In Times Like These (47 page)

“We were also hoping we could use Bob’s gravitizer, if it’s not too much trouble,” I say.

“Oh, yes. I think that would be all right,” Connie replies.

“Why don’t we take care of that real quick while you’re baking.” I nudge Blake with my elbow and gesture with my head toward the upstairs.

“Okay, I’ll see if I can find you all something to snack on.” Connie opens a pantry door and begins pulling things out.

“Okay, we’ll be back down shortly.” I lead the way upstairs to the office. It looks essentially the same as we left it in 2009. Cardboard tubes of maps still lean against the desk.

“Which map did Cowboy Bob give you?” Blake asks.

Francesca looks into the tube in her hand and pulls out the drawing inside. She lays it on the floor. The drawing looks like a spiderweb with the major lines labeled with letters. “It’s all the primes,” Francesca says. She points to the N branch. “There’s ours.”

A map to get us home.
But not yet.

“We’re going to need to de-gravitize this.” I toss t
he Rubik’s Cube to Francesca, then begin rummaging through the cupboards and desk drawers.

“What
are you looking for?” Blake asks.

“She said there’s a gun up here somewhere.”

“You’re going to get it, even though she said not to?” Francesca asks.

“Good idea.” Blake begins to help me search
. “I’d rather face the anger of an elderly woman than go up against a serial killer unarmed.”

Francesca frowns but sets to de-
gravitizing the Rubik’s Cube. I’m closing a drawer full of paperclips and staples when Blake finds it.

“Whoa. This should work.” He turns from the cabinet and displays a wooden box with two revolvers in it.

“Oh wow. Those are cool.” I admire the polished wood handles and shining stainless steel. “Are there bullets for them?”

“Yeah.” Blake r
eaches back into the cabinet, pulls out a small box labeled “Barnes,” and gives it a light shake. It sounds full.

“Do you think they have gravitites in them?” Francesca asks.

“I guess we should check.” Blake lays the gun box and the box of ammo down on the floor in front of Francesca. She aims the end of her degravitizer at it and pushes the test button. The light turns green. “Nope.”

“I guess we’ll have to throw them in Bob’s machine,” I say. “Is there anything else we need to take with us?”

“What do we have to work with in that pack right now?” Blake asks. I grab our pack and dump it out on the floor. Our winter clothes tumble out, followed by my tortoise shell, a few other miscellaneous anchors we have left, and multiple envelopes of photos, along with our logbooks.

“
Do we need to take all this stuff?” I ask.

“I’m way behind on
logging our jumps.” Blake picks up his logbook.

“Mine is gone,
” Francesca says.

“We should probably
plan out this next one. I can add your entries into mine.” I pick up my logbook and flip to one of the empty pages. “Bob said the Rubik’s Cube is in one of the jump rooms the day the lab burns. That was January 9th, right? We need to figure out what time we want to show up.”

“What time did you get Stenger’s gu
n away from him?” Francesca asks. “I don’t want to show up till then.”

I think about my trip into the lab with Carson. “
I remember we were stuffing things into the packs around six o’clock. We ran into Stenger right after that. I’m guessing it wasn’t much later, 6:05 maybe?”

“When did the lab start burning?” Blake asks.

“I saw the smoke before I jumped back, I think that was probably around six-thirty or so, maybe a little after. I don’t remember exactly.”

“Did you write it
in your logbook?” Francesca points to the book in my hand.

I flip through the pages. “Um. I think I forgot.”

Blake stares at his logbook. “I’m starting to understand why these things are important.”

“Okay, so we’re trying to get to Stenger between the time he loses his gun at 6:05 and when he lights the place on fire a half hour later? Is this really our best option?” Francesca asks. “It sounds unnecessarily dangerous.”

“We could try to find him later, but I don’t know where he’ll be, and he could end up with another gun for all we know,” I say. “This is the only time we know of, where we know where he is, and we know he doesn’t have a gun.”

“I want one of our guns at least,” Francesca says.

“You know how to use it?” Blake hands her one of the revolvers.

“I think I’ve seen enough Clint Eastwood movies to figure it out,” Francesca replies. “Plus my brother took me to a gun range once. I’ve killed my share of paper targets.”

“So we get to the lab jump room, find our way near the hallway where Stenger is when he loses his gun, shoot him and get out of there, yeah?” My stomach churns a little at the idea of being in the hallway with that psycho again.
It has to be done. Carson needs us.

I toss our other anchors back into the pack and leave out the socks and my extra shirt. I pick up my tortoise shell and extract the photo from inside it.
When all hope is lost
. I put the photo back inside and toss the shell into the pack. “You want your coat?” I ask Francesca.

“Yes. It’s January there.”

I hand it to her. I cinch up the pack and start dialing my chronometer for January of 1986. “What’s the Zulu conversion for winter? Five hours?”

“Yeah. No daylight saving
s.” Blake starts dialing his as well.

“Wait, we’re going right now?” Francesca asks. “What about Connie? She’s downstairs making food for us.”

“I think the snacks can wait.”

“That’s kind of rude
,” Francesca says.

“We’re going to the past,” I say. “She won’t notice. We can always stop for cookies or whatever on the way back. I really want to get this over with before I have to think about it any longer.”

Francesca frowns again. Blake is stoic. “Fine,” she says. “But I need to pee first.” She sets the revolver on the desk and disappears into the hall.

“That’s probably a good idea,” I say.

“So what did we decide on? Six?” Blake asks.

“I think we should get there a little earlier t
o give ourselves time. We’ll just have to be careful to not run into me or Carson before they get the gun away from Stenger. The lab is a big place. We should be able to hide out and get ourselves some prep time. Let’s go with 5:25. That should be plenty of time.”

