The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller (3 page)

Stephen wasn't supposed to go missing for three more days, but my presence could have changed things. I drove to the library and was browsing the shelves by the window in time for the afternoon bell. He walked by himself to the bus and sat near the front. I waited for it to pull away, then walked past the staff lot to make sure the black Lexus was there. Its location confirmed, I drove to the entrance to the trailer park and pulled into a spot outside a video store.

Amsel cruised home less than an hour later. Thirty minutes after that, a bald clerk came out of the video store to tell me it was time to move on. I nodded agreeably and drove out.

I'd put off the gun for too long anyway. It's a bit convoluted, but it's just not a great idea to jump into a strange place with an unlicensed weapon. The Pods are good enough to spit you out somewhere where the chances of being seen mid-transfer are virtually zero, but they don't have anywhere near the data to account for who you might run into when you're walking out of the woods or the hills in the middle of the night.

Better to play it safe. Send the gun to another spot. Isolated, but nearby. Go pick it up once you've got the lay of the land. At least a damn car.

In just a couple of weeks, of course, all these precautions would be flung far out the window. At the time, however, it was just another job. I wasn't above bending the rules, but I always played by the book until that was no longer an option.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. At that moment, I figured Stephen should be safe for the time being. I went to the motel to sleep off the rest of the day, then grabbed the location from my laptop. Hills south of town. Nothing there but a few powerlines and a couple of farms. We weren't yet in the GPS era and my directions were essentially a treasure map: the site Xed onto an old satellite photo of the area.

The road climbed into the hills. The last of the houses stopped, replaced by dead land tinted bone white by the moon. Short basalt bluffs overlooked the road. The city spread out behind me, ten thousand points of light clustered around the wide and endless river. The pavement ended and I slowed to navigate the bumpy dirt road. After half a mile, I eased onto the narrow shoulder and killed my lights.

I took a printout of the map with me into the yellow field. A hundred yards in, I almost fell headlong into a natural ditch creasing the dirt. I found a slope gentle enough to climb down, dirt crumbling around my shoes, then followed the ditch to two big, jagged rocks. I started digging.

The gun was as era-appropriate as my clothes. Nothing fun, nothing caseless or explosive. Just a simple, black, antique pistol. I checked the safety and the magazines and brought it back to the car.

Wind shifted the grass. A red beacon stood on a high hill to the south, but besides that, I was alone in a peopleless place. It could have been ten thousand years in the past or ten thousand more into an apocalyptic future. Something rustled in the weeds. I jumped in the car and drove back to the trailer park.

The next day was a Saturday. No school. The Jasos drove to the park and then drove home. I went to stake out the trailer park. I had barely pulled into the laundromat when a big white van lumbered onto the road.

I followed it up to the main street. Amsel coasted to a stop at the light and made a slow right turn. He drove down the righthand lane, smaller cars passing on the left. I had to travel well below the speed limit to stay behind him. I didn't like this. It had the feeling of a trap, the cold contempt a man like Amsel feels for those who presume to hunt him. I half expected him to pull off the road and stay there, as if he had no better way to spend a weekend than sitting in his car, or to drive in aimless circles until I could have no doubts he knew, or to rumble up into the bare hills, hop down from the driver's seat, engine still running, walk into the yellow grass, and disappear.

What he did was far worse. A half mile past the park, he headed left into winding residential streets, pulled up in front of a pretty blue house, opened the garage and the front door, and began unloading boxes from the van.

I felt as if I were being dissolved. My case was dead. Obliterated. Leonard Amsel was simply new in town. He'd probably gotten the job before he had a home. Rented a trailer until he found the right house. If the boxes were full of scalpels and ropes and garbage bags, sure, it could still be him, but otherwise, there was no way the killer would bother moving into a new home less than 72 hours before he planned to leave this world.

Two options. One, Amsel was the killer, but he wouldn't know it until Monday when he saw Stephen Jaso and the dark gears of his mind clicked into place; the crime wasn't premeditated, but one of opportunity.

Or he wasn't my man.

