Page 23 of Time Traveling Space Bastards
Torrek flipped me over like I didn’t shop in the plus-sized section, gave me a little love tap right on my ass, and then yanked me right into another bear hug.
“Don’t discuss fucking other males around me,” he growled.
“If you spank me every time I do, I’m going to go into a graphic list of all my conquests.”
“Minx. We can do that after we save your life.”
Kuka cleared his throat.
“It might not have been Owen, but Owen compromised the investigation. After they decided Owen looked good for it, instead of proving Owendidn’tdo it like they were supposed to, they shelved the investigation. We need to consider that everything Enix found in your police file was put there to protect a politician’s son instead of solving your murder.”
“Well, I’m certainly not going tocallOwen, but we can cyber stalk him and see if he’s holding a grudge.”
Just because I didn’t have social media didn’t mean a lot of people didn’t post their business publicly. Torrek let out that little growl again when I shifted on his dick to grab my laptop. Yeah, I loved that little growl.
The first thing I did was plug Owen’s name into a search engine. If he’d gotten in trouble before, Daddy must have paid to make it go away because I couldn’t find anything. He was pretty low key unless he was ranting about his family. Owen wasn’t one of those guys who wanted to get super serious really fast, either because that was one of my red flags. He also didn’t get weird if he wanted to hang out and I didn’t.
I found his social media and pulled it up. He kept his posts private, but I could see what he was tagged in if it was public.
“I don’t think he wants to kill me. It looks like he’s got a girlfriend now and he’s happy. She’s gorgeous and thin. Why would he be hung up on me?”
“It’s hard to access because there are so many firewalls on it. Someone involved in the investigation tried to look into Owen on the side and ended up getting demoted for her troubles. She tried to bury her notes where no one at work could find them, but they caught her anyway. Owen didn’t have an alibi. He refused to say where he was the night you were murdered. He was the only one who couldn’t say he was definitely somewhere else that night and have someone else confirm it.”
“That’s suspicious. He always could have asked the new girlfriend to lie.”
“No. If I die on a Thursday, then it makes sense. Owen could never do anything on Thursday and he never said what he was doing. I never pressed because that was his business, but he never wanted to talk about it.”
“What if he murders women every Thursday, and that’s his kill ritual? Is that a thing on this planet?” Kuka asked.
“We don’t have as many serial killers as we used to, but yeah, it’s a thing. If he was dropping bodies every Thursday, I would have heard something about a serial killer and the police would be issuing a warning to lock our doors. And they tend to kill thesame. The police would have known by how I was found that I was a serial victim.”
“Yes, of course. I just really hate Owen because you used to fuck him,” Kuka said.
“Weallhate Owen,” Enix said.
Maybe therewasan alien foursome in my future.
“Well, we’ve got a time machine,” Omi said. “If you can aim it right, we can go back a few weeks and figure out what Owen is actually doing on Thursday night. If it’s killing women, then you all get your wish and get to murder Owen.”
“Seriously? I get to travel back in time? I was hoping to do Ancient Greece my first time but just going back a few weeks to give my ex an alibi for my murder also works.”
Beggars couldn’t be choosers. I learned that shit a long time ago. Maybe we could still do Ancient Greece if we figured out the cluster fuck that was my life before they went home.
I didn’t want to think about them leaving.
Iknew what hate felt like. I didn’t know what it was for the longest time, but I hated my owner. I hated some of the regulars he sold me to. I hated this Owen, and it wasn’t for the same reason Torrek and Kuka hated him.
We all had pasts. If we brought Baxter back with us, she’d meet Torrek and Kuka’s exes and plenty of people I was sold to. I hadn’t known her long, but she might want to murder their exes, too. She’d have a problem with the people who bought me.
No, I hated Owen because I knew men like him back home. I’d been sold to a few. If Owen didn’t do it, then fine. But the proper processes should have been followed to prove that. If he did, he should have been launched into space or whatever this planet did to murderers.
Maybe he was innocent. Baxter was the only person in the room who knew him, and she thought he was. It was the fact that no one did their jobs to prove that. They bungled an innocent girl’s murder investigation to protect him. Maybe that didn’tmatter to them, but Baxter Holmes was very important to my planet, and she was an amazing woman. We couldn’t save her life with the information in her file.
Your first experience time traveling in Big Daddy should be amazing. Ours was. We went through a black hole and lived. Weshouldbe taking her anywhere she wanted to go, but we were just going back to find out what her ex did on Thursday nights.
And Big Daddy was sentient. Kuka wrote a system that was similar to mine and used technology his genius mother developed in college to collect matter from the black hole in our galaxy. Big Daddy was probably smarter than I was and could access the same information. He didn’t always take us where Kuka directed him to go, but we always ended up where we needed to be.
Wewantedto see what Owen was doing on Thursday nights, but that might not be where we ended up. Valtens was an idiot, but even Kuka’s earlier blueprints were solid. There was always a chance Valtens could have ended up here and been the one who murdered her. We had the much better time machine. We couldwantto see Owen and end up seeing what happened to Valtens.
