Timecaster (20 page)

“You know I didn’t. Just like you know I didn’t kill anybody. I’ve never killed anybody, Teague. Now state your name.”

Teague didn’t say anything. I picked up his hand and showed it to him. Then I set down the DT and used the Nife to shave off the very tip of his index finger.

“Fine! Fuck, bro!”

I picked up the DT. “Go ahead.”

He sighed. “Joshua Teague VanCamp.”

“Did you set me up?”

“No.”

Truth.

“Do you know who murdered Aunt Zelda?”

“Yes.”

Truth.

“Who did it, Teague?”

“You did, bro.”

Truth.
Son of a bitch. He still believed it was me.

“Do you know anything about timecasting parallel worlds?”

“What? Fuck, no.”

Truth.

“Did you set up a fake timecast at Aunt Zelda’s place?”

“I don’t even know who Aunt Zelda is.”

Truth.

“Are you working with Neil Winston?”

“Neil who?”

Truth.
Teague had nothing to do with this frame. He was just being his normal, asshole self.

“Do you still love Vicki?”

“No.”

Untruth.

I showed him the screen, then tucked the DT away. “You need to get over her, old buddy. It’s not healthy.”

His eyes went hard. “You’re giving me advice? You’re in the center of a shit storm, bro. You’ll be dead by the end of the day.”

I stared at him, feeling very sad all of a sudden. “What happened to us, Teague? We were like brothers.”

“You chose a woman over your brother. There’s no bigger sin than that.”

I didn’t want to argue with him, and truth be told, I don’t know that I disagreed.

“I need to borrow your TEV. And your shoes. You won’t be walking out of here anyway.”

I pulled the boots off his feet. Teague was a half size bigger than me, but it was better than stomping around with aluminum soles.

“You’re going down, Talon. Going down hard.”

“Don’t come after me, or I’ll break your neck again. And next time I’ll twist it off, so the ER can’t fix it. Just like Zelda.”

“Fuck you.”

I bent down and pinched his ear.

Teague said, “Call 911. Officer down.”

I sheathed my Nife and left Teague to his headphone call. Then I grabbed his TEV and got out of there.

My next destination would be heavily guarded. I had no idea how I was going to pull it off.

But I didn’t have a choice. Teague was right. Unless I proved my innocence, and fast, I’d be dead by the end of the day.

And the day didn’t have that many hours left in it.

THIRTY-TWO

I couldn’t start Teague’s biofuel scooter without a chip, so I cut away the override switch with my Nife and did an old-fashioned hot-wire. I was really getting to like the Nife, though I was sure my opinion would change when I got careless and accidentally sliced off my pelvis.

Once on the bike, I followed the railroad tracks to the nearest street, and then headed south, toward home. Using Teague’s TEV, I wanted to timecast my house to see who’d planted the listening devices. I had a hunch the perp picked Boise based on my morning conversation with Vicki. If I could catch his trail, I’d know who my adversary was. I was both disappointed and relieved Teague hadn’t played a part in this, but with him no longer a suspect I had no clue who could have set me up.

I pressed my earlobe and said, “Block all calls.” I hated to miss it if Vicki or Sata tried to contact me, but if they were being monitored, it was too easy for the authorities to triangulate my position once a call connected. Headphone silence was safest.

Once I left the corn farm and entered an industrial stretch of Illinois, lighting became poorer. I knew the cops would be covering the main highways, so I’d have to deal with lesstraveled routes, and remain as inconspicuous as possible.

I pulled over and took out my all-vision contact lens from the case on my belt. Though my Tesla account had been closed, the AVCL had a full battery charge that would last for hours. I put the lens in my eye, then closed my lid and tapped it three times to activate the night vision. Closing my left eye, the world was bathed in a soft, green glow. I killed my headlight and motored through backyards, alleys, and side streets. It took me two hours to travel the forty miles to home, and I doubled back a few times to confuse Teague, who I’m sure would be on my trail again once they reattached his nerve endings.

I parked in an alley a block from my house, then did a quick reconnaissance. Two cops were circling the perimeter. I tapped my eyelid once, going to infrared, and saw four more cops inside. Two on the first floor, two on the second. Then I checked my neighbor’s house. The only one home was that dick Chomsky. Sitting in front of his projector, probably watching animal pr0n.

