Jaclyn the Ripper (38 page)

The Kawasaki fishtailed, and he let go of the brakes.

It straightened up. He hit the brakes again, but too late. Still doing a
good thirty-five, the bike slammed into the double glass doors, wrenching them open. He somersaulted over the bars, hit the travertine floor and rolled.

The alarms went off.

“Amy?” said Amber breathlessly. “Is Bertie there?”

“Why, no,” she replied, “he left a little after half-past.” Trying to relax, Amy was tidying up the suite after the SWAT team had left, their black boots having raised havoc with the rugs in the bathroom and the foyer. “Are you downstairs in the lobby?”

“No, I'm in my car! I was supposed to finish up at the crime scene, but I bailed, I couldn't help it! Major manhunt or not, this is personal!”

“Yes, unfortunately I know. You'd think Bertie would've left that, that woman to the police, but, oh, no, not my Bertie.”

“Where is he?!” she cried.

“He's gone to the museum, my dear.”

“Okay, thanks, gotta go.”

“Please don't let him hurt himself, will you?”

Amber rang off. She was heading east on Wilshire, almost to Burton Way and the hotel. The sky was crowded with police and news helicopters, their spotlights advertising what was for Beverly Hills a rather dubious event. Without thinking, she spun around in a tight U-turn ahead of onrushing traffic, stood on the accelerator and ran the red light at Wilshire and Santa Monica. She cut between a string of cars
turning left, barely missed an SUV and angled behind a Mini Cooper, their horns blaring at her, then fading in the confusion left behind. Filled with dread, she rocketed up Wilshire. She knew that as brilliant and wonderful as he was, H.G. was no match for Jaclyn Smythe. Amber had no clue what she would find or what she would do, but she had to do something.
I may not deserve him, and he may not deserve Amy, but if nothing else, her kids deserve a father.

H.G. regained consciousness a few seconds after slamming through the doors. He got up on his hands and knees, wasn't sure if that awful ringing and buzzing noise was reverberating off the stone and glass or inside his head. He felt around him for his spectacles, found them a few feet away. One lens was cracked, and the frames ridiculously bent. He put them on his face where they hung precariously, but at least he could see again.

The lights came on. He looked up. Three security guards were in the rotunda, gawking in disbelief. One glass door was cracked badly and listed on its lower hinge. The other had been knocked completely off. The bike had slid upside-down across the rotunda leaving a trail of multicolored lubricants, then crashed on its side, the seat yawning open. H.G. got to his feet, staggered in a circle and tried to collect himself. His head throbbed.

“What the fuck?” said the guard named Cedric.

“Would you mind turning off the alarm?” H.G. said to him.

Cedric turned to Mark Goodwin—the head guard, now jabbering at the police on his cell phone—but Goodwin frowned, shook his head impatiently and waved him off, and the noise went on.

Finally, Goodwin flipped his phone shut. “West Division's stretched thin,” he announced, raising his voice over the alarm. “They're on some kind of major flap, so they'll be a while.”

“What the fuck?” Cedric repeated to H.G., spreading his hands. “You just lose it, or what?”

“I'll take care of the damage, my good man,” H.G. declared. Thinking ahead, he scavenged the toolkit from the wrecked Kawasaki and jammed it in his coat pocket. “But you must understand I'm here on a matter of—”

“Take him downstairs and hold him,” Goodwin ordered.

“I'm from Scotland Yard!” H.G. shouted. He pulled out his fake ID and waved it at them.

“Like I said,” an angry Goodwin repeated to Cedric, “take him downstairs and hold him!”

“Let's go, Sherlock.” Cedric grinned, took H.G. by the arm and propelled him across the rotunda.

Goodwin started for the stairs. “I'll get the goddamn alarm, people.” He pointed at the third guard and barked, “Wait for the cops.”

“Me?” said the third guard.

“You.”

 

As Cedric led him toward the elevators, H.G. was about to make a break for it, then saw the men's room across the alcove and got a better idea. His captor pushed the call button, and H.G. gave him a sheepish smile.

“Excuse me, sir, but if you don't mind, I must use the loo.” He nodded toward the sign.

Cedric gave him an impatient look, let go of his arm and held the bathroom door open. When they were both inside, H.G. started toward a stall, then turned suddenly.

“Give me your keys,” he demanded.

