He nodded, pulled on underwear and his jeans, grabbed his backpack. He said, “We’re almost out of time. I’ll be right back.Stay here.”
I nodded, and he jogged out of the bedroom. I wondered what he wanted with my computer. I wondered even more what he wanted with the internet. I heard the computer’s boot-up sound, and him walking around in the living room, and then a couple of quick taps on the keyboard. And then nothing. A whole lot of nothing. I waited. That “stay here” had sounded important.
Then I heard footsteps on the little patio outside my bedroom window, and I looked at the clock.
7.23 a.m.
7.23 a.m.
I stopped thinking at all.
I stared at the window, shuddering, willing my body to move. I heard the aluminum frame start sliding open. The blinds were drawn, so I was in near blackness. There were no sounds from the living room any more. Which meant . . .?
That Per had realized he was out of time, and had used the internet to connect to his time travel device?
That he’d been . . . beamed home?
Or that time had grabbed him and ripped him away from me while he was trying to stop it?
It didn’t matter. He was gone.
And there was a killer outside my window.
I keep a baseball bat under my bed. I couldn’t in the orphanage, when I had plenty of reason to want one, but as soon as I got into foster care, I found a way to acquire one. Mostly I didn’t need it. Once, with a dreadful foster family, I did.
The aluminum bat lay under my bed.
I grabbed it and moved fast, because there wasn’t much time. I ran to the window.
The digital display on my alarm clock changed to 7.24 a.m. There were no more sounds outside my window. But Per had been very clear: 7.24. He’d seen the recording of my murder.
7.24 became 7.25 a.m, and someone politely tapped on the glass.
Tapped?
Baseball bat at the ready, I gave the roll-up blind a quick tug. It shot upwards and rattled around its spindle for a second before falling silent.
On the other side of the window stood a complete stranger. He had duct tape over his mouth and around his wrists. Behind him stood Per, shirtless and rumpled.
The bat dropped to the floor with a clang, and I stared. It was 7.25 a.m., and Per had not vanished into the future. He was still here.
And looking a little uncomfortable. “Let us in before someone sees us.”
“Oh. Right.” I opened the window, and my would-be killer came through head first, propelled by a vicious shove from behind by Per. Per followed, with a speed and grace that made my heart thud in my throat.
“You’re here.”
“We’ll deal with that later,” he said. Up close, I could see that he was going to have a bad bruise under his right eye, and that his lip was split and bleeding. “We still don’t have a lot of time.”
He handed me a gun. “This is his,” he said, kicking the hit man in the thigh. “Shoot him with it if he so much as twitches.”
I shrugged my shoulders just enough that Per caught the gesture.
“Never shot a gun?”
I shook my head.
He stepped behind me, reached around me with both arms, and thumbed the safety off. (I looked at the red dot staring back at me – “red is dead”, I remembered someone telling me once.) He put me in a shooting stance with the gun aimed at the killer’s chest. “He makes one move, you pull the trigger. Can you do that?”
