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“You—” a voice rasped.
“Who is this?” I said.
“Need to pay.”
“Pay what?”
“Come outside,” the voice said. “It’s your time. Nothing you can do will change it.”
“Time for what? Who is this?”
“You have intervened in things that are not your concern. Now you must pay.”
“I’m about to hang up. You’d better get yourself a better scriptwriter, bud.”
“Walk to the water’s edge.”
“What for?”
I was in the kitchen and the lights were off; I believed I could not be seen. I could see the driveway and my pickup and the porte cochere and the backyard. I was convinced no one was there.
“You and your friend are going on a journey from which you will not return,” the voice said.
“Tell you what, podna. How’d you like to eat a bullet?”
“Bravely said. But in each man is a child. They whimper like children. They beg and soil themselves.”
“I’m going to hang up now,” I said.
“I thought you were a more dignified and modest man.”
“Say again?”
“You’re dressed in your underwear. That’s both unclean and immodest.”
High in the sky, lightning jumped between the clouds. There was no one in the yard. I could hear myself breathing. “Your first name is Gideon. Your last name is Richetti. You broke a pimp’s neck in the Quarter, and you gave a hooker thirty grand to start a new life. Who knows, maybe you’re not all bad. But how about losing the time-traveler charade? It’s a drag.”
“You say time traveler?” the voice said, each word coated with phlegm. “Look out the back window again, my friend.”
Then I saw the galleon slide into view in the middle of the Teche, its wood sides and oars glistening with rain, a muscular man in a brass helmet and leather vest and leather skirt beating cadence on a drum.
“Do you deny what your eyes tell you?” the voice asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“How so?”
“Because you’re a fraud of some kind. Because maybe you’re—”
“I’m what?”
“Evil,” I said. “A magician of the mind, someone who knows how to use hallucinogens on others. But ultimately a hoaxer.”
“You lie,” the voice said. “Never speak to me that way again.”
I fumbled the phone onto its cradle, my hand shaking. Then the phone fell into the sink. I jerked the cord from the base unit. The phone was completely disconnected now. But the caller’s voice rose from it, disembodied, floating in the air around me, laughing.
I went to the window. The galleon was gone. The room was tilting and spinning around as though I were caught in a vortex. I tried to walk into the bedroom, then stumbled and fell, taking a chair down with me. I woke at two in the morning, trembling as though the malaria that lived in my blood was giving me a free ride back to Vietnam, my ears filled with hissing sounds like automobile tires on a wet highway, like 105 artillery rounds arching out of their trajectory, like snakes writhing upon one another in a basket.
