by Rachel Ford
It was, indeed, Fluff, his golden eyes wide with fright.
The taxman was only a little less frightened himself. He had never had an issue with the device before. In all the time he’d used it, it only transported things that were in some way attached to him – clothes he was wearing, a backpack slung over his back, and so on. He’d been near Fluff, but hadn’t been touching him when he pressed the button.
Then, he frowned. The device transported people within the radius of operation. Maybe it moved more than people. Maybe it transported any organic being in the vicinity.
“Sugar cookies,” he said again, fighting the panic that swelled in his chest. He reminded himself to breathe.
This was an inauspicious start to his trip, sure. But it was just a minor setback. All he had to do was jump back to his own time with Fluff in tow, and try again – this time, far from the menacing feline.
Okay, I can fix this. He stooped for the cat, but, to his mortification, Fluff bolted. “Satan,” he hissed. “Get back here.”
The cat headed for the doorway. Fudge muffins. “Satan, get your fluffy buns back here. Now,” the taxman snarled. He was really starting to get annoyed – annoyed, and frightened again.
The idea that he’d inadvertently taken Nance’s cat back in time scared the daylights out of him. This was supposed to be a covert op. She was never supposed to know about this little jaunt through time. How would he explain what happened, if the devious feline got away?
And would she ever forgive him? It would be bad enough to lose the kitten at all, but by using the spacetime generator – the generator that they’d both specifically agreed they wouldn’t touch except in direst need?
“For the love of God, get back here, Satan.” Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was vaguely aware of how bad that sounded. He made a mental note to revisit the topic later, when he was in a better state to reevaluate his use of that nickname.
In the meantime, he scrambled for the cat. Then, a voice sounded, horrifyingly near the office. “C’mon. Let’s wait it out in my office. It’s too warm out there.”
“You sure he’ll be here?”
“Sure as shit.”
The voices were accompanied by the sounds of footfalls, muted against some kind of floor covering – but getting closer.
Alfred gulped, his eyes flying around the office, looking for a spot to hide. The desk was out – if these men were indeed coming to this office, the desk would likely be their first stop.
His gaze fell on the plant and chairs at the opposite end of the room, and, tripping over his own feet in his haste, the taxman dove behind them. He ignored the pain of his knee smashing into the pot, and hoped to high heaven no one else had heard his thumping into place.
Thoughts of the cat were long gone, now. All he could think of was getting home, before someone filled him full of lead.
“He’s supposed to be here already, isn’t he?”
“Nah. His car left five minutes ago. It’s twenty minutes from the station, easy.”
Alfred heard two distinct speakers, and two distinct sets of footfalls, enter the room. With trembling hands, he set the coordinates.
One of the men sneezed now.
“You okay, boss?” This was said by the coarser of the two voices, and Alfred glanced up for half a second to catch a glimpse of the speakers. A short, balding man stood with his back to him.
But a big man with a barrel chest and handsome, though portly, features sat behind the desk, his fingers steepled in front of him and a smug grin stretched across his face.
Alfred felt his heart skip a beat. He’d recognize that smirk anywhere. Fat Sal. He was bigger in person – not heavier, but taller and, if it was possible, more intimidating than in the photos. He spoke with a strong East Coast accent, the kind that seemed determined to rid the English language of r’s, and introduce h’s where they had no place being. On his lips, a car became a cah, warm became wahm, and so on.
“Of course I’m okay, Gi. What do you think you are, my mother?”
Alfred cringed at that rendition of the word. Muddah. It reminded him of those extended family reunions his mom used to drag him to as a kid, where he’d meet relatives he’d never seen before and who seemed to speak another language.
He shook the thought aside, and readied to press the button. Then, he froze. Satan returned unbidden to his thoughts. Not the kitten, exactly, but the way he’d gotten here. Alfred had transported him simply by using the device in the general proximity.
He considered the distance between himself and the mafia men, and a terrible thought occurred to him. What if using the device now brought Salvatore Tomassi and his henchman back with him?
