Jaclyn the Ripper (29 page)

Jaclyn parked the golf cart below the South Promontory and skirted the West Pavilion looking for a way inside. She saw a “Maintenance Department” golf cart parked by a service door. Smiling at her good fortune, she waited in the shadows, waited for her
entrée
.

Voices.

She coiled. The service door opened; light from the stairwell splashed outside. A Hispanic janitor held the door open as her partner wheeled out a bucket and cart of cleaning tools and supplies. While they loaded their golf cart, Jaclyn darted inside with her own tools ahead of the door hissing shut and locking automatically behind her. Ear to the door, she listened. When she heard their voices recede, she opened it carefully, duct-taped the bolt inside the door, eased it shut.

She followed a hallway around the pavilion's lower level, discovered that the only access was through metal doors marked
FIRE
, sure to set off the alarms, so she kept going until she found a service elevator that took her up to the third level in the South Pavilion. She crossed a
glass-walled bridge between buildings, and voilà, she was on the floor above the H. G. Wells exhibition. She went to the front, crept halfway down the stairs to the lobby.

No one was behind the desk where Teresa Cruz had been early Sunday morning, yet someone had left a blue blazer hanging on the chair, meaning they would be back.

She stole into the central gallery, gazed at the time machine silhouetted by a warm glow of recessed lights on the walls, thought it resembled a dark monolith. Or tombstone. She cocked her head, listened, heard only a profound silence in the building, architecturally sealed from the omniscient roar of the megacity outside.

She let herself inside the engine compartment, donned gloves and headlamp, crawled to the heart of the engine, inching her toolkit behind. She didn't have sabotage in mind; she needed the machine to be her black steed through the cosmos. Instead, she was about to attempt “preventive surgery”—a concept unfamiliar to professors when Leslie John had attended medical school, with the brutal exception of amputation. She was going to alter
The Utopia
so that should Wells and spouse decide to return to 1906 before they confronted her, the machine would send them to that black hell of dark energy, that vortex of nothingness graced with the stench of burnt technology.

She opened the small door to the RRL housing, reached up blind and scratched her arm on the gearing wheels, annoyed that Wells had built his engine like a circular labyrinth.
It reflects his character—his scientific brain coiled like a snake
. Her fingers brushed something alien, something that moved, and she jerked her hand from the housing as if bitten. Cursing under her breath, she took a dental mirror from the toolkit and used it to guide her hand back inside the housing. Wells, that clever do-gooder, had hung a simple bicycle lock on a gearing wheel—indubitably to protect his machine from those very same barbarians of the future.
Or maybe from yours truly.
She started to remove it, but stopped.
Should Wells check the engine before he takes his beloved back home—and he would be a fool not to—he'll expect the lock to be here.
She left it on the central gearing wheel.

Her mirror led to a neat wrap of black wires. The RRL circuitry. She
carefully pulled them from the housing and discovered that she was holding two identical arteries amid smaller wires. She recalled being Leslie John on that glorious night in 1893 when he had stolen the machine and escaped Scotland Yard. A quick study of Wells's diagrams had shown the way, so she realized—here in 2010—that if she cut both arteries, the machine wouldn't go anywhere; whereas if she cut the one governing rotation into the past, the machine could only travel into the future. That was what Wells had written, was it not?

The wires were unmarked.

She gazed at them, uncertain now, then finally propped her headlamp up in the housing so the entire area was lit. Panning the mirror, she followed the wires to where they merged with the pulse generator. Near the base, one was labeled “W,” the other “E.” She sighed with relief and nodded. She remembered Wells saying that “if you rotate to the west, you gain yesterdays; to the east, you accumulate tomorrows.”

She pulled the wires taut, intending the cut the one marked “W,” but instinctively wiped them all clean as Jack would've done to a patient in a surgery, and when she picked up her wire cutters and turned back to the wires, she stopped suddenly, horrified. She had unwittingly wiped off the labels with her rag.

