And then, as she was walking away, I heard something else from the radio. The DJ ended his chatter and started playing another song, but I could tell it wasn’t a record. It was the same voice I’d just been hearing. He had a guitar in the studio and was now playing and singing live.
I’d heard the voice before.
And it was mine.
Not the voice I heard in my head, but the one I’d heard on the record Sherise had surprised me with this afternoon.
Trying not to sound baffled, I stopped the waitress midstride. “Excuse me, but who is your cook listening to back there?”
She furrowed her brow at me. “You new in town, mister?”
“Kind of,” I said.
She nodded and gave me a little smile. “Well, that’s Jetpack Jed,” she said. “Pretty much everybody’s favorite around here for the last couple of months now.”
“Jetpack Jed,” I echoed, hoping she couldn’t tell that my heart was racing. “That’s kind of an odd name, isn’t it?”
She smiled and leaned on the counter, clearly glad to have a talkative patron in front of her and an excuse to break up the monotony of her shift. “It is,” she said. “The story, the way he tells it, is that he doesn’t know where he’s from or where he’s going. Just that he found himself one day flying over Los Angeles on a jetpack. Landed in Fremont Square without knowing anything about himself but his name. Saw a fella playing a guitar and somehow just knew he could play it, too. Found enough money in his pockets to buy the guitar and started playing it right there in the square, playing for money, you know? The way they do?”
I nodded, my mind racing along with my heart now.
She continued. “That was where a radio programmer heard him playing and offered to give him his own show on account of his playing was so unusual. You can hear how different it sounds from everything else, can’t you?”
“I can,” I said, and my voice seemed to come from far away
“Well, that’s Jetpack Jed. He tells that story and bunches of others, only all the other ones are about other people he said he knew before without really knowing where or when. It’s kind of funny, but I don’t believe a word of it. A talent like that…it doesn’t just fall from the sky now, does it?”
“I suppose not.”
“And the way he tells it, one day he expects he’ll just fly out of here the way he dropped in. Which, again, I don’t believe for a minute. It’s one of them…what do you call it? Publicity stunts! To get people to listen just in case tomorrow he disappears again. Marco—he’s the owner here—he says it’s like creating scarcity of a product so people buy more. Only with Jetpack Jed, they’re not buying. They’re just listening.”
“That makes sense,” I said, hoping I sounded normal. Then, feeling paranoid that the waitress might somehow connect me to Jetpack Jed, I tried to change the subject. “Coffee isn’t scarce, is it? If not, I’d love a little more.”
She smiled at this and sashayed over to the burner where a glass pot rested. I thanked her when she filled the cup but made sure not to make eye contact, hoping that would release her to whatever other duties she had so I could be alone with my thoughts. It worked. Moments later, she was filling salt shakers, and I was on my own at the counter.
Like the waitress, I was suspicious of Jetpack Jed’s story, but not for the same reasons. It might have worked nicely for publicity, but it also struck me as surprisingly similar to my own situation. It had been an electrical accident that jarred me out of my proper world and into the one where I’d found Carmelita and Guillermo. Might something similar have happened to this Jed? In my case, I’d had no idea that I was in the wrong world until much later, but that was mostly because the two worlds I’d occupied were so similar. In Jetpack Jed’s case, if he’d come from a world without hovercars or rocketball, he would have known more quickly than I had that something very strange had happened to him. It sounded like he’d hit upon a creative solution to the problem, though, coming up with the wandering jetpack story to excuse any anomalies that he might display in getting the lay of this new land.
Of course, it was also possible I was wrong. Furthermore, it didn’t really matter. I wasn’t here to find another version of Jed Strait. It was Elsa Schwartz I was after and, if not her, then at least this world’s Guillermo Garcia, who needed to be warned that Elsa might try to track him down. The one thing I could be certain about regarding Jetpack Jed was that if Elsa had heard his voice and his story in the time that she’d been interloping in this world, she would have made absolutely sure to stay as far away from this Jed Strait as possible. He couldn’t help her. Of that she’d have to be sure. To the contrary, he might actually hurt her, as he’d be someone I might be drawn to when I crossed over—which I was sure she’d been expecting me to do ever since she first arrived in this world.
No, the story of Jetpack Jed was nothing more than a curiosity I could feed to my world’s Guillermo when I got home again.
The radio show still played in the background, and I sat listening to what I could hear of it, fascinated at the sound of this other version of me entertaining his audience. It was eerie. Earlier, I’d felt like I had shown up to my own funeral when arriving at Guillermo’s, and now I felt something similar, like I had found my own ghost and he was talking in a nearby room. I hated the feeling, and yet I couldn’t stop listening.
When Jetpack Jed broke for a commercial, I heard him say something about a contest and a cash prize, and then he gave out the station’s phone number. I heard that clearly enough, an arrangement of numbers and letters that sounded nothing like a phone listing to me: 16015D.
Jetpacks, hoverboards, rocketball, and hovercars, I thought. And weird phone numbers. What other oddities did this world offer, I wondered.
