The Shakedown Shuffle: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 3)

by Richard Levesque

  “Where’s Osvaldo? The other car? Did they go over?”

  Still nothing.

  Taking a quick look around, I saw no signs of life in the darkness and the rain, so I took a chance and stood, moving a few paces back toward the truck and my car beyond. I stepped into the beam of the Winslow’s headlights and waved to Guillermo. Almost instantly, the passenger door opened, and I saw the old man moving as fast he could through the rain; he must have dropped the scope to the car’s floorboards after I had left him or else shoved it over to the driver’s side. Otherwise, there would have been no way for him to have climbed over it and exited the car so quickly.

  “I can’t get her to say anything,” I said, raising my voice above the sound of the rain. “Do you think she’s hurt?”

  Guillermo reached into his shirt pocket and pulled something out. Almost instantly, he was shining a light in Carmelita’s face, and I realized he had taken what must have been the world’s smallest flashlight from his pocket, another of his surprises. In the little light’s powerful beam, Carmelita’s face was revealed as a mask of grief. Though I knew she couldn’t cry, the rainwater streaming down her cheeks were all the tears she needed. She looked heartbroken and lost.

  Leaning close to her, Guillermo started speaking Spanish. I was able to get only a few words, but it sounded to me like he was asking questions. At first, Carmelita gave no responses at all, but when I heard the old man mention Osvaldo, the volume of Carmelita’s moans increased. Unfazed by this display, Guillermo asked the same question again, and this time Carmelita responded by moving her arms—an agonizingly slow response—and pulling from the folds of her saturated skirt the remnants of Osvaldo’s light wand.

  The globe atop the handle had been smashed. A few brightly colored jagged bits of glass bulbs were still fastened to the handle by a tangle of wires, and I knew that somewhere inside the handle was the bit of Chavezium that had powered the toy along with the hidden transmitter that had sent out the tracking signal.

  Turning to me, Guillermo said, “She must have found it here on the roadside. No sign of Osvaldo or the other car.”

  “Where’s Osvaldo?” I asked.

  Guillermo shrugged. “Who knows?”

  We both looked into the darkness of the road ahead, and I expect we were thinking the same thing. Somewhere up the road, maybe higher in the mountains or maybe all the way beyond them in the darkness of the desert, a car was rolling. Maybe it still had Osvaldo in it, and maybe it didn’t. Maybe he was a willing passenger, and maybe he was being held against his will. Part of me wanted to believe the light wand had flown from the car as part of a scuffle as Osvaldo fought with his captors, but there was another part of me that could just as easily picture him discarding the wand, tossing it out like trash now that its usefulness as part of his “shy Osvaldo” routine was over.

  I didn’t want to think about either possibility and what they’d mean to Carmelita or Guillermo.

  “Is she okay?” I asked, nodding toward Carmelita, whose moans had decreased in volume once more.

  “I think so.”

  “This rain…it’s not going to hurt her is it?”

  I was imagining Carmelita starting to rust, as her brain or some other components began shorting out.

  Guillermo smiled and shook his head. “If anything’s going to hurt her, it’s not going to be something as simple as water.” He looked up at the sky and his expression clouded a bit. “This cold, though…maybe.”

  “Let’s get her back in the truck,” I said. “Can you drive it down the mountain?”

  “Si,” he said.

  “All right. I’m going to drive on ahead for a few minutes and see if there’s any sign. Then we’ll head back.”

  “You’re sure? I can go with you. She’ll be okay if we leave her in the truck for a few minutes.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to take any chances, Guillermo. Just wait with her, okay?”

  He didn’t look happy about it, but he agreed.

  Carmelita weighed far more than a human of her size would have, so there was no way Guillermo and I would have been able to get her off the asphalt and into the Patterson’s cab if she didn’t want to go. Fortunately, after hearing a few more words in Spanish from the man she thought was her uncle, Carmelita pulled herself forward, got her legs under her, and stood, letting Guillermo take her arm and lead her to the passenger side of the old truck.

