of one’s favorite diner, and my top pick was, by far, Dane’s Delicious Dishes. It was, quite honestly, like a second home to me. I started the day there, it’s where I took my lunch break, and it was one of the few places that stayed open after my shift ended. You can work long days as a cop, days I’m usually not too fond of, because they tend to mean something bad happened and I’ve got to write a report on it. Particularly, I didn’t like winding up in a shoot out for pulling someone over.

As I heard the door at the other end of the diner creak open, my eyes slowly drew off of my morning pancakes and over to the sound. The eyes of a heavily scarred man scanned the area slowly until he finally spotted me. He breathed a sigh of relief and quickly made his way to my table as I gave him a blank stare. I didn’t know him, how’d he know me?

“Parker Daggett?” He inquired. Okay, better question, how’d he know me by name? The way he asked didn’t even imply he wasn’t sure. It was like he was asking in the off chance he was wrong, which he was confident he wasn’t.

“…Yeah…” I eventually answered, “I’m sorry, have me met?”

The man ran his callused hand through his dark brown hair awkwardly before responding. “Well, yes and no…” He told me, trying to find the best words to explain the situation with. “Yes,” He indicated to himself, “And no,” he finished, motioning to me.

I looked at him like he was high. “How does only one of us meet each other?” I demanded, “Are you stalking me or something?”

“You haven’t met me yet.”

“You’re making one hell of a first impression.” I told him straight up. “What exactly are you on?”

A heavy sigh escaped the man’s mouth and he placed both hands on my table. “You know how whenever someone shows someone else a photo they say, ‘this is a picture of me when I was younger’?”

“Yeah.”

“Well uhh,” The man paused momentarily before sitting down across from me, pulling out his wallet in the process.

“If I see drugs, I’m arresting you here and now.”

He looked up at me oddly as he drew out a photo from one of the many pockets in his wallet. After placing it face down on the table, he slid it across. “This is a picture of you when you’re older.”

I almost didn’t pick the thing up, but I was too confused, and too thrown off to just leave it where it lied. I took my perplexed gaze off the man, and glanced downward as my fingers gradually lifted the edge of the photo. It started off normal enough. The top of a Christmas tree was the first thing my eyes met. There was a massive star on the very top if it and lights rotated all around. It was void of ointments, but I never threw them on my tree anyway. Feeling that it may have just been an ordinarily picture, I suddenly flipped it over. It was a good thing that my mouth wasn’t full, because if it was, mushy pancake bits would have scattered all over the table.

“Where the hell did you get this!?” I demanded as I pressed my finger firmly on the face of the man in the photo. The man holding the little girl, and the man on whose shoulder a woman was resting her head. The reason for my sudden outburst was because the man in question had my eyes, brow, hair color, jaw, smile, ears, and everything else! The only difference was that he looked about fifteen years older than me, and if there was any question about that, the date marked at the bottom read ‘December 25, 2028’. It was a fake, but it was a pretty damn good one. By a lot. At least twice over. “Because it isn’t funny, and in fact, it’s pretty creepy.”

“You sent it to me.” His words hit me as hard as I wanted to hit him. He was obviously lying, but he sounded so sure about it…

“…And I sent you this because…?” I questioned, crossing my hands.

“We were partners at the time,” It was growing clear that he had something specific to discuss and was growing uncomfortable with all my questions. “And your wife loved to write Christmas cards.”

“So, just to be clear, you want me to believe that your doctored picture was sent by my supposed wife and that you’re from the future.” I wasn’t sold by a long shot.

“Daggett, please,” He urged me; “You must believe me! Peters won’t trust anyone else!”

“That bastard!” I laughed, “I should’ve known he’d get some payback on me! Pretty elaborate too, a bit over kill for a Scream-In-A-Box though.”

“Listen to me! There’s a serial killer out there and he’s getting information from someone on the Force!” He harshly whispered as he suddenly leaned forward, “We don’t know who it is, and Peters is the only one with any kind of information, but he refuses to even tell me! He won’t talk to anyone BUT you!”

