Lost Friday

by Michael Bronte

  There was a long, long pause on the other end of the line. “You know, my memory isn’t what it used to be, Johnny.”

  Huh. I watched a Brick Township police car out in the parking lot pull up and park a couple of rows away from Gomer’s-and-Jethro’s truck, facing it. I could see the lone police officer inside doing that head down thing they all do when they’re playing with their cop toys, but I had no idea if it had anything to do with the truck, or not. Talk about coming back on you: it was like the slice of pizza I’d just eaten caught fire inside my stomach. I struggled to concentrate on the conversation. I knew Roy’s memory was a steel trap; what he said didn’t jive. What was he trying to say that I would know, and an impostor would not? “Are you saying you don’t remember the last time you ate baklava?” I questioned.

  “This week, last week, next week, who can remember?”

  He ate baklava next week? “Was it good baklava, Chief?”

  “It was stale baklava, Johnny, real stale. Could have been a couple of hundred years old for all I know.”

  Roy didn’t say another word, and I knew he wouldn’t until I came back with something he was looking for. “Chief? What if I had some fresh baklava, just made today? Would you like that?”

  “I would,” said Roy, “but it had better be the real thing and not some of that synthetic stuff. You get my meaning, Johnny?”

  I gave Roy the location of the pizza joint, and told him to get there in half an hour. As I fingered the Glock next to me in the booth, I said, “Chief?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve seen a lot of synthetic baklava lately, so much of it that I’ve had to get rid of some of it. You know what I’m saying, Chief?”

  “You should stay away from that synthetic stuff, Johnny.”

  “I’ve heard that before, Chief. I don’t like wasting baklava like that, but I’ll do it again if I have to.” I ended the call and noticed the guy behind the counter looking at me.

  “I don’t sell baklava,” he said.

  * * * * *

  Remington and Romano walked in at quarter-to-one and we moved to a booth in the back, the last in the row of ten or so that lined one wall. As expected, Romano looked pissed, and he didn’t waste any time.

  “You wanna explain a dead guy in a company van, with your ID, and your phone?”

  “Who looks like your clone,” Remington added for good measure.

  “He is,” I said, giving Remington a look. This was going to be hard enough to explain to Romano; I didn’t need her flapping her gums and piling on.

  Romano looked at me sideways. “He is… what? Your clone?”

  “Actually, they call them Synthetics.”

  “They who?”

  Romano was his usual extraordinarily impatient self, but I was saved from another incredibly long explanation as, behind him, I saw Roy enter the pizza joint and zero in on me as if he had radar. Like a wild animal anticipating trouble, his eyes never left mine, and even at a distance I could feel his intensity. There were several other customers in the pizza joint now, most of them in line placing their orders. Oblivious to them, Roy walked down the row of booths with his right hand an inch from the bulge beneath his trademark flannel shirt, which he wore as an over-shirt. One wrong move, and I was toast. Under his left arm was a thick wad of folded up newspapers. Romano and Remington were seated opposite me in the booth, and, seeing my distraction, they turned just as Roy came up on us. He ignored them, and his eyes narrowed so that I expected laser beams to zap out from them at any second. Roy brushed the flannel shirt away to reveal the .357 on his hip; I made sure I kept my hands on the table.

  “Are you going to shoot me?” I asked calmly while Romano and Remington tried to become part of the booth.

  “I might,” he said. “Until I know for sure which one of you was killed inside that van.”

  I said, “Your wife makes potato salad with pickles in it.”

  Roy must have figured that was something no Synthetic would know, and he sat down next to me.

  Romano being Romano, he said, “Who the hell is this?”

  I remembered that up to the point of Lost Friday, as far as I knew Romano and Roy had never met. Roy showed Romano his badge, which was just enough distraction for me to take the DNA Glock that was sitting next to my left thigh and shove it into Roy’s side. “At this range, I figure this thing will pretty much cut you in two.” Roy flinched as I jammed it further into his ribs. “And don’t think I won’t. I’ve already wasted one Synthetic today, two won’t make any difference to me.”

