I crossed Fourth Street via the crosswalk, then strolled south into Old Northeast. It was a fair hike to my place, but once I was off the main road and under cover of the old oaks, the walk was less of an inconvenience. I could use it. Clear my head.
My encounter with Dirk had given me another angle to this puzzle but now it was all corners and no edges. My mind kept showing me scenes from my night. Mostly Isla’s lips and the gaping hole in Foster’s head. Needed a good night’s sleep and a fresh start.
Hawk was waiting for me at the top of my steps, his golden eyes reflecting moonlight and making him look like the predatory killer he was. I scratched under his chin till his purring got loud, then filled his food dish. It occurred to me as I navigated the hallway to my bedroom that I’d left a nearly full beer at my office. It was still cold when I left too. I was too tired to go back for it now but I did make a note on my phone. A future me wouldn’t let it go to waste.
I undressed and crashed into the pillows face-first.
When my alarm went off at 7 a.m. I was still tired. I noticed the door to the guest room was locked. Not a bad idea.
I jumped back in time two hours, careful not to wake myself on arrival, went into the guest room and locked the door. I got another two hours of sleep before the alarm went off at seven again. This time I felt I could handle it.
Coffee first. Then coffee.
Breakfast was fresh fruit over oatmeal, juice, two glasses of water, and Advil. The Old Fashioned and the beers had been a great idea at the time but today would require reparations. Workout shorts and a T-shirt got me out the door. Hawk was missing again. Off regulating the local feline population no doubt. Had to keep the neighborhood hierarchy in order.
I refilled his water bowl and trotted down to the garage.
There was a sexy beast of a machine in the driveway.
The Boss.
Dad must have jumped it here sometime overnight. Never heard it arrive.
I hadn’t owned a car in a decade. Wasn’t anywhere I wanted to go that I couldn’t get to by bicycle, rideshare, or time travel, but I had to admit the Boss had style. Dark as death and just as mean, the car’s curves were an assault on decency. It had the body of a ’68 Mustang fastback but had been taken to the future for upgrades. An electric auto-drive system was rigged beneath an upgraded factory engine. More importantly, it could time travel. The intake for the supercharger yawned wide like a ravenous predator. It was a vehicle that would devour its enemies and crush their bones beneath its tires. Chrome door handles and window trim were the only accents keeping it from being mistaken for a black hole.
Not a car you parked outside if you wanted the neighbors to like you.
I opened the garage to see if I could make room.
My weight bench was centered in the right-hand bay. Toolboxes and more anchor cabinets filled the left. Relocating the weight stand was a workout in itself but once I got the bench moved, I loaded the bar with two forty-five pound plates each side and pressed out a set. Not bad for a warmup. I stretched and loaded up another pair of thirty-fives, then climbed into the interior of the car to sync it with the house.
It took over an hour to upload Waldo to the onboard CPU of the Boss, but it was worth it. Bouncing around time, access to the cloud could be spotty. I finished my workout while I waited.
By late morning I was freshly showered and changed, wearing my cozy stakeout clothes: a black hoodie, worn-in jeans, a T-shirt, and Chuck Taylors. I wore a ball cap and shades as well, completing the look. It was one of my ABC’s of investigations. Always be comfortable.
Plus, it was Saturday.
Then, it was mid-October. Foster’s death day.
Time to fit another piece in this puzzle.
I parked the Boss in Hyde Park, a block away from the Mercedes G-Class SUV and Foster Phillips’ house. There were already too many of me in the vicinity today. One of me staking out the alley on foot, one showing up inside the house and getting zapped by a dude I assumed was Foster’s killer, and now me, lurking in the pitch-black void of the Boss’s interior.
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.”