“About four-ish. I waited and waited. Parminder returned from shopping. She was horrified when she saw me, and made a fuss, thinking I’d just been mugged, and at first I did not disabuse her of this notion. But then, of course she noticed the time machine I’d borrowed, which I’d tried to hide, and the empty garage. ‘What have you done?’ she said to me. ‘What have you done?’ It was, oh it was brutal, Spider.”
“I can imagine.”
“She put two and two together, and figured out that the me standing before her, as small as an ant, was a time traveler. ‘What have you done?’ she said again, and marched into the house. But then she wanted to know where ‘your boy’ might be. Was he staying over at a friend’s house? I did not think so, but I didn’t know. Then we got a call from the parents of a girl. Her name was Phoebe, a girl Parminder said she had met a couple of times when Vijay brought her round after school to play. Parminder thought she was a lovely girl, but not suitable for Vijay. It seemed this Phoebe had called her parents on the way home from school and told them she was having dinner at our house, and would be home later. But Phoebe had not come home, nor had she phoned to say she would be late. They wanted to talk to her.”
“What did you do?”
“Parminder turned to me. She told me that this was my mess. She transferred the call to me, and went to the bedroom, and began packing.”
“Packing?”
“She wanted to clear out before Phoebe’s parents started an investigation. Me too. I told them I’d call back. Then I hopped into my borrowed time machine and blipped back to the dealership, returned it, and drove home. On the way I started thinking that you, of all people, could help me out. I’d read your file and knew you had been a policeman and your employment record showed you are a time machine genius.”
“Christ,” Spider said, not happy. “Thanks.”
“I know, I know. But I’ve got no one else to turn to.”
“Right. Okay. How many guys did you see, before they knocked you out?”
“There were at least four.”
“The one who spoke to you, was he Australian? The way you described what he said to you, it sounded Oz.”
“He was, I think, either Australian or a Kiwi. Maybe British.”
“Good grief,” Spider said. “So how tall, do you think? Tall as me? Shorter than me? Tall as you, maybe? Like a jockey? Or some kind of lumbering great bloke?”
“Tall, yes, taller than you. And lean, quite fit, I think. Like perhaps a player of Australian football.”
“You’re sure about that? He wasn’t my sorta height, but really thick-set, made of cement, no neck, like a rugby player?”
Patel laughed. “No, he could have played AFL.”
“What about the other guys?”
“I didn’t get much of a look at them, sorry.”
“Yeah, fair enough. Okay, here’s a touchy question. What, um, race were they, these guys?”
“What race?” Patel stared at him.
Spider was embarrassed. Here he was, well into the twenty-first century, and race was still the hardest thing in the world to talk about, particularly when talking to a person not of one’s own race. “I’m really sorry, all right? But I have to know. Was he a whitefella like me — or what?” Having said this, Spider stopped a moment and wondered what on Earth possessed him to use the term “whitefella”, something you generally only heard in discussions involving or about Aboriginal people. Spider wished he could climb under a rock and pretend he hadn’t said anything, but he couldn’t. The word was out there, hanging between them, like a lingering fart.
“Oh,” Patel said, getting it, but not happy. “He was white. From what I could tell.”
This was getting murky, with layers and layers of cause and effect, whole realities being created and eliminated right there in Patel’s garage. It looked as though Patel’s garage was either a naturally occurring nodal-point, or it had become one as a consequence of all the high-powered time-travel-related activity that had happened there. Either way, all kinds of possibilities branched off. It made Spider tired just thinking about it. It also occurred to him, once he saw that Patel wasn’t going to hold Spider’s clumsiness with language against him, that it was possible, in Spider’s present timeline, that Vijay and his girlfriend might simply have taken Kali for a joy ride, and any thieves in the here and now would simply have found an empty garage. It was like a card game with all the players slapping down cards that completely changed the nature of reality every turn, and the turns happening blindingly fast, leaving the final winner almost impossible to figure out. “Phoebe’s folks must be climbing the walls.”
