Free The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller by Edward W. Robertson

name."
    Yount looked up. His eyes glittered, calculating, then he smiled hard and shook his head. "It's daisu. Nothing you can do."
    "Why don't you let me see for myself."
    " Daisu , man."
    I smiled. "You asked who I am? I'm no one. I'm a ghost. A few days from now, no one here will ever see me again."
    "Yeah, because they'll mulch you and spread you over their soybean fields," Yount muttered. I didn't say anything. He sighed. "Your life, your loss. You want a name? Obo Tanzuki."
    "Why are you telling us this?" Vette blurted. "Won't it come back on you?"
    Yount laughed sourly. "These people stole my original formula. Rushed it to the black market and paid off the judges to criminalize it before I had a chance to perfect it. I'd spent years on it. When they stole it, they stole my life."
    "What is this thing?" I said.
    "Same thing I was selling Korry." He narrowed his eyes at it. "And if you're after Obo, you might want some yourself."
    He went to a dresser and removed a bag of small green pills.
    Vette drifted forward. "What does it do?"
    A brief and brittle smile emerged from Yount's clouded face. "Lets you see the future."
    "That all? I can do that now."
    He cocked his head, still holding out the bag. Vette glanced at me from the corner of her eye. I took the bag and pocketed it. Vette blinked.
    "What now?" Yount said, totally disinterested, like he was stuck in a conversation with an ugly stranger explaining what they'd dreamt about the night before.
    "We talk to Obo," I said. "I don't need drugs to see your future from there. They'll come for you. You need to leave tonight."
    He spread his hands at his dim apartment, the flaking paint and the cancer-shaped water stain on the ceiling. "But how could I ever leave a place like this?"
    I chuckled politely. We left. After the gloom of the apartment, the ads and lights glared from the night. Rain misted down so finely I could hardly feel it on my face, but the streetlights caught each dust-small drop, illuminating them in bright cones.
    "Okay," Vette said. "First off, what ?"
    "Specifically?"
    "What's the daisu? A gang?"
    "Organized crime." Shielding my device from the rain, I slid links from my pad to hers. "Legal and illegal wings. Sounds like Obo's part of the latter."
    She frowned at the files, keeping one eye on the sidewalk. "And you want to go after him. Just the two of us."
    "They're up to something weird. I want to find out what."
    "Why kill Haltur, anyway? What's he got to do with anything?"
    "I don't know," I said. "But the OD was a coverup. The first time they killed him was a screwup. Too obviously a murder. They gave him a hotshot to try to throw us off, but the Pods had already caught the original killing."
    A man called at Vette from the steps of a smoke shop. She stared him down until we passed. "And you think Obo knows why. Is he from Primetime?"
    "Doubtful. Orgs like the daisu don't let strangers past the lowest levels. But he's the only lead we've got."
    We left the poor district behind, returned to the faded splendor of the hotel. I yanked everything the net would give me on Obo Tanzuki. He was daisu, but not just on the illegal side: he was a junior executive at Greene & Associates. Such things can be forged, but his degrees backed him up.
    Anyway, his history didn't matter. Fact or forged, it had bought him the present. 82nd-floor office at G&A. A home in the burbs. Three wives (not simultaneously—I'd only been to one world where polygamy was common).
    And security ranging from the high-tech newest (G&A's patrolbots) to the oldest and crudest (three personal bodyguards).
    We were looking at a challenge. We needed him cut off. Isolated enough to be scared enough to confess to the Haltur assassination. Harder yet, to his Primetime links, if he had them. That meant separating him from his guards and rendering him incommunicado to G&A and the daisu, although those two were probably one and the same. We'd be working with limited resources. Plenty of money,