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

by Richard Levesque

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  I turned and started moving toward the door, not happy about having the gun at my back. When I was almost at the door, I stopped and glanced down, turning my hand so I could open the closed fist. Looking at the coins, I said, “I didn’t think you were supposed to be able to bring anything back.”

  “From where?” She sounded impatient.

  “From the other side. The other world.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Of course, you can’t bring anything over to our world.”

  “Then where’d this Roosevelt dime come from?” I asked, holding up one of my shiny little Wilsons but far enough away for Elsa to be unable to see it clearly. I dropped the other coins back into my pocket.

  Excitement crossed Elsa’s face as she said, “Let me see it!” She stepped forward, her focus on the coin rather than her aim, and when she got within two feet of me I swept my left hand down to knock her gun hand in the other direction. At the same time, I swung with my right, and my fist landed squarely on her chin.

  I won’t say I felt bad about it even though that’s the only time I’ve ever hit a woman. It was her or me at that point, and there was no time for quibbling.

  It was like knocking a bird out of the air. One second she was there in front of me—all attitude and confidence and imposing swastika—and the next she was down, like she’d been a fancy soufflé and I’d just opened her oven door. She slumped onto the floor, her eyes closed and a little cut appearing on her perfect skin where my knuckles had connected with her boney chin. I rubbed my hand and gave her a quick look. Distasteful though it was, I picked up the Luger and Guillermo’s gun, sticking the German weapon in my waistband and aiming the non-lethal one at her pretty face.

  “Sleep well, fraulein,” I said. “Maybe you’ll get to go over to the other side now.”

  Then I pulled the trigger. I felt the jolt, heard the whoosh, and smelled the scent of Guillermo’s element being heated up—or whatever it was that the gun did with those blue crystals. There was no change in Elsa Schwartz, but I knew that she was down for the count now. If the gun had the same effect on her as it had had on Annabelle the night before, her slumber would keep her out of my hair for a good twenty minutes. I thought about finding something to tie her up with, but I was too anxious to get out of that house and back to the mainland, so I left her there and went out into the hallway.

  No one was around. I didn’t even hear the sound of servants milling about although I was pretty certain there’d still be a fair amount of cleaning up to be done after the previous night’s party. It wasn’t until I was outside in the fancy gardens that I finally let my grip on Guillermo’s gun relax a little. I’d kept the thing in my coat pocket as I made my way through the house, but always at the ready in case someone should try to stop me. No one did, and the same held true for the gardens. A peacock strutted across the path to the tram, but he didn’t seem particularly formidable and I made it to the little station without incident.

  Of course, the tram wasn’t there; the control panel in the station had only one button on it, a bright red one with the word “Call” printed in white letters. I pushed it, trying to remember how long it had taken the tram to climb the hill with Annabelle and me on board in the early morning hours.

  Five minutes, I told myself, not much more. That should be all right, I knew, picturing Elsa still knocked out on the floor in the big house behind me. Even so, I still regretted not having used the belt from Annabelle’s robe to tie up the German, and I was already anticipating her coming through the greenery with some other Nazi weapon in her hand, ready to take charge again. My only hope was that Elsa would be out of commission for at least as long as Annabelle had been. If not, the slow tram might end up being the death of me.

  It arrived much faster than I’d anticipated, the little tram chugging through the man-made jungle and clearing the nearest palm fronds no more than two minutes after I’d pushed the button. That was when I realized I should have been more vigilant about the tram coming up from below than I’d been about any sort of menace coming at me from the house above.

  There wasn’t time to call myself an idiot, but time only to see that the tram was occupied and to understand that it had already been on its way up the hill when I’d pushed the call button. The chauffeur from the night before, the one Annabelle had called Edward, stood at the front of the tram, his foot up on one of the benches and a cigarette between his fingers.

  I had less than a second to decide whether to nail him with Guillermo’s gun, duck for cover behind the nearest massive tropical leaf, or stand my ground and act like I had every right to be waiting for the tram. Had I been faced with that kind of choice six months earlier, I’d have pulled a weapon and fired it before the other options had had a chance to sound off in my brain. So, the fact that I had to stand there for that fraction of a second before deciding seemed like proof that I was at least part of the way toward becoming a civilian again.

  As it turned out, Edward made the decision for me, spotting me at the tram station almost as soon as I saw him coming up the hill. With considerable relief, I saw him acknowledge me with a significantly different expression on his face than he’d worn during our early morning rendezvous. Then, he’d been serious and stone-faced, somehow deferential and condescending at the same time. I’d made him for a vet then, and his countenance now told me he’d made me for the same. Without any of Uncle Cosmo’s “friends” around, he appeared to relax a little when he saw me, giving me the same almost imperceptible nod that I would have expected if I’d crossed paths with another GI on patrol or in the shadowy recesses of an underground gambling den in some occupied French town. I returned the nod without thinking twice about it.

  The tram reached the end of the line, and the chauffeur opened the gate to step onto the platform. He put the cigarette between his lips and offered his hand. I let go of the gun in my pocket and reached out to shake, uneasy about the weight of the gun and wondering if it was obvious to the other man that I was armed.

