Cast the First Stone

by David James Warren

  I’m here because of him.

  He’s tackled me, but I trap his legs, pull his head down into my shoulder and slam my fist into his ear. He struggles, so I hit him again, and when he pushes away from me, I flip on him, my knee in his gut and crunch my fist into his face.

  It’s all blurring now—the shouting, the heat rolling off me, the cursing of the man fighting back.

  He lands a couple blows in my ribs, but I’m impervious. Then Burke pulls me off, shoves me away “Step back, Rem!”

  He grabs Neon in an arm bar, flipping him onto his stomach. “You—stop moving. Stay down!”

  Neon stops struggling and I sink to the grass, breathing hard.

  Burke shoots me a look. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Me? I stare at him. “What—he was in the crowd!”

  “Maybe,” Burke says, his hand still on Neon’s back. Now, he leans in close to the man. “Talk. Why’d you run?”

  Neon swallows, glares at me, shakes his head. There’s a confusion on his face that doesn’t make sense, and there’s nothing clicking in, no memory that might clear this up.

  “Let him go!”

  The voice travels across the green, sharp and resonant, authority in the tone. Booker?

  What is Booker doing here? He strides up, a little out of breath. And behind him—Mariana? She’s parked her car on the street and is running across the grass in her bare feet.

  “Let him go!” She echoes Booker’s words and I get a sick feeling.

  Burke has risen, backing off Neon who rolls over, spit in his eyes. And by the way Booker glares at me, I know I’m going to have some explaining to do. I’m still sitting on the grass, however, catching my breath.

  “This is Ramses Vega—Mariana’s son,” Booker says and extends a hand to the man. “You okay?”

  Ramses looks at me as if he’d like to have another go at me, and barring Booker, (and maybe Burke) he would.

  Let’s go, buddy, I say with my eyes as I climb to my feet. My shirt is torn, grass stains my suit pants. I don’t even try to brush them off. This is why I stopped wearing dress clothes to work.

  “I have my reasons, boss,” I say to Booker and he considers me for a moment even as Mariana runs up and throws her arms around Ramses. He embraces her, dark eyes glued on me.

  “What is your problem?” Mariana shrieks, and there go my chances of getting that garage addition.

  “He was at yesterday’s bombing,” I say quietly.

  Ramses presses his thumb to the corner of his mouth, and he’s sporting a doozy of a goose-egg under his eye. I’m sure I have my own war wounds, but you don’t see me whining.

  “And today’s.”

  Only now do I realize that Mariana has turned to him and is translating for him.

  No wonder he looked so confused.

  He responds in Portuguese, a deduction I make when it pings in my brain that Mariana is Brazilian.

  “He was there yesterday,” she says, her voice a little shaky. “He was going to class. He attends English class at the Calvary Baptist Building, at the immigrant school there. The coffee shop is a block away from the school.”

  My memory can’t confirm that, but it doesn’t matter because Booker is apologizing to Mariana, taking her hand, wearing apology on his face.

  Listen, don’t go that easy on her, I want to say, but Booker is a nicer guy than me.

  Ramses and his mother head back to the car as Booker rounds on me. “Another instinct?”

  “He was at both places,” I say. “C’mon, boss.”

  Booker’s looking at me again as if trying to see through me. “You can do better than this,” he says finally and turns, heading back to the scene.

  Burke however, lifts a shoulder, gives a half-grin. “He nearly took you.”

  I shake my head, not ready to let this go. Because it’s a little weird to me that that Mariana ran an entire election campaign, her face plastered on signs and leaflets around my neighborhood for the better part of a year and not once did I see—or hear mention of—her immigrant son.

  As if he simply didn’t exist.

  That question is a burr under my skin all the way back to the scene. The crowd is dispersing, the fire trucks packing up, the fire fighters walking through the now charred, smoking house.

  I spot Eve taping off the scene, and I want to go over to her, but maybe I don’t have time to smooth things over.

