Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  “Then I suppose that there is no point in my being here any longer,” Mrs Maine decided suddenly, standing up and not even waiting for the surprised Mayer to rise before heading for the conference room’s glass door.

  Gruber was less surprised than the lawyer. All those years of reading people on the streets and trying to divine their purposes and their lies had allowed him to pick up on signals that he could not even have identified consciously. He slipped out of the side door to the conference room and took the freight elevator down to the ground floor. The building that housed MMCW also housed a lot of other companies and the passenger elevator was going to stop on several floors on the way down, whilst the freight elevator was unoccupied and went straight to his preferred destination.

  When the passenger elevator doors opened to disgorge Felicity Maine, plus a couple of other people that Gruber didn’t know, he was ready to intercept her straight away. He did not want this conversation to take place in clear sight of everyone in the building’s lobby, so he all but jumped in front her as she strode out.

  “Mrs Maine, please, could I speak to you? It’s very urgent.” He could tell that she wasn’t going to stop. She was a rich woman and had learned the best way to avoid those trying to find a route to her wealth was to simply ignore their existence. “It’s about your husband.”

  That caught her attention, but she was suspicious. When you had as much money as the Maines, suspicion was probably a requirement of daily life. Especially when you had that much money and your husband was accused of stealing most of it and killing for the rest.

  “A couple of minutes of your time,” Gruber promised.

  “You’re part of the MMCW team aren’t you?” She recognised his face, but couldn’t put a name to it. “Mister…”

  “Gruber,” he supplied it. “And now that you have terminated your arrangement with them, no I’m not part of their team.”

  Mrs Maine glanced up to the ceiling of the lobby, though in her mind she was looking all the way up the sixth-floor office space of the law firm. “There didn’t seem much point in continuing.”

  “Well, Mr Mayer wasn’t kidding when he said they had exhausted all the avenues that were open to them,” Gruber told her. “I could swear to that.”

  “A loyal employee,” she said without much feeling.

  “Contractor,” he corrected her, “and loyal only to the person who’s paying me. MMCW may have done everything they can, but that does not necessarily mean that I have done everything I can.”

  She looked at him sharply, trying to divine what he meant by that, and whether he could be trusted, or whether he was a con artist trying to work her.

  “Old man Mayer might not be above getting people off on technicalities when he knows they’re guilty as sin, but he’s not one for actually doing anything illegal. His code of honour is funny that way. Then again, he’s a lawyer so morals don’t really come into it.”

  “A lawyer you worked for,” she pointed out.

  “I’m not suggesting I’m an angel either,” Gruber admitted. “Look, there’s possibly one more thing that I can try. It’s a total long shot. Call it an act of desperation.”

  “Illegal?” she enquired.

  “Risky,” he evaded.

  “And why would you do this for me, Mr Gruber?”

  Now she remembered his name right enough.

  “A million dollars,” he told her baldly.

  “A million dollars,” she repeated, surprised.

  “I’m dying, Mrs Maine,” he told her flatly. She was the first person to know, other than his doctor and himself. “Cancer. No need to say you’re sorry or anything. You weren’t responsible. But I have kids that I’d like to help out before I go. Half a million dollars each would go a long way to doing that.”

  “A very long way,” she agreed.

  “Only if it works,” he told her. “Nothing until your husband is home with your kids. It’s a lot, I know, but what price can you put on having your husband home, free?”

  “I’ve already put quite a price on it,” she replied, glancing once again towards the offices of the very expensive law firm. “What do I have to sign?”

  He shook his head, “No contracts for this.”

  “That’s a risky proposition for you,” she suggested.

  “I’m a pretty good judge of people,” he said, not immodestly. His time on the force, and the investigations thereafter had proven this to be true. “If I deliver, then you’ll pay.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I’ll pay.”

  Gruber believed her and trusted that he was right.

  “Then we have a deal and I have work to do,” he said, giving her the best smile that he had and walking away

  ‘An act of desperation,’ he’d told Mrs Maine and he hadn’t been lying. He was staring at the box as though he could blame everything on it. It was nothing but an old cardboard box. A very old cardboard box, in fact. It was old enough to be mainly held together by duct tape and mould.

  It was three hours since he had gone out into the garage and brought the box into the kitchen. For those three hours, he had been prowling around the room, leaving occasionally to go and prowl around the lounge or the bathroom instead, but mainly circling the thing like a hungry scavenger wanting to feed, but scared that the lion’s carcass wasn’t quite as dead as it looked.

  Gruber was afraid and he didn’t like the feeling. He hadn’t been this afraid in a very long time and that feeling made him angry.

  The box had been abandoned in the garage and looked like it. He’d had to wipe the dust and cobwebs off the damned thing before lugging it inside. He could remember the junk that was piled in with the object that was the real source of his fear. The junk was camouflage to make it appear that there was nothing of significance in the box at all. There was certainly nothing of monetary value in there. Unless you used it that way, of course.

