“With what funding?” Maggie asked quietly. “According to Chuck, even Data Tech had to go to outside sources to get the money necessary to build the Runabout.”
“Maybe … private investors.” Charles was reaching for answers now. “I have some connections—”
“And if you used those connections, Ken Goodwin and Wizard-9 would be able to track you down. And then we’d be right back here, right where we started.”
Charles sat for a moment in silence. “It’s just … It’s hard for me to quit.”
“It’s not quitting. It’s foreseeing a dead end and choosing a different path.”
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. How I’m supposed to …”
“Just decide,” she said quietly. “Picture yourself taking another route to the future.”
“All right,” he said, straightening his shoulders, steeling himself. “I’ll submit my resignation to Data Tech first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll go back to school, finish up my medical degree. Do you think that’s really all it’s going to take? A simple decision? Because I’ve done it. I’ve decided.”
It took all of Maggie’s willpower not to glance over her shoulder at the still-dark hallway that led to the bedrooms. Was Chuck already gone? Would it happen just like that? One moment he was there, and the next he was gone?
But then there was a bang as the bedroom door was pushed open.
Maggie turned as Charles jumped to his feet, ready to defend her, if necessary.
But it was Chuck who came into the hallway, hopping out to meet them. The movement jarred his injured leg and made lines of pain stand out around his mouth.
“It’s happened.” He looked from Maggie to Charles. “I can feel it. I feel … different. So why the hell am I still here?” he said, then collapsed onto the floor in a crumpled heap.
Maggie reached him first. “Oh, my God, he’s burning up!”
He was. As Charles touched Chuck his skin felt hot and dry. Feverish. And his wound had bled clear through his bandage. His jeans were saturated too. “He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“We’ve got to get him to a hospital!”
“We’ve got to figure out what I did wrong.”
Chuck roused, groaning, swearing softly. “Maggie! Oh, God, they shot her! Gotta get up—”
“No, you don’t.”
“I’m here, Chuck. I’m all right. You’re just having a nightmare.” The sound of Maggie’s voice seemed to soothe him and he quieted.
Charles took charge. “Grab his feet,” he told Maggie. “Help me get him back into bed.”
The sheets were stained a bright shade of red. Charles lowered Chuck down on top of them anyway.
Now what?
Chuck was in a great deal of pain, made worse by his feverish state. He drifted, hovering across the line of consciousness, on the edge of some terrible, nightmarish place, and he fought to stay awake.
“Get a towel,” Charles ordered Maggie, and as she vanished back into the hallway he glared down at Chuck. “For a registered genius, you are one hell of an idiot. How could you possibly have forgotten the basic rule of first aid? Apply pressure to stop bleeding.”
Chuck was pale, nearly gray looking, and his teeth chattered from a sudden chill. “I did. In the car. It stopped.”
“Yeah? It looks like it started again.”
“I didn’t think I’d be around long enough for it to matter.”
“Well, I’ve made my decision. No way am I following your path. But you’re still here, so it looks like I’m going to have to do more than simply make up my mind to change my future. I don’t suppose you have any suggestions?”
Silently, Maggie appeared, holding the towel out for Charles. He took it, using it to gently apply pressure over the makeshift bandage.
“I’ll find some blankets,” Maggie murmured, taking one look at the way Chuck was shivering.
“Thanks,” Charles said.
She met his eyes briefly before she left the room. Her own gaze was decidedly sober. She knew as well as he did that their situation had just dropped from bad to worse.
Chuck had drifted off again, before offering up any suggestions.
Charles had to answer for him as Maggie brought a pile of blankets into the room and began covering Chuck. “Maybe I have to take action,” he suggested, helping her. “Maybe I should call Randy Lowenstein. Tell him right now—today—that I’m leaving Data Tech. I could call John Fairfield at NYU. He always promised that he’d do whatever was necessary to get me into the medical school at the university. He was a friend of my uncle’s,” he explained to Maggie, “who always wanted me to complete my degree and go into medical research.”
He made the phone calls quickly, from the telephone on the bedside table, as he continued to apply pressure to Chuck’s still-bleeding leg. He turned slightly away, because he didn’t want to see Maggie sit down next to Chuck, on the edge of the bed. But she didn’t. Instead, she sat quietly on the floor, away from both of them, leaning back against the wall. She tucked the shortened skirt of her dress in and pulled her knees tightly to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.
He could feel her watching him as he spoke on the phone, and he felt a pang of longing so sharp, he had to clear his throat before he could talk. Chuck loved her enough to die for her. How could he possibly compete with that? After all this was over, what would happen? Would Maggie even want to see him again, or would he remind her too much of Chuck?
And if he asked her, would she come with him to New York? He honestly didn’t know. But he wanted her to. He wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything.
More than he wanted to find a way to travel through time.
He dropped the phone back into the receiver, and Chuck fought to open his eyes. “I’m still here,” he whispered.
