But I sure as hell don’t enjoy the process.
I let the sickness sit at the back of my throat until I’m sure I’ve given it its due, then I swallow it back down. It’s the brutality of the deaths that brings men like Owen to the Row in the first place… and eventually to my office. It’s what we’re both trying to change, and why I’m here, rather than treating someone whose biggest problem is that they can’t get along with their spouse.
I review the case again, focusing on the parts of the timeline I can change, not on the horror of what will happen if I don’t. Evidence at trial included DNA at the crime scene and on Owen’s clothes, his prints on the gun and knife, and a damning surveillance video where James and Owen fought over a woman.
I’ve watched the video at least two dozen times. The first half of their fight is unintelligible, as they keep it to the back of the dingy convenience store. Then Owen marches to the front, and James rushes up, into camera range, to stop him.
“You can’t have her!” That’s James shoving his finger in Owen’s face. James is a shorter and stringier version of Owen. They’ve supposedly known each other all their lives.
“You can’t stop me.” That’s a younger Owen, full of menace and danger. He’s got a can of beef stew in his hand and looks like he wants to bash in James’s head with it. Young Owen is a completely different person than the nervous-mouse man who sits unconscious in my office.
“Do what you want,” James says, “but if you take her out, you’re gonna die, man.” I trip over that part of the video each and every time. James is making the threat, but it’s clear that Owen is the one ready to beat him bloody. And that phrase: if you take her out. As if they’re going to kill each other over who gets to take the girl to dinner.
There’s something off about it. Unfortunately, there was never any girlfriend found to explain it.
The prosecutor constructed a timeline as part of the investigation, and Corrections fleshed it out further with as much detail as possible before approving Owen’s Shift, but Owen himself was little help. Claimed he couldn’t remember the events surrounding the murder, even as he finally flipped to remorseful guilt in time for the final Shift hearing. Once Owen was in my office, he still stuck to his story about not remembering the events leading up to the crime. So, all I’ve got is the official court records, which say Owen had his encounter with James at the convenience store approximately two hours before James’s death in the basement of the rental house they shared on LA’s East Side. The events of those two hours are unaccounted for, but forensics showed some kind of struggle in the basement prior to James being shot. Then the torture and mutilation, which soaked Owen’s clothes in James’s blood. And after that, Owen abandoned the body and went on the run…
I realize we must have stepped into that moment earlier, when we were looking down on James’s mutilated body. Owen’s horror was probably the same emotion he felt at the time, as the rage subsided and he realized what he had done. That shock must have spurred him to go on the run. It might even have been the beginning of his extreme need to deny what happened, which could also extend backward to the events leading up to the trauma. His subsequent clumsy disposal of the gun and knife nearby, then later his clothes, also fits. He was eventually found hiding in a run-down motel not far from the crime, fully in denial that he had committed it—a stance he maintained until his survival instinct kicked in, and he figured out that the Shift was his only chance of staying alive.
I’d like to keep Owen alive. If I can nudge the universe, push the invisible skin of the timeline just enough, but not so much that I snap it, I can alter the events surrounding the murder, and save not only James but Owen as well.
There are definite upsides to my job.
The tattooist finishes the last number and quickly cleans the tag. He smears it with anti-bacterial gel and bandages me up good. The last step is injecting the biometric chip, programmed with my tag number, deep into my bone. That one hurts like hell and makes the tattoo seem like a walk in the park.
But it’s over quickly, followed by a deep, numbing after-shot to erase the pain.
I ease, gingerly, out of the chair, testing the bandage. It’s solid: no chance of coming loose. I pull on my shirt and say, “Thanks.”
The tattooist nods and quickly turns away to clean up his equipment.
I don’t offer to pay. He’ll get reimbursed by the Department of Corrections, once he files the number.
Outside the shop, the LA smog turns the blue sky a hazy white. Even with Owen landing us a couple of hours before the crime, I barely have enough time to get the tattoo before I have to be at the convenience store to fight with James.
I hurry down the street, check the time, and decide to hail a cab. Owen has all of five dollars in his pocket, but I won’t need to actually buy anything at the convenience store—the video showed him storming out after the fight with James—so I blow the last of Owen’s money getting as close to the store as I can. I still have to hoof it the last half-mile, and the sun is starting to blaze hot, but I keep my long sleeves rolled down. They cover most of the tattoo bandage, and that’s one thing I can’t afford to lose. Getting a tattoo is no big deal; getting a Death Row tag is a whole different story.
As I come up on the convenience store, I see James there, already waiting for me, clutching a paper bag. My heart rate kicks up a notch, but the timeline stays smooth: apparently I was supposed to meet him here.
“What took you so long?” James says as he pushes off the crumbling concrete wall. Faded paint behind him says Aces Up! In one of the store’s previous lives, it must have been a lotto shop.
I show him the bandage peeking from my sleeve. “Got some ink.” I have no idea if this is something Owen would say. This is the trickiest part of all: drawing inside the lines, keeping the timeline plausible until I make the big push to stop the murder.