“They have contacted the police. Phoebe is now officially missing, and I am the chief suspect. I have had my house searched, my property examined, and I have been interviewed at length. Of course they don’t know about Kali”
Spider could imagine. The police would look at the facts, and come up with all manner of possible theories to explain what had happened, and in the end they would go where the evidence led them. All the same, among those theories they would have to explore was the one in which Mr. Patel, possibly with the complicity of his mysteriously absent wife, had done a vile thing indeed, not only with their own son, but with another child, too. Even if Mr. Patel eventually confessed to building a hotrod time machine, the coppers could think that Patel was simply creating a distraction, and that Vijay and friend might well be somewhere here in the present, and very possibly have come to a bad, bad end. Spider had to keep that firmly in his mind. It was a lesson he had learned on the job: things are not always as they seem. Sometimes, even most times, they are far stranger than you’d imagine, and most likely more perverse than you’d care to consider.
Spider believed there had once been this fabulous hotrod time machine, called Kali. He believed, with difficulty, that Mrs. Patel had shot through to India to let her husband take all the flak. He believed that Patel was a genuine time machine enthusiast. You only had to look up at that glorious machine hanging above his desk to see that. That right there was solid platinum geek-ware, he thought. But geeks could still be killers and worse. When children were involved, you had to take every possible care, follow every procedure, make damned sure you were interpreting the law correctly to the nth degree. Because you would be tested on it. You could very well wind up in court, defending the integrity of your findings while the defendant’s lawyers did their best to destroy your credibility. How awful would it be if you presented an account of kids having absconded in Dad’s illegal time machine, only to have the truth turn out to be simply that Dad killed them in his bathtub, or in that great big two-car garage, and buried the bodies in a shallow grave out in the bush somewhere? The thing was, correlation did not necessarily imply causation. Yes, Patel’s time machine, and these two children, were gone. But it did not necessarily follow that the missing kids were with the missing machine. Spider had to be on his guard here, the way he had to be on his guard years ago, when he was tracking Superintendent Sharp and his pedophile buddies to early twentieth-century Perth, when they were interfering with local kids and getting away with it because they weren’t locals. He shuddered, remembering that, and seeing that right here, he could be up against similar trouble.
So, what to make of Patel? Spider thought. There was something madly admirable about his desperate determination to push through and succeed, no matter what; but there was also something sinister about that desperation that left Spider feeling uneasy in Patel’s presence. How far could such a man go in order to make a losing proposition pay off? What would such a man be prepared to do? Was there anything he would not do? What kinds of deals would he make, if it meant great glory? Or even, maybe, simply getting away with murder? He scribbled some notes on his watchtop, and decided to change the subject. “What’s the name of the officer leading the investigation?”
“O’Connor
. William. Bill.”
“‘Wild Bill’ O’Connor? Right. Okay.” Spider knew the guy. Very professional, and most likely clean, not having been part of Superintendent Sharp’s group of special chums. This meant Spider might, possibly, be able to talk to O’Connor about the situation, without too much of his own history getting in the way. Or so he hoped. Spider had been away from WAPOL for a long time now; he didn’t know how his legend might have spread or waned in the interim. If Iris’ accounts were to be believed, the general mood of the local service was still very much anti-Spider, at least on the surface. Was it possible that O’Connor might talk to him, professional to professional? Or was he, Spider, just as likely to get drawn into the whole thing and treated as, at the very least, a Person of Interest?
“I’m going to need your help,” Spider said.
“There are limits to what help I can provide, Spider. My position here is not what it was.”
“Yeah, I get that. But you’re still here, you can still requisition stuff, right?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I’ll need a unit. A time machine. And I can’t do anything without money. The pittance you pay me for my work at the shop is not going to cut it.”
“My authority to requisition such things is—”
“Curtailed, yeah, okay.” That didn’t leave Spider many choices.
