Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  I took advantage of his distraction to shift two or three of the lines. After a bit more fussing, I presented the mirror. On it were two groups of three lines each.

  “There,” I said. “This—” I tapped the razorblade next to the first group “—is from the stuff you’re buying. And this—” tapping next to the second group “—is from the Rock. I suggest you try the merchandise first, so that you can judge it without synergistic effects.” Everyone seemed amenable to the notion.

  I looked down at the money Jimmy the Wit had dumped in my lap. “Damn, Jimmy, these are all old bills. Either of you guys got—”

  Stringy pulled out a leather bill-holder from inside his jacket, and suavely slid out a single, crisp and spotless thousand-dollar bill from what was obviously a matched set of one hundred. My expression communicated approval, and he happily rolled it into a snorter.

  I held the mirror up to Stringy, and with a gracious smile he did up the first line, half in one nostril and half in the other. Jimmy the Wit was all impatience, and as soon as Stringy had half-shut his eyes and leaned back his head in appreciation, Jimmy snatched the rolled-up bill from his hands. He leaned far forward and did up his line in a single snort. I followed suit. Then all three of us let out small laughs of appreciation.

  “Ve-ry niiiiice!” Stringy said. “In fact—” he handed the leather billfold with its hundred-grand cargo to me with a flourish “—I’d go so far as to say ‘Keep the billfold.’”

  “Sheila,” I said quietly. She was there. I handed her Jimmy’s wad and Stringy’s money. She riffled through Jimmy’s first.

  “Fifty,” she said. Then she riffled through Stringy’s money, every bit as quickly, but with a great deal more care.

  “Ninety-nine.” She faded far back. To the kitchen, in fact, where there was a switch to a signal light in the next building.

  “Well,” I said. “That was pleasant.” I was playing with the empty billfold, admiring it absently. “What say we do up the rest?” No argument.

  Of course, Jimmy and I had snorted up lactose while Stringy was inhaling pure Peruvian toot. When I juggled the lines, I laid out the blow in the first, fourth, and sixth places. Which meant that Stringy, being first to sample each group, snorted up powder from the Rock. It also meant—that the last line—ostensibly for me—was also real coke. And there’s where I made my one little mistake.

  The play as written was that in handling the mirror I would bumble and spill the last line all across the rug. What happened was that I got greedy. Coke’ll do that to you.

  I did up the line.

  It was just as the rush was hitting me that Sheila’s signal was answered. There was a vicious pounding on the door, and then a crash as the whole damn thing came splintering off its hinges. Men in blue uniforms, carrying guns, spilled into the room. “Awright, nobody move!” one of them yelled.

  I was riding on a great wave of clean energy when it happened, and it threw off my timing. I lurched forward a split-second late, and then everything happened at once.

  Stringy jumped to his feet, looking wildly for an exit.

  I fell across the coffee table, scattering bags of white powder with gleeful abandon.

  One of the shills screamed. Another shouted, “Let’s get OUTTA here!” Blue Jay Way was playing in the background.

  Clouds of white rose from the table as zip-lock bags burst open. There was a gunshot.

  Jimmy the Wit grabbed Stringy by the arm and pointed toward a rear window, which led to a fire escape.

  The shills ran about frantically.

  And Sheila turned the lights out, plunging the room into darkness.

  For the next three minutes, we all acted out our parts. Then, when she was certain that Jimmy the Wit had led Stringy safely out of the neighborhood, Sheila turned the lights on again.

  Everyone stopped what they were doing. The “police” holstered their guns. The shills straightened up their clothes. And I swiped at the lactose powder on my knees.

  Then they all lined up to get paid.

  “Good show,” I told Sheila, as we left. “Damned good.”

  “Yeah. Drop you someplace?”

  “Naw. I feel like taking a stroll.”

  When she was gone, I murmured, “Damned good” to myself again, and started walking. I was feeling fine. There was a time when they said there were only three Big Cons: The Wire, the Rag, and the Pay-off. The Rock was my own invention, and I was extremely pleased with how well it was working out.

