“Where to?” he asked before the pneumatic door had finished closing.
“Downtown, please,” I said. “Hall of Records?”
I didn’t know for certain that the place I wanted went by the same title in this world, but—again—it looked like luck was on my side. The driver said nothing, unless you count grunting. He tapped a button on the meter and the money started flowing as he checked over his shoulder and then slipped into traffic.
In the world I was used to, a cab driver would have been a good source of information about the city and the general vibe of the place. Instead of asking this fellow anything, however, I kept to myself in the back seat, knowing that anything I asked might elicit questions in response. I didn’t want to have to answer anything. In a world where the cars didn’t touch the road, I couldn’t know what else was entirely different from the things I might take for granted. It wouldn’t do to ask about politics or even traffic patterns, as the questions themselves had the potential of exposing me as someone who didn’t belong here.
As the car neared the entrance to the rocketball stadium site, I caught my first view of this world’s downtown Los Angeles. In my world, downtown was a cluster of tall buildings, all concrete and glass with neon signs at street level but nothing gaudy or outrageous. In this world, Los Angeles was a city as sleek as its cars. Glass spires shot into the sky, ending in what looked like fine points but which were probably still large enough spaces to be luxurious penthouses. The glass of the buildings was blue and green and orange. They looked a bit like candy. When I looked closer, I could see small dots flying high in the air around the city.
Jetpacks, I thought, which made me think of Jetpack Jed again. I wondered where my alternate self was right now, probably heading toward the same lustrous city to prepare for this evening’s radio show.
Watching the shiny city grow closer, I had to wonder what had caused architecture and technology in this world to be so different from the worlds I’d seen before. A history book would help, and I toyed with the idea of grabbing one before heading back to Echo Park and the portal. It would be a nice present for Guillermo, especially since I’d failed in bringing home the newspaper the night before. Without hard evidence from a source like a history book, though, my best guess was that the U.S. had not gotten involved in the war in Europe. All that energy, all those resources, all that life…if it had gone into building and learning and growing rather than fighting and killing and tearing down, then maybe the result could have been a city like this.
By the time the driver pulled up to the curb next to the Hall of Records, it was a little after four o’clock—plenty of time for me to get some searching done but certainly not all the time I might want. I told myself that in the morning I’d need to get serious about finishing the search for Katrina Mulligan so I could get paid and get Imelda squared away; then I’d be able to devote as much time as I needed to this world and my search for the woman I was really interested in finding.
“Forty-three cents,” the driver said, half turning in his seat.
“Thanks,” I said as I reached into my pocket for a silver dollar. “Here you go. Keep the change.”
I handed him the coin and saw his face register confusion.
“What’s this?” he asked.
I reached for the door handle, ready to pop it free.
“Silver dollar,” I said. “Brand new. I just got that from the bank. New design, they said.”
“New design,” he repeated.
Then I watched in mounting unease as he reached forward and flipped open a compartment in the console, the equivalent of a glovebox, I supposed. He reached in and grabbed something, then leaned back in his seat, half turning toward me again. I saw that he was holding a coin—large and shiny silver.
“I got this yesterday,” he said. “Silver dollar. 1949. Looks the same as any other silver dollar I’ve ever gotten. Nothing new about it.”
Squinting a little to be able to see, I made out the engraved image on the coin, the profile of a bearded man, no one I recognized. My luck had just run out.
“I save these for my nephew, see?” he said, and I felt like my lie to the bank teller from the day before had just come back to bite me. “Kid knows everything about coins. I’ll bet he’d have a pretty interesting thing or two to say about this one.”
“Well, I hope he enjoys it,” I said, and I pulled the door handle.
“Hey!” the cabbie yelled as I bolted through the opening before the door was even a quarter of the way up. “Get back here!”
I ran, dodging a few surprised pedestrians as I headed for the row of glass doors on the bottom floor of the tall building. Not looking back, I yanked open a door and ran inside. A broad lobby greeted me—shiny tile floors, a high ceiling, and graceful columns running up the walls at either end. There were ten or fifteen people in the lobby, some coming and some going, men and women in business clothes and carrying briefcases. No one gave me a second look. On the other side of the lobby was a counter where several employees helped patrons; the set-up looked like a bank lobby. There was a wide marble staircase to the right, leading upstairs to where the records would have been kept.
That staircase should have been my goal, but I saw right away that there was a guard at the bottom, and he was checking the paperwork of everyone who sought to get past him—the clerks behind the counter being the source of those magic pieces of paper.
Nervous that I had not seen the last of the cabbie, I looked around for a way to disappear, at least for a few minutes. Deliverance came in the form of a sign that said “Men” above a doorway to my right, so I walked straight to it, glancing over my shoulder only once to be sure the taxi driver hadn’t followed me into the building.