  The box had been in the garage since before Melissa had been taken from him by a drunk driver over on Capitol Drive. It had been lucky for that driver that Gruber had been laid up in the hospital recovering from his bullet wound at the time. By the time that he was fit enough to walk again, the terrible anger had subsided enough for his reason to restrain it. He had two kids to raise on his own and getting caught for murder wasn’t a good way of doing that. Besides which, Gruber had been a cop for long enough to know that murder wasn’t something you got away with if you had a link to the victim.

  It was that anger, that unreasoning rage, that had driven him to fill the box and put it in the garage in the first place. The temptation was just too great and he had hidden it away in a pile of mouldering old stuffed toys, washing machine parts, AV cables and who knows what other useless garbage he had found around the house. He had tried to forget it, tried hard. And he had managed to do that until now.

  “Aw crap,” he muttered to himself and reached out to open the box. The duct tape had lost its adhesive quality some time before and came off the moment he pulled at it. The cardboard slumped as the support was removed, but the box didn’t break.

  Gruber gingerly opened the flaps at the top and looked inside. The box contained nothing that had held any significant memories for him. The teddies and broken toys were ones the kids had exclaimed delightedly over on Christmas morning and then never even looked at again. There was only one important object in there and it glittered at him from the interior, as though it was winking at him.

  There was still time for him to close the box and tape the flaps up again. He could still shove the box back into the garage or even take it down to the local garbage dump to get rid of it once and for all, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. He could no more get rid of it now than he had been able to before.

  He reached in and took hold of the neck of the bottle, pulling it out from under the other contents. It was about four inches tall and was fashioned out of a fine blue glass wrapped in a silver filigree mesh. You could buy something like it down at the local market, t
hree for a buck.

  Those weren’t like this one, though.

  Gruber placed it on the table top and regarded it closely. It was a simply decorated bottle, nothing more, and yet as he watched it he was certain that it was watching him back.

  “Time to be bold,” he told himself, rubbing the afternoon stubble that stained his cheeks and wondering if there was ever a time to be this kind of bold.

  “It can wait until tomorrow,” he decided, but knew that it couldn’t, now more than ever. The bottle was out and he was looking at it once more. There was no way he was going to be able to overcome its pull now.

  “Can’t put the genie back in the bottle, I guess,” he said and chuckled to himself. “But I guess you can let it out.”

  In one swift motion, before he could talk himself out of it, he grabbed the bottle in his left hand, the stopper in his right and pulled. There was a small pop and nothing happened.

  “Not quite what you remember?” a deep and sonorous voice asked melodically from behind him, causing the old ex-cop to almost crap his pants.

  There was a low, throaty chuckle from behind him and the genie floated around to face him. “Well, look at you now, you silver fox. Or maybe that ought to be grey grizzly.”

  “It’s been a while,” Gruber replied.

  The genie looked exactly as it had before. Gruber suspected that it had looked the same throughout its entire existence and there was no telling exactly how long that had been. Actually, the genie could probably have told him, but he had never thought to ask. It had the general shape of a human, though it seemed to be composed of mist that thickened to an almost solid state at times and became as thin as gauze at others. It was also blue in colour, which was about the only thing that the Disney version had managed to get right. It was dressed soberly in a suit that could have come from Old Man Mayer’s wardrobe and there were no manacles on its wrists, only what looked suspiciously like a Rolex. Its hair was slicked back with gel. It reminded him a little of that Michael Douglas character in Wall Street, Gecko. He couldn’t remember the first name, except that it had the same first letter, so maybe it was George.

  The one thing about the genie that Gruber couldn’t accept (which was saying a lot considering the rest amounted to a levitating see-through blue stock trader) was its eyes. Far from being a window to the genie’s soul, they were mirrors reflecting everything it saw. It was disturbing to look at them for more than a moment.

  “How long?” the genie asked and Gruber could sense that the question was not as casual as the genie would have liked him to believe. Though it was most certainly not human, it reacted in very similar ways.

  “Twenty-six years, give or take.”

  “Another quarter century,” the Genie said softly. “What did I miss?

  “Rampant technology and bad politics,” Gruber said with a shrug. He wasn’t about to try and come up with a summary of the last twenty-six years. Not without a history book anyway.

  “So, not much has changed then,” the genie suggested, “except your hair colour and waistline. Wait, let me take a look at you. A good look.”

  The genie did just that, widening those silver pools of mercury and turning them on Gruber in a fashion that made him believe that they were looking inside him, perhaps into his very soul, assuming that he had one. Then the floating being shook its head a little sadly, “Oh, I see. How long did they give you? Eight months? Six?”

  “A little more. I’m a stubborn sonofabitch, so I intend to see the year out.” It was painful to admit it, but he didn’t want to look weak in front of this strange creature.

  “Do you want me to fix it?” the genie offered, tilting its head to one side. The eyes, of course, showed nothing.

  “I thought you couldn’t do death,” Gruber responded. “A bit above your pay grade.”

  The genie bowed its head slightly, “It is true. Everything has its limitations.”