  I left them there, got back in my car, and pulled ahead. It seemed that the rain might have eased a little during the time we’d been stopped, but it was still coming down. Now that I knew Carmelita was safe and that the oscilloscope was going to do me no good, I didn’t tear up the road as I had before but rather took it slowly, giving myself the chance to peer into the darkness on either side of the road, hoping to catch sight of a parked—or crashed—car. There was nothing, though, and after a few more minutes of climbing I noticed the first floating snowflake blow into my windshield like a lost and suicidal moth. This was followed soon by dozens more.

  My tires weren’t meant for snow, so I slowed to a stop, knowing that if I kept on in pursuit, the luck I’d enjoyed until now would be sorely strained. I sat there for almost a minute, the car’s heater barely keeping up against the cold outside, and looked into the darkness. With snowflakes being carried on the breeze and my headlights illuminating the clusters of pines the road ahead curved around, the scene looked deceptively peaceful. It was almost easy to forget the distresses of this night, just as it had not been too difficult for me to forget—thanks to the tangles of my life and work and friendships and romance—that I was in the wrong world, that these trees and mountains, that even this car and the snowflakes dropping onto it, were really the province of another Jed Strait, one who might be dead or else who might be in my world right now, staring at a similar scene and wondering if he would ever get back to his proper place.

  I let out a long sigh. Then I turned the wheel and nudged the car forward, starting the process of making a tight turn on a very narrow road.

  Chapter Twelve

  The drive down from the mountains seemed to take twice as long as the drive up. I went slower this time, of course, and wasn’t so fixated on the goal of catching up to Carmelita, so it made the curves seem infinite. As I drove, I kept glancing in the rearview to keep track of Guillermo in the pickup truck. While the car made its way rather leisurely down the mountain, my mind was still racing.

  I knew there was no way I could continue to keep my suspicions about Osvaldo to myself. As painful as it might be to Guillermo, he had to know there was at least a chance that the attempted burglary at Garcia Industries having been an inside job. He would scoff, of course, and most likely ignore the warning, but I knew that if something else happened where Guillermo got hurt, I’d never forgive myself for staying quiet.

  The other thing I kept coming back to was the green Meteor station wagon. Until now, I’d been reasonably certain that Carson Mulvaney was behind the wheel, trying to get more material for his ridiculous book. But another possibility nagged at me now. When I’d first broached the subject of my tail to O’Neal, I’d spun a story about it possibly being Elsa Schwartz, arguing that she might be gearing up for an assault on me, or Carmelita, or Guillermo. The fabrication had been meant to nudge the detective into getting me information on the car, but what if I hadn’t been too far from the actual truth? I wondered now about the possibility of Elsa—or one of her minions in the German embassy—using the Meteor to keep track of me and possibly others to watch Carmelita and Guillermo so she could take a swipe at Garcia Industries. She couldn’t know for sure that Klaus Lang’s coded journal had ended up there, but she did have an inkling about Guillermo’s technological and mechanical wizardry. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that, if we still had the book, it could be found somewhere in Chavez Ravine. And while Elsa could have come in with guns blazing, it was also likely that she’d been ordered by the Reich to get the book more quietly, to get i
t back to Germany without there being any proof of where it had gone or who had taken it.

  But could Osvaldo have been in on a scheme like that?

  I doubted it.

  In either case, my musings led to one simple conclusion: Guillermo shouldn’t be left on his own tonight. Thwarted burglars might come back, aided by Osvaldo or not. And the same was true of Elsa Schwartz.