“What—?” Cedric spun around; his eyes widened.

H.G. had his Beretta aimed at Cedric's nose. He held out his hand. “Your keys. . . . And your radio.”

Cedric complied.

As H.G. backed out of the men's room, the alarm was finally turned off, and he half-smiled. With the blessed silence, his head had stopped hurting. “Sorry, old man,” he apologized to Cedric, then locked him inside.

He took the elevator down to the lower level, ran along the corridor to the stairs below the West Pavilion and went up to the fire door. Out of breath, his hands shaking, he managed to find the right key and unlocked the door. But he had to jerk it open, and his glasses slipped off his face. Muttering, he bent the frames tighter, then eased into the corridor and went around the corner, let his eyes adjust to the darkness, the dim glow from night-lights. He sighed with relief. No guard in the lobby. He crept in the center gallery, his heart surging when he saw his beloved
The Utopia
, silhouetted by the recessed floor lights. He paused and listened to the silence, the void. He heard, he sensed no one. He went to the time machine, put his hand on the engine compartment. Cold. He smiled grimly. Jaclyn hadn't yet arrived.

He scrutinized the room, thought about surprising her in the machine, itself.
I'll get behind the chair, and when she opens the cabin door, I'll shoot her in the heart and be done with it—though one wonders if I shouldn't use a wooden stake.
He hesitated.
No, no, she's much too clever for that. I need a ruse that smacks of the twenty-first century, that will allow me—literally and figuratively—vision in the darkness.

In the ceiling near the center gallery was a tiny night-light. It spilled illumination on the large portrait of himself over the archway, but more important, it cast a faint glow on the floor. In the blackness just beyond, H.G. set down the radio as if he were a hunter staging a decoy. He hesitated. It was more like setting an electronic birdcall that might never go off, but under the circumstances it was the best he could do.

He felt his way through the black to the display of photographs in the exhibition proper, and took up a position alongside it as if he were another portrait of himself. He drew his Beretta and waited. After a while, despite the controlled temperature in the pavilion, he began sweating. Muttering, he wiped his face and adjusted his glasses again.

Again, he waited.

Jaclyn took Steve up North Bundy Drive and the mountain curves of Firth Avenue, going the back way to the Getty complex. Surprised by the barrier, he stopped the Escalade just inches away, and she laughed softly and told him to drive around it. Uneasy, he hesitated, but she told him she had done it many times before and coaxed him forward, her breasts brushing his arm, fingernails making circles on his leg, making promises.

He gulped, muttered fearfully about Dad's car, then went ahead and maneuvered around the barrier. On her instructions, he parked above the ring-shaped building where the access road curved and the moonlight was shadowed by trees. Tense, he turned to her and waited. Smiling, her eyes closed, she ignored him, idly dropped her hand to her knife, wondered when it would happen, but wasn't worried about time. She had the special key. She had carte blanche to the cosmos. For her, the universe was timeless, but at that moment the digital clock on the dash glowed 9:23
P.M
.

Steve cleared his throat. She glanced at him, reveled in his jittery moves, his impatience. She enjoyed playing the tart; it gave her a power and control that Jack never had.
Yet I have his same murderous rage, his
same strength and will, and
. . . . Her sweet lieutenant came to mind. She grimaced, couldn't help but think:
I am capable of love.

She turned to the window and blinked back tears, and the tears made her angry, and suddenly she wanted it over with. “Take your pants down.”

“Okay.” He struggled to get them down.

“You know something?” she said with a bemused smile. “You forgot to ask me if I was a cop.”

He froze, wide-eyed and panicked, his pants below his knees.

She stabbed him in the chest.

H.G. waited.

He listened intently, yet it was so utterly quiet in the pavilion that all he heard was the thunder of his own heartbeat. He hadn't moved from his position by the photographs and envisioned himself becoming another artifact from his own life. He wasn't amused. The moment dragged—as if real time had stopped—and he wondered if he were making a ridiculous mistake. He told himself no. The police finally knew who Jaclyn was; they'd launched a huge manhunt; she was no longer anonymous; she had nowhere else to go. Moreover, she had the special key, and how else would someone from hell escape except by using
The Utopia
? He smiled ironically.
This rather staid exhibition of my life is about to become a redemption of sorts.

