He left, and I had no idea what he was going to do that night. Either way, it didn't look good.
He could go to the hangar, meet me, and screw up the timeline.
Or he could not go to a place I'd already been, to a place that, in my version of reality, he had already been. I didn't know what that would do to me.
Either way, sitting there on the bed in my damp skinsuit, I figured I could be smoking my last cigarette. I made it last, savored every carcinogenic puff.
Then the Gate arrived in the bathroom and I stepped through. For all I knew, there might be nothing on the other side. The thought didn't bother me much. For a night, anyway, I had lived.
16 A Night to Remember
Testimony of Bill Smith
There were two cops at the desk as I went through the lobby. They were talking to the manager. I didn't think about it until I got outside and saw two more cops, two police cars, and a tow truck pulling Louise's Italian sports car out of its parking slot.
I started over there. I was going to ask what the hell was going on, but something made me stop. Instead, I found a spectator and asked him what was going on.
"The cop said it was stolen," the man said.
"Stolen?"
"That's what be said. Must have been a kid. Who the hell else would be dumb enough to steal a thing like that? I bet there's no more than six or seven of them in the whole country."
I got out of the elevator and ran down the hall toward my room. I was getting out my key when a strange noise started. l looked around, up and down the hall, but I couldn't locate its source.
We weren't that far from the airport, so I dismissed the noise. l had my key, so I started to put it in the lock.
At least, I tried to.
The door bulged away from me, like it was made of rubber.
I almost fell over; putting out a hand, I caught myself against the wall, which had also distorted. Then, slowly, it eased back into position.
I stood there, sweating. I backed away from the door, studied it and the wall. No paint was cracked. I ran my hand over the door, and around the frame. Nothing was warped, there were no splinters.
Jesus. I'd had bad hangovers before, but nothing like that. I rubbed my hands over my face, and unlocked the door.
For just a second it looked very odd in there. At the far end of the room were sliding glass doors that led to a coffin-sized balcony. The doors were shut, but the drapes were blowing as if in a high wind. I couldn't feel the slightest breeze. And everything in the room seemed to be coated with ice.
Maybe ice isn't the right word. Frost, or powdered sugar.
I blinked, and it was all gone. The curtains were barely stirring, and there was nothing wrong with the walls or the unmade bed.
She was gone.
I did everything I could think of. It didn't bring her back.
The balcony door was locked from the inside. I opened it and stepped out, looked around, couldn't see how she could have gotten out from the fourth floor. There was no rope of knotted bedsheets or anything.
I hadn't been gone that long. I suppose she could have come down one elevator while I was going up the other, or she might have used the stairs, but there was something that made me doubt that. Her clothes were still there. All of them, from the brown shoes to the cotton bra.
Her purse was gone, though. Could she have had some clothes in there? The only other evidence she had ever been there was the stained sheets and the heaping ashtrays.
I stayed in the room for almost half an hour, trying to put it together.
A stolen car. A night to remember. A strange story about a place where everybody died.
A dead or stillborn or heroinaddicted infant.
Oh, yes, and two more clues. In the bathroom trash can I found a Vicks inhaler and an empty package of Clorets breath freshener. I sniffed at the inhaler and wished I hadn't.
Whatever was in the thing, l didn't want any part of it.
Chalk it up to experience, I told myself, only it didn't help. You're supposed to learn something from experience, and all I had was questions.
I decided not to tell the police anything about her, at least not until I'd had a chance to talk to her myself. Maybe she needed help. I didn't think she was dangerous.
I had to call a cab to get to the airport. When I arrived, I went straight to the United desk, and around back to where Sarah Hacker had her office.
She looked like she'd had about as much sleep as I had. Maybe there are worse jobs than personnel and public relations for an airline that's just lost a plane, but I don't know what they are.
"Hi, Sarah," I said. "I'd like to find Louise Ball, if it's not too much trouble."
"No trouble," she said. "What does she do, and in what city?"
"She works right here," I said. "Or she did yesterday. She's a ticket agent."
Sarah was shaking her head and reaching for a book. She flipped through it.
"Not unless she was hired after five o'clock yesterday evening. I know all my people, Bill.
She might have been a temporary. Let me look."
She did, and came up with nothing. She put the name through her computer, and confirmed that no one named Louise Ball worked for United.
It was time to call in the FBI. A harmless kook with an obsession about a dead daughter was one thing; an unauthorized person hanging around an investigation pretending to be something she wasn't was another.
I actually got into a phone booth and had dialed the first couple digits of the number Freddie Powers had given me ... then I hung up. Louise had said she'd be back that evening.
I'd wait, and give her a chance to explain herself.
I remembered I did have something to talk to Frddie Powers about, so I went back into the booth. I found him at the temporary morgue.
"What about those watches?" I asked him. "Did you find anything new?"
"One thing," he said. "You remember the digitals that were running backwards? They're all running forwards again."
"Did you bring somebody in on it?"
"Yeah."
"What"d he say?"
"He said it couldn't have happened."
I thought about that.
"How many people actually saw them? I mean, while they were running backwards?"
There was a pause. "You and me, Stanley, and that doctor, Brindle. Maybe a couple people who were helping him take watches off the corpses ... but I don't think so. He's the one who noticed it."
"Did you get any films, videotapes ... anything like that?"
"No. Nothing. All we've got is the testimony of the three of us."
"Three?"
Another pause. "I'm not sure Brindle wants to swear to anything."
"Why don't we wait on this? We've still got the watches that are forty-five minutes off."
"Right."
With the digitals, all we've got is that you and I and Tom saw it."
There was a long pause. I assumed he was thinking over his position, how his career was going and how a story like this would affect his advancement in the Bureau -- which has always liked things neat.
"I saw it," he said, slowly, "but that doesn't mean I think it's important."
"Right. Sit on it for a while, okay? I'll decide if it's important."
"You've got it, Bill."
One anomaly dealt with.
The day went like that: pretty well, except I kept looking over my shoulder expecting Louise to drop into my lap.
She didn't.
We started off with Norman Tyson, from the company who built the air traffic control computers.