  “Edward Ross,” he said.

  “Jed Strait,” I returned as we released each other’s hand.

  “Tenth infantry,” he said as he took the cigarette from his lips and blew smoke into the air.

  “Belgium?” I asked.

  He nodded. “For starters. You?”

  “Sixteenth.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You got out in one piece?”

  I nodded. My nightmares didn’t count as wounds. “Sometimes I still have to do an inventory just to be sure, but…yeah.”

  He smiled at this, badly crooked teeth telling me why he kept his expression so grim when he was around Uncle Cosmo’s “friends.”

  “Smoke?” he asked, reaching into his coat pocket.

  “No,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Even if I’d been a smoker—like the Jed Strait whose body I’d been occupying not long ago—I would have declined the offer. Standing here trading war stories over a smoke would be all right under other circumstances, but not now: not with Elsa possibly on the verge of awakening and coming after me, and not with Annabelle and Beadle possibly heading toward Chavez Ravine and the unsuspecting Guillermo. I needed to get on that tram and get out of Beadle’s jungle, but at the same time I needed to do it without tipping my hand.

  “I didn’t think anyone else was left here,” he said.

  With a smile I hoped didn’t convey nerves, I said, “I overslept. Everyone else went to that…wake, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not you, though? No…chauffeuring needed?”

  “It’s been taken care of,” he said after taking another drag on the cigarette. “I get afternoons off as a rule.”

  “You drive the night owls.”

  “That’s right,” he said again.

  “Well…” I said. “It’s good to meet you…again, I guess.” I let go with a little laugh and then pointed at the tram. “For now, I think I’ll take that little thing d
own the hill and get my toes in the sand before my friend comes back.”

  He stepped aside to let me pass, and relief washed over me, as I’d been imagining his friendly demeanor vanishing again and his bulk blocking my path.

  As I stepped onto the tram and closed the gate, I heard him say, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but the blonde you were with last night…”

  “Annabelle?” I said, turning toward him, my hand on the tram’s controls.

  “Yeah. You and her…”

  “A set?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He shrugged. “I just wondered.”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  Part of me wanted to ask if he’d seen her with other men in his capacity as chauffeur. But a bigger part of me didn’t want to know, so I kept quiet.

  “We’ll see,” was all I added.

  He smiled at that, a little wistfully rather than slyly, and I guessed he’d been watching Annabelle, hoping she was unattached and maybe interested. I doubted that Cosmo would hire a nonbeliever to drive his guests around, and if the tall man with the cigarette was a Crossover, he was clearly a few steps above those punks from the alley but still a few steps below being embraced as one of the “friends.” A big part of me wanted to ask how long he expected to be doing time as a servant before getting called up to the big league, and I suspected that Annabelle hadn’t been the first pretty face among the “friends” with whom he’d considered forming a bond, if only a carnal one, as a means of moving up the ladder a little quicker. But I also knew that question was going to have to go unasked, at least for now. I didn’t want to have to shoot this brother in arms or knock him out with Guillermo’s gun, but I knew that was what I’d be looking at if I stuck around long enough for Elsa Schwartz to come stumbling down the garden path.

  “Well…good luck with that,” Edward said.

  I nodded and said “Thanks.” Then I hit the “Down” button on the tram’s control and braced myself for the initial lurch.

  Edward gave me a casual salute before dropping his cigarette to the ground and smashing it under his heel. I returned the salute with mock military rigor and watched him turn away. It was only after the platform disappeared from view that I let myself relax, but even then I was still on alert.

  At the bottom of the hill, I looked at the controls for just a second to see if there was an emergency shut-off that would disable the tram and keep it from being recalled at the other end of the line. There was nothing obvious, though, so I abandoned the idea and ran toward the beach and the docks, looking back over my shoulder every few yards.

  The Avalon docks were populated with quite a few boats, including one of the larger tourist boats that took landlubbers back and forth across the channel. If I’d had more money in my wallet, I would have gone looking for someone with a little motorboat and plenty of time to kill, someone who could get me to the mainland quickly and who could be paid to leave right away. My wallet, though, was in a sad, sad state, so all I could do was buy a ticket on the tourist boat. According to the sign at the ticket window, the boat would leave in twenty minutes. That was longer than I wanted to wait, but I didn’t have much choice.

  I planted myself in a seat near the back of the boat where I had a clear view of the road down to the beach from Beadle’s fancy little tram. If Elsa—or Edward—came down to the docks, I could duck down and watch from here, checking to see if my pursuer also got on the tourist boat or else had access to one of the sleeker models in the moorings. Beadle had at least one boat of his own; that was the one Annabelle and I had ridden over on the night before. I would have bet good money on that boat being over on the San Pedro side now, but there was still a pretty good chance that Beadle had more than one watercraft and that any of the others around me might be at the disposal of his “friends.”

