Written in Time (22 page)

Jack stood up, then offered his hand to Ellen, helping her to her feet. Her shoes were caught in the cheaply made hem of her dress, and she shook it free as she stood. “What can we do for you, sir?” Ellen asked, always suspicious of authority, especially since it was appearing in the immediate aftermath of a double killing. There had been no law enforcement of any kind so far. Was the mayor also the marshal?
 

“I wanted to talk with your husband, ma’am.”
 

“You can talk with us both,” Jack said flatly.
 

“Lizzie—stay with your brother. Keep him on that couch resting a while,” Ellen ordered.
 

“Would you folks step out on the porch with me?”
 

Jack picked up his hat in his left hand and took Ellen’s elbow with his right. The attaché case was under his left arm, and David’s revolver was tucked into the front of his gun belt. “Sure. Crowded out there, isn’t it?” Jack observed.
 

“Citizen’s Committee—”
 

“If it’s about—”
 

“Is and it isn’t, sir. Don’t fret. You neither, ma’am. Nobody’s angry ‘cause some of Jess Fowler’s trash is dead. We just wanna talk is all.”
 

The mayor held the door for them. Jack paused to assess the porch, then ushered Ellen through the doorway a step ahead of him. As men saw her, they removed their hats entirely or at least tipped them. Someone pulled up the porch’s solitary rocking chair and offered it for her to sit down. Gathering her skirts about her, she took the offered seat, waiting, almost holding her breath.
 

“With you folks new to Atlas and all,” Mayor Berger began, “it’s like as not you don’t know what’s just happened.”
 

“I killed two scumbags who assaulted my family and were about to . . .” Jack let the obvious hang as Mayor Berger and some of the other men—some in business suits, some in work clothes—cleared their throats and shuffled their hats nervously in their hands.
 

Jack rested the attaché case across Ellen’s lap. Her eyes settled on Jack’s face, trying to read it. As the mayor began to speak, Ellen’s heart began to sink. In her mind’s eye, she saw Jack looking not like Jack at all but like Errol Flynn. And she was Olivia deHavilland, overhearing the good citizens of Dodge City asking Errol Flynn to take on the job of town marshal.
 

“Jess Fowler won’t try anything in the open, Mr. Naile,” Mayor Berger was telling them. “But his range detectives won’t rest until they’ve done settled the score with your family, sir.”
 

Ellen Naile had a sudden picture of Jess Fowler as a young Bruce Cabot, with Victor Jory cast in the role of Fowler’s chief evil minion.
 

“But,” Mayor Berger continued, “Jess Fowler would be less likely to loose his dogs of war against the family of the city marshal. If you’d take the job even for jes’ a little while, that’d give us the time to find ourselves a career peace officer. You saw tonight firsthand what having no law in town can bring about.”
 

“Mayor Berger,” Ellen interjected, looking up from the rocking chair. “My husband isn’t a lawman. He’s a writer by trade. He was just defending his family.”
 

“I never killed anyone before tonight and I hope to God that I never have to again.” That Jack made this statement amidst a crowd of well over a dozen armed men was a credit to his honesty and his nerve, Ellen reflected, proud of her husband for his courage.
 

A voice from the back of the crowd—she recognized the gun salesman—chimed in. Lizzie had said she thought he was handsome. “I don’t live here, it’s true. But you folks might be interested in knowing that the famous Wyatt Earp of Tombstone had killed a man only once before that big gunfight they had down that way. When I was just gettin’ started as a gun salesman and I was workin’ over Colorado way, I sold Doc Holliday a nice little nickel-plated Colt with birdshead grips. I bought him a drink or two, and we talked for a while. I’ll never forget it. But Doc Holliday’s the one what told me that, and there was no reason that he would’ve lied over it.”
 

“Look, guys,” Jack said in earnest. “I’m not Wyatt Earp, and I’m not Doc Holliday.”
 

“All I know, Mr. Naile,” Mayor Berger persisted, “is that you happen to be the first and only person to stand up to Jess Fowler’s gunmen and not come away with a beatin’ at best or jus’ plain shot dead.”
 

