That Time: A story of the past and future and how they tangle with the present.

... and this time and the time before that.

I'm no detective. I never have been, really. Maybe once in a thousand lifetimes. But not today.

Today, I sling drinks for a living. Whiskey, sour. Crown and Coke. Beer, wine, orange juice or ice water or coffee for the ones with the shakes.

I don't get involved in their stories. Oh, I'll listen, or pretend to. People will tell you that's the best way to earn a tip. I don't know anything about that. I've never been able to decide whether the ever-changing gang of barstool representatives are here for a good ear, or just a good drink.

Don't much matter. Some like to talk, at least until their friends show up. Mostly, I've found people just want to be left alone to nurse the drink.

Who knows, maybe it was different before the tv over my shoulder. The babble box has its uses, I guess. There's no need to talk if you don't want to. Just stare at the box and even the most gregarious will eventually get the point.

I don't mind. I work the day shift, clean up after the night shift, keep my regulars in the style they like. By the time the rowdies show up, I'm home with the old movies and the old records and an old dog whose trick days are long behind him. The night life pays the biggest part of the bar bills, but my time for that sort of thing is long gone, and blessed be the day I hired somebody else to mind those hours of the clock.

Hell, I don't even care that the night till is occasionally a little light. Credit cards have made that a lot harder to get away with, these days. And my current crew's honest, honest enough not to steal so much we go broke. No mortgage, no rent, so long as we cover the lights and the liquor, we're good.

I made a point of building my bar in a place where the city cops don't have any need to visit. The sheriff's deputies show up on the rare occasion, but we don't have any need to grease any palms.

Closest thing to a pub I can make it. The only hard rule I give the night crew is to ease the crowds in and out, but break up the 'gangs', no matter if they're bikers or clubbers, anarchists with an axe to grind or gang bangers looking for another place to lean on. Bad service, call the cops to hassle 'em, whatever it takes, so long as they don't know they're being moved along.

The bikers are the only ones who discover us on any kind of regular basis. We're hidden away, so most rough crowds don't really come to visit except by accident. And I make sure the place is clean, too sterile for them to think it's a good place to set up shop. Most times, they come by a time or two, realize the juke box doesn't play whatever passes for 'hardcore' from the corporate radio stooges, that a snooker table isn't a pool table, and that the daytime and evening crowd just wants a good place to smoke a pipe or cigar, not put up with trouble.

It takes some work, building up a 'local' in the old style. It means the night crew have their waves, the local girl's night out stopping in for a couple glasses of wine before they head out to the 'real' clubs, the contractors dropping in for a beer before they head home. The college kids at one in the morning, meeting up one more time before they sneak back into their parents' houses.

The final shift are usually the late night assignations, the couples who pretend not to know each other in the daytime sneaking in one last half hour before they go back to their other halves.

Like I said, a nice quiet place, a local pub in the old style, or at least as close as I can make it, and I get to enjoy serving my regulars and then going back to the house at night to let my feet and ears rest.

Until she showed up. The victim, I mean, not the killer.

May something or other. Not Maybelline, like the old song or that makeup brand. Older name than that, Maybel? I don't remember, she never said her full name that I could hear, and I don't keep up with the papers enough to have ever caught it again.

She came in for the dart board. We've got a set of them, two electronic and a couple of the older style, and a pretty good set of dart throwers to keep them busy. Especially on Wednesday, there's a regular tournament. I know most of them by face, they usually start showing up right as I'm winding down and heading out the door.

Wayne whatshisname came in with her, I think. Gin and tonic for him, seven and seven for her, and then look out 'cause the lady's got an aim like you wouldn't believe.

Lisa, my nightshift head, told me she took over the place. From then on, for the next couple weeks, if you came in to throw a brace or two, she was the one you were throwing against. She never lost, not anytime that we were open and she was there.

That didn't set off any alarm bells for me. Not then, not 'til later, when I'd had time to think about it. How many dead-eye shots are there, really?

