Remember the Future

Remember the Future

by

Bryant Delafosse

Copyright 2016 by Bryant Delafosse

All rights reserved.

Electronic edition: January 2016

Published in the United States of America

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events of locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

PRELUDE:

Maddy awoke with a disjointed recollection of a dream--one so vivid that she was unable to rid herself of its echo, even after the sun broke.  She would later recall this as the moment her life changed forever, though she couldn’t have known it at the time.

In the dream, she approached the scene of an accident, the lights of the emergency vehicles casting carnival-like lights on the surface of the road, wet from an early morning rain.  A dread slowly built inside her, along with a crystal clarity that someone she cared about was in the direct center of that carnage.  No, not just cared about.  This individual was the center of her existence.

She walked toward the anxious emergency personnel yelling orders to each other and knew the hopeless feeling that with each step she was leaving her former life behind and walking into the darkness of an uncertain future.  She knew that the coming moment would set her adrift completely alone without her rock--the one thing that anchored her to this world.

When she finally awoke, it was with a cold emptiness that elicited uncontrollable shudders for the next half hour, no matter how many blankets she huddled beneath.  It was a psychological permanence that shook her to the core of her being.

Yet she knew that the dream wasn’t her own.  It wasn’t a dream at all, for that matter.

It was a memory that belonged to someone else.

She had never loved anyone like the holder of this memory had loved the victim of the accident.  Of course, she had loved and lusted but never shared a reciprocated love like the one she had only glimpsed in the nightmare.

It was a vision, she knew.  A night terror borrowed from another.

But who was this other person?

More importantly, what made this other person so special that she felt their pain before actually having the pleasure of making their acquaintance?

I.

HOUSTON, TEXAS

1

Grant sat behind the wheel of his dented white 1995 Toyota Corolla and tried to come to some sort of peace with the fact that he was about to die.

He held no romantic illusions about his life.  He was a working class man in the fourth largest city in the United States and was paid fairly well in a high stress profession.

He had been given a deadline one year ago to come up with a particularly large amount of money—a sum that had required him to liquidate the last of his resources (including his life insurance policy), sell his house, work every extra overtime hour he could manage, and otherwise, live his life on a shoestring budget.  He had even cut his food intake, sustaining himself, it seemed, on stress alone at times and moving through the motions of the drudgery of his life on sheer momentum.  At one point, he had become so gaunt that the Safety representative at work asked him if he needed any time off for health reasons, all the while carefully circumnavigating the dreaded “C” word.

After that confrontation, Grant had finally taken a good look at himself in the solitary mirror he owned in the one bedroom apartment down the street from Bush International Airport and found looking back at him a pair of bulging eyes in a malnourished face with the same ebbing light he glimpsed in the starving children from the commercials on late night TV for non-profit organizations overseas.

The company doctor that he had been obligated to see told him that if he did not start eating, he would be dead inside of a year.

Not yet, Grant told himself.  Not until after I’ve paid off what she had borrowed.

Paying his debt to the hoodlum Arturo Torres had become his only reason for existence, as if by successfully accomplishing it he would somehow rid him of the guilt that had plagued him for the last year.  Now with the end in sight, he felt that he had barely enough strength left to thrust his body across the finish line.

Grabbing the brown paper sack from the passenger seat, he shoved the driver’s door open and instinctively reached for the key in the ignition.  He stopped in mid-motion, gave a single dark snort at himself as he realized that this was, in all probability, a one-way trip, and left the keys behind in the unlocked car.

The single arc light atop a pole in the distance gave the empty parking light the grey pallor of a barren moonscape.  Nothing but dust and vacuum.

Grant felt momentarily giddy with excitement.

This is the end, he knew.  A rush of adrenaline fueled his advance to the solitary building, an automotive paint and body shop, and the single man standing outside smoking a cigarette.  It felt to him as if he were falling from a great height.

The waiting dark-eyed man squinted at Grant from beneath the awning of the door, casting him in shadow.  Wearing a dark leather jacket, the man seemed to almost completely disappear when he stepped out of the light.

Nice jacket
, Grant thought randomly. 
Looks expensive.

Grant instantly felt the firm reality of earth beneath his feet again.

“You’re not thinking of trying something funny, are you?”

Grant shook his head, not quite registering the reality of what he had been asked.

“Then what’s with that dumb-ass grin on your face?”

“Let’s just get this over with,” Grant replied dully, consciously reapplying the familiar grim expression he was accustomed to wearing.

The man snatched the bag out of his hand and gauged the weight.  Finally, he tossed the cigarette he’d been smoking to his feet and pushed the door open at his back, giving Grant a single finger snap to follow as he backed inside.

Grant started forward, taking the briefest of moments to find the discarded cigarette and grind it out with the toe of his shoe.

They entered a large mazelike office hallway and followed the distant high-pitched sound of lug nuts being removed.

“My name is Grant Frederickson.”

“I know who you are,” the swarthy-skinned man replied indifferently.

He entered a code on a door at the far end of the hall and entered a large garage filled with expensive European cars: Mercedes, Lamborghini, BMW, Ferrari.  There were ten or fifteen men hard at work removing and replacing large pieces of various cars.  Far in the back inside of a clear plastic tent, several men were taping up portions of a futuristic sports car that Grant didn’t recognize in preparation to painting.

Like a prod in the back with a sharp instrument, Grant realized that he had been allowed into a working chop shop.  On the heels of this, he concluded that there could only be one reason why he had been freely given this address—a single smoky grey business card with elegant black lettering left atop his answering machine--and allowed to see the on-going illegal activity of a man to whom he owed money.

