Time of Death

by Nathan Van Coops

  But the events inside the house weren’t what I was after this time.

  Waldo commandeered the stereo, and the sounds of Kavinsky soon emanated from the speakers. He’d been on a synth wave kick lately. Better than the strange phase when he’d been into twenty-second-century emo jazz. I didn’t criticize. I’d learned that A.I. developed their interests how they wanted. It was best to let them.

  I watched the clock. Shortly after Foster Phillips met his maker, the black SUV rolled by. I synced my phone with the camera I’d attached to the Mercedes’ side-view mirror on my first visit.

  Bingo. Now I had eyes.

  The Boss had a display screen on the dash so I routed the video feed to that, then pulled out of my parking space. The Mercedes had turned a corner, but thanks to my hitchhiking camera, I had a clear view of their route.

  Work smarter, not harder. Dirk P. Walls should take some pointers.

  The Mercedes took the Selmon Expressway to Twenty-Second Street, then the access road that wound north to the Ybor City Historic District.

  Historic Ybor was once home to Tampa Bay’s thriving cigar business but was now populated by breweries, nightclubs, and Scientologists. The old buildings were still there, however, and I had an inkling the Mercedes didn’t belong to the L. Ron Hubbard crowd. I bumped over trolley tracks embedded in the brick-paved streets as I tailed the black SUV. The Boss got a few looks from pedestrians and I could almost see the questions in their minds. Was it a new-looking old car or an old-looking new car? I passed before they could trouble themselves further.

  The Mercedes slowed in front of an all-brick factory and turned down an alley. They stopped in front of a rolling industrial door and idled. I cruised past the alley at a casual clip but pulled over once I was out of sight, not wanting to lose connection with the camera. There was no discernible activity from the SUV, but they must have messaged someone inside because the loading door opened and revealed the warehouse interior.

  Men with rifles waited inside. What was this about?

  I leaned close to the car’s display screen to get a better look and fiddled with the camera’s controls via my phone. It didn’t have much range of motion, but it did zoom, so I employed that to get shots of the guards. No one I recognized. I did recognize the contraption in the center of the warehouse.

  It was a shipping container of the sort carried by a train, truck, or cargo ship. The doors hung open and revealed a vacant interior. Nearly vacant anyway. I zoomed in farther to get a look at the technology rigged to the interior walls. A less observant person could be forgiven for thinking it was just a mass of electrical cables bundled to form an arch. An electronic control pad mounted to one side of the container had big knobby buttons that glowed faintly. A guard typed something into it manually. Old school.

  Guards moved out of the way and the Mercedes rolled forward. Transmitters rigged to the cable bundles lit up and emitted something that made the air go wavy. In a matter of seconds the space inside the shipping container was pulsing with multicolored light. It was bright enough to obscure much of the camera’s view. The SUV forged ahead into the glow and the camera went completely blind. But then, just for a fraction of an instant, there was a view of a rainy twilight sky out the other end of the container.

  The camera feed went dead.

  I whistled.

  Time gate. Not the transportation choice of your everyday gun thugs.

  “Waldo, were you watching that?”

  “No. I was viewing reruns of Knight Rider to see if I could gain a few tips.”

  “Funny. You happen to catch what they typed into that keypad?”

  “It was an alpha-numeric key code, part of which indicated a date and time.”

  “Anywhere fun?”

  “One of your least favorite decades. They traveled to nineteen eighty-four.”

  “Damn.”

  Time travel law enforcement had a pretty solid grip on the twenty-second century. The twenty-first century was also managed, albeit questionably. But they listed the millennium as the border of their jurisdiction. Like all borders, there was a side criminals preferred to operate on. If you equated time travel criminal activity to the North American drug trade, the year 2000 was the US/Mexico border and the 1980s and 90s were Juarez and Tijuana.

  1984.

  “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy,” I muttered.

  “Shall I begin selecting jump coordinates?”

  I shifted back into gear. “Not yet. I have a stop to make.”