Behind me, one of the lone diners had decided to move on. He approached the cash register and paid the waitress, who then went around the counter to clear the man’s table. I watched her, curious to see if the man had left her a tip, as I was hoping to learn the customs here. There were a few coins on the table along with the dirty dishes and a discarded section of the man’s newspaper. The waitress scooped up the coins, and was about to grab the paper with the plates and utensils, likely planning on dumping the paper in the trash and the plates in the kitchen’s sink.
“Excuse me,” I said, hopping off my stool. She looked up at me, a little surprised until I said, “Do you mind if I grab that paper for a minute?”
“Sure,” she said, folding it in half and extending it over the edge of the booth to me.
The paper was called The Los Angeles Star, and all the other patron had left me was the first section. That was fine. I wasn’t much interested in sports or movie reviews or the classifieds—although I was still curious to find out what rocketball was and if there had been houses in Chavez Ravine until the stadium had come in. That, like most things, was knowledge that would have to wait.
I skimmed the headlines, noting with cynicism that this world looked about the same as any other if one were to judge it by its scandals, politics, and petty problems. There were stories about corrupt judges, a city ordinance on public drunkenness, and others that I paid no attention to beyond the first paragraphs.
Four pages in, though, I did see something interesting. The headline on a small, three-inch story read “Mulligan Held in Death of Actress.”
Well, well, I thought and proceeded to read about Penny King having been found dead in her garage, only the cause of death here was asphyxiation from hovercar fumes. I surmised that these sleek flying cars ran on something dirtier than diesel if the exhaust was enough to kill a person. At any rate, the DA claimed that the death was made to look like a suicide but that the victim’s broken nose suggested foul play. Mulligan’s tyrannical control of the actress before her death—along with complaints by his wife’s friends that he was abusive and had forced her into accepting the three-way love affair—had prompted his arrest. Of further interest was the fact that Katrina Mulligan was
missing in this world, too.
I checked my watch. It had been more than an hour since I’d scaled the fence at the stadium. Long enough to give the night watchman a chance to hover away to some other part of the structure, but maybe not long enough to really let him settle down to what I hoped was the boring routine of guarding an unfinished stadium through one long night after another. Guillermo would be opening the portal in another fifteen minutes, but I knew there was no way I could make that. So, I had at least an hour and fifteen minutes to kill, maybe more if the stadium didn’t look right for breaking into again when I got there.
“Excuse me,” I said to the waitress again. She was leaning through the opening to the kitchen, maybe talking to the cook and maybe listening to more of Jetpack Jed, who I could hear had started playing records again. When she turned toward me, a questioning look on her face, I asked, “Have you got a telephone directory that I could look at? I tried with the operator on the phone out there, but she couldn’t help me.”
“You mean a phonebook?” she asked.
Not familiar with the term, I took a chance and said, “Yes. A phonebook.”
“Sure.” She turned and went to the register. From a shelf underneath it, she pulled out a large book several inches thick and set it on the counter in front of me.
“Thanks,” I said and started leafing through the pages. When I saw that she was still standing there watching me, I gave her a nice smile and said, “Thanks again.”
She nodded, taking the hint, and turned away.
With my privacy restored, I turned right to the G section and started looking for Garcias. There were several, of course, but the list of names ended at the bottom of one page with Francisco Garcia. The next page had been torn out.
Apparently, this world did not want me finding Guillermo Garcia.
That option a dead end, I turned to the ads and found the taxi services. I checked first for Big City, Little Cab, but there was no listing. Then I opted to bother the waitress one more time and ask her if she knew if any of the companies listed worked more or less in the area.
Chewing her gum loudly, she walked over and leaned down a little, providing a strategically orchestrated view of her cleavage—something to help with the tip, I supposed. She flipped a few pages of ads and dropped her index finger onto one of them. “They’ll do,” she said.
I thanked her and asked for the bill.
The pie and coffee came to sixty-five cents.
This was the part of my journey that I’d been most nervous about. Every other time I’d traveled to a different world, it had been ethereal. Either through the magic of musical vibrations or the entirely different magic of Guillermo’s first contraption, I had visited those worlds by occupying the minds of other Jed Straits while my body stayed right in Guillermo’s world where it sort of belonged. In those worlds, if the Jed I occupied needed money, he had it—that world’s currency and coins, which I’d learned the first time I’d made such a jump weren’t always the same as they were in the world I was used to. Now, however, the journey was corporeal, which meant that the money I’d brought from my world was the only money I had access to. And if money in this world was different, I was effectively broke.
With all the confidence I could muster, I reached into my pocket and freed a silver dollar from the roll I’d gotten at the bank that day. Then I set it down on the counter on top of the check.
The waitress looked at the coin with a questioning stare.
“This American?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“I had a fella try to pass a Hungarian coin on me a couple weeks ago. Can you imagine that?”
“It takes all kinds,” I said. Then I tapped the coin. “That’s the real thing, though. I got it at the bank just this afternoon. They said they were newly minted.”
She picked it up, the bright coin’s face glinting in the light as she turned it over. “What is that? An angel?”
