Destroyer

CHAPTER FIVE

The next morning I accompany Ellie to an appointment at the hospital while Iffy runs some errands for her mother.

It’s a quick visit, Dr. Roseth wanting to make sure she isn’t having any complications from the latest treatment she received. Like the past handful of times we’ve seen him, he’s very pleased with her progress, and while he doesn’t come out and actually say it, I get the strong sense he’s convinced she’s going to beat the disease.

This experience is completely different than when she was sick in our original time line. I was twelve when the cancer had begun to affect her, and just a year older when it had taken her life. As lowly members of caste Eight in a North America still ruled by the British, proper medical care was not an option for us. The truth is, though, I have a feeling that even if we’d been born into the nobility¸ the empire’s doctors still wouldn’t have been able to save her. There was an inertia in our old world that throttled progress, much like the dial throttles the power output on RJ’s charger, and I don’t think medicine had come anywhere near as far there as it has here.

I am feeling particularly optimistic as Ellie and I leave the hospital and take the bus to the restaurant where we will be meeting Iffy for lunch. The two things I’ve been most worried about are both moving in positive directions — Ellie, of course, and the power situation of my chaser. The latter is currently showing a battery level of 76.44 percent after I left it hooked to RJ’s charger all night. Even if RJ isn’t able to make a better connector, the problem has been solved.

The restaurant in the Gaslamp Quarter of downtown San Diego has become a favorite of mine, and Iffy is waiting outside when we arrive.

“So?” she asks Ellie.

“He said I’m on track. I just need to keep doing what I’m doing.”

“That’s great.” Iffy hugs my sister and then me.

The hostess offers us our choice of tables, either on the front patio or inside. While Ellie wants to sit in the sunlight, I worry that the warm day will drain her too much so, much to her disappointment, we take a place in the middle of the dining area.

I can’t remember the last time I felt as relaxed as I do now. The conversation as we eat focuses mainly on things Ellie wants to do when she’s finally given a clean bill of health — places she wants to go, foods she wants to eat, and activities she wants to try. She’s obviously been doing some research of her own about this world, because it’s actually quite a list. As little as three weeks ago, I would have steered the conversation in another direction, fearing we would otherwise be tempting fate. But it appears fate has decided to give us a winning hand, and I now see no harm in letting her dream a little.

I’m feeling so good when we leave that I almost overlook the gray-suited man from the library sitting at a patio table. His presence is such a surprise that I can’t help but stare at him for a few seconds before grabbing Iffy’s arm and putting a hand on Ellie’s back so that I can hurry them out to the sidewalk.

“What’s wrong?” Iffy asks.

I say nothing until we walk around the corner and are no longer in the man’s line of sight. “It’s him.”

“Him who?” Ellie asks.

I hesitate. My sister knows nothing about the man shadowing me, and though I don’t want to unduly worry her, it would be better if she knew the truth. “A guy I think is following me.”

“What?”

Iffy asks, “Where was he?”

“Sitting outside the restaurant.”

Ellie starts to turn like she’s going to head back to the corner and take a look, but I gently grab her arm and stop her. “Why don’t you two go home?” I say. “I’m going to figure out who he is.”

Ellie looks worried. “Is that a good idea? What if he catches you?”

“He’ll never even know I’m around.”

Iffy is trying to act unconcerned, but I can’t miss the unease in her eyes. I kiss her and whisper in her ear, “It’ll be fine. I’ll be home before you are.”

“You’d better be.”

While I earlier wrote off seeing the man at the library as a coincidence, I realize now that was a mistake. His presence at the restaurant cannot merely have happened by chance. He’s tracking me.

So it’s time I return the favor.

I find a spot behind a dumpster where no one can see me and set my chaser for a backward jump of seventy minutes. When I reappear there is a slight change in the angle of the sunlight and some of the cars parked along the street are different, but otherwise everything is exactly the same as when I initiated the journey.

I make my way to a sandwich shop that sits almost directly across the road from the restaurant where we ate. I purchase a bottle of water and a bag of chips and then sit at one of the tables at the front window.

Nine minutes later, I see Iffy arrive, and four minutes after that, Ellie and the earlier version of me join her. There was a time when seeing myself like this was unnerving, but I’ve had plenty of interaction with other Dennys since then, and it doesn’t faze me anymore.

Thirty seconds later, I spot the man coming down the street from the same direction Ellie and I just did. He pauses a couple of storefronts away until the three of us go inside the restaurant and then begins walking.

I watch as he is shown to the outside table where I will later spot him. When he’s occupied giving his order to the waitress, I slip out of the sandwich shop and find another quiet spot.

This time I jump back fifteen minutes and position myself near the entrance to a liquor store, a half block from the bus stop Ellie and the earlier me will arrive at. I know the man wasn’t on the bus with us. Even in my good mood, I didn’t neglect to check my surroundings, and I’m sure I would have seen him. But he must have been following us.

