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

by Richard Levesque

  “Mr. Strait?” he asked.

  I gave him a quick look, hoping to be able to assess the situation before anything else happened, but that didn’t work out. Something poked me in the side—through the other man’s jacket and my own. It didn’t take a genius or even someone familiar with this world to know it was a gun barrel and that I was one smart remark away from being down to one kidney.

  “Yeah?” I managed to ask.

  “You should come with me.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, just put his other hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the curb. It was a practiced move. The barrel of the gun never left my side until the door was opened, and at that point he was blocking my escape. My choices were getting in the car or tackling him on the street, and since football was never my strong suit, I got inside the car.

  It was big on the inside and had two back seats facing each other; a pane of glass separated this compartment from the driver’s up front. I climbed inside with my new gun-toting friend and found that we weren’t alone. Two people were waiting for me inside.

  One was a man with a craggy face and bags under his eyes. He wore a black fedora and had a gun of his own pointed at my chest. Beside him sat a woman in expensive-looking clothes topped by a hat with a black veil. It didn’t cover the whole works—just eyes, nose and mouth—so it left me with a choice view of tight, white skin on her chin and part of her cheek. The only things that stood out were the silky brown hair that flowed out from under the hat and the three little moles—beauty marks, some people call them—that were on her lower left cheek, arranged in a perfect triangle as if by design. They made me think of the star and triangle tattoo I’d become so familiar with since coming to the version of California that I figured my real body was still in.

  The door closed, and the car pulled away from the curb.

  Regarding me with contempt, the man with the fedora repeated the question his companion had already asked, “Mr. Strait?”

  “That’s me,” I said. “If you’d wanted an appointment, my secretary could have set one up more easily than this.”

  “Don’t be glib, Mr. Strait,” he said. He spoke with a British accent, but not a street accent like I’d gotten used to hearing from some of the guys I’d fought with overseas. Rather, it was a more proper accent, an upper crusty kind of thing that seemed out of step with the nasty looking .38 he had aimed at me.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  “You can’t find Veronica Clark,” he said.

  I raised an eyebrow at this. “For the moment,” I said.

  His gaze grew sharper. “You misunderstand me, Mr. Strait. You can’t find Veronica Clark.”

  I got it now. It wasn’t an assessment of where I was on the case. It was a command.

  “Because?”

  “Because if you do, my friend and I will have to put large holes in you. Do you understand?”

  “That’s pretty persuasive,” I said.

  “Good.” He nodded. “To be honest, I didn’t think I was going to find you so willing to cooperate.”

  “I hate having holes in me as much as the next guy, pal,” I said.

  Again, he nodded. “That’s good, Mr. Strait. Unfortunately, I’ve learned that this town is full of people who say one thing and then do another. You’re not like that, are you?”

  “Never.”

  “I need to be sure.”

  The car had been driving all this time, leaving the bustle of the busy street where I’d been picked up and heading west.

  “I hate to ask how you propose to get a guarantee,” I said.

  “By making sure you know we mean business.”

  I glanced at the gun still trained on me. Even though I knew it was actually pointed at another Jed Strait, I didn’t enjoy it one bit. “You can be absolutely certain that I know you mean business,” I said.

  The woman with the veil and beauty marks hadn’t said a word the whole time. In my world, that might have meant she was one of the gunslingers’ girls, but the way she was dressed and the way she held herself in that seat—all attentive and with perfect posture—told me that she was more than just a gun moll, and I guessed she was the brains behind my impromptu excursion. Why she wouldn’t want me finding Veronica Clark was another question, and one I planned on pondering despite my assurances to the contrary.

  When I saw her give a quick nod to the fellow who’d grabbed me up, I knew I was in trouble. It was a signal, something they’d worked out ahead of time. Before I could react or protect myself, her gorilla had me by the hand, and he was bending it back at a ridiculous angle. I felt like everything in my wrist was going to pop, the pain so intense that it had me immobilized with no thought in my head as to how I could get away or exact revenge for this cruel treatment; all I wanted was for the pain to stop. When he let go, I felt a wave of relief and an upwelling of emotion that I realize now was gratitude, bizarre as that might sound.