  Keeping his hands on the table, Roy looked at the Glock, and said, “We both know you can’t fire that.”

  “This belonged to my friend in the van. You want to take that chance?” I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t. “Last time I saw you, you were watching corpses being turned into fish food 190 years from now. How do I know you’re not another Synthetic? How do I know you haven’t been one all along?”

  Roy shoved the Glock aside and gave me a look that said, What the hell do you think you’re doing, boy? It was a look that no Synthetic could possibly imitate. Okay, then. That was good enough for me. He caught Remington in his sights. “Are you Kelli Remington?”

  Having never seen Remington at a loss for words, I thought she’d swallowed her tongue. True to form, however, she copped an attitude and asked a question.

  “Actually, I’m the queen of England,” she said, catching Roy’s stare head-on without so much as a blink. “And who the fuck are you?”

  I didn’t say it was a good question, but it was effective. Damn, she was good.

  Roy looked at me before taking the wad of rolled up newspapers from under his arm and spreading the first one on the table in front of Remington. Even upside down, it only took me a second to make out the headline: PRESIDENT KNEW ABOUT KIDNAPPINGS! I thought, fuckin’ A! These were the stories that took down President Richardson!

  Roy said, “They almost took over the country last time. This time, we can’t let them get that close.”

  Chapter 34… Roger?

  Remington and Romano were, like, duh. Roy had spread out several issues of the Asbury Park Press, all of them with the byline Kelli Remington under huge headlines. There were some other good ones like FUTURISTIC TERRORISTS INVADE, and PRESIDENT TAKES BRIBE. My favorite one was BETRAYED! I said, “Where did you get these?”

  Roy grinned slyly. “I stole them.”

  I didn’t bother asking from where. I did ask how he got there, however, seeing as the last time I saw him he was 190 years hence. Roy answered, “Vishal,” and I said, “Ah.” The guy got around.

  I took a couple of the editions and paged through the A-sections, noting story after story on President Richardson and his complicity with the Red Diamond. If these were examples of what Remington wrote between Lost Friday and the night she took a dive off that bridge with me and Romano, it was a barrage that made Woodward’s and Bernstein’s pieces on Watergate look like a neighborhood newsletter. I mean, she had names, dates, sources, the whole enchilada. Talk about getting tattooed by the press; the president must have felt like he’d gotten caught in front of a steamroller with Remington driving. The media firestorm that must have taken place as a result of her exposé had to be bigger than Watergate, Iran Contra, and Monica Lewinsky combined. I mean, getting a hum job in the Oval Office was nothing; proving we were visited by futuristic terrorists was huge; implicating the president in their plot to reshape historical events was almost incomprehensible. I noted that my byline was all over the place as well, most of the stories having to do with the terrorists, David’s abduction, and what it took to get him back. It dawned on me that, according to the stories, we must have gotten him back at least once, but here we were again, further back in time, trying to undo that event and foil yet another Red Diamond attempt to obtain David’s formulas. And around-and-around-and-around she goes.

  As I wat
ched Remington and Romano drooling over the papers—they had to realize that what they were reading was way beyond Pulitzer material; hell, it was in the realm of getting books written about you—I couldn’t help but feel their disappointment when they realized it would never happen. Not if we were successful, that is. The way I saw it, we were in a position to end this time travel conundrum once and for all, meaning that neither the Red Diamond, nor the ICTO, would have ITD technology if we could get David to destroy his formulas and persuade him to never rewrite them. Sure, time travel seemed important, but the technology was being abused and was causing more harm than good. Damn, I thought. Talk about being in a position to alter the course of mankind: had it really come down to me to be the one to make this call? Me? Johnny Pappas? Go fucking figure.

  Romano finally zeroed in on the future dates. “Okay, what’s the gag? These papers haven’t even been printed yet.”

  Roy looked at me, and said, “I’ve explained this so many times I’ve about got it memorized.”

  “How many times has it been?” I asked curiously.

  “That I can remember? This would be my sixth.”

