“Charlie, he’s been hit!”
Only then did Charles see the smear of blood on the white wall. Chuck’s blood. His blood.
“I should have remembered the man in the closet,” Chuck said through tightly clenched teeth. “But I didn’t, and he surprised me.”
“But I had his gun—”
“You had one of his guns.”
“It’s his right leg,” Maggie told him as he crouched beside her.
Chuck held out his gun to Charles. “Here. Take this and go with Maggie. Quickly.”
TWELVE
“WE’RE NOT GOING anywhere without you,” Maggie said fiercely. She turned to look at Charles. “How bad is it?”
Chuck answered. “It’s not bad, but I won’t be able to run. I don’t think I can even walk.”
“I’ll carry the gun, you carry him,” Maggie said to Charles.
“No, I’ll slow you down—”
“So?”
Chuck’s eyes blazed. “So I may have taken care of the others and destroyed the Runabout, but Goodwin got away. He could be anywhere. And I know for damn sure that he’s going to be aiming his gun at you, Maggie. You need to be able to move, and move fast.”
Chuck had “taken care of” the other Wizard-9 agents. That’s what he called shooting them full of bullets and draining the life from them. Maggie kept her back firmly turned to the sight of the three dead men sprawled on the other side of the room. How could he be so matter-of-fact, so emotionless about killing? How many times in the past had he been forced to kill? Or had he always been so callous and thick-skinned?
She risked a glance at Charles. His expression was grimly identical to Chuck’s. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe the thought of those three men never standing up and going home to their wives and children didn’t make him sick to his stomach, either.
“Maggie’s the only reason I’d risk building another Runabout,” Chuck said, his voice harsh. She looked up at him and she could see pain mixed in with the fiery intensity in his eyes. His wound may not have been “bad,” but it hurt him badly.
“And Ken Goodwin knows that,” he continued. “If you’re dead, Mags, I’d keep my theories of time travel alive.” He thrust his gun at Charles. “Come on, kid. I’m expendable. I’ll be gone anyway when you finally do the right thing and decide to leave Data Tech. So take it and get Maggie the hell out of here.”
“You did know,” Maggie interrupted. “You knew all along that if I could convince Charles to give up his research, you’d just disappear, didn’t you? I can’t believe you would let yourself vanish without saying good-bye!”
“I did say good-bye,” he said quietly.
Her voice caught. “You didn’t mention that that good-bye was because you intended to leave me forever.”
Chuck’s gaze flickered to Charles, who was quietly working to stanch the flow of his blood. “My intention was to never leave you again.”
“You mean your intention was for Charles to never leave me again.” Charles glanced uneasily over at her, and she shook her head. “Don’t worry, Charlie, I won’t hold you to any promises you made seven years in the future.”
Charles straightened up, picking up Chuck’s gun and handing it back to him. “Let’s go,” he said.
Chuck pushed the gun back toward him. “No.”
“We’re not leaving you here,” Charles stated.
“Instead you’d rather risk Maggie’s life?” Chuck countered.
Charles glanced back at the dead Wizard-9 agents. “I think we’d be risking Maggie’s life if we left you here,” he said quietly. He hefted the weight of Chuck’s gun. “Because I don’t think I could bring myself to use this the way you can.”
“Believe me, you’d use it. If Goodwin pointed his gun at her, you could bring yourself to use it,” Chuck told Charles.
“Yeah,” Charles agreed. “Maybe I could. But I’d rather not have to find out.” He glanced back at the bodies again, the muscles clenching in his jaw. “That’s one way I have absolutely no desire to be like you, old man.”
“Please, can we go now?” Maggie whispered. “All of us?”
Chuck let Charles help him to his feet, swearing sharply, his mouth tight against the pain. He took back the gun, holding it at the ready in one arm while Charles pulled his other arm around his neck. But he also drew his handgun, the small one he’d bought illegally in the roadhouse north of Phoenix, and held it out to Charles.
