3 Time to Steele

by Alex P. Berg

  I frowned and glanced at Quinto.

  “Don’t look at me,” the big guy said. “I have no idea what he’s talking about.”

  Rodgers sighed and rolled his eyes. “I was trying to come up with a way to say that even though you’ve had a hard time locating Gill, Harland Wyle’s been even harder to find. I mean, not in the literal sense. We know exactly where he is—in holding. But at least there’s a paper trail indicating your guy exists. Not so for Wyle. He has no arrest record, and we stopped by Public Records to see if he’d ever been admitted to a psychiatric ward. No dice. We even stopped by Taxation and Revenue, but they didn’t have a file for him either.”

  “All of which corroborates our theory that the guy’s been lying to us about everything,” said Quinto. “Including his name.”

  “So, basically, we’re no closer to solving Darryl and Anya’s murders than we were this morning,” said Shay.

  “Basically,” said Rodgers. “Although, on the bright side, if Gill Sr. is this hard to find, chances are Scar Face hasn’t found him either. At the very least, there haven’t been any runners tearing through our halls with bad news.”

  I crossed my arms. “Forgive me if that doesn’t make me break out in dance. Both of our murders have occurred early in the day. Who’s to say Buford Gill’s death would be any different? And, of course, it’s always possible the man’s already been murdered and nobody’s found the body yet—which wouldn’t surprise me if the man’s as big a recluse as everyone says.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” said Rodgers. “I’m not sure what our next move should be, unless you want to turn the screws on Wyle some more and see if he changes his story, but seeing as we already tried that…” He shrugged and took another sip from his mug.

  I frowned. I still hadn’t figured out what it was about Wyle that bothered me. There was his ludicrous time travel story, of course, but I could deal with craziness and lies. What I couldn’t deal with was craziness and lies that fell just close enough to the truth to make me go ‘Hmm.’ The timing of his break-in at Darryl’s apartment and his intrusion at Anya’s house seemed more than coincidental, and I wasn’t sure I believed Shay’s simple address-based explanation of how he tracked down Anya.

  I tapped my chin. “You know, maybe we should talk to Wyle once more.”

  “Again?” said Shay. “What’s your angle going to be this time?”

  “My angle,” I said, “is that regardless of whether or not he’s a whacko or he’s manipulating us, he knows something about the murders we don’t. If he’s crazy, perhaps by playing into his delusions, we can get him to reveal a clue we haven’t yet uncovered. And if he’s not crazy, perhaps by making him believe we believe in him, we’ll achieve the same effect.”

  “I’m not sure I totally follow,” said Quinto.

  “It’s ok,” I said. “Come with me and follow my lead.”

  Most of the time a command like that resulted in jeers or at the very least some mild resistance, but apparently everyone was really and truly stumped. As I turned toward the back stairs, everyone followed me without so much as a snort or a roll of the eyes.

  I led my entourage down the back stairs to the holding pens. Drunken Goakey Joe had been set free, but Harland Wyle still sat in the same cage he had earlier in the day. He stared at the rough stone floor of the cell, neglecting to look up at the sound of our octuplet of pattering feet.

  “Hi, Harland,” I said as I stopped in front of the wrought iron bars.

  Wyle kept his gaze trained on the floor. “What do you want this time?”

  “I want to go over one part of your story, again,” I said.

  “Not this again.” Wyle sighed and turned his face up to meet mine. “Why should I? So you guys can have another laugh at my expense? This may be funny to you, but I’m still agonizing over the possibility that everything I’ve ever known and loved is gone—or rather never existed. Dealing with your mockery in addition to that is more than I can deal with.”

  “Possibility?” said Steele. “So you’re no longer convinced your future has changed?”

  Wyle shrugged. “I may have overreacted. Trust me, it’s easy to get emotional when you think your world just winked out of existence, but I thought it over. The theories we developed regarding time reconstruction are solid. If my reality was extinguished, I should’ve felt a substantial wave in the time streams, even accounting for the spatial gap between me and the psychopath from Citizens for Simplicity. Either that, or I shouldn’t exist anymore. Either way, I’m pretty sure my future still exists, which means there’s time to right the ship. I think…”

  I regarded Wyle and his crop of wavy black hair. The guy’s wacky robe and implausible story were overt sign of lunacy, but even though I didn’t have any formal training in psychology, I’d met enough drunks, whack jobs, and nutcases to get a feel for the group. Wyle didn’t fit. That meant he was lying—but boy, he was a pretty good actor.

