They found themselves rolling across a street, tumbling to a stop when they finally hit a sidewalk. The Middleman pulled himself up and extended a hand to help up Wendy. They looked around the bustling city sidewalk they found themselves on.
"So now where are we?" Wendy she questioned as she got back to her feet. The Middleman helped dust her off as he replied,
"The better question is, 'when' are…" he was quickly cut off by Wendy smacking away his helpful hand and sticking a pointed finger at his face,
"Don't you dare. That is the lamest time-travel joke there is." His squared face seemed concerned,
"That is no joke, Dubby. When dealing with the complexities of time travel, knowing one's current year is of upmost importance." He lectured his young student. All he got in return was a typical Wendy Watson eye roll. The two then took a keener interest in their surroundings, "We appear to be in the 1920s." the Middleman deduced as he noted the fact Wendy was now dressed as a typical young flapper, with a matching dull purple dress and hat, while he was now clad in a black zoot suit with accompanying fedora. She continued the job of dusting herself off that the Middleman had started.
"Well, at least we can't have another nuke dropped on us."
"Don't become complacent, Dubby. There is still plenty of danger here, especially when we're dealing with…"
"… a rogue time-traveler." She finished his sentence in an annoyed tone, "I know. I know." The Middleman huffed a tight heave and then turned to his watch,
"Ida. Do you copy?" he started his verbal hails again. This caused Wendy to realize she hadn't called Tyler yet today. She pulled out her phone from the small cloth purse. She clicked his name on the contact list and held the phone to her ear. Even if the last time they spoke was a fight, she could use an update from him to bring some perspective into her turbulent day. She was greeted not with the sound of a ringing phone, but the sharp beep of a 'no signal' tone. Taking a break from his attempts, Wendy's boss saw her trying to call out. "1920s Wendy, there are no cell towers yet." She sighed in anger, stuffing the phone into her purse.
"Then how do you think you can call Ida?" she asked in opposition. He dropped the watch to reply properly,
"The Middle-Watch is a quantum entanglement communicator. We always have a line back to the Middle HQ as long as you have the watch." He then tried one final hail for Ida that went expectedly unanswered. "Mines of Solomon." He exclaimed in disappointment, "Well, we still have a criminal to catch."
….
During the Middlemen's time in the Prohibition Era, Ida finally rebooted back to consciousness on the floor of the Middle HQ. Running a hand through her frizzled hair she picked herself off the floor, she walked over to the HAYDAR. The silver ball was emitting puffs of smoke and exposed wires hung from opened panels.
"Ugh, they don't pay me enough." She griped to herself as she started repairing the malfunctioning equipment. Her gaze took a glance at the Interrodroid standing in the corner with that blank stare. "Well, we don't have all day. Grab a broom. Clean up this mess." She ordered it around with an inconsolable voice.
…
The two Middlemen wandered into a nearby storefront to get off the busy streets full of hurried people. It turned out they found themselves in a soda shop. There was a free spot at the bar where they could rest their elbows. The soda jerk approached the two waiting for their orders, the Middleman went first,
"Hey there daddy-o, real swell joint you've got here." His attempt to speak the lingo caused Wendy to place a palm on her face, "I'd really enjoy a nice glass of cow squirt." The barman eyed the two patrons for a moment, then spoke in a grumbly tone,
"Alright, you's two fallow me." He came out from behind the bar and led them to a door near the back with a sign stating, "Janitorial supplies". After opening the door, the three stood in a room larger than most janitor closets, even if it was full of mops and metal pails. The barman rolled a barrel aside and lifted the hatch in the floor it exposed. He motioned his hand towards the descending ladder, "Haff a good time." Wendy shot a worried stare at the Middleman that he reciprocated, but both quickly decided to enter the dark hole to avoid suspicion. Once they both hit the bottom, the soda jerk closed the hatch and they listened as the barrel was rolled back on top of it. The two walked across the only available doorway where they found themselves in a lantern-lit room. Tables scattered the floor and another barman stood behind a tall oak counter. All of the patrons seemed to be imbibing spirits.
