Agent of Time

by Nathan Van Coops

  Stella’s curiosity was piqued. She rummaged around in the bag of tapes and found the one marked as the rear parking lot feed. She got up and popped it into the VCR. It took several minutes to find the corresponding time stamp, but sure enough, just as the appointed time came, the back door of the store opened and a barefoot man in a jumpsuit emerged.

  “What the hell?” Stella leaned forward in disbelief as she watched the man exit the store, glance around the parking lot, then sprint out of frame. A few seconds later, the store proprietor stuck his head out the door to look around, then closed it again.

  Stella rewound the video to the point the barefoot man was emerging and let it play again. She paused it when he was fully in view.

  There was no doubt in her mind. It was the same guy from the scooter. The tall brown-haired young man she met at karaoke. Ben.

  “What on earth are you up to?” she muttered.

  She fast-forwarded through several minutes of footage, then rewound as well, looking for any other sightings, then switched back to the internal camera tape and searched as well. She found several other shots of patrons entering and exiting the bathroom hallway, but none with her suspect. Unless he was hiding in the bathroom for hours at a time, it seemed as though he appeared in the bathroom by magic, then ran out the back door a little after seven. Despite searching through the equivalent of several hours of footage, there was no sign of him ever entering the building. Frustrated, Stella rewound all the way to the beginning of the tape, and even checked the tape from the morning, but found no sign of him ever entering the store.

  She looked through the police report for the proprietor’s statement and reread it. She skimmed through the part about the patron attempting to douse him with gas and chasing him inside. The proprietor had then hid in the bathroom. He claimed the barefoot man rescued him from the bathroom just after the power went out, then went into the bathroom himself and locked the door, completely vanishing by the time the police got the door open.

  Stella leaned back in her chair. He somehow came out of the bathroom after seven pm, but went in after midnight? It made absolutely no sense. She double-checked the time stamps and the proprietor’s statement, but that’s what it said.

  Stella rewatched the video several times, studying the images of the arsonist as well, but found no new information. She checked the report again and noted the date.

  She had been at the bar with Danny that night.

  What time had she left the bar?

  Briggs hadn’t left till after he got the call about the fire. The karaoke singer had been there the whole time, hadn’t he? It couldn’t have been the same guy who let the proprietor out. It was completely impossible unless he was in two places at once. She jotted a note in her notebook. Timeline makes no sense.

  She stared at the words. There seemed to be a lot of that going around this week.

  It was 4:30 when a pretty young secretary in high-waisted slacks walked in with a print-out stuck to a clipboard. “Hi. Special Agent York? I have that license plate information you requested.”

  “Thank you,” Stella replied, accepting the sheet of perforated printer paper the secretary offered. The woman lingered in front of the desk, staring. “Was there anything else?” Stella asked.

  “No. Sorry. I just think it’s rad what you do, you know? A woman in the FBI.”

  “It’s not as glamorous as it might seem,” Stella replied.

  “But still,” the secretary said. “You have a gun and a badge and work for a big federal agency. Around here if you’re a woman trying to work in law enforcement, they just want to grab your ass or send you for coffee.” She frowned. “I’ve been working here a year now. Sometimes I don’t think it’s ever going to get better.”

  “You been to college?”

  “Two years.”

  “Major in political science and finish up your bachelor’s degree, and then come apply at the bureau,” Stella said.

  “You really think they’d take me?” she asked.

  “If they know what’s good for them,” Stella said.

  “All right, then. Maybe I will.” The young woman clutched her clipboard to her chest and smiled, then turned and walked out.

  Stella watched the vacant doorway for a long second, hoping she hadn’t set the young woman’s expectations too high, but then shook off the thought. The MacGregor’s of the world had to be on the way out. This was 1986. It was time for things to change.

  She looked down at the printout in her hand.

  The Buick was registered to a Robert Cameron. She copied the address into her notebook for ease of access and read on further. There wasn’t much on him. No criminal record. Not even any traffic violations. She’d need to get a better look at the location and see how he was affiliated with the guy Ben from the bar.

  She recalled the moment she spotted him exiting the impound lot. If they were running some kind of chop shop, it would be pretty stupid to be stealing from a police impound. Still, it was worth looking into. There was something very strange going on with this group of friends, and she was determined to find out what it was. She gathered up her notebook and moved to the door. She almost collided with Briggs on the way out.

  “Oh, hey,” Danny said. “Hoped you were still around. How’d the video research turn out? Any leads?”

  “Implausible ones,” Stella replied. “Hey, what time did you leave the bar the other night?”

  “Uh, around midnight, I think, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s what I thought. And the guys I was watching at the bar. You agree they were there the whole time, right?”

  “You couldn’t keep your eyes off them,” the detective said. “Despite my best attempts to distract you.”

  “There’s something not normal about that group.”

  Danny leaned against the wall. “You working tonight or do you want to maybe grab a drink? I promise not to get dragged away this time.”