  The pain, followed by my relief at its ceasing, had all been meant to make me drop my guard, and the tactic had succeeded. I held my sore wrist, focusing only on it for the moment. As a result, I barely noticed when the thug shifted his weight next to me. All I saw out of the corner of my eye was his other hand coming down. Then I felt the whack of his gun butt behind my ear, and everything went black.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I opened my eyes, and I was in Annabelle’s room again—wearing neither goggles nor earphones. It took me a second to orient myself and a few more to realize I wasn’t still in the back of that car. Neither my hand nor my head seemed to be injured, but the vivid memory of the pain was enough to keep my restoration from bringing a sense of relief; I still felt terrified that it had happened and was astounded at how real the whole thing had seemed.

  Unlike at the Break O’ Dawn, I felt no need to run from the room in a panic. I did, however, want to get a better look at the box Annabelle had hooked me up to. I doubted in my ability to figure out how it worked or how it had nudged me to cross over, but I figured Guillermo would have a good idea if I could describe everything to him.

  I was slumped forward in the chair I’d been sitting on when Annabelle had treated me to the show inside the metal box. Sitting up, I found no sign of the apparatus now, and no sign of Annabelle, either.

  I wasn’t alone in the room, though.

  The woman with the swastika from the night before stood at the window, once again dressed all in black and with that nasty armband still in place. She noticed me stirring in the chair and turned to give me a smile.

  “Good morning, Mr. Strait,” she said, her German accent almost imperceptible.

  “Is it?” I asked as I rubbed my eyes.

  “It is,” she answered and turned her face back to the window. “The sun is shining in a bright, blue sky. We’re here in this nice big house among friends. What else could we call it but a good morning?”

  I ignored the question and asked another of my own. “Where’s Annabelle?”

  She turned toward me again. “She’s gone to the mainland with the rest of Cosmo’s friends. It’s just you and me, Mr. Strait. My name is Elsa Schwartz. You enjoyed my little toy?”

  She means the box, I told myself, recalling the Nazi eagle. I also realized it must have been her on the other side of the door when Annabelle had been receiving instructions on how to work the mind-bending machine.

  Trying to stand, I found my legs were wobbly, so I opted to sit a bit longer. “You invented that thing?” I asked.

  “I was part of the team, yes. Remarkable, is it not?”

  “Well…” I said, rubbing my eyes. “It’s definitely something.”

  “It’s just a prototype. We haven’t worked out all the problems yet. Eventually, the discs will hold feature films, and people will watch them in their homes.”

  “Annabelle explained all of that,” I said. “She left out the part about hypnosis, though.”

  She raised an eyebrow at this and feigned surprise as she said, “Hypnosis
? What do you mean, Mr. Strait?”

  “If not outright hypnosis, then at least susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion.”

  “What do you know about such things?”

  “Enough to know when I’ve been messed with.”

  The time I’d spent in that other world had pulled my thoughts away from everything in front of me, but now it had all come back—Carmelita Garcia, her uncle, the dead movie producer in Las Vegas, and everything else right down to my trip to Catalina with Annabelle and her manipulation of me. I supposed I should be grateful for the machine and its inventor for having helped me figure out that Guillermo Garcia had lied to me about his wife and must be hiding his niece inside the little house in the ravine, but the same machine had also made it easy for me to spill the same information to Annabelle, and now she was gone with it.

  I also figured my hunch about Guillermo had been all wrong. All the old man wanted was to save his niece. The idea that he was linked to the Crossovers and that he’d had something to do with Annabelle ending up in my bed was preposterous. I saw that now just as clearly as I saw the ocean in the distance through Cosmo Beadle’s expensive window.