  Six! “This has to be the last time,” I said.

  “No problem there,” Roy replied. “Vishal can only spring me from that Red Diamond jail so many times.”

  “That explains why Vishal has to stay in the future.”

  Looking at us through narrow eyes, Romano said, “What the hell are you two talking about?”

  “Yeah,” Remington added. “I’d like to know that too.”

  Roy looked at me. “You want to do this, or should I?”

  “You go ahead,” I said. “If I explain it, she’ll probably think I’m trying to get her to go to bed with me.”

  “Not on your life,” Remington shot back.

  I looked at her seriously, and said, “It’s both our lives, Remington.”

  * * * * *

  When Roy was done explaining, Remington said, “No way,” but I think Romano wanted it to really happen. I mean, for Romano the stories were better than sex. That’s when I asked him if he thought they were worth his own skin, and I explained how he could be swimming with the fishes after the company Christmas party. I don’t think he would have believed me if Roy hadn’t verified the whole thing. I mean, how could you not believe Roy? Romano certainly changed his attitude as soon as he found that, for him too, now it was personal.

  “So the president knew about the scientists’ abductions beforehand,” Remington concluded.

  To me, this was getting to be old news, but I had to go through it for her benefit. I went through the whole thing. When I got to Corvissi, I said, “He was your Deep Throat. He knew the scientists had proven that David’s proofs held true mathematically, and he tried to keep a lid on it because he knew what it meant. Smart guy, that Corvissi.”

  Remington said, “Did Corvissi know the president was complicit?”

  “No, just that he knew about the project. But something smelled when the president urged cooperation with the kidnappers, and that’s when he leaked the project to you.”

  Romano was just sitting there with his mouth open. He turned to Roy, and asked, “Were the scientists’ abductions the only ones President Richardson knew about beforehand?”

  “I’m not sure,” Roy answered, his eyes darting about the pizza joint. He pulled his baseball cap lower on his head. “Most of the other abductions were the result of previous jaunts back in time by both the Red Diamond and the ICTO to change, unchange, or otherwise screw around with events.”

  Just as I’d thought, I thought to myself.

  “Once an event is altered, the ripple effect is huge,” Roy went on. “Even if both the ICTO and the Red Diamond were meticulous about restoring situations once they’d altered them—and I doubt they were—it would be impossible to catch them all. My guess is that after a while they simply didn’t bother to restore anything.”

  Remington looked angry. “So the jurors, the teachers….”

  “All unfortunate victims of many different historical alterations,” Roy explained. “Almost impossible to track, and even more impossible to restore. There’s no telling what happened to the people who got caught outside their own time.”

  “Fish food,” I said.

  Roy nodded. “Quite possibly, unfortunately.” His eyes lingered on something near the entrance.

  Remington’s anger continued to bubble. “We can’t just sit here and let this happen.”

  “But these stories….” Romano indicated. We all looked at him, and he said, “What?”

  Roy scooped up the papers and tucked them under his arm. “Johnny, do you know for sure if you can fire that Glock?”

  Remington speared me with a stare. “I’m not sure,” I said.

  Roy said, “Let’s hope so.”

  * * * * *

  I’d locked the keys and cell phone back inside Gomer-and-Jethro’s truck, and Roy called in that he’d spotted it outside the pizza joint none the worse for wear. Now, we were parked down the street from the Robelles’ house, Roy and I in his truck, Romano and Remington behind us in Romano’s Beemer. I’d been in this position several times now, and none of them had turned out well. The weather was clear and cool, with a salty September breeze coming off the water. Everything on the streets of Sea Beach had seemed normal as we drove over, but to me it felt as if I was waiting for the surprise ending in some weird play. Ending: perhaps I could have used a better word.

  “You know, David is dead if the Red Diamond gets hold of those formulas,” I said.

  Squinting through spears of sunlight cutting through the trees, Roy said, “Which David do you think is in there? The one who knows about the Red Diamond, or the one who doesn’t?”

