Fortune

by Craig W. Turner

  “No way.” He could hear Emeka grinning over the phone.

  “Yes, you bet I do. I need your help with that. Second, I’m going to throw a little party to celebrate. I’m hoping you can make it.”

  “You know I’ll be there.”

  “Can you meet me at the lab at three o’clock this afternoon?”

  “I can. I’ll bring some tools.”

  “Great. I’ll see you there.”

  They hung up and Jeff continued his trek home. Like Erica, he felt as though he hadn’t been home in weeks, when in reality he’d been there less than 24 hours before. As soon as his head hit the pillow, though, all sense of time was lost as he quickly fell into a deep, present day sleep.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  By taxi, Erica and Abby’s tablet arrived at Jeff’s lab mid-afternoon, but after checking into the building as a visitor and making her way to his second floor facility, she found it locked. She dialed Jeff on her cell and he instructed her to meet him out behind the building where they’d parked the armored car earlier that morning.

  She emerged into the sunlight to find Jeff and Emeka assessing the rear end of the car, which was sticking out of the garage. Jeff saw her approach and greeted her. Emeka turned and smiled.

  “Good to see you,” he said, extending his hand. “I haven’t seen you since-”

  “Our lunch in New York,” she said, taking it.

  “From what Jeff tells me, it probably seems a lot longer ago to you than it does to me.”

  She laughed. “I’ll bet.”

  He put one arm around Jeff and squeezed him in a big-guy bear hug. “Well, thanks for taking care of my buddy here. He says you were a worthy partner.”

  “I’m sure there were moments on our trip when he wished you were there instead of me.”

  “Nah,” Emeka said, and she caught a little glance and grin that he flashed at Jeff.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, blinking back embarrassment. They’d been talking about Jeff’s feelings while they did their manly stuff here. He’d probably told her about the kiss. She changed the subject quickly. “What’re you up to?”

  “Emeka thought he could just blast through the side of the car, but it appears that in the future people are a little more cautious,” Jeff said. “Some kind of military-grade materials – I don’t know what it is. Plus, a blast in the middle of a suburban office park wouldn’t go over well, and it would probably destroy all of the money anyway.”

  “Sounds about right. What’s the back-up plan?”

  Emeka jumped in. “I think I can get around the lock, but I don’t know if I can get it done by the party. I wouldn’t want to leave it half-open. Gimme a second.” He ran off to his SUV, which was parked about thirty feet away, across two garage bays.

  She looked at Jeff, who said, “I was hoping we’d be able to get a peek at what we have here before the party tonight. I reserved the bar for just us at Freddie’s, which is a little burger bar down the street here. Walking distance.”

  “Is Dexter coming?”

  “He is, yes.”

  “Good. How about my flight?”

  “You’re flying out of Teterboro tomorrow at 8 a.m., get you to San Francisco about 9:30 a.m. Pacific time. A car will pick you up at the hotel about 7 tomorrow morning.”

  “No personal ride?”

  “I can if you want me to,” he said, a little too hopefully.

  “No,” she said, laughing. “You sleep in. The car is perfect. I appreciate your doing that.”

  “After how you stepped up for me? It’s a bargain.”

  “That’s assuming I’m not going to ask for anything else.”

  He laughed as Emeka returned with a welder’s mask and a large drill. He pointed at the back of the truck as he explained the situation. “You have three locks here,” he said. One takes a key, which of course we don’t have. One is a combination lock – and we don’t have the combination. And one takes some kind of ID badge – obviously, we don’t have that either. Unless you want to head back to the future and procure those things, we’re going to have to go around them.”

  “Why don’t we try going around them?” Jeff said, grinning.

  “Fair enough.” Emeka put on his gear and headed to the back door of the truck. Jeff protectively ushered Erica back several steps as he began to drill into the door.

  “Aren’t people in your building going to hear that?” Erica asked.