  9

  Looking the part in a decade other than your own doesn’t always have to be a production. Time travelers often overdo it on dressing up for trips, and the 1980s are a fashion rabbit hole. I prefer to select a single item to suit the era and leave the rest alone. That’s why the pitstop to my place here in 2019 only involved ditching my hoodie and pulling a jean jacket from the closet. I had to have something to hide my gun.

  My Stinger 1911 was now resting comfortably in the shoulder rig beneath the jean jacket. Some decades require more fashion, some more firepower. The ’80s required both.

  As I was preparing to leave the apartment again, a text showed up on my phone.

  <<< Come for dinner tonight? I’d like an update.

  It was Isla Phillips. I texted back.

  >>> What time?

  <<< Eight. Bring wine.

  >>> I’ll be there.

  I waited for a response slightly longer than necessary, then shoved the phone into my pocket.

  * * *

  The jump back in time wasn’t bad. I showed up in a private parking garage I knew was secure.

  A thunderstorm had come through. Street signs and tree limbs were still dripping. I cruised the streets of 1984 St. Pete with a wary unease.

  The city had two reputations in the ’80s. One was God’s waiting room, a sleepy borough of retirees and ex-somebodies living out their golden years in peace and quiet. That rep was only the façade. Some of those old timers were ex-gangsters. Some were current gangsters. Drug planes did scud runs across the Gulf of Mexico on the regular, evading radar and dropping cocaine in Tierra Verde, a peninsula destined to become the home of the rich and powerful.

  St. Pete had a direct line to New York, and 1984 was a similar gateway to the next millennium for all manner of ill-gotten gains. So I kept an eye out.

  Waldo managed to snag a destination date and time when the Mercedes G-Class SUV rolled through the time gate, but he didn’t get me a location. That was problematic. Still, there are only so many places in this city that you can park a shipping container concealing an illegal temporal portal.

  And I had time on my side.

  It was 8:33 p.m. outside the train yard. I waited forty minutes and didn’t see a thing. Then it was 8:33 p.m. on the Tierra Verde causeway. I gave that almost an hour before jumping back again. At 8:37 I was parked on Eighth Ave Southeast watching the south side of the Albert Whitted Airport and a barge in the Port of St. Petersburg. Two birds, one stakeout. I got lucky.

  The Mercedes SUV pulled out of the port gates, cruised past me and headed up First Street. My ride-along camera was low on juice but I was able to sync with it. The view from the side-view mirror soon showed rain-slicked streets and pink neon. They were headed for the dangerous part of town.

  In the next thirty years, Downtown St. Pete would be gentrified. Movie theaters and restaurants, high-end shopping and money. But not yet. In ’84 you didn’t come downtown unless you wanted drugs or trouble. The SUV was out of place here so I wasn’t surprised when they pulled into a U-Haul storage facility and a few minutes later a ’78 Buick Skylark rolled out. Squinty and Neck Folds, my acquaintances from outside the Phillips’ house, were now clearly visible through the untinted windows.

  Switching cars had lost my extra eyes, so I tailed the Skylark the old-fashioned way: a few cars back and playing it casual. They cruised past rows of dive bars till arriving at a place called Annihilation. The motif was apocalypt
ic and patrons outside could have been extras on a Mad Max film. Young punks in studded leather jackets and sporting colorful Mohawks drifted in and out of a cloud of cigarette smoke. In the parking lot, a trash can was on fire.

  Squinty and Neck Folds climbed out of the Skylark and were met with dirty looks from the punk set, but they entered a side door without hassle. I parked the Boss in a back alley in front of a sign that said ABSOLUTELY NO PARKING EVER! then instructed Waldo to jump the car thirty minutes into the future. It vanished.

  Let the meter-maid try to ticket that.

  I strolled up to the nightclub and was met with hostile glares. There was a bouncer at the door but he didn’t bother to ID me. Stepping inside was like huffing an exhaust pipe. Most of the twentieth century smelled like an ashtray but here I could barely see the walls. The lighting was all neon and black lights and it seemed the owners had saved on decorating by simply hitting everything with a sledgehammer. Any surface that wasn’t rubble was covered in band stickers and graffiti.

