The Beatles—Future Perfect, Part 13

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Year 1969—Two Riders

Ray had been driving cabs since he came back from Korea, and in that time he'd developed a sense that never wasted words on him. He didn't call it a gift. He called it paying attention, which was free and most people didn't bother with it.

He'd noticed them at the second pawn shop. Two men, one big and scarred around the mouth, the other smaller with the loose, hungry way of moving that came from watching more than working. They'd stood near the door pretending to look at a rack of hunting knives, but their eyes kept drifting to Kyle and Zack at the jewelry case—two young men in Western shirts, laughing, peeling bills off a roll without a second thought, admiring turquoise like it was candy.

Ray had seen that look before. On men sizing up a purse left open on a bar.

He hadn't said anything. Wasn't his business, and besides, plenty of men looked hungry in Reno and never did a thing about it.

But then at the Mexican place, he'd caught the smaller one's reflection in the window glass, loitering too long, and something in Ray's stomach had gone cold and quiet. When Kyle tipped the waitress twenty dollars, Ray watched the two men's faces in that same reflection, and it wasn't envy he saw. It was arithmetic.

At the Western shop, he'd seen their car in the side lot on the way out—an old Fairlane, Oklahoma plate, parked crooked like a man in a hurry to look like he wasn't.

On the highway climbing back toward Tahoe, he watched his mirror the way he watched everything, without seeming to. The Fairlane fell in three cars back, then two, matching his speed too precisely for coincidence. When he took the exit toward the West Shore, so did they. He said nothing to the boys in the back, chattering about lap steels and casino bells. He just committed the plate to memory the way he'd once memorized supply manifests: OK 4J-1176.

Through the winding road above the lake they let more distance open between them, but they never quite let go. By the time he turned in through the gate and dropped Kyle and Zack at the door, the Fairlane was nowhere in sight.

That worried him more than seeing it would have. He drove on, slow, watching the shoulder, and there it was—tucked around the bend, dark, empty, nosed into the brush where it wouldn't show from the house windows. Ray didn't stop. He drove another hundred yards to where the private road met the county route, pulled onto the gravel, and picked up the mic.

"Dispatch, this is Ray. I need a deputy out to the Y on West Lake Road, no lights, no rush that shows. Got a car I don't like the look of." He read off the plate.

A couple of minutes later the radio crackled back. "Ray, that tag comes back stolen. Deputy Pruitt's ten minutes out."

Ray sat in the dark and waited, engine off, hands loose on the wheel, feeling the old wartime calm settle over him like a coat he hadn't worn in years but still fit.

Pruitt pulled up without lights, window down. "Evenin,' Ray. Same car?" "Same car. Empty when I passed it. Nosed in around the bend, hid from the house."

They idled up together and blocked the Fairlane nose to nose with the cruiser. Still no one in it. The house beyond sat lit and easy, music drifting faint through the pines, nothing wrong that either man could see. Yet.

"Whoever left is on foot," Pruitt said quietly. "Let's split the doors."

Ray took the side entrance without being asked. Pruitt covered the front. They waited in the dark for the better part of twenty minutes, the cold settling into Ray's knees, before he caught movement in the brush—two shapes coming carefully up from the shoreline, moving low, moving wrong.

They reached the front steps just as Pruitt's flashlight snapped on.

"Hands up. Now." The smaller one bolted first, straight for the trees, and never got ten feet. Ray, unseen in the shadow of the porch, put a leg out and dropped him flat, then knelt on his back until Pruitt got the cuffs on. The big one—Wade—didn't run. He just smirked, like getting caught was a small tax he'd expected to pay eventually, and went down on his knees when Pruitt told him to.

The commotion brought Xap, Julian, and Kiran out through the door first, the others were still lost in the music in the front room. Ray kept the second man's own dropped revolver leveled steady while Pruitt radioed for backup.

Kiran stood very still, watching the two men on the ground with an attention that had nothing to do with police procedure. Afterward, once the sheriff's cars had come and gone Karin found Xap by the dock.

"There's no one home in either of them," Kiran said. "I don't mean morally. I mean I can't find the light. No flicker of it. They function. They react. But I don't detect actual consciousness there."

Xap was clearly nonplussed, "The CCE manifested them... " He wisely said no more. Kiran said what he was thinking, "It's proving far stranger than we imagined."

"And Ray?"

Kiran's expression shifted, something almost like wonder. "Ray is different. I sense an element of something real in him. Not a placeholder. Consciousness."

Xap didn't need convincing. He'd guessed it himself, knowing Ray had tripped a running man in the dark without a wasted motion, then held a gun steady for twenty minutes without his hands shaking once.

Xap found him afterward, waving to the deputy.

"Ray," Xap said, "you got some vacation time coming?"

Ray shook his head. "No. I'm my own boss. Freelancer, since after the war."

Xap didn't hesitate. "I've got a good feeling about you. I want to hire you for a couple of weeks. Whatever you generally take home in a week, I'll triple it." He held out his hand.

Ray couldn't quite repress a grin. "At your service. Where to?"

"Nowhere, yet. But I need your discretion."

"You already have that."

Xap took out his wallet and counted three hundred dollars into Ray's hand—a small fortune in 1969. "Go home. Pack a bag for a couple of weeks. Take a room at the nearest lodging to this house, I'll cover it. Come back tomorrow around noon."

He and Julian were careful, in the hours that followed, not to say more than the moment required. The bands hadn't seen much, and there was no reason to frighten anyone with the fuller truth of what had almost happened, or the stranger truth underneath it.

Ray arrived the next day at noon exactly. Xap walked him down to the dock, away from the house, and they sat on the weathered boards with their feet almost touching the water.

"I went by the sheriff's office this morning," Ray said. "Those two are wanted in three states. Armed robbery, aggravated assault, car theft, a few other things besides."

Xap absorbed that in silence, thinking privately that even the criminal record had apparently been furnished complete, down to the paperwork—another detail the CCE hadn't skipped.

"Ray," he said after a moment, "you follow popular music at all?"

"Sure. Driven the best of 'em through this town. Frank, Dino, Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt. Anybody who's ever played Reno or Tahoe, I've seen, and talked to most of 'em."

"How about these rock groups. The Beatles. The Rolling Stones."

"Don't listen to the radio much in the cab. Disturbs the customers. Some of 'em like to talk, ask questions, you know?"

"Sure. But you never saw the Beatles. On television, anything like that?"

Ray looked faintly uncomfortable. "Well—on Ed Sullivan I saw Elvis, and I saw the Beatles, for about ten seconds. Couldn't hear a thing over all those screaming girls." He glanced sideways. "Why do you ask?"

"Because you're about to spend a couple of weeks with them." Xap smiled at Ray's expression. "These are good, hardworking guys from England who've been screamed at for years and robbed of anything like a normal life. I'm glad you don't know much about them—you'll see they're funny, regular, working-class fellas. One of them's a bit testy. Just be yourself around them. Helpful, in the background, unless they ask you for something." He paused. "I want to thank you again, for yesterday. If you hadn't done what you did—"

Ray didn't say anything. He gave a small nod, acknowledgment enough.

"Next week," Xap went on, "we're going to need three limousines. And you'll need to find us two more drivers. Men with your particular qualities."

Ray looked out at the lake, turning that over.

"I know a couple of fellas," he said. "Quiet men. Know how to keep their mouths shut and their eyes open."

"That's exactly what I'm looking for."

Ray nodded slowly, and for the first time since Xap had met him, something like genuine curiosity crossed his weathered face.

"Alright then," he said. "Let's go meet the Beatles."

To Be Continued...