Free Time Slip by ML Banner Page A

life.”
    He hit the brakes, slid to a stop, and looked up at the massive gate. He wasn’t sure what to do next, so he yelled out, “Hello?”
    After waiting a little longer, he yelled out again, “Hello, is anyone there? This is Doctor Ronald Stoneridge. I have traveled eight hundred miles to see my wife Betsy. Is she there? Hello?”
    After a moment, the gates opened. They swung in and stopped, leaving just enough room for a single person. And then he saw her standing there, her arms outstretched toward him. It would be his happiest day as well.

Epilogue
     
     
    Rodney Deerwester turned the bubble mailer around in his hands, inspecting it with the greatest curiosity. He stared at his name and address printed from some stamp program. There was no name on the return, only an address in Dallas, Texas. He only knew one person from Dallas, and that was his old friend Monty, who was horrible at keeping touch and whom he hadn’t corresponded with in years.
    “Sign here,” demanded “Mr. Smiley,” the name the kids called him because he never smiled.
    Rodney scrawled his name on the electronic pad, his writing almost unintelligible. “Thanks, Bob,” he said to the mopey postal worker and left, already zipping open the top of the mailer. Rodney stopped at the garbage by the exit, discarding the stringy piece and intending to dump the envelope too. He turned it over and gave it a flick to dislodge its contents. A stainless steel stick skidded out into his awaiting palm, but nothing else. He looked inside, thinking a note should be there, but there was nothing. Tossing the envelope in the trash, he pushed the flash-drive around his palm, as if he expected it to come alive and tell him its purpose. The mystery would have to wait. He had to get to the Y, then he had to give his class, and then maybe he could load the contents into his computer and find out the answer to this mystery.
    He shoved the stick into the pocket of his warmups and walked down Massachusetts Avenue to the YMCA.
    ~~~
    The man blew out a long cloud of smoke, dropped the cigarette on the ground, and drove his heel into it, extinguishing it completely. A woman walking toward him looked up, her face dark with scorn, her lips preparing to launch a tirade of words about his littering and smoking in public. Then she saw his face, and her scorn transformed into surprise and then terror. She wanted to look away, sure she was seeing evil in person, but her gaze was stuck on the man’s features: the long vertical scar on his cheek, the scabbed-over areas of his head, the hair mostly absent on one side, the thin lips that curled into a smile and those eyes, dark as a nightmare.
    The man glanced past her, ignoring her altogether, as his gaze followed his target; he was headed to the Y to do his workout. Finally, he had gone to his box and picked up the package. The man had watched his target dump a stick drive in his palm and discard the envelope, before shoving the drive into his pants pocket. It was the stick he was after… Simple. Then that would be the end of this whole Stoneridge-Merriweather affair.
     
     
    Read what happens next in The Stick (Coming 2015).

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