live music bar next door played loud unintelligible rock, and pierced and tattooed patrons wandered in and out, joining and leaving the throngs as they pleased.
Rueben and his friends had other plans than to enter another bar. Or at least they had a plan. It wasn’t the brightest of ideas, but with less than seven minutes to both decide and execute it—and with alcohol in all their bloodstreams—it was the only one they could come up with.
A few moments later, they were standing at the mouth of an alley with a line of sight on the Exit Bar. “Rueben,” Aki said, slightly tipsy. “If you’re pulling a prank…” She batted her eyes at him, and Rueben swallowed.
“I wish it were, but this is no joke.”
In the darkness, Buzz postulated. “So let me get this straight. We plan to lie in wait for this unidentified gunman in a white hoodie, and then we four ambush him?”
Rueben watched the crowds filter in and out of the bar. “That’s the short and long of it.”
Buzz frowned. “What about the metallic body armor he’s wearing and that hi-tech gauntlet you said he has? And you mentioned he carries a silenced pistol.”
Throwing up his hands, Rueben turned to Martha and Aki. “Anyone have any better ideas?”
Aki giggled, and Rueben thought it was about the sexiest thing he’d ever heard. He shook his head to clear it. Then Aki made things worse by planting a palm on his shoulder and meeting his eyes. “Good plan, boss man. Now let’s kick some ass.”
Buzz tugged his shirt collar at the public display of affection, then pulled up a phone app. “I’m calculating our respective body weights, and if this man is the height and breadth that you describe, I would say that together we equal only slightly more than him. Of course, that’s not accounting for muscle mass, which can be quite tricky to determine without the proper—”
Rueben ran his hands through his hair. Buzz was a great guy, but sometimes Rueben needed him to shut up. This was one of those times. “Look, consider that your X factor, okay? Muscle mass.”
Buzz typed away. “Well then, I would say that we would have to approach him from a velocity of… Hmmm…” Buzz scratched his chin as he made calculations and grabbed sticks and rocks to lay out angle variations. Based on Rueben’s experience with their opponent, they had much bigger problems than velocity.
Martha adjusted her dress in a futile attempt to be less formal and more utilitarian. She took off her earrings and laid them neatly on a ledge. “Don’t want them to get in the way. Costume jewelry, anyway. You’re sure you saw him leave?”
“Yes, I did,” Rueben said definitively. “I specifically saw him come into the bar. He looked around the room and walked out. I don’t know where he went or why. But he wasn’t with anyone and didn’t seem to talk to anyone.”
Aki nodded as she took in the information. “Then he’s probably working alone.”
Rueben answered, “As far as we know, but he’ll be back. He has something he has to do in here. Trust me.”
Buzz toyed with his homemade taser and propped it up in the holes of a chain-link fence. “This thing is controlled by an app I wrote. So, if I have it here… Everyone step back.”
The whole group nearly jumped out of the way of his invention. He pushed a button, and the taser emitted a terrific electric blast. “See, it works.”
“That ought to do it,” Martha observed.
“Right. Now, if I rig it against this wall this way, it will stun at a forty-seven-degree angle. All he has to do is come past that crack, right there”—he shone his phone flashlight at a small sidewalk crack—“and I can activate it from here, and boom. He’s toast.”
Aki nodded approvingly. “That’s great work, Buzz. What are you? Some kind of mad scientist?”
Buzz chuckled nervously, and Rueben cleared his throat. “I told you, it’s not going to work as a sole weapon. You’ll buy some time, but you’ll need a backup plan.”
Buzz whined. “I’m not comfortable with hand-to-hand combat.”
Rueben scoffed and was quick to answer. “Yes, you are.”
“I am?”
Rueben produced the steak knife from his pocket that he’d pilfered on the way out of the bar. “Trust me. Use it.”
Buzz frowned, grabbed the knife, and inspected the serrated edge. “There are seventeen points on this knife, each one capable of making an individual incision.”
There’s Buzz the sadist, Rueben thought.
Buzz fingered the knife. “But serrated blades aren’t meant for stabbing—they’re for sawing and cutting. However, with the proper angle of incision…” He held the weapon awkwardly and made a clumsy lunge. “I can’t do it.”
Rueben smirked. “Deep inside you, Buzz, is a much more violent man. Reach inside. You’ll find him.”
“I resent that remark.”
“Me too.”
Aki corrected his stance. She was starting to take things seriously, which was good. “If you want to disable an enemy, you need to do it like this. Weight evenly distributed on both feet.”
“Okay.” Buzz stared down at his feet, and Aki directed him on how to stand.
“You have to use your body weight to your advantage. You would know all about that. Velocity.”
“Velocity I get, but how to harness that power? I’m afraid I’m at a loss.”
Buzz and Aki worked on knife lessons while Rueben continued to watch the sidewalk for the gunman. There was no sign of him. He had to come back, didn’t he? Rueben didn’t know why he’d left the bar, but he was sure he had seen him walk in and out. Obviously, he had done that before without them noticing, so he clearly was on his way back. Did he come to check that they were there and leave to get his gun?
Aki had finished the knife lessons, and now she looked irritated and cold. Winter ran late this year, and in May the evening breeze still had a sting to it. “I wish you wo
uld tell me this anonymous tip that you keep getting intel from. It would help us both.”
He repeated what he had told her a dozen times. “I can’t. I told you, you’d be uh, implicated, and I can’t put you in that position.”
“I have a higher security clearance than you.”
He blushed. “Don’t make this about that.”
“Then tell me. You don’t think I can handle it?”
He couldn’t explain to her the truth about himself. Not yet, anyway. When Rueben had first found out about his ability, Buzz had accepted it pretty quickly. Martha…well, Martha still gave him looks every time he mentioned time warping, but at least she went with it.
Aki wasn’t ready, and he knew it.
One day, maybe, but not today.
He shoved his hands deep in his pockets. “Look, I care about you…”
She drew a deep breath, and her expression rang with little patience. He talked over her, not wanting to hear any objection she might counter with.
“I mean, like, you know, as a friend and all—or more than that, if well, I don’t know. Look, that’s not the point. The point is, I don’t want anything to happen to you. Not that you can’t take care of yourself or anything, but I feel like it’s better this way.”
She didn’t respond to that but rubbed her arms in her sleeveless formal. “It’s freezing out here.”
It was. He slipped off his sport jacket and handed it to her. “Here.” The cool spring air cut through his dress shirt.
She scanned the sidewalk and pushed the jacket away. “You don’t have to do that. It’s fine.”
Aki’s words came in hard. She didn’t trust him. Why would she? She barely knew him, but he knew her.
They’d had many conversations about so many different things, not that she remembered.
They’d kissed, not that she remembered.
He’d had almost a dozen interactions that she didn’t remember.
He did, and her brushoff hit him hard.