  So I strolled along, whistling, following the path I knew Jimmy the Wit would lead the pimp along. This was the final part of my job, to make sure the button hadn’t come hot, that the roper had gotten away from the mark clean, and without attracting any attention from the police. But it was pure routine, for I knew, deep in my bones that the button hadn’t come hot. I could feel it.

  So I was stunned when I rounded a corner and saw Jimmy the Wit and Stringy in the arms of the Law. There were five cops around a stricken-looking Jimmy and an extremely pissed Stringy.

  That’s when I realized what a mistake it had been to do up that single, innocuous line of coke. Because Stringy was looking mad because the cops were laughing at him. After all, he was holding a hundred-gee bagful of what they had just spot-analyzed as milk sugar.

  I realized all in a flash that I was in big trouble. A fraction of a second too late in scattering the bags. Stringy had been able to shove one of them under his arm before fleeing. If I’d been on cue, when the cops nabbed him for suspicious running—which is a crime in some of our larger metropoli—we’d have still gotten away clean. He’d have never realized that he’d been burned.

  Even at that, if Jimmy the Wit had been looking my way when I rounded the corner, he’d have managed to distract Stringy while I eased out of sight. But there’s just no arguing with a losing streak. Stringy lashed an indignant finger at me and yelled, “There he is! He’s the burn artist that ripped me off!”

  I bolted. Behind me, one of the police yelled, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” and there was the sharp sound of a bullet hitting the edge of the building inches to my side. A fragment of brick went flying, and cut an evil gash in my upper arm. The pain struck me with all the force of a fist in the ribs.

  I stumbled and fell to my knees, recovered, stood, and ran.

  The cops ran after me.

  They chased me through the warehouse district and into a cul-de-sac.

  No place to go—

  The smooth wall of the warehouse loomed up in front of me, and it might just as well have been Mount Everest.

  Dead end, you dumb schmuck, I shrieked silently at myself, dead end! My mind gave up at that point, but my legs had developed a will of their own; they wanted to run, so run they did—I imagined them whirring around in huge blurred circles like the legs of cartoon characters, biting into the dirt, sending me sizzling forward like a rocket. Feets, don’t fail me now!

  I hurtled, toward the wall. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have stopped in time.

  Behind me, I could hear an ominous double click as one of the cops cocked his gun for another shot.

  Some distanced part of my mind made me put my hands up in front of me at the last moment to absorb some of the impact.

  There was no impact.

  I went right through the wall.

  There was no impact, but there was sudden darkness. The world disappeared. I think I screamed. For a moment or two all was madness and confusion, and then, without having broken stride, I began to lose momentum, my running steps coming slower and slower, as though I were in a film that was being shifted into slow motion, as though I were trying to run through molasses. The resistance I was moving against increased, and just at the point where all my forward momentum had been spilled and I was slooooowing to a stop, there was a slight tugging sensation, like a soap bubble popping, light burst upon me, and I could see again.

  I was standing in a room.

  Someone’s living room, it looked like—an
antiquarian’s perhaps, a man of quiet tastes and substantial means. There was a Bokhara carpet in scarlet and brown. A large, glassed-in bookcase filled with thick and dusty leather-bound volumes. A browning world-globe on a gleaming brass stand. A highboy with decanters and cut-glass goblets arranged on it. In the middle of everything, about ten feet away from me, was a massive mahogany desk, obviously an antique, with charts carelessly scattered across it and, behind the desk, a tall-backed overstuffed chair—of the type you see in movies that take place in British clubs—with someone sitting in it.

  The walls and ceiling of the room were featureless and grey, although it was hard to tell what they were made of—they seemed oily somehow, as if there was a faint film over them that would occasionally, almost subliminally, shimmer. There were no doors or windows that I could see. The quickest of head-turns told me that another blank wall was only a step or two behind me. There was no sign of or sound from the police, who should also have been only a step or two behind me.

  I thought my disorientation was complete until I took a closer look at the man in the chair and saw that it was Stringy.

  “Jerry, my man!” Stringy said jovially. “You have been a baaad boy.” He smiled at me over a brandy snifter half-filled with some amber-colored fluid. For the first time in my life, I was at a loss for words.

