the casebooks. Nor had such stylized killings, with their major themes of bondage in nurse uniforms and long sexual bouts, appeared along Clifford’s life history. Until now.
The drapes concealed events inside the house. He caught flickering shadows, though, and prepared his approach. Warren made sure no one from nearby houses was watching him as he angled across the lawn and put his foot on the first step up to the front door.
This had worked for the first three disposals. He had gained confidence in New Haven and Atlanta, editing out killers who got little publicity but killed dozens. Now he felt sure of himself. His only modification was to carry the pistol in his coat pocket, easier to reach. He liked the feel of it, loaded and ready.
Taking a breath, he started up the steps—and heard a door slam to his right. Light spattered into the driveway. A car door opened. He guessed that Clifford was going to drive away.
Looping back to this space-time coordinate would be impossible, without prior work. He had to do something now, outside the house. Outside his pattern.
An engine nagged into a thrumming idle. Warren walked to the corner of the house and looked around. Headlights flared in a dull-toned Ford. He ducked back, hoping he had not been seen.
The gear engaged and the car started forward, spitting gravel. Warren started to duck, stay out of sight—then took a breath.
He reached out as the car came by and yanked open the rear passenger door. He leaped in, not bothering to pull the door closed, and brought the pistol up. He could see the man only in profile. In the dim light Warren could not tell if the quick profile fit the photos and 3D recreations he had memorized. Was this Clifford?
“Freeze!” he said as the driver’s head jerked toward him. Warren pressed the pistol’s snub snout into the man’s neck. “Or I pull the trigger.”
Warren expected the car to stop. Instead, the man stamped on the gas. And said nothing.
They rocked out of the driveway, surged right with squealing tires, and the driver grinned in the streetlamp lights as he gunned the engine loud and hard.
“Slow down!” Warren said, pushing the muzzle into the back of the skull. “You’re Clifford, right?”
“Ok, sure I am. Take it easy, man.” Clifford said this casually, as if he were in control of the situation. Warren felt confusion leap like sour spit into his throat. But Clifford kept accelerating, tires howling as he turned onto a highway. They were near the edge of town and Warren did not want to get far from his resonance point.
“Slow down, I said!”
“Sure, just let me get away from these lights.” Clifford glanced over his right shoulder. “You don’t want us out where people can see, do you?”
Warren didn’t know what to say. They shot past the last traffic light and hummed down a state highway. There was no other traffic and the land lay level and barren beyond. In the blackness, Warren thought, he could probably walk back into town. But—
“How far you want me to go?”
He had to shake this man’s confidence. “Have you killed any women yet, Frank?”
Clifford didn’t even blink. “No. Been thinkin’ on it. Lots.”
This man didn’t seem surprised. “You’re sure?” Warren asked, to buy time.
“What’s the point o’ lyin’?”
This threw Warren into even more confusion. Clifford stepped down on the gas again though and Warren felt this slipping out of his control. “Slow down!”
Clifford smiled. “Me and my buddies, back in high school, we had this kinda game. We’d get an old jalopy and run it out here, four of us, and do the survivor thing.”
“What—?”
“What you got against me, huh?” Clifford turned and smirked at him.
“I, you—you’re going to
“How you know that? You’re like that other guy, huh?”
“How can you—wait—other guy—?”
The car surged forward with bursting speed into a flat curve in the highway. Headlights swept across bare fields as the engine roared. Clifford chuckled in a dry, flat tone, and spat out, “Let’s see how you like our game, buddy-o.”
Clifford slammed the driver’s wheel to the left and the Ford lost traction, sliding into a skid. It jumped off the two-lane blacktop and into the flat field beyond. Clifford jerked on the wheel again—
—and in adrenaline-fed slow motion the seat threw Warren into the roof. The car frame groaned like a wounded beast and the wheels left the ground. The transmission shrieked like a band saw cutting tin, as the wheels got free of the road. Warren lifted, smacked against the roof, and it pushed him away as the frame hit the ground —
Quiet. Crickets. Wind sighing through the busted windows.
Warren crawled out of the wide-flung door. He still clutched the pistol, which had not gone off. On his knees in the ragged weeds he looked around. No motion in the dim quarter-moonlight that washed the twisted Ford. Headlights poked two slanted lances of gray light across the flat fields.
Warren stood up and hobbled—his left leg weak and trembling—through the reek of burnt rubber, to look in the driver’s window. It was busted into glittering fragments. Clifford sprawled across the front seat, legs askew. The moonlight showed glazed eyes and a tremor in the open mouth. As he watched a dark bubble formed at the lips and swelled, then burst, and he saw it was blood spraying across the face.
Warren thought a long moment and then turned to walk back into town. Again, quickly finding the transflux cage was crucial. He stayed away from the road in case some car would come searching, but in the whole long walk back, which took a forever that by his timer proved to be nearly an hour, no headlights swept across the forlorn fields.
He had staged a fine celebration when he invented masked inset coding, a flawless quantum logic that secured against deciphering. That brought him wealth beyond mortal dreams, all from encoded 1s and 0s.
That began his long march through the highlands of digital craft. Resources came to him effortlessly. When he acquired control of the largest consortium of advanced research companies, he rejoiced with friends and mistresses. His favourite was a blonde who, he realized late in the night, reminded him of that Nancy, long ago. Nearly fifty years.
The idea came to him in the small hours of that last, sybaritic night. As the pillows of his sofa moved to accommodate him, getting softer where he needed it, supporting his back with the right strength, his unconscious made the connection. He had acquired major stock interest in Advanced Spacetimes. His people managed the R&D program. They could clear the way, discreetly arrange for a “sideslip” as the technicals termed it. The larger world called it a “jogg,” to evoke the sensation of trotting blithely across the densely packed quantum spacetimes available.
He thought this through while his smart sofa whispered soft, encouraging tones. His entire world was smart. Venture to jaywalk on a city street and a voice told you to get back, traffic was on the way. Take a wrong turn walking home and your inboards beeped you with directions. In the countryside, trees did not advise you on your best way to the lake. Compared to the tender city, nature was dead, rough, uncaring.
There was no place in the claustrophobic smart world to sense the way the world had been, when men roamed wild and did vile things. No need for that horror, anymore. Still, he longed to right the evils of that untamed past. Warren saw his chance.
Spacetime intervals were wedges of coordinates, access to them paid for by currency flowing seamlessly from accounts, which would never know the use he put their assets to—or care.
He studied in detail that terrible past, noting dates and deaths and the heady ideas they called forth. Assembling his team, he instructed them to work out a trajectory that slid across the braided map of nearby space-times, all generated by quantum processes he could not fathom in the slightest.
Each side-slide brought the transflux passenger to a slightly altered, parallel universe of events. Each held potential victims, awaiting the knife or bludgeon that would end their own timelines forever. Each innocent could be saved. Not in Warren’s timeline—too late for that—but in other spacetimes, still yearning for salvation.
