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Okay.
“How long?”
I’m still not following, although a slow creep in the center of my gut is telling me—
“You have it, don’t you?”
“What?”
He stares at me for a full ten seconds before answering. “My watch.”
I look down at my wrist. Swallow.
“How long have I been dead?”
I stare at him, my eyes wide, blown apart. “I—”
“Did you give me a good eulogy?” He grins and I’m frozen. Because what am I going to do? Confess that I’m from the future? See, even to me it sounds crazy, and I’m living it.
He holds up his hand. “Okay. I get it. You don’t want to tell me. And probably that’s right, because I shouldn’t know.”
Now, I want to tell him. Please, don’t track down Leo Fitzgerald at his house. Don’t go inside. You’ll set off a trigger line and…
“How’d you know?”
“You kidding?” He grunts and chuckles at the same time. “It’s written all over your face in block letters.”
I sigh. “I have questions—”
Booker holds up his hand again. “In time. I’m going to tell you only what you need to know, what Chief of Police Greg Sulzbach said to me when he gave me the watch.”
My eyes widen because I remember him. He died of cancer a few years before I joined the force.
“I looked just as wild-eyed when I realized that…well, that I could go back and get justice.” He raises his eyebrows and I nod, my first acquiesce to the truth.
But, Booker knows. He knows, and maybe, suddenly, I have an ally.
“I have to tell you something, Chief—”
“No, you don’t.”
“But—”
“Here are the rules. The biggest one, the one that is never, ever to be broken…Don’t change the past.”
Oh.
“You don’t know what else you could change, and what chaos you could cause.”
I look away, my mouth pursed, because I could have used this conversation, well, a couple days, one month and twenty-plus years ago.
Before I overwrote my life.
But really, I couldn’t let people just…die, right?
He gave the watch to the wrong person if he expected me not to get involved.
“The watch was created to find answers, bring closure. To solve cases. And keep people from suffering.”