  Because—I feel it in my gut, along with the realization that I’m in way over my head—this is real.

  And I’m running out of time.

  Chapter 13

  This is not my reality. How can it be? That thought pulses with every heartbeat, slowly turning into a sledgehammer in my head.

  I need coffee, and suggested it on the drive to the precinct, but Burke looked at me as if I’d declared I wanted to stroll naked down Nicollet Mall.

  I’m currently drinking the sludge out of the green coffee pot on the side table. I’m effectively holding up the wall, my head leaned back, feeling like something that slept in an alley off Hennepin Avenue.

  Booker has procured another whiteboard. Five new faces, two female employees, one male employee, a mechanic from the local body shop, and a Vietnamese woman who ran the Vo’s takeout (I know her son—he runs the place now and it serves excellent Goi Cuon). The music minister at the Presbyterian church on the corner is fighting for his life at HCMC ICU.

  The victims were quickly identified by Mariana, a job I don’t envy.

  I’m still niggling on the fact that Ramses has so totally fallen off the grid, in my world.

  My world. That’s how I’m thinking, as if I’m a visitor here, the precinct not where I spent twenty meaningful years, Burke some cousin of the real Andrew, back in, well, my world.

  And Eve. Eve is the younger, easier-going version of the woman I am really starting to miss. Not that I don’t like this Eve, but I need the Eve who can knock me back into play, unravel the knots in my brain.

  I need answers, and not just about the second bombing, but…all the answers.

  It’s an action from Booker that gives me a lead. He is standing at the front of the room, listing the what-we-knows and results of yesterday’s bombing (pretty much what Eve suggested, a homemade bomb, although I know all that already) when I see him glance at the back. To the clock on the wall.

  It’s a quick, almost nonchalant, practiced glance and it occurs to me…why isn’t he looking at his watch?

  The watch I’m wearing, incidentally, which is still working, purring along as if it never had a glitch.

  “I gotta run an errand,” I say to Burke. Although Booker has assigned us lead investigators on yesterday’s bombing, he’s clearly helming today’s update. We’ll spend the morning interviewing employees and creating files on the deceased.

  Burke looks at me, frowns. “Another hunch?”

  Touchy. “No.” I say, but yeah, that conversation is looming. I have to give him some reason for my soon-to-commence search for the location of bombing number three, a fact that still eludes me.

  Not that I would remember well. Shortly after arriving at the third bombing scene, I got a call from dispatch and spent the rest of the day pacing the HCMC waiting area as my mother fought for her life.

  That memory I remember with brutal clarity.

  I guess a stroke is a natural reaction to hearing the long-dreaded news about your missing son, especially when one suffers from high blood pressure.

  But if I’d been there that morning as my father headed out to the barn with the sunrise, when the sheriff showed up with the news, maybe the blow would have been softer.

  Maybe even better if I had delivered it.

  I make a mental note to check in with Booker about the DNA results and head outside into the sunshine, the bright, blue-skied day a betrayal to th
is morning’s devastation.

  My Camaro is parked in the shade and I slide in, crank down the windows and hang my elbow out as I cruise toward Uptown. I turn on KQRS and find an oldie playing … well, maybe not that old anymore.

  Styx, “Come Sail Away.”

  I wish.

  I turn off Lake to Hennepin and park in front of the Uptown theater. I cut across the road, past the McDonald’s and down the alley to the American Vintage Watch Repair, looking for a younger version of my Asian friend.

  Same dim hallway, but at the end I find a small room advertising a coin-operated tanning bed. No sign of the workshop, the wooden bench, the giant magnifying glass, or the not-so-helpful watchmaker.

  I walk back into the sunlight, a crazy thought slivering into my brain.

  Stillwater.

  Please.