There's a part of me that's known a few. Memories, echoes of something before and after. My grandma always called it the family curse. Some kind of old country magic, the kind that nobody ever discussed with a young priest.

Sharpshooters. That's what she reminded me of. There's a memory, a bunch of guys in the CCC, whiling away the time between the storms of war, trying to feed their families.

This guy used to spend his free time making dimes off his buddies. Little single shot twenty-two rifle, a handful of washers just big enough for the bullet to pass through the hole in the middle. Toss the washer, shoot one through the hole as it passes through the sun.

"Betcha dime the bullet went through."

"Prove it."

Easy enough, put some tape over the washer, toss it again, listen to the other guys laugh when the new guy picks it up and sees the clean new hole in the tape.

It only works on the new guys, and the shooter's patient. Take a dime here, a dime there, don't let any of them feel like you're taking advantage of them.

Problem was, people raised in the country always know they're the best shot for miles around. Most of the time, they were right.

But the shooter was better. It ended for him one cool Arkansas fall evening, sitting on the back porch of this little rocky cabin. They'd fenced off the yard, barbed wire and creosote-soaked posts.

He was taking advantage of the post tops. They were new, but rough cut so he could stand matches in the crevices. Put up a couple matches, walk back to the porch, take the little twenty-two and shoot the heads of the matches off.

That wasn't the trick. There were a couple other guys in the gang who could match that, maybe not five for five, but three for five and he didn't push it.

But one guy did. Big kid, Nebraska husker with the muscles built from arguing with a mule. The kid had spent an awful lot of time putting prairie chickens in his home pot. That twenty-two rifle was just like the one he brought along with him wherever he went.

Five for five, just like the shooter. The shooter hadn't earned a dime off the kid yet. And after he saw the kid was pretty good with the gun, he didn't worry about trying to.

There would be more new guys, and there was no use rubbing the kid's nose in it.

But the kid didn't leave it alone. He'd got it in his head, he was going to take a dime or two back from the shooter.

So the shooter pulled out his trick. "Betcha dime I can light those matches, five for five."

Not shoot the match heads. Light them, in place. The kid took the bet.

Four for five, one after another, the shooter lit the matches. The crack of the gun hid the crackle of the flame. And the evening sun behind them was bright enough so they couldn't quite see the flames. Each shot, they'd walk out to the post, and the shooter would wait for the kid to acknowledge the blackened match head.

Fifth shot, fifth flame blown out by the evening wind coming up the mountain. And it was the kid's turn.

It was the third match that did it. First two, the kid did good, and the shooter nodded his acknowledgement from the porch. He didn't need to walk out to see how well the kid shot.

But the kid did. He put the rifle down, action open and leaned against the porch rail, walked out to the post and counted 'em off. "One..."

"Two..."

Three didn't come. The shooter already knew it.

He didn't press the kid, though. No point to it. The dimes were for an occasional soda, maybe popcorn and a movie on the rare occasions when they got down the valley to the little town at the bottom. Like everybody else in the gang, the dollar a day went back home to the family.

They found the shooter there the next morning, when reveille sounded and everyone wandered out, gapping and stretching for the morning calisthenics. A single shot through the head, right between the eyes, and the kid from Nebraska was still asleep in his bunk.

The only thing the kid ever said about it was that he didn't owe the shooter nothin', and now he never would. They strung him up a couple months later, last official hangin' in that Arkansas county.

That's how it goes for me. Little flashes of something, stories that might or might not mean anything. Usually they do, though. It just might take a while before I find out what my past and future are trying to tell me.

This time with May the dart thrower, there wasn't an immediately obvious killer. Not one that any of my crew could identify, like that Nebraska kid who couldn't bear to lose. How many people go to a dart tournament expecting to win every throw?

The sheriff's office did their best. They went through our regular dart throwers, came in three weeks running for the tournaments, plainclothes though. They'd interviewed everybody we knew, the detectives just wanted to see if anybody might have been a little too shy to show up with the badges standing around.