I hefted the TEV to my back using the shoulder strap. Then I put some fresh gecko tape on my hands and knees, snuck around the opposite side of Chomsky’s house, and scaled the wall.

It was difficult, especially since my right arm had been growing considerably weaker since leaving the cornfield. When I reached his green roof I took some amphetamines and some aspirin to improve the blood flow, and spent a minute trying to catch my breath. Then I looked around for Chomsky’s atomizer.

Like most folks, Chomsky grew a lot of hemp. And like most folks, Chomsky often got stoned off his own supply. Smoking weed died out around the same time as smoking tobacco, due to various health risks. Some used a home pilling machine to make their own hash tablets. But the easier, and less expensive, way to get high was with an atomizer. Weed went in one end. Pure THC came out the other. It could be inhaled in a health-conscious, noncarcinogenic way.

I’d seen Chomsky puffing on his atomizer many times. You might have thought it would mellow him out, but you’d be wrong. Even wasted, Chomsky was still a dick.

I found his atomizer next to his lawn chair. It was roughly the size of a miniature dachshund, and in fact was painted to look like one. You put the pot in the dog’s mouth, then sucked on his ass.

Boy, was this guy a dick.

I also found a plastic garbage bag filled with marijuana buds. I sniffed one. White rhino strain. Good shit. I put the atomizer in the bag and slung it over my shoulder. Then I stared over at my roof.

I was tired. Beyond tired. There was no way I could make the jump between our houses. Especially with a Santa Claus sack full of weed. But I wasn’t sure I had the energy to scale my wall, either. I could picture myself halfway up, just hanging there, exhausted, and the cops walking up and seeing me. It would be an inglorious end to my supposed crime wave.

So I settled for jumping, once again. I tapped my eyelid, checking the cops’ position. They’d just reached the front of the house, which gave me about twenty seconds. Then I shoved the top of the bag into my belt, set my jaw, and sprinted for the edge of the roof.

I jumped.

I soared through the air.

And once again, I realized I was going to come up short. Really short.

I didn’t even make the edge of my roof. I missed it by about a foot, slapping into the side of my building, sticking there by my hands and knees as the gecko tape performed as advertised.

Then I felt the garbage bag begin to slip. I peeled a hand off the wall and stretched down to grab it. The act jostled the TEV on my back, and the strap came off. It fell on top of the garbage bag, the strap catching on its circumference.

I lifted it up, my fingers digging into the thin plastic, stretching it, and then breaking through. The bag began to tear, and I was in real danger of losing it, and the TEV. The buds would survive the fall. The TEV likely wouldn’t.

Which was when the cops rounded the corner, heading my way.

I was hanging about ten feet over the walkway. The bag was maybe eight feet above the ground, but the plastic was stretching thin, descending about an inch per second. With all the cool things science and technology have brought mankind, why couldn’t they invent a tear-proof garbage bag?

It was dark, but not so dark the cops wouldn’t notice a man dangling over their heads. Especially a man dropping dope.

They took their time, strolling slowly, locked in a deep conversation that luckily precluded them paying attention to their surroundings.

“What would you do if you got the reward?”

“I’m a public servant. I couldn’t collect.”

They stopped directly under me. I tried to lift up the bag, but it was stretching faster than I could raise it.

“The president said anyone can collect.”

“No shit? Well, with ten million credits, I’d buy property. Serious property. Maybe even this house here.”

He tapped the wall with his monadnock baton, and it gave off a little spark. I felt my sphincter squeeze closed.

“It’s a nice place. Probably pays a fortune in biodiesel tax, though. And you meet his neighbor?”

“I did. What a dick.”

“I wonder if the wife comes with the house. She’s worth the ten mil, easy. Real redhead, I hear.”

I managed to lift the bag up to my mouth. I held the plastic in my teeth, then reached lower for a better grip and watched in horror as a bud slipped out and began to fall. Without thinking, I peeled away my right hand and reached for the bud. I snagged it and wound up kneeling on the wall at a perfect ninety-degree angle. My legs, abs, and glutes burned like they’d been set on fire. I couldn’t hold this position for more than a few seconds.