  Once we were on level ground again and approaching Sunset Boulevard, I pulled to the curb and watched as Guillermo followed suit, coming to a stop behind my car. Rolling down my window, I waved for him to come and then leaned over to open the passenger door for him. The ensuing conversation went about the way I had expected. The old inventor scoffed outwardly at my theories and at the suggestion that he should spend the night at my place, but I could tell that I’d started his wheels turning. Once again, I felt guilty at causing him such turmoil, but I knew he could handle it, and I also knew that it was going to have to be said sooner or later. What really won the argument, though, was when I played my ace and explained that I wanted to keep Carmelita from seeing things that would remind her unnecessarily of Osvaldo. The little house in Chavez Ravine would be full of such triggers, Guillermo knew, and so he acquiesced.

  Once at my house, it was a bigger battle to get him to sleep in my room rather than on the living room couch, but eventually he gave in—only after we’d gotten Carmelita settled in her room and I explained to him that I was too wound up to sleep, that my using my room would be a waste of a perfectly good bed. At first, he didn’t want to hear my argument, but when I told him I wasn’t going to let up—and that the continued sound of our voices in the living room would probably keep Carmelita from slipping into the torpor state that served as her sleep and allowed her electronic brain to process information and learn from it—he finally gave in. I expect his being exhausted also had something to do with it.

  By the time we’d gotten back to Echo Park, Carmelita had calmed down. Though she still insisted on clutching what was left of Osvaldo’s light wand, she had seemed more like herself as Guillermo had escorted her into the house. She had barely spoken, however, responding a bit to Guillermo’s questions in Spanish but almost not at all to anything I said. Now that she was in her room and—I assumed—on the path to being more fully restored after a few hours in her torpor state, I told myself not to worry about her, knowing that if the night’s traumas had had any lasting effects, Guillermo would be able to sort them out. If not, there was nothing that could be done about it now.

  With a 3 AM cup of coffee on the kitchen countertop next to me, I pulled Detective Merwyn’s card from my wallet and put in a call. The catatonic clerk who answered somehow found the energy to tell me that Merwyn was out in the field and couldn’t be reached but that I could leave a message.

  This conjured an image of the jaded detective hassling a lady of the evening and probably coercing her into working off her debt to society. That, or he probably had the run of every afterhours drinking establishment in the city and might be busy bending his elbow to keep his dark thoughts at bay until the dawn chased them all away—at least until his next shift. Even if the man was actually out “in the field” doing some good work for the city, it was no help to me. Still, I opted to leave a message, hoping it would actually get to him in a timely manner.

  After giving the clerk my name and phone number, I said, “Can you tell Detective Merwyn that the missing person from Chavez Ravine was taken into the mountains. I tracked them up Highway 2 for several miles but the trail went cold. The suspect might have taken the victim up into the desert or else into one of the mountain communities like Big Pine or Wrightwood. Have you got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” came the lackadaisical response.

  “Could you read it back to me?”

  A long sigh came through the receiver, and then I heard the message—or a close approximation of it—repeated. I thanked the clerk and hung up. Then I waited for the sun to chase my demons away.

  I spent the next couple of hours sipping coffee, cradling my gun and letting my mind replay myriad scenarios. I spent a good portion of that time on the couch, staring at the front door, but when I found myself getting drowsy, I forced myself to walk around the living room and kitchen, checking windows again even though I knew they were all secure. Twice, I went outside to check the perimeter and even walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the house, making sure all the cars on the street looked familiar and that there wasn’t anyone crouching down inside any of them.

  In my mind, I started off by going over all my past encounters with Elsa. This led to thoughts of Cosmo Beadle, the one-time actor and millionaire cult leader whose interest in alternate worlds had first gotten me introduced to Elsa Schwartz. And, of course, that led to other thoughts. Soon, my mind was far away from the problems at hand and I was thinking more about all the worlds Guillermo had let me glimpse with the machine I’d lifted from Cosmo and Elsa—as well as the possibility of ever more worlds that could be accessed through the machine Guillermo had built in his workshop. And all those worlds, I knew, had not been right. None had felt like home. Even in the ones where I was here in Los Angeles rather than on the east coast or somewhere else, even in the ones where I had managed to connect with Sherise, there was always a sense of alienation, as though I wasn’t just in the wrong world but also somehow in the wrong skin. The only place that felt like home was this world, and yet I knew as well as anything that I didn’t belong here either.

