Read Online The Time Stone by Jeffrey Estrella - Free Book Online Page B

cranny in this place and leave no stone unturned
until you find them. We have to report to higher men soon.
Dismissed.” Bromley stood there thinking with his back to the door
and his hands on his hips, feet at attention as the Sergeants
saluted their commanding officer and walked out of the office
shutting the door behind them. “Who are they?” Bromley asked
himself thinking back to a similar encounter he experienced in his
youth as a rookie cop officer on the beat of the mid-1980s Chronix
Bay. “It couldn’t be.” He wondered.
    It was twenty six-years
ago and a different time back then. He was a cocky officer straight
out of the police academy walking down the street twirling his
night stick and whistling a happy tune, “ The Saints Go Marching In .” He still
had a mustache but less pronounced and no sun glasses during the
evening patrol. He stopped in his tracks at the sign of a hold up,
a robbery, in his area.
    “ Hey, give me all your
money,” said a masked man raising a pocket knife to an elderly
woman.
    “ Ooh no,” said the woman
shaking mercifully as she handed over her pocketbook.
    “ Hold it right there,”
yelled the young Bromley as he ran to them waiving his nightstick
then the masked man turned and ducked as Bromley approached
swinging his nightstick at the masked man’s face. The masked man
then laughed at Bromley and struck his left arm with his
switchblade.
    “ Ouch” Bromley saw his arm
bleeding through his blue uniform and he stepped back as the
perpetrator came at him to finish the job when all of a sudden a
flash of light blinded him for an instant, a yellowish blue haze,
shone above them and a large object fell out of the sky directly
above them landing on the masked man knocking him to the ground and
rendering him unconscious. Bromley and the elderly woman stood in a
grateful relief and awe as they realized that it was not an object
that fell from the sky and saved them but a man, a man who got up
as quickly as he landed and ran into the street as a Mack truck was
approaching. Bromley’s training in face identification and suspect
tracking helped him recognize the man as a tall above average build
Caucasian male with blue eyes and dark hair, a greyish shirt and
suit and a logo of some kind of gold etched onto it. The man
fiddled with his wrist as he ran and did not say a word but in a
matter of seconds as he was in the middle of the street looking at
them held his wrist squeezed something and vanished in a brilliant
flash of light of yellow and blue just like when he arrived and as
the Mack truck passed over the spot where he once stood. The pair
stood their ground in shock of this sight they both knew that they
would never forget.
    Bromley’s eyes were widened with
disbelief at what he just saw and now decades later there are more
wrinkles of age on his face while the same awe and wonder of
disbelief as to what happened that day remain with him and he
ponders that it always will be. In the present age he was wiser and
more seasoned at his job, his physical wounds had healed, but the
memory of that night was etched in him unhealed forever. He never
saw the man in light again or learned of the origin of the
mysterious vanishing man.
    Bromley stayed in touch with the old
woman who was the first crime victim he helped on the job and she
passed on a few years later taking her unanswered questions about
the mystery of the vanishing man to her grave. Bromley feared he
would be fated to do the same. He thought of it from time to time
but never told anyone because they might think he was crazy. The
bust did advance his career exponentially as he was given a heroes
medal by the police commissioner, had a spot in the hall of fame in
his precinct as well as a quick promotion to detective. He felt
honored but often ashamed taking credit for a collar that wouldn’t
have happened had it not been for some unbelievable intervention.
His catholic background made him think that it was a sign from