I ducked into a stall and closed the door, standing there awkwardly and listening for the door to the lobby to open. After a few minutes, I assured myself that I was fine, that the cabbie must have let go of the forty-three cents worth of offense he’d suffered and moved on. I left the stall, but something told me not to walk back into the lobby just yet. If the driver intended to stand his ground, if he was the type who’d say “It’s the principle of the thing,” then I might be walking into a mess.
Glad that the men’s room wasn’t a high traffic zone, I looked around for a moment and fixed my gaze on one of the paper towel dispensers on the wall above the basins. I stepped to it and saw it was a simple metal box, hinged at the top. Flipping the lid up, I saw folded sheets of paper, ready to be fed out the bottom. It was about half full. So, I slipped Guillermo’s gun free from my pocket and set it on top of the folded sheets. Next to that, I left my remaining silver dollars. If things were quiet out in the lobby, I could walk back in and retrieve everything. If things were not quiet, I’d be glad not to have any hard evidence on me.
Sliding the metal lid back into place, I hoped for no complications and turned toward the door where I took a deep breath and pulled it open.
The cab driver was across the lobby. He had a policeman with him, a tall fellow in a peaked cap and with shiny buttons all the way up his blue uniform. There were still a few people moving back and forth in the lobby, but not enough to shield me. Before I could duck back into the men’s room, the cabbie saw me. His finger went up, a pointing accusation, and I heard him say, “That’s him!”
To run would have been pointless. The cop was big and unlike the night watchman from the stadium, this fellow clearly carried a gun. He’d had a bemused expression on his face when I’d first seen him, but as soon as the cabbie fingered me, the cop’s face turned to granite determination. The cords in his neck bulged out as he tightened his jaw and started crossing the lobby, his eyes locked on mine.
The zap gun would have saved me, but the paper towel dispenser may as well have been in the next county. There was no way to get to the gun now, not without a fight, and if the cop saw what I was after or even suspected that I was going for a weapon—even a non-lethal one—then I knew I could count on his gun coming
into play. Even if I still had the gun on me, the act of reaching into my pocket while the bull charged across the lobby would have meant a shoot-out. He might have gone down if my hand could have found the trigger fast enough, but there would have been a good chance he wouldn’t have been the only one laid low. Only one of us would have gotten up.
I let out a sigh and got ready to try talking my way to freedom. It was going to take more than talk, though.
Chapter Eleven
The wheels of justice rolled slowly. By the time I’d been printed, photographed, written up and arraigned, it was close to nine o’clock. Every time I watched the clock’s hands crawl their way to the top of the circle, I thought of a portal opening in an Echo Park garage, freedom on the other side. I thought, too, of Guillermo and Carmelita and even Osvaldo growing more and more worried as each ten-minute interval came to an end and Guillermo shut down the crossover machine again, probably trading positive predictions with Carmelita and forcing a smile. The other fifty minutes of every hour, I spent thinking about how I was going to get out of this mess, and when those thoughts ended up just going round and round, my mind went back to Sherise and the way we’d left it in Alphonso’s. I felt awful about that, about her wondering if I was going to make the first move to fix things between us, and about the way I was stuck here now, unable to make a move of any kind. Now, getting back to my world felt like a greater motivator than catching up to Elsa Schwartz—all of which led me back to ruminating on how I was going to get free. Meanwhile, the hands on the clock kept crawling.
Things with the cabbie and the cop might have gone a little easier for me if not for my adventures from the night before. The cop let it slip as he was handcuffing me and leading me out of the Hall of Records that someone fitting my description had passed a counterfeit coin at a diner the night before.
So, it wasn’t just a simple misunderstanding between a driver and his fare.
Instead, it was a guy with no ID who matched the description of a counterfeiter.
Sure, the amounts were petty. But the crime itself was serious.
Earlier, I’d asked myself if there was any chance that Imelda Bettencourt was still some kind of lawyer in this world. It was pointless speculation, though. Even if she was practicing, there would be no way to convince her that we were associated in any way—not without bringing the state’s entire mental health apparatus down on my neck. No, this was a mess I was going to have to get myself out of on my own—or not at all.
That line of thinking had led me to waive my phone call earlier, but now as a cop barely old enough to shave led me from the tiny jailhouse courtroom and back toward the cells, I reconsidered that decision.
“Is there any chance I can get my phone call now?” I asked.
“You already got your phone call,” he said, sounding too busy to be bothered.
“I waived it.”
“So?”
“So, now I’m not waiving it anymore.”
“Things got real, huh?”
“You could say.”
We stopped where there was a house phone on the wall. The young cop shackled me to a metal ring mounted to the wall—I’d seen several of these things throughout the jailhouse, a simple system for constraint. Then I listened as he put a call in with whoever was in charge of such things and found that I had, indeed, not gotten my call earlier.
Sounding even more annoyed, he said, “Come on,” as he hung up and unshackled me.
We changed directions and he led me through a set of double doors and into an open space with a lot of desks and a lot of cops sitting at them. The young cop led me to a desk at the end of one row and told me to sit. Then he handcuffed me to yet another metal ring mounted to the side of the desk. “Stay put for a minute. You’ll get your phone call as soon as the clerk gets back from wherever she is.”
