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

by Richard Levesque

  By the time the intruder was outside again and working on the locked door of the Garcia Industries workshop, Osvaldo had figured out that it was a woman. This confused him a little but not so much as to keep him from acting. Once the workshop padlock was picked and the woman slid the door open wide enough for her to step inside, he left Perdida on the porch and went to the woman’s car. His plan had been to take note of the license plate, but when he saw that the driver’s door had been left open, he opted to peek inside to see the car’s registration, reasoning that a name would be better information than just the plate number.

  He was just about to turn on his wand to use as a flashlight when he heard commotion from inside the workshop, and when he looked up he saw the woman slamming the door closed and starting to run toward the car.

  “It was Joaquin Murrieta, Jr.,” Guillermo said with pride. “He must have come at her in the dark and scared her off.”

  I could see how that might be possible, especially given how Elsa had been rattled at Gold Rush Gulch by her inability to stop Carmelita in her tracks with the electronic gun she’d already used so effectively on me.

  Seeing that the woman was coming straight for the car, Osvaldo dove into the backseat and huddled down on the floor, hoping to avoid detection and knowing he had to do what he could to get Guillermo’s book back, no matter how awful it made him feel.

  At this point, Carmelita broke away from the story Osvaldo was telling. “You need to understand, Jed, that Osvaldo isn’t like you and me. He gets nervous when he has to talk to people. Well, maybe nervous isn’t the right word. He says he feels like he leaves his body, like he’s floating above it and looking down at himself and can’t make his body do what he wants.”

  “That sounds awful,” I said, and I meant it, having had plenty of experience with being disconnected from my body since returning from the war. Shaky though my trust of Osvaldo might still be, I couldn’t wish that kind of anxiety on anybody. “He doesn’t seem to have that problem around you, though,” I added.

  “Well…” she said, and couldn’t seem to hold her smile back. “Things are different with us.”

  I nodded, prompting her to get back to the story.

  Osvaldo stayed on the floor in the car’s rear compartment, huddled there holding his wand and resisting the urge to light it up as a source of comfort. The longer he stayed there, the worse he felt, the feeling of disembodiment paralyzing him as he worried about how he was going to get home and about what was going to happen to Guillermo’s book. When the rain started, he began feeling even worse, as rain had always made him feel lonely when he was living in the mental hospital.

  The worst thing, though, was the mountain road.

  Apparently finding the strength to look at me for a moment, he spoke in English, saying, “I started to feel sick.” Then he looked back at the floor.

  Guillermo took up the story then, translating for Osvaldo as he described feeling worse and worse as the car climbed and took turn after turn on the windy road. I could imagine how much worse the feeling of motion sickness must have been without being able to look out the window to anticipate the turns and brace for them.

  He fought the nausea as long as he could, but some things can’t be beaten back, and he was finally sick on the car’s floor.

  “The woman shouted in another language,” Guillermo translated. “German, I guess, yes?”

  “I expect,” I said.

  She pulled the car over and leaned over the seat to find Osvaldo on the floor, still retching. Then she got out and went around to the passenger side, opening the back door to pull him out, ready—I suppose—to abandon the stowaway there on the mountain road.

  But Osvaldo fought her. I found this a little hard to believe, given how shy he was, so I pressed Guillermo to ask for clarification. Osvaldo repeated this part of the story in Spanish, and Guillermo gave it back to me in no uncertain terms: Osvaldo fought back. He and his captor struggled as she tried to pull him out of the car and he did all he could to remain inside. When she finally found the strength and leverage to yank him onto the wet road, the force of her effort knocked them both to the ground. That was when the wand toy broke on the pavement.

  Osvaldo looked heartbroken at this part of the story, and I really did feel bad for the guy. I knew Guillermo would set him up with another box of parts before long, though, and he’d have the toy replaced—and more than likely improved upon—in no time at all.

  When Osvaldo found his feet on the wet mountain road, he tried to get back into the car, and that was when the woman pulled out what he described as a flashlight, but no beam of light came from its lens. Instead, he described the feeling of getting hit with a bolt of pain that knocked him backwards and off the side of the road.

  Elsa’s zapper, I thought.

  The force of the weapon didn’t cause Osvaldo to lose consciousness completely, but in a sort of twilight state that might have been similar to his frequent feelings of incorporeality, he watched for a moment as his body fell backwards off the edge of the road and slid down the steep embankment in the rain. Moments later, he was fully alert again, desperate to scratch out a handhold in the darkness as he slid down the mountainside. There was no way to know how far he dropped before a bush stopped his descent, and by that time all was quiet. He assumed that far above him, his attacker was gone.

  The heartlessness of the woman should not have surprised me, but it did anyway. I wished she were here so I could get a piece of her, not that any shouting or violence on my part would ever bring about a change in her cold logic.

  Osvaldo stayed on the mountainside for some time, and must have still been there when Carmelita reached the scene and found the broken wand. He didn’t hear her from down below, nor did he have any idea that Guillermo and I showed up. When the rain let up, he started climbing, and he said it seemed to take hours to reach the road again. I doubt that was accurate, as he probably would have begun suffering from hypothermia if he’d really been exposed on the mountainside that long. Regardless, by the time he got to the roadside again, there was no sign of anyone else. Since there was also no sign of the wand, he figured he’d climbed to a different spot along the roadside, and he was probably right since Carmelita took with her only the main part of the toy, not bothering to collect the shards of broken bulbs from the wet pavement.