  I opened my mouth, closed it again, like a fish breathing water. My thoughts scurried in a dozen different directions at once. The first thought was that I was dead or in a coma—one of those goddamn cops had shot me, blown me away, and somewhere back there—wherever “there” was; wherever here was—I was lying dead or dying in the street, crazed thoughts whirling through my cooling mind like the goosed scurryings of autumn leaves in the wind. Or, less dramatically, I had somehow hallucinated everything that had happened since snorting up that fateful line of coke. The little boy fell out of bed and woke up. It had all been a dream!

  Screw that. A con man doesn’t last long once he starts conning himself; an ability to face reality is de rigueur in this trade. I could feel the sweat cooling under my arms, could smell the sour reek of my own fear. The bullet graze on my upper arm throbbed. I had a bitch of a headache. No, whatever was happening—it was real.

  I didn’t like the way Stringy was looking at me.

  “You burned me, Jerry,” he said. “Jerry—you shouldn’t have burned me.” He sounded regretful, almost wistful.

  Then, slowly, he smiled.

  “Hey, man,” I said, licking at my lips. “I didn’t—I don’t know what’s—”

  “Oh, cut it out,” Stringy said impatiently. “Don’t bother working your way through ‘Injured Innocence,’ tape 5-A. You burned me, and I know you burned me, and you are going to pay for it, never doubt it.” He smiled his glacial sliver of a smile again, thin enough to slice bread, and for the first time in years I began to regret that it wasn’t my style to carry a piece. Was Stringy packing a gun or a knife? Macho Man is not my style either (I’ll run, given a choice), but the thought flickered through my mind that I’d better jump him quick, before he pulled some kind of weapon; even if I couldn’t overpower him, maybe I could go over or around or through him and find some way out of here—

  I spread my hands wide in a weakly conciliatory gesture, at the same time kicking out with my legs and hurling myself at Stringy, thinking punch him in the throat, people don’t expect that . . .

  Stringy touched something on the desktop, almost negligently, and I stopped.

  I just stopped, like a fly trapped in amber.

  If I’d needed something to confirm that something very weird was going down here, that would have been plenty.

  My body was no longer obeying me from the neck down but, oddly, I felt my nerves steady and my panic fade—there are times when things get so bad that it seems you’ve got little left to lose, and that is the time, as all high rollers know, to put your whole bankroll down and pick up those dice and go for broke.

  “You’ve made your point, Stringy,” I said in a calm, considering voice. Then I smiled. “Okay, then,” I said brightly. “Let’s talk!”

  Stringy stared at me poker-faced for a couple of beats, and then he snorted derisively, and then he laughed. “You know, Jerry,” he said, “you’re really pretty good.”

  “Thanks,” I said dryly.

  “You had me fooled, you know,” Stringy said, smiling. “And I don’t fool easily. I really thought that you were going to come across with all that great snow, I really did. And that setup! Your staging and your timing were superb, you know, quite first-rate, really. You had me going in just the direction you wanted me to go, steered neatly right down the chute. If I hadn’t managed to pick up that bag in the confusion, I’d never have known that you were burning me—I would have just shrugged my shoulders and chalked it all up to fate, to the influence of some evil star. I really would have. You are a very subtle man, Jerry.”

  He was still wearing his Superfly pimpsuit, but his voice had changed; it was cultured now, urbane, almost an octave higher, and although he still employed the occasional smattering of street slang, whatever the unfamiliar accent behind his words was, it certainly wasn’t Pore Black Child from Lenox and 131st. Even his skin was different now; there were coppery highlights I’d never seen before, as if he were some refinement of racial type that simply did not exist. I was beginning to realize that whoever—or whatever—else Stringy was, he was also a bit of a con man himself.

  “You’re an alien, aren’t you?” I asked suddenly. “From a flying saucer, right? Galactic Federation? The whole bit?” And with any luck a Prime Directive—don’t hurt the poor backward natives. Please God?

  He curled his lip in scorn. “Shit no.”