  “Another night, maybe,” Stella said. “I’m onto something here and I just need to figure out what it is.”

  “You think the guys from the bar have something to do with your prison escapee? How are you making that connection?”

  “I saw one of them leave the impound lot where the prisoner van was held, then the same guy shows up connected to your arson case. I’m beginning to think it’s all the same damn case,” Stella replied.

  “You think the arsonist is the same guy as our van killer?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Stella said. “But the things I don’t know are starting to pile up. I plan to get some answers, and I’m going to start right now.”

  7 Paradox

  Stella York took the freeway on-ramp at Fifth Avenue and headed north, grateful that MacGregor had at least left her the car and had the good sense to take a cab to the airport. She yielded to an elderly couple in a convertible who had the top down and seemed in no particular hurry as they merged onto Interstate 275. It would be a short drive to the next exit, then she could stop by the address in her notebook and see what she could learn about Robert Cameron and his Buick.

  Stella attempted to change lanes to get out from behind the old folks in the convertible, but an eighteen wheeler and a passenger van were blocking her. She glanced ahead, trying to gauge whether it would be worth getting around them and the convertible or if there was even time before her exit. She changed to the middle lane and then nearly had a heart attack.

  There was a man standing on top of the tractor trailer in front of her!

  Stella gawked in amazement as she recognized the arsonist from the gas station surveillance video staggering along the top of the truck, working to keep his balance in the wind.

  “What the hell?” Stella said, trying to get a better look at what was going on on top of the trailer. It was only a few car lengths ahead of her. She scrambled to grab her notepad and pen to write down the truck’s tag number, but froze when she spotted the second man. He was crab walking backward near the edge of the traile
r. She caught a glimpse of his face as he looked down at the old people in the convertible in the next lane. The old folks saw him too and began to point and shout. The arsonist from the station video was standing, wielding a knife, and he looked like he was about to fillet the guy laying atop the trailer.

  “Holy shit!” Stella dropped her notepad and reached for the gun at her waist, but didn’t even have time to clear it from her holster when the soon-to-be-victim on the top of the trailer promptly disappeared.

  The man with the knife looked flabbergasted. Stella’s jaw dropped too. She stared at the spot where the young man had just been but he had vanished. The man with the knife began to turn, raising the knife to look for his victim behind him, but he never got the chance.

  The next moment was pure horror. A pedestrian overpass cleared the top of the truck but took the arsonist with the knife right in the back. He was launched headlong into traffic.

  Stella swerved wildly across the fast lane and shoulder and bounced through the grass in the median between the northbound and southbound lanes, nearly losing her seat. By the time she regained control of the car she had spun sideways and was now angled toward the freeway facing the wrong direction. She jammed the brakes hard and skidded to a stop, the car rocking violently as it came to rest.

  Other drivers weren’t so lucky.

  The freeway was chaos. Several cars had swerved out of their lanes and ended up in the runoff ditch, one embedded itself in the guardrail, and a few others collided with one another in the free-for-all on the road.

  Stella slowly uncurled her fingers from the steering wheel, secured her gun back in its holster, and swung the door open on her car. She took a second to calm her nerves and dizziness, and then climbed out to survey the carnage.

  The big rig hadn’t stopped.

  She spotted the old couple in the convertible parked along the far side of the road a hundred yards farther along the freeway. The passenger van that had been behind Stella on the freeway had a shattered windshield and was halfway into the grass. The windshield was splattered with blood.

  It was time to work.

  Stella made sure traffic had completely stopped before rushing to assist the injured. The driver of the van was an airport shuttle driver who was severely shaken but seemed to be unharmed. Stella made her way from car to car and checked on the condition of the occupants. There were quite a few people with minor injuries and several cars that had suffered severe damage, but fortunately none of the occupants seemed to be in a critical condition.

  Until she came to the body.

  Several onlookers had gathered around the man, but no one had summoned the courage to touch him. Stella instructed the gawkers to step back and give her some room. “Someone needs to get to a phone, let emergency services know what happened right away!”

  “I have a CB in the car,” a man said.

  “Use it,” Stella replied. “Get on channel nine and call this in. Let them know we need ambulances on scene right away.”

  Stella crouched next to the fallen man’s body and put her fingers to his throat to check his pulse. She knew the answer to the question without having to check, but she went through the motions anyway. The man’s body was broken in places that you don’t come back from.

  Over the next few minutes, Stella did her best to reassure drivers of the vehicles that had struck the man that the accident was unavoidable. By the time the first police cars and emergency responders showed up, she had made a mental list of the key witnesses. She was going to be one herself, but could she believe what she had seen? Where had the men come from and where did the other one disappear to? The image of the man on top of the truck came back to her and she recalled when he glanced down at traffic. Had it really been Ben? The same barefoot guy from the gas station fire? It had certainly looked like him. Whatever these two guys had going on, it seemed like they kept clashing in the most extreme ways.