Alfred’s palms slicked at the very idea. Fudge muffins. The gangsters would have no idea what was happening if they suddenly found themselves whisked away from the pizzeria and deposited in someone’s home. But he suspected they were shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later types of guys. He was pretty sure he’d wind up in a pine box long before he had a chance to explain what happened.
He was turning his predicament over in his mind when Sal sneezed again. This time, he drew in a heavy breath afterwards. “What in the hell?”
“Boss?”
“Don’t you feel that?”
“What?”
“Whatever’s in the air.” Sal was gesticulating emphatically. “You don’t feel that? My eyes are burning.”
Gi, the balding man, shook his head. “I don’t feel anything, boss. You want me to get you some hooch to clear your head?”
Salvatore brushed the idea aside. “Nah. I need to be sharp when that son-of-a-bitch copper gets here. Speaking of…you seen that patsy from The Globe yet?”
“Donnelly? He’s at the bar.”
“Good.” Sal nodded. “Good. Everything’s ready, then. This needs to be captured. For posterity.” He chuckled to himself, as if pleased with his own turn of phrase. Then he sneezed, more violently this time than before. His head snapped backward, and his entire chair rocked.
“You sure you don’t need a drink, Sal?”
“Dammit, Gi, I told you-” He broke off, sneezing again.
Alfred shivered, hoping that, whatever this lowlife had, it wasn’t an airborne contagion. The last thing he wanted to do was carry decades-old germs home with him.
Unlike the last time, though, the mafia prince didn’t recover himself in a moment. He remained hunched over, wheezing, for a good half a minute.
“Jesus, boss, you’re scaring me,” Gi said.
Then, before Sal had a chance to reply, a little blur of orange flashed in front of the mobsters. Alfred had to repress a yelp. He had to bite down on his tongue to keep from screaming, “Satan, no!”
Because it was, indeed, Fluff. The kitten must have wandered back from wherever he’d been hiding, and decided to practice his signature move: jumping up onto a surface where he wasn’t supposed to be.
Only this time, instead of irritating a humble enforcer of tax law, he’d chosen to cross paths with a bloodthirsty mobster. Oh God. He tried to imagine how he’d explain this to Nance, but the fact was, he was drawing blanks.
Hey, darling. So you remember your kitten? Yeah, well, the mafia killed him. There was no way that that didn’t beg more questions than it answered.
The taxman half made up his mind to rush out of hiding, grab Fluff, and pray he could run fast enough to press the button and escape the mob – when, all of a sudden, Salvatore Tomassi clutched at his throat.
Alfred blinked. Gi asked, alarm in his tones, “Boss? You okay?”
Fluff, meanwhile, meandered across the desktop, rubbing against the choking gangster as he passed.
Sal was gasping for breath, his face turning red and purple. He pushed Fluff away with a rough shove of his hand. The kitten twitched its tail, remaining on the desk.
Gi flailed in place for a minute. “Boss?” Then, he turned to the open doorway. Alfred got a good look at him now. He was a middle-aged man, with hard
features and flinty eyes. In the moment, those dark eyes seemed lit with more fear than concern. “Hey! I need help. Sal’s choking.”
As the balding man’s attention shifted, Fluff wandered back to the form crippled up over the desktop.
Alfred gulped. The kitten, he thought, was suicidal. Sal was not a guy to cross in the best of times, but when he was wheezing away like a Typhoid Mary, polluting the air with his germs and disease?
Again, he planned his intervention. He tried to count how many steps it would take to get from his hiding spot to the desk. And from there-
His thoughts broke off suddenly as a popping sounded nearby, and a flash of light filled the room. For half an instant, the taxman feared a gunshot. But it had been far too quiet for that.
Gi, though, cursed, “Get the hell out of here, Donnelly, before I shove that camera down your throat.”
It was now that a hullabaloo at the far end of the restaurant broke out. Heavy boots rang out on a wooden floor, and shouting voices filled the air.
Hurried steps headed down the hall outside Sal’s office, and an agitated young man called, “He’s here. Lorina’s here.”
