I parked in the alley behind Darkness. Sherise’s little Vixen was in the only actual parking spot behind the business, but I managed to nudge my secondhand Winslow in pretty close. If anyone came speeding through the alley, they’d likely clip my rear end, sending the bigger car right into the Vixen and landing me in hot soup with Sherise, but it was a chance I was willing to take. Like just about everything else I associated with Sherise—her hair, her clothes, her nightclub—the Vixen was black and flawless, inspiring both attraction and wariness, which was a pretty irresistible combination.
The club’s back door was locked—as was Sherise’s practice when she was here alone. I knocked, waited about a minute, and then was rewarded with the sound of the lock turning. The door opened, and there she was—not the perfectly made up woman who would embody nighttime loneliness and desire on the club’s little stage tonight but rather the freckled farm girl who’d been transplanted into this rough city. A checked blouse covered her tattoos, and her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail that—combined with the freckles—made her look like she’d just stepped out of a rustic barn rather than into a Hollywood alley that smelled of spilled liquor and a few varieties of bodily fluids. It was only the diamond she wore in the piercing on the side of her nose that gave her away as anything other than wholesome, and the combination made me burn for her just a little.
She stood on her toes, and I leaned down a little so we could kiss there in the doorway. It lasted only a moment, but it was enough to push away all the tribulations the morning had brought me, enough to push away the hunger in my stomach and replace it with a different type. When she pulled away, she gave me another smile and said, “The liquor order came in early. Feel like helping me move some boxes?”
The hollow feeling in my middle came back right away. Hoping it didn’t sound like dissembling, I said, “I was actually hoping we could grab something to eat. I’m starving.”
She raised an eyebrow at this and said, “Poor Jed. Too weak from hunger to lift a few boxes.”
I couldn’t help smiling. Then I shook my head and said, “Where are they?”
She stepped aside to let me into the narrow hallway that led to her office, a tiny storeroom and, farther along, the back of the bar. Blocking the way were four cases of liquor that Sherise must have needed to scoot past in order to get to the door when I’d knocked.
“Isn’t this Nicolai’s job?” I asked, referring to the man who doubled as bartender and bouncer.
“Nicolai doesn’t come in until one,” she said.
“At which point, we would be back from lunch,” I returned. “Walking in to find a beautifully open hallway.”
“I’ll buy you dessert.”
“I’ll take another one of those kisses instead.”
“Just one?” she teased.
“More might kill me.”
“So fragile,” she said, rubbing a hand lightly across my shoulders as I bent to lift the first box.
Moving the liquor was a matter of only a few minutes, and I really didn’t mind doing it. Even so, when I was done a bit of sweat had gathered on my brow. I wiped it with my forearm and said, “There you go. Anything else?”
“Are you seriously asking?”
“Not really.”
She smiled at this.
“There is something I do need to be serious about, though,” I said.
Sherise raised an eyebrow at this but said nothing, waiting.
“I can’t play Wednesday night.”
The eyebrow dropped and the smile that had been raising the corners of her mouth went flat.
Our deal had been that I played guitar in the club four nights a week—Friday, Saturday, Monday and Wednesday. The other nights of the week, she had Nicolai resort to their old way of keeping the patrons entertained during and between acts: spinning scratchy old blues 78s on the nightclub’s record player, the sound passing through tinny speakers mounted high in the corners above the stage. Sherise had made no shakes about telling me that she’d noticed a definite increase in patronage on the nights that I played—both in terms of attendance and liquor sales—and she’d hinted that if the trend kept up she’d give me a bump in pay. When one considered that I was sleeping with the woman who signed my checks, it made things only more interesting…although at times a bit complicated.
This was one of those times.
“Sorry,” I added before she could say anything. “I’ve got to stake out a place that night.”
“Carmelita can’t do it?”
Like Peggy, Sherise knew all about Carmelita; it would have been tough otherwise to convince her of the propriety of my living with my assistant, as I didn’t think the brother-sister story we’d fed to the neighbors would hold up to Sherise’s scrutiny.