Charles took it unwillingly, jamming it down into the pocket of his torn tuxedo jacket.
Chuck gritted his teeth. “Let’s do it, then.”
Both men spoke in unison. “Maggie, get behind me.”
· · ·
Charles proved to be as good as Chuck when it came to taking precautions and evading capture.
He got them into one of the Wizard-9 limousines, and they’d pulled away from the burning ranch house, the flames from the fire cracking and dancing, lighting up the night behind them. They’d hit the gate going fifty, and the big car had plowed right through.
Charles had driven directly down the mountain and into Phoenix, where they quickly left the limo on a side street. The danger and Chuck’s injury made borrowing another car a necessity, although Maggie kept careful track of each of the streets from which they purloined yet another vehicle. After this was over, she’d go back and make retribution.
If she were alive.
Charles knew the same trick with switching license plates that Chuck had pulled not so many nights ago. He drove them from one side of Phoenix to the other, making sure they weren’t being followed before he shut off the car’s headlights and pulled into the driveway of a house that was dark and silent.
“Where are we?” Maggie asked. The neighborhood was upscale suburban, complete with thick green grass growing on every lawn. In the somewhat cooler darkness of the night, sprinkler systems were going full blast in the yards all around them. She could just imagine the water bills.
“A vice-president from Data Tech is out of town,” Charles told her. “He’s in Ireland with his family until next week.”
“You mean Randy Lowenstein? If it’s Randy, we’re not safe here. Goodwin will have access to the schedules of all my—your—friends,” Chuck said warningly from the backseat. His voice sounded tight. Maggie could only imagine the pain he’d endured during the course of the night.
“This isn’t Randy’s house. It’s Harmon Gregory’s, VP of finance. He’s not a friend,” Charles said quietly. “In fact, I only met him once, when Randy and I delivered something here to his house. I overheard Gregory’s secretary talking to mine, heard her mention Ireland.” He turned around to look at Chuck over the back of the seat. “Do you still carry a Swiss army knife? Goodwin’s men took mine.”
Silently, Chuck handed his pocketknife to Charles, who pulled up the parking brake and climbed out of the car.
Maggie turned to look at Chuck.
In the backseat, his face was completely in shadows.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t take you to a hospital?”
“I have a bullet in my leg,” he said. “They’d have to notify the police.”
“How are we going to get the bullet out? What if it gets infected? I don’t want you to die.” Her voice cracked softly.
He was silent, unmoving. When he finally spoke, his voice was raspy, and he had to stop to clear his throat. “I’m not going to be here long enough to need to get the bullet out.”
“But you said you destroyed the Runabout. Can’t you just—”
“I did, and although the time pressures are off, that doesn’t mean we can just pretend the threat’s not still there. We need to convince … Charlie … to quit his research. I still need your help, Mags.”
“Isn’t there any other way?”
“No.” The word held all of his absolute resolve, but he said it gently.
“How can you be sure? Maybe if you talked to Charles, together you might—”
“Maggie, do you think
I haven’t tried to find some loophole, some alternative—” He broke off, intentionally taking a deep breath and lowering his voice again. “Here’s what we’d need to do. We’d need to hunt down and kill Ken Goodwin. And then we’d need to hunt down and kill his present-day counterpart, because what if, God forbid, he got in touch with himself and tipped himself off as to what you and I did at the Data Tech lab that day. But then, you know, I’d start wondering about the other members of the Wizard-9 organization. Maybe he’d told them. We’d have to kill them, too, wouldn’t we?”
“All right,” she said.
But he didn’t stop. “Or how about Goodwin’s wife? Maybe he told her. Should we kill her too? And his children …?”
“Stop.” Her voice was only a whisper, but he heard her.
“I’m sorry.”
Maggie blinked back tears as she looked out the windshield at Charles. He was working with Chuck’s Swiss army knife, doing something to the small key plate on the frame of the garage door.