He sounded contemptuous—not just of me and my phone call but also the absent clerk who was supposed to administer it. I had no idea why but didn’t really care.
Or at least I didn’t care until I saw the clerk approach her desk and take her seat opposite me.
Her dark hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her expression was no nonsense. On her blouse was a nametag that simply read “O’Neil.”
“Name?” she asked me, all business.
It was uncanny. The detective I’d worked with repeatedly since arriving in LA, the one cop who’d known the truth about Carmelita and had been willing to look the other way regarding her oddities and potential danger to public safety, the woman whose partner I had killed and who’d taken my side in the ensuing debacle was here in body and mind, but she was regardless an entirely different Brenda O’Neil. I thought of the contempt the brash young cop had seemed to exhibit for the absent clerk, and the way the O’Neil I knew would never put up with that kind of attitude from anyone.
But this wasn’t the O’Neil I knew. As with the dissimilarities I’d observed in this world’s technology and architecture compared to mine, I realized now that I had encountered no women among the police. And, knowing what I knew about the Detective O’Neil from my world, my guess was that this version of O’Neil was not happy about the way this society relegated her to a clerk’s job. True, she might know nothing different and thus might have no idea that being dissatisfied was even an option. I hoped otherwise, though, for both our sakes.
“Jed Strait,” I said.
She opened a desk drawer and pulled a clipboard from it. Setting it on the desk, she used the tip of a pencil to scan down the list on the sheet of paper before her. When she got to my name, she made a checkmark and wrote a note. Then she reached for her phone and handed the cylinder to me.
“Go ahead,” she said, her voice showing less emotion than Carmelita in her least human moments.
“Thank you,” I said with a smile.
Upon first arriving in the Los Angeles I now called home, I’d been in a similar situation—arrested, arraigned, and friendless. I’d waived my phone call then, too, since I hadn’t known anyone in the city. But then I’d had an idea that had led me to Guillermo. Tonight was an echo of that experience, and though I didn’t see a way to reach Guillermo now, I knew there was something else I could try.
I pushed the 0 button for an operator the way I’d done outside the diner the night before.
“Hello, operator,” I said. Then I played the hunch that had occurred to me after my arraignment and said, “I’d like the number for Carmella Garcia please. She should be in the LA city limits.”
“One moment please,” the operator said.
I waited like a good boy, letting my eyes go to the ceiling rather than run the risk of bugging O’Neil.
When the operator came back on the line, she said, “I have a Carmella Garcia in Boyle Heights, sir.”
“That would be the one,” I said, the certainty in my voice hiding my awareness that the trail I’d just started following was thin and cold.
“I’ll put you through.”
I thanked her and then listened to the rings, recalling what Guillermo had told me about his wife, killed years earlier in an explosion that had almost taken him out, too. In this world, she’d lived. Did that mean Guillermo hadn’t? I hated the thought, but at the same time I knew that my friend’s absence from this world would be one more obstacle in Elsa Schwartz’s way.
By the tenth ring, my optimism was fading. Then the operator returned. “I’m sorry, sir. There doesn’t appear to be any answer. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
I glanced at O’Neil and saw she was staring at me. Doubtless, she knew the routine—the asking for a number and the silence that followed it. She shook her head to indicate that I’d had my chance and that I was not to ask for another number.
“No, operator,” I said. “Thank you for your help, though.”
I handed the phone back to O’Neil. When I saw that she wasn’t about to set it back in its cradle but rather was going to use it to make a call of her own—probably to the baby-f
aced cop so he could retrieve me and let her get back to work—I knew I couldn’t let the call go through. And in that moment, I realized who I should have called in the first place.
Feeling desperate, I said, “Please, ma’am. No one answered the phone. If I could have just one more try.”
“Sorry,” she said. “One phone call. Those are the rules.”
“I know, I know, but…this place is full of rules, isn’t it? Not all good, I bet.”
She raised an eyebrow and said, “You’re not going to change my mind.”
“Not even if I guess your first name?”
Now both eyebrows went up. “What is this?” she asked. “Did Sullivan put you up to something?”
“No, ma’am. No. I promise.”
She turned back to the phone. “Tell him it’s very funny.”
“Please,” I said. And then, “Brenda.”
Now she looked exasperated. “He did put you up to this.”
“No one put me up to anything. I can’t tell you how I know your name, but there’s something else I know about you. And it’s that you’re better than this. You could do their job. I can see that. But they won’t let you because you’re a woman.”
I thought I might have her now. Her attention was more on me than on the phone, and her face registered interest rather than incredulity.
So, I continued. “And that’s completely wrong. There’s no reason you should be at this desk. You’re smart and you have a real instinct. No one’s ever let you show what you’re worth, but you and I both know you’re worth more than any five of these guys.”
The Jetpack Boogie: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 4) Page 11