If he is from the institute, he would be using rewinder techniques and could very well already be somewhere nearby waiting for our bus to get there. I carefully scan the road but see no sign of him, so as the bus finally approaches, I focus on the vehicles behind it.

There. He’s in a sedan two cars back.

As soon as the bus pulls away and reveals Ellie and me walking down the sidewalk, the sedan swerves into the spot where the bus had been and pauses. Most of the parking spots along the street are filled, but at the curb not far from where I’m watching everything, a car is pulling out. The man notices this, too, and is starting to swing his vehicle into a U-turn that will bring him over here.

I duck inside the liquor store and pretend to be interested in the magazine rack next to the window. As soon as the man parks, he jumps out and jogs across the street after my sister and the earlier me. When he reaches the corner, he stops and looks down the road toward the restaurant, just like I’d seen him do when I was in the sandwich shop. Once he disappears, I exit the store and approach his car.

Letters on the back spell out LEXUS. This is a luxury brand belonging to one of the large carmakers, but I don’t recall which.

I pause momentarily as a memory flashes in my mind. Last night, when I went out for my walk, there was something…

A car, with a man sitting in it. Right. I’d forgotten about that. His vehicle was a nice sedan. I didn’t check the brand, but an uncomfortable feeling on the back of my neck is telling me I’m looking at the same car now.

Who is this guy?

Looking through the windows, I spot three square white boxes in the backseat, and a toppled stack of loose paper in the well where a passenger’s feet would go. A gym bag and several files sit in the front passenger seat, while on the floor are several crumpled-up paper sacks from various fast-food establishments.

I try the door, but it’s locked. Unfortunate. I was hoping I could learn his name from the vehicle’s identification papers. I could time hop inside, but the car is exposed and I can’t chance someone seeing me suddenly appear in the front seat. There is another way, though, a method I’ve utilized several times on my missions to obtain more money. I use my mobile phone to take a photograph of the Lexus’s license plate and then find an empty alley.

My jump takes me into the office of Mason Evans, a supervisor at the Department of Motor Vehicles facility in the town of Oceanside. I’ve arrived in the middle of the previous night, and, as expected, am alone. Mr. Evans’s office has become my go-to destination for vehicle information. After searching around several bureaus, I’ve selected his for two reasons: the smaller town means less security than in San Diego or Los Angeles, and most importantly, Mr. Evans keeps his login password on a piece of paper taped underneath his keyboard.

Moments after I input the Lexus’s license plate number, I am presented with the name Vincent Kane and an address not in San Diego, as I’d hoped, but in Los Angeles. To be sure I have the right person, I look up Kane’s driver’s license information and am presented with a picture of my unwanted shadow. The address listed matches the one on the car registration.

I’ve seen Kane in San Diego for a few weeks now, and it makes me wonder if he’s made a move south but has not yet reported a change of address. That would complicate my task. If I’m going to find out why he’s so interested in me without tipping him off, I need to get inside his home and see what I can learn. If that place is now in San Diego, I’ll need to follow him to find it, a task far from easy, even with my chaser.

The logical move is to check out the Los Angeles address first.

When the world rematerializes around me, I am standing on a hiking trail in Griffith Park, with the city of Los Angeles sparkling in the night below me. The time difference between my last location and here is only five minutes, so it’s still the early hours of morning.

The park is a few miles from Kane’s address, but as I’ve been trained, I always choose a place I’m confident will be unoccupied for my initial arrival point. The home is located in an area just northwest of downtown that the map on my chaser tells me is called Myer Hills. But that map is of my old world. According to the one on the smartphone, here the place is referred to as Echo Park.

The quick route would be to follow Sunset Boulevard, but even at this hour there is traffic and my chance of being seen is too great. So I take a more circuitous route, making a series of what are called visual jumps — meaning I can actually see the place I’m jumping to before I hit go. Short hops, in other words, and safe. I pass through backyards and empty lots and quiet side streets. It takes me thirty actual minutes to get there, but I alternated between jumping forward and backward thirty seconds, so, by the clock, I arrive in Kane’s neighborhood at basically the same time I left Griffith Park.

While I did spend a considerable amount of time in downtown Los Angeles several months ago when I first realized I’d changed the worlds, I have never been in this specific area before. It’s a small valley bisected by a road called Echo Park Avenue. The home is near the east end of the valley on a street halfway up the north side.

As I approach, I see that it sits on a lot a good fifteen feet higher than the level of the road, and is reached via a stairway that runs up the side of the street-accessible garage. There’s a mailbox at the bottom of the stairs — no name on it, only the house number.

