The Blacktop Blues: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 1)

by Richard Levesque

  “Did they follow us into the ravine?” I asked.

  “I think so. But he turned off his lights. I think he’s parked over there someplace where he can still see us but we can’t see him. Maybe he goes again when he sees you come inside.” He shrugged. “And maybe he stays.”

  He led the way into the outbuilding. It was bigger than most private garages, probably wide enough to hold two cars, maybe even two-and-a-half. Once we were inside and Guillermo flipped on the lights, it took me only a second to see that no cars had been in that space in a long, long time, nor would they be anytime soon.

  Cluttered didn’t even begin to describe the place, and I hoped for Mr. Garcia’s sake that California managed to hold off on any more of its famous earthquakes until he could at least finish his projects and get out of the building. Shelves lined the walls, and on these were bins of parts, several oscilloscopes and other machines whose purpose I couldn’t guess, what looked like half of a motorcycle engine, and more spools of wire than I could have hoped to count. But the shelves’ capacity had long ago been surpassed, resulting in piles of electronics, boxes of tools, and bins of parts that covered almost every inch of the floor. Little trails looked like they’d been left to allow the old man to negotiate the piles.

  I stood in the doorway, taking it all in for a few seconds. The place reminded me of Sid Drummond’s pawnshop, and—to a degree—Guillermo also reminded me of Sid. It wasn’t just that they were both old or that they both tended a little toward more roundness of shape than was probably healthy. More likely, it was the general good humor, coupled with the way life had led each man to be surrounded by so much cast-off stuff.

  Guillermo said, “Close the door, por favor. I don’t want to let any of the cats out.”

  “You have cats in here?”

  “A few.”

  He walked along one wall toward a workbench with a single stool before it. I noticed now that he walked with a little limp and that he sat on the stool with something that looked like relief on his face.

  That was when I saw something move behind one of the shelving units. It wasn’t a cat.

  “Is somebody in here?” I asked, wondering if we’d just foiled a burglary. Maybe that cop sitting out in the dark would come in handy after all.

  Guillermo chuckled. “That’s just Joaquin Murrieta, Jr. Come here, Joaquin.”

  I expected a person to round one of the corners made by the shelving units. My expectations were not met. Instead, it was a…thing of some sort that came out of the shadows. It was roughly person-shaped with two appendages resembling legs and two more resembling arms. Its torso was dull metal with dials and blinking lights embedded in it. The thing walked upright, albeit stiffly. Where its head would have been if it had been human, the thing had a rounded piece of sheet metal with a speaker in place of a mouth and little camera lenses instead of eyes.

  It was one more in a series of strange encounters that had started with the Swan picking me up in the desert, all of which had come to make me feel more and more like a fish out of water.

  “Say hello to our new friend, Joaquin,” Guillermo said in the direction of the walking machine. “This is Jed Strait.”

  “Hello…Jester Eight,” came a noise from the speaker. It sounded a bit like a voice, but not quite, more like the noise that would come out of a radio that’s been hit one too many times with a baseball bat.

  “Hello,” I answered although I felt self-conscious about speaking to the machine.

  I looked at Guillermo, my expression nothing but questions.

  The old man laughed. “Don’t be scared of Joaquin,” he said. “He’s harmless.”

  “I’m not scared. At least, I don’t think I am. What…is he?”

  “Joaquin? He’s…” Guillermo shrugged. “I don’t know the best word. Robots are slaves. He’s not that. Mechanical man? Automata in Spanish.”

  “Automaton?”

  His face lit up even more than normal. “Si. Automaton. Joaquin’s been with me for a while now. He keeps me company out here.”

  “Along with the cats?” I had yet to see any sign of a feline.

  Guillermo nodded. Then he said, “You can go rest, Joaquin.”

  The mechanical man took a moment to process the command; then it turned and shuffled back to a spot in the shadows. I watched it go, amazed.

  “How does it…? Does it understand you?”

  “Basic commands. Joaquin is just a prototype.”

  “You’ve got plans for more sophisticated…creations?”

  Guillermo laughed at this. “I’ve got many, many plans.” He looked around at the disarray in the workshop, and his unwavering smiled wavered a little. It was as though the clutter that surrounded us was a reminder of plans unrealized and—maybe—unrealizable. He let out a little sigh and then said, “I’m sorry I can’t offer you a seat. I never get company out here.”

  “That’s all right. I’ve been sitting all day.”

  “I could get you a chair from inside the house, but my wife and grandkids are in there. I didn’t see any lights on when we pulled up, so they must be sleeping already.”

  It struck me as early for sleeping, but I wasn’t going to argue the point. “Really, it’s okay. I don’t need to sit.”

  “Fine,” he said. He folded his hands across his belly and gave me a satisfied look. “So, maybe now you tell me how you got the gun, yes?”

  “And maybe you can tell me just what the hell kind of gun it is,” I said, deciding there was no point in playing games with him, at least not about the gun.

  “It’s a little different, that’s for sure.”

  “You only made one?”

  “It’s not Garcia Manufacturing. If I was interested in mass production, I wouldn’t be here, and I wouldn’t be able to work on anything new, would I?”