Randy Lowenstein had expressed regrets about Charles’s decision to leave Data Tech, but he’d been supportive and had wished him luck. Dr. John Fairfield, a man whose anatomy classes Charles had audited while still only a child, had been overjoyed that he was intending to complete his medical degree. Fairfield had never understood that Charles had needed to know enough about the human body to make sure that his time-travel device delivered a living, breathing person rather than some compressed bundle of protoplasm to the past. That was Charles’s sole purpose for studying medicine. Achieving a medical degree to dangle off the end of his name meant nothing to him. At least not until now.
But despite the sense of forward motion he’d gotten from his phone calls, nothing—apparently—had changed.
“Maybe I need to do more.” Charles rubbed his eyes with his free hand, wishing there was time to lie down, to take a nap. He wanted to sit down next to Maggie and pull her into his arms. But he wouldn’t do that. Not in front of Chuck. “Maybe I need to erase my hard drive. Maybe I need to delete the files of my research notes.”
It would damn near kill him to wipe out nearly three decades’ worth of research. But he was going to have to do it—because he didn’t want to end up lying on that bed with a bullet in his leg, filled with vividly violent dreams caused by extremely nonresidual memories of Maggie bleeding to death as he held her in his arms.
“Maybe,” Maggie said quietly from where she was sitting on the floor, “Chuck hasn’t left because Ken Goodwin is still out there somewhere. Maybe this has to do with him. Maybe until we confront him …”
Charles turned to look at Chuck. “Confront Goodwin …?”
Chuck didn’t answer, held prisoner by his feverish dreams.
And then the doorbell rang.
FOURTEEN
CHARLES TURNED TOWARD the living room and froze, a look of intense concentration on his face, as if he were waiting for something, listening—for what?
Maggie’s heart was pounding so loudly, it seemed impossible that he could hear anything over it at all.
“Who do you think it is?” she breathed.
He shook his head very slightly, his eyes still unfo
cused, still listening.
“Charlie, do you think it’s …?” Ken Goodwin. She couldn’t bring herself to say the name. It was impossible, anyway. How could he have found them here?
Charles unfroze, glancing first at Chuck, who tossed feverishly on the bed, then turning to meet her gaze. She knew what he was thinking. If it was Ken Goodwin, he was virtually on his own. Chuck was out for the count.
“I don’t think he’d stop to ring the doorbell,” he said. But just the same, he held out his hand for hers, hoisting her to her feet. “Help me move Chuck into the closet. I want you in there with him until I know for sure what’s—”
On the other side of the room, a window shattered with a crash, the curtain billowing as the figure of a man kicked his way through.
Maggie heard herself scream, a scream that ended abruptly as the weight of Charles’s body pushed her down onto the floor and knocked all of the air from her lungs. But then Charles was up again, reaching for Chuck, pulling him off the bed and down, nearly on top of them, as the gunman opened fire.
The noise was deafening in the small bedroom. Again, Charles covered her. The mirror on the wall above them shattered, raining shards of glass down on top of them.
But then the shooting stopped.
“I think that’s enough,” a voice said. “Don’t you?”
Charles shifted slightly, and Maggie could see the leader of Wizard-9, Ken Goodwin, standing in the doorway of the room, holding a gun. From his vantage point, he could easily kill them all. He must’ve come in through the front door.
He nodded a polite greeting, as if he were paying a social call. “Ms. Winthrop. And the Doctors Della Croce. You didn’t honestly think I wouldn’t be able to find you?” He smiled. “That bullet the elder Dr. Della Croce has in his leg is part of a little pet project I’ve been working on over at the Wizard-9 labs. It’s specifically designed to lose velocity upon impact and remain embedded in the recipient’s body, where it acts as a homing device. Clever, don’t you think, Ms. Winthrop?”
Charles moved so he was directly in front of Maggie. His face was bleeding. He’d been cut by the flying glass just below his left eye. He wiped the blood away as if it were merely an inconvenience. “You keep that gun aimed away from her.”
“Take care of those weapons,” Goodwin said to his hired gun, motioning with his head toward Chuck’s assault weapon hanging on the bedpost and the handgun on the bedside table.
Charles pulled himself to his feet, carefully keeping Maggie behind him as the gunman followed orders. Chuck still lay on the floor, caught in a feverish nightmare. Charles’s own nightmare was far too real.
He could feel Maggie’s fingers wrapped tightly around his arm.
“Step away from her, Doctor,” Goodwin said almost gently.
“I don’t think so.” Charles inched his hand down toward the pocket of his jacket. Chuck had been right. If he had to, he would use whatever means possible to protect Maggie.
Maggie’s voice was low and urgent. “Charlie, whatever happens, whatever he does, don’t continue with the Wells Project. It’s not worth it—I’m not worth it. I know you don’t love me, you couldn’t possibly—you don’t even really know me and—”
“Move away from her, Della Croce,” Goodwin said again as Charles slipped his fingers beneath the edge of his pocket. “You’re an extremely intelligent man. No doubt you’ve figured out what I have to do to guarantee your continued participation in this project.”
“Just keep thinking about New York,” Maggie told him fiercely. “If you give in and do what he says, he’ll use you for as long as he needs you and then he’ll kill you anyway. If I’m going to die, at least let my death mean something.” Her voice shook. “Promise me, Charlie. Let me at least hold on to those pictures of you in New York. I have to believe you’ll get there—that you’ll be all right.”