On his next trips to the van, he offloaded a brass table lamp, three boxes of books stacked on a handcart, a giant box overspilling with comforters, and a cat tree.

I didn't have time for this. I headed straight to the motel and got out my laptop and stared at it in a daze. I had a little more than two days until the boy was taken and no leads as to who was about to cut him up. Kendra Wilkins? I had no proof she had attended a local high school. She could have told the old woman anything she wanted. Perhaps the fact she'd filled Irene Kleitz in on that detail betrayed a person eager to prove they had a past.

I let that thought simmer while I combed through my files and photos. There was no order to my search. I was trolling for connections and patterns, letting the lines of my consciousness snag whatever they could. I hooked nothing.

Wilkins, then. Her dusty sedan was parked right in front of her apartment building. I went to the diner across the street and got a seat by the window. I ordered coffee, took my time ordering a BLT. I hadn't had real bacon since one of my last visits, but my stomach was squeezing itself so hard I had a tough time keeping it down.

By the middle of the afternoon, I was on my fifth cup of coffee and thinking hard about where to set up camp next. A Jeep rolled into the apartment lot and jarred to a halt. Three young women swung out their legs, hopped down, headed up the stairs, and knocked on Wilkins' door. I covered my face with my hands. Time-hopping pedophile predators don't go out for weekend drinks with their girlfriends.

I'd seen a pet store just a couple shops down from the diner. I headed there, browsing among the bubbling aquariums, adrift in the musty warm smell of mammals. The employees left me alone. Around five o'clock, four young women left the apartment and piled into the Jeep. Numbly, I followed them down the highway and across another smaller river. They pulled into a bar and grill. I didn't bother to slow down.

At the motel, I flopped on the bed and stared at the primer-white ceiling. No leads. No suspects. But a lot could come together in the last two days. That's when the snakes slip from their dens.

I headed to the park. The Jasos weren't there. None of the faces rung any bells. I drove past their house. The car was still in the driveway. I parked at the corner and adjusted my rearview. The sun bloomed red and drained from the sky.

There was nothing more to see. I returned to the motel and reread news and police reports that would emerge in the years after the killing. I woke facedown on the keys. The sun got up and so did I. There were no cars outside Amsel's trailer. At his new home, a couple of men wrestled a couch from the back of the van.

My only real option would be to hang out around the school tomorrow and hope I'd be covering the right door when Stephen got abducted. Instead, I drove to one of the massive department stores across the boulevard from last night's bar and grill and bought the smallest pair of walkie talkies I could find. My hand shook as I handed over the cash.

Quite possibly, it was already too late to do the very stupid thing I was about to do. The family car was parked in the Jasos' driveway. I parked on the opposite end of the block from where I'd spent most of my time and cracked open my book. Two hours later, Stephen and his mom left the house, got in the car, and drove to the Safeway.

That spooked me a little. I waited for them to get inside, then passed through the automatic doors. She pushed her cart from aisle to aisle, reading the ingredients on the back of the boxes. She stopped to examine canned pineapple. Stephen wandered further and further down the aisle, trailing his fingers along the bottles of juice.

"Stephen," I said softly.

He glanced up. "Yeah?"

"I need to talk to you."

"What about?"

Down the lane of goods, his mom frowned at a can, set it back, and glanced our way. I studied the grape juice. She picked up another can.

"Does your mom ever let you go out by yourself?" I said.

He cocked his head. "Sometimes."

"After you get home, I need you to meet me at the park."

"But I don't know you."

"My name's Blake," I said. "And if you don't like me, you can yell and yell until the other people call the police."

He blinked his blue eyes, puzzled but wanting to please. No wonder the killer would be able to take him away without drawing notice. Well, I was about to take advantage of his trust first.

"Okay," he said.

I winked. "Keep it secret. Okay, buddy?"

"Okay."

His mom put two blue cans in her cart. I turned and walked out into the bright sun. My head felt as light as a plastic bag on the wind. I went straight to the park and sat on a bench and got out my book. I even managed to read some of it before minutes became an hour and I began to doubt if I'd ever see the boy again.