“You never had a peace officer here?” Ellen asked.
 

“Had one up until two months ago,” Mayor Berger admitted, his manner quite suddenly subdued.
 

“Dead?” Jack inquired.
 

“No. Fowler’s men ran him off. Them two from tonight and four others. Forced Marshal Bilsom to unbuckle his gun belt if’n he wanted to live. Then they figured they’d up an’ see how far they could go. Made him take off his clothes, right there in the middle of the street in front of the general store. By that time, Bilsom had lost any nerve he had. They tied him on a horse stark naked—beggin’ your pardon, Mrs. Naile. Don’t know what possessed me to speak that way in front of a woman.”
 

“It’s all right, Mayor Berger,” Ellen reassured him.
 

“Anyways, a bunch of us lit out after Bilsom, brought him clothes and a gun and seventy dollars and tol’ ‘im adios.”
 

“And none of you made to help the marshal when he was up against six gunmen, professionals?” Jack queried, a poorly disguised tone of disgust edging his voice.
 

“Weren’t that way,” another of the men on the porch said.
 

“Still. No excuse,” Mayor Burger declared passionately.
 

“I still don’t understand,” Ellen said calmly. “Would you please just explain what happened so that I can understand, Mr. Mayor?” Men liked to feel intellectually superior to women, and sometimes the best way to get a man to divulge something he was reluctant to say was to feign ignorance, interest or both.
 

“When Bilsom came to town, he made himself off like a professional, a good hand with a gun. Said he’d deputied for Bat Masterson’s brother over in Colorado. And he was the best trick shot I ever seen! Could blow out the pips on a playin’ card at twenty feet fast from the holster. We all seen him do it. Bluffed his way along for two years, never drawin’ that gun o’ his ‘gainst nobody, but always doin’ trick shots, like they say Wild Bill used to do back in the old days in Deadwood.”
 

“He was no Wild Bill,” one of the men on the porch suggested.
 

“He was yeller,” Mayor Berger confessed. “Pure and simple. When he first took on the job, he insisted that the first time anyone interfered with him as he enforced the law, he’d quit. No matter what, didn’t want nobody t’ help him. By the time we realized he was a charlatan, a liar, a coward, if’n any of us had gone to help, Fowler’s men would’ve killed ‘im. We’d a been jes’ as hoosiered up, and Bilsom woulda been dead in the street. We been advertisin’ for fillin’ the marshal’s position since Bilsom left town.”
 

Ellen felt a chill along her spine. Jack had always been a sucker for hard-luck stories, and this was the hardest. A whole town at the mercy of killers because their only lawman had been a jerk. “What about the county sheriff?” Ellen insisted.
 

“In Fowler’s pay. Won’t do nothin’ without Fowler tells him to.”
 

Ellen looked at Jack, again imagining herself as Olivia de Havilland and Jack as Errol Flynn. But there wouldn’t be any Guinn “Big Boy” Williams or Alan Hale, Sr., to stand and fight at his side. She almost told Jack out loud, “There’s no little boy who’s going to die on the way to the Sunday school picnic. You don’t have to do this.” But Ellen merely said, “Do what you think is best, Jack.”
 

“Only until you get a regular peace officer, and only if I’m assured of the fact that all or any of you will back me if it comes to that. Even a half-dozen professionals won’t stand against a whole town united. I’ll take the damn job, but only that way and no other.”
 

The townsmen assembled on the porch sent up a cheer, and Mayor Berger pumped Jack’s right hand, smiled down at Ellen, handed Jack a shiny silver-plated star, pumped Jack’s hand again and clapped Jack on the shoulder.
 

There should have been a crescendo of music and a quick montage sequence of Jack cleaning up the town. Warner Brothers Pictures would have done it that way.
 

But there was none of that, only the smell of tobacco as some of the men lit cigars and Jack lit a cigarette—the match was struck for him by Mayor Berger.
 

The only other thing was the hollow, scared feeling Ellen Naile felt in the pit of her stomach. Ellen closed her eyes, letting reality fade to black.
 