“I’m not comfortable with that,” I said. “It may be more than a stakeout. Could be a confrontation, too. Some sensitive material’s involved.”
She nodded, her expression still serious. Then, rather than try to nudge me with a bit of guilt over letting her down, she said, “This isn’t the kind of thing that could get you hurt or anything, is it?”
Most things in my other line of work could easily result in my getting hurt. Fortunately, that didn’t happen too often, mostly because I made a habit of self-preservation and had learned a long time ago how to talk myself out of a squeeze rather than punch or shoot my way free. Even so, I knew the risks inherent to private investigation were not something Sherise was a fan of—kind of like I wasn’t a fan of her creative use of feather boas on stage—so I tried to minimize the notion that I could come to harm while earning my rent.
“I highly doubt that,” I said. “The suspect in this case is a woman, and I doubt she’s going to be armed when I drop the sack on her.”
“Will Carmelita be there?” she asked.
Knowing the truth about Carmelita meant that Sherise also knew how strong my mechanical assistant could be and how her sense of self-preservation sometimes overrode the programming that kept her from recognizing she wasn’t human.
“Maybe,” I said. “She had a little malfunction this morning. I think Guillermo’s got it fixed, but he wants me to come see him later. Says there’s something odd about the way it all shook out.”
Sherise nodded, her expression still stern. “Well, be careful,” she finally said.
“I will.”
“And don’t worry about the music. I’ll have Nicolai dust off a few records. The crowd won’t know the difference.”
She hit me with a smile then, to which I said, “Thanks.”
“You’re still playing tonight?”
It was Friday, and I said, “Yes” without hesitating. There was more work ahead of me that day, and I didn’t know when it was going to end, but rather than dread the idea of watching Friday slip into Saturday while playing guitar for strippers and drunks, I found those late nights at the ends of long days to be more respite than drudgery, the weariness of the day leaving through my fingers, passing into the strings and turning into electricity that made the speaker cone in my amplifier vibrate with the force of all the heartache and misery I’d been getting paid to witness and—sometimes—stamp out or at least ease.
“Great,” she said. Then she stepped forward and put a hand lightly on my chest. “Maybe…stay with me after we close?”
I liked the sound of that very much, but I had to say, “It depends. On Guillermo. Whatever he’s got going on. You understand, don’t you?”
“Of course,” she said, and she left her hand where it was while lifting her face for another kiss. This one lasted longer.
Chapter Four
As I started the drive back from Hollywood, I was much more content than I’d been on the way out. Time with Sherise had that effect on me. But the farther I got from Darkness, the more wound up I started getting—the necessities that still made up the rest of my day pushing aside the pleasant tactile memory of Sherise’s soft skin and the smell of perfume on her graceful neck.
So involved was I in these thoughts that I almost missed a turn, and I pulled the wheel quickly, resulting in a brief squealing of my tires and one horn blast from an irritated motorist whose displeasure with me I opted not to respond to. While glancing in my rearview, however, to see if the other driver was looking for trouble, I noticed that another car—bright green—had quickly changed lanes and made the turn as well. I knew it wasn’t the driver who’d blown his horn—that car had been much closer. This car wasn’t a make I recognized, but I had recently seen an ad in a magazine for something similar, a station wagon it was called. Ugly, I remember thinking, and kind of bulbous—like a cross between a squashed bus and a downed airship with all those curvy fenders and what seemed like row upon row of windows in the back. The driver of this monstrosity eased off the gas as soon as the turn had been negotiated and let several cars get between us.
I didn’t like it. My mind racing to consider who might be tailing me, my thoughts immediately landed on Elsa Schwartz. The Nazi scientist had gotten away during our last skirmish, and I’d been expecting her to try settling the score somehow.
Tailing me in an ugly station wagon wasn’t exactly her style, though. When Elsa struck, it was usually far more stealthily and with more firepower than horsepower.
