The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller (7 page)

"Spread what?" Vette said, sharper than the skyscrapers penetrating the clouds.

The men cocked their heads. Vette got louder. While they bickered, I reached into my pocket, pulled out a dull polymer marble, and dropped it on the toe of my shoe, muffling the noise. It rolled past the bouncers into the thumping club.

I took Vette's elbow. She yanked it away. I muffled my grin. "Come on, girl. Can't you tell when we're not wanted?"

One of the bouncers smirked behind his mirrored shades. "Oh, I
want
plenty. But nobody gets in without a search."

"So you can get your hands on this?" Vette cupped her jacketed chest.

Overdoing it. I took her elbow again. This time, I didn't let her shake me off. "We're done here. Let's go get you another drink."

She scowled at me, then let herself be led back up the stairs. Which didn't stop her from slurring obscenities at the amused bouncers blocking the doors. Up top, a kid in a purple leather jacket jostled me, but I pretended not to notice. Another bar down the street was nine-tenths empty. I took her inside.

"Wait, you're serious about the drink?" Vette said.

"Need somewhere close and quiet. The transmission range on that thing is just a few hundred yards."

The old man behind the bar asked to see her ID chip. She provided it, started to order a Primetime drink, realized her error, and pointed at a bottle of whiskey. "Two of those. On ice."

The bartender ginned up our drinks. I opened a tab and found a corner booth. I put my back to the wall and my tablet on my lap.

The screen showed a floor-level view of shiny shoes and knobby metal chair legs. Light strobed, shredding the darkness. I fitted my earbud, winced, and twiddled the pad into screening out the music, which sounded like two cars doing vicious battle. As the music faded, two voices picked up. Male. The tablet IDed one as Haltur.

"Where'd you get
that
thing?" Vette said.

"The mobile cam?" I scooped up the second man's voice and started a net search for matches. "Thought it might come in handy."

"...awful fast," the stranger was saying.

Haltur laughed. He didn't sound happy. "I work hard."

"Work? Stuff's supposed to be
fun
."

"Early retirement is more fun. Look, you got it, or you gonna play Saint Peter with me all night?"

"Saint Peter?" said the stranger. "I got the shit. That means you got to call me
God
."

"Can you even grow a beard?" Haltur said. "All right. Shit. Listen, God, I got a real big project ahead of me and I'm all out of jet fuel. If You could find time in Your busy schedule to tap me into some of what I need, I swear I'll run right home and sacrifice a fatted calf. My firstborn. Whatever You want."

The man laughed. "Six bills."

"God's a real gouger," Haltur muttered.

Under the table, two hands exchanged a plastic bag and a credit chip. Each hand retreated to its owner's respective pocket, then disappeared above the table.

"Gotta log." Haltur's feet shuffled as he stood and walked away.

I moved the camera, craning for a better view of the stranger. "Looked like a very average, everyday drug deal."

"It did." Vette sounded sad about it. She took a drink, glancing at the bartender, who'd been watching her all the while. The man winked. She snorted and turned back to me. "What now?"

I checked my search progress. "IDed the voice. Josuf Yount. We'll give it a few minutes to see if this sparks any other developments, then head home."

Down in the club, Yount continued to sit at his table, tapping his toes to the muted music. He made no calls. Sent no messages. No one came or went from his table. Oddly hermetic for a dealer, but I didn't make him to be from Primetime—he was too comfortable here. Still, there was something off about him. Maybe Vette was getting to me. Whatever the case, I rolled the mobicam next to his shoe. A needle projected from the cam's side and penetrated Yount's rubber tread. Finished, I ordered the cam to melt down, then cut the link.

Back at the hotel, Haltur had already dug back into his networks, posting up a storm. Whatever he was on had pumped him up with more wattage than the sun-bright theater marquee across the street.

With nothing more pressing to do, I plugged in a deep search for everything on Josuf Yount. While the tablet's bots crawled the infinite tangle of the web, I took stock of where we were at. Which wasn't far. No true suspects had emerged. We'd culled many partial suspects from Haltur's far-flung online tribes—a couple of stalker-types after the famous (in his circles) coder; all the women who'd been responding to him on a dating site (a private one, though its security hadn't lasted three minutes against our souped-up software); a handful of nearly-anonymous presences whose online footprint wouldn't fill a thimble. That was it.