How could she think that? How could she imagine he’d be all right anywhere without her? But then Charles knew. He’d never told her he loved her. And he did. He loved her.
“Put this one up on the bed.” Goodwin nudged Chuck with his foot as he spoke to his gunman. “And rouse him. I want him to be awake.”
This was it. Charles knew this was his chance. As the gunman slipped his own weapon over his shoulder and bent down to lift Chuck onto the bed, Charles dropped his hand into his jacket pocket, praying the handgun Chuck had given him hours before was pointing in the right direction.
It was.
He aimed it at Goodwin and fired, right through his pocket, like some kind of dime-novel gangster.
It all happened so fast. The look of shock on Goodwin’s face. The bloom of bright red on the white of his shirt. Maggie’s hands pushing him away, pushing him down. The sound of Goodwin’s gun as he squeezed off one final shot before his knees crumpled and he sank lifelessly to the ground.
And just like that, Goodwin vanished.
The gunman staggered back with a cry of alarm as Charles scrambled to his knees, pulling his gun free from his pocket. As he aimed the handgun at the man he saw from the corner of his eye that Chuck, too, had disappeared.
“I have no desire to kill you too,” he told the gunman. “Just slowly put down your weapons.”
The man’s hands were shaking as he obeyed.
“The girl’s been hit,” he said.
The words didn’t make any sense to Charles. At least not at first. The girl’s been …?
But then he turned and saw the blood.
Maggie.
Charles dropped his gun, fear and anguish hitting him like a battering ram to the chest. Goodwin’s final bullet had hit Maggie.
“Call 9-1-1,” he shouted as he reached for her, searching for her pulse, praying she was still alive. But the gunman was already gone, out of the room, the front door slamming behind him.
The bullet had gone in her lower back, just below the ribs, as she’d pushed him down and thrown herself across him. Once again, she’d taken the shot that was meant to kill him.
He reached for the phone himself, dialing the emergency number as he worked desperately to stop her bleeding.
“Don’t die,” he told her. “Goddammit, I’m not going to let you die!”
· · ·
“Dr. Della Croce?”
Charles looked up warily as the police detective came into the small cinder-block room.
He’d been questioned for hours, first at the hospital, and then here, in this interrogation room at the police station. He’d told his story over and over again to all shapes and sizes of detectives. To the precinct captain. To a psychiatrist who was clearly trying to evaluate his sanity.
He knew it sounded crazy. Time travel. Who would possibly believe it?
The worst of it was, they seemed to think he was the one who had shot Maggie.
Maggie’s surgery had taken an interminable amount of time. She’d come through it alive, but when he’d been taken from the hospital she still wasn’t out of danger. She was placed under guard in the intensive-care unit.
Charles wanted to be there, sitting next to her, holding her hand, telling her to hang on, to fight to stay alive.
Telling her that he loved her.
Instead, he’d been taken here. And while he hadn’t quite been put in a jail cell, the door to this little room had been securely locked each time he’d been left alone.
He’d tried to focus his thoughts on Maggie, tried to reach out to her across all the city blocks that separated them.
Her love for him had defied the boundaries of time. Surely his could touch her across such a short physical distance.…
“How is she?” he asked the detective, praying that the news was good.
“She’s corroborated your story,” the man told him.
Charles’s heart leaped and he stood up. “She’s conscious?”
“Yeah. Not that we believe her any more than we believe you, but at least we seem to have removed you from our list of suspects. Ms. Winthrop insists you didn’
t shoot her. Although I think it’s the fact that the ballistics lab verified that the bullet the doctors took out of her didn’t come from your gun that’s working the most in your favor.”
“I want to see her.”
“Well, she’s asking for you, too,” the detective told him. “So let’s go.”
The drive to the hospital took forever, as did the elevator up to the intensive-care unit, but finally Charles was there.
Maggie was asleep. She looked so tiny in that bed, hooked up to every monitor imaginable. An IV tube was attached to a bag that sent a slow but steady drip of a powerful painkiller into her arm. Charles took her chart from the foot of her bed.
“You can’t read that,” the nurse admonished him.
He gave her a long, level look. “Yes,” he said. “I can.”
She was silent as he opened Maggie’s chart and quickly read the doctor’s notes, saw from where the bullet had been removed, saw that it hadn’t come near her spine, saw that none of the damage it had done would be permanent.
Her injuries were serious, but she would live.
If she wanted to.
The nurse watched him warily as he replaced the chart.
“I’m going to sit with her,” he told the woman.
“Visitors aren’t supposed to stay long,” she told him. “There’s no chair.”
“Then I’ll stand.” Charles reached out gently and touched Maggie’s hair, touched her hand. “Hey, Maggie,” he said quietly, unable to keep his eyes from filling with tears. “I’m here.” His voice broke and he couldn’t go on. All he could do was hold her hand, hope that she felt the pressure of his fingers against hers. He didn’t care what anyone said, he wasn’t leaving her side again. He needed her to hang on. He needed her to come back to him. He wanted her to open her eyes and look at him while he told her that he loved her.
The nurse stood and watched him for several long minutes before she silently left the room.
Time Enough for Love Page 16