  There was, of course, a third option besides madness and pathological insincerity that explained his story, one I’d joked about earlier in the morning but hadn’t given any real credence to. It was an option I weighed in a dark corner of my mind. As much as I disliked it, if it turned out to be true, it was my responsibility as a detective to prove it.

  “Alright, Wyle,” I said. “Let me be frank. We think Buford Gill, the father of the two people you found murdered, may be in serious danger, but we can’t find him. This morning, you mentioned how you tracked down Anya. You said you followed disturbances in the time stream, or something along those lines, to find her. Is that right?”

  “That’s an imprecise way of describing it,” said Wyle. “But yes. Close enough.”

  “Ok,” I said. “So my question for you is, can you use that method to find Buford Gill?”

  I heard a feminine groan and a derisive snort that may have originated from a half-troll. Rodgers, however, apparently managed to keep whatever scorn he felt to himself.

  I turned to face my detective buddies and gave them a stern flick of my eyebrows which I hope conveyed that I wanted to them to hush and play along.

  When I turned back to the cell, I found Wyle had stood.

  He gazed at me intently. “Are you serious?”

  “I can’t vouch for the officers of the law behind me,” I said. “But yes, I am. Dead serious—no pun intended. If you can help us find Buford Gill—or even better, Darryl and Anya’s murderer—that’s all I care about.”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” said Wyle, approaching the cell’s bars. “I can’t track down this Buford Gill guy. As I said, I’ve never heard of him. But I might be able to track down Scar Face. He’s the one who altered the time streams. But if you’re serious about collaborating, we need to move now. We call them ripples for a reason. They disappear quickly. As it stands right now, I’ll be lucky if I can still feel them.”

  I turned to Quinto. “Can you find the jailor?”

  “You’re serious, then?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Get the keys. We’ve got work to do.”

  30

  We followed Wyle through the streets of New Welwic on foot, heading south. Given how much walking I’d already endured throughout the day, I would’ve preferred to take rickshaws, but several forces conspired against their usage. For one, five was an awkward number to transport via the biwheeled contraptions, as they normally fitted two people abreast. Although my gut told me Wyle wouldn’t make a break for it, he obviously needed to be kept under close supervision, but the most important reason we fueled our travel via the power of our own legs had to do with Wyle’s powers, such as they were.

  The astronomically-garbed young man walked through the city’s maze of avenues and boulevards in spurts, pausing every now and then at street corners or at the mouths of alleys. He claimed his ability to sense the fluctuations in the time streams—which he described as rivers flowing through the fourth dimension, whatever the heck that meant—was akin to
the sense of touch, but from watching Wyle perform his tracking maneuvers, he appeared to be listening for signals rather than feeling anything.

  Because of the way he described it, I thought Harland might need a tool to help him in his search, whether a wand or a divining rod or some futuristic doohickey I couldn’t envision, but he progressed with his hands empty and his arms hanging loosely at his sides. He’d pause and squint, then turn his head to and fro as if he’d heard a rustle or a rush or the flop of a time fish. After thinking silently on the invisible, inaudible cues he received, he’d set off again at a brisk pace until the next break in the action.

  I found Wyle’s act fascinating, if for no other reason than because I found myself comparing it to Shay’s fingers in the air, eyes rolled back in the head, psychic trance. I couldn’t help but wonder how much the two shared in terms of both actual ability and showmanship. For the sake of all of us, and of Buford Gill, I hoped there was a glimmer of a method behind Wyle’s madness, but I’d be willing to accept a routine packed with hogwash and malarkey so long as there was a vein of knowledge and useful intent seated behind it.

