It’s a Friday night, someone is hollering out on the street, and Archie Penn is going in search of a dead man.
Well, one who doesn’t have long to live anyway. Not Archie’s choice. Just the way things were going to go.
The Kansas City air clung to him, the muzzy nighttime air of a city laced with liquor and perfume. A streetcar rattled past him, and the beast of its body rocked back and forth as it moved against the overhead wires that supplied it with power. A few automobiles sputtered by, belching exhaust.
Each city Archie had visited, across a span of over a hundred years, was different. And he became a different man inside each one.
Tonight, in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1927, that man was an operative.
Normally, Archie liked to think of himself as a tourist. A traveler. Sometimes, he would concede to “thief.” Okay, all right, usually he was a thief. That was the whole point of these trips, after all.
But Archie didn’t like to think of it like that. Didn’t like to reduce his entire personality down to such a thick, uncomplicated sauce. He learned about places. Visited them. Talked to the people. Tasted the food. Breathed the local air. He had never gone on a vacation in his life, but he thought this was a little bit what they might have been like. If he had. If he’d ever had the chance.
Tonight, though, he couldn’t dress it up any other way. He was an operative. He was on a mission. He had a dead man to find.
The briefing from his brother Barney had told him the where and the when of it. Tonight, in the back of a bar called the Red Umbrella. In that bar, a man was going to die.
A man was going to die, Archie was going to let it happen, and then he was going to swoop in like a vulture.
Archie made his way down the bustling street. Mr. Rathbone, closing up shop at the pharmacy for the night, nodded at Archie as he passed. Archie gave the man a jovial wave.
He’d stayed long enough this time. He hoped he had. Long enough that people noticed him as he moved through their town, but didn’t notice him too hard. Didn’t peg him as a stranger who might mean them harm. Two weeks frequenting the cafes and diners, the bookstore and the general store. Three days earlier, he’d ridden the streetcar just for the novelty of it, rode it from end to end, and had let himself fall asleep to its gentle rocking, his temple pressed to the glass.