A little later, a kid wandered onto the grass. I closed my book. Stephen saw me, then glanced at the swings, where a couple watched their kids. Two other families were scrabbling around on the slide and the bridge. That seemed to reassure him.

"Can I help you?" he said.

I laughed. "Got a question for you. Do you believe in time travel?"

"Like for people?"

"Yeah."

He spoke in a rush. "No because if there were time travel then people from the future would already be here."

I laughed again. "That is a very smart answer. But if there were people from the future, do you think you'd recognize them?"

Stephen frowned. "I don't know."

"Or what if you're not supposed to go back in time except under very special circumstances? Making it very, very rare?"

"I guess."

"So it could be real."

He glared at the grass. "Yeah, but then someone would know."

I raised my eyebrows. "Maybe it's a secret."

A guarded look stole over his face. "I'm not supposed to have secrets with strangers."

I glanced around the park. None of the adults were looking my way. "Then why did you come to see me?"

"Because you're kinda strange."

"That's because I'm from the future," I said softly. "I'm here to save your life. But I need your help."

He was too young to hide the expressions wrestling for control of his face. Doubt. Suspicion. Wonder. In the end, curiosity won. It usually does.

"Really?" he said. "What's it like?"

"I can't tell you. Even if I could, the future from my world is very different from this one. But if you promise to keep it secret forever, I'll tell you what I can."

He bit his lip, then nodded. "I promise."

I put my hands in my pockets and gazed at the traffic on the street past the park. "There's more than one Earth. More than one future. I'm from the only one that can travel into the past. We're not supposed to, but some people do. Bad people. Criminals. Sometimes, they go back in time where no one can see them. They hurt people."

"Are you one of the bad people?"

I shook my head. "I'm the one who stops them."

His face went sober in the way only a child's can. "Someone's going to hurt me."

"No, they're not. But I need you to help me."

"Why?"

"Because I don't know who they are."

"But you can go back." He scowled, then raised his finger like a pint-sized professor. "So you can see who it is and then you can go back again and stop them for real."

I grinned. "Hypothetically, yes. But I would have to go back and forth several times. This will take me several minutes of real-time. Meanwhile, the bad guy is back in real-time living his life in my world. So if I go back and forth to stop him for real, it will undo anything he's done since returning. Changing my world's past. And that's the one thing I can never do."

"I don't understand."

"I don't always, either," I said. "But that's how it has to be done."

"So what do we do?"

"Tomorrow at school, someone will ask you to leave with them. I don't know who. Probably a man. Probably someone you know. I need you to go with them."

He drew back. "Why do I have to go with them when they want to hurt me?"

"Because I have to catch them in the act or they'll come back and try it again. But you'll be okay. Because you'll have this." I handed him one of the walkie talkies. I'd tied and taped the talk button to always be on. "When you go to school tomorrow, I need you to turn it on. It's this little knob here. Don't let anyone see it, but keep it with you the whole day."

Stephen took it from me, clicked it on and off. "So I can tell you who it is."

"That's right. And where they're taking you. But you can't just say it. They might get suspicious. You have to be sneaky. Ask, 'Where are we going, Mr. Smith?' Or, 'What's your name?' Do you get it?"

He nodded. "I think so."

"Your parents, your teacher, your police—none of them can help you." I put my hand on his shoulder. His eyes were round and frightened. Good. "If you tell them, I can't either. Do you understand?"

He nodded again, a small gesture, as if he were afraid the motion might dislodge the tears from his eyes. "Yes, sir."

"Call me Blake." I patted his shoulder and straightened. "It'll be okay, Stephen. As soon as they take you outside, I'll be right there."

I watched him walk across the bright green grass. Everything I'd just told him was off-limits. Enough to get me suspended. Imprisoned, if they wanted to make an example out of me. You are not supposed to make contact with the victim under any circumstances. And the idea of telling them or anyone else anything remotely resembling the truth—it was enough to make me want to turn myself in.