  Once emergency response was well under way and ambulances had begun gathering up the injured, Stella made her way over to one of the squad cars. “I need to get an alert out on another vehicle involved in the accident,” she said. She pulled out her badge.

  The officer looked interested. “FBI, huh? You have a lead on what caused all this?”

  “Big rig trailer was headed north. This victim was on top of the thing when he got hit by the overpass. He’s a suspect in an ongoing investigation we’re involved with. I only have a partial on the plate for the big rig and a description of the trailer, but we should get a call in to see if someone spots it. I’d love to know where it came from.”

  The officer nodded and reached for the transmitter.

  Stella spent the next thirty minutes giving her report to the officers on scene and reassuring the medical responders that she didn’t need attention herself.

  The body on the side of the road had been covered up but the area was still being photographed. The officer with the radio walked up to Stella and tapped her on the shoulder. “Hey. Thought you might like to know. Had a call in for a possible sighting of your truck. Someone saw it coming back across the Gandy Bridge, then turning south on Ninth Street. They said it pulled back into a loading dock. Vicinity of Ninth Street and Fifteenth Avenue North.”

  “How long ago?”

  “A couple minutes, maybe?”

  Stella thanked the officer and made a note of the address, then checked her watch and made her way back to the rental car. In her report to the officers on scene, she had omitted the part about seeing a guy vanish into thin air atop the truck, but she still wanted to know what happened to him. Had she just lost sight of him? Was he still up there the whole time?

  She climbed back into her car and eased it along the break-down lane until she found a break in the guardrail, then swung the sedan into the southbound lanes and sped up to join the flow of traffic headed that way. It took her about ten minutes to reach the intersection the officer had listed.

  Stella had the windows down as she cruised Ninth Street looking for the loading dock that the officer had mentioned, subsequently she smelled the smoke before she saw the fire.

  What the hell was going on now?

  Traffic was light but she came upon a couple of cars stopped along the side of the road. A young man was standing beside the vehicle of a passerby while pointing to a multi-story glass-paned office building across the street. He looked vaguely familiar but she couldn’t place him. It looked as though he had flagged down the car and was looking for help. It was obvious why. Smoke was billowing out vents in the roof and the glow of flames illuminated several windows.

  Stella climbed out of the car and walked briskly toward the man standing in the street. She flashed her badge as he turned toward her. He appeared to be Middle-Eastern with dark eyes and a distinctive crooked nose. She tried to recall where she had met him before. He looked relieved to see the badge. He immediately began gesturing toward the building.

  “There’s a crazy man in there. Very dangerous. He’s holding people hostage and he lit the building on fire! Stenger. His name is Elton Stenger!”

  “Has someone called the fire department?” Stella asked.

  “The first car I stopped. They went to find a payphone,” the man replied. Several bystanders had accumulated on the sidewalk now as well, gawking from the vicinity of the bus stop.

  “You said there are hostages inside? How many?” Stella asked.

  “Two. My friends Francesca and Ben. They’re on the third floor.”

  Francesca and Ben. Them again? What on earth was going on with these people?

  “Is there a loading dock for this building?” Stella asked.

  “Around back,” the man replied. “You might be able to get in that way. There’s a back door. But you have to be fast.”

  “What’s your name?” Stella asked the man.

  “Malcolm. Malcolm Longines.”

  “Stay here, Malcolm. Tell the fire department and police what you told me as soon as they arrive. I’ll be right
back.” Stella pulled her gun from its holster and darted across the street, angling toward the sidewalk that ran alongside the building.

  In a situation like this, she had limited options. An arsonist with hostages inside a burning building? She needed backup. Backup she didn’t have. She had no doubt that the police would be on scene any moment, but it might be too late. She needed to at least get a look at the situation, and then she could decide whether or not to go inside after the hostages.

  Stella moved quickly down the sidewalk, trying several door handles along the side of the building, but they were all locked. When she was almost to the alley at the back of the building, she discovered the loading dock. The trailer she had seen earlier on the freeway was there, now missing its tractor. Whoever had been on top of it was—

  Right there! The man she had seen disappear, Ben, was back again. Not in the building like the man Malcolm had said, but here on the ground. He was doing something strange, creeping along the alley, watching the windows on the third floor. Stella quickly ducked into the shrubbery along the path, hidden from his view, but able to observe. She kept her gun ready. What was he doing? The young man slunk along the alley until he reached a low wall with some bushes for cover and ducked behind it. She could still make out one of his feet protruding from his hiding place, but it was clear he was trying not to be seen.

  A window overhead exploded. Glass shards rained onto the loading dock, along with two intertwined figures. They plummeted from the third story window and crashed onto the top of the trailer with a resounding thud.

  Stella’s heart leapt in her chest from the shock of the noise and she instinctively covered her head to protect from any more falling glass. The next moment she had her gun trained on the top of the trailer. One of the figures stood up.

  It was impossible.