Sunset came late and Billy began to grow impatient. He felt the pressure of the armor; if he didn’t take some action soon he would have to power down. When he was up too long he grew edgy, nervous, a little unstable. He looked at Lawrence Millstein and frowned.
Millstein hadn’t moved from his chair all day. He sat upright by the phone, and every time he called Tom Winter’s apartment Billy pictured Millstein as Ann Heath, the wedge of glass driven in a little deeper with every number he dialed. Millstein was pretty much a wreck.
Billy thought about this.
He said, “Does Tom Winter live alone?”
Millstein regarded him with a dread so familiar it had become tiresome.
“No,” Millstein said faintly.
“Lives with a woman?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where she might be?” The silence now was protracted.
“You could call her and just leave a message,” Billy suggested. “It wouldn’t be hard.”
“She might come here with him,” Millstein said, and Billy recognized this as a prelude to capitulation. Not that there was any question of it, really.
“I don’t care about her,” Billy said.
Millstein trembled as he picked up the phone.
It should have gone easily after that and Billy wasn’t sure why it didn’t: some flicker of his attention, maybe, or of the armor’s.
He waited with Lawrence Millstein through the long evening after sunset, while the air through the window turned cooler and the apartment tilled with shadows. He listened to the sound of voices from the courtyard. Not far away, a man was shouting in Spanish. A baby was crying. A phonograph played La Traviata.
Billy was distracted a moment by the lonesome sound of the music and by the stirring of the burlap curtains in the breeze. This was a kind of paradise, he thought, this old building where people lived without fighting over rice and corn, where nobody came and took children away and put them in golden armor. He wondered if Lawrence Millstein knew about living in paradise.
Then there was a knock at the door.
Billy turned, but Lawrence Millstein was already standing up, shouting.
He shouted, “No! Oh, fuck, Joyce, go away!”
Then Billy killed him. The door opened and a woman stood outlined in the light from the hallway, a huge brown-complexioned woman in a flower-print dress; she peered into the dark apartment through thick lenses. “Lawrence?” she said. “It’s Nettie—from next door!”
Billy killed Nettie with his wrist beam, but his hand shook and the beam cut not neatly but like a ragged knife, so that the blood went everywhere, and Nettie made a noise that sounded like “Woof!” and fell back against the faded wallpaper.
Then the hallway was full of voices and distress and although Billy had soothed his armor with these killings he knew his real business would have to wait.
Sixteen
A woman in the crowd tugged Joyce away from the doorway, away from the bodies. Tom understood by the look on her face that Lawrence was inside and that Lawrence was dead.
His first impulse was to comfort her. But the crush of tenants held him back, and the sirens were closer now … He edged down the stairwell and out to the sidewalk. He couldn’t allow himself to be questioned even casually, with a wallet full of ID from the future and no one to vouch for him but Joyce.
A crowd formed around him as the police cruisers pulled up. Tom stood discreetly back among them. He watched the cops erect a barricade; he watched two medics hustle from an ambulance into the building, then stroll out moments later to stand under a streetlight, smoking and laughing. The red rotary lights on the police cars made the street ominous and bleak. Tom stood a long time even after the crowd began to thin, waiting.
There was a hush when the bodies came out: two amorphous shapes under blankets.
Joyce emerged a little after that, a fat man in a brown suit escorting her toward an unmarked car. The fat man, Tom guessed, was a police detective. He must have asked her whether she knew either of the victims; yes, she would have said, that one … She would cooperate because she’d want to help find the killer.
But Tom knew by the way she looked at him, and then away, that she was confused about his role in all this.
A confusion he shared. Not that he might have committed the crime but that Millstein’s death might be connected somehow with his time-traveling. Too many possibilities, Tom thought. A world that contained doorways between decades might contain almost anything else … Any kind of evil monster might have tracked him to Millstein’s apartment.
The police cruisers began to pull away from the curb; the crowd dispersed. A raft of cloud had moved across the sky from the northwest and the night was suddenly cooler. A wind whipped around the corner from Avenue B.
Rain before morning, Tom thought.
He thought about the walk back to the apartment, dangerous in these night streets.
He felt a hand on his shoulder … and spun around, startled, expecting a cop or something worse, and was shocked again:
“Hey, Tom,” Doug Archer said. “We have to get out of here.”
Tom took a step back and drew a deep breath. Yes, anything was possible. Yes, this was Doug Archer, from Belltower in the state of Washington at the end of the 1980s, as incongruous in this dirty street as a Greek amphora or an Egyptian urn.
Doug Archer, who seemed to have some idea what was going on. Now there’s a neat trick, Tom thought.
He managed, “How did you find me?”
“Long story.” Archer tilted his head as if he were listening to something. “Tom, we have to leave now. We can talk in the car. Please?”
Tom took a last look at the building where Lawrence Millstein had died. An ambulance pulled away from the curb, headed uptown. Joyce was gone.
He nodded.
Archer drew an oversize Avis keytag out of his pocket.
Tom felt but didn’t understand the urgency as Archer hustled him into a boxy rental Ford and pulled away from the curb. The heat had broken and the rain came down in a sudden, gusty wash. Dawn was still hours away.
They drove to an all-night deli in the Village and ducked inside.
“A man was killed,” Tom said. He was still trying to grasp the fact of Millstein’s death. “Somebody I knew. Somebody I got drunk with.”
“Could have been you,” Archer said. “You’re lucky it wasn’t.” He added, “That’s why we have to go home.”
Tom shook his head. He felt too weary to frame a reasonable response. He looked at Archer across the table: Doug Archer in a crewcut and a starched shirt and black leather shoes, his sneakers presumably abandoned in 1989. “How do you know all this?” Millstein dead and Doug Archer in the street outside: not a coincidence. “I mean, what are you doing here?”
“I owe you an explanation,” Archer said. “I sure as hell hope we have time for it.”
An hour ticked by on the wall clock while Archer told him about Ben Collier, the time-traveling custodian.
Much of what Archer told him was barely plausible. Tom believed it, however. He had been numbed to the miraculous a long time ago.
At the end of it he cradled his head on his hands and struggled to put this information into some kind of order. “You came here to take me back?”
“I can’t ‘take’ you anywhere. But yeah, I think it would be the wise thing to do.”
“Because of this so-called marauder.”
“He knows about you and he obviously means to kill you.”