The wires were identical now, temporal direction hidden inside, and Jaclyn didn't know which one to cut. Her practiced, surgically trained hands began shaking. So badly, she dropped the wire cutters. She blinked, tried to get a hold of herself, tried to recall if the “W” wire was on the right side of the bunch or in the middle or—She bit her lip in frustration. She had no clue.

Disconsolate, she rewrapped the wires and pushed them back in their housing, then gathered up her tools and backed out of the engine compartment. She stared at the enigmatic machine and thought furiously, trying to picture Wells's diagrams on his workbench in 1893, not willing to let go of her scheme.

Wait.
She spied the declinometer under the cabin door and smiled slowly, tentatively.
Perhaps sending Wells to hell is not as complicated as I imagined.
She pulled it out, peered at the prism-shaped device, held fast to its ring by four small bolts. She disconnected it with a speed
wrench and put the ring back in its slot so it appeared that all was well. She chuckled softly.
Now when Wells tries to go home, he and his bride will blast off without the machine. Maybe they won't go to hell, but they certainly won't be here. . . . Maybe they won't be anywhere at all
. Bemused, she twisted Shakespeare again:
All's well that ends badly
.

She hid the declinometer under the bottom firewall, then stashed her tape and headlamp alongside. She was coming out of the compartment when someone strode into the gallery and blinded her with a halogen flashlight.

“Hey!”

Startled, she backed up and tripped over her toolkit, and its contents went clattering all over the floor.

“It's
you
!” The security guard, Peterson, had recognized her. “Jesus Christ, you're not a dude! You're a woman!” He started toward her.

She scooped up a pair of needle-nosed pliers, sprang toward him and, with a little growl, stabbed him in the chest.

He flailed backwards.

She stabbed him again.

He hit the wall and staggered forward, and she stabbed him a third time, pile-driving him to the floor, then watched his body shake and rat-a-tat-tat on the floor, watched him die. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, felt the rush of that sex-death climax wash over her, leave her all aglow and wanting more.
Ah, God, for a bed. My dark kingdom for a bed and my Casey Holland to couple with and then to sleep and dream of—

“Hey Peterson,” the walkie crackled. “This is Cedric. . . . I'm gonna do my walk-through and then I'm gonna boogie for coffee, man. Ten-four.”

Peterson had come upon her at a most inopportune time, and she had to make him disappear before this Cedric or some other guard came looking for him. She gathered her tools and hid them behind a display case in the exhibition, went back to the body. Juiced from the kill, she lifted it to her shoulder, trotted upstairs. On the third level, using his keys, she opened the electrical room door and pulled Peterson inside. She stripped him of his uniform and left him propped up in the
corner, blood oozing from his chest wounds, soiling the “canvas” of his well-defined stomach where—with a more leisurely murder—she could have drawn an elaborate happy face using the ridges of his muscles to enhance her collage. She left his uniform folded inside the door in case she'd need it at a later time and started out.

Wait. No need to run so quickly. There are no whistles or shouts, no sirens, no coppers hounding you. This castle of the future is insulated by its own smug invincibility, and Cedric has gone for coffee.

Humming that sweet lullaby from the music box, she took out her cell phone, studied the display. She recalled the salesman's instructions, pushed the proper buttons and videoed Peterson's corpse, lingering on the jagged holes in his chest.

 

Back in the parking structure, Jaclyn was about to get in the Mercedes, but froze. A blue-and-white security vehicle abruptly turned in Getty Center Drive and went into a slow 360-degree turn. She ducked down behind the car till the lights receded, then peered over the hood. The vehicle was idling on the frontage road—the driver talking into his phone—and then it sped away.

Heart pounding, she got in the Mercedes and pulled out of the parking structure, paused at the street, variables racing through her brain. If they found the murdered guard, found out that she had been there . . . Rather than continue on to Sepulveda or the 405, Jaclyn went back up to the Getty complex and followed the road past the ring-shaped building. Just when she thought she was driving in a gigantic circle, she saw a road to the right. A sign read
EMPLOYEES ONLY
, and a wooden arm blocked the road.