“As for money, I can pay you out of my own savings. What else?”
“I need a leave of absence from the shop, so I can work on this full-time.”
“I’m afraid not, I’m sorry to say.”
Spider could not believe his ears. “No?” He stared at Patel. “No? You expect me to slave over bloody time machines and argue with idiot owners and rescue your nuts from the fire in my spare time?” When not tending to poor Mr. Popeye for Molly, of course, he thought with more than a trace of bitterness.
Mr Patel said, “I assumed you would make use of a time machine to get all the sleep you need without it affecting your duties at the workshop. Full shift at workshop, hop in time machine, go off and get eight, ten hours sleep, something to eat, a bit of rest and downtime, perhaps, and then pop back to the present and carry on working on the case for the rest of the evening.”
“Just like that,” Spider said, disgusted at the way Patel had it all figured out.
“It did not seem like a problem in any way, I thought,” he said.
Spider went to object, but he knew, as always, resistance was useless. He shook his head. The shitty deal just got shittier. Perfect. “What about you?”
“What about me?” Patel said, the color of doom itself.
“Probably only a matter of time before you’re arrested and charged.”
“That seems very likely at this stage. I have already retained a legal team.”
“I see.”
“All is not yet lost, of course,” Patel said, glancing at Spider, allowing himself the tiniest of wry smiles.
Spider remembered a detail. “You said you had a nodal point all sorted, didn’t you?”
“With a bit of luck, I can make all this so it never happened, even if I have to wait twenty, thirty years to do it. It just depends on you, Spider. You must find Vijay and Phoebe.”
“What about the machine?”
“I do not care about the machine. Bring it back, destroy it, whatever.”
This made Spider lift his eyebrows. “I’ll come over to your place tonight, late, to have a look at the premises.”
“I should be there any time after nine.”
Turning, getting ready to leave, Spider glanced up at the Time Machine hanging above. He needed a working time machine to find the damned kids. “Ahh … as for the coppers…”
“I shall keep you posted.”
Spider looked back at Patel, a little guy in big trouble. Trouble that he was only too happy to spread around. This could go very badly for Spider, he knew that. It would be too easy to find himself caught in the same vortex that was taking Mr. Patel down the plug-hole. He could wind up an accessory, or even an accomplice, in the eyes of the law. Certain officers of WAPOL might well think, justice has caught up with that traitorous scumbag Spider Webb at long last. He had no doubt that there would be people out there only too happy to doctor evidence, to change statements, anything at all that might help seal his fate. “We never picked you for a bloke interested in little kiddies, there, Spider. Very nasty. How the mighty have fallen.” He could see it all now.
As he left Patel’s office, and emerged once more onto the hectic bustle of St. George’s Terrace, dodging panhandlers, Hare Krishna groups, doomsayers bearing apocalyptic signs raving on, mobs of grave-faced office workers in rumpled shirts bearing boxes of personal effects, Spider thought, Gonna need some help. And no sooner had he thought that than he noticed a white “Jim’s Custom Pets” van parked across the street. The hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up, and he felt cold. Then he noticed people who seemed perhaps too obviously just standing around casually, chatting on phones, fiddling with their watchtops, eating takeaway. In all this hustle and bustle, with so many people moving around him, people standing still stood out. And yet, he told himself, doing his best to keep calm, that even though the government almost certainly knew about Mr. Patel’s hotrod time machine, there was the possibility that Patel had been so clever that he’d pulled off the seemingly impossible, and nobody knew. As impossible as it must have been to keep such a project secret, it seemed equally impossible that government agents worth their weight in dark sunglasses would look quite so obviously up to something like these people he saw. Real government types, Spider thought, proper professionals, would indeed blend in. Which was a line of thought that did not help. And that wasn’t even taking into account those watchers out there monitoring him in ghost mode. Spider told himself he wasn’t being paranoid, but the fact was he was now involved in two separate situations in which the government had probably taken an interest: Dickhead’s mysterious “upgraded” severed head; and the hottest hotrod time machine ever built. He hated this kind of thing. It reminded him of the long secret campaign against Superintendent Sharp, when he could only speak to his control officer about the case, worried all the time that the control officer was somehow also talking to Sharp, and it was all going to crash down on his head. The tension made him sick all the time. And now he could feel that tension settling in the pit of his stomach all over again. But here he was, thinking, “you’re not paranoid if there really are people out to get you”.
