Ray Wood: Schrödinger's Gun

Unless it wasn’t me that went.

I imagined closing myself inside a box. It was something that they’d taught us during training, a visualization exercise: imagine that you’re Schrödinger’s cat. No one knows if you’re alive or dead. Except, in the quantum language of the heisen, it’s more than that: you’re both alive and dead, a million quantum cats existing in both states at the same time.

Alive and dead.

West 23rd Street and Trumbull Avenue.

Another me climbed out of bed and slipped into her coat.

The following afternoon, I went to speak to Vincent Quine. I’d gotten a full eight hours’ sleep the night before: nothing had happened over on West 23rd Street that was worth seeing, so I left that possibility thread to another me and decided, with a flick of the heisen, that I had been in my bed all along. I tracked down potential Quines, ignoring the more isolated and unstable possibilities that would send my investigation hurtling down an unpredictable path, such as finding him dead in the road on Ellen Street having been struck by a cab that skidded on a patch of ice.

In most universes I found him in a speakeasy joint above a bookstore on Evergreen Avenue. I’d been there before: it served awful bathtub cocktails, mostly to gangsters, and was little more than an attic space with a bar along one side. It had never really been worth raiding. I chose a universe in which I remembered the correct pattern of knocks to gain admittance and slipped through the door before the bartender could shut it. All conversation in the place went dead as I stepped inside.

“Afternoon, fellas.” They’d squeezed a pool table into the far corner since I’d last visited. Quine and a couple cronies stood around it, cues resting on their shoulders. There must have been ten, fifteen other hoods in there—half of them drinking, most of them smoking, all of them wearing suits. I looked each of them in the eye, one by one.

—a hand plunges into a coat pocket, but other hands are faster—

—a cacophony of bangs as hot lead screams across the room—

I spread my palms to show I was unarmed and looked towards the bar. “What’s a girl got to do to get a drink around here?”

Smoke drifted lazily towards the ceiling. For an awful moment I thought I was going to end up splattered across the wall, then someone laughed and the tension broke. Heads turned away; conversations resumed. The bartender hurried over with a waxen smile.

“Good to see you, Detective. Here—on the house.”

Awful-tasting cocktail in hand, I made a beeline for the pool table. Quine was leaning halfway across it, squinting down his cue. He was a big guy. Most of it was muscle, although when he undid his jacket I could see a hairy fold of beer gut through the gaps between his shirt buttons. His slick black hair was lovingly oiled. Chicago legend had it that he had a messy scar on his leg from a badly-healed bullet wound: he’d plugged it with a finger during a gunfight and had refused to go to a hospital.

“Came down to the nine, I see.”

He squinted up at me. In all but one of the universes spread out in front of me he made the shot and won the game—I thought victory might make him more amenable, so I chose one of those. The balls clacked together and the nine-ball shot into the pocket, the cue ball bouncing softly off the cushion and carrying on around the table. With the heisen’s help I pinned it first try beneath my index finger as it came towards me.

“Fancy a game?”

Neither of us spoke while I set up the balls inside the diamond. It was obvious that I wasn’t on a social call. I took off my coat and flicked my hair out of my collar, wanting to see Quine sweat while he tried to work out how much I knew. He handed me a pool cue, chalked end first.

“So, Detective,” he said. “Are my tax dollars paying for you to come play pool nowadays, or are you here on business?”

I took the cue and dusted the little cube of chalk around the tip. “Johnny Rivers is dead.”

He nodded gravely. “So I heard. God rest his soul.”

I watched him cross himself and tried to gauge his reaction. I had expected him to feign ignorance. “You’ve certainly got your ear to the ground,” I said. “He’s not been cold forty-eight hours.”

“News travels fast in Chicago. You break.” He placed the cue ball behind the line and stepped aside with a gentlemanly bow. One of his cronies lifted up the rack. “Besides,” he said, as I chose a possibility that gave me a good break without potting any balls, “he was a friend of mine.”

I tucked my hair behind my ear. “Don’t take me for a fool, Vince. Everyone and her mother knows he was the biggest rival you lot had in this part of town.”

“Well, Detective, you know what they say. Keep your friends close, and your enemies”—he pocketed the one—“closer.” He shot again and bounced the two into a cluster of high balls, leaving the cue ball penned in near the corner pocket. “But that’s it, isn’t it? You want to pin Johnny’s murder on me. Jeez. You know what—I ain’t even surprised, what with the way your boys have been on my back lately. Need a suspect for a lineup? Get Vincent Quine. Someone done a robbery? Must be Vincent Quine. Seems like a cat can’t have kittens in this town without me getting blamed for it.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, sliding the cue into the groove between my thumb and forefinger. “Poor, innocent you.”

By my count, Quine had dodged three murder charges already that year, all of them dropped due to lack of evidence. The prostitute who had agreed to testify against him for the Dickson murder had been lured to her death by Montagnio goons pretending to be federal agents. Her body turned up in Lake Michigan a month after she disappeared. No way to prove anything, of course, but the story spread fast enough to make any other potential witnesses think twice about doing society a favor. I opened up a universe in which I made the cue ball hop over the eight and roll into the two, just to put me back in the game. Suddenly I didn’t want to lose.

“What you got on me this time, then?” Quine took a gulp of his drink while he considered his next shot. “Prints? Witnesses? A little handwritten note saying ‘Detectives, you ain’t picked on Vinnie Quine enough—he did it!’?”

I jumped universes as his cue came forwards, grabbing hold of a possibility thread in which he slipped and struck the cueball on one side. It spun off slowly at an angle and collided with the seven.

“Whoops.” I knew that I was pushing it, using the heisen to manipulate the game to this extent, but I wanted that smirk wiped off his face. It was only when two balls smacked together with a gunshot crack that I remembered the trap that I had come to set.

“You know I wouldn’t be wasting time chewing fat if we had solid dirt on you,” I said. I watched him as I sipped my cocktail. Did he look relieved? Was he thinking of a stubby pistol, dropped in a scramble up the stairs? I made a show of estimating the angle needed to bounce the cue ball off the cushion in order to connect with the two. “But you had means, motive, and opportunity, so—”

“I also have an alibi.” He ran the back of a finger over his lips as he surveyed the table. “I was eating at Giordano’s, over on the other side of town. All night. Ask anybody.”

“Giordano’s?” I said, as he took his shot. “Come on, you’ve got to do better than that. The Montagnios as good as own that place.”

The two knocked the six into a pocket.

“Hey—if I was there, I was there. What do you want me to do, puke up some pasta to prove it?”

He grinned and took another shot, once again ensuring that I had to make mine from an unfavorable position. I chalked my cue. With a bit of possibility manipulation I managed to ping the nine close to a pocket a few times without fouling, although I was careful not to be too lucky. (There were a couple one-in-a-million shots that I knew would tick Quine off, but I had my temper enough under control not to risk it.) We played in silence until there were only two balls on the table. It was Quine’s shot when my implant buzzed.