Blake nods and finishes his chronometer settings. I do the same.
Blake stuffs the box of ammo and the revolver in the gravitizer, then grabs Francesca’s gun and puts that in as well. I move to the control panel.

The blue vial on the side is still full of gravitites. There is a button labeled
“gravitize” and one labeled “de-gravitize”. The gravitize button is already illuminated.
Simple enough
. I flip the lever, and it’s only a matter of seconds till the chime dings. Blake opens the door and pulls out the guns. He hands one to Francesca as she walks back in. I put the box of ammo in a side pocket of my pack.

“Where
’s the bathroom up here?”

Francesca points. “First one on the left.”

As the water from the sink flows over my fingers, I look my reflection in the eyes. They look the same as they always do. Maybe a little more tired.
You’re going to have to kill somebody. Are those the eyes of a killer?
I shake off the thought.
You’re going to save someone. Killing Stenger is just the only way to make sure he won’t hurt anybody else. The families of all those people he’s hurt over the years would probably thank me
. The face in the mirror doesn’t look convinced.

My heart has begun to pound as I rejoin my friends in the office. Francesca and Blake both have the unloaded guns tucked into the fronts of their pants. I join them in the middle of the room
and pick up the Rubik’s Cube, holding it a little lower than the height of the lab anchor stands. Blake touches his chronometer hand to it as well. Francesca hesitates a moment, then turns and darts out to the railing of the stairs in the hallway. She leans over and yells down, “Miss Connie? We’ll be right back!” She doesn’t wait for a response, but promptly rejoins us and puts her hands to ours.

“Feel better?” I say.
She gives me a nod. I count off. “One, two, three.”

The fluorescent lights of the lab jump room seem harsh and uninviting after the warm afternoon sun of Montana.
Jump lessons feel like forever ago.
We move away from the anchor stand and I stuff the Rubik’s Cube into my pack.

Francesca pulls her revolver from her waistband. “Bullets
, please.” I slide the ammo box out of the side pocket of the pack as Blake unhinges his revolver. I open the box and hold out six bullets. “How did you get it open?” Francesca asks.

Blake hands his revolver to her and takes hers. I hand the bullets to her instead.

“It’s this thing on the side.
” Blake shows it to Francesca.

“I thought you said you didn’t know much about guns,” she replies.

“I can get them open. That’s about the limit of my knowledge.”

I fish out six bullets for Blake.

“Um. Why aren’t these fitting?” Francesca asks.

I watch her trying to slide the bullets into the various holes in the gun. “Let me see.”
She hands me the gun.

“She’s right,” Blake says. “They don’t fit.”

I try to slide one of the bullets into Francesca’s gun and the brass casing is just slightly too large for the holes. “Shit.” I look at the flap on the box. “Are these the wrong kind of bullets?”

Blake takes the box from my hands. “It says 0.45 caliber. What are these guns?”

“I don’t know.” I turn Francesca’s gun over in my hands and read the engraving on the barrel. “Shit. It says 0.38.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Francesca says. “Seriously? They won’t work?”

“Oh God. I’m so sorry,” Blake says. “I just grabbed what was next to the gun box.”

“Does that one say the same thing?
” I point to Blakes gun.

He nods. “Thirty-eight.”

“Why would Bob have the wrong bullets in there?” Francesca asks.

“He must own a forty-five somewhere too,” Blake mumbles. “I never bothered to look for more guns. I thought those were the only ones.”

“Oh God. We’re in a building with a serial killer and we have no weapons at all now? We’ve got to get out of here,” Francesca says. She moves to the blue door and swings it open.

“No! Francesca, I’m out there!” I say. She’s midway out the door when she freezes.

“Son of a bitch!” She jumps back into the room. The doorknob slips out of her grip and the door slams shut behind her. She cringes at the noise.

“What?” Blake says.

“I just saw you,” Francesca says. She looks to me. “You were looking the other way, but I just saw your back.”

“I had to have heard that.” I shove the box of shells back into the pack. “Come on!” I move toward the green door and crack it open. We hurry out the door and across the hallway into a classroom. I gently close it behind me till there’s just a sliver of space to look through. A moment later I see a door
open farther down the hall. The man emerging from the room isn’t me however. I touch the door closed gently.

“What is it?” Francesca whispers.

“It’s the young Quickly.”

“Is he going to come in here?”

“No. We’re okay. He talks to me in the hall for a few minutes and then goes into a jump room.”

“What do we do now?” Blake whispers.

“I think we just need to wait it out. I end up going into Quickly’s office in a few minutes and finding the money. We should be able to sneak out of here and make our way toward the hallway where we run into Stenger.”

“How do we get rid of him now? Our guns won’t work,” Francesca says. “Are we just going to throw bullets at him and hope he gives up?”

“Well, we do have the guns. He doesn’t know that there aren’t any bullets in them,” I say. “Maybe we can still get him to surrender.”

“Surrender?” Francesca glares at me. “That’s a terrible plan. We were supposed to shoot him, not keep him as a pet.”

“If we capture him, we can give him to the police. At least he’ll be locked up, and maybe we can get rid of him later.”

Francesca is breathing heavier. “I’m not facing a serial killer with an empty gun. I can’t even lie at
Balderdash
. This isn’t going to work. We should just get out of here and come up with a better plan.”

“What if he gets away?” I ask. “Robbie said the cops never catch him. Well
 . . . they catch the wrong one, but they never find the Stenger we’re after. How much of our time are we going to have to waste tracking him down later, when we know where he is right now?”