  “What are you, then?”

  He propped his feet up on the desk, leaned back, put his hands behind his head. “Time-traveler.”

  I gaped at him. “You’re . . . a time-traveler?”

  “Got it in one, sport,” he said languidly.

  “If you’re a time-traveler—then why the hell were you trying to score cocaine from me?”

  “Why not?” he said. He had closed his eyes.

  “Why, for bleeding Christ’s sake?”

  He opened his eyes. “Well, I don’t know what you do with yours, but what I do with mine is to stick it right up my nose and snuffle it up, snuffleuffleupagus, until it’s all gone. Yum. Gives you a hell of a nice rush. Helps pass the time while you’re on your way to the Paleolithic, or whenever. Makes a long boring trip through the eons just fly by. Other time-travelers may be into speed or reds or synapse-snappers or floaters, but among the elite of the Time Corps, such as myself, coke is the drug of choice, no others need apply . . .”

  “That’s not what I meant, damnit! Why come to me for it, why go to all that trouble, sneaking around in back alleys, spending all that money? If you can really travel in time, why not just go back to, say, pre-Conquest Peru, and gather up a sackful for nothing? Or if that’s too much trouble, why not just go back to the turn of the century when it was still legal and buy all you want, with nobody giving a damn? Or . . .”

  Stringy aimed a finger at me like a gun, and made a shooting motion, and I’m ashamed to admit that I flinched—who knew what he could or couldn’t do with that finger? Nothing happened, though, except that he made a pow! noise with his lips, and then said, “Right on! You’ve put your finger right on the veritable crux of the problem, sport. Why not indeed?” He winked, laced his hands behind his head again. “The problem, my old, is that the authorities are almost as stuffy in my time as they were in yours, in spite of all the years gone by. Particularly the Powers That Be in the Time Corps, my bosses—they want us to flit soberly through the centuries on our appointed rounds, primly protecting the One and Proper Chain of Events and fighting off paradoxes. They do not want us, while we’re engaged in protecting and preserving Order by, say, keeping the bad guys from helping the Persians to win at Marathon, they do not want us, at that particular moment, to go s
neaking off behind some scrubby Grecian bush and blow our brains right out of the top of our skulls with a big snootful of toot. They frown on that. They are, as I say, stuffy.”

  He stretched, and ran his fingers back through his afro. “To forestall your next question: no, of course my bosses can’t watch all of time and space, but they don’t have to—they can watch the monitors in the control complex that show where and when our timecraft are going. So if we’re supposed to be in, say, 1956 Iowa, and we stop off in pre-Conquest Peru instead to grab us a sackful of crystal, why, that’ll show up on the monitors, right, and we’re in big trouble. No, what’s been happening instead is that we’ve been doing a lot of work the last few subjective years more or less in this location and in this part of the century, and it’s so much easier, when we’re scheduled to be in 1982 Philadelphia or whenever anyway—when our car is already parked, so to speak, and the monitors off—to just whomp up some money, whatever amount is necessary; and take a few minutes off and go hunt up a native source. To take our bucket to the well, so to speak.”

  “I see,” I said weakly.

  “Except,” Stringy said, sitting up slowly and deliberately and putting his feet back on the ground and his hands flat on the desk in front of him, “except, Jerry, what do you think happened? We went to the well with our bucket this time, and the well was dry, Jerry.” That flat, evil light was back in his eyes again. “No snow in our forecast, Jerry old bean. And do you know why? Because you burned us, Jerry . . .”

  “If you can do all that stuff,” I said, fighting to control the fear that wanted my voice to break and whine, “why don’t you just go back to the start of all this and find yourself another source. Just never come to see me in the first place.” Why me, Lord? Let this cup pass from me . . .

  Stringy shook his head. “Might create a paradox-loop, and that’d show up on the monitors. I came close enough to looping when I shook off the fuzz and came angling back to snatch you away from the long arm of the Law. Although”—he smiled thinly—“I would’ve loved to have seen the faces of those cops when you ran right through that brick wall; that’s one police report that’ll never get filed.”