  Rodgers and Quinto trailed behind Shay, Wyle, and me, seemingly resigned to accept the jerky stop-and-go venture for what it was, but my partner couldn’t leave Wyle in peace. She kept pestering him for information regarding his methodology and time magic in general, which I found hilarious. Nonetheless, I kept my chuckles constrained to the interior of my chest cavity. I doubted my mirth would help advance our nebulous relationship in a positive direction.

  “So, explain again to me,” said Steele, “how exactly you perceive the time stream.”

  “I already told you,” said Wyle as he stopped and glanced into an alley populated by dented steel trash cans and yellow-eyed cats. “It’s exactly like it sounds. A stream of actions, liquid and indistinct, rushing by all around me. I can’t pick out discrete events because they bleed into one another.”

  “So…like ink?” asked Steele.

  “Exactly,” said Wyle. “Imagine taking a pipette of ink and squeezing a drop of black into a stream. As soon as the droplet hits the water, it disintegrates, incorporated into the rushing waters, but the ink’s still there. It’s just hard to discern because it diffuses so quickly. If you poured an entire jar of ink into the stream, you’d see it, and the color would spread for a while, but eventually it, too, would disappear.”

  “And yet you keep describing the disturbances in the time stream as ripples,” said Steele, crossing her arms. “So your analogy seems a little…contrived.”

  Wyle stopped and turned. “Why are you giving me such a hard time about this? Out of this group of detectives, aren’t you the one with magical knowledge? I’d think if anyone would understand, it would be you. You can’t describe magical powers in terms of the traditional senses. Wading through the time stream isn’t like seeing or hearing or feeling. It’s a totally different sensation, one I have a hard time describing because it’s so different to any of the other, traditional senses. But it’s most similar to the sense of touch, which is why I describe it that way.”

  Steele stood her ground. “I’m just trying to learn about your abilities. If time magic is real and it does exist, it’s a massive breakthrough that’ll change the face of magical theory.”

  “Um, yeah,” said Wyle. “It does, actually. And it’s not supposed to happen for another hundred and twenty years. So quit asking me about it.”

  Shay grit her teeth, and she looked as if she might tear into Wyle, but I managed to distract her with a wave. She walked over to me, her lower lip jutting out comically over her chin. It made her look cute, in a way, but I kept that tidbit to myself.

  “What are you doing?” I said in a low voice. “We’re supposed to be playing into his delusion to see what he knows. If you keep attacking him, chances are he’ll clam up and we’ll lose any progress we’ve made with him.”

  “I am playing into his delusion,” said Steele. “That’s why I’m asking so many questions. If I wasn’t, I’d be breaking into a rousing rendition of ‘Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.’”

  “You sing?” I smiled. “I’d pay to see that.”

  “I’m sure you would.” Shay’s pout diminished somewhat. “But be honest with me, Daggers. You don’t believe a word this guy’s saying, right? He’s so full of crap, I’m surprised he hasn’t burst yet.”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” I said. “But I meant what I said at the precinct. If he can lead us to Gill Sr. or to Scar Face, I won’t care how he did it. Well, I will, but I’ll figure it out later. Right now I’m interested in results.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re not getting much of those, either,” said Steele with a glance at Wyle. He was still peering into the trash can-filled alley.

  “Give it a bit longer,” I said. “Perhaps he’ll surprise us. Besides, it’s not as if we have many other leads to follow.”

  As the words escaped my lips, Wyle straightened and his eyes widened. “There! There it is! I felt something. A ripple, a recent one. Come on, this way!”

  Steele glanced at me. I shrugged in reply and hurried after Wyle.

  31

  We jogged a few blocks farther south before ultimately stopping at a flophouse located on the outskirts of New Welwic’s dwarven quarter, derogatorily referred to by many of the city’s residents as Little Welwic. The interior of the dwarven sector was dwarf only—not in the sense that intruders were tarred and feathered, but in terms of design and function. All the buildings featured six foot stories, and the furniture in the shops and restaurants, though robust enough to support a wide dwarven frame, wasn’t particularly suited to guys my or Quinto’s height. I’d only had to venture inside one of the dwarven apartment buildings once in search of a suspect, and I hoped never to have to repeat the experience. My back didn’t forgive me for a week.