  I pulled my sunglasses from my pocket and activated them before slipping them on. I looked like a D-bag walking around a bar wearing sunglasses in the dark, but they came with twenty-second-century night vision and lit up the haze for me.

  It still took ten minutes to locate Squinty. Neck Folds must have gone to the head.

  Whatever business they had was brief. I was there in time to watch the bartender slip Squinty a metal shot glass and a business card. He looked like he was waiting for a tip but Squinty ignored him. Bartender curled his lip and walked away.

  Squinty studied the card, then drank the shot while he waited on Neck Folds. He then pocketed the card and the shot glass.

  Odd.

  Kleptomaniac?

  When Neck Folds got back from the John, I’d started recording via my sunglasses. He repeated the process Squinty had used. Bartender gave him a card and a shot. This time I noticed he’d pulled the metal shot glass from a different shelf than he was using for his other patrons. Neck Folds likewise drank the shot and kept the shot glass, tucking it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

  A puzzle. I was intrigued.

  Squinty and Neck Folds headed to the back of the bar and disappeared into a hallway. I followed. I took it slow and peeked around the corner. The hallway had private booths blocked off by curtains. All the curtains were closed. Whichever one Squinty and Neck Folds had gone into, they’d done it fast enough to dodge me.

  I cruised the corridor, listening to any sound that made it over the music. I pushed aside a few curtains and discovered two couples in states of undress and was cursed out by several more. No gun thugs. It was only at the end of the row that I found something promising. When I pulled aside the curtain, it showed a booth without upholstery. A chain was strung across the access and a sign on the table read CLOSED FOR REPAIR. The table was indeed damaged, a third of it missing, but it hardly seemed notable considering the state of the other decor.

  But Squinty and Neck Folds were nowhere to be seen.

  Their two shot glasses were upended on the table.

  Fascinating. This was a game I wanted to play.

  I walked back to the bar and leaned on it. The bartender wandered over.

  I stared at him, pushed my sunglasses up to my forehead so he could see my eyes. I was about to speak when he gave me a nod.

  He turned and reached for a shot glass. He poured me some Mariachi Añejo and slid it and a business card across the bar. He then pulled a rocks glass from a stack, added a large ice cube and stuck a lime on the edge. He set that in front of me and wandered off to serve other customers.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  I picked up the business card. It looked unexceptional. The name read THE LAST NIGHTCLUB and listed a phone number. On the back was a stamped jumble of letters. Furrowing my brow caused my sunglasses to slide down my forehead and land on my nose again. I poured the tequila into the rocks glass and sipped it while I studied the back of the card.

  It wasn’t a word jumble. My guess was a substitution cipher. Where was the key?

  I turned over the metal shot glass and peered at it over the rim of my sunglasses. When I angled it toward one of the black lights, it revealed an addition sign, the number four, and the words BOTTOMS UP.

  Aha.

  I worked out the business card cipher on a napkin, simply jumping four positions in the alphabet for every letter. Then I pressed my sunglasses back into place against the bridge of my nose.

  The result was TEN THIRTY FIVE PM EST. It didn’t list a location or date. I left a ten-dollar bill on the bar and walked to the back corridor again. I dodged a staggering drunk and made my way to the empty booth. I slid the curtain closed and studied the position of the two shot glasses Squinty and Neck Folds had left behind. I replaced theirs with mine.

  Bottom side up.

  I set my chronometer for ten thirty-five eastern, yesterday. Then I jumped.

  Then I regretted it.

  10

  I wasn’t in Florida anymore. That’s the exciting part about time travel. Seeing new sights.

  I’d landed on a stool. Same height and distance relative to my shot glass but the bar was long and polished.

  This wasn’t a post-apocalyptic dive in the Grand Central District. Judging from the skyline view out the windows past the bar, I was in New York City. Top floor of somewhere hip and expensive.

