Page 9 of In the Nick of Time
Nick jerked his head back around so quickly he was lucky he didn’t sprain his neck.
“You have a sense of humor?”
“No, I don’t,” Swanson assured him. “My moniker is Long Shot—or it was. Mr. Impossible, who is an egotistical ass, is in Miami, I think.” Swanson’s masterful hands gripped the steering wheel as he backed the Pontiac up and navigated out of the parking lot.
Nick snapped his mouth shut—thinking about flies and all that—and kept staring at Swanson’s profile. And those hands.
“You weren’t kidding.”
“Nope. As you pointed out, I don’t have a sense of humor.”
“What exactly do we do at SPAM? Like I said, the recruiter was vague.”
And Nick probably shouldn’t have accepted the job without all the details, but he really needed the money so he could move out of his aunt’s basement and, basically, have a life of his own again.
“I fix difficult situations. You watch and learn.”
“Oh.” Nick directed his gaze out the passenger window instead of at Swanson. They were heading toward downtown. “Where are we going?”
“Midtown Mall. One of our people needs a hand.”
“One of our people. What kind of people are we?”
Nick reconsidered the job application he’d filled out.Have you always thought you were special?Nick mostly thought he was a loser. Notwithstanding that morning, he could always find parking in a pinch, and he seemed to have a knack for avoiding certain death or at least very uncomfortable situations. He couldn’t explain how he did it, things just ended up…nothappening around him a lot of times. Almost, but not quite.
“Special,” Swanson replied. “But not quite special enough. That’s you, by the way, not me.”
“Right, because you’re retiring yourself like a racehorse put out to pasture. What are you going to do with yourself?”
“Move to a remote area. Live in an isolated cabin.”
Okaaay. Message received.
To distract himself from all the things he didn’t know, Nick dug his phone out from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and checked his email. Nothing. Big shock there.
“And what else?”
“What do you mean what else?”
“There needs to be three things to balance your sentence. You know, like the Army logo from the eighties, ‘go places, meet people, and learn things’—or whatever it was.”
“Fuck.”
“Okay, that’s a possibility. Probably will keep you feeling young.”
“Dammit,” Swanson muttered. “We didn’t get there in time.”
He pointed at the two police cars that had just swerved into the lane ahead of them. Nick assumed they were speeding to the same place he and Grumpy Pants were headed. Their lights and sirens were blaring. Nick glanced over at his trainer. Should he? Or should he not?
Along with getting parking spaces—except for today—Nick could rewind time. The farthest he could go back with any certainty was just under five minutes, and he’d never told anyone he could. He was already weird enough, so why add to it?
Shutting his eyes and concentrating, he did his thing. He focused on not wanting what had happened to happen. He opened his eyes again.
“Special,” Swanson said again for the first time. “But not quite special enough. That’s you, by the way, not me.”
“Speed up or the police will get there before us,” Nick ordered.
“What? Are you sure?”