  Luckily, the flophouse Wyle led us to catered to species of all heights, though if external appearances were any indication, it didn’t offer many amenities. Faded bricks containing elements of dull browns and even duller tans climbed the side of the building, and a huge crack arching through the bricks ended in a hole near eye level where a few dozen of the clay blocks had fallen out, revealing rotting wooden interior paneling.

  I thought about cracking a joke about structural issues and insurance scams, but I feared it would fall flat. Wyle presence had unbalanced our detective quartet’s humorous center of mass, and besides, I think we were all anxious to see where, exactly, the self-professed time mage’s powers had led us.

  “So this is the place?” said Quinto, staring at the faded building exterior.

  “This is it,” said Wyle.

  “And by it,” I said, “you mean Scar Face’s whereabouts?”

  “By it,” said Wyle, “I mean the epicenter of the most recent time ripple. Unless someone else I’m unaware of travelled backwards in time to this era, I’m assuming Scar Face had something to do with it. But I don’t know if this is where he currently is, a place he recently visited, or a place he will visit.”

  “Will visit?” said Rodgers.

  “Do you remember what I told Detective Steele earlier about the ink droplets?” said Wyle.

  Steele rolled her eyes.

  “Right, right,” I said. “Diffusion. Streams. Rushing water. We get it. It’s complicated. Quinto, join me up front. Rodgers and Steele, bring up the rear. Wyle, you’re in the middle. Everyone keep your eyes peeled.”

  Hinges squealed in protest as I pushed open the flophouse’s front door. I paused for a moment in the building’s meager lobby, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom as the rest of the troupe filled in behind me.

  “Can I help you?” said a gruff voice to my left.

  I blinked a couple times before I discerned a short, bearded figure behind a low desk darkened by pipe ash and old elbow grease. A dwarf. Figures. They loved gloom. The dude’s hair fell around his face in an untamed mane, scraping the top of the grungy clerk’s desk, and I thought
I smelled the lingering funk of burnt high-mountain pipe weed.

  “Hey, dude,” I said. “You own this place?”

  “I run it,” said the dwarf. “And the name’s Sheila.”

  Whoops. Dwarf gender was a tripping point for me due to the whole bearded women thing.

  “Sorry. It’s the whole…” I mimicked stroking my chin. “Well…you know.”

  Sheila chewed on something and spat, her spittle impacting the floor with a wet slap. “I’m guessing based on your magisterial appearances you’re not looking for a room to party in for a few hours, but if I’m wrong…” She glanced at Steele and jingled some keys. “Sorry, honey.”

  I don’t think I’d ever seen Shay blush, but she did so now. Or maybe it was just the gloom. I’m sure she’d use that as cover if I asked her about it later.

  I flashed my badge. “We’re looking for someone. Human. Grizzled guy. Old scar under his left eye. Did anyone bring the sketch?”

  Shay shook her head while Quinto checked his pockets.

  “Don’t need one,” said the dwarven manager. “I know who you’re looking for. Third floor. Unit six.”

  I blinked and shook my head. “Wait…what? Seriously?”

  I don’t think I hid my surprise particularly well. I know Shay didn’t. She openly stared at Wyle, who grinned in response.

  “Yeah,” continued Sheila. “Been here a few days. Paid for the whole week ahead of time with real silver. Shaved some right off a solid block with a knife. Whacko…”

  “Is he here right now?” I asked.

  “Not sure,” said the dwarf. “I think he left about a half hour ago. I could be wrong though. I don’t pay much attention to people leaving. It’s the people entering who need to pay. Feel free to check. But for the love of the gods, use a key.” She chucked one my way and I caught it. “You and the big brute look a little too eager, and I don’t want to replace any locks, you hear?”

  “Thanks.” I waved for everyone to follow me and headed up the rickety, worm-eaten stairs. I reached into my jacket and snagged Daisy as I propelled myself up the steps, two thoughts prominent in the front of my mind: one, how the dwarf lady had known about my proclivity toward kicking in doors, and two, how Wyle had known Scar Face had taken up residence in this rathole—if, of course, he’d discovered the knowledge through rational means.