"Ghosts of Hamlet! We're in a speak-easy, Dubby." She was already leaving the side of her boss as this realization donned on him.
"Cool." Was her one word reply. She went up to the bar and asked the man for a shot of whiskey. As the man poured out the small shot from an unlabeled glass bottle, the Middleman bolted to the side of his trainee.
"Dubby, we are still on a mission. The fate of time doesn't have 'time' for this." Wendy daintily took the shot between her thumb and pointer finger.
"How often can you say 'I drank in a real speak-easy'?" she posed the question before ingesting the burning liquor, but her boss seemed none the more swayed.
"Alcohol impairs judgement, Dubby. And gosh darned it, I need you on your best game for this assignment." Unfortunately the bartender happened to overhear the Middleman's comments.
"Whoa, you some kinda government spook?" he said in a decibel loud enough to be heard by the drinkers in the bar. A dead silence fell across the room as they awaited an answer. The Middleman hesitated for a second, Wendy's face that like of a deer in the headlights,
"Ah, no. He meant 'assignment' as in, we're on a job, to…. taste all the local liquors for a judging contest." She half-babbled out as a knee jerk answer.
"Yeah, my cool cat. We are searching for the best rotgut around." The Middleman finally input with cheesy slang. These answers didn't appease the suspicious man, nor the skeptical room. Not taking his eyes off the two in question, the whiskey slinger reached for a bottle under the counter and poured a shot on the bar. He pushed the overflowing glass towards the striped sleeve of the Middleman's zoot suit.
"Go ahead, give it a try then." This was issued more as a dare, less than a request. The Middleman picked up the glass in his hand and looked at it as if he could think it out of existence. All the time, the barman's brow furrowed farther and a cold sweat beaded on Wendy's smooth face. Before the shot glass touched his stiff upper lip a new patron entered the illegal bar. He quickly identified the two people under scrutiny and uttered a quick angry yell.
"Hey, it's you!" this caused the whole room to erupt into a fury with shouts and tables being overturned.
"They're revenuers! Get them!" The duo focused on the man who shouted at them and followed him out of the bar while dodging flying bottles and stray punches. They made it to the passage and chased the mysterious man up the ladder to the soda shop. The three of them burst across the otherwise peaceful restaurant. Wendy reached the stranger first and tackled him out of the door and onto the hard sidewalk outside. Her forearm pinning the man's head to the ground, she hollered to her boss as he caught up,
"Hey, I've got him." But as the Middleman stood next to her prone figure, he slowly raised his hands.
"We've got bigger problems, Dubby." He warned her from his position. She looked up from the target to see three men lording over her. One tugging on a big cigar, the other two leveling Thompson machine guns at them.
"Oh phooey." She wittily remarked. The middle figure dropped his cigar to the sidewalk, nearly singeing the stranger's cheek.
"Toss'em in the car boys." The two men prodded the Middleman into a nearby Ford Model A, then returned to pick Wendy and her target off the ground. All three were stuffed into the cramped back seat.
"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." Wendy muttered to herself. The car ride remained silent for the rest of the way. The driver finally pulled off the road next to an alley. With more prodding from the barrel of the Tommy guns, the three found themselves marching down the alley until they were nice and out of sight. Before Wendy, the Middleman, and the stranger knew it their hands were bound behind them with a length of rope tied to an exterior pipe. The cigar man had started smoking a new stogie before he addressed his captives,
"So, why did I happen to find you three rushing from the boss' establishment after I hear shouts of 'government spooks'?" he asked them sent a thick puff of smoke into the Middleman's face. The straight-shooting hero coughed horribly as the sickly smoke entered his lungs. "That could give a fella the wrong idea about you folks." This time he moved to send the puff of smoke into the stranger's face, "The boss usually wants me to question squares like you? Gathering intel about the enemy, he calls it, but," he took another long puff on the stogie and the smoke billowed out of his nose, "I'm in a bit of a hurry today." He turned to his two goons, "Waste'em boys." They looked at their boss,
"Duh, what about the girl, boss?" he looked back at Wendy, scanning up and down her figure with a sickly grin,
"I'll let you boys decide." He answered them as he headed back to wait at the Model A. As the two goons looked dumbfounded at each other, Wendy wriggled her hands around inside the rope knots until she could access her Middle-Watch.