James shakes his head. “Man, what is wrong with you?” But he says it like I’m an idiot, not like he thinks Owen’s body is possessed. “We don’t got time for that!” He turns his back on me to stalk to the glass door of the shop, which is nearly opaque with stuck-on advertisements.
I hesitate too long.
“Well, c’mon.”
I follow him into the shop and to the back, desperately trying to read his body language for some kind of clue about the fight we’re about to have. His shoulders are tense, hiked nearly up to his ears. He cranes his neck as he walks, working the stress out. His hands are stringy and nervous, playing with the pocket of his jacket, or possibly hiding something in it.
Owen’s pulse pounds in my head.
James pretends to examine the end cap, but it’s filled with baby diapers. “Tell me the truth, man.” He’s speaking to me but he’s staring at the diapers. “Did you take the merchandise out?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, c’mon!” He turns to me, anger lighting up his face. “Don’t give me that shit.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The timeline nudges me. This isn’t what Owen said, but I have no clue what’s making James grit his teeth and squeeze his eyes tight, like I’m about to make his head pop.
“You can’t shit me about this,” James says. “She told me what happened.”
Okay. Here it is. The girlfriend.
I hold my hands up, going for innocence. “I don’t know what she told you—”
James grabs hold of my shoulder and shoves me up against the diapers. “She said you—” He cuts himself off and darts a look around. There’s no one else in the store besides the bored clerk up front, but James still lowers his voice. “She said you took out the merchandise. Man, I told you not to do that.”
Back to the merchandise. Were they dealing drugs? There wasn’t anything on the autopsy or Owen’s intake report that showed—
James gives me a shake. “You gotta snap out of this, understand? She’s not yours. She’s not ever going to be yours.”
The girlfri
end again. I’m getting mental whiplash. But James is warning me off her like a friend. Not the threats I expect if he wants her for himself.
“Maybe she could be,” I say, cautiously. “You don’t know.”
“Shit.” He pushes off me and steps back. “You are going to get us both killed, you hear me? Both of us. Bullets to the head. Is that what you want?”
“No! I don’t want that, man, I swear.” I don’t have to fake the fear—this is spinning out of control, sounding more like a drug deal gone bad than a crime of passion. I have no idea what’s going on.
“You got that right.” James calms a little, straightens his shirt. “I’ve got some buyers. They want the whole set, but not all at once. Too hard to move ’em. So we gotta keep the merchandise cool for a while, you know what I’m saying?”
I nod, even though I barely have any clue. The set? Sounds like they’re in a smuggling operation, but maybe not drugs.
“I got some more supplies to take care of that problem.” He shoves the paper bag at me. It’s light, with tiny clacking sounds inside, like it’s filled with plastic pens. “You go home, and you take care of it. And don’t waste none of that shit. It was expensive.”
I’m certain I’m holding a bag full of illegal something. The timeline squeezes on me. I’m not supposed to have the bag. James is too calm. We’re supposed to be fighting. I don’t mind diffusing the causes of the murder—at some point that’s got to happen—but this feels too soon. I struggle to piece it together, but I’m missing almost all the parts.
“So you want me to go back to the house…” I try, hoping James will fill in a few blanks for me.
He runs a frustrated hand through his hair. “Man, do I have to spell it out for you?”
Yes, please. Instead, I pretend to get angry. “Maybe I don’t want to, okay! I don’t even know what this shit is!” I shake the bag in his face. Maybe he’ll take it back.
He shoves it away, gritting his teeth. “Don’t screw this up, Owen.”
“Screw you! What, are you the boss of me now?” I push at James’s obvious concern that I’m going to blow their whole operation, whatever it is.
James paces the back wall. “Owen, don’t do this. Not now, man. We’re almost there.”
“Maybe I don’t want to go there anymore.” The more I push back on James, the more the timeline relaxes around me. I turn and march toward the front, hoping that’ll force James to reveal a little more about what I’m up against. Because I’m driving blind in the dark with no headlights.
“Owen!” James calls from behind, but I don’t stop. He rushes up behind me and jerks me to a stop. He shoves his finger in my face. “Look, you can do whatever you want, but you can’t have her.”
“You can’t stop me.” The words practically force themselves out, and I know that feeling: it’s the timeline syncing me up, forcing me to play the game it’s already played. I push back on it, and add, “I can do whatever I want.” I’m shaking the bag at him instead of the can of beef stew from the video. Small changes. Stretching, but not too much. The timeline eases off its squeeze.
James shakes his head. “If you take her out, man, you’re gonna die.”
Take her out. What the hell does that mean? But I’m getting no more out of James, so I turn my back on him and stalk out of the convenience store in my artificial huff. The timeline skin lets me pass without clamping down. I’m supposed to do this. I’m supposed to march out of the convenience store in a fit of anger. Only now I have a bag filled with God knows what, and the universe is nudging me back to the house.
There’s nothing to do but follow it.
Chapter Three
The location of the murder isn’t far from the convenience store. Just a half-mile stroll carrying illegal substances in a paper bag through one of the tougher neighborhoods of East LA. If this were my first travel, I might actually worry about some of that. Instead, I’m keeping my head low to avoid attracting attention, while my mind scrambles to figure out what I’m going to find at the house, what I’m supposed to do when I get there, and what actions will or will not trigger the sequence of events that lead to the murder.