I move to the other side of the street so I can actually see his place. Even then, it’s only a partial view, but it’s enough to see that the place is a two-story Spanish-style home. Like in the other homes in the immediate vicinity, I see no lights on inside.

Cautiously I return to the stairs and make my way up, then sneak through the small front yard to the house. Much to my relief, the night remains quiet. In my world, people often had small plaques mounted beside their front doors engraved with their family name. It would be nice if Iffy’s world also embraced this practice. I would hate to jump inside and find that it is not Kane’s home. I maintain an oddly stitched-together set of morals now, I guess, that includes it’s okay to steal from criminals, that sometimes it’s acceptable to enter someone else’s personal property without permission and sometimes it’s not, and, top of this list, it’s okay to erase untold numbers of lives to be with the woman I’ve fallen for and to save my sister.

Yeah, there’s a lot of gray area in my life.

One more jump puts me on the other side of the door, in a living room filled with old, overstuffed furniture. A large television sits on a cabinet against one wall, while mounted to another are shelves filled with books and framed photographs.

On the other side of the room is the opening to a hallway that appears to go all the way to the back of the house. I know I should probably check to make sure no one is there first, but the photos draw me over.

I turn on my phone’s flashlight and narrow the beam with my hand so that no unnecessary illumination escapes. Immediately I can confirm that I have not made a mistake by coming here. In many of the pictures is the man who’s been following me, meaning I can officially label him as Vincent Kane.

There are other people in the shots, too — friends, I suppose. There is an older couple who both, in differing ways, bear a resemblance to Kane. His parents most likely. In three of the shots is an even older woman, who is always accompanied by the woman I assume is Kane’s mother. She looks as if she could be a hundred years old. I’ve never seen a face so wrinkled and worn, like it’s long overstayed its welcome. Only her eyes, blazing with keen awareness between her aged lids, speak of a life not yet ready to give up.

The thing I take most from the pictures is that if the couple are indeed Kane’s parents, then he was born in this world and is not, as I feared, another rewinder. While on the one hand that’s a relief, on the other it begs the question why would a person from this time line be interested in me?

Hoping I will find my answer somewhere in this house, I begin searching.

The back hall leads to an open room that is part kitchen and part second living room. The furniture and television are newer than what’s in the front room, leading me to believe this is the space Kane uses most. Along the back wall are several large windows, one of which appears to be able to slide open. Though it’s too dark to see much of anything beyond them, light from a handful of homes on the hillside glows here and there. The view during the day must be beautiful.

The only thing of any real interest I find, though, is a note on the refrigerator door held in place by a “See Grand Canyon” magnet. On it is written the name Vince, followed by a phone number. And below this is what appears to be a schedule:

I have no idea what it could mean. The phone number, however, is the prize here. I take a picture of the note and then return to the front of the house and take the stairs to the second floor.

Along the upper hallway are five doors — two on either side and one at the far end. The two nearest me are closed. I leave them for now and check the ones that are open. The first I come to leads into a bathroom that — from the items I find on the counter — appears to be used by a woman.

The next open door is on the other side of the hall. Technically it’s probably considered a bedroom, but it’s been converted into an office and is cluttered with more of the white boxes I saw in the back of Kane’s Lexus.

I remove the lid from one of them and find it stuffed with files. After a quick look through a couple of folders, I get the sense that Kane is involved in some kind of financial work.

This guess is confirmed when I find a business card in his desk with his name on it and the job title of: CERTIFIED PUBLIC ACCOUNTANT. There is no company name, and the address given is a post office box. It makes me think that it is likely Kane is self-employed. I pocket the card, and as I start to leave the room, I see a large, six-month calendar pinned to the wall. There are over two dozen dates circled. When I realize the day I saw Kane at the library is one of them, I try to recall all the other times I’ve noticed him. To the best of my recollection, every single one of those dates is circled. To say that realizing this is upsetting would be an understatement. But what troubles me even more is the fact that there are other dates marked for which I don’t remember seeing him. Was he watching me those days, too?

Then I notice the outlier, and a shiver runs down my back. The marked date is more than three months before the other circles begin and has a very special significance to me.

April 4, the very day I returned to this world with Ellie.

The day I made Iffy’s time line permanent.

He can’t know that.

There’s no way he can know that.

Stop! You’ve seen the pictures, I tell myself. He’s not a time traveler. There is no way he can know the importance of April 4.

I take several breaths to calm down. While the other circled dates may or may not represent all the times our paths crossed, the April date must have nothing to do with—

I pause, staring at the calendar as an answer dawns on me. If the other dates are times he saw me, then maybe the same is true for the first one. Maybe he was in the park where I appeared with Ellie. To this point, I thought that our arrival had gone unseen, but there were others in the park. Many had come running to see if they could help when Ellie collapsed. Had he been in the crowd? Could that be what this is all about? He could have been freaked out by what he saw and searched until he found me again. And when he did, he started following me to see if I would disappear.

