Authors: Jude Hardin
I did the math. I had thirteen hours and thirty-four minutes to live.
The wristwatch Brenda had given me for Christmas two years ago was equipped with a digital countdown, a function that came in handy for my calisthenics every morning. Thirty minutes for the whole routine. The countdown keeps me from slacking off on the pace. I synched the watch with the time that my chip would release its toxin, down to the second.
13:33:16…13:33:15…13:33:14…
The parking lot was still empty. I started thinking that maybe Rutherford and his staff took Fridays off, but then I remembered the little jingle at the end of his radio commercials:
We’re there for you and that’s no jive, Monday through Saturday nine to five
.
I wondered what marketing genius had come up with that little ditty. Probably Rutherford himself. The guy was a joke. He wore cheap suits and too much cologne and a hairdo that had gone out of style back in 2045. If I ever saw him again, I was going to punch him in the face. After I got my hour back.
I climbed out of my car, walked up to the door and tried the knob. It didn’t budge. I started knocking, but of course nobody answered. The place was deserted.
I cursed Rutherford under my breath, and then it hit me. He wasn’t the one I really wanted to talk to anyway. I needed to speak with his client, the mystery man who’d swindled me out of twenty-five years of my life.
I looked around, waited until there weren’t any cars passing by, and then kicked the door in. The jamb splintered with a loud crack, and lock parts flew inward and bounced around brassily on the tile floor.
I stepped in and tried the light switch. Nothing. I adjusted the blinds on one of the windows, just enough to stripe the room with sunshine, and then I propped a chair against the ruined door to keep it from swinging open.
The furniture was still there, but nearly everything else was gone. Typewriters, lamps, books, pictures, everything. There was still a phone at the receptionist’s station, but otherwise the place had been stripped clean.
I pulled open some drawers and found exactly what I expected.
Air.
And it wasn’t even clean air. Dust particles rose and floated in the stark ribbons of morning light as I frantically checked all the desks and shelves and cabinets.
Rutherford must have moved out as soon as I left the office last night.
Right after I signed the contract.
Which told me that Rutherford and his anonymous client were probably one and the same.
The phone was still there, one of those black rotary-dial things people used back when I was a kid. Rutherford’s entire office had been outfitted in that retro mid-twentieth-century style that seemed so popular these days. You kind of expected Perry Mason to come walking in from the back room, and what you got was Rutherford. The suit. The hair. But come to think of it, his secretary did look a little like Della Street.
I picked up the receiver, got a dial tone, called the operator. She patched me in to the World Time Bank, and ten minutes of canned music later I finally got to talk to someone named Thelma.
“I need to check on a transaction,” I said.
“Account number?”
I told her the number. “If possible, I would like to—”
“One hour was subtracted from your account last night.”
“I know that. It was a mistake. I want to reverse it. I want my hour back.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible, sir. Not without authorization from the recipient.”
“Could you give me that person’s name?”
“I’m sorry, but that information is confidential. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
“Is the name William B. Rutherford?” I said.
There was a long pause.
“Again, I’m not at liberty to—”
I hung up on Thelma. Her hesitation had told me what I needed to know. It was Rutherford, all right. The conniving little slime ball. He’d been scheduled to die tonight at eleven-thirty, and now I was going to take his place. I would drop dead, and at midnight he would be given the twenty-five years that should have been mine.
I had to find him, try to persuade him to give my hour back.
I peeked through the blinds, saw a police cruiser with its blue strobes flashing parked at an angle behind my car.
If there had been a back door, I would have used it. Unfortunately, there was one way in and one way out, and the officer had it covered. I didn’t have time for this. I’d never been arrested, but I knew it was a lengthy process, knew that I might not be able to see a judge and post bail until Monday morning.
And of course I would be a corpse in a casket by then.
Crouched behind the engine compartment of his car, the fat little cop drew his pistol and aimed it at the door to Rutherford’s office.
“Come out with your hands behind your head,” he shouted.