"Hey, big goomba." She said in a sweet voice, one of the hired thugs looked at her, "Yeah, you come here." The goon complied and the Middleman just looked at her with an odd mix of worry and curiosity. "I do you a favor and then maybe one day, and that day may never come, I'll call upon you to do to a service," she clicked the laser 'on' on her Middle-Watch and it made quick work of the rope. And it was just quick enough as the mobster had come into range. Her arms flew out in front of her, sending a karate chop into his neck and a leg sweep dropped him onto his face unconscious, his gun sending out a messy flurry of inaccurate bullets. The second soldato began to raise his gun, but with the push of a button a small tazer probe launched from Wendy's watch and into his forehead. The jolt of electric hunched him over in pain. "Until that day, accept this as a gift." She quipped as she kicked him in his family jewels. With the two goons dispatched, she went to untie her boss. They huddled around the third hostage, but didn't undo his restraints. The Middleman ran his scanner over the stranger, it began to whiz like crazy.
"Well, well. Dubby, this is our no-good chrono-bandit right here." She looked at the rather portly man with a sneer,
"Is that so?" she bit her lip devilishly, "I think we owe him for dropping a nuke on us." This caused the man to struggle, his orange whiskers shaking on his face as if they had a mind their own. The Middleman kept his face stern as he responded,
"First, I'd like to know a name and a reason?" he have the sweaty man a chance to speak, and he took the opportunity heartily,
"I'm Jasper Caldwell the 7th. I've been trying to right some wrongs." This caused an eyebrow to raise itself on the Middleman's stone mug. "My family has had nothing but bad luck for generations, and I was finally presented with a way to fix it."
"Explain bad luck?" Wendy demanded as she straightened up her flapper hat, it had become offset during her scuffle. Caldwell took a deep breath before expanding on the topic.
"Whenever a Caldwell was on the verge of success fate would intervene and send us plummeting back to the bottom." He explained in his voice much more nasally than would be expected from a hefty man.
"So, you tried to set a nuke off to what erase your problems?"
"My father, Jasper Caldwell the 6th was a promising scientist at Area 51 until someone accused him of being a Communist during the test of that atomic bomb. Then he got demoted to gardener. With no money, he couldn't afford to send me to college. So, I made the bomb go off early." He said this with great conviction, the Middleman stayed quiet, silently assessing all that was happening, so Wendy continued the investigation,
"Okay, now why are we here in the Roaring 20s?" He fidgeted some more, fighting to get free but seemed unsuccessful.
"My great grandfather, Jasper Caldwell,"
"The 4th?" Wendy guessed.
"Yes. He was the best rumrunner in the state, but he got taken care off by some mobsters when he'd visit that speak-easy later tonight." After this explanation, the Middleman finally spoke up.
"Unfortunately, the wheels of justice must turn just as the wheels of time do. We're taking you back to our correct time period." He started to approach the man, but Jasper busted out from his restraints and ran away. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal an arm bracer glowing with scientific delight. He punched a few of the buttons as the Middlemen chased him down the alley. Before they could catch him, he whizzed away in a flash of blue light. Their momentum stopped when they bumped into wise guy's Model A. He stuck his head out the window as the two heroes tinkered with their WATCH belts.
"Five shots? Five shots and you're still alive!" he exclaimed while watching them disappear into a crack of white light.
