Jaclyn the Ripper (24 page)

Suddenly, she couldn't hide a tiny smile and hated herself for it, realizing she was secretly pleased that Amy was dead.
Is that why I didn't set the GPS right, knowing in my heart that the 405 would be a parking lot and we wouldn't get to Amy in time?
She glanced guiltily at H.G., but he hadn't seen her smile.
Amber Reeves, may you burn in hell.
She considered it, then sighed.
Okay. If it means we might end up together, then so be it.

When they were almost to the beach, he shifted in his seat and said, “Where are you taking me?”

“I dunno. I was afraid to ask.”

“Would you have an old-fashioned alarm clock?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. A travel clock—for when the power goes out.”

“It's not digital?”

“No.”

“Jolly good. I'll need that and some tools,” he said thoughtfully. “And your laptop.”

“Okay, but—” She turned left at Pacific Avenue and headed south for her apartment. “Somebody has to call her parents and tell them, right . . . ? I mean, if you're not up to it, I can do I for you.”

“No. . . . There's no need.”

“Huh?”

“I'm going to change the day.”

“What?”

“I cannot accept . . . I refuse to live in a world without Amy.”

Why would she do that
, Casey Holland asked himself, rooting through the trash in the master bath.
Was she trying to set me up or was her brain on a goddamn vacation?
When he'd been in the shower at the motel, Jaclyn had put a pink-and-rose note in his pocket, and Cheryl had found it getting his stuff ready for the cleaners while he was taking a guilt-ridden second shower. The shit had hit the proverbial fan. After screaming and waving the note in his face, Cheryl had crumpled it up, slam-dunked it in their remodeled bathroom and had been in tears and a fury ever since.

Briefly, he had thought about denying it, but, no, that would make him as pathetic as the low-lifes who claimed innocence even when their prints and DNA were all over the evidence. Besides—though his life was coming apart—he still couldn't erase images of Jaclyn from his mind.

He found the note, flattened it out on the tile, saw Jaclyn's flowery script asking for more, her lips in a cherry-red kiss. He remembered those lips all over his body.
Okay, so I'm new at this
, he thought, gazing at the note,
is it a souvenir or a fucking talisman?
Regardless, it had her phone number on the back, and he kept it, despite knowing in his heart that she would ruin him.

Back in the dining room, he waited for Cheryl, who was trying to put the kids down for the third time. Usually, they went to bed happily and easily, but tonight they had picked up on the tension in the house, the reality that their mom was angry and hysterical, and wasn't telling them why.

The TV was playing commercials to an empty living room. Without looking, Holland aimed the remote and turned it off, then looked at his cell on the table next to his cold coffee. He hadn't checked in for over three hours and resisted an urge to do so despite the case, ugly on his mind.
To hell with the case
, he told himself. His wife was in a controlled fury, and he had no clue what to do next.

Cheryl strode barefoot into the kitchen, poured herself more wine and came back in the room, tragically beautiful in a simple tank top and cutoffs, yet her blue eyes red and swollen from crying.

He straightened up. “Look, honey, there's gotta—”

“Shut up, Casey! Shut
up
!” She waved her hands alongside her head, then drank to calm herself. “Why does there have to be a way . . . ? Why?! How about
no way
, Case?”

“Because I love you.”

She laughed raucously, took a ragged breath, then burst into tears again, and when he tried to console her, she pushed him away and curled into a ball on the chair. “I want you out of this house. I want you gone.”

He almost said, I'm not going anywhere, but wasn't sure, so he didn't say anything. He welcomed the silence. Maybe it would soothe her, and they could talk sensibly and put this behind them.

For something to do, he turned on his phone. It beeped with six new messages, wrecking the silence, so he turned it off.

“How many times did she call?” said Cheryl hatefully.

“It's work, I'm sure.”

“Bullshit.”

He held out his phone. “Want to read the caller ID?”

“No, I don't! I want to know why!” She cried, “Why, Casey,
why
?”