  When I heard the big engine kick into service and felt the deck rumble beneath my feet, I wiped my brow in relief. Elsa had not come down from the tram yet, and if my luck held out, she wouldn’t make it in the next couple of minutes. Those minutes crept by, and when the boat finally cast off and the tourists and I were on our way, I let myself exhale in a long emptying of everything I’d been holding in. There was nothing more I could do until the boat tied off again in San Pedro. Until then, there’d be no point in doing anything other than relaxing and trying to push the memory of that other Los Angeles out of my mind. I wondered if maybe on this trip I’d get to see some of those flying fish Annabelle had gone on about during my first trip across the channel.

  And then, when we were maybe three or four hundred yards out, something caught my eye as I looked back toward the island. The harbor was laid out in picture postcard colors with all the boats bobbing in the sun. Off to my right, I could see the opulent casino dormant in the daylight, and on the hills behind the rows of beachfront shops I had a perfect view of the places where wealthy folks like Cosmo Beadle had their weekend hideaways. And from there, up on that hill, I caught sight of a speck. It rose into the sky above the trees and the mansions’ roofs, got pretty good altitude, and then turned in the direction of the tourist boat.

  My mood plunged.

  A few seconds later, the speck was large enough for me to make it out as clearly person-shaped. And after a few seconds more, I watched as Elsa Schwartz dropped down to fly above the surface of the ocean, imitating those flying fish just long enough to catch up to the tourist boat. She turned her head in the boat’s direction, eyes seemingly on no one but me even though every tourist on that side of the boat was standing there pointing at her and taking pictures; she even waved at me before she turned her attention back to the control panel and shot high into the sky and toward the mainland.

  I cursed under my breath and sat down in my seat, no longer interested in flying fish or anything else, thinking only of what I needed to do once the boat made it to the distant dock.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The rest of the trip back to the mainland was interminable. I tried hard not to think of the head start Elsa had on me and the damage she might be able to do with that kind of time on her side. My guess was that she’d go straight to Beadle, who was probably already at the wake. But what then? Would she lead a few goons—maybe the kind that also wore swastikas on their biceps—back to Chavez Ravine? Or had the damage there been done already?

  Not thinking about Elsa, though, meant my mind turned to Annabelle instead. It wasn’t easy to contemplate the way she’d betrayed me, and I wondered what I’d say if I saw her again.

  I forced myself to go to the galley where I surrendered a bit more of my quickly depleting resources in exchange for a skimpy sandwich and a cup of coffee so weak that I’d have been better off trying to get a jolt from the sea water all around me. Eating did little to derail the locomotive of thoughts racing through my mind on a full head of steam.

  The way I figured it, the only saving grace in my situation came from the possibility that I might still have it in my power to muck up the works for Uncle Cosmo and all his followers, Annabelle included. Doing so would involve throwing all my energy into helping Guillermo with what he’d asked of me in the first place—clearing his niece’s name. For all I knew, the woman who’d called herself Gemma Blaylock really had killed Lance Masterson, and right now I didn’t care. Nothing against the poor dead son of a bitch, but if he’d been mixed up with Beadle, he’d have to get justice from someone other than me. The way I’d been treated by the Crossovers had turned me into something of a Crusader against their cause, and by the time the boat finally docked, I might as well have been waving a banner denouncing the whole lot of them.

  Practically bouncing with energy, I was the first one off the vessel, and I ran along the wooden walkway to get onto dry land again. Scanning the area around me, I saw a phone booth next to a ticket office and headed straight to it. I didn’t know Guillermo’s number, but the operator was able to help me. I stood there, feeling impotent as I listened to ring after ring after ring. When the operator came back on the line an
d told me the party was not responding, I hung up and bolted from the booth without waiting for my nickel to clink out of the phone, my adrenaline pumping even more now that I was picturing Guillermo lying on the floor of his workshop, maybe dead, with Joaquin Murrieta, Jr. looking helplessly down at him.

  Not sure of where I was going, I ran toward the sounds of traffic. When I got to the street, I started scanning, looking for a cab. In my mind’s eye, I imagined one of those big green cabs I’d been used to all my life on the east coast, the kind that could haul a whole family and all their luggage across town on their way to an airship field. But I wasn’t on the east coast any more, and the first cab I saw was a little foreign job with the slogan, “Big City Little Cab” painted on the side. The taxi looked even smaller than some of the little cars I’d seen in Europe, and I doubted it was big enough to haul half a family anywhere.

  Despite my doubts, I didn’t hesitate to flag the driver down. Moments later, I was opening the cab’s back door and folding myself up to get inside.

  “Where to, buddy?” the driver said as I maneuvered my body in such a way that I could reach for the door and pull it shut. I caught only a glance at her profile before I was squeezed into the seat behind her, my knees tucked up and my neck bent over to keep my head from bumping against the rear window. The ID plate fastened to the seatback in front of me said her name was Margaret West and it showed a grainy black and white photo of her unsmiling face. Something about her looked familiar, but I couldn’t figure how.

  “I need to get to Chavez Ravine, near downtown. Can you do that?”

  “Sure I can, pal. That’s a nice fare.”

  She started the meter, put the car in gear, and started out.

  “How much do you think this’ll run?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “In the neighborhood of five bucks, give or take.”