by time-skipping. You'll have to live concurrently, but that'll be an advantage. You can familiarize yourself with the area, locate the victims, make yourself part of the landscape. Let your sideburns grow. We've found an apartment for you, heart of the district, corner of North Kings Road and Santa Monica, second floor. Here, wait a minute - ' She stepped out of the room for a second, came back with a cardboard filebox, and a set of keys. 'We bought you a new car too. You can't drive a '56 Chevy around '67 L.A. It attracts too much attention.'
'But I like the Chevy-'
'We bought you a '67 Mustang convertible. You'll be invisible. There are a hundred thousand of these ponies in California already. It's in the parking lot behind. Give me the keys to the Chevy. We'll restore it and put it in storage. Another forty years, it'll be worth enough to buy a retirement condo. A high-priced apartment.'
She popped the top off the box. In it were another dozen envelopes of varying thicknesses. 'Everything we've got on the other disappearances. Including pictures of the vies. It's the first two you want to focus on.'
I sorted through the reports. 'Okay, so we have an approximate geographical area and a pretty specific age range. Is there anything else to connect these victims?'
'Look at the pictures. They're all twinks.'
'Twinks?'
'Pretty boys.'
'And based on that, you think they're gay?'
'I think we're dealing with a serial killer. Someone who preys on teenage boys. Yeah, I know-lots of kids go missing every year just in L.A. County. They hop on a bus, they go to Mexico or Canada, they go underground to avoid the draft. Or maybe they just move without leaving a forwarding address. But these thirteen don't fit that profile. The only connection is that there's no other connection. I don't know. But that's what it smells like to me.' She finished her drink. Neat. Just like Margaret. 'I think if we find out what happened to the first victim, we unravel the whole string.'
I finished my drink, pushed my glass away, empty. Put my hand over it in response to her questioning glance. One shot was enough. If she was right, this was big. Very.
Took a breath, let it out loudly, stared across at her. 'Georgia, you've been working these streets long enough to know every gum spot by brand name. I won't bet against you.' I gathered the separate files. 'I'll check them out.' I thought for a moment. 'How old am I now?'
Georgia didn't even blink. 'According to our tracking, you're twenty-seven.' She squinted. 'With a little bit of work, we could probably make you look twenty-one or twenty-two. Put a little bleach in your hair, put you in a surfer shirt and shorts, you'll look like a summer-boy. What are you thinking? Bait?'
'Maybe. I'm thinking I might need to talk to some of these kids. The closer I am to the same age, the more likely I'll get honesty.'
Something occurred to me. I turned the maps around and peered back and forth between them. Pulled the disappearance map closer.
'What are you looking for?'
'The dates. Which one of these was first?'
'This one, over here.' She tapped the paper. The one east of Vine. 'Why?'
'Just something I heard once about serial killers. Always look closest at the first vie. That's the one closest to home. That's more likely a crime of opportunity than premeditated. And sometimes that first vie and the perp - sometimes they know each other.'
'You've never done a serial killer before,' Georgia said.
'You're thinking about bringing in some help?'
'It might not be a bad idea.'
Considered it. 'Can't bring in L.A.P.D. They have no jurisdiction. And County isn't really set up for this.'
'Bring in the Feds?'
I didn't like that idea either. 'Not yet. We might embarrass ourselves. Let me do the groundwork first. I'll poke around for a few days, then we'll talk. See if you can get anything from uptime.'
'I've already put a copy of the file in the long-safe. I'll add your notes next week. Then we'll look for a reply.'
The long-safe was a kind of time capsule. It was a one-way box with a time-lock. You punch in a combination and a due date, a drawer opens and you put a manila envelope in. On the due date -ten or twenty or thirty years later-the drawer pops open, you take the file out and read it. Usually, the top page is a list of unanswered questions. Someone uptime does the research, looks up the answers, writes a report, puts it in another manila envelope, and hands it to a downtime courier-someone headed backwards, usually on a whole series of errands. The downtime courier rides the quakes until he or she reaches a point before the original memo was written. The courier delivers the envelope, and it goes into the long-safe, with a due date after the send date of the first file, the one with all the questions. This was one of the ways, not the only one, that we could ask the future for help with a case.
Sometimes we sent open-ended queries-what should we know about that we don't know yet to ask? Sometimes we got useful information, more often not. Uptime was sensitive about sending too much information back. Despite the various theories about the chronoplastic construction of the stress-field, there weren't a lot of folks who wanted to take chances. One theory had it that sending information downtime was one of the things that triggered time-quakes, because it disturbed the fault lines.
Maybe. I dunno. I'm not a theorist. I'm just a meat-and-potatoes guy. I roll up my sleeves and pick up the shovel. I prefer it that way. Let somebody else do the heavy thinking, I'll do the heavy lifting. It's a fair trade.
I didn't set out to be a time-raveler. It happened by accident. I was in the marines, got a promotion to sergeant, and re-upped for another two years. Spent eighteen months in Nam as an advisor, mostly in Saigon, but occasionally up-country and twice out into the Delta. The place was a fucking time bomb. Victor Charlie wanted to give me an early retirement, but I had other plans. Rotated stateside the first opportunity.
Got off the plane in San Francisco, caught a Greyhound south, curled up to sleep, and the San Andreas time- fault let loose. It was the first big timequake and I woke up three years later. 1969. Just in time to see Neil Armstrong bounce down the ladder. Both Dad and the dog were dead. I had no one left, no home to return to. Someone at the Red Cross Relocation Center took my information, made some phone calls, came back and asked me if I had made any career plans. Not really, why? Because there's someone you should talk to. Why? Because you have the right set of skills and no close family connections. What kind of work? Hard work. Challenging, sometimes dangerous, but the money's good, you can carry a gun, and at the end of the day you're a hero. Oh, that kind of work. Okay. Sure, I'll meet him. Good, go to this address, second floor, upstairs from the shoeshine stand. Your appointment is at three, don't be late. And that was it.
My first few months, Georgia kept me local, bouncing up and down the early '70s, doing mostly easy stuff like downtime courier service. She needed to know that I wouldn't go off the rails. The only thing the agency has to sell is trust. But I wasn't going anywhere. The agency was all I had-they were a serendipitous liftoff from the drop zone of '69, and you don't frag the pilot. A lieutenant maybe, but never a pilot-or a corpsman.
I'd thought about corpsman training early, even gone so far as to sit down with the sergeant. He just looked across the desk at me and shook his head. 'There's more to it than stabbing morphine needles into screaming soldiers. You're better where you are.' I didn't know how to take that, but I understood the first time mortar shells came dropping in around us and voices all around started screaming, 'Medic! Medic!' I wouldn't have known which way to run. And I just wanted to keep my head down as low as possible until the whole damn business was over. It was only later, I got angry enough to start shooting back. But that was later.
After the courier bit became routine, Georgia started increasing my responsibilities. When you pass through '64, pick up mint-condition copies of these books and magazines. Pick up more if they're in good condition, but don't be greedy. Barbie dolls, assorted outfits (especially the specials), and Hot Wheels, always. Buy extras if they have them. Sometimes she just wanted me to go someplace and take pictures - of the street, the houses, the cars, the signs.
After a couple months, I told Georgia that the work didn't seem all that challenging. Georgia didn't blink. She told me that I had to learn the terrain, I had to get so comfortable with the shifting kaleidoscope of time that I couldn't be rattled. That's why the '60s and the '70s were such a good training ground. The nation went through six identifiable cultural transitions in the course of sixteen years. But even though the '50s were supposed to be a lot quieter, she didn't think so. They weren't all that safer, it was just a different kind of danger. Georgia said she
