Interesting Times (Interesting Times #1) (6 page)

“Yes.” Oliver already wished he hadn’t
mentioned it.

“Cats cannot speak, Mr. Jones,” the girl
said dryly.

“Yeah, I guess not.”

“Well,” Artemis said thoughtfully,
“that’s not entirely true. However, the last cat that
could
speak died
over two thousand years ago.”

“Really?” asked Tyler, perking up
instantly. “That’s amazing.”

“Not really,” Artemis said. “The poor
thing’s brain was so scrambled from generations of inbreeding, she never made
much sense.”

Tyler and Sally stared at Artemis, who
ignored them. “As I said, Mr. Jones, cats cannot speak. So perhaps that much
was your imagination, after all.”

“Okay,” Oliver said, hoping that meant
they could change the subject.

“Out of curiosity, what did the cat
say?”

“Jeffrey,” Oliver corrected her. Artemis
raised her eyebrows curiously at him. “I named him Jeffrey,” he explained. When
she didn’t reply, Oliver continued, hoping he wasn’t about to be laughed at
again. “He said that my life wouldn’t be easier if he could talk.”

“I see. That is an unusual way to begin
a conversation. May I assume you spoke to…
Jeffrey
…first?”

“Yeah.”

“And you said to him?”

Oliver sighed. “I told him I wished he
could talk.”

“And then he spoke.”

“Yeah.”

“So in a way,” Artemis mused, “your wish
was granted.”

“He’s a genie!” Tyler exclaimed,
pointing at Oliver triumphantly. Artemis turned and glared at him.  “Sorry,” he
said sheepishly.

Artemis turned back to Oliver. She made
her fingers into a steeple and said nothing for a long moment. Finally she
looked up. “I don’t know what to make of this, honestly. But I’ve decided that
we will continue to protect you for the time being. Mr. Teasdale’s clients tend
to be extremely unpleasant people, and I’ve found that the world is a better
place when they don’t get what they want. If one of them wants you dead, I want
you alive. For now, at least.”

Oliver thought he saw Sally brighten up
at the “for now” but he decided not to make an issue of it. “So what am I
supposed to do?” he asked. “Hide here?

“No,” Artemis replied. “This house can
only be used for short periods of time or else…
things
happen. And Mr.
Teasdale is hunting you. I don’t want him tracking you here.”

“Can he see the house?” Sally asked.

“Not yet,” Artemis replied. “But given
enough time, he would be able to discern that it is here.”

“So I should…” Oliver began, hoping she
would finish the sentence for him.

“We will need to figure out who hired him,”
Artemis said. “Who is it that wants you dead?”

“Besides Sally?” Oliver asked.

Oliver thought he saw another trace of a
smile from the girl. “Yes. Besides her.” She rubbed her palms together. “Well,
there is work to be done. Tyler, go to it. Take him with you and try to keep
him alive.”

“Got it,” Tyler said.

“What about me?” Sally asked.

“You will drive me back to the office,”
Artemis said. “We have a matter to discuss.”

Sally didn’t look pleased, but Oliver
noted that she didn’t argue with the girl. He was a bit relieved that she
wasn’t coming along with them. He wouldn’t have to worry about getting on her
bad side. But he still had questions before he took off with Tyler.

“Wait a minute here,” Oliver said. “What
about my…my life? My house? My job? How am I going to explain all this to
people at work?”

“I don’t know,” Artemis said, standing
up. “But I am certain that it will be much more difficult to explain if you are
dead. For now, Mr. Jones, I will ask you to trust us.”

“And everything will be okay, I guess?”
he asked, feeling a bit of sarcasm might be called for.

“Things rarely are,” Artemis said,
heading for the door. Sally trailed a step behind the girl. A moment later they
had both vanished through the door, back into the real world.

“Now what?” Oliver asked Tyler.

“I’m going to do the dishes,” Tyler
said, collecting the muffin plates and tea cups onto the tray and taking them
into the kitchen. 