  The metal shot glass was still at my fingertips. My anchor in time. Only it was in a new location so I was too.

  Fun with time travel.

  I surveyed the room and noted roughly thirty people. I took off my sunglasses. No one seemed surprised by my abrupt arrival. The bartender was here. Same one from the dive in St. Pete. His wasn’t a look of recognition. But how could it be? This was yesterday and he was meeting me for the first time.

  He walked over and eyed me. “Welcome to the Last Night Club. What’s your drink order?”

  “Hook me up with a sipping tequila,” I said. He poured me a double-shot of Mariachi over an ice cube and garnished it with a lime, same way as he’d do tomorrow. He slid it to me.

  “Thanks.” I passed him another ten. Expenses were starting to add up.

  I swiveled on my bar stool and took in the scene.

  Tables. A few booths. Servers in black aprons cruised the room handing out cocktails.

  There. Back wall. Watching me. The source of my unease.

  He was handsome. Actual movie star handsome. His face was a pristine black with perfectly shaped eyebrows and a strong, clean shaven jaw. He completed his debonair look with a ten-thousand-dollar suit, manicured nails, and a stare that didn’t waver. The women at his table were gorgeous. Could have been models. But I didn’t take my eyes off the man in the suit.

  From the outside, there was no visible sign that he was the center of the gravity of this room. Patrons bantered and meandered about. Conversations hadn’t so much as paused at my arrival. But his eyes had found me instantly. I slid off the bar stool and walked toward him. One doesn’t veer away from a singularity.

  Partway to the table I was blocked by a value-sized Incredible Hulk. All the muscles at half the height.

  “It’s all right, Leo. Let him through. I don’t think Mr. Travers is here to harm me.”

  Mini Hulk obeyed.

  This guy knew my name. Not shy about letting me know it.

  He was wearing a signet ring on his left hand emblazoned with the symbol of a pegasus.

  “What’s your business here, Mr. Travers?”

  “You know my name but I don’t know yours.”

  “And here I thought you were a detective.” He cocked an eyebrow.

  “When manners fail.”

  “Far be it from me to deprive you of your curiosity.”

  A test.

  I scanned the table, his clothing, the mirror behind him, then brought my attention back to his face. The women to either side of him eyed me cautiously.

  “You’re Roman Amadeus.”
/>   He broke a smile, displaying impossibly white teeth. “So you are a detective. Care to divulge what gave me away?”

  “There is an edge of a chronometer peeking out of the cuff of your sleeve. A limited edition Manembo chronometer that wasn’t sold to you. By your ring, you attended the Academy of Temporal Sciences and were a member of the Immortal Realm fraternity so we’ve narrowed you down from being just a rich time traveler to being a rich, well-educated, well-connected, time traveler. But since Manembo would never have sold you that chronometer, you are either a thief or you associate with them. Add that we’re in Lower Manhattan, and you’re the owner of this club, the family crest over the bar makes you an Amadeus. Most of the senior members of the family are stuck in Rookwood prison or an alternate timeline for the foreseeable eternity and the only remaining cousins with brains enough to graduate the academy were all women. Except one. Roman Amadeus.”

  Roman nodded. “I’d like to think that a few of my male family members could have persisted through the Academy, but you’re probably right. Their talents lie in other areas. How do you know the personal politics of Abraham Manembo?”

  “Family friend.”

  “Ah. I should have guessed. Ladies, why don’t you give us the table so Mr. Travers can sit down.” The women beside him scooted out of the booth as fast as their miniskirts and the norms of modesty would allow.

  I eased into the booth and mini Hulk squeezed himself into the other side. He caught Roman staring at him.

  “What?”

  “I assure you I’m quite safe, Leo. Why don’t you see if Mr. Travers could use another drink.”

  “Oh. All right.” He got back up. “You want a steak? Steak’s good here.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “You should try the rib eye. Maybe the fillet.”

  “Leo, Mr. Travers was raised at the far end of the next century. He’d probably only accept plant-based options.”