  He looked up. “Most of the building’s probably empty by now. Plus, they’re used to me doing weird things. Nobody will be fazed.”

  “If you say so.”

  With sparks flying off of the back of the truck, Abby’s yellow Mustang pulled up to their side. She got out of the car and walked toward them.

  “I believe this is yours,” Erica said, slipping the case from around her neck and handing it to her.

  “My baby,” Abby said, taking it. She looked over at Emeka working on the truck. “It served you well, I see.”

  “Let’s just say I have the utmost respect for your mathematical skills. I think you’ll like the pics I took for you.”

  Before she knew it, Abby’s arms were around her in a big hug. Their relationship seemed to have come a long way in the last 24 hours of real time. Abby left their hug and grabbed Jeff similarly. “I’m so happy you made it,” she said. “You ready for our next adventure?”

  Jeff laughed. “Hold on. Not quite yet. I’ve got pretty bad time travel lag, and a few bumps and bruises that need to heal up. Gonna need a couple days before we think about that.”

  “Alright, I’ll give you a couple,” she said. Erica sensed more seriousness than was probably appropriate, especially given their conversation two days before.

  Emeka’s drill wound down and he turned to the three of them. He gave a quick wave at Abby, who waved back.

  “How’s it going?” Jeff asked.

  “Actually, not too bad. But I might have to take the whole door off.”

  “That a problem?”

  “Just that we’d better have somewhere to put everything that’s inside. Once this is open, it’s open.”

  “Good point.”

  The drill started again and Jeff pulled out his cell phone. He walked about 100 feet away and made a call.

  “So was it everything you’d hoped it would be?” Abby asked.

  “What? The time travel? It was certainly hairy at times.”

  “Lot of danger in the future?”

  She laughed. “When you’re trying to steal an armored car full of cash, yes.”

  “And how’s Jeff?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is he ready to get back to work? Or is he looking to start a new adventure with you?”

  Not as rosy as she let on. She shook her head. “Abby, I don’t know what you want from me. If you want to know Jeff’s intentions, you’ll have to ask him directly. All I know is that he needed my help and I was available to help him. And we were successful. Where he goes from here, I don’t know. All I know is that I’m getting on a plane in the morning back to California, where I’m going to deal with everything that’s happened in the past couple days in my own way. I’m not a new addition to your group, I promise.”

  “So you’re not sticking around to see what happens next?”

  “No. I can’t begin to tell you how traumatic all of this has been. Yes, everyone’s in a celebratory mood. But right now, I just want to get on with my life. Remember, if Dexter hadn’t been trapped in the past, I never would have been involved in the first place. This trip was a logical finish of that to help Jeff answer some questions, but that’s it.”

  Abby nodded what Erica interpreted as her approval as Jeff got back. “Just ordered a U-Haul,” he said. “Dexter’s almost here. He’s going to stop and pick it up.”

  They looked over at Emeka, who had now created a chasm in the thick metal door almost all the way from top to bottom. Sparks continued to fly past him, dissipating on the pavement. Erica l
ooked up at the windows of Jeff’s building and, despite his assurances, could see people in various offices rubbernecking at them. They wouldn’t be able to be so obvious transferring the bags of cash from truck to truck.

  After a little while, Emeka’s drill cut through the top of the door and he fell backwards onto the ground, catching himself on his feet and holding the drill safely out in front of him. The heavy door swung on its hinges past him, unveiling the inside of the truck. The three of them raced to Emeka’s side. Literally raced there, stopping short at the back of the truck.

  Their efforts had not been for naught. The truck was filled to capacity with white canvas bags stuffed with paper money. Erica tried to quickly count at least the visible bags so she could estimate how many there were in total, but they were too packed in.

  Jeff let out a whoop and grabbed her, hugging her tightly as he spun around. Then he hugged Emeka and Abby.

  “We’ve got some counting to do,” he said, slapping hands with Emeka.