Gi remained fixed in place, his eyes darting between the doorway and his still wheezing boss, until Sal waved him away, choking out, “Go.”
That was all the urging the other man needed. He was gone a moment later.
Alfred crouched in place listening for a long minute. He heard frenzied shouting and angry yelling aplenty, interspersed with the occasional breaking of bottles and exchanging of blows. Grunts and the soft noise of fists impacting with flesh, along with the grimmer sounds of bones snapping, sent a shiver up the taxman’s spine.
He decided it was well past time to get home, and this was as good a chance as any. Sal was too busy wheezing away to present a real threat. So, he gritted his teeth and sprang out of his hiding spot.
Salvatore didn’t even seem to see as he approached the desk. At this closer vantage, Alfred was struck by the curious shade of purple that the other man’s face had turned. He shivered anew, thinking of the contagions he was likely breathing in at that very moment. Whatever this man had, it was clearly an unpleasant and – frankly – disgusting illness.
Fluff, meanwhile, was still rubbing up against the choking gangster. “Come on, you dumb cat,” the taxman hissed.
No sooner than had he grabbed the squirming kitten did Sal lurch forward. Alfred yelped, ready to bolt.
But the mafia man was not lunging at him. On the contrary, he didn’t even notice him. He didn’t notice anything at all.
Salvatore Tomassi slipped out of his seat, and rolled onto his back, his eyes open wide and unseeing.
Alfred blinked, staring at the downed man. Fat Sal was dead.
Chapter Eleven
Alfred stood, rooted to the spot for several seconds. Not even the commotion in the pizzeria drew him from his stupor. Fat Sal’s not supposed to die. How the hummus did he die?
It was only Satan’s squirming, and the heavy application of the kitten’s back claws to his hands, that drew the taxman from his stupor. “Ouch. Stop that, you little son-of-a-biscuit.”
Satan did not stop, though. Indeed, the longer he was held, the more vociferously he protested, writhing this way and that and yowling piteously.
That decided Alfred. Whatever had just happened, it was time to cut his losses. He could always come back and straighten this mess out.
Alfred offered a silent prayer that the spacetime generator only worked with living bodies. He had no idea how he’d explain the presence of a dead mobster in his living room – either to the police or, more worryingly in the moment, to Nance. With trembling hands, he pressed the button to send them home.
His ears hummed and his eyes flooded with light. A kind of calm washed over him, driving the adrenaline back.
Then, a sharp, pricking sensation drew him from this serenity. He felt two points of pain and a trickle of blood running down his hand. Instinctively, he released the menacing feline.
“Ow. You bit me, Satan,” he gaped.
This was very true. The cat had left two puncture wounds in his hand, and now, entirely unrepentant, scampered away. Alfred scowled, but remembered that there were more pressing issues at hand.
Like seeing if he’d brought a dead man back with him.
A quick survey of the dining room and adjacent living room turned up no corpses. Just to be safe, though, Alfred sprinted through his house, checking each room as he went. Then, satisfied that they weren’t hiding Fat Sal, he checked the yard too.
Finally, he breathed easy. If the mobster had made the trip across time, he’d wound up somewhere else. If he’d left his office, well, at least now he was someone else’s problem, and not the taxman’s.
He collapsed into a seat, shaking. Sugar cookies. That had certainly not gone according to plan, but Alfred had no idea why or how.
Fat Sal was never supposed to die. Fat Sal lived a long, wicked life, and retired happy and free to Miami.
He knew that.
And yet, he’d seen the mobster on his back, staring with dead eyes at the ceiling overhead.
What the hummus? he wondered, rubbing his temples – with, he saw a still-bleeding hand. What changed? I didn’t do anything. No one saw me, except Sal – and that was seconds before he died. So how could the timeline have changed?
His mind was a whirl of thoughts and confused memories. He distinctly recalled reading about Sal’s retirement to Florida. He knew it, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And yet, at the same time, he remembered reading something else. Something about…an anaphylactic reaction.