  And Annabelle…

  I saw her clearly, too. The embraces, the sweet words, the way she’d gotten me to disregard the content of her letter, the old ways that we’d slipped back into with such ease…they’d all been means to an end, and that end had been finding out everything she could about the woman the Crossovers knew as Gemma Blaylock. And all of it had been directed by someone higher up in the organization out here on Catalina. Maybe that meant Beadle, and maybe someone else, this Schwartz woman perhaps. I didn’t know, but I aimed to find out.

  Thinking it through, I knew that Annabelle wouldn’t have just gone down to the dock and crossed back to the mainland to fetch Carmelita herself. There had to be phone lines out on Catalina; if not, there must be radio. Either way, someone was heading for Chavez Ravine right now, and I needed to get there ahead of them.

  My watch read 11:40, but that wasn’t much help, as I couldn’t remember what time Annabelle had started hooking me up to Elsa’s little machine. I might have been in that crossover world for two minutes or two hours. It didn’t matter. The damage was done.

  Part of me was still shaken by what I’d seen, and I couldn’t help being worried for that other version of me, the one who’d just been threatened and then slugged for good measure. It felt both like it had really happened to me and at the same time to someone else I knew very well. In either case, I wondered what would happen if I went back to that other world again. Would the next vision of myself be seen from inside a casket? Something told me that wasn’t the case, and that was a good thing, but I was also left wondering how I was going to get back there and help that other me out of the jam he’d obviously gotten himself—and me—into.

  I forced myself to my feet, which brought another eyebrow raise from the German. Still dressed in the fancy robe, I looked around for my clothes and suitcase, the flight pack and non-lethal gun being the two things I wanted most. I saw my clothes were folded neatly on a little bench at the foot of the bed, but there was no sign of my suitcase. The gun had been in my jacket pocket when I’d taken it off the night before, and I hoped it was still there now.

  “Where’s my suitcase,” I asked.

  Elsa smiled. “That is an interesting question,” she said. “It’s an interesting suitcase. A bit battered, not unlike its owner, I suppose. And also like its owner, full of surprises. What is that device inside your sad little case, Mr. Strait?”

  She had it. Or she’d gotten a look inside it and someone else had it now.

  “None of your business,” I said. “Where is it?”

  I didn’t wait for an answer but lunged toward the bench and my clothes. When I pulled up on the jacket, I knew it was too light to still have the gun inside the pocket. I caught movement from Elsa and looked up, expecting to see the gun pointed at me, a nasty echo of my encounter with a gun in that other world. But instead of pointing a non-lethal gun at me, Elsa had a sleek black Luger in her hand.

  Shivers ran up my neck. The gun was the same as the one redhead Annabelle had pointed at me, probably shooting me with it in another world. Might there be some connection between the redhead and that world’s Elsa Schwartz? And how did their connection mirror their relationship in this world? More importantly, I worried about the possibility that Annabelle—blonde or not—might get her hands on this gun. It was hard to imagine her being angry enough to use it on me, but a lot of the things I’d seen since getting to California would have been tough to imagine before I’d headed west.

  Talking my way out of a tight spot had gone badly for me when I’d crossed over, but something told me this woman wasn’t quite so bent on inflicting injury. Swastika or not, her game was a bit subtler than the one that the veiled woman in the other world had played.

  “I think the morning just got a little less nice,” I said, my eyes focused on the gun.

  “Not necessarily. Were you looking for this?”

  She pulled Guillermo’s gun from a pocket and eyed it. “It doesn’t appear to function in the conventional way, but it’s not a toy, is it? You wouldn’t have gone for it so quickly if it were just a prop. What does it do?”

  “Hand it over and I’ll show you.”

  She gave me that same cat smile again. “I don’t think so. Why don’t you sit down?”

  Not quite ready to assert myself, I did as I’d been told.

  “What does it do?”