“I hear she’s an SLP. Maybe you can get on her waiting list.”

“Chick like that? Couldn’t afford her.”

“Maybe you should save your money, stop giving it all to El Stop Linda.”

“Don’t knock El Stop Linda. She may not be much to look at, but she’s got the vibrating tongue implant.”

“She looks like a guy.”

“You wouldn’t care, once she starts licking.”

Gravity began to beat me down, my upper body starting to sink. Getting caught wasn’t the only threat anymore. If my ass touched my heels, I had no idea how I’d ever get back up.

“You know who she looks like?” The voices were fading. They were finally walking away.

“Who?”

“Stan, in accounting. Except El Stop Linda has more facial hair.”

“I’d call them about even. Stan’s got bigger boobs, though.”

I watched them round the corner. Then I dropped the bud, adjusted the TEV strap, and grunted in agony sitting up into a vertical position again. I couldn’t hold the bag anymore, so I tossed it onto my roof, hoping no one would hear. Then I painfully climbed the two more feet to the edge, hooking my arms over the top, dragging myself onto my lawn.

If I lived through this, I was going to buy a ladder for the side of my house.

After half a minute of rest and recuperation, I fished out my DT and did a quick calculation figuring out the air volume of my home and the parts per million of atomized THC needed to get someone high.

I crawled over to one of my hemp plants and began harvesting buds. When I finished the plant, Chomsky’s garbage bag was full. I dug out the atomizer and moved in a crouch over to my air-conditioning unit, the fan humming. I didn’t bother with unscrewing the top, instead using the Nife to remove the outer housing and hepafilter. Then I placed the ass end of the atomizer above the spinning fan and began feeding it marijuana.

It took fifteen minutes to empty the bag. I waited another five, cutting the hepafilter to mask size and taping it over my mouth and nose. I tapped my eyelid and viewed the infrared. The four cops were still in my house. They all appeared to be sitting down or reclining, two in the upstairs living room, and two in the downstairs den. Hopefully, the pot had put them to sleep, or at least made them so loopy they’d forgotten why they were there.

I slid open my patio door and crept inside, powering up the TEV, which was still set to Teague’s Tesla account. Vicki said a listening device had been found in the kitchen, so I set the lens for a wide angle and got started. It took only a few seconds to tune in to the eighth membrane and less than a minute to find the octeract point and pet the bunny. Once I had a decent image on the monitor, I did a speedy rewind and watched, viewing back in time from an hour ago.

I saw cops, lots of cops, moving in reverse. I went further back, before they arrived, and I saw the skinny, elderly face of Barney the dentist, one of Vicki’s clients, sticking his nose in my refrigerator. I slowed it down, got a close-up. He was eating an apple, the same smug/satisfied look on his face every man wore after being with my wife. I highly doubted he was the one who had set me up, but I followed his movements anyway to see if he planted any bugs. I trailed him, in reverse, out of the kitchen, down the hallway.

I paused, hearing a noise coming from the living room. Peeking around the corner, I saw two cops slouching on my sofa. My projector was on. The cops looked dead, except every few seconds one of them would giggle. I looked at the wall to see what they were watching.

Extreme Hobo Deaths 11.

I snuck past, peeling the gecko tape off my hands and knees as I tiptoed to my wife’s bedroom. I never went in her bedroom. It was her place of business, and none of my business. But a bug had been found in her bedroom as well, and I needed to see if it was one of her clients who had planted it. I opened the door.

Then I whirled around, hearing someone behind me, and stared right down the barrel of a Glock Taser.

THIRTY-THREE

The cop holding the Taser had droopy eyes, the whites completely bloodshot.

“Dude,” he said. “You got any chips?”

I cleared my throat. “In the kitchen. Cabinet next to the refrigerator.”

“Thanks, man.”

“You want me to hold your gun for you?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

He handed it over, giggled, and stumbled off. That was some good weed.

My eyes dropped to the monitor and I followed Barney into my wife’s bedroom.

Vicki was standing next to the bed, taking her clothes off in reverse. I paused it, wondering if I should continue. Vicki was entitled to privacy. And I really didn’t want to see her making love to another man. I should just skip past this, and keep searching for bugs.