“Oh.” That seemed awfully mundane given
that they were inside a house where time stood still, but Oliver guessed that
household chores were the same wherever, or
whenever
you were. “And
then?”

“Then we’re going to go find out who
wants to kill you,” Tyler called from the kitchen. “You want me to pack up some
of these muffins for later?”

Oliver was about to say “no” when he
caught himself. “Yes,” he said. “Yes I do.”

Chapter 8

As a child, Oliver had
been enamored of fairy tales. One of his favorites had opened with the line,
“Sometimes more happens in a single day than in a hundred years.” What followed
was the story of an ordinary villager who wound up fighting an ogre and saving
a princess. Or something like that. Oliver could no longer remember exactly how
the story had gone. Whatever it had been, Oliver had decided he was having that
kind of day. When he’d gone to work this morning he’d been living an ordinary
life. In the few hours since then he’d been the victim of an assassination
attempt, had been gassed and sort-of kidnapped, and had eaten fantastic
blueberry muffins in a house that apparently existed in its own unique corner
of the space-time continuum. 

Now he was on the run, and the only
people he felt sure he could trust, albeit hesitantly, were a creepy little
girl, a woman who had threatened to shoot him, and…Tyler.  Tyler, a man who possessed
a very questionable fashion sense, but made up for it with fantastic baking
skills.

I’m so screwed
, Oliver thought.

Tyler had driven them to the Tenderloin
district in a black 1960’s era Dodge Charger. Oliver had marveled at the car
when he’d seen it parked outside the house. He hadn’t seen one like it in
years. “Did you have to go back in time to buy it?” he’d asked Tyler.

“No,” Tyler had replied, looking
confused.  “I bought it in Oakland.”

Oliver was about to say he had only been
joking, but then he wondered if that was something people actually did. Go back
in time to buy cars. The others had laughed at the idea of being time
travelers, though, so that seemed a bit far-fetched.

At the moment Tyler was on his knees in
front of the rear door of a run-down pawn shop, attempting to pick its lock.
There had been a “CLOSED” sign in the front window and if there was anybody
inside the store, they’d ignored Tyler’s repeated banging on the front door.

“God
damn
it,” Tyler swore. One
of his picks had snapped.

“You’ve picked locks before?” Oliver
asked. 

“I don’t make a habit of it,” Tyler
said, retrieving another pick from a kit he’d had stashed in his glove
compartment. “He’s got a good lock.”

“Did it ever occur to you that he’s out
to lunch or something? We could just wait.”

“It’s not like him to close during the
day,” Tyler said. “Besides, you want to be hanging around here while an
assassin is out looking for you? In
this
neighborhood? Somebody might
beat him to killing you.” 

“Fair point,” Oliver said. He avoided
the Tenderloin as a general rule. It was as high-crime an area as could be
found in San Francisco.

The lock clicked. “Finally!” Tyler
announced triumphantly. He pushed the door open. “See? Nothing to it. Let’s go
check it out.”

Oliver wasn’t sure this was such a good
idea. It was breaking and entering, after all. But to be fair, a minor felony
was probably the least of what he had to worry about today. He stepped
cautiously through the door after Tyler.

He found himself in a storage room lit
by one bare, flickering bulb in the ceiling. The room was filled with metal
shelves cluttered with old electronic equipment. DVD players, televisions, and
old computers were stacked on top of each other in haphazard piles. In one
corner he could see a man-sized gun safe. The room was covered in dust and
looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in years.

Tyler had taken his pistol out from
under his shirt. “Rocky?” he called. “You in here?”

The shop was quiet. Rocky, whoever he
was, wasn’t answering. A rectangular object caught Oliver’s eye. “Is this a
Betamax?” he asked quietly. “I’ve never seen one of these in real life.”

“Might be,” Tyler said. “You can ask
Rocky about it.”

Oliver ran his hand over the ancient
video player. He was sure it was authentic. “Why would anyone hold onto this?”
he wondered. “Who would buy it?”