He shook his head. “I can't explain it. I felt this pull. I couldn't stop myself. It was like something otherworldly.”

“Otherworldly . . . ?” she said sarcastically. “As in an angel—?”

“C'mon, Cheryl—”

“—or fuck goddess?”

“I was trying—”

“I really don't want to hear your garbage, okay?” She finished her drink, then went back in the kitchen for the bottle. “What is it with you cops, anyway? When you graduate from the Academy, do you pledge to do other women . . . ? Like you do bad guys . . . ? Is that it . . . ?” She sat down again. “I thought we were beyond that. I thought you were different.”

Desperate, he seized upon her words. “I
am
different, Cheryl! I'm here right now when I'm supposed to be on a goddamn case, and I'm trying to work things out with you because I think you, me and the kids are worth saving!” He took an enormous breath. “Everybody else I know would've made a joke out of it! They would've gone on cheating till they got caught in the act.”

“Okay.” She straightened up, glared at him, then looked off thoughtfully. “Okay, maybe you are different. . . . Maybe you are.”

“I am, honey, I swear to God, I am.” His voice cracked. He sagged with relief and hoped the worst was over and that he could do some serious damage control and get some counseling or brainwashing or something and wipe the image of Jaclyn from his brain.

“I want you to quit the LAPD.”

“What?”

“It's not just your whore—it's what happens next—it's the rest of it, as well,” she said. “The reality is: We don't come first in your life when all along you've come first in ours.” Her eyes were unflinching. “I can't live like this anymore.”

“But, I'm a cop,” he said, stunned. “It's what I do.”

“Find something else to do.”

“You can't be serious.”

“Us or the LAPD, Case. Your choice.”

“I promise you,” he said desperately, “I'll never see her again!”

“I don't give a fuck about her. . . . Us or them.”

“You're playing God.”

“There is no God,” H.G. said automatically.

“Sometimes there is,” Amber said brightly.

“Your naïveté is astounding,” he replied with disgust, forgetting that despite all the tears and tragedy, this girl lived in the moment, and right now she was gloriously happy to be alone with him. He stared gloomily at anonymous sandwich-box buildings under dirty-yellow streetlights as they sped east on Santa Monica Boulevard torward the 405. The notion of an intermittent supernatural force seemed ludicrous.
Perhaps 'Dusa's god is wish fulfillment, making her no different from anyone else in this brightly lit, dubious year. Like her, these people hurry everywhere, yet are going nowhere, all done within the sanctity of motor cars. They're always talking on electronic devices—or is it a form of prayer?—yet they never go to church because they already exist in one enormous, technological church of wish fulfillment. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy phone number.
He stopped, realizing that his cynicism had become self-indulgent.

“Bertie . . . ?” She hesitated. “Is it still okay to call you Bertie?”

He nodded impatiently.

“Isn't the reality of time travel proof that we are made in God's image?”

“Ha!” Briefly, despite the loss of Amy, he rose to the occasion of debate. “Isn't the reality of Jack the Ripper proof that we were made in someone else's image . . . ? Or perhaps not created at all?”

“What d'you mean, ‘not created'? We're alive, aren't we?”

“Thanks to the wonders of evolution. You have heard of Charles Darwin, I take it.”

She nodded and recited, “We started out as amphibians, moved on to four-legged carnivores, then the Australopithecus, and—give or take a few million of years later—voilà! Now we're thinking, feeling human beings.”

“Who may not have that many years left.”

Startled, she shot him a concerned look. “What . . . ?”

He wished he hadn't said anything.

“What are you talking about?” she persisted.

“Idle nonsense,” he lied, dismissing her. He didn't want to get into global warming or Armageddon with her. Right now, saving Amy was more than enough.

Amber got off the freeway at Getty Center Drive and drove in silence the rest of the way to the museum. She parked by the steps of the arrival plaza, and H.G. noticed a security guard watching them from the rotunda.