I had two choices: I could surrender, or I could make a run for it.
If I gave myself up, I would die for sure. In a jail cell.
So there was really only one choice.
I yanked the door open and darted out to the right, ignoring the string of expletives that followed the officer’s command for me to freeze. I turned the corner, sprinted a hundred feet or so to the chain link barrier that separated Rutherford’s building from the alley behind it.
I was pretty agile for a ninety-nine-year-old man, but it had been a long time since I’d climbed a fence. Amped on adrenaline, I grabbed the top and heaved myself up, swinging my leg around and hooking my foot on the rail, pushing myself over and rolling onto the asphalt on the other side.
I scrambled to my feet, took off down the alley galloping like a madman, the way you might run if some sort of wild beast was chasing you. A lion or a tiger or something. I didn’t look back, but I could hear the policeman’s footsteps behind me. I could hear them, and they were getting closer. He was gaining on me, somehow, even though his legs were short and his belly was enormous.
He was probably about seventy years younger than me, about my wife’s age, so it made sense that he was faster. What
didn’t
make sense, to me at least, was what happened next.
4
Two strong and angry hands grabbed my shoulders, pulled me backward and threw me to the pavement.
“You don’t understand,” I said, rolling onto my back, trying to catch my breath. “If I don’t find William B. Rutherford by eleven-thirty tonight—”
A hot blue arc of excruciating pain sped from one end of my nervous system to the other, shooting through me like a pressurized injection of boiling seltzer, scalding my brain and my toenails and every micrometer of flesh in between. It felt as though I had been cut in half with a razor and dipped into a vat of molten lead.
I curled into a fetal position and moaned, every muscle in my body twitching with raw painful spasms.
“Try to get up and I’ll hit you with it again,” the cop shouted.
“You’re kidding, right? I couldn’t get up right now if my life depended on it. Which it does, if you want to know the truth.”
“Why did you run?”
I told him about the letter, the time and money exchange, everything.
“If you take me to jail, I’m going to die tonight at eleven-thirty. Let me go, and I might have a chance.”
He stood there and stared down at me for a few seconds, his eyes unreadable behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses.
“You got any weapons on you?” he said.
“No.”
“What about in the car?”
“There’s a knife under the seat.”
“What kind of knife?”
“Survival,” I said. “It’s in a sheath. Totally legal.”
“You don’t need to tell me what’s legal and what’s not legal. Why should I let you go? What’s in it for me?”
Was I hearing this guy right? Was it possible that he was open to a bribe?
The penalty for that kind of thing was severe, on both ends, but it wasn’t like I had a ton of options at the moment.
“I’ll give you a million dollars to let me walk away,” I said. “There’s a phone in Rutherford’s office. We can go back there and do the transfer right now.”
And so we did. He was skeptical at first, handcuffing me and threatening to zap me with the Taser again if I tried to run, but everything went smoothly once he heard my bank account balance over the phone.
12:41:29…12:41:28…12:41:27…
I climbed into my car, steered to the exit and took a right. The cop followed me for a couple of blocks and then made a U-turn. It had been his lucky day. He was a millionaire now, and all he had to do was look the other way on a simple breaking and entering. What did he care? There wasn’t anything in the office worth stealing anyway. It wasn’t like he’d let a murderer go, or a drug dealer or something.
Although it was possible that he
had
let a murderer go, because I planned to kill William B. Rutherford if he didn’t give me my hour back.
But first I had to find him.
I had a friend who worked at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and I figured that would be a good place to start. If Rutherford had a car registered in his own name, the DMV would have his home address on file.
I drove over there and waited for Jimmy to go on break. He ferreted through some files, ran off a copy, slipped it to me discreetly over the counter.
“If you get in trouble, I don’t want my name coming up,” he said.
“Don’t worry, man. If things go my way, I’ll give you enough money to retire from this crummy gig. If things don’t go my way, I’ll be dead.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks. I’ll need it.”