“Mulvaney,” I said aloud.
The car didn’t match the hack writer’s style either, but at least in his case I was pretty sure the style he presented was all façade. What was more, he had a reason to be following me. I’d cut him loose before he’d gotten what he wanted, and I’d insulted his project in the process. It would be like the unscrupulous smarm to skulk around after me, hoping to get a little bit of free “inspiration” while so puffed up by his own prowess as a man of mystery that he figured he could tail me without being made.
“No such luck,” I said, a little smile twitching at the corners of my mouth.
Two intersections later, I made a quick right turn and then immediately pulled to the curb. I watched in the rearview as the station wagon got to the corner, started to turn in pursuit, and then quickly abandoned the maneuver, straightening out and continuing along the street we’d just been on. The driver had seen me pulled over, I knew, and had realized there was nothing for it but to keep on driving past me like my parked car was no different than any other in the city. Rather than risk being seen as he drove past, my tail had opted to put a toe tag on the effort, maybe to try again another day.
If nothing else, this told me that the other driver didn’t want to be recognized. And if that was the case, the other driver was definitely someone I knew. A hired gun whom I didn’t know from any other stranger wouldn’t have cared if I made him as he drove past.
Everything pointed to Mulvaney.
I wished I’d had the forethought to try a bit more cat and roach with the station wagon before shaking it off. Doing so might have yielded a license plate, or at least a partial—something I might be able to talk Brenda O’Neal, my sometime ally in the LAPD, into running for me so I could get some definite answers.
There was nothing for it now, though. I’d have to go with my theory instead of anything concrete. If it was Mulvaney, I’d handle him soon enough—and make him sorry in the bargain. His tailing me through this part of town meant that he’d followed me to Darkness and waited around while I was inside with Sherise. That was a level of audacity I wasn’t inclined to let the hack writer get away with. In the meantime, there was work that needed to be done.
The rest of the drive was uneventful. It took me a little longer than normal to get to Guillermo’s because I kept slowing down to check for that ugly green car in my mirrors. Guillermo’s front door was, as always, open, and I walked in like he’d instructed me to, rapping my knuckles on the jamb as I swung the screen door wide. “Hello,” I called out.
“Lobo! Back here,” I heard Guillermo call out from the kitchen, so I cut through the small front room and walked in on a sight I hadn’t been expecting.
Guillermo stood by the kitchen sink, drying his hands on a towel. His little mechanical dog, Perdida, was doing figure-eights around Guillermo’s legs, something the old man had programmed into the dog’s brain long before I’d met either one of them. Of far greater interest, though was the pair sitting at the kitchen table—Carmelita and Osvaldo.
The difference between how they appeared now versus how I’d last left them—Carmelita inert and Osvaldo staring mutely—was stunning. To my great relief, Carmelita appeared perfectly normal: beautiful and vibrant, a smile lighting up her face, not a hair out of place. At the same time, she looked somehow more alive than normal, her smile more vivacious, a condition I attributed to the infusion of a fresh supply of Chavezium from Guillermo.
The change in Osvaldo was even more stunning. Gone was the stare and the habit of looking at the floor or the walls—anywhere but in the eyes of people around him. He had combed his hair and shaved, and his smile looked just as alive as Carmelita’s. I knew the curve of his lips had nothing to do with Chavezium, though, or at least not directly. It didn’t take a genius to see that the young man was smitten with the mechanical woman before him, and there was no doubt in my mind that he knew full well that Carmelita wasn’t a human female. She was something different and—or so it seemed—possibly something better, at least in Osvaldo’s mind.
On the table between them was the little device I’d seen him holding when he walked into my house in the morning. At the time, I hadn’t been able to tell what the thing was. The handle was now obscured as Carmelita and Osvaldo both had a hand wrapped around it, their fingers necessarily entwined. I watched as they pressed buttons on the handle and saw that the lights on the globe responded, the colors shifting and changing as the pair pushed at the buttons in seemingly random ways. When the lights shifted into a new pattern, it brought giggles and gasps from both of them, and when I saw the lights form a checkered pattern across the globe, Carmelita brought her free hand to her mouth, her eyes opening wide. What I had assumed was a tool had turned out to be something like a high-tech toy.