But I wasn't worried. Yet. It was still relatively early in the game. We had four full days before the killing. That's how these things always go: a lot of nothing early on, the fuse crawling toward the keg, then
boom
. It all blows out at once.

Anyway, unless the murderer had pulled some serious tricks on the cops, we knew Haltur would be killed in his room. Worst-case, we'd break into his apartment and hide in his closet waiting for the assassin to come around.

The sun rose. Through the gap in Haltur's curtains, the lights burned on. Traffic flooded the streets. The lights stayed lit, the curtains motionless. No blue-uniformed food peddlers biked up to the stoop. Noon came and went. As twilight fought through a sifting, mist-like rain, I pulled up the latest records. Haltur's most recent post was timestamped 2:27 AM. Sixteen hours ago.

My gut knew we had a problem, but guts don't have words. Instead, it tightened, then soured and twisted.

"Suppose he's sleeping it off?" Vette said.

I pulled my head out of the files on Yount, who had turned out to be an interesting figure. Raised in one of Brownville's poorest neighborhoods, he'd excelled in science. By age 15, a pharma company called WesCo had sponsored his enrollment at Loramount University, one of the country's most exclusive. Before he'd been old enough to drink—the legal age here was twenty—he'd churned out a few dozen patents, advanced polymer refinements mostly, slimming their profile while beefing their strength, but he'd made a couple genuine breakthroughs, too.

Then, less than two weeks after earning his doctorate, he'd disappeared. Not just from the public sphere, but from the virtual one as well. Little wisps of him remained, a post here or a comment there linked to an account my bots had flagged as his, but that was it. Three years later, here he was, dealing drugs out of a basement Brownville nightclub.

All of which had nothing to do with Haltur and his epic nap. Before I could open my mouth to tell Vette it was probably nothing, but it might be time to ramp up into invasive spying of our partial suspects' networks, my tablet camera caught a siren wailing down the damp and grungy streets.

Through our tablets, we watched them load Korry Haltur's body into the wagon and take him away.

"
What?
" Vette said. "He wasn't supposed to die for another three-plus
days
."

"Maybe he's not dead," I said.

But I didn't believe it. My doubts were confirmed less than an hour later when a nurse leaked to his Bi0 network that former gaming legend and current code wizard Korry Haltur had died of a drug overdose.

"Did we do that?" Vette said, more quiet than I'd ever seen her. "Like, our coming back here, did it change the timeline?"

"No." Again, I didn't quite believe myself. But there was something else here. I could already sense the dark connections rising from the depths. "But someone else did."

"That's impossible. I just got out of theory, remember? Once we jumped in here, it became a closed loop for us. It has to play out as it currently stands. If someone else comes back from Primetime to a year before we got here, we won't notice those changes, because they won't actually step into this timestream until after what we're doing now has flowed back to them in the present."

"I know," I said, although this particular subject was one that always knocked my head sideways. "Someone got here before us."

"How? We left within thirty minutes of the Pods' alarm."

"And they got here faster."

"That makes zero sense." She laughed helplessly. "Why would they come back again? To undo what they just did?"

I tapped at my tablet. "In a manner of speaking."

"Well, Haltur's dead. Self-inflicted. Case closed."

I shook my head. "We have three more days before the Pod snatches us up. Grab your gear."

Vette was starting to look mad. "Where are we going?"

"To see the dealer."

That freshened her expression. "What are you up to?"

"Finishing your lead."

I stopped in the faded grandeur of the lobby to get out my pad. Yount was an off-grid ghost. A free radical in an age where everyone else was ensnared in the social net. I didn't even know where he lived. With just three days to track him down before we'd be snapped back to Primetime, I would normally have no chance to find him in the sprawling city.

Except I'd listened to my gut.

Last night at the club, the mobicam had injected his shoe with a beacon. The dumbest, simplest, most passive little device I had. On the chance Yount also had access to high-end security sanitation, I hadn't even activated it yet. I did now. My pad showed a grid of the city. A green dot lit up less than half a mile away. The system identified it as an apartment complex.