“And why is that?” I questioned, still grinning by how quickly I figured out what was going on, and how close I was to catching the man in a lie that not even he could get himself out of.

There was a long silence, a silence I used to eat some of my pancakes, before he spoke again. “Because,” He began solemnly. I quickly swallowed what I had in my mouth. He was good at coming up with things that would make me spew it all out. “You retired five years prior to it starting…”

Good thing I did. “What!? So now I’m retired too!” I chuckled, “Damn! Your story must be costing Peters a fortune! Let’s see…” I quickly did some math in my head, “I’ve been a cop for two years, the picture’s dated sixteen years from now, so that’s eighteen, minus five is thirteen. Thirteen years?” I laughed again, that was just ridiculous. It was my dream to be a cop, there was no way I’d give it up so soon.

“No, it was eighteen,” The man corrected, “The picture’s five years old. It’s the last thing you sent before you and your family left the county.”

“So now you’re over two decades from the future, and I’m no longer living in America?” I inquired with a smirk. “What exactly sent me packing?”

It was immediately evident it was not something the man wanted to speak of, but I made it clearer that he had to. “The case you were working on.” He finally answered after a heavy sigh. “A little girl was kidnapped when she was only seven and raped-” My smirk immediately vanished. “-Repeatedly for eight years.” My eyes suddenly narrowed into a deep glare. He had stopped being funny with his bizarre cycle of lies. “You never stopped looking for her, and when you found her, she looked so broken, so empty, so filled with misery that it broke your heart. You were expecting to see her overjoyed at her rescue, but as long as you saw her, she never stopped crying. A constant steam of tears flowed from her eyes, and as you led her captor outside in cuffs, she raced up to you and grabbed your pistol from its holster. You turned around just in time to see her pull the trigger with the gun pressed firmly against her jaw, but barely too late to stop it. She died instantly and fell lifeless into your arms. You quit the next day, and bought a boat by the end of the week. You were gone in two more.”

“Leave.” I ordered. I was officially pissed off. “Now.”

“What can I say to make you believe me?” The man asked desperately. He was a good actor, it almost seemed like there may have been a hint of truth to what he was saying. “Do have to see how I got here?” He immediately pulled up his sleeve and revealed some sort of high tech watch. It looked like it had a compact computer monitor on it and its numbers were constantly changing. ‘2/7/2012 07:49:26:96’. Well, only the last two were changing, but they were easily recognizable as the date and time.

“A nice watch doesn’t help your story much.” I growled, “Like time travel’s twenty-three years away.”

“It isn’t…” The man mumbled after a moment, “It’s a long story, but it was accentually a gift.”

“You already told me a long story.” I stated, poking my food. “And now my pancakes are cold. Tell you what; if you really want me to believe a grain of what you told me, tell me something personal that I wouldn’t have told anyone. Something that wouldn’t be in my file, and then maybe I’ll consider what you’re saying.”

The man didn’t even hesitate, “You abandoned your friends in a town none of them were familiar with at your twenty-first birthday for a one night stand. You took the party bus to do it and ended up getting an STD from the encounter.”

“You said Peters’ in danger, right?”

He finally had my full attention, and for the first time he breathed a sigh of relief. “Everyone is until we find the murderer,” He answered, “and who’s leaking the information to him.”

“So…what do I have to do?”

“Follow me,” The man told me, standing to his feet. “We have to talk to Peters, but we have to talk to him in the present.” I gave him an odd look and he corrected himself, “My present, or else he’ll look at us like you looked at me.”

“That sounds about right,” I nodded, as I counted the cash for my bill and left it on the table. I quickly grabbed my pancakes and followed the man as he led me outside. “I’ve got one last question before we go,” I told him as he pushed the door open.

“Oh, right, sorry.” He apologized, “I’m Jason Jung, I was your partner before you quit.”

“…Not what I was going to ask,” I admitted, “What I want to know is why now? If there’s eighteen years before I retire, why when I’ve only been a cop for a couple? I’m only 24, and I’m not even a detective yet. Why not get me when I have more experience?”