She stopped by the electronic box on a post and correctly figured that if one inserted a card, the arm would lift. With nothing to lose, she tried one of Heather's credit cards. A red light blinked, and the arm didn't move. She was tempted to just drive through and break it, but was afraid of setting off an alarm, so she got out and looked. Beside the barrier, the road had been cut into the hill, yet there was a gap on the other side, then a drop-off, then trees. Back in the Mercedes, she put it in low, eased
around the barrier to the edge of the drop-off, pulled hard on the wheel and swung back on the road. She smiled triumphantly. She was gone from the Getty complex via a back road.

She wound down the mountain past sprawling, secluded homes and minutes later emerged on North Bundy Drive.

Heading south toward Sunset, she took out her cell phone. She recalled another tip from the Verizon salesman and speed-dialed Lieutenant Holland, but was disappointed when his voice mail answered. She sighed heavily and almost rang off—her sigh being message enough for him—but added, “I miss you.”

Then she laughed and thought,
The good lieutenant is not the only phone number in my . . . my repertoire, shall we say?

The electric knife buzzed quietly through the turkey breast, a slice of meat falling on other slices, the stack perfectly symmetrical, the knife lifting away, shiny in the electric candlelight. Captivated, H.G. watched Kevin Robbins press the button again and effortlessly cut another slice.
Good Lord, what will they think of next? An automatic eating machine?

Trying not to be obvious, H.G. looked away. He sipped a chilled California chardonnay and instinctively wished it were French. Though he wasn't a fan of white wine, it did make the first moments alone with his father-in-law almost tolerable. Finally, he nodded politely at the turkey. “I must say, sir, you needn't have gone to all that trouble for us.”

“No trouble,” said Kevin, chuckling. “It's takeout.”

H.G. blushed, reminded of where he was. He quickly scanned the dining room for unknown objects so that he wouldn't make an anachronism of himself should he encounter some other surprise technology, yet as he assessed tiny speakers in the ceiling that broadcast an unrecognizable classical dirge, the buzz of the electric knife captivated him. He stared at it again.

“Cordless,” said Kevin, gesturing with the knife and grinning. “Got
its own charger built right into the handle. What will they think of next, huh . . . ?”

“A world-state, perhaps?” H.G. replied before he could stop himself.

“Politics?” said the old man. “I wasn't talking about politics.”

“Nor was I, sir.”

“What the hell is a world-state, then? Something that runs on batteries?”

“Forgive me for wanting to improve the planet.”

“Soon as the Chinese and the Indians and all the rest of them clean up their own mess, people like me will get in line,” Kevin growled, then segued into how he'd helped people with his start-up Internet insurance company. His voice rising, he went on about how many millions he'd sold it for three years ago, lamenting that if he had sold it today, he'd have gotten twice as much in spite of the economy.

“Well, then as you Yanks say, why didn't you hang on to it?”

“You don't ‘hang on to' a company when you've had a goddamn stroke, boy. You hang on to the goddamn doctors.”

“And their science and technology,” H.G. added conspiratorially, lifting his horn-rimmed spectacles.

Kevin Robbins gave him an incredulous look, drained his whiskey and went on with his own agenda. “So that's what happened to me after the goddamn earthquake. I lost everything and I got it
back
.”

“And aren't we the luckier for it,” said Elizabeth, trying to turn the conversation as she came in the room carrying a gigantic salad.

Amy and Sara followed with rice, rolls and butter and a steamed something that H.G. had never seen before.

“I'm
so
glad you came,” Sara said warmly to H.G., using tongs to set an artichoke on his plate.

He glanced helplessly from the artichoke to Amy, and she nodded back like mother to child that he should do as she did, and then they all sat down and were passing the dishes around, the girls marveling that it all looked and smelled so wonderful.

Kevin appraised H.G. “So what about you . . . ? You Brits don't have earthquakes, do you?”

“Actually, in Perthshire during the winter of 1839—”

Kevin interrupted, guffawing with what he considered a witticism. “Then again, you gotta have something to lose something.”