That's when the memory of that Ozark mountain murder came back to me. I'd run out of gas, I figured I owed it to the sheriff to make sure I spent a little night time in the bar, helping where I could.

Not that I was much use, the night crowd were mostly strangers to me. I'd spent too much time on the day shift to identify anybody by name. By the time of the third tournament after they found May's body, though, I'd caught enough drink orders from the dart throwers to be slinging 'em up before they asked.

It was the extra hours that put me in the place my mind needed to be. Stumble in after closing time, glad as hell I'd stopped drinking on shift, walk and feed the old dog, pass out in the recliner with him curled up in my lap and Nick Clooney telling me about some Hitchcock marathon they were running.

"Hey, kid, no big deal. Buy me a coke someday, and we'll call it even."

The big kid stared at the ground, working it up in his head. "I don't like owing people."

Not a lot did. Owing people was why we were all up here. Banks not being known for anything except taking whatever they could pry away, especially when they could take five dollars for a penny owed, sheriffs laughing at the auction block.

"You don't owe me nothin', nothin' more than what any of us guys owe each other on the mountain."

The shooter wasn't a gunslinger. But he'd spent more than enough time hunting to know when he was in trouble. The kid was like a bear he'd hit, but not killed. Pissed off and looking for someone to maul.

The kid went back to the gun, set up to shoot the next match. The shooter lit a cigarette, leaned back against the porch post and wondered if maybe he needed to walk inside and let the kid work it out on his own.

He should have. The Nebraska kid shot again, but maybe he was too worked up, or the wind picked a bad time to gust. Either way, the fourth match went unlit.

Sometime between the kid throwing the gun down on the porch, and the kid walking back to the porch with his head down, the waves of anger rolling off him disappeared.

The shooter thought he was safe. The kid had thrown it off, it felt like.

But no, he'd just made his decision. He picked up the gun, loaded up and knelt like he was taking the fifth shot.

The shooter didn't quite notice how far back the kid was from the rail. Not until the kid turned the barrel toward him. The little twenty-two rifle wasn't much, but at five paces away, it was enough.

I turned on the recliner, not awake, just aware of the crick in my neck that would be coming on. Settled back in and worked through what my mind wanted to show me.

Bets. No, debts, implied and stated. Who owes who what? Did somebody owe May, for something in the bar, or something outside the bar? What, though?

The entry fee for the tournaments is always two bits, a quarter. A good night and the winner might make ten dollars. Even a great night, the largest I'd ever heard of was fifteen dollars, and they'd been worried the fire department was going to shut us down for too many for the room. This ain't the Depression, who kills somebody over ten bucks?

Hell, ten bucks don't even get you a full loop around the Beltway, with the tolls closing on two dollars a gate.

I drifted again, worrying at it. But my mind didn't have anything else to say. If there was another memory, foretelling, whatever, to be had, I'd have to work at it first.

Ok, fine. If I couldn't for the life of me see how a ten buck dart pot would stir someone to the killing zone, that just meant that if our bar had something to do with it, then it was the side bets that mattered. The kind we pretended didn't exist.

There are few things that get the Texas state authorities really riled up. But gambling in a bar is awfully high on their list. It's one of the big no-no's, worse than giving out free drinks. A registered dart tournament works, no different than trivia night in the chain bars. So long's the money don't add up enough to matter.

But we can't do anything about the side bets. That's another reason to stick with a regular crowd, as much as possible. People who see each other every week sort of modulate as the friction rubs off the rough edges.

May had been new, though. Who else was new? Or, maybe she set off one of the regulars. Maybe she was the seed crystal for something violent to crash down out of an old metastable stew.

Time to dig out the computer.

I'd passed over the standard security recordings. It didn't happen in our bar, nor in the parking lot. But they'd found her body just down the road. A single shot, right between the eyes. Like the shooter in my memory, and the bullet had been a twenty-two. So, close enough to matter.

