The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller Read Online Free

walked by himself to the bus and sat near the front. I waited for it to pull away, then walked past the staff lot to make sure the black Lexus was there. Its location confirmed, I drove to the entrance to the trailer park and pulled into a spot outside a video store.
    Amsel cruised home less than an hour later. Thirty minutes after that, a bald clerk came out of the video store to tell me it was time to move on. I nodded agreeably and drove out.
    I'd put off the gun for too long anyway. It's a bit convoluted, but it's just not a great idea to jump into a strange place with an unlicensed weapon. The Pods are good enough to spit you out somewhere where the chances of being seen mid-transfer are virtually zero, but they don't have anywhere near the data to account for who you might run into when you're walking out of the woods or the hills in the middle of the night.
    Better to play it safe. Send the gun to another spot. Isolated, but nearby. Go pick it up once you've got the lay of the land. At least a damn car.
    In just a couple of weeks, of course, all these precautions would be flung far out the window. At the time, however, it was just another job. I wasn't above bending the rules, but I always played by the book until that was no longer an option.
    But I'm getting ahead of myself. At that moment, I figured Stephen should be safe for the time being. I went to the motel to sleep off the rest of the day, then grabbed the location from my laptop. Hills south of town. Nothing there but a few powerlines and a couple of farms. We weren't yet in the GPS era and my directions were essentially a treasure map: the site Xed onto an old satellite photo of the area.
    The road climbed into the hills. The last of the houses stopped, replaced by dead land tinted bone white by the moon. Short basalt bluffs overlooked the road. The city spread out behind me, ten thousand points of light clustered around the wide and endless river. The pavement ended and I slowed to navigate the bumpy dirt road. After half a mile, I eased onto the narrow shoulder and killed my lights.
    I took a printout of the map with me into the yellow field. A hundred yards in, I almost fell headlong into a natural ditch creasing the dirt. I found a slope gentle enough to climb down, dirt crumbling around my shoes, then followed the ditch to two big, jagged rocks. I started digging.
    The gun was as era-appropriate as my clothes. Nothing fun, nothing caseless or explosive. Just a simple, black, antique pistol. I checked the safety and the magazines and brought it back to the car.
    Wind shifted the grass. A red beacon stood on a high hill to the south, but besides that, I was alone in a peopleless place. It could have been ten thousand years in the past or ten thousand more into an apocalyptic future. Something rustled in the weeds. I jumped in the car and drove back to the trailer park.
    The next day was a Saturday. No school. The Jasos drove to the park and then drove home. I went to stake out the trailer park. I had barely pulled into the laundromat when a big white van lumbered onto the road.
    I followed it up to the main street. Amsel coasted to a stop at the light and made a slow right turn. He drove down the righthand lane, smaller cars passing on the left. I had to travel well below the speed limit to stay behind him. I didn't like this. It had the feeling of a trap, the cold contempt a man like Amsel feels for those who presume to hunt him. I half expected him to pull off the road and stay there, as if he had no better way to spend a weekend than sitting in his car, or to drive in aimless circles until I could have no doubts he knew, or to rumble up into the bare hills, hop down from the driver's seat, engine still running, walk into the yellow grass, and disappear.
    What he did was far worse. A half mile past the park, he headed left into winding residential streets, pulled up in front of a pretty blue house, opened the garage and the front door, and began unloading