Something rumbled beneath the floor. He glanced down, figured it had to do with the air-conditioning system under the building, but then the silence, the void closed in again.

He lifted his gaze and concentrated on the darkness so that the dim spots of illumination wouldn't ruin his night vision, so he wouldn't be surprised by someone coming out of the blackness.

The air moved.

He sensed her.

He heard nothing, but that slight caress of breeze was enough, and he knew instinctively that she was in the pavilion, dangerously close. But where? He resisted a tingling sensation on the back of his neck, resisted looking into the blackness behind him, and forced himself to focus on the center gallery. The only logic guiding him was his conviction that she would be going to the time machine.

He sensed her closer.

The tingling stopped, and a warm flush spread through his body. His pulse quickened. He held his breath and raised the Beretta. He peered into the blackness. Yet he saw, he heard nothing.

Suddenly, the radio barked.

“Hey, Cedric . . . ? What's your twenty?”

His decoy had worked.

In the blackness near the archway, a figure jumped, startled by the noise. H.G. swung his pistol toward the faint silhouette and fired, but in the sudden movement his glasses slid off. Cursing, he dropped to the floor and felt for them with his free hand.

“Cedric . . . ? You copy?”

He found them and was getting to his feet when someone smashed the radio over his head. Dazed, he staggered forward, fired blindly, didn't see Jaclyn push over the vertical display of photographs. It hit him in the back and sent him sprawling to the floor. He lost both glasses and Beretta, and was groping for them when she grabbed him by the throat and slammed his head into the floor. Once. Twice. He went limp.

Amber swung to a stop in the arrival plaza, bumped over the curb, left the Milan with one wheel on the sidewalk, jumped out and hit the steps running. The security guard by the splayed doors saw her coming and got off his cell phone, but she waved her badge at him.

“A task force is right behind me!” she shouted, going in the rotunda.

“They got him downstairs,” the guard called back.

No way in hell
, she thought, but veered toward the elevator figuring that was how H.G. had gotten in the West Pavilion. She took it to the lower level, sprinted along the lower corridor. Moments later, she pushed through the unlocked fire door, went down the dark corridor into the lobby, paused and listened.

Silence.

Her heart pounding, she crept into the H.G. Wells exhibition, aware of the dark shapes of tables and display cases, then stopped suddenly. A glow came from the center gallery.

Someone had turned the lights on.

H.G. woke up and blinked, became vaguely aware that someone was taping him to the chair in the cabin, but could see only blurry shapes. He remembered that his glasses had fallen off. Gingerly, he moved his head. Pain shot through his temples. He groaned.

“Ah, good, we're awake, then.” Jaclyn chuckled. “For a moment, I was afraid I'd killed you before your time.”

She put his glasses on him. He blinked again. She had switched on the lights in the gallery, and he saw her clearly now. His Beretta was stuffed in the waistband of her pants and the cabin door open behind her. Smiling triumphantly, she finished with the tape, stepped back, swept her lovely hair out of her eyes, admired her work. His head pounded. He wanted to massage it, but couldn't move his arms above his shoulders.

“I was going to cut the wires,” she said, “the ones enabling travel to the past . . . but I made a mess of it, I'm afraid, so I had to do something a little less precise.”

His mind became suddenly, horribly clear, and he knew why he was taped in the chair. “You've disabled the declinometer,” he said hollowly.

“Brilliant, Wells.” She patted him on the head. “And after I've sent you to hell, I'll repair the machine and be on my way.”

She was also holding the bicycle lock—swinging it from her fingers—which meant she had found and removed his safety device, and the machine was hers now. He closed his eyes, tried to remain calm, tried to control his pain so that he might make sense of this moment, however badly it ended. His mind flashed to the exhibition. Though he had deliberately not wanted to know of his accomplishments later in life, the fact that he had a future was reassuring. But that didn't mean he
hadn't
gone to that same hell where the Jack the Ripper had been; nor did it tell him how long he'd be there or what sort of agonized “death” he would endure. He could be there for millions of years, his beloved machine still a slave to this Jaclyn in some distant Grecian universe while she toyed murderously with those who had created Western civilization. Maybe
The Utopia
would turn to dust before he left hell, and he would have to wait until someone else in another universe built a time machine and accidentally let it loose on the fourth dimension. The odds were not in his favor.