CHAPTER
SEVEN
 

The helicopter wreckage, although only weeks old, looked to have been where it was for decades. The twisted metal of the rotor blades was rusted well more than half away. The upholstery for the seats was rotted to near nothingness. Clarence had demanded that the FAA officials show him photos of the pilot’s body (found buried in a shallow grave near to the wreckage site, a pile of stones used as a marker). These were Polaroids showing the open grave. There was no corpse, only bones—bones stripped clean by what could only have been decades of rot and decay. Even the dead man’s watch was covered with corrosion, Clarence was told. The pilot’s horsehide leather flight jacket, the FAA official admitted in strictest confidence, had been more rotted than unpreserved leather gear from World War I.
 

The condition of the wreckage and the solitary body were “inexplicable.”
 

Clarence Jones had flown to Nevada within hours of being notified by the film company that the helicopter carrying his aunt, his uncle, his niece and his nephew was missing. He’d taken the Chevy Suburban—Jack and Ellen had left him with the paperwork giving him power of attorney, and he’d always had a set of spare keys—and driven as close as he could to the approximate crash site, a one-hundred-twenty-five-square-mile area, mostly mountains and woods. He’d joined the state and local authorities in their search for the downed aircraft, working with them from dawn until dusk each day, the search slowed by unseasonably heavy rainfall in the mountains on the Nevada side.
 

After two exhausting weeks, the search had yielded nothing and would, in days or less, be called off. Clarence had already determined that he would not give up the search, no matter how long it took. But, on the afternoon of the fifteenth day of the search, a private pilot reported spotting something that could have been wreckage. Despite the fact that the area had already been searched, it was searched again.
 

Clarence found himself seventy-eight miles away from the crash site when it was finally, positively, located. He connived a ride with a volunteer helicopter pilot.
 

By the time he had reached the crash site, the pilot’s grave had been discovered, the body exhumed, gone.
 

But the Polaroids were enough—almost—to finalize the treatment his digestive system had suffered from the helicopter ride. Yet he held it in, realizing that it was hard to cry and throw up at the same time. He cried.
 

That the Suburban was left behind signified that something had gone terribly wrong for his loved ones.
 

Lighting a cigarette, staring through his tears at the helicopter wreckage, the nearly bare metal frames that had once been seats, evidence of catastrophic fire damage abundantly clear, Clarence Brown told himself that if anyone could have somehow escaped death here it would be his aunt and uncle. And David and Lizzie were tough, competent, smart survivors, taught to be so by their parents.
 

If they were alive in the past, they would need what they had somehow been forced to leave behind—the contents of the Suburban.
 

The search was continuing, looking for four more bodies.
 

Clarence’s search had ended.
 

His family had made it through the barrier of time, somehow. They were alive and well in the past, somehow, and needed his help. And they would get that help. They had never abandoned him. He would never abandon them.
 

It would take money, because he would have to quit his job. He was barely holding on to it even as he stood there, gone from it for more weeks than he had vacation time or sick leave. Despite the fact that it would take quite a long time for Jack and Ellen to be declared legally dead—no bodies, and there would be none—his power of attorney would enable him to utilize their remaining assets to help him to help them.
 

With intelligence work, when there was a blip or a sound that didn’t belong, there was always the means, however convoluted, of somehow identifying what had caused it. Thinking back to one time in Greece, he appended that to “almost always.”
 

But, here, specific things had taken place. The helicopter had left Atlas, Nevada, at a specific time, filed its last radio transmission at a specific time. Whatever other extraneous events had occurred, he would discern them, ascertain their effect. He would find a way.
 

The sounds and the blips were different, and he would not be reading an O-scope, consulting volumes of material, have precise logs to peruse. But the problem was the same.
 

If one time-travel incident were possible, then it could be duplicated—somehow.
 

By parlaying his old comrades in arms, he could make contacts in the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board, gain access to the analysis of the downed aircraft’s black box, its flight recorder. There had been no cockpit voice recorder.