Eight in the morning, sun streaming through the blinds, old dog walked and fed, his old partner washed and contemplating the coffee pot. "Hey Erin, I'm gonna have to beg off the bar today. Think you got it, or you need me to call someone else in to cover with you?"

Erin was my daytime barback. College kid, mostly looking for a quiet job that paid next semester's tuition. Good hand with the till and pouring, especially if the traffic was light. "Nah, boss, I got it. Tracy's coming in early anyhow, she's got a deal with Lisa to leave early for her kid's football game."

The most holy of holies, the Friday night game. The high school was only big enough for six-man, so you'd better know that people noticed if you missed a game. Not that I blamed her, those six-man games are more fun than should be allowed. "Tell her not to forget her chair, last time they almost threw her out for screaming from the sidelines."

Erin laughed at that. Tracy's a full on momma-bear, big beautiful black woman with a broadcast shout that reaches the cheap seats. The folding chair at least let her and Morgan sit in the back where the crowd kept her from rushing the field. When Lisa put the game on over the bar speakers, depending on where they'd set up the mikes, you could hear Tracy good and loud and clear when she got on a roll.

Good, cleared the day for myself, it was time to call up some old magic.

My grandma would have asked the wind. And it would have answered back. But I didn't get fresh raw cream delivered to the house every day. My choices were pretty much limited to what I could hack out of the electronic ether.

The recordings I'd given the sheriff's office access to were our bar cameras, inside and out. They'd gone through them, looking for violence, arguments, anything that stood out on the night of May's murder.

They'd struck out. If the killer had been in the bar that night, they'd been like that Nebraska kid in my memory, calm and ready, nothing more.

So. There was no way I'd have the time, all by myself, to go through weeks of digital backtrail looking for something that might just look like casual conversation. If my subconscious was telling me anything useful, it was that only May and her killer would have known what was coming.

How do I track down something so casual? Let the computer do the work for me, a little image recognition, at least as best I could manage, May's face was the only one that mattered. Map out her network, the people she'd bumped in to over the past few weeks.

Not that image recognition is all that reliable, even now. But it's enough for a first pass, cut down the terabytes to gigabytes, then reconfirm and let the box work on the acknowledged dataset.

It's a tedious process. I had to remind myself to get up, walk around, drink water instead of coffee. Walk the dog. Eat. Take a nap and see what the box has to say for itself.

A peculiar sort of meditation. No ritual, no incense or prayers. Tap tap tap the keys, stare at the screen 'til your eyes blur.

But it worked, sort of. The day passed until I was sitting in the near dark, sundown passing and the in-between settling in. I'd set the final collection of video snips the computer had collected to run continuous, first day to last of May's visits to the bar. I made a bag of popcorn, poured a beer, and settled in to watch the final product on high speed.

The program ran with two outputs. The videos, and in the corner, a little network map, a spider-web of abstraction spreading out with names. The intersections, the nodes where the lines of connection met, grew in size depending on how many times May had talked to the person each node represented.

I didn't pay attention to that map, yet. I didn't try and think. I just watched.

Big black dude, weekend biker, guy's a dentist with an allowance from his wife for the only hobby he's ever lusted after, the big Harley with the loud pipes. Cognac, the good stuff, keeps me buying it even if he's only up for a big snifter filled once and sipped through the dart tournament once a week. He's good, usually finishes top three. Wide handsome grin, not even advertising for the day job, just happy to be here throwing darts.

Little tiny woman, Bangladeshi I think, her and her husband started coming in regular when the kids graduated, she's a holy terror on the dart board. Tea, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, never sweet, she's another of the regulars at the top of the tournaments.

