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The man simply didn’t play fair.
15
You can’t win against time. Booker is in my head as I stare at my ceiling of my one-bedroom, third floor apartment. The orange glow of the sunrise is barely glinting my windowsill and the wind teases the blinds, smacking them against the screen.
I can smell rain.
I was here three days ago, in my time, and then the place was fairly immaculate, given my bachelorhood status.
When I arrived last night, the tiny vintage apartment looked like it had been hit by my college self, with a couple empty pizza boxes on the table and more than a few socks balled up and thrown at the television set, a stained white t-shirt hanging on a radiator.
I spent a few minutes tidying up for the young man inside me who seems to be having a hard time getting back on his feet. Take out the trash, wash the dishes, throw the clothes into the wash.
If I’m going to rewrite my life, I should do it in clean duds.
Mostly I had to work out of my system the desperate urge to return to Eve’s house, to find myself again on the stairs, kissing the woman who still believes in me.
I admit to losing a piece of myself, holding onto Eve as if she belonged to me—and enjoying way too much the fact she seemed to want me, too. She is young and compassionate and I’m a jerk because someday she’s going to sit on a picnic table and tell me it hurts her too much to love me.
Yeah, that thought was in my head, too, as she kissed me. And maybe I dove in because I wanted to expunge that impulse from her thoughts.
Then she said the thing that turned me cold. “He doesn’t know who pulled the trigger.”
No. Hassan might not know it was Danny who shot his brother.
He might even think it was me.
It was that thought that drove me out of her house to my tiny apartment. It settled in a dark and jagged place in my brain. Itched at my attempts at sleep.
What if I screw up, do something stupid here and die? Do I just vanish? Clearly if Art is right, and I’m overwriting time, then yes. Finito. I’m just a memory in Eve’s rear-view mirror.
Ashley never exists.
But that’s not why I can’t sleep. Well, not the only reason.
I keep running the fight with Booker through my head. The real fight we had in my very real past three years ago before I quit the force.
The night I watched Jimmy Williams get gunned down by a fifteen-year-old gang member in an ambush…twenty years from now.
He was one year from retirement, left behind two teenage children, and seeing his wife at his funeral made me return to the station and turn in my badge.
Yes, just like that. Ashely was four and I was shaken to the bone.
Booker tried to talk me out of it in a heated, you’re-a-cop-for-life argument. How being a cop is more than a job. It’s a responsibility, a calling.
That it was in my soul.
Maybe. But I had a family, a life.
Had being the key word for me, pounding in my brain as I tossed the night away.
I had a life.
And I came here knowing I would do anything to get them back.
But again, not if I’m dead.
The sound of the gunshot in the parking lot is also ricocheting in my head, along with the odor of blood on my hands, and the cold slick of horror that if Danny had listened to me, I would be dead.