  “How much do you think could be in there?” Abby asked.

  Jeff shook his head. “There’s no way of knowing. There’s all different denominations of bills. From what I could see, all they were doing was stuffing money in bags without any rhyme or reason.”

  “Yeah,” Erica said, finding herself caught up in the excitement, though all she really wanted to do was be away from it. “The machines separated the cash by denomination. There was no reason to do it manually.”

  “It’s a helluva lot of money no matter what,” Emeka said. “Nice job, guys.”

  “Here’s the mastermind,” Jeff said, pointing at Erica.

  Which was a title she definitely did not want – to be considered the architect of the operation. She shook her head with a reluctant laugh. “This guy invents time travel, dives off the top of an armored car and takes on a swarm of cops, and he calls me the mastermind.”

  “Hold up,” Jeff said. “We’ll tell the story start-to-finish with drinks in our hands.”

  They heard a car horn to the side and turned to see a large U-Haul truck pulling into the lot. Through the windshield, they could see Dexter behind the wheel. When he got close, Jeff motioned for him to back up so that the truck was almost covering the mouth of the garage. When he parked, Dexter got out, gave out the required round of hugs, and looked into the back of the armored car.

  “You did it, Jeff,” he said quietly. “You made this work.”

  Jeff put his arm around him. “I couldn’t have done any of this without you.”

  “What do you mean? I didn’t have anything to do with this. This was you and Dr. Danforth.”

  “Leave me out of this,” Erica said.

  Jeff shook his head. “One thing leads to another,” he said. “If we don’t do the Wilton job, we don’t do any of this.”

  Dexter sighed. “Ah, that’s a stretch. It’s probably true, but the credit you’re giving me is over-the-top. This was your ballgame. You and Erica.”

  Emeka’s hand appeared on Jeff’s shoulder from behind, giving him a shake. “You’re the man, dude,” he said.

  “Alright, alright,” Jeff said. “There’s no sense congratulating ourselves here in the parking lot when I’ve got a bottle of Pinot Noir whose grapes haven’t even been grown yet for us to enjoy. Let’s get this thing unloaded and celebrate our victory the right way.”

  Jeff headed for the truck with Abby and Emeka following. Erica took a step toward them, but Dexter grabbed her arm.

  “I have something to show you,” he said, pulling a small leather bag out of his pocket. He placed it in her hand.

  Taking it, she opened the bag and emptied it into her other hand. It was filled with gemstones of various colors. “What are these?”

  “What do you think they are?”

  “Really? Garvey’s gemstones?”

  “A sampling of them. You’ll be interested in knowing they were secured for the Museum by Rosalynn Darby.”

  She turned her attention from the stones to his face. He had no expression. “So that’s how you ended up with her daughter,” she said. “You knew Rosalynn through the Museum. There was no fight at the convention?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “The fight still happened. We just found something to bond over, I guess.”

  “The stones.” It dawned on her. “The stones weren’t available before Jeff punched Garvey in the face. In the other reality, they’d been lost.”

  He was nodding.

  “Absolutely incredible. Who’d have thought everything could be so intertwined?” She softened and made her best sympathetic face as she replaced the stones in the bag and handed it back to him. “So, how are things? How’s being married.”

  “I hate every second of it,” he said without pause.

  “Hey,” Jeff called back to them, “we can get this done faster with everyone helping.”

  Dexter made eye contact with her for a moment, then turned to join the team. She followed. Within an hour, they’d emptied the armored car and filled the U-Haul, which was then backed into the next bay in the garage for temporary safekeeping.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  If this was what being “on top of the world” meant, Jeff was pretty happy to be there. As much as he someday looked forward to them for himself, he couldn’t imagine that a wedding, a birth of a child of his own, or even hitting the lottery would be able to fill him with such pride in accomplishment. Sitting at Freddie’s Burger Barn with his friends, old and new, he was perfectly content. Perfectly.