Neat guy, well cut suits and patent leather shoes, gets his hair trimmed at the place down the street and comes in for whatever craft beer we have on tap. Not really a dart thrower, but he's learning. Don't think he's ever finished in the top ten. Hear his boyfriend is a chef, the dart tournament's a good way to kill time until the Wednesday shift closes out. Guy got hooked, though. He watches the others, looking for the tricks of the trade.

Bit by bit, clip by clip. The names on the map didn't correspond to anything, I didn't know any of them, and didn't yet want to spend the time chasing them down. Settle for "A, B, C, ..." for the moment.

Just the dart crowd. There were incidental contacts, little pushes here and there, May interacted with humanity. The non-incidentals, though, were all the dart throwers.

And the bar crew. But none of them would have had reason to...

What was Erin doing at the bar on the night shift? He wasn't running drinks. No trays, in front of the bar nor behind it, and he wasn't throwing darts.

I said there wasn't any real way for us to handle the side bets. Not without getting our hands in it, and that was the big no-no. Had Erin spotted a crack to slip through?

He needed money for tuition, that much I knew.

I keep a schedule board for my gang to map out their times on. Nothing formal, I don't much care what they get up to, so long as the shifts are covered. The board's just there so that everyone can look at it, see ahead of time where they might be able to jump in and work a little extra, or take off for a couple days because there's plenty of hands on deck.

Erin had us trained for his schedule. He worked days at the bar, kept his evenings clear for night classes. After a few false starts, he'd done good keeping up, every semester writing out his schedule.

Lisa takes a picture of the schedule board, once a week, and emails it to all of us. She calls it "closing the board". I pulled up the last picture.

Erin's Wednesdays were clear, all across the board. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Friday lab days, they were all taken up and marked out. But tournament night was free.

I paged the computer screen over to another desktop, set the video program going again from the top with Erin as the center of a new web. It was going to take a lot longer, but once I started this, I couldn't afford to miss his regular shifts. Focusing on the dart tournament would leave a lot of possibility space open for interactions to hide in. I hit the button and went back to looking through May's network.

Roughly twenty people. That's what her network in the bar mapped out to. Four of my gang, the rest the dart regulars. And then the world, if none of those twenty had anything to do with her murder. Could I eliminate any of them?

No sound. But the dentist was only ever on the line with her. One two three darts and someone went to sit down and wait for next. Three nights, all three nights the dentist only met up with her in the next to last round, and all three nights he went to sit down for the loser's bracket.

Standing on the line was the only time he'd been anywhere near her, and as far as I could tell, he never said anything to May besides "your turn" and "nice throw". Cut him out of the network and go on, quick pass filter for now.

The other lady, our regular champion, she was even more restricted. The only time the computer could map her talking to May was in the final set of each tournament. So she was out, as well.

The newer dart guy, the one who'd dove in like a duckling with his first feathers, he was more involved. Talk here, question there. He liked to buy a drink for the winner when he lost.

And then he'd go somewhere that passed out of the computer's reckoning. He'd thrown against May just twice, though. Not a lot to go on, there. The only difference between him and the others was the slightly more involved way he liked to acknowledge the winner. Otherwise it was just the same.

Stand up, take your shot, lose to the lady and move on.

Oh yeah, May was a sharpshooter. Not showing off, just winning. I couldn't judge from the camera angle, but she just kept putting up the points. So if she hit bullseye, she never showed it in her reactions.

No reason to. Like the shooter in my dream, she didn't need to rub anyone's nose in it. She just needed to win. And she always made the throws to win.

I drummed my fingers on the keyboard, impatient. Got up, walked the dog, wolfed down a sandwich.

The computer flashed a notification, finally. Just before midnight. "erinMap finished, 3 hours 47 minutes 28.3 seconds."

Just before midnight. The witching hour. Well past my normal bedtime. I was tired, grumpy at even the thought that one of my gang might be up to something funny.

Groan, stretch, bitch and moan and cuss and get back to the keyboard, damnit all to hell.

Focus came back, slowly. I dove into the video.

