Schrödinger's Gun Read Free

do during the day. I’d be exhausted.
    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 23 rd 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 23 rd 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.
    â€œAfternoon, 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.
    â€”a hand plunges into a coat pocket, but other hands are faster—
    â€”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.
    â€œGood 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.
    â€œCame 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.
    â€œFancy 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.
    â€œSo,