  “No way to know,” I said, “but regardless of which it is, I don’t think he’s home.” I tapped my watch. “He’s probably at football practice. As a matter of fact, the house could be empty. I know both parents work, and the twins are too young to be home alone after school. They’re probably in day care.”

  The only sound was the whistle of the ever-present sea breeze as it found the crevices in Roy’s truck. “Depending on which David it is,” Roy said, “those formulas may or may not be in the house. I’d sure like to know that before I go and commit felony breaking-and-entering.”

  I saw Roy’s point. “Okay, we know he kept the formulas in his room. Do you know where exactly?”

  “Sure do. He kept them at the bottom of his right side desk drawer.”

  I let out an anxious sigh. “What if someone else committed that felony instead of you?”

  Roy took a moment and jagged his head toward Romano’s Beemer. “Take one of them with you. And be careful. I’ll stay here and keep watch.”

  Wondering if Roy had lived through this specific piece of history before, it only took me a second to decide who would to go with me. Sea Beach being Sea Beach, I figured there wouldn’t be much in the way of security to hinder us, and I was right. One of the garage windows slid open easily. Problem was, it was on the street side of the house, and even though the neighborhood was pretty spread out, any neighbor who happened to glance outside could easily determine that we were breaking into the home. With my heart racing, I formed a cradle boost with my fingers and said to Remington, “Okay, alley-oop!”

  Her look suggested: you’ve got to be kidding. “I’m wearing heels,” she said, indicating a pair of girly wrap-arounds protruding from beneath some rather expensive-looking tailored trousers.

  “So take them off,” I said, meaning the shoes, of course.

  She let go with a dramatic sigh, and nestled a stocking-clad foot into my cradle. I boosted her into the open window, pushing up on that stupendous ass of hers once she hooked her leg into the opening.

  “Did you just squeeze my butt?” she growled at me from above.

  To which I replied, “Of course not.”

  She shot me a
sarcastic snarl, and swung her attention to the inside of the garage. “Nothing unusual,” she said. “You want me to look for a stepladder, or something?”

  “Why don’t you just unlock the door?”

  “Oh.”

  I was inside a second later, noting a typical messy garage full of family gear: bikes, lawn mower, coolers, stuff. As if I knew what I was doing, I climbed the three steps to the entrance door to the house and pressed my ear to it, hearing nothing except Remington’s ragged breathing and the beat of my own heart. I turned to her and put a finger to my lips. She nodded, and I turned the doorknob. The door opened easily, and the sound of the gunshot that went off nearly scared me to death.

  I dove back off the three steps, catching Remington full on with my shoulder and landing on her so that she went “Uummmpppphhh!” I mean, I knocked the crap out of her. Scrambling to my feet, yelling, “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I grabbed her by the wrist, but she just laid there like a really good-looking bag of sand. Another shot rang out, different from the first one, and splinters rained down on me like whirlybird seeds from a maple tree. I looked at Remington, seeing no sign of life. What to do. I tapped her on the cheek. “Remington, wake up. Wake up, damn it!” Nothing. Another blast boomed out, just like the second one but further away, still enough to make my teeth rattle. Remington was limp as a dishrag, her lips blue. Shit. I put my hands on her chest, and under any other circumstance would have been, like, boing, but I didn’t feel a thing. What to do, what to do. Blue lips, no chest motion … CPR! I squeezed her cheeks and covered her mouth with mine, exhaling so hard that I could have inflated the Goodyear blimp. Her chest heaved just as something crashed inside the house, or into the house, it was that big. I gave her another shot of air and her chest heaved again as I put a finger on her neck, thinking that’s what they did on all the CSI shows when they were looking for a pulse. I prepared to give her another blast of air when, suddenly, I found her arms around my neck. She wasn’t having any trouble breathing either, unless it was due to the fact that she almost sucked my tongue down her throat. I mean, she had a lip lock on me like I couldn’t believe. I actually tried to get away when, schwomp, her left hand clamped onto Mister Chubby as if she was going to hammer a nail with it. I managed to put some space between her lips and mine, saving my molars from being sucked out of my mouth.