I.

The rain in Los Angeles didn't wash things clean. It just made the grime slicker.

Jack Morrison sat in his Ford sedan outside a bar on Sunset Boulevard and watched the neon bleed into the wet pavement. Inside, he could hear the piano player working through a tune he'd played a hundred times before. Jack didn't go in. He was waiting for something. Or someone.

He had been waiting for three years, ever since he came back from Okinawa with a head full of holes and a mind full of tomorrow.

The doctors called it "war neurosis." They gave it a Latin name that Jack couldn't pronounce and didn't care about. They gave him pills that made his hands shake and dreams that made everything worse.

But Jack knew what it was. He had seen the future. Not a metaphor. Not a symbol. The actual future. Buildings that didn't exist yet. Cars that flew through the sky. Streets lit by a light that needed no wire.

He had seen it every night for six months in the hospital. And then, gradually, it stopped being dreams and started being memories.

II.

The first time Jack used his "gift," it was an accident.

He was sitting in a bar on Bunker Hill, drinking whiskey that tasted like regret, when a man at the next table mentioned a stock his company was about to announce. Jack knew, with the same certainty he used to know which way the wind was blowing on the beaches of Okinawa, that the stock would triple in a week.

He put five hundred dollars on it. He made fifteen hundred.

The second time, he put five thousand on it. He made fifteen thousand.

By the third time, Jack was sitting in a leather chair in an office on Wilshire Boulevard, looking at a man who introduced himself as Mr. Delaney.

"I've been watching you, Mr. Morrison," Delaney said. He was a small man with big eyes and a voice that didn't quite match the size of his office. "You have an unusual talent for knowing things before they happen."

Jack didn't answer. In the military, you learned when to talk and when to listen. This felt like a situation that required listening.

"I represent a group of investors," Delaney continued. "We're interested in a partnership. You provide the--insights. We provide the capital. We split the profits sixty-forty. Your sixty."

Jack looked at him. "Why?"

"Because five hundred thousand dollars doesn't appear out of thin air, Mr. Morrison. And you've made half a million in six months without lifting a finger." Delaney smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. "We know you're not ordinary. That's why we want you."

Jack thought about the pills. The dreams. The future city burning behind his eyelids every time he closed his eyes. He thought about the twenty-eight dollars in his bank account and the room above a laundromat that smelled like detergent and despair.

"Forty-five," he said.

Delaney laughed. "You're a negotiator. I like that. Forty-five it is."

III.

For eight months, Jack Morrison was the most valuable man in Los Angeles.

He knew which stocks would rise. Which buildings would sell. Which politicians would fall. He knew which speakeasies the Feds were planning to raid and which race tracks were rigged. He knew things before they happened, and the knowing came with a price.

Every vision cost him something.

The first time, it was a headache. A sharp pain behind his eyes that lasted for hours. The second time, he lost an hour of memory--he couldn't remember what he'd had for breakfast or who he'd spoken to. By the tenth time, he was losing days. Weeks.

He kept a notebook. In it, he wrote down everything he remembered before each vision, and everything he forgot after. The gaps grew larger. The handwriting grew shakier.

"Who are you?" he wrote on a Tuesday in March and didn't remember writing it.

He found the note on a Thursday and stared at it for a long time. He didn't remember writing it. He didn't remember Thursday. He only remembered the vision--a woman in a red coat standing in a rain-soaked alley on Sunset Boulevard, and a gun, and the sound of a body hitting the pavement.

He didn't know who the woman was. He didn't know why he remembered her. But he knew, with the terrible certainty that had become his curse, that she was going to die.

He drove to Sunset Boulevard that night. He parked across from the alley and waited. The rain fell in sheets. The neon flickered. And at 2:17 in the morning, she appeared.

The woman in the red coat.

She was beautiful in the way that beautiful things are in movies--the kind of beautiful that doesn't exist in real life. But this was real life. And real life was about to take her away.

Jack stepped out of the car. "Miss?"

She turned. Her eyes were dark and intelligent and full of something he couldn't name. Fear? Hope? Both?

"Can I help you?" she said.

"I--" Jack opened his mouth and found that he couldn't speak. He didn't know her name. He didn't know anything about her except that she was standing in this alley at 2:17 in the morning and that in three minutes, a man would come around the corner with a gun and she would be dead.

"Please," he said. "Come with me. Right now. Get in the car."

She studied him. The rain was soaking through her red coat. She shivered.

"Who are you?" she said.

The question hit Jack like a punch to the chest. He didn't know. He didn't know who he was anymore. He knew the future, but he didn't know the present. He knew tomorrow, but he had lost today.

"I'm someone who can save you," he said. "Please. Trust me."

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded.

They got in the car. Three minutes later, a man came around the corner with a gun. He stood in the empty alley for a moment, looked left and right, and walked away.

Jack drove. He drove through the rain through the streets of Los Angeles with a woman he didn't know sitting beside him, and he tried to remember her face.

But the face was already fading. The vision was already taking its toll. By the time they reached her apartment, he couldn't remember her name.

"Who--" he started, and then stopped.

"It's okay," she said. She was smiling. "I'll tell you. I'm Diana. Diana Voss."

"Diana," Jack repeated. The name meant nothing to him. But something in his chest meant something to her.

"Thank you," she said. "Whoever you are."

IV.

Jack Morrison never saw Diana Voss again.

He tried. He drove past her apartment three times that week. He left a note at the address he'd gotten from her. He sat in his car outside the bar where he'd first met her and waited for her to appear.

She never came.

And he couldn't blame her. He was a stranger. A man in a Ford sedan who pulled up in the rain and told her to get in. A man who saved her life and then forgot her name.

What he didn't know--what he would never know--was that Diana Voss had gone home that night and written his name in a notebook. Jack Morrison. Veteran. Survivor. The man who knew things before they happened.

She had gone to the newspaper the next day and written an article about him. Not about the stocks or the money or the visions. About the man. The man who carried the war inside him. The man who saw tomorrow and lost today.

The article was never published. The editor killed it, saying it was "too strange" and "too sad." But Diana kept a copy. And in that copy, she wrote his name.

Jack Morrison.

He never saw her again. But her name stayed with him, in some corner of his brain that the visions hadn't reached. A corner he visited in the quiet moments, when the rain was falling and the neon was bleeding into the pavement and he was sitting in his car, waiting for something he couldn't name.

One night, six months after the alley, Jack sat in his car outside an empty apartment building. The "For Rent" sign was up. The windows were bare. Diana Voss was gone.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph. It was blurred at the edges, taken by a amateur with shaky hands. A woman in a red coat standing in a rain-soaked alley. He didn't know who she was. He didn't know why he had the photograph.

But he knew, with the last remaining certainty he had left, that her name was Diana.

And that was enough. For one night, it was enough.

Jack started the car and drove into the rain. Behind him, Los Angeles slept. Ahead of him, tomorrow waited. And somewhere in the space between today and tomorrow, a woman in a red coat was walking down a street he would never find.