Being from the future actually helps with very little of this.
As far as James knows, I’m going to the house to solve whatever problem he and Owen have with their smuggling operation… no indication of which ever appeared in any of the investigations. And sometime in the next two hours, James is going to show up and do something to throw Owen into a homicidal rage. And the weapons have to come from somewhere. I already checked Owen’s body when I arrived: I’m not armed. At the moment, at least. So James is bringing the weapons with him. Which would be very bad. Or possibly they’re at the house. That would be better.
I glare at a couple of punk teenagers lurking at the ramshackle house next to Owen’s, just to keep them from getting any ideas. About harassing me. Or following me. I’d like to tell them to clear out, but that’s not my mission here. Owen and James’s one-story rental house next door is just as dilapidated as the punks’: the rotted wooden porch looks like it’ll barely hold my weight, but the front door is solid, with iron security bars across it. I fish around in Owen’s pockets and come up with a ring—it has a passcode sensor and several regular flathead keys on it. I need all but two to get inside.
Three-day-old leftover pizza perfumes the air with moldy cheese. A couple of chairs sit askew around the table, but there’s no other furniture. I take a quick tour through the kitchen, poke my head in the back bedroom, and check the bathroom, but there’s no one here. A door I thought was a closet ends up being the door to the basement. Which I will give a thorough investigation in a moment, but first, now that I’m off the streets, I open up the bag to see what James has given me.
Needles. Syringes, actually. Single dose, pre-prepared. The kind you use for vaccines, although I doubt these are for whooping cough. For a moment, I think Owen and James are smuggling drugs after all, but… then I realize street drugs don’t come in neat sterile packages of pre-dosed something or other. These are stolen from a hospital or clinic. They could sell them on the street, but what did James say? Got to keep the merchandise cool for a while.
A chill trickles through my stomach. I look back to the basement door.
It starts to add up, but in a very bad way.
I shuffle toward the door and have to practically force my hand to reach for the knob. It’s not the universe that’s squeezing me away from the door—Owen’s been down these steps before. A lot. The timeline’s practically shoving me down the stairs. It’s my own dread at what I’m going to find down there that’s dragging on my feet.
I flip on the lights. The steps are decayed wood, just like the porch. The basement is bare concrete with a single bulb dangling near the base of the steps. As I take one creaky step after another, the moldy smell of the main floor is replaced with the sharp tang of urine. I grimace, force myself to keep descending. At the base of the stairs, the space opens up, and I can see the source of the smell.
Cages.
Filled with people.
I freeze, my hand on the stairwell railing, steadying myself.
Two large cages, side by side, made of steel bars and wire mesh, hold at least a dozen women between them. They’re huddled together like frightened children. The bottom halves of the cages are mesh, and fingers poke through it, curled around the thin wires. The top halves are narrowly spaced vertical bars. A few hands and arms lean out. The women stare at me while I stand frozen at the base of the steps.
“Baby!” one calls out. “You’re back!” Her voice is sweet, with a heavy Slavic accent, and it unlocks my legs. I stumble over until I’m standing in front of the cage, one hand automatically reaching out. I stop just outside the zone where I might touch them—or they might touch me.
“What did he say, baby?” She smiles wide, but her voice has an undercurrent of fear that’s as pungent as the urine that permeates the dank room.
If you take
her out… I pull my hand back.
What in the name of all that’s holy is going on here?
“Baby, what’s wrong?” Panic blossoms in her voice. The others, the ones holding back, lurking behind her, move a little. My eyes adjust to the dimness and shadows, and I can see the unkempt clothes and bruised faces. The chains on their wrists and ankles. The bucket for a toilet in the corner.
I gag, and for a moment, I think I’m going to be sick. I swallow it down. “Nothing’s wrong, I just…” I take a step back and look wildly around the basement, sure that James is going to appear out of thin air and the murder is going to happen right now.
Because everything is horribly, horribly off.
Think, Ian, think. There was no evidence of human trafficking in the reports. None. No indication there had ever been people living in the basement. And yet here they are, and Owen knows them… knows one in particular very well… and then it clicks.
She’s the girl.
She attempts a smile, but her dark eyes are ringed in shadows. Cheeks sunken, skin pale, like she’s already a ghost. Her eyes dart over me, dance to the bag, back to my face, sizing me up. I glimpse something feral, as if the smile is just a veneer over a slight wildness. How long have they been in these cages? How long does it take for the bars to start clawing away at your humanity?
Her hand reaches through the bars, inviting. “Did you talk to James, baby?”
James. I look at the bag of syringes in my hand. He sent me here to drug them. Maybe sedate them. Maybe something worse. They’re the merchandise, and James has buyers, but we have to keep them cool for a while. Is that what Owen and James fought about? Is that what caused Owen to go into a rage and kill his childhood friend? Because he had fallen for one of the women, and now James was going to sell her into slavery? I knew the horror stories of human trafficking. The women were likely here illegally, and some of them were barely more than girls. There would be no good end for them. Owen had to know it, too.
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel Page 5