  Even the little ditty about Jack and Diane refuses to lighten my mood as I drive south. I pull into the parking lot near the river, two blocks from the house, in front of a used bookstore, someday to be a coffee shop, and head down to the Tudor. The white stucco is freshly painted and the chimney is not yet in disrepair. The door is a pale pine, not yet stained, and a cheery geranium sits in the pot by the door. The hosta hasn’t matured, the Japanese maple a shadow of its future self.

  I don’t know why, but I feel like a kid at Halloween, ready to shout trick or treat—and mostly trick—as I press the creepy doorbell.

  Is it crazy to think this old guy might remember me? He’s never seen me before, and it’s a much younger version who opens the door, frowning at me.

  The next twenty years will be hard on him. Not as bone thin, he looks well-fed, less brittle, and certainly a gentler version of himself despite the gray hair, cut military short.

  Life hasn’t yet beaten him. His blue eyes widen when I say, “I need your help.”

  I know. It’s a pretty desperate move, but what would you do if you were wrestling with the idea that this trip through time could be real?

  “That so,” he says.

  I hold out my hand. “Inspector Rembrandt Stone. I’m working a couple bombings in Minneapolis—”

  “I saw that on the news.” He shakes his head.

  “Who is it, Art?” A voice emerges from behind him and a woman appears. Her long brown hair is pulled back, glasses atop her head and she’s wearing a white halter top, a pair of jeans, and is barefoot. She pushes past her husband. “Sheila Fox. How can we help you, Detective?”

  So, she must have heard something. She has a firm handshake despite the delicate bones of her hand, and the look of a professor as she pulls me over the threshold.

  The home is immaculate, and bright. It possesses the wide crown moldings and arched doorways of a classic 1930s Tudor, narrow planked pine wood flooring, a comfortable family room with leather overstuffed chairs and heavy brocade draperies, a piano in the corner, and a neat, but cluttered knee wall bookcase. The kind of house in which I would not have had to look hard to find my muse. It smells of pipe smoke, maybe a pot roast in the kitchen.

  Art is not thrilled I’m standing in his entry way, but he closes the door behind me. “We don’t have anything to do with the bombings,” he says, “so I’m not sure how we can help you.”

  “Lemonade?” Sheila asks.

  I could use something stiffer, maybe, but I nod and she heads to the kitchen.

  “I suppose I have to invite you in now,” Art says.

  “I hear you can fix vintage pieces.”

  I point to my watch and study his expression. He glances at it and lets a tiny frown dip down over one eye, then nods and heads down the hall. “This way.”

  I follow him to a study, or perhaps a workshop because it contains a desk, a magnifying glass, and the familiar surgical instruments I remember from Vintage American.

  “What’s wrong with it?” he asks, and I unbuckle the watch from my wrist.

  “Um … well, actually, nothing right now.” I hand him the watch. “But it wasn’t working back in…well, actually, that’s why I’m here. See…I think I’m,” and here goes nothing, “from the future.”

  I say it without my voice shaking, incidentally, which I think deserves props.

  He just looks at me. A grandfather clock ticks somewhere in the room, or down the hall. Or in my head.

  “Let me see the watch.”

  I hand it over. He studies it, then turns it over. Runs his thumb over the words inscribed.

  “Be Stalwart.”

  “I inherited it.”

  “Mmmhmm.” He takes it over to his desk, sets it down. “From whom?”

  Oh. “My…well, my boss, Chief of Police, John Booker.”

  He nods again and the fact he hasn’t jumped on my words, I think I’m from the future has a crackle buzzing under my skin.

  He picks up what looks like the same stethoscope he used before, or in the future (see how confusing this is?) and presses it to the watch, listening, like it might have a heartbeat.

  Of course it does.

  “It didn’t work when I first got it and then…” I brought it to you. Yes, I nearly say that, but I yank the words back because then I’d really sound nuts.

  Besides, it has occurred to me, slowly, that something has happened to his wife over the past twenty-plus years, and I don’t want to be trapped into having to expound how we know each other. He might start asking questions.

