This pretty well threw me. I mean, what was I supposed to say? What would you have said. All I could manage was a sort of gulping sound. Not my best moment.

"Alex," Johnny Boy said quietly, "you have to trust me. And you must trust that, above all, I'll keep you safe. After all...no one's got more to lose than me if anything happened to you. You're my own bloodline!"

My head started going in that endless circle of temporal logic: What if you could go back in time and kill your own grandmother....then you'd never have been born in order to do that, so presumably she'd live and then, of course you would be alive to do it.....but I stopped myself before I got too deep.

"Alex," he said again. "I can't do anything until I know you believe me. You have to at least try."

"Okay, let's say I'll try, for the sake of argument," I offered, rubbing my temples hard against the headache I knew was coming. "But I think it's gonna take something stronger than coffee for me to hear any more of this. Let's get out of here."

"Lead on," he said.

It didn't take long to find the kind of bar I knew would serve me. We sat at a table near the back and the place was almost empty at that time of day. I ordered a beer and he got another coffee, which was just as well because my cash reserves were just about depleted. 

Even after the first long swallow, I started to feel a bit more like myself again.

"So," I began, "I suppose there are others like you around here? From the future?"

"At the moment there's only three that I know of. Myself and those two men you saw. Time travel isn't as common as you might think in my time. We have the technology, but there are temporal laws.I had to break about three of them to get here. Those men you saw? They're TBA - temporal balance agents."

My head started to hurt again.

"And what exactly do these agents want with me?" I asked, a bit more harshly, maybe, than I meant to. "What the hell kind of temporal laws could I have broken?"

"Alex, it wasn't you, it was me," he began. "Okay, how do I say this... "

And that's when he told me that he was wanted for more than just temporal crime in his own time. He was wanted for murder. Yeah, that's right, readers. Good ol' Johnny Boy wasn't the innocent everybody thought he was. The guy had killed a man. His own history professor!

He swore it had been an accident.

"It  started out as a bet," he said. "Who could trace their bloodline back the farthest. We gave ourselves two months and had to have the research and documentation to prove it. A few weeks into it, I found you and was ready to cash in early."

"So why'd you kill him?" I interrupted.

"It was an accident, I swear it," Johnny Boy said again. "It was the way I found you. I had to hack into some pretty high security level stuff..he threatened to turn me in on it. He tried to get my data chip...there was a struggle...I'd have been thrown out of the university, at the very least...it was only a bet!" He stopped then, and stared into his coffee cup.

"I still don't see what this has to do with me. What the hell did I do?"

"Alex, in my time there hasn't been a murder -- at least not a proven murder -- in over 28 years. The punishment for murder is worse than death. It's total eradication of the bloodline." He looked me straight on with those turquoise eyes. "They don't kill me. They wouldn't dirty their hands with that. They go back and kill the bloodline. Then the problem goes away."

I immediately wished that I'd had the money for another beer at this point.

"Well why me?" I asked at last. "I mean will they go after my father? My Grandmother? Her Grandmother? I don't see how protecting me can do either of us any good."

"No, it's you, Alex. It's the thing with the atoms. We match. It's hard to explain, but that's all part of what I found when I hacked into the system. You and I are uniquely connected, Alex. If they disposed of your father, there is still a chance that I might be born on an offshoot line...your great Aunt Susie, say...but if they eradicate you, well I go away."

"And what happens to the guy you killed?" I asked, traces of temporal circles creeping back into my aching head.

"He goes back to his wife and kids and his bloodline continues as it should have."

"So what the hell do we do?" I asked.

"I have a plan," Johnny Boy said, a trace of a smile curling his lips. "I wouldn't have come here without one."

My only hope, readers, was that Johnny Boy's plan was going to work. But, if any of this was true, and we all know how believable Johnny Boy was,  he didn't seem like the luckiest guy in the timeline.