I pulled my gaze away to meet Guillermo’s. The old man was beaming. Whatever had actually caused the transformation in these two, I could tell that Guillermo was primed to take the credit.
“Well,” I said, “it’s nice to see everyone’s getting along so well.”
The sound of my voice must have brought Carmelita out of whatever reverie she’d been in, as she looked away from the globe for a moment and said, “Oh! Hello, Jed.”
“Hello, Carmelita. Enjoying your afternoon off?”
“Yes,” she said without irony, her eyes now back on the globe and the little buttons she and her new friend hadn’t stopped manipulating despite my interruption. “That was awfully nice of you to give me the day off. At first, I thought Guillermo was teasing me about it, but he convinced me.” Then, another thought obviously crossing her circuits, she gave me a quick, sharp glance and added, “He wasn’t teasing, was he?”
I smiled. “No, Carmelita. He wasn’t teasing. You’ve been working awfully hard lately. I was fine with giving you the day off. You deserve it.”
“Thanks, Jed,” I heard her say, but her eyes were gone again, lost in the lights on the little device and in the eyes of Osvaldo as well. The pair seemed to look up at each other in perfect coordination, their eyes meeting momentarily before the lure of the little lightbulbs pulled them back.
I didn’t like it. The spark between these two should have been something I found amusing and harmless. The mechanical woman and clinically shy genius had found something in each other that I wouldn’t have previously thought possible, but rather than being pleased or charmed, I felt uneasy. It was as though I was looking at a crime scene clue, but it wasn’t a clue that spelled out anything that made sense. No, this was a clue that simply stood out as something that didn’t belong, an incongruous bit of information that I didn’t know what to do with. All I could do was file it away for later.
Not completely inept when it came t
o social graces, I recognized that I was at least supposed to find the little flirtation charming, so I faked a smile, turned to Guillermo, and said, “Now I see why you wanted me to come and see for myself.”
He was still staring at the pair, the proud pseudo-father of one of the misfits at the table and the benefactor of the other. “Yes,” he said. “I’m still not sure what it means, but I’m glad to see it, yes?”
“Yes,” I answered, not sure if I was convincing him or not. “Was this what you wanted to show me?”
Still beaming, he said, “That’s one thing. I want to show you something else, though. Come out to the workshop.” Then, turning, he led the way to the back door, little Perdida following excitedly.
As we crossed the unkempt yard and headed for the workshop behind the house, I said, “So, what happened?”
Guillermo threw his hands up.
“You ever see a baby, um…el pato?”
“El pato?” I asked. “I don’t know that one.”
“It’s…uh.” He looked confused for a moment, and then inspiration kicked in. “Quack, quack,” he said.
“A duck?”
“Si, si. A duck. You ever see a baby duck follow his mama?”
“I guess.”
“That’s those two. They say a baby duck follows whatever he sees when he opens his eyes, yes?”
“If you say so.” Ornithology wasn’t my strong suit.
“Well, when Carmelita opened her eyes this morning, she was staring right at Osvaldo, and he was staring back. Those two…I’ve never seen anything like it. Like a switch got thrown. And both their circuits started firing like never before.”
We had reached the sliding door of the workshop, and Guillermo grabbed the handle to give the door a shove on its old wheels. It squeaked and creaked as it slid aside. Guillermo went in first, pulled a chain somewhere above him, and a bare lightbulb revealed the clutter inside the shop. In the far recesses of the shed, something moved, and there was a bit of a clatter as a box fell to the floor. Guillermo called out, “It’s okay, Joaquin! It’s just me and Jed.”
The Shakedown Shuffle: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 3) Page 5