If Rutherford had left the continental United States last night, there probably wasn’t anything I could do. There just wasn’t enough time. I was toast, as we used to say in a decade I barely remember. But I had a hunch Rutherford was still in town, or at least somewhere nearby. He’d done a really nasty thing, and I was almost certain he’d broken some kind of law. He wouldn’t have wanted to arouse suspicion by traveling abroad after making such a large transfer of funds. Chairman L’s International Bureau of Investigations kept an eye on things like that, and you didn’t want to mess around with those guys. They didn’t carry Tasers, and they didn’t take bribes. They could make you disappear in a heartbeat, no matter how much time you had on your chip. No questions asked.
I took the interstate north, got off on River Road, veered right at Webster’s Park and followed the winding two-lane up to a gated community called Whispering Oaks. Rutherford’s house was on a cul-de-sac, two-story red brick with a black roof.
There was a real estate sign in the yard.
OPEN HOUSE, FEBRUARY 13 AND 14, 2PM TO 4PM
I parked my car, killed the engine, climbed out and walked up the drive. It was still a little early for the open house, but there was a Cadillac up there with magnetic signs on the doors, same real estate company as the sign out front. The agent was in the house, and I was hoping that William B. Rutherford was too.
I stepped up onto the porch, used the fancy brass knocker, and a few seconds later a woman wearing a cranberry business suit answered. Her nametag said Kiki. Nice makeup, decent dye job. She could have been forty, or she could have been ninety. With Gen-41, it was hard to tell.
“I’m sorry, but we’re not quite ready yet,” she said.
“How much is the house?”
“Excuse me?”
“How much money does the owner want? What’s the asking price?”
She gave me a
you’ll-never-be-able-to-afford-it
look, but then she went into salesperson mode anyway. Just couldn’t help herself.
“This property went on the market yesterday,” she said. “And I can tell you right now that it won’t last long. Six bedrooms, four and a half baths, two wood burning fireplaces—”
“How much?”
“It’s listed at two-point-four, but of course that’s just a starting price.”
“I’ll take it,” I said. “Is the owner here?”
“Sir?”
“I want the house. I’ll pay for it right now. Cash. There’s only one stipulation. We have to close on the property today.”
She took a deep breath. “Today?”
“That’s right. So get the papers together. I’ll come in and sit down with the owner and we’ll get this thing done.”
“Have you ever bought a house before, sir? That’s just not how it works. We can’t close on it today. You can put an offer in, and I can take that offer to the owner, and if he accepts it—”
“I’m offering two point four million dollars, but only if I can sit down with the owner today. Right now. We can at least get started on the paperwork, right?”
“Actually, the owner isn’t here, and he doesn’t want to be disturbed. At least until tomorrow. Those were the instructions he left, and I feel compelled to honor them.”
“I’m sure you do. But don’t you think the owner might be just a little perturbed when he finds out that you had a cash offer on the house? Surely that doesn’t happen every day.”
“Regardless, he was very specific about not wanting to be bothered while he was out on his boat today.”
“He has a boat?” I said.
“I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that. Anyway, if you want to come inside, we can go ahead and write up the offer. I’ll remove the open house tag on the sign out front and replace it with one that says sale pending.”
“Okay. If that’s the best you can do.”
“Great. Come on in.”
I stepped over the threshold. When Kiki closed the door, I grabbed her by the arms and wrestled her to the exquisite Persian rug covering the hardwood planks in the foyer. She screamed, but the house was well insulated, and there weren’t any neighbors close enough to hear her.
“Where’s the boat?” I said.
“Let me go, you son of a—”
“Tell me where the boat is, and I’ll let you go. Don’t tell me, and I’ll kill you. Your choice. You have five seconds. One, two, three, four—”
“All right! It’s on the lake.”
“Arrowhead?”
“Yes.”
“Del Ray?”
“Yes. Please don’t hurt me. I’m just trying to do my job.”
She started sobbing.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “But I’m going to have to tie you up. I don’t have time to bribe any more police officers.”