“The woman at the bank said it was called ‘winged victory,’ but I don’t know coins all that well. It’s okay, though, isn’t it?”
She looked at it for a second longer, during which time I feared she would ask me if I had anything else. But then she said, “Sure. Sure. I can see it’s a U.S. coin all right. And it’s got the date right there.”
With a smile, she went to the register and rang up my bill. She made change and was bringing it back to me when I said, “All I need is enough for a phone call. You can keep the rest.”
Now the smile grew broader. I suppose she figured the cleavage trick had been worth it. She handed me a nickel and thanked me.
“No, no,” I said. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
Then, after one more glance at the cab company’s number, I took the paper and the nickel and headed for the door, hoping to have better luck with the phone than I had on my first try.
Chapter Seven
The cab hovered to a stop in front of the diner. I stood there looking at it, still unable to discern anything that looked like a door and also unable to make out a driver inside since the windows were too dark to see through. For a moment, I thought that taxis in this world were as incomprehensible as telephone operators’ behavior; it was possible, I realized, that there might not be a driver at all, that this cab was as automated as Carmelita was.
But then I heard a loud click, and a door popped open on the vehicle’s back end, the lines of the door only becoming visible once it started sliding open. It was more of a hatch than a door, the whole side and a piece of the rear roof hinging upward to allow me into the taxi’s spacious compartment. After hesitating a moment, I climbed in and sat on a plush seat, watching as the hatch dropped back into place automatically. There was a driver, and from what I could tell she wasn’t a machine.
She turned, black hair pulled back in a ponytail, a beautiful, confident looking woman of Japanese ancestry. Her presence here made me wonder about this world’s war and how each side had fared, but I knew that was something else I’d have to file away as unknowable and not crucial to my mission. Looking past her, I saw that while the dark window couldn’t be seen through from the outside, from the inside it appeared to be a pleasant shade of amber, blocking out all the glare of the streetlights and oncoming traffic while allowing clear visibility of everything else. It was another idea I’d have to feed Guillermo when the chance came around.
“Where to?” the cabbie asked.
I nodded toward the front of the car. “I’m going to be heading back toward the stadium in a few minutes, but I wanted to look around in that neighborhood up ahead first. Not sure of the street names. I’ll just tell you as we go, okay?”
“That’s fine,” she said. She pressed a button on the console in front of her, and I saw my fare light up on a little screen in the back. The pennies started ticking past as soon as the cab pulled away from the curb with its whining hum. I found the sound annoying but told myself I could get used to it, especially if the pay-off was the smoothness of the ride. Unlike bouncing along on pitted asphalt and worn rubber, riding in the hovercar was smooth and luxurious, quite an innovation, I thought.
“Take your second right,” I said, peering through the amber lens that separated us from the night.
I didn’t pay attention to the street signs to see if they were the same as in my world. That didn’t really matter. What I cared about was the general layout of the streets, and I found that these were about the same as what I would have found cruising through this neighborhood in my Winslow.
After several more turns and a few windy runs up and down the steep hillsides that form the eastern border of Echo Park, we came to my street and, moments later, my house.
“Just pull up there,” I said. “That little one on the right.”
The driver did as I’d asked.
“Can you wait here for a minute? I want to look around.”
“You’re not going to do anything that’s going to cause trouble?” she asked. “I’m not a getawa
y car, you know.”
I smiled and said, “No. I used to live here is all. A long time ago. I just want to get a look at it for a minute, and then we’ll go.”
This must have been satisfactory, as the door popped open with a pneumatic hiss. I got out and walked across the sidewalk, trying to get a feel for the little house and see how familiar it felt.
Just as in my world, there was a streetlamp at the corner of the property. This gave me a good look at the place, but I also knew that if anyone inside had heard the cab’s approach, I would be perfectly visible as well. I hoped this didn’t matter.
The first difference I noticed between this house and my version of it was that there was a low chain link fence bordering the front yard; a little gate at the end of the walkway led to the front porch. As far as the house itself was concerned, I saw no difference—windows on either side of the door, a narrow porch. Nothing remarkable there. There was one thing, though: on the lawn between the fence and the porch were several children’s toys—a little scooter and a doll the only things I could clearly make out from the light of the streetlamp.
That told me what I needed to know: whatever else was true of Jetpack Jed, he hadn’t followed my trajectory by making his home in Echo Park.
I walked to the corner of the yard and looked down the driveway. Where my tired Winslow should have been parked, there was another one of those sleek hovercars. This one rested on the ground, of course, unoccupied. Even so, it looked like a sleeping cheetah—ready to bounce up and fly at the slightest provocation.
Beyond the car, was the garage.
My garage, I thought.
What was in there, though?
It could have been another car if the family living here had two vehicles. Or the little outbuilding could have been a workshop or used simply for storage. Either way, it looked dark and quiet, which was what I was hoping for.
With a nod to the house and the darkened hill beyond it, I turned back to the cab and asked the driver to take me to the construction site entrance.
The Jetpack Boogie: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 4) Page 7