  I might start having to lie.

  But I feel for him. If I lost Eve I’d end up stripped of life, gaunt, hollowed out. So I finish with, “…suddenly, yesterday, it started working.”

  “How?” He puts down the stethoscope.

  “I was…” I’m searching my brain to catalog the exact events. “In my study. And I was looking over my old cold cases—one of these being the bombing from yesterday, and today…” And tomorrow. I debate that and skip over it. “And suddenly the watch started working.”

  “You wound it, right?”

  I frown. Then. “Yes.”

  “Then, of course, it started working.”

  “What do you mean, of course it started working? It wasn’t working before. At all. Then…it just started ticking.”

  He lifts a shoulder. “That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s a timepiece. It ticks off time.” He hands the watch back to me. “It looks like it’s working exactly how it’s intended.”

  I stare at him. Because, well, you know, that’s what he said before. Or will say.

  Oh brother.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think you know what I mean,” he says and stands up.

  I have no idea what he’s talking about. “It’s…did you hear me? I think I…” I close my eyes, wincing even as I say it. “I think I traveled in time.”

  Silence, and I open my eyes. He stares at me, one eyebrow raised.

  I can’t stop myself, the words rushing out, a catharsis. “By twenty-four years. One minute it’s 2021 the next…” I shake my head. “The next I’m watching the past repeat itself. I’m watching people die, again. And today…well, I thought it was a dream at first, but…” I press my hand to my forehead because my head is pounding.

  He considers me, arms crossed over his chest long enough for me to think maybe I’m losing my mind. Behind him, the sun’s rays filter through the window, tiny particles dancing on the streams, and the room is turning woozy and hot.

  Maybe, really, maybe this is a dream, the variety that involves me being hospitalized. Maybe I was hit by a car and I’m in a coma—

  “Be Stalwart,” he says quietly.

  I look up at him.

  “It means be dependable.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Loyal.”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  “Faithful, devoted, unwavering—”

  “I know what i
t means!”

  “And?” His voice falls. “Are you?”

  I blink at him. Open my mouth. Close it. “I don’t know.”

  That’s when the room starts to pitch. Sideways, my head about to explode. I reach for the wall and find instead his hand on my arm, guiding me to a chair.

  I dip my head forward, cradling it in my hands.

  His hand falls on my shoulder. “Cold cases, you say?”

  So he was listening. I nod.

  “Unanswered questions, promises unkept.”

  I draw in a breath. Look up at him. “Is this real?”

  “Tell me. How did you find me?” Those blue eyes hold mine like a vice.

  “We met before.”

  He gives the slightest of nods. “We will meet, then.”

  I return the nod.

  “And what do I tell you?”

  “That…that the watch is working.”

  He smiles. “Indeed.”

  His hand squeezes my shoulder and a moment later, Sheila comes in with the lemonade. She hands it to me. “Fresh squeezed. Nothing artificial. But it’s a little tart, so be careful.” Then she grins and takes Art’s hand just like Eve has taken mine for the past million years.

  I really miss Eve.

  “Can I get back?” I whisper, taking a drink. It is tart, and my throat tightens, my eyes burning.

  “Yes.” He pauses and draws in a breath. “I think so.”

  A fist releases inside me.

  “Can I change things?”

  “How would I know?” he says quietly.

  “How long am I here?”

  He lifts a shoulder. “But I think you should hurry.”

  I finish the lemonade, and down the hallway, the grandfather clock chimes.

  He takes the glass from me and nods toward the door. “Be stalwart, Inspector Stone.”

  Chapter 14

  "I suppose you’re going to miss a lot more breakfasts.”

  Eve looked up from the magnifying glass and her examination of the fabric that matched the bomber’s backpack to spot her father as he came into her lab. Inspector Mulligan held his jacket by a thumb over his shoulder, his tie loosened, a haze of whiskers on his face.