“I saw your face after I killed those men.” Chuck spoke almost inaudibly. “I can do it when I have to, Maggie. But I’m not going to kill everyone that Ken Goodwin might’ve talked to. I can’t do that. Even if you wanted me to, I couldn’t. But I know you don’t want me to. What I’ve already done is bad enough for you.”
Silence. Outside, Charles made an adjustment with the knife and the automatic garage door slid up.
He quickly began refastening the key panel to the frame.
“Will you help me?”
Maggie closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes.”
Chuck touched her then, reaching forward, leaning out of the darkness to squeeze her shoulder. “Thank you.”
She turned to face him, catching his hand in hers, keeping him from disappearing once again into the shadows.
“I love … both of you.” She felt tears welling up in her eyes again.
His face looked so tired, his eyes so filled with pain. “There’s really only one of us. There will be only one of us.”
And that one wasn’t going to be the man sitting facing her, gazing into her eyes.
He reached forward and caught one of her tears with his finger. “That’s a good thing. It’s going to be a good thing.” He touched her cheek, her hair. “Hey,” he said, “you don’t think I like what I’ve become, do you? Always having to look over my shoulder, always suspicious, ready to kill or be killed …? This way I get a second chance, Mags. I can take a do-over. Not many people get that kind of opportunity.” His eyes softened as she pressed her cheek into his hand. “It’s not like you’re never going to see me again. You will. I promise. I’m going to be a little different—no, a whole lot different, probably. Better different.” He smiled. “But you’ll see me again, and I’ll kiss you”—he leaned forward and brushed her lips with his—“just like that, and you’ll look into my eyes and you’ll know it’s me. I’ll remember everything. Very faintly, but I will remember.”
Charles opened the door of the car, and the sudden light seemed blinding. Chuck sat back, letting go of Maggie’s hand as Charles climbed behind the steering wheel.
“I’m sorry,” Charles said quietly as he shut the door and the car was plunged once more into darkness. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
He quickly pulled the car into the empty garage and shut off the engine. He got out of the car just as quickly, and using one of the buttons near the door to the house, he lowered the automatic garage door.
They were hidden.
At least for now.
Charles was in Data Tech VP Harmon Gregory’s living room, sitting in the dark. They didn’t dare turn on any lights. Although the houses in this wealthy suburb were quite a distance apart, he didn’t want anyone seeing lights on in a house that was supposed to be empty.
He was sitting with his head back and his eyes closed. He was trying to push aside his exhaustion so that he could think, when he heard a radio switched on from somewhere in the back of the house.
He stood up and moved swiftly down the hall toward the bedrooms.
Maggie was in one of those rooms, in the dark, putting plastic trash bags underneath the bed linens to keep the Gregorys’ mattress from being stained by Chuck’s blood. Chuck was in the bathroom, with the only candle they’d found, trying his best to clean himself up—something he’d insisted upon doing on his own. Charles could hear the water running behind the closed door.
He came face-to-face with Maggie in the hallway as she, too, heard the radio. He tried not to think about the way he’d seen her, sitting in the car, her eyes filled with tears, holding desperately to Chuck’s hand as he kissed her. He tried, and failed.
“Is someone here?” she breathed, her eyes wide.
Charles put one finger to his lips and moved forward, trying to see into the room where the radio played. He could make out the shape of the bed and …
It was empty.
From the other side of the window shades, he could see the first light of dawn streaking across the morning sky.
“It’s a clock radio,” he said, crossing the room and raising one of the shades an inch, letting in a little more of the early-morning light. The room was that of a teenage girl, with magazine pictures and posters plastered over the walls. A bright yellow bedspread covered a bed that was littered with a menagerie of tiny stuffed animals.
Maggie was staring down at the radio, a slight frown wrinkling her forehead. “That song …”
The melody of the slow pop ballad was hauntingly familiar despite the fact that Charles couldn’t remember the last time he’d listened to a Top 40 radio station.