Spider popped his watchtop and called Iris; told her he needed to talk to her, tonight, at Trinh’s Vietnamese cafe, about eight. This was code they both understood. A “meeting at Trinh’s” was in fact a meeting at the Kid’s Adventure Playground in the depths of Kings Park. Iris went on to ask what was going on, but he cut her off, and headed off to catch a taxi back to the shop. It was nearly five p.m.; the sun was diving for the western horizon, beyond the hulking mass of Kings Park, going underground.
Chapter 9
As soon as he walked in the door, Malaria popped up, looming over him. “Spider! Thank God!”
He glanced about, on edge. “Something wrong?”
“The coffee droid’s died.”
He felt himself sag with relief. All the way home, after calling Iris, he’d been tense, coiled up, to the point he had to ask the taxi driver to pull over because he thought he was going to be sick. After some dry heaves, a coughing fit, and a foul taste in his mouth, he got back in the car and they carried on. It was a telling sign. He was in trouble, and knew it. There was an excellent chance Iris Street might arrest him tonight, and bring him in for questioning, with the aim of turning in Mr. Patel. He hoped he had enough connection with Iris that she would instead at least listen to him, and decide what to do about it later.
But now? The coffee droid was dead? The office clock sa
id it was five-thirty. Spider felt knackered. Long, long day. Too much going on. What he wanted was a nap, but doubted very much he’d be able to sleep even if he tried. It was such a tempting thought. Failing a nap, a lovely double macchiato would have hit the spot instead. “All right”, he said. “How dead? Show me.”
Malaria showed him. The machine was still operational enough to greet him, “Spider-san!” But there was also something of humiliation in the way it stood there in the workshop, tucked away in a corner. Malaria left him to it.
Charlie came over. “How’d it go with the old man?” This was a bit of a joke with them since Patel was young enough to be Spider’s son.
“Same old,” Spider said, evading the topic, making a show of inspecting the droid. “Know anything about this?”
“Yeah, I went to get a flat white while you were out. Coffee came out cold, tasted of shit and chemicals, and this nasty stinky smoke — it smelled like burning plastic, tell the truth — started pouring out the vents.”
“Really?” He looked at the machine. “Coffee Droid—”
“Spider-san?”
“Feeling a bit sick, yes?”
“Coffee production functionality currently not online. I am … ashamed.”
“Machine intelligence,” Charlie said, shaking his head, disgusted.
“It’s all right, Coffee Droid—” he said, and turned to Charlie. “We seriously need a better name for this thing.”
“Right now,” Charlie said, “I’m voting for ‘Useless Box o’ Gears’.”
Spider felt a pang of embarrassment on behalf of the coffee droid, which itself stood there, venting noxious steam, somehow conveying to Spider a sense of profound shame that clearly Charlie did not or could not detect. To the droid, he said, “Coffee Droid, I—”
“Spider-san! How may I serve you?”
“Good fucking grief,” Charlie said. “I’ll leave you to it. Meanwhile, is there any of that jar of instant left in the — oh, shit.” A few months ago Malaria had bought a small jar of instant coffee to get through a crisis with their last coffee droid. Only problem with that was that that jar, as far as Charlie and Spider knew, was still in the break room, and the break room was still cordoned off with blue and white WA POLICE CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape. “I’ll go talk to Malaria.”
Paradox Resolution Page 8
