Schrödinger's Gun by Ray Wood

 
    I could reach no possibilities in which Johnny Rivers—wise guy, bootlegger, crook with his eye on the big time—still clung to life. In every crime scene every one of me was looking at, he lay face-down on the floor with two bullets in his back. It was a pity. Not because Chicago was particularly the worse off for one more dead mobster, but because murders are murders, and solving Johnny’s would have been a whole lot easier if he’d lived long enough to tell me who had pulled the trigger. Maybe, in another universe, another me had shown up sooner and had gotten something out of him.
    That me was a lucky woman.
    It was one of those drab Chicago winters, the kind where every sunrise brings fresh bodies on the sidewalks. At least this one was indoors. The shooting had taken place in the basement of a disused housing project just off of West 21 st Street, which was, we had just discovered, the center of one of the Rivers gang’s bigger bootlegging operations.
    The details of the crime scene didn’t vary much between universes. Metal slatted stairs led up to the street outside, and a jumble of distilling equipment—drums, pipes, a big tin bathtub—shone grimily in the light of a single, swaying light bulb. In one universe the tub was on its side, leaking moonshine into the floorboards. The Johnny in that possibility had flung an arm out as he fell, I guessed. It didn’t change much: all of him had fallen in pretty much the same direction, cut down by a shooter on the stairs. I felt my heisen implant work behind my forehead.
    I tucked my hair into my collar and knelt to examine the body. Two entry wounds: one to the right of the spine and another just below the shoulder. I traced my finger around the edge of one of them and let the heisen throw up possibilities.
    â€”an acrid cough of gunpowder—
    â€”a shell casing tinkles as it bounces into a dark corner—
    â€”rubber soles slip on the stairs—
    â€”a small grey pistol leaps from clumsy, sweaty fingers—
    There!
    Other universes closed around me. I clung to the possibility thread that I had plucked out from the throng, visualizing it as a literal rope clutched in my fist. I felt like I was falling—the walls lurched briefly into the ceiling—then all at once I stopped, and I was standing in the basement—just one of them—listening to the faint wash of traffic on the street outside.
    In this universe, the murderer had dropped the gun.
    I found it in the shadows underneath the stairs, an evil glint of metal. It was a snub-nosed pocket pistol—kids’ stuff, really, compared to what a lot of hoods were carrying, but I didn’t doubt that it had spat the lead that was now in Johnny’s back. It must have dropped between two slats as the shooter fled up the stairs. I squatted down to pick it up, the tail of my trench coat brushing my heels. The gun’s potential buzzed beneath my fingers.
    â€”a flashlight cuts the darkness, swinging, frantic—
    â€”fingers search and scrabble, desperate to close around the handle of the pistol, to retrieve the evidence, dispose of it—
    I took my hand away. I stood up, pinned the gun beneath the toe of my boot, and skidded it further underneath the stairs. That possibility was worth leaving open.
    â€œMoore!” It was the first time I had used my voice in a half hour. He took a second to reply.
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œAll done.”
    Light spilled in from the street outside and Detective Moore descended, feeling his way down the handrail. He had his eyes screwed shut.
    â€œYou worked your magic?” he said. “Can I look now?”
    â€œOpen your eyes, wise guy.” As if it made any difference now whether he looked or not. It did keep the possibility lines clearer on my end if he stayed out of the way while I searched the scene, though, and he might have closed a lot of universes to me had he come down first. He looked