  A man without a world, I thought as I finished my fifth cup of coffee and checked that my gun was loaded for the tenth time.

  Just after sunrise, Carmelita emerged from her room. She had changed into clean, dry clothes and seemed pretty close to her normal self. I knew not to offer her coffee or breakfast. Instead, I wished her a good morning, which she returned with a wan smile before stepping into the bathroom to fix her hair and makeup, both having been seriously abused by her time out in the rain.

  When she rejoined me in the kitchen, I said, “I want you to stay with Guillermo today. Can you do that?”

  “Yes. Of course. But why? Don’t you need me at the office?”

  She sounded a bit hurt, but rather than find the response annoying it made me glad. It told me that her electronic mind had done its job during the night, compartmentalizing her trauma over Osvaldo’s loss so that she could resume normal functioning upon her return from the torpor state.

  “I do need you, but the caseload is light right now. Non-existent, really, after last night. I know last night was hard on you, so you should just take the day off. Stay with your uncle. Relax a little.”

  “That’s not how someone gets made a partner. I don’t need to relax.”

  “Someone gets made a partner by taking friendly suggestions from their boss.”

  I left not long after, which meant that for once I got to the office ahead of Peggy. She was surprised to find me there, and after I gave her the rundown of what had happened the night before—both with Osvaldo and the aborted stakeouts at Leonora’s and Jeanie’s homes—I asked her to put a call in for Detective O’Neal to get back to me as soon as possible and for her to reach out once more to Leonora Rigsby.

  “Is that still in play?” she asked.

  “Not officially. We need to work up final billing. But I really just want to see what happened. If she got her film back, or part of it, or none at all.”

  “Professional curiosity?”

  “I guess. There’s still something about the case that strikes me as shady. Like somebody got played. And I don’t want it to have been me.”

  She smiled at this, but it faded fast.

  “What is it?” I asked from the threshold of my office doorway.

  “You mentioned billing.”

  “Right.”

  She sighed. “It hasn’t been a very good month, you know.”

  “I was aware of that,” I said.

  “But do you know how not very good we’re talking about?”

>   I tapped my finger on the doorknob and said, “I don’t. I’ve been trying to avoid bad news lately. Does terrible things to my digestion.”

  “Well, let me apologize to your innards in advance, then.”

  “That bad?”

  She nodded. “I don’t have my fingers in all your finances, of course, but it looks to me like you’re not going to get to the other side of this month without dipping into your savings. Unless something turns around, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said, forcing a smile but thinking about how anemic my savings account had become lately. Late night gigs at Darkness were the only steady income I had, but the gigs didn’t pay great; maybe once Sherise and I got our act worked up to a professional level, the music might start paying some real bills, but not until. Billing clients through the agency was more lucrative in terms of hourly wages, but those billing opportunities had been awfully sparse of late. Easy money like the kind I’d gotten from Carson Mulvaney wasn’t likely to fall into my lap again, and even if it did, I would have to be truly desperate to accept that kind of “work” now that experience had become so distasteful.

  The only other thing I could think of was to call Cosmo Beadle. The initial amount I’d invested in my business, my license, my car and rent on the house in Echo Park had all come from Beadle paying me for the story of how I’d jumped worlds to solve a murder when I’d first come to Los Angeles. Now that money was just about gone. I knew I could offer him more tales of my travels in alternate worlds and that he’d pay for them, his followers ravenous for proof of the existence of such things. But I also knew he wouldn’t be as likely to make another one-time payment. If he thought I had a lot more to offer him, the ex-actor would want more of an obligation from me, maybe insisting that I make myself available for speaking engagements at his cult headquarters on Catalina Island, or else pressuring me to let him write up my stories and publish them for the faithful.

  I didn’t like any of those prospects, but I also didn’t like going broke and watching my business fall apart before it really had the chance to get going.