  He started walking downhill, not sure how far he’d have to go before he got home. Shivering in the dark, I expect he wouldn’t have lasted long if a car hadn’t come along. The driver pulled over right away. I recalled that it had been a minister on his way up to the desert, which I suppose was a lucky break, but I expect just about anybody would have stopped for the lone man in the middle of the night, clearly in distress.

  “That man saved Osvaldo’s life,” Carmelita said, her voice wavering a little. “I’d like to go up to the desert and thank him if you think we could find him.”

  “Of course,” I said. “What kind of detectives would we be if we couldn’t pull that one off?”

  The rest of the story I pretty much knew but let Osvaldo tell it through his translators anyway—how the minister had taken Osvaldo to the police station on the other side of the mountains, and how they’d gotten him medically evaluated and then shipped him off to Camarillo upon being unable to get Osvaldo to communicate despite his being diagnosed with nothing worse that scratches and bruises. Apparently, it had taken a little bit of convincing, along with a phone call from Detective O’Neal, to get Osvaldo released back into Guillermo’s custody, but it had come off eventually, and now they were back.

  As I’d listened to the story and watched the young man’s face, I’d become convinced that he was telling the truth and that he’d had nothing to do with Elsa’s theft of Klaus Lang’s notebook. There was always a chance I was wrong—just as I’d been wrong in judging Leonora Rigsby to have been a bona fide victim of blackmail rather than the perpetrator—but for now I was ready to give the young man a chance. It would be a real c
hance this time, not the one I’d grudgingly agreed to for Guillermo’s and Carmelita’s sakes.

  “I’m glad you’re back, Osvaldo,” I said. “And I’m glad you weren’t hurt too badly in the whole thing. Tomorrow, I’ll call my friend on the police and we’ll get her to take a statement, all right?”

  “Is that really necessary?” Carmelita asked, her hand resting on Osvaldo’s not unlike the way I’d seen Leonora and Jeanie in my office on Monday.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’ll be all right, though. You and Guillermo can be present. Detective O’Neal needs to know the score so she can get more police involved and maybe we can be rid of Elsa for good this time.” Shifting in my chair, I added, “It’s a shame she got away with the book, but maybe if O’Neal can put out a bulletin, somebody can catch her before she gets out of the country and takes it back to the Reich.”

  Guillermo chuckled, which surprised me, and when I gave him a quizzical look, he said, “She didn’t get the book, lobo. Even though Osvaldo was sick, when he saw the car was stopped and the woman got out, he reached over the seat and grabbed the book. She’d been riding with it next to her like it was her baby. It was going in his pocket when she pulled him out of the car.”

  “Do you think she knew he had it?” I asked.

  Guillermo shrugged, still smiling. “Not right away, I think. Or else she wouldn’t have sent him down the hill, yes?” He laughed aloud now and said, “I wish I could have heard her when she realized it was gone and that she’d just helped it go for good.”

  He leaned forward then and pulled the worn little notebook from his back pocket.

  “How did Osvaldo keep it the whole time he was with the cops?” I asked. “And in the hospital?”

  “Every time they tried to take it, he had a little…how do you call it?”

  “A fit?” I asked.

  “Si, si. A fit. So, they just let him keep it. They probably thought it was all crazy scribbles anyway.” He thumbed the book happily and then slipped it back into his pocket while I told myself that at the first opportunity I was going to have a talk with Guillermo about keeping the book in a safer spot.

  Part of the way through Osvaldo’s narrative, Josefina had taken it upon herself to ease the miseries of the day with food, taking charge in Guillermo’s kitchen and filling the little house with wonderful smells it probably hadn’t known since Guillermo had lost his wife. We ate shortly after her son finished telling his story—all but Carmelita, who demurred by saying she’d eaten a little while ago even though she’d spent the last couple of hours in the truck with Guillermo and Osvaldo and absolutely no food.

  It was close to nine o’clock by the time the meal was over and the dishes were washed. Guillermo insisted on walking Josefina home. When he returned, he said, “Come out to the workshop with me, lobo. There’s something I want to show you.”

  This gave Carmelita and Osvaldo an opportunity to be alone, and I could tell this made them both happy as Guillermo and I crossed the narrow yard to the home of Garcia Industries. He fitted the key into the padlock and rolled the door open, turning the lights on as Perdida trotted in after us. In a shadowy corner, I saw Joaquin Murrieta, Jr. begin moving toward the door and then, at a word in Spanish from Guillermo, the rustic automaton stood down, seemingly going dormant in a corner.

  I shut the door as Guillermo went to his workbench where he pulled out the notebook again and set it down. “It would have been not so bad if that Nazi had kept the book, you know,” he said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Osvaldo since he tried so hard to get the book back, but since Carmelita read every page and told me what all the code meant, the whole thing’s still in her brain. She could write out the whole book just like that.” And then he snapped his fingers for emphasis.