As if reading Grant’s mind, his dark-eyed escort stared significantly at him just outside a large office door as if to ask the rhetorical question: “You getting a good look, Frederickson?”

Grant gave a single nod to the man as he entered a code into another keypad, pushed open the door and led him through a large office just big enough to act as a noise buffer to the second office within.  Half a dozen grim-faced men looked up from their various duties—one actually cleaning a handgun in the middle of a full bar.  Several grunts affirmed that the man who entered had been expected.  One reached out and rapped hairy knuckles on the single door set into the far wall.

“What?” a voice bellowed.

“S’Rudy!” hairy knuckles answered.

Moments later, a professionally dressed female opened the door, a Chihuahua squeezing around her tiny ankles leading to athletically-shaped legs.  She traded a quick but significant look with the man named Rudy and stepped outside the inner office, brushing ever so-slightly against the man as he held the door open.

Grant hesitated the briefest of moments before accepting his fate and stepping over the threshold.

Arturo Torres reclined behind his boat-like desk as comfortably as a five-foot five, three-hundred pound man could.  A fat cigar smoldered in an ashtray the size of a pitbull’s water dish.

“Rudy says you have my money,” Torres grunted.

The other man appeared at his boss’s side and set the bag on the desk.  The obese man snatched up the bag and upended it across his desk without looking down.  Cash in various denominations were rubber-banded in twenty separate bundles.

“How much?” he asked Grant.

“Every dollar that she borrowed from you.”

“There’s still the matter of interest.”

“I figure that money and my wife’s blood should settle things.”

Several men appeared from opposite sides of the room as if materializing from the architecture.  Rudy narrowed a look at Grant.

An amused smile appeared on Torres’ face.  “Oh, is that what you figure?”

Grant held his tongue, simply returning Torres’ look.  He felt suddenly as if he were watching the scene remotely and safely from a great distance, amazed and intrigued by what the tiny lone man that looked a lot like him was doing in this din of evil men.

Torres’ smile faded and he looked over at one of the men standing alert in the shadows.  “Al, you know shit about what Frederickson is talking about?”

“No, sir, boss,” a gruff voice answered.

“You, Phil?”

“No sir,” came the chorus.

“Well, we don’t know anything about all that, Grant,” Torres continued.  “That is a pretty bold accusation considering that you were the one who requested my services to begin with.”

“My wife was a smart woman who made a dumb mistake,” Grant replied, feeling emotion trying to rattle his steady voice and rejecting it.  “As I explained before, the deal she made was without my knowledge and out of love for me.”

“If you ask me who was at fault, I’d say it was you, Grant,” Torres snapped, clipping off the last of Grant’s declaration.  “You were the weak one.”

Grant stiffened.  The feeling returned all at once to his legs and the weight of reality made them wobble.

“Well, this is a healthy start, but it doesn’t balance our books.  There was a good bit of interest on your loan.”

Torres reached out retrieved the cigar from its tray--like a cannon from its mount--and took a long relaxing puff.   “Seeing as how you’ve seen our facilities and you’ve got no way to pay us back, I’ve really only got one option here.  A business arrangement that will square us up.”

Torres slid the top drawer of his desk open and retrieved a small tightly wrapped package and tossed it across the desk toward Grant.  “You deliver this for me to the address Rudy gives you, Frederickson then we’ll talk again.”

Grant looked down at the package and felt a smile appear like a gag reflex, completely impossible to contain.  He heard himself snort derisively and saw the men bristle as if provoked.

“That cash on your desk is all you'll ever get from me,” Grant heard himself say.  “I can give no more than what you've taken from me. If that's not enough, then I give you permission to kill me.”

For a moment, the room was a windless desert.  Even the garage seemed to be observing a moment of reverential silence.

“Permission?” The word in question seemed to float like a balloon out of the mass of confused expressions.  It took Grant a moment before he realized that it was Torres who had uttered it.

Then the big man was on his feet, moving more quickly than a three-hundred pound man had a right to and snapped his sausage-like fingers at Rudy.  “Get him out of my sight.”

But Rudy was frozen.  His dark eyes seemed transfixed at the scrawny man standing before the grand oaken desk as if trying to solve a puzzle.

“Now!” Torres commanded in a loud voice, and one of the men leapt from the shadows just before Rudy himself began to move.

Grant took a deep breath and steeled himself for the killing blow, expecting either the deafening crack of a handgun or the excruciating intrusion of a blade.

Instead he felt himself flying back through the garage and the maze of hallways as if rewinding a recorded image back to its beginning.  The only pain he felt at all really was the pinch of rough hands at the scruff of his neck and pressure of the waistband of his pants on his belly.  Suddenly, he found himself sailing through the air and colliding roughly with the pavement of the parking lot.

He rolled over and looked up at the dark-eyes of Rudy standing in the doorway of the building along with a second much-larger man, who turned his back without interest back to the shop.

“So, are we good?” Grant asked, finding--against his better nature--a smirk blooming on his face.

Glaring down at him for a moment, Rudy finally withdrew into the building and slammed the door behind him.

Grant took a moment to gather his weak legs beneath him and rise.  Dusting himself off, he cast a single look back at the closed door and wondered if the door would open again after his back was turned.  He certainly didn’t want to get it in the back.  He was still enough of a man to want to meet death face-to-face.

Finally, he climbed back into the driver’s seat of his car to find the keys awaiting him in the ignition.  He sat in silence, grasping the steering wheel and trying to get his shaking hands under control. Shutting his eyes, he took a long ragged breath and slowly released it.

He could hear the beat of his heart in his ears and knew that he was still among the living.

Finally, he cranked the engine and left the parking lot, wondering what to do for dinner since he hadn’t made any future plans.