Cabs whooshed past, but I wanted a few minutes to think. I started down the damp sidewalk. "Field test. How do we convince a wunderkind-turned-hermit to speak to us?"

Vette bit her lip. "The Two Classic Means: threats or temptation."

"Let's start with temptation."

"I don't know anything about him."

I gave her the rundown: child prodigy, education sponsored by a major corp, a rising star that suddenly went dark. "So?"

She shrugged. "Could say we're from WesCo."

"What if they had a falling out? That's why he went hermit?"

"He sells drugs. We pose as buyers."

"Pretty thin," I said. "He'll shrug us off."

Her glare was as bright as the neon signs. "You've got better?"

"Nope."

She smiled, satisfied. A siren yowled, its cry echoing down the city's canyons. As we walked east, the upscale glass and steel structures fled in panic, replaced first by quaint, baroque rises, then apartments too shabby and beige to have any recognizable style whatsoever. Shells to prevent yourself from dying of the cold, that's all. And the dot leading me to Yount was within one.

People littered the stoops and sidewalks. Few walked; most were just
there
, staring into the night, curled up under cardboard and three coats, sitting around smoking those sweet-smelling cigarettes, murmuring to each other, eyes glinting from deep hoods. We don't have much of what are known as poor people in Primetime. Seeing them in other worlds is always a nudge to the ribs.

"Why do they just leave these people lying around?" Vette said, having similar thoughts. "Why would anyone want to come here?"

"Same reason we do," I said. "Drugs."

We reached the building indicated by my dot, a grimy walkup. Yount's name wasn't on the buzzers, but my little beacon indicated which apartment was his. I buzzed up.

Seconds walked past and died. I reached for the buzzer. Before I could press it again, Yount's voice came through the intercom. "Yeah."

"Looking to buy," I said.

"This look like a department store?"

"We're friends of Korry's."

"Yeah?" Yount said. "What's your name?"

"It matter?"

"Know what, it doesn't. I wouldn't sell if you told me you were buddies with Kris Kringle."

The line went dead. Vette shuffled her feet. I buzzed again, holding the button for three seconds.

"Get off my doorstep before I take you off it in bags," Yount said.

"Korry Haltur," I gambled. "He's dead."

A long pause. "You police?"

"Independent."

Another pause. The light on the lock switched to open. I pushed through, Vette on my heels. The cramped foyer smelled like mildew and urine. The stairs creaked beneath me. Sloppy spraypaint fuzzed the walls. Behind me, Vette looked equal amounts compelled and disgusted.

We reached Yount's floor. He opened the door before I could knock. He was small and smart-eyed and his skin seemed to be drawn too tight over his face, pronouncing his nose and teeth. His apartment smelled like spices and cooking oil. Paper books weighed down every available surface. Besides a shiny stereo and some less-shiny kitchen appliances, there were no identifiable electronics. The blinds were shut. A single bare overhead light interrupted the darkness.

He stood in the door, blocking the way in. "What happened?"

"We shouldn't talk out here." I gestured down the hall. "Don't know who's got ears."

Yount snorted. "Who's gonna bug this termite mound?"

"Given what happened? Nobody good."

His face went guarded. He swore and stepped back. I smiled like you would at a funeral. He closed the door behind us. I got out my wand and waved it around the apartment, checking for bugs. It wasn't just for show.

Yount watched me, sharp eyes trying to place my look, my bearing. "You Fed?"

"We're not law." I finished my sweep, collapsed my wand, and returned it to my pocket. "Not any you need to worry about."

"So Korry's dead."

I fixed my eyes on his. "Overdose."

He paled. Unless he had glandular implants, that wasn't a thing a man faked easy. "He ODed?"

"Last night. Right after he saw you."

Yount shook his head, dazed. He reached out behind him into empty space. "Why are you here?"

"Korry was in danger. We were looking out for him."

"Bullshit."

"You fed him the dose. It was hot. The question is why."

His face grew very careful. He glanced at Vette, then my hands. "Where does this go?"