  “You cure the cancer and I’ll just get hit by a bus or my plane will crash or something like that,” Gruber recalled an earlier conversation.

  “Something like that,” the genie admitted.

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “You might suffer less,” the genie offered.

  “I’m not here for me,” Gruber told it.

  “Ah, so this is more of a business meeting than a social visit. Let me guess, you want to put some things right before the end gets you?

  “Something like that,” Gruber agreed, echoing its words. The genie wasn’t human and it sometimes reacted to situations in ways that were unexpected. Its apparent glee at his imminent demise was disconcerting, but shouldn’t have been. The wraith could be shockingly tactless at times.

  “Well then, let’s get down to it,” the genie said excitedly. “I mean, your wish is, quite literally, my command. I am your…”

  “Don’t say it,” Gruber warned.

  The genie grinned, though without any real humour, “Ah, the great guilt of the American white man. It never quite goes away, does it? You can’t quite assuage it and they wouldn’t let you if you could.”

  “Are you aware of Eric Maine?” Gruber enquired carefully, ignoring the genie’s taunts.

  “Oh please,” the genie rolled its eyes. “I can pick up local television broadcasts even inside my bottle inside a mouldy cardboard box stuck at the back of the bottom shelf of an unused work table in the garage. Which doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pay for me to have cable installed.”

  Gruber ignored the genie. He continued to speak slowly, measuring up each sentence before he actually spoke it. “Is there proof that he is innocent?”

  “Nobody is completely innocent,” the genie said. “At least not past the age of two. As soon as you learn to speak, you learn to lie. It’s very human of you.”

  “Is there proof that Eric Maine is innocent of the charge of murder?” Gruber phrased the question as precisely as possible.

  “Yes, there is,” the genie told him. It didn’t even have to stop and think about the question. It simply knew.

  “And it existed even before I asked the question,” Gruber pressed. “You didn’t just create it out of thin air?”

  He had been burned by that before.

  “It’s genuine one hundred percent bona fide,” the genie confirmed.

  “I want that proof,” Gruber said. “I wish to have it.”

  “And there’s the magic word,” the genie approved. It held out one impeccably-manicured hand and opened it to reveal a small object in the middle of the insubstantial palm. Gruber wondered what kept it from falling through to the floor.

  “What’s that?”

  “A USB stick,” the genie said as though it ought to be obvious and it was slightly embarrassing that it wasn’t.

  “I can see it’s a USB stick. What’s on the USB stick?” Gruber kept a tight rein on his anger.

  “Why don’t you put it in your computer and play it?” the genie suggested.

  Gruber took the data stick and went through the house into his study. The genie floated after him, though its ability to float right through the walls meant that it arrived there first.

  The Mac was an older machine, a couple of generations behind the current offering, and Gruber heartily wished that he had never let his daughter persuade him to move away from his trust in all things windows-related, but it fired up quickly. He only used it for work, so he didn’t have any memory guzzling games or porn-related viruses gumming up the works.

  “This isn’t going mess up my computer, is it?” Gruber asked, pausing before inserting the USB stick into the relevant port.

  “No reason why it should,” the genie said, “though I’m no IT specialist, having spent the last quarter century in a wi-fi free bottle.”

  The genie could twist words and misdirect, or trick people, but it couldn’t lie. At least not as far as Gruber understood the rules.

  He inserted the memory stick and waited for the computer to AutoStart whatever was on it. He watche
d the video clip that was the only content for only a minute or so before he smiled to himself.

  “That’ll do, genie. That’ll do.”

  “We can’t use it,” Old Man Mayer said when the video came to its abrupt end. There were no subtle edits or list of credits. The clip just stopped.

  “What do you mean ‘we can’t use it’?” Felicity Maine demanded. “It proves that Eric is innocent and that everything that he has been saying is absolutely true.”

  “It does,” the partner agreed readily, “but it will not be admissible as evidence. It was clearly filmed without the consent of the people involved and was obtained who knows how.” He turned to Gruber at this point, “Would you be willing to explain to the judge how you came to be in possession of it.”

  “I think that it would be better for us all if I didn’t,” Gruber suggested with some certainty.

  “Exactly,” the elderly lawyer concluded that he had been right, though he could not possibly have guessed the reasons why.

  “So we have the proof, absolute proof, and we cannot use it?” Mrs Maine was clearly struggling with the concept. “What sort of justice is that?”

  “It’s not justice, it’s the law,” Mayer said without the slightest hint of irony.

  “Well then the law sucks,” the woman said vehemently.

  “Frequently,” Mayer concurred succinctly. “However, the law may be stupid often, but it is not blind. When I said that we cannot use it, that did not mean that you cannot use it.”

  “What do you mean?” Mrs Maine demanded.

  “My grand-daughter has a cell phone the size of a small television,” the lawyer said, as though speaking of some alien device from another world, like a lightsabre or something. “It seems permanently attached to her hand and she uses it to exchange messages with her friends constantly. Social media, I think they call it.”

  “The court of public opinion,” Gruber said, seeing where the old man was leading them.