  “Could she do that for any book she’s ever read?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Probably.”

  I nodded. “Well, it’s still good that Elsa didn’t get it. Even if you could get Carmelita to reproduce it, we don’t need the Nazis getting all those secrets.”

  “You’re right,” he said as he turned away from the workbench and moved toward the sheet of canvas that covered the crossover machine. “And we don’t want them building another one of these, yes?”

  Not sure of what he had planned, I stepped forward regardless to help him uncover the machine. The sight of the thing made me uneasy, especially after my earlier conversation with Sherise. I didn’t want anything to do with the machine or the worlds it promised to open onto. Even so, I stayed there out of politeness and respect as Guillermo fired it up.

  With a wide smile, Guillermo called Perdida to him. The little dog capered over to him, her tail wagging as Guillermo bent down at her approach. I thought it strange that he was taking this moment to be affectionate with the mechanical dog, but then I saw he wasn’t bending down to pet her. In his bustling around the workshop, he had picked up the odd harness I had seen Perdida wearing the night before, and now he slipped it onto the little dog’s body, fastening the buckles around her chest and belly. Then, giving me a playful grin, he went over to the rat cage and reached inside. He pulled out what looked like a little female rat, white and wiggly, and he slipped her inside the pouch that had been sewed into the harness. So, now Perdida was essentially giving the rat a ride. Where a real dog would have probably squirmed at the indignity of having a rodent hitching a ride, Perdida didn’t seem to mind. As always, she was pliable and programmed, ready for her master’s next instructions.

  Guillermo moved back to the humming machine, its lights all glowing now and the floor of the workshop vibrating under my feet. Before he could do anything at the controls, though, the door behind us rolled open. I turned to see Carmelita framed in the doorway.

  “We’re going to take a drive,” she said.

  “You didn’t have enough time in the truck today?” Guillermo asked with a smile.

  Carmelita shrugged. “It’s fine. We just wanted to go out and be away from everything for a little while.”

  Guillermo looked at me, a question in his eyes, and I could tell he was deferring to me. I had to balance my uneasiness at the brazenness of Elsa’s assault the night before against Carmelita and Osvaldo’s feelings, such as they were. Guillermo clearly wasn’t about to take the stern father role, and I didn’t want to either, so I looked for a compromise with my discomfort over this moonlight ride.

  “Can you take one of Guillermo’s phones with you?” I asked. Carmelita’s expression shifted to one of annoyance, and I could tell she was thinking I was trying to keep her on a tight leash. “Not because I think you’re going to get into trouble,” I added quickly. “Just in case we need you, okay?”

  It took a few seconds for her happy demeanor to return, and when it did, she said, “That’s fine, Jed. But can we take your car instead? The heater works better.”

  “Sure,” I said, knowing full well that Carmelita wouldn’t be affected by the heater either way. She was thinking about Osvaldo, which I still found amazing given her lack of legitimate human emotions.

  “One of the phones is in the kitchen drawer,” Guillermo said. “You know the one?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her smile now quite wide, she rolled the door closed again.

  Guillermo turned back to the machine and started working the controls, twisting dials and pushing buttons. There were corresponding changes to the lights that circled the field through which a traveler would pass as well as shifts in the machine’s whining tone. When he finally had the settings the way he wanted them, he turned back to me and said, “You remember I was trying to figure out how to get the rats back so I could see how they do in the crossing?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I remember.”

  He gave a light pat to the pouch on Perdida’s back. “I had the answer right here in Perdida the whole time.”

  I understood immediately. “You can send her back and forth as many times as you
want,” I said.

  “That’s right. And if passing through is harmful to organic life, well…”

  “Your transportation system is fine, but the rat isn’t.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Now, watch!”

  Bending down, he muttered something in Spanish into Perdida’s ear. Then he patted the little dog’s rump and she gave a happy bark before trotting across the floor and leaping through the ring of lights on the crossover machine. As had happened before when Guillermo had tossed the rat through the opening, one second Perdida was there and the next she was gone. It looked like she had jumped out of existence when she made the little hop over the lowest neon tube that ringed the doorway to another world.

  “Do you know where she went?” I asked.

  “I have the coordinates,” he said, tapping the machine’s control panel. “But that’s all I have. I think I’m going to mount a camera on her next time and see what she brings back. I’ve been working on a camera that doesn’t use film, but it’s giving me a little trouble.”

  A camera without film, I thought, incredulous. That wouldn’t be a camera at all, would it? Not for the first time, I wondered if Guillermo’s imagination was getting the better of him. But every time I’d thought that in the past, his inventions had turned out to do what he’d claimed.

  “Come,” he said and turned away from the machine toward the oscilloscope on the workbench. Already, I could see the blinking light moving away from the screen’s center, and I knew it represented a tracking device that Guillermo had either built into the harness or inserted into the mechanical dog. “There they go.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Amazing.”

  And then, our eyes still on the scope, the machine itself shuddered to a stop behind us. The sudden silence in the little workshop was shocking. Guillermo and I both turned to see the crossover machine sitting there inert, all its neon tubes sickeningly dulled.