  Playing nice isn’t always my first line of defense, but you could say I was more than a little gun shy after my experience in that other Los Angeles. So, I answered her. “It’s a non-lethal weapon. It incapacitates the person it’s fired at. I’m not sure for how long, and don’t even ask me how it works because I have no idea.”

  She turned the gun in her hand, the Luger never wavering in the other.

  I didn’t like the idea of her getting any more information on the gun or possibly following it to Garcia Industries the way I had, so I threw something else into the mix.

  “I shared with you, so maybe now you’ll share with me,” I said. When she failed to acknowledge what I’d said, I went on anyway. “Your movie machine…I won’t say I get how it works, but I get the idea. Images and sound come through on the goggles and earphones, and the hypnosis thing I suppose comes from focusing the senses so much on what you’re seeing and hearing that it leaves you open to suggestion. What I don’t get, though, is how it creates that vision of the other world.”

  It was like I’d poked her with a needle. Guillermo’s gun might as well have been a chunk of tree bark for all the interest she paid it now. She looked at me with her sharp brown eyes, her perfectly sculpted eyebrows rising. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “The other world.” I said it as casually as I could manage even though the vivid memory of that other space still shook me with its intensity and the way it had ended. “It came to me after I was about three disks into the show. How do you do it?”

  She didn’t bother answering. “You’re telling me you went to one of the other worlds while you were connected to the Exetron?”

  “That’s what you call it?”

  Again, she ignored my question. “Tell me what happened.”

  She sounded desperate.

  “You’ve never been there, have you?” I asked. “I would have thought you’d already be an old hand at crossing over.” Now it was my turn to give a cruel smile as I watched the envy rise behind her eyes—no, it was more than envy; it was hunger. “That’s not the case, is it? Not with all the mental exercises and purification and prayers, not even with the help of your little machine. And here I come along and cross over without even trying.” I shook my head. “Where’s the justice in that?”

  “Tell me,” she said again.

  “Where’s my suitcase?”

  “I’ll get it for you. But tell me first.”

  I did. There was n
o point in lying about what I’d seen or making something up that was more fantastic. She would’ve known I was fabricating if I tried. But I didn’t want her to know what happened when I was pulled into the car, so I described my office and the conversation with Peggy as well as the cityscape outside the building and ended with my revelation about the Roosevelt dime.

  “Your side lost, by the way,” I said.

  “Lost?”

  “The Nazis. In that other world, we got the bomb but you didn’t. It looked like the Russians took a big chunk of Europe for themselves and half of Germany. The rest was restored to the right people. And the Russians got the bomb, not you.”

  She shook her head, denial in her eyes for a moment, but then she shrugged. The alternate world I had described was my alternate, not hers.

  “Maybe one of these days you’ll see it for yourself,” I said. “Or maybe it’ll be different. Maybe in the world you go to, Hitler will have forced our hand and the Third Reich is nothing but ashes and smoke.”

  “Maybe,” she said. She tipped the Luger upward, using it like a pointer. “You should get dressed.”

  “What about my case?”

  “Later. I need to get you to Uncle Cosmo first. He needs to hear about what you experienced.”

  “That wasn’t the deal.”

  She shrugged and nodded toward my clothes.

  I nodded toward the bathroom door. “I’ll go in there if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Leave the door open.”

  I gave her my best smug expression and said, “We all have to get our kicks somewhere.”

  She made no response, so I gathered my clothes. Once in the bathroom, I actually used the toilet, hoping the sound would bother her. Then I got dressed, taking my time and wondering how I was going to get out of this mess. Reaching into my pants pocket, I found the handful of change I’d gathered since arriving in LA, and I pulled the coins out now. Then I exited the bathroom, ready to throw the fistful of coins in Elsa’s face the first chance I had. The Luger was once again trained on my chest the second I re-entered the bedroom, however, and I told myself to wait for my chance; now wasn’t the time.