City Out of Time. William Robison III
and a few other key items. It only took him five minutes to pack and then Lanz headed out of his apartment and went straight to his car.
He threw the bag into the backseat and opened the driver’s door. He was just about to leave when he heard his roommate calling him.
Lanz looked up to the apartment door and saw his roommate standing there with the apartment’s cordless phone in his hand. He was holding the receiver in the air as if to say, “Here’s a lovely bone…” Lanz was tempted to get into his car and drive away, but curiosity made him go back to the apartment.
“Hello?” Lanz asked, taking the phone from his dim-witted roommate.
“Mr. Franco,” said the vaguely familiar voice on the other end, “This is Colonel Buck… I was calling to remind you of our meeting tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“For pie?”
Lanz looked towards his car and wondered if he shouldn’t hang up now and just go.
“Yes… I remember,” Lanz said. “I’ll see you there.”
“Good. I will expect you.”
Lanz put the phone back in the cradle and then patted his roommate on the back and said, “Goodbye Jaymes.”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
Chapter Two
Baker, California
April 8, 1996
Pike’s Restaurant was every bit of the dump that Lanz remembered. In the 1950’s, Pike’s had been part of a small local empire that included a Mobil Oil gas station, an El Rancho motor hotel complete with swimming pool, and the eponymous Pike’s Restaurant. Not much was left. The gasoline station had been reduced to a couple of pumps. The motel had closed nearly ten years before. Even the restaurant was a shell of what it had been ten years earlier when teenaged Lanz and Seth had come here for pie and a few hours away from any sort of adult supervision. Not to gloss over Lanz’s golden memories of his youth… he knew the place had been seedy even then, but there had been a charm to seedy when he was that age. Now, Lanz almost felt embarrassed walking through the front door.
If Colonel Buck felt any sort of discomfort in his surroundings though, he wasn’t letting on. He sat back in a duct taped vinyl booth that probably hadn’t been cleaned in a couple of weeks. With a glass of ice cold milk and a generous slice of cherry pie in front of him, he looked, for all that any one could tell, like a man on vacation. The Colonel waved Lanz over and Lanz took a seat on the other side of the booth from the Colonel.
“Can I order you some pie?” Colonel Buck asked.
“It should really be my treat, sir,” Lanz replied.
The Colonel laughed and pulled a wad of dollars out of his pocket that was as big as a fist. It looked like hundreds of dollars.
“See this?” he asked, waving the money in front of Lanz, “It’s play money. Where I live everything is taken care of – uniforms, housing, even meals. So money really has no meaning to me. I always have enough to get what I need.”
Lanz looked at the money like it was a magic wand. “Must be nice.”
“I also rarely have a chance to spend money,” the Colonel noted. “Pie, especially, can be a treat. Would you like a slice?”
“Sure,” I said.
The Colonel waved the waiter over and handed him a wad of bills without counting them, “My friend will have the same.”
“Yes, sir,” the waiter replied enthusiastically, and as he walked off, he started counting the money in his hands.
“Thank you,” Lanz said.
“It’s my pleasure, son,” The Colonel replied. “Now… shall we get down to business?”
“Business? Oh, right… the Will…”
The Colonel hesitated, “Is everything alright?”
“Yes… fine… why do you ask?”
“It’s just that you seem… well… you sounded kind of reluctant on the phone earlier. Is there something… was there something between you and your brother that I should know about?”
“My brother? No. Nothing. Actually, Colonel, I’ve just been having a really bad day.”
“Ah… I see… how bad?”
“The kind of bad that makes you question your place in the universe.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Quite frankly, I was thinking of getting away from my life for a while – maybe exploring a bit, finding a new place to live, a new life to have, a new me.”
“In my experience, no matter how far you run, you can’t outdistance your past.”
“Only I don’t really have much of a past, do I? My brother is dead. My parents are both gone. And the only family I have left, my uncle, would never come looking for me.”
“So this is about your brother, then?”
Lanz took a moment to think about this before answering.
“Seth and I never really saw eye to eye. He was never serious – always wandering off into some new scheme or adventure. He was restless and wild. Without parents, he was a real handful. I was only a few years older myself, but the job or raising him was mine. Our Uncle Pete gave us a place to stay and food to eat and clothes to wear, but he wasn’t a parent. To him, we were distant relatives crashing on his couch. Seth was always running off and I was always bringing him back home. I think he resented me for that.’
‘But Seth was my only family, Colonel – my only connection to the past. We didn’t exactly see eye to eye, but he was still part of my life. It didn’t matter that we didn’t get along. Just seeing Seth would remind me of all that we’d been through together – all that we’d survived. But… ultimately… he finally found something he couldn’t outrun and I wasn’t there to bring him back home. Now, I’m on my own.”
“It was your brother’s time,” Colonel Buck noted. “Perhaps it was your time too.”
“What?”
“I once had a brother – only we weren’t related by blood. We joined the service at the same time, shared many of the same adventures, and lived, loved, and fought together. But then, tragically, I lost him. I was really torn up about it, Franco. I even thought about quitting. I couldn’t imagine doing this job without him. In a way, I was lost right along with my brother. But then, I realized that just because he was gone didn’t mean I had to quit. It just meant that it was time to move on to a new phase of my life. Maybe it’s time for you to move on as well, Lanz.”
Before Lanz could say another word, the waiter arrived with another slice of cherry pie and a glass of ice cold milk. As Lanz contemplated the pie and the milk, Colonel Buck slipped a plain manila envelope on the table in front of Lanz.
“This is what your brother wanted me to give you,” Colonel Buck noted. “He said that you’d know what to do.”
Lanz looked at the envelope and nodded. Somehow, Lanz had expected something as ordinary as an envelope from Seth.
“And now I’ve said my piece and done my business,” Colonel Buck said. “Please enjoy your pie and your milk… and with luck, perhaps our paths will cross again.”
The Colonel slipped out of the booth and stood up, straightening his uniform as he went, and balancing on his cane. Lanz watched him stand with a bit of surprise on his face.
“You’re leaving? Now? Don’t you want to see what Seth put in the envelope?”
“I’m