Instead of risking travel by skyporter, I made the trip on foot, and was surprised to find that the woods behind my apartment building stretched the entire two miles to the rendezvous point. I enjoyed a walk through woods that I had always known as sprawling parking lots surrounding a huge factory. Good riddance to whatever they were selling.

Then I remembered what they made there in the previous version of history — impact absorption shield emitters. I don’t know if Danetta’s note was the lone reason that only trees and untamed undergrowth greeted me, and I didn’t care. I was enjoying a walk through the forest, with fresh air to breathe and leaves crunching underfoot.

A nagging thought, previously lingering almost inextricably in my mind’s dark recesses, came to the surface. What if we change something that messes things up worse? I tucked it back down, thinking it only fair to hear out Danetta’s plan before giving my opinion.

When I reached the spot, she wasn’t there. I checked the coordinates on my display. Chura had shown me the place on her display, and I had called Danetta to set a time. I was precisely where and when she asked me to be.

I still wasn’t sure I could be who she wanted me to be.

Since school, I always was somewhat of a loner, my loyalty all used up on myself, and I sneaked in a few illegal and unethical activities. Incarceration, however, was not something I thought I could face. With modern monitoring techniques, only the worst offenders were sentenced to prison. Most era contamination violations, although rarely committed by violent people, landed the guilty in a maximum security facility. The company one kept inside those walls was not exactly the Tupperware crowd.

An acorn bounced off my head. “Ouch!” I looked up and was temporarily blinded by the sun.

“Hey, there, bird man.”

With only a round silhouette to go on, I had a hard time making out the face. I held my hand up to my forehead — blotting out the entire sun with just my clustered fingers. My eyes adjusted enough to tell it was Danetta, sitting on the fork of two oak branches about 15 feet off the ground. With her hands on either side of her, she sat swinging her legs. As playful as she seemed, had I not seen her face I would have have thought she was Chura.

“You seem awfully cheerful for a fugitive,” I said.

“Hey, look who’s talking, Mr. Cop Magnet.”

“They were only there because they were looking for you.”

“Come on up.”

I had hiked many trails on various jumps back in time, even rappelled down a few cliff walls, but I hadn’t climbed a tree in years. The last time I had, I often spent hours in the woods behind Grandpa’s place trying to see what it was like to be that high, like a falcon, without a skyporter. Occasionally, if I sat still long enough, one of the mighty birds of prey lit on a branch in a nearby tree at the forest’s edge. My heart thumped when one of them caught site of its prey in the open field, and then made a daring dash for the kill.

I approached the massive trunk and jumped up to grab a branch directly above my head. My feet found purchase on another branch, and it all came rushing back. Almost as simply as climbing a ladder, I put together a series of twists, pulls, and pushes that got me level with Danetta’s perch. Deciding not to push my luck, however, I sat next to the trunk, one arm securely around it, the other hand gripping the branch.

“Falcon? I think we’ll have to start calling you ‘Monkey,’” she said.

“Thanks.”

She had died her hair red. It looked bad on her. I supposed more than one brown-skinned blond in a crowd of three would have attracted unwanted attention.

“So, where are your sister and your niece?” I asked.

“Chethra doesn’t like heights. She’s over near a brier thicket having some berries, and Chura’s with her.”

“You risked going into a grocery?”

“There are wild berries out here.”

“Wow.” I had never seen them in our time. “All your gloating aside, you’ve stirred things up. A lot of people died because of what you did.”

“I know.” Her voice turned somber so quickly, I knew she had been putting on an act. “I guess Chura told you about the plan.”

“Sure. Something about taking four chambers back with us so we can have a whopping 24 hours to do some major patchwork.”

“That sums it up. Speaking of which, we’re going to need large sums of money.”

“I can’t just go pulling out all my money. I’m sure TCE is looking for that kind of thing. Don’t forget, you’re the only one here who’s incognito.”

“That’s not what I meant. We need lots of 20th-century cash. I’ve heard that collectors place a high value on it, and that some folks in our fair city have large stacks.”

“What are you going to do with cash in the past?” I asked

“Buy houses. I don’t know how many there will be along the Buffalo’s banks, but for the most part it was undeveloped even before it got protected status. If we can snatch up the houses and the land, then we can keep people from dying.”

“I guess you’re talking about Beers’ family.”

“Right. If they live, he’s born, and his inventive mind lives on to save countless others. Heady stuff, huh?” Her mood was lifting. She obviously believed it would work.

“Yeah, heady. Listen, I’ve thought about it, and I’m not sure how much longer they’ll let me keep my place running. The longer they can’t find you, the more likely Glock is to put more pressure on me. They shut me down, and your little scheme just got a lot tougher.”

“Then we better get moving. Now, I’ve scoped out a few people rumored to collect eras-gone cash.”

“Forget it.”

“What?”

“I mean, I don’t need your list. One of my shadier customers was a collector, and used one of his jumps to get a lot of it.”

“But you can’t bring back anything you didn’t take.”

“Nope, but you can steal it and hide it in a safe place. He found a place that had never been developed through all those years, and hid it there. Within a few hours of our return, he was the single largest owner of 20th-century bills.” It was one of the many crimes that completely baffled eras-gone investigators.

“Ingenious.” She tilted her head. “Wrong, but ingenious.”

“I think most serious collectors do the same thing.”

I heard leaves crunching below us. I looked down to see Chethra and Chura, their jaws working as they chewed. Chethra held berries out to Chura in one hand as she gestured to us with the other. “So, Falcon, how do you plan to get this cash from him?”

“He owes me one for all the illegal jumps I took to help him scope out his big job. He scored way too much to show it all to even his closest friends and enemies.”

“It’s set, then,” Danetta said. “You go rob the robber while we prepare ourselves.”

——-

“Well, Billy-boy Plotz, you old sumbitch. How are you?”

His name was Theodore Cranston, but his friends called him “Theo.” Either way, I thought it was a hell of a name for an old-west wannabe, but what did I know?

“Fine, Theo, just fine.”

“It’s a real bumfuzzler, havin’ ya drop in on me like this. What’s the bur under yer saddle?”

“I’m not going to sugarcoat this, Theo.”

“Well, ya ain’t gotta piss in my Cheerios, neither.”

“I’ll try to go easy. It’s about money. I need a lot of it.”

“Need a little loan, do ya? Hang on, lemme check somethin’.” He looked in a nearby mirror, its frame encrusted with empty shells from gunpowder-based ammunition. “Well, gawd dayum, it looks like I’m still Theo Cranston, the richest shitkicker you’ll ever meet. What in blazes is that?” Baring his teeth, he moved his face closer to the mirror as he reached down to pull out a pocketknife. I wondered whether anything in his house wasn’t contraband. He flipped out a pointed implement and used it to pick something from between two front teeth. Is this guy for real? I figured anybody laying it on that thick must use it as an escape. If you don’t like your life, then just act like you’re somebody else.

I wish I could do that right now.

“No, not exactly a loan. I need some of your 20th-century cash to take back with me.”

“Come back?” He continued digging at the pesky bit of food.

I found myself speaking more like him. “A client needs it to fix something in the past that she busted up real good.”

As he folded the knife up, he dropped it. The fake woodgrain housing smacked loudly against the laminate floor. I leaned down to retrieve it.

“Well, fuck me runnin’, Billy-boy! That’s a big gun ya got there. You expectin’ trouble?” His voice, while still putting on the cowboy act, took on a barely perceptible nervous tone.

My Ruger had peeked out from under my shirt when I bent over. Careless dumbass! I scolded myself.

“Don’t worry, Theo, I’m not going to shoot anybody.”

(continue to Part Nine)