“Uhhhh…” Jason held the sound for a few seconds as he made his way to my car. “I’ve gone through you file several times, and this is the only time that you, uhhh, getting injured…won’t change the future.”

“Wait what?” I demanded, unlocking the door, “Why is that?”

“You… you get run over and hospitalized-”

“WHAT!?”

“-during your evening jog.” After stepping into the passenger seat, he added, “Sorry to be the bringer of bad news. Are you ready to go?”

“I’m close enough,” I grumbled, aggravated over getting run down later today. “I free run in my spare time, how do I miss car?”

“For the record, it was truck,” My mouth gaped. “Alight, I just have to punch a few buttons on my watch and it’ll take us to my time. Make sure you grab it when I say to.” I nodded and Jason began tapping buttons on the side of his watch, making all kinds of menus glow on the screen. “One last thing,” He grimly informed me halfway though, “This is going to hurt.”

“More than getting hit by a truck?” I joked.

He never told me. “…NOW!” Jason suddenly bellowed. Instinctively, I swung my hand on his watch and immediately felt a tingling sensation surge throughout my body. In the following seconds, I got the answer to my question. The colossal agony that the shredding of molecules creates is completely indescribable.

It did in fact, hurt more than getting hit by a truck.[/spoiler]


As quiet as Jung was talking, his voice boomed in my throbbing head. I felt like I was literally burning in hell (alright, I don’t have that reference point, but if I did, it’d be pretty accurate) and every noise I heard was amplified as if it was blasted into a megaphone. “I’m awake,” I managed to grumble shakily. “Where are we?”

“Peters’ house, or driveway rather,” I was informed, “He went into the private sector a few years ago, but he’s still a good detective. Do you want some painkillers before we go inside?”

I was about to say ‘no’, but before I could get the word out, I heard a door outside the car slam. Or maybe it just closed, but either way in my excessively sensitive ears, it sounded like it was a slam. Curious as to what the sound was, if not to see whose fault it was, I pulled up the recliner in Jung’s passenger seat. As my view became more than the roof of a car that had changed little as the years passed, I saw an obese man rushing off of his porch with a cigar in one hand and sandwich in the other. If I had to guess, I’d say he wasn’t expecting to work today. His undid tie and unbuttoned suit rippled in the light breeze, and his shirt was neither tucked in nor ironed. The man was clearly angered by the fact that Jung was blocking his own car from getting out of the driveway, and somehow his thick mustache seemed to emphasize his scowl. Only after Jung motioned for him to get in his car did he finally join us inside.

“Corner of 8 Mile and Mac,” He stated flatly, slamming the door behind him, causing me to cringe in pain. “He’s claimed another victim.” Jung didn’t need to hear anything else for him to shift the car into reverse and peel out of the driveway. As much as I hate having to use medicine, I began considering it when he activated the sirens on the top of his cruiser. “What’s with the kid?”

“You don’t recognize him?” Jung asked as he switched to drive and stomped on the accelerator. “You told me he was the only one you’d talk to.”

“That’s Peters!?” The Peters I remembered looked like a champion bodybuilder, if such a thing existed. In my time, he was also clean shaven and didn’t have a massive bald spot covering half of his hairline.

“That’s Daggett!? What the hell Jung!?”

“If I took him from any other time, an injury would risk-”

“Enough with your future bullshit! In case you haven’t noticed, it’s something that needs to change!”

“Yell quieter!” I bellowed to them both, “My brain’s pounding against my skull, and you’re making matters worse!”

After a moment of silence, Peters picked up exactly where he left off. “Has he even had a real case!? I was expecting to talk to him from NOW! When he’s actually a damn good detective!”

“Well this is the best I can do, so you’ll have to settle. Besides, now it can’t be any more obvious that he isn’t the inside man.”

I wasn’t a big fan of the idea of Peters having to settle for me

Very nice Crank, it took me awhile to realize you were our Crank from the FA. I was wondering why you wrote so well~!

I had a little bit of confusion when Jason was explaining Parker's past/future/whatever it was. It might have been due to my lack of sleep then and the fact that it was like 3 in the morning, but other than that it was a very good piece you've written here.