“I don’t know,” Tyler said. “Probably
nobody. The thing is, he’s not really a pawnbroker.” He looked through the
doorway into the main room. “Rocky?”

“What is he really?” Oliver asked.

“He’s a…aw, shit.” Tyler said, spotting
something. He went through the doorway.

Oliver peered through the doorway after
him. Tyler was in the center of the room, kneeling down next to an overweight
man in a dirty white T-shirt and jeans. The other man was balding, unshaven,
and didn’t appear to be breathing.

“Oh,” Oliver said, feeling a knot form
in his stomach.

Tyler felt the other man’s neck for a
pulse. “Come on, Rocky,” he said quietly. He waited, but then shook his head.
“Nope.  He’s all done.”

“I’m…I’m sorry,” Oliver said.

“Don’t be. He was an asshole.” Tyler
sighed. “How was Teasdale going to do you? Injection?” He tugged at Rocky’s
shoe and removed it, followed by the sock. Oliver winced as Tyler pried the
other man’s toes apart and inspected the skin between them. “Nothing there,” he
said. He went to work pulling off the other shoe.

“Is that really necessary?” Oliver
asked. It seemed somehow obscene to be examining a dead man’s feet.

“If you want to know what’s going on
here, then yes. There. See?” He motioned for Oliver to look at the skin between
the first two toes on Rocky’s other foot. Oliver could see a tiny red mark
there. “Injection site,” Tyler said. “This could’ve been you.”

Oliver felt sick. “But why?”

“Why kill you? Like I said, we don’t
know yet.”

“No, not that. Why kill him? What does
he
have to do with this?”

Tyler stood up. “You think Mr. Teasdale
is in the phone book? He’s not. If you want to hire him, you need a middle man.
Rocky here is…was…one.”

“A middle man?”

“Yeah. A guy with connections. He knew
everyone and could get you most anything. I didn’t know until now he was the
broker on your contract, but even if he hadn’t been, it would have been a good
bet he knew who was in the market for a killer.”

“So why kill him?”

“The deal’s gone to shit. You got away
and now we’re involved. If he’s dead, he doesn’t tell us who’s behind this. I
guess Mr. Teasdale didn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut.” He took his phone
out of his pocket. “Damn it. Artemis is going to be pissed.”

Tyler made a quick call, telling the
little girl what had happened and listening to her instructions. He hung up
with a grimace. “She’s sending cleanup,” he told Oliver. “You may as well look
around the place, see if there’s anything you want.”

Oliver looked around, confused. There
was nobody else working. “You mean
steal
things?”

Tyler shrugged. “Steal. Loot. It hardly
matters now. Leave some money on the desk if you want.”  He spotted a stack of
old records and started flipping through them. “You never know what he’s going
to have.”

There was something grotesque about
looking through a dead man’s merchandise while the dead man in question was
lying on the floor in front of them. “What did you mean by
cleanup
?” he
asked.

“Grab his computers and files. I’m sure
it’s all encrypted but we’ve got a guy. There may not be much we can use, but
you never know.”

“Oh.”

“And of course, scrub away any trace
that we were ever here. Hair, fingerprints, skin cells. Anything with DNA that
could lead back to us.”

“You can do that?”

“Sure. It’s easy, if you know how. And
if you have the right tools.”

Oliver didn’t feel like browsing around
the shop. He went to stand by the door. “How long until that team of yours gets
here?”

“A few minutes.” Tyler had chosen a few
records and was looking through a stack of comic books. “You sure you don’t
want anything?”

“That man is dead!” Oliver snapped.

“And you’re alive,” Tyler observed.
“Keep that in mind.”

Oliver shook his head in disgust. He was
thinking about calling his office, although he knew he didn’t dare. The police
must be finished over there by now. How much would they have been able to get
off of the security camera footage from the lobby? If they managed to get a
good photo of Mr. Teasdale, maybe they were out looking for him. Of course,
that meant they were likely out looking for Tyler, too, given that Tyler was
the one who had actually dragged him out of the office.