He was running the numbers. That much came clear, right away. Person to person, connection to connection. Anytime a pair stepped up for their turn in the ringer, there was my boy, shuffling along in the background looking for the action. Slow, bit by bit, he reeled in the brackets.

Our very own office bookie, like the one who runs from desk to desk Friday afternoons writing down the football wagers. And then disbursing the proceeds Tuesday morning.

First two tournaments, everything went fine. Third tournament, and no one wanted to bet against May, the shooter. Bad part of making your bets with a bunch of people who know what they're looking at. They know when they're beat.

But Erin couldn't stay away, couldn't take the warning. When the cops took my video map and showed it to him, he explained the part I could imagine, but not hear.

"I had to make the action." He ended up taking all the bets against May on his own.

He'd have made it, though. But May threw a wrench in his gears. The first two tournaments, he'd approached her just like the rest, and she'd blown him off. "Ten bucks was enough to cover her bar bill, that's what she told me," Erin said to the sheriff's deputies.

Except for that last night. "I asked her, not expecting her to bet. But she surprised me."

It was there on the camera. You couldn't see the value of the bill she'd handed him, but you could see the pass. "She put a hundred in."

And he'd miscalculated. One too many bets, one hundred dollars he didn't have and never would. On the video, by the time she'd got to the last throw, her win was nothing but a formality. So he was there in the background, settling up with all the other bettors. "By the time I got back to her, I was broke."

"What'd she say?"

" 'Don't worry about it, kid. Drinks are on you for a while.' "

He looked down at the table in the interrogation room. The sheriff's office showed me the tape, later. In that moment, I could see that bullheaded kid from Nebraska superimposed over Erin's body. "I don't owe her nothing, now," Erin finished. And that was the last anyone heard from him.

He's sitting on death row up in Huntsville. I don't know if he'll ever walk the line, like his doppelganger or previous incarnation or whatever, but at least they caught him.

Grandma always called this thing 'my ghosts'. I don't know if she ever thought she'd lived a past life, and her ghosts were the echoes. She was pretty religious, even with the old country charms and spells hanging around the family blood. She could have thought they were God-given, visions sent to help her help someone else. She never talked about that part of it.

But she always told me, "Son, they're never through with you. There's an awful lot of past, and even more future. And my ghosts have an awful lot to say about it. But there's one special time you need to be prepared, and listen, even more than you ever have before."

"What time's that, Grandma?"

"When you think they've finished telling you a story."

I remember that warning. It's hard to forget.

I'm sitting in my chair again. I still get the paper every day. I've got an online subscription to the Chronicle, but mostly I use that for digging through the archives. The daily news I like to read with the ink rubbing off on my fingers, and the paper rustling while I chase down the interesting stories.

There's not much going on today. Buried in the back pages of the local section, there's one headline that catches my eye. Erin's first appeal's been bounced by the courts. The defense attorneys did their best, but there's nothing much for them to hang their hats on, and the appeals court let them hear about it.

Dog's been walked, so I lean back in my chair and let the nap come.

The memories don't even wait for me to get all the way asleep. I'm floating, waiting high over a porthole as Africa rotates away beneath me. There's a body, tied down so we can work on it in freefall. I'm taking blood samples, but the color of the skin gives fair warning of at least part of the story.

Oxygen deprivation; sallow color, broken blood vessels around the nose and cheeks, and in the pupils when I peel them back. Bells are screaming in the back of my head. A malfunction would be bad enough, you won't get too many tourists on an orbital hotel if they hear that the life support in your room can kill you.

That's when the maintenance chief checks back. "The mechanicals are fine. But someone's monkeyed with the control systems."

"Monkeyed with, how?" I ask the disembodied voice.

She stops to doublecheck. "Computer trail says she fed it a new program, last night. A worm, looks like."

"You're saying she did this to herself?"

"That's what the computer thinks."

I wake up, then, staring at the ceiling. Spend the rest of the night awake, wondering what my ghosts are preparing me for now.