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He cocks his head at me. “Did you hear nothing of what I just said? Inspector Mulligan has your number. You even get near her, he’ll send the entire First after you—”
“Calm down, Burke. By the time the weekend’s over, Danny Mulligan’s going to love me.”
Burke raises an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Yep.” I turn into Quincy’s and pull up to his Integra. “You just wait.” And then I wink.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe it’s the fact that I feel a little bit invincible, the wind under me.
I can change time.
Okay, and yeah, I very much remember the mess I made of things in the future. But I’m going to find a version, a timeline rewrite where eighteen-year-old girls don’t get strangled in alleyways, where fathers and sons aren’t gunned down in the street, where little girls aren’t abducted from their beds at night.
And yes, you’re saying, the world is full of tragedy and violent crimes and you can’t save everyone, Batman, but this is my timeline, er, timelines and I can fix what I want, so leave me alone.
This is going to end well.
Redbone confirms it with Come and Get Your Love as I pull into the precinct station. We’re still hanging out at the 5th precinct while the downtown office finishes up the remodel. This office on Nicollet
is new and shiny and nothing of the exhausted facade of future days. I get out, and saunter into the station, humming.
I enter, and for a second, I’m thrown.
What? My office isn’t in the middle of the conference room command center, but parked in the corner, the farthest from the coffee machine as if Booker has it in for me.
Burke’s office, I might add is the closest, so I guess we all know why he became Deputy Chief. But I’ll sort that out when I get back.
I fill a coffee cup as I walk by the machine and am just setting it on my desk—predictably piled high with file folders—next to a chunky box monitor (and I’m trying not to laugh) when I hear a voice.
“Rem. My office. Now.”
Chief John Booker. And I don’t know why but every time I hear his voice tunneling through the past to grab me, it takes a piece out of me.
After my Mikey died, Booker started coming around, updating the family on the case. He always had time for me. He was my mentor until we had the fight of the century the day I quit the force. Up till that moment I considered him a father.
Now, he’s standing in the door of his office, a hand on the frame and I have the sense of being summoned to the principal’s office, the tiny hairs rising on the back of my neck.
Booker wears every case—especially the few unsolved ones—in every craggy line on his face. Short clipped graying hair, he has the dry humor and few words persona of a Montana cowboy. Think a towering, solemn version of Sheriff Dillon, from Gunsmoke. A couple people look up as I walk by, a smattering of pity in their eyes.
They don’t realize that although Booker has a look that can stop a man from drawing a piece, he’s also the guy who actually gives someone the time of day and isn’t afraid to wait for you to speak.
He closes the door behind him and hangs on the knob for a bit.
Gestures toward a chair with his chin.
So this is a sitting talk. Great.
I lower myself into the chair, not sure what I did. I’m flying blind here, now on both sides of the timeline, and I’m just hoping that my respect for Booker in my youth was enough to keep me from doing something colossally stupid.
“How long?” His voice is soft, but there’s steel in the question. He folds his arms over his chest and walks to his desk, leaning on the front edge.
“How…what?”
He draws in a breath. “I started to suspect something during the bombings. You just…” He shakes his head. “Rem, there’s no way you followed the hunch in your gut to that third location.”
Remember, I was undercover for a while. So, I angle him a look. “What are you talking about? Eve and I made the connection between the coffee suppliers—”
Booker cuts me off with a compound word I’ve rarely heard him say.