  “I don’t suppose.”

  He nodded. “And if you’ve found my gun, does that mean you got it from my niece?”

  I raised an eyebrow at this. “This…Carmella you mentioned on the phone?”

  “Carmelita,” he corrected.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know any Carmelita.”

  Another nod followed. “The gun, then.”

  “I found it in a dead man’s car. I didn’t know if the gun was his or—”

  “The gun is mine. My niece took it without permission.”

  “Your niece…she wouldn’t go by another name, would she?”

  His smile faded but didn’t die. “She’s doing that Gemma thing again, isn’t she?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Gemma Blaylock is really Carmelita Garcia?”

  He groaned a little and shook his head.

  What I’d assumed was a healthy California tan had actually been Gemma’s indigenous roots showing through, one more thing she’d been adept at hiding.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  Chapter Nine

  So, I told him. I’d already gone through the whole story more than once for the cops, and now I did it again, not going as far back as my discharge from the army this time. The only difference was now I really did spill the whole thing, opting not to leave out the bits about the gun or the case like I had with O’Neal.

  When I got to the part about the punks in the alley, I stopped the story and said, “I have to ask—I mean, I know I asked before, and you didn’t seem like you wanted to tell me, but…what the hell is the story with the gun? When I pulled the trigger and those punks went down…”

  Garcia’s irrepressible smile got just a little bit bigger. “Come here,” he said and turned toward his workbench again. Pulling open a little wooden drawer, he took out a rock about the size of my thumbnail and maybe a quarter-inch thick. It was gray with little blue sparkles in it and jagged like it had been chipped out of something bigger, not smooth like a rock that was tossed around in a river for a hundred years before being buried in the sand. He handed it to me and said, “Have you ever seen anything like that before?”

  “No,” I
said, giving the little rock a close look. “I can’t say as I have.”

  “I’m not certain, Mr. Strait, but I think you’re holding a new element there. Not the rock itself but the little blue bits.”

  “An element?” I asked, trying to remember my high school chemistry and failing.

  “It has some very interesting properties,” he went on, ignoring my befuddlement. “It gives off some powerful energy, but not radioactive, yes? I don’t quite understand everything about it, but I have been able to harness its power.”

  “In that gun.”

  “Yes. And other things.” He nodded toward the rock. “Smell it.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it. You’ll see why.”

  I hesitated but then did as he’d asked. There was a definite chemically odor to the thing. It took me only a second to realize I’d smelled it before.

  “The gun,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Where did you get this stuff from?”

  “Trade secret,” he said. “Not far from here, though.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  “Not yet. At first, I was thinking Chavezium, after the ravine.”

  “Not Garcium?”

  He chuckled at this. “No. I don’t want to be immortalized that way. Maybe Carmelium, though.”

  I raised an eyebrow at this. “After your niece?”

  “No, no,” he said. “After my wife, Carmella. Not Carmelita—little Carmella, eh?”

  “Your wife must be something special if you’re going to name an element after her.”

  His smile shifted at this; it was hard to tell what this new variation signified—maybe nostalgia, I thought. “Definitely something special,” he said, and he tapped the little rock, so I couldn’t quite tell if he meant the element or his wife.

  “And it powers that gun,” I added, recalling the odd smell that the weapon had given off once I’d used it in the alley. “How, though? And why?”

  “The how I’m still figuring out. The why, though…You said you were in the army, yes?”

  “I did.”

  “And you probably saw some of the awful things weapons can do.”

  Again, I said, “I did” as the image of the faceless Buddy Stiles, never far from the surface, welled up in my consciousness once more.

  “Wouldn’t things have been different if our army had had a weapon that could knock out the opponent without killing them? Just leave them sleeping until they could be tied up and captured?”

  I thought of fields full of dead men and body parts, rainy days where the puddles on the ground were all red. And then I thought about those same men waking up disarmed, their hands tied behind them as they were led off to POW camps. It would have been a different war, maybe one whose outcome even guys like Deke Miller could have gotten behind.

  “That would have been something,” I said.

  “Maybe the next war,” Garcia said.

  “If you can get your gun back.”

  “And if I can perfect it.”

  “Your niece took it before you were finished with it,” I said.

  He nodded at this. “The gun has some flaws, so it’s not ready for the military or anyone else to use on a wide scale. I could build another, start from scratch. But I’d rather have the prototype here until I’m ready to do something with it rather than let it fall into the wrong hands.”

  “And it’s completely harmless?” I asked. “This blue stuff…it doesn’t have any side effects like radiation does?”

  “Not that I’ve found yet. I’ve been working with this stuff for years now, and I’m still fine. I think, eh?” He chuckled at this.

  “I hope,” I said. “For your sake.” And mine, I thought as I remembered how I’d kept the gun pretty close to some of my more prized organs when I’d had it in my coat pocket. “I assume you’ve run tests on it?”

  He shrugged and gave me an embarrassed grin. “Not the most scientific tests, but…yes.”

  “What on?” I asked. “Stray dogs?”

