Free Summer of Love, a Time Travel by Lisa Mason

cheek.
    She
screams.
    The
face disappears.
    *  
*   *
    Ruby
peers through the front-door peephole of the Mystic Eye. The red-haired dude is
still sitting on her stoop, his back propped against the wall, his long legs
stretched out before him. Arms folded over his chest, he nods gently, eyes
closed, chin drooping in the collar of his jacket.
    She
cracks open the door with the chain lock still locked.
    “Hey,
you,” she whispers. “Wake up. Can you hear me, huh?”
    He
yawns, blinks. His eyes flutter open, shiny from the street lights. Human eyes,
not black holes.
    “You
tell me why you stayed and watched Leo Gorgon and you tell me right now. What
do you know about him?”
    “I
told you,” he says, sitting up and stretching. “I calculated the probabilities.
I. . . .” Big yawn, another stretch. “I calculated.”
    “Calculate
your ass over here.” She slaps the door in frustration. “And don’t give me that
probabilities shuck. No one outside of the Haight-Ashbury knows about Leo
Gorgon. I’ve never seen you before, sonny. So tell me something good. Convince
me.”
    He
stands, loosening his legs. “Convince you of what?”
    “That
you’re not the Man, setting me up for a bust ‘cause you don’t like my face.”
She grinds her teeth. “Damn it, sonny, I need somebody. To help me now.”
    He
comes over at once and huddles by the door. “I’m not a narc, I swear. Your
sign”—he points up at her blue neon Eye of Horus, which she leaves on all night
for good luck—“is a sign.”
    “My
sign is a sign. I’m glad we cleared that up.”
    “Yes!
If my calculation is correct, you’re another point of reference. I searched my
Archives after you kicked me out. I’ve got a record of a woman, probably a shop
owner. A quadroon, dark curly hair, light skin.”
    “There’s
a record? ” Ruby’s adrenaline shoots through the ceiling. “Of me? ”
    He
presses his thumb to his lip. “Don’t worry about it.”
    “Sonny,
I’m not worrying. I’m panicking.”
    “Forget
I said it. Believe me, you’re not in any trouble. Please tell me how I can help
you. Is something wrong?”
    A
record of you, a record of you keeps echoing in her ear.
Damn if she knows why, but she decides to trust him. His vibe is still all
right.
    “Someone’s
messing around in my backyard. There’s something weird about it. I don’t want
to call the cops.”
    He bends
and deftly picks up a large square of something that looks like plastic
sandwich wrap lying on the stoop. He’s been sleeping on sandwich wrap? He
shakes it like a stage magician and the plastic wrap vanishes in his hand.
    “I’ll
go look.”
    “Don’t
get your head blown off, you hear?”
    “How
do I get back there?”
    “There’s
an alley right there, next to the building. The garage is out back. The yard is
next to it, but it’s all fenced in and the gate is locked.”
    “I’ll
manage.”
    He
strides down the alley before she can tell him to stop. She slams the door
shut, hits the deadbolts home, races upstairs to the kitchen, and steps out on
the deck.
    She
watches him down below, pushing the gate open. Beautiful. He picked the lock.
She’s not sure which makes her happier: that he’s a narc or a lockpick. He
takes something from his jacket pocket and proceeds to creep along her fence,
north to south, and back again.
    Nothing.
The intruder is gone.
    “You
see anything?” he calls up to her.
    “No.
He—she—it; it’s gone.”
    He
stands at the foot of the stairway leading up from the yard to the deck. If
she’d fallen, she could have broken her neck. He gazes up at her, his face as
pale as a peeled potato.
    “Lock
the gate,” she says, “and come on up.”
    She
steps inside and sits warily at her kitchen table.
    In a
moment, he clatters up the stairs, steps inside, and shuts and locks the door
behind him. Polite. A respectful young man, how often do you see that these
days? He takes out an astringent-smelling tissue and swabs his fingers,