  “This bottle was actually left for us by me in the future,” he told everyone. “It is a 2020 Pinot Noir. The way I see it, anyone can drink wine from the past, but we are about to become the first people in history to drink wine from the future!”

  The team gave a cheer, which added even more intensity to his enthusiasm. In the back of his mind he had actually thought about the fact that the bartender could hear everything they were saying, but he was the only one. He must’ve thought they were crazy, but he knew that at the end of the night he could give him a supersized tip in exchange for forgetting anything he heard. Though he’d probably heard his share of drunken foolery over time anyway. He handed the bottle to the bartender, who poured everyone a glass.

  “Alright,” Emeka said, pulling two stools from the bar and lining them up next to each other to create a stage as the bartender walked away. “We want to hear the whole story.”

  Jeff laughed, a fake humble laugh. Truthfully, he’d been itching to get his friends together and play storyteller. He took one of the stools and patted the other for Erica to join him. She shook her head and smiled shyly, but ultimately came and sat down next to him.

  As they settled in, he asked Dexter what he thought of the wine. He said it was “grapey,” which made him laugh. “That’s exactly what future me said. ‘Grapey.’“

  Once Erica was sitting beside him, he delved into their tale. From landing on the beach in rising tide – assuring Abby that her tablet had been safe the whole time – to the surfer motel clerk to their gift pack on the bed to fighting the hurricane to checking in at the same hotel three years earlier to their dinner in Times Square to the future New York skyline to the dawn of a cashless society, for the next hour in tandem they laid out the details of their journey.

  But when they got to the crime itself, despite the heroism he felt from all of these accomplishments, he found himself not wanting to overdo it when it came to the actual heist. In his mind, that had been the pinnacle of everything they’d done – particularly because, at every step, he was not only concerned about succeeding, but about protecting Erica. There was something in the story that he couldn’t put into words, as though he was her knight and she was his lady, and as they fought to capture the money and get back to the present, it was his responsibility to ensure her safety. With that sentiment hanging there, Jeff let her tell the story of the robbery, allowing the chivalry and romanticism of it to remain in his own mind, for his own enjoyment.

  Th
e story was amazing coming from her. Her perspective was completely different from his, mainly because, as soon as he toppled off the side of the truck, she couldn’t see him. He hadn’t thought about the fact that she was laying on top of the truck with no clue what had happened to him or when she should pull the trigger on the time device. Still, she’d been completely unshakable, no matter how nervous she claimed to have been at the time, and all that made him appreciate her even more than he already did.

  In telling the story, neither of them mentioned the kiss on the scaffold.

  When the story was over, the rest of the team marveled at their fortitude, tossed out some questions about the future, and finally tried to probe Jeff as to what was next for their little project. With the future wine long gone, they plodded through three or four rounds of top shelf liquor, breaking into smaller conversations. At first, while Jeff had acted out his daring leap onto and over the armored car for Abby and Emeka, Erica and Dexter had coalesced over what Jeff could only imagine were the nerdier parts of the trip. After a while, Abby and Emeka sidled over to Dexter and, having not had the chance to talk to him since his capture in Colonial America, were grilling him on the details of the life he swore he’d had before the one they knew about. And the details of his life that Jeff and Erica swore he had before the one any of them knew about. For which he, of course, had no answers. “I can’t imagine you without Liz,” Abby said to him.

  Jeff took the opportunity to sit down with Erica, both leaning on the bar. “You’re pretty amazing,” he said. “I had no idea what was going through your head in those moments before we came back. It was fascinating to hear.”

  She laughed. “We planned everything on paper, and it all sounded like it made sense. But suddenly, we’re separated from each other and only one of us has the time travel device.”

  Which she still had, he reminded himself.

  “If I’d clicked the button at the wrong time, you’d have been stuck.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I know. I didn’t have time for that to occur to me, but I know it now. We’re a good team. That’s all I can chalk it up to.”