Maggie looked up at him. “We danced to this song at the Data Tech party. Do you remember?”
He did. He remembered it now too. Faintly. Foggily. As if remembering a dream. And it had to be a dream—neither of them had gone to the Data Tech party.
Maggie laughed. “It’s a residual memory,” she said. “We’re remembering things that happened the first time around. Wow, I’ve never had one this vivid.”
That had to be what it was. And she was right. It was vivid. Although it was misty, he saw the events played out as if he were remembering a scene from a movie. As if he were living a movie. “I saw you from across the lobby,” Charles recalled, “and followed you into the dining room. I was determined to find someone who could introduce us—” He broke off, shaking his head in confusion. “But we’d already met, in the restaurant.”
“No, we hadn’t met before,” Maggie told him. “Not the first time. You just came up to me, introduced yourself, and asked me to dance.”
“You said yes. I was thrilled.” Charles pulled her into his arms and began to dance with her, as if they were there, right now, at the Data Tech party.
“You were very charming,” Maggie remembered, tilting her head to look up at him. “I think we talked until midnight. I told you my entire life story—about growing up in Connecticut and coming out to Arizona State U. and ending up in Phoenix—and it wasn’t until I got home that I realized you’d told me next to nothing about yourself.”
“I wanted to kiss you while we were dancing, but we were surrounded by people we both worked with, so I asked you to have dinner with me the next night instead.”
“I agreed to meet you at Tia’s.”
“A Mexican restaurant near your house?”
“Yeah.” Maggie smiled up at him.
“You were late.”
“A client called just as I was going out the door.”
“When you arrived I remember thinking it was like being hit by a hurricane. You had so much energy. You must’ve apologized twenty times.”
“I was afraid you might’ve gotten tired of waiting. I was afraid you’d left. I was so glad to see you.”
Charles pushed her hair back from her face. They’d long since stopped dancing, but he still held her in his arms. “You called me Chuck.”
She nodded, her smile fading. “I know.”
“You said I n
eeded a nickname.”
“You said you didn’t care what I called you—”
Charles smiled. “So you started calling me Frank—until I retracted my statement.” He touched her lips gently with his thumb, tracing them. “All I could think about all night long was how badly I wanted to kiss you.”
“All I could think about was how much I wanted you to tell me about yourself. I’d pretty much decided that if I could get you to open up to me, I’d let you walk me home, and I’d even … invite you to stay.”
Invite him to … His arms tightened around her. “Oh God. Really?”
Maggie shook her head, smiling almost shyly up at him. “I liked you a lot. Right from the start. But I wanted you to talk to me. I tried, but you sidestepped all my questions.”
“I knew you wanted something more from me,” he said quietly, “but I don’t—I didn’t—feel comfortable talking about myself, about my past.”
“I would’ve settled for you telling me how you felt.”
“I felt happy. You made me smile, made me feel so warm. And hot. God, I’ve never wanted a woman the way I wanted you—the way I still want you. I had this feeling that you were going to walk away from me,” Charles whispered. “But I still couldn’t give you what you needed.”
“You gave me what I needed today.” Maggie reached up to touch him. “Was it really that hard to talk to me?”
“No.” He closed his eyes, loving the sensation of her fingers in his hair. “Yes.”
She laughed, and feeling a burst of that now familiar warmth and heat, he lowered his head to kiss her. But she stopped him.
“You didn’t want to talk about your brother’s death, but you’ve never let yourself forget or move forward, away from it,” Maggie pointed out. “Even now. You’re still tied to what happened when you were a child.” Her eyes were so serious as she gazed up at him. “After all this time Stevie’s life is still more important to you than your own.”
Charles didn’t speak. What could he possibly say?
The sound of the bathroom door opening made him step back, away from her. He hadn’t liked watching Chuck with Maggie in the car. The least he could do was spare his future self a similar sight.
Time Enough for Love Page 14