“Your identification will get us in, right?” he asked warily.

She nodded confidently, and they got out of the car.

 

His jacket off and sleeves rolled up, H.G. was deep inside the engine compartment while Amber positioned the work light they had borrowed from Security on the ruse of looking for more evidence in the Teresa Cruz murder. Though already covered with extratemporal residue, he moved gingerly, for he didn't want to lean on the diamond buffers or pulse generator and place unanticipated stress on the crystalline bars. He had no desire to perform an alignment 103 years away from his laboratory. He was reaching up to unscrew the Destination Indicator when the light moved.

“Is this better?”

He frowned. “I can't see a blasted thing.”

The light moved again. “Now?”

“It was fine where it was,” he said, annoyed.

“Jeez,” she said, sliding the light back to square one. “Don't bite my damn head off.”

“Don't move the damn light.”

“Okay, sorry.”

“And while you're at it, I need a larger screwdriver.”

She had two, but rather than make another mistake, she crawled inside the engine compartment, held her purse open and let him choose for himself. He pulled out a nail and grinned.

“We're not building a bloody house here, 'Dusa.”

Chuckling, he tossed the nail back in her purse, found the tool he wanted and went back to work. He heard Amber walk away, wondered fleetingly where she was going, then went back to work, but couldn't turn the screws on the Destination Indicator housing. Though mounted within the gyroscopic rotation radius—meaning they shouldn't age—they were frozen in place. He didn't know if it had been caused by
The Utopia
's trip to infinity, where all bets were off, or if it the problem was his forty-year-old hands. He shook up the small can of WD-40 which Amber insisted solved all things mechanical and sprayed the connections. He wiped off the excess lubricant, then waited.

He heard a guffaw from one of the galleries, then her footsteps on the travertine stone floor, her breathless giggles as she leaned in the hatch.

“She didn't really
say
that, did she?”

“Who is she?”

“Odette Keun.”

“And who just might Odette Keun be?”

“Come on! You'd been sleeping with her for three years. You were hosting a dinner party for some lord and his wife at your place in France, and someone at the table called you the Fabian Casanova, and—”

“ 'Dusa, please—”

“—then somebody else said, ‘What exactly did Casanova do?' And then Odette said, ‘He fucked women.' ”

“Dammit, 'Dusa!”

She was laughing so hard she didn't hear.

Thoroughly annoyed, he straightened up and hit the firewall with a resounding bang. “Ouch!” Muttering, he rubbed his head.

That, she heard. “Are you okay?”

“
Please
don't tell me about a life I haven't lived!”

A silence.

“I don't want to see any blasted photographs, either!”

“Okay, okay. I'm sorry. It was 1927. I'm sorry.”

“If you're bored, you can find me a blindfold for when I come back to this place and have to walk through the exhibition.”

“Why don't you take me with you?” she said softly.

“Absolutely not.” He continued working on the screws. “I will not expose you to reformulation errors.”

“I'll risk it.”

“No. I'm sorry.” He sighed, wiped his brow and leaned back against the firewall. “Would you mind very much getting us some food?”

“King of Siam or McDonald's . . . ?”

“Neither.”

“Soul food?”

 

After she'd gone out for food, his clumsy fingers finally cooperated, and he got the Destination Indicator loose. He paused to wipe sweat from his face, then inspected the autoclock. It had been crushed. He rotated it slowly, nodded as the problem came clear. He had made its housing slightly beveled. It had never occurred to him that his time machine would travel to infinity and back—and that over such a great distance, the heavy and corrosive nature of dark energy would wreak havoc with components which were not square. Yes, but what about the other diagonals and curves in his engine? They hadn't frozen, melted or oxidized. Perhaps it had something to do with the mechanics of time—as
in autoclock—traveling through time. Or perhaps it was the capricious nature of dark energy itself. He had no clue.

“Get on,” he whispered to himself.
Get on before you find yourself stuck in this indifferent century.