Last Thorsday Night #5
I had been scared of the man who had come to kill me, but I was more scared of Tyler. He was urbane. Genteel. Respected and respectable. He had people – a lot of them. Law partners, parents, siblings, guys he went yachting with, guys he went big-game hunting with.
All of them would no doubt say he was the best guy ever born. Salt of the earth.
And me . . . who did I have? I had the Thorsday Night Writers, whose odd-lot appearance and diverse lifestyles would make their testimony a hard sell.
And for the moment, I had Per. He hadn’t yet disappeared, but was probably going to any second.
Small picture, there were three of us, and only one Tyler.
Big picture, Tyler knew how to use his gun. And had every other advantage, too.
And then Len, would-be hit man, pond scum, violent criminal, said, “You shot me in the back, you son of a bitch.” With his wrists still duct-taped in front of him, he lunged to his feet, yanked the gun out of my hands and charged Tyler with a speed and a fury that made me realize Len could have been on me and I would have been dead before my reflexes even had a chance.
I scooped up the baseball bat at my feet as Len’s animal leap launched him across my bed towards Tyler. Tyler swung his gun away from me to protect himself.
Len’s gun jammed, and Tyler shot him. He dropped like a bag of hammers and lay bleeding on my bedspread.
Per lunged at Tyler. I charged at the same time, baseball bat swinging in short, sharp arcs. I swung and kept swinging, and kept connecting, until Per dragged himself across the bed and pulled me away from what was left of the would-be John Grisham of fantasy.
Per introduced himself to the cops as Per Tordonsson, of Tordonsson Detective Agency, and told them I’d hired him to check out the man I was dating.
He presented them with his card and a folder from his backpack that included copies of documents on which Tyler had forged my signature, giving him control of my estate, naming him as my next of kin for all my personal effects.
He handed them what he said was a phone tap of Len getting the date and time of my murder from Tyler.
He said it was clean, that the affidavit was in the folder.
The cops sent someone to the ER to talk to Len, who admitted that Tyler had hired him to murder me. He also said that he hadn’t intended to do it.
No one believed him.
It was the end of a long, exhausting Friday. Per sat across the table from me in the hotel room we’d rented, his leg stitched and bandaged, working his way through room service steak and eggs, salad, roll and a dessert of questionable origin.
“What happens now?” I asked him.
“What do you want to happen?”
“I want to be with you forever. I just keep waiting for this beam of light to surround you and whisk you out of my life, and I want to know how much longer we have.”
And there it was. That smile again. The one that melted me on the inside and made me know from the first instant I saw it that this was a man I had to know.
“I’m staying,” he said.
“But your time. The research historians. Won’t someone be along to drag you back?”
“I can’t go back,” he said. “Ever. The instant I loaded my life spider onto the internet through your computer and went after Len so he couldn’t come through your window to kill you, I broke my connection to home.
I created a new branch in time, a new past relative to my own time.
In this past, you live. In the past I come from, you always will have died – but there’s no way to this past from there. And no way there from here.”
“But your family? Your friends?”
“I had them. I’ll miss them. But I had a dangerous job, and they knew it, and so did I. Research historians get swallowed into alternate pasts from time to time. It’s why we travel with life spiders.”
“Which do what?”
“In your time, they create validation in public databases for all the information that lets me prove who I am. Every research historian working in the age of the internet carries a life spider with him that creates a name, social security number, driver’s licence .
. . all of it. Complete with past. In my case, even a nice bank account. ”
“You came planning to stay?”
“I came hoping to stay. Big difference. If you had not been you; if you had wanted to die so your books would live on; if you had not wanted me – then I would have disappeared. No light. No magic. I just would have blinked back to where I was supposed to be.”
“But you’ve given up everything to be here. And you decided knowing that I had just met you. You couldn’t know whether I would change my mind . . . and now you can’t ever go back.”
“Life doesn’t come with guarantees, Nila. What it does come with is chances. You’re the chance I wanted to take.”
I slid my hand into his. I might never be famous. I might never change someone’s life. I swear I’ll try . . . but when I’m gone, maybe no one will remember my name.
That’s all right.
I know what it is to be loved. I know what it means to love. And the chance I’ve won is better than any guarantee.