Chapter 9 - "Tooth of the Gear"

The imposter slips.The boy listens. The detectives get too close - and Michael decides it's time to remove th flawed cog.

The impostor drank from a convenience store coffee cup, hands shaking. Two sugars. No cream. Routine.

Michael knew the type-arrogant, sloppy, desperate to be seen. 

The impostor had killed again last night. The news hadn’t caught up yet, but Michael had followed the trail: a dumpster fire in the industrial district. A woman’s wrist exposed just long enough for the clock to tick 2:06 before the flames took her.

Wrong again.

He adjusted the lens of his scope-not to fire. Not yet. Just to see.

Time wasn't to be imitated. It was to be obeyed.

And this one? He’d mocked the Law too long.

-

Across the parking lot, just beyond the lights, a figure stood.

Still. Watching.

Then gone.

He blinked. His coffee cup trembled slightly in his grip.

He turned around. No one there,

But something in his chest clicked off rhythm.

-

Behind the shed, a mouse twitched in an old trap-still alive.

Eleven minutes passed before he reached for the blade.

No screams. No cries. Only a whisper: 

“Shhh. Just be still.”

Inside, his mother screamed at his father. He counted the seconds between insults.

Four. Six. Ten. Silence.

Tick.

He pressed the blade to the mouse’s tail. Not to kill. Not yet.

He wanted to see how long it would take to stop moving.

-

His eyes looked wrong in the mirror-like someone else’s stared back.

The blade clattered in the sink.

Whispers began the day after he’d burned her.

“Not your time. Not your Law.”

He scrawled new clocks in a spiral notebook. All 2:06. Over and over.

But sometimes, the time shifted.

He saw 3:41 once.

A yellow train schedule in an article about a closed station-3:41 p.m.

A broken alarm clock in a blurred crime scene photo. Hands jammed at the same mark.

Coincidence?

He wasn't sure.

But the clocks were changing.

-

“I don’t like this,” Brandt said.

“Because it’s too clean,” LeClair muttered.

The 2011 lead case zoning files were sparse. But one thing stood out: Amelia Carr had signed an exception order letting a section of the factory to remain operational.

That section was condemned years later.

The foreman who had petitioned for the exception? Found dead in 2016. 

Ruled natural causes. 

But his file had been redacted.

LeClair pointed to a note scribbled in red ink on a photocopy of the appeal form:

“M approved. Leave it.”

No last name. No initials. Just M.

They looked at each other.

“Who the hell is M?”

-

He is hearing me. That much is clear. 

He’s not listening yet, but he hears the second hand behind him.

He knows the ticking isn’t just his guilt. But guilt is not a gear.

He will run soon-or lash out. 

I must remove him before he stains the mechanism further.

The child watches too closely. I think he may listen in time.

But the detectives-they are too near something important.

‘M’ is only a letter until it is spoken aloud.

Then it becomes a door.

Michael folded the page carefully, slid it into a small white envelope.

On the flap. he wrote, in small block letters:

"READ ONLY ON THE HOUR"

He walked two blocks to the police station, silent in the early fog, and slipped the envelope into the hollow of a split tree near the front steps.

No address. No markings.

But someone would find it.

Time had a way of revealing the proper reader.