  I’d meant it as a joke, but he didn’t take it that way, looking a bit surprised at my astuteness as he shook his head. “I like dogs, Mr. Strait. Cats, though…”

  He’d indicated there were cats in the workshop when we’d first come in, but I still hadn’t caught any sign of one. Other than Guillermo, myself, and Joaquin Murrieta, Jr., there seemed to be nothing else in the workshop capable of moving. If there were any cats in there, they’d probably learned from experience that it wasn’t a good idea to get noticed.

  “Please,” Guillermo said now, “finish your story. I still don’t know why the police are so interested in you.”

  I did as he asked. When I got to the part about the Masterson murder and the autopsy photos Detective O’Neal had shown me, the old man stopped me.

  “The police think my niece did this?”

  “They’re definitely curious. The longer she lays low, the worse it’s going to look.”

  “Do you think she did this thing?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know her at all. She didn’t say much on the drive.”

  He nodded at this but said nothing, his eyes seeming far away now.

  I cleared my throat, hoping to bring him back. When he shifted his gaze toward me, I asked, “Do you have any idea where she could have gone?”

  Garcia shook his head. “No. I wish I did. She’s been gone for a while now. I feared she might fall in with bad people. It looks like she did, yes?”

  “Maybe. This Masterson doesn’t seem like he was the rough type on the surface. I mean, movie executive is a pretty respectable profession, right?”

  He shrugged at this.

  “But he did have a tattoo that suggested he was mixed up in some odd things. Maybe dangerous.”

  “Crossovers,” he said, his tone indicating disgust.

  I remembered O’Neal using the same term.

  “The ones with the star and triangle?”

  “That’s them.” He shook his head.

  “Are they dangerous, these people?”

  Again, he shrugged. Then he said, “Probably no more than you or me. I think they think they’re very special. When someone thinks they’re special and you tell them they’re not, well…” He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Things get ugly. They get…defensivo, yes?”

  “I can see where they might. Is that why Gemma—uh, Carmelita stole your gun? Did she act like she thought she was in danger?”

  “I don’t remember everything she said. Right now, if I can’t get Carmelita to come home, I at least want my gun back. Maybe you give me your hotel key and I go get it myself. It’s hidden in your room?”

  “Yes. I could tell you where it is, but…that cop out there. What if he follows you back downtown and then hassles you after you leave the hotel again?”

  What I was also worried about—and maybe even more worried about—was that the cop, Miller I imagined, would take the Patterson’s departure from Garcia Industries as a reason to do a little illegal search of the place. He’d find me and Joaquin Murrieta, Jr. in the workshop and who knew what else in these shambles. My presence here wasn’t illegal, but I figured Miller wouldn’t need much of an excuse to tune me up and then haul me back in for resisting. The real question was whether O’Neal knew about his little stakeout, but right now I didn’t want that question answered. Finding the facts was likely to be pretty painful.

  “He might,” Guillermo said. “What do we do, though?”

  Now it was my turn to shrug. “I don’t know.” I thought about it. “What if…what if I go back to the hotel and I let him stop me after I get the gun. And then I zap him with it. I get it back to you, and then I lay low for a while.”

  Shaking his head, he said, “Too dangerous. Plus, it gets you into even bigger trouble with the cops than you already are.”

  “They don’t scare me,” I said, and I think I meant it.

  The old man smiled at this, looking
like he was convinced he could see right through me. “I have a better idea,” he said.

  I raised an eyebrow at this, waiting.

  His smile got even wider. He dropped the little chip of rock back into the drawer and shut it. Then he said, “First, I’m going to help you find out if that detective is still parked out on the road, watching. If he’s not, we can take a chance and go back to your hotel. But maybe they’re waiting for you there, so…you go a different way.”

  “Through the alley again?” I asked. “Up the fire escape.”

  “No. Like I said, I have a better idea.” He must have anticipated that I was going to ask for details, as he cut me off with a raised finger, indicating that all would be made clear eventually. “And after you’ve got my gun, then you’re going to find a way to get Carmelita out of this mess with the police.”

  “How the hell do you expect me to do that?”

  He shrugged. “I’m convinced you’re a smart man.”

  I ignored the compliment. “And why exactly should I attempt this impossible task?” I asked.

  He looked me up and down. “I didn’t have to bail you out, you know. And I’m taking a big risk hiding you here.”

  I let this sink in for a moment. “You’re saying I owe you?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “You could say you’re returning a favor. Making us…what’s the word? Even? You could walk away, too. Take your chances. But…I think you know the scales would be out of balance.”

  I let out a long breath. From the moment I’d wrecked my Meteor out on that desert highway, all of my California plans had been shot. I just hadn’t known it yet. Even the ones I’d made since then in those optimistic scribblings on hotel stationery—none of them had come to pass either. I realized that despite losing my car and not finding Annabelle where I’d thought she’d be, I had still been functioning under the assumption that I was pretty much in control of my actions and my destiny. Now, standing in the clutter of Guillermo’s workshop and hearing him explain not only his plans for me but the degree to which I was morally compelled to follow along with them, I realized how much of an illusion the thought of that control had been.