This possibility fits the facts, but while I want it to be true, it’s still speculation. And it’s always better to know for sure.

I exit the room and move to the one at the end of the hall.

The moment I step inside, I freeze. I’m in the master bedroom. A door off to my right leads to what I’m sure is an en suite bathroom. It’s the bed, however, that’s caught my attention, or more specifically, the shape of the single person lying on it.

When I’m sure there’s been no change to the deep, rhythmic breathing I heard upon entry, I quietly move into the room until I’m close enough to see the sleeper’s face.

It’s Kane.

This is unexpected. In less than twelve hours, he will follow Ellie and me to our lunch with Iffy. Which probably means he will follow us first to the hospital and then to the restaurant. With the way morning traffic is in Los Angeles, he’ll need to leave within a few hours to be able to do that. Add in the possibility that it was Kane I noticed parked on my street last night, and I would have thought he’d have found a hotel in San Diego. Now I’m wondering if he actually comes home every evening, even if just for a few hours. That’s a lot of driving and doesn’t make much sense.

Unfortunately, any search of his bedroom will have to be done when he’s not here, so I go out as silently as I came in. I also ignore the two rooms with closed doors at the other end of the hall and add them to my “check next visit” list, which, for me, will be in only a few minutes.

I’m tempted to jump right into his living room midmorning, when I know he will be gone. But caution, as it almost always does, overrides this whim. There could be others sleeping behind the closed doors after all. I hop back out to the porch and then choose a spot in some bushes around the side of his house that can be seen only by someone standing a few feet away. I set my arrival time for 10:00 a.m. and jump.

When I pop back into the world, my eyes are closed to slits in anticipation of the morning sun. As soon as my irises adjust, I head toward the front of the house. Logically Kane can’t be here and still make it to San Diego, where the earlier me will see him in a couple hours, so my hope is that the house is empty, but I’m stopped at the corner of the building by a voice coming from the front yard.

“Here we go. Lemonade, nice and cold.” The speaker is a woman with an accent I believe is Hispanic.

She’s obviously talking to someone. I wait for a second voice, but there’s no reply. Kneeling down, I peek around the corner. A chair has been placed in the middle of the small front yard, and in it sits an old woman, a glass raised to her lips. I have only a partial angle on her profile, but it’s enough to see that she’s the same wrinkled woman from Kane’s photographs. Standing beside her is a middle-aged Hispanic woman with shoulder-length dark hair. She’s wearing a colorful shirt and a pair of white pants, and sees the world through brown plastic-framed glasses.

The older woman lowers the glass again and hands it to her companion. “Not sweet enough. More sugar.”

“No more sugar,” the Hispanic woman says. “It’s not good for you. This is okay.”

“More sugar.”

“Mr. Kane would not want you to have more sugar. You know that.”

“Do you see Vincent here? I don’t.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Lorna.”

My eyebrow raises slightly. Lorna is one of the names on the schedule I found in the kitchen.

The Hispanic woman — Lorna — raises her free hand in surrender. “Okay, okay. More sugar. I’ll be right back.” She heads inside the house.

So the schedule is a list of… attendants? I think for a moment, trying to recall what this kind of person is referred to as here. Caregiver. That’s it. The people on the list must be the ones who watch over the old woman while Kane is gone. Which must mean he comes home every night to take over.

Without looking, I reach for the wall to steady myself so that I can lean out and get a look at the front door, but I misjudge the distance and my palm knocks into it harder than I expect it to. The sound isn’t loud, and when the old woman starts turning in her chair, I assume she’s easing an ache, but she twists all the way around until she is looking directly at me. I hold as still as possible, hoping her ancient eyes are not strong enough to pick out the part of my head sticking around the house. Her blank expression seems to confirm this is the case at first, but then suddenly her lips curl in a smile and I can’t help but think that it’s aimed at me.

My hand automatically moves into my satchel and finds the combination of buttons that will trigger an emergency escape, but there’s something about her face that keeps me from pushing anything yet. Maybe it’s the intelligence burning in her eyes, or maybe it’s the fact that I can see some of Kane in her. Whatever the case, I’m unable to figure it out before the groan of a hinge signals the door opening again.

The old woman turns back around as Lorna returns. I listen, sure that she is going to say something about seeing me, but instead she takes the glass, gives the lemonade another taste, and says, “Now, that’s better.”

I back out of sight and pull my chaser out. Instead of hitting the escape combination, I select the locator number for the living room of my apartment and a time that will put me there not long before Iffy and Ellie arrive home from lunch.

As much as I would like to conduct a more thorough search of Kane’s home, I would be a fool to do so when someone else is here, which, from the looks of things, might be all the time.

The only thing I can do for now is go home.