His head hurt, and he groaned aloud. It felt like a migraine was setting in. Not just any migraine, though, but the mother of all migraines, pounding his poor brain into jelly with every attempt to use it.
His memories seemed to be competing in his mind. He had two distinct recollections, identical in every particular – except one. In the first, Alfred learned that Fat Sal lived for years after the raid. And in the other, Salvatore Tomassi died the night Ray Lorina was taken into custody. It didn’t make sense. They couldn’t both be true.
And yet, he knew they were, as true as he drew breath.
The taxman rose now, heading for his case file. If his memories couldn’t be relied on, the files, at least, could. The case file would tell him what actually happened. Then…well, then he’d figure out what was going on with his head.
He rifled through his stack of papers until he found the section on Fat Sal. And as he read from the autopsy, his jaw dropped.
“Deceased Salvatore Tomassi died of anaphylaxis at approximately seven-thirty on the evening of February 3rd, 1940. Presumably brought on by an encounter with a cat. Witnesses recall seeing a small orange or yellow cat in the deceased’s office, immediately prior to fatal episode. The cat could not be located afterwards.
“Conclusion: deceased suffered from an undiagnosed but deadly cat allergy. Presence of stray feline triggered fatal reaction.”
Alfred read and re-read the report, feeling almost nauseous with shock. “Satan…killed Fat Sal,” he concluded at last. He wasn’t sure if he was horrified, or proud of the little monster. “Satan…took down the Salvatore Tomassi.”
He’d fallen asleep at the table some hours later. He understood, now, the competing and seemingly contradictory memories. They were both real, and both accurate. His recollection of Sal’s retirement was what happened before he interfered with the timeline. The other memory, where Sal died, stemmed from his interference.
On the one hand, he was relieved. He wasn’t going crazy. He wasn’t imagining things.
On the other, he had messed up the timeline, however inadvertently. Nance was going to be furious. He’d done exactly what they swore they’d never do.
Still, after awhile of feeling guilty, rationalization began to kick in. As far as Alfred could tell, nothing else had changed. Sure, he’d trifled with the timestream. But the principl
e players all ended up where they’d started – except Salvatore, whose career of murders was cut short. The rest of his family continued to ply their bloody trade. Lorina was arrested that night, just as before.
He and Satan curtailed the career of a brutal and prolific killer, but otherwise left the timeline unsullied. And the more he thought about that, the better it sounded. “We make a pretty good team, actually, Satan,” he decided.
He frowned, hearing the words out loud and cringing. “I really need to stop calling you that, don’t I?”
Not long after, still obsessing over the files, he’d fallen asleep. He woke early in the morning with a start. His phone was ringing beside his head, and it sounded terribly loud. “Hummus,” he gasped.
Then, glancing at the name that popped up on his screen, he tried to brush the sleepiness away. “Nance?”
“Hey babe,” she greeted as her image appeared. Then, “Oh, did I wake you? It’s only, what? Five there? Crap.”
“It’s fine,” he assured her. Nancy Abbot was something of a night owl, and she’d woken him more than once in the wee hours of the morning. Five, comparatively speaking, was child’s play. “What’s up?”
“Just saying good morning.”
“Oh.” He nodded. She’d promised to call before their day started, hadn’t she? “How was your party?”
She laughed. “Well? Interesting, I guess. There were a lot of people I recognized. You know, from the MDC movies. And they were nice. But I felt a little bit…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Out of place.”
“It sounds awful,” he nodded sagely.
“It wasn’t. It was fun. Maggie had a hoot. She danced with Dave Yankovic. Which, by the way…” She was grinning. “I have not stopped hearing about since.”
Alfred rolled his eyes. “If you’re trying to make me feel sorry for you, Nancy…well, it’s working.”
She laughed. “And what about you?” She surveyed him for a moment with a piercing gaze. “Tell me you went to bed last night, Alfred.”
“Of course I slept,” he prevaricated.
“You’re wearing the same outfit you had on when we talked last…”
