“And how long do you think it’ll take?”
Again, she shrugged. “This time of day? I don’t know. Shouldn’t be too bad. Forty minutes? Little more?”
I groaned inwardly, imagining Elsa flying through sky in half that time. “Six bucks if you can get me there in thirty,” I said.
The driver said nothing, but I felt the little car lurch forward as she shifted gears and gunned the engine.
As the cab wove in and out of traffic, I tried not to think about how I was going to have any money to live on once this ride was over. More than once, I asked myself if I wasn’t making a mistake—or rather making one more mistake in a long chain of them. When it all came down to it, I could just as easily have asked Margaret West to pull over and let me out on any corner. I’d have enough money to cover a few days’ cheap road food as I hitchhiked my way east again, and wherever I ran out money would be the place I’d stop and find a job I could put my back into. Eventually, I could scrape enough together to buy a secondhand guitar and wheedle my way into a paying gig in some dingy dive. There’d be no more gunplay, no more crazy inventions, and no more beautiful women for me to figure out, run from, or try to save—with or without swastikas. With luck, there’d be no unplanned trips to other worlds, either.
Two things kept me glued to the back seat of that little taxi, though. One was the way Annabelle had claimed to have found me at the Hotel Dorado. Her story about staying friendly with a chambermaid might have been legitimate, but that didn’t account for the agenda she’d clearly been following from just about the minute she woke up in my room. She’d asked about Carmelita then, albeit indirectly, and when she had me under the influence of that crazy movie machine on Catalina, she’d wasted no time in getting the information from me that I hadn’t been willing to spill at the hotel. No, she hadn’t just heard that some fella was in town and asking about her; she’d been sent. I didn’t know by whom or why, and I also didn’t know how she’d known I was there. All I really knew was that Guillermo hadn’t had anything to do with it. I had a lot of unanswered questions; if I left the city now, I knew those questions would haunt me. I also knew that whoever was on the other side of this nasty equation had questions too—whether it was Beadle or Schwartz or someone else—and there was a good chance that my enemies had long arms that extended much farther than Las Vegas. If there was something the Crossovers wanted and they thought I had it, I wouldn’t have any peace until they had their answers.
The other thing was the experiences I’d had while crossing over into that other Los Angeles. It kept whirling through my mind—the cars on the street, the newspaper, the Hollywood sign, my office, my career as a PI—and, of course, the woman in the back of that big car. How long had I been in Los Angeles in that other world? And how had I gravitated toward private investigation? There were so many unanswered questions, things that made me wonder not only about how I’d ended up looking down the wrong end of a gun but also about the choices I’d made in this world, the one I thought of as the real world. Given the opportunity, I knew I’d head back to that other world, the less real one, in search of a few answers and maybe a little satisfaction.
And all of that kept me in the cramped backseat of that little cab as Margaret West drove the little cab, avoiding pedestrians and cops and stalled trucks like a true artist.
At one point I asked her, “So what gives with this little tuna can for a taxi?”
She laughed at this. “It’s Japanese,” she said. “Spoils of war, I guess. The company got a boat load of ‘em on the cheap, I’m told. They claim these little things’ll get you where you want to go faster than the big jobs. I’d say they’re right.”
Twenty-six minutes after Margaret West had started the meter running, she slowed the little car down, and turned off a major street and onto the unpaved roads that wound their way into Chavez Ravine. “Where to from here?” she asked.
I leaned forward in the seat and directed her forward, trying to match what I saw in the daylight to the turns Guillermo had made in his pick-up the night before. “Right there,” I said when I saw the “Garcia Industries” sign ahead and to the left of the car. The workshop looked closed up tight, but the front door of the little house hung open.
The cabbie parked and I asked if she could wait a couple minutes in exchange for an even bigger tip. I could see her forehead in the rearview mirror and noticed that she raised an eyebrow at my offer. “Mister, this is my lucky day. You bet I’ll wait, but don’t make me come looking for you, okay?”
She sounded pretty tough as she said it, which told me she’d been stiffed before and wasn’t going to put up with it again. I didn’t know the woman, but I had no desire to be on the receiving end of her wrath.
I promised to return as quickly as possible.
Leaving the cab’s back door open, I ran for the front door of Guillermo’s house, calling out to the old man as I got to the porch.
He was sitting inside on a ratty old couch, a wet cloth held to his forehead. I could see that blood had run down the right side of his face. A scruffy little dog lay on the couch beside him.
“You’re a little late, lobo,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I ran into the house and got down on one knee in front of the old man. The house looked like a wreck with furniture overturned and picture frames askew on the walls or knocked to the floor altogether. “What happened?”
“A cop,” he said.
This surprised me. I didn’t know what kind of muscle Beadle employed, but I hadn’t expected it to be off duty cops. “Are you sure?” I asked, the image of a Nazi goon squad still in my mind, Elsa Schwartz leading them.
“Sure, I’m sure.”
“How so?”
“Because last night, after you left, the same guy came knocking on the door.”
“Right after?”
“No. Maybe…an hour. I think he was pretty mad he lost you.”
“What did you tell him?”
His infectious smile appeared for only a second, but it must have hurt to smile, as he reeled it back in again right away. Then he said, “I didn’t tell him nothing. No hablo ingles.” He chuckled a little at this, but he put the brakes on that, too, as the pain grabbed onto him again.
The little dog reacted to his laughter and its sudden cessation, raising its head to look at Guillermo with brown eyes that seemed almost too big for its face. The mutt had picked up on its master’s distress, and I could easily imagine it barking up a storm while the house was being torn apart.
“Blond guy?” I asked. “Angular face? Mean looking?”
Guillermo nodded. “Like his mother didn’t love him enough.” He let out a long breath and added, “I really could have used that gun today.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. I had a feeling I was going to be saying that a lot. “He took Carmelita?”
He shrugged. “In the end. She put up a fight.”
“Was he alone?”
“Yes.”
“Did he show his badge?”
Guillermo gave me a confused look.
“Did he say she was under arrest?”
“I don’t remember.”
“In a police car this time, or the same car from last night?”
“I didn’t see a police car.”
I nodded at this. A lot of what I’d been through since being woken up the morning before was starting to make more sense.
“You think he took her to the station?” he asked.
“I doubt it,” I said, my thoughts racing.
Miller was an acolyte of Beadle’s; I was sure of it. And now when I thought of Annabelle’s story about the chambermaid, I understood what had really happened the night before. Miller knew Annabelle through Beadle—as the desk clerk at the Hotel Dorado had said, you didn’t meet a lot of women named Annabelle anymore, and while my Annabelle and the one Miller knew from the Catalina rituals might not have been the same, it hadn’t been too hard for him to figure out that they were
. Thanks to the letter from Annabelle that I’d held onto like a talisman all the way to California, Miller had made me for Annabelle’s east coast ex-beau when he and O’Neal were putting my feet to the fire, and once O’Neal knew I’d made bail—maybe even before then—her partner had set Annabelle up in my room, ready to get the truth out of me about the woman they knew as Gemma Blaylock.
Guillermo and I had overreacted when we’d spotted the tail the night before. Miller had been following, but not with any intention of rousting me or Guillermo as soon as he had an excuse. He’d been keeping an eye on me to make sure I fell into Annabelle’s grip. If I’d been a good boy and done as he’d expected, he’d most likely have hung back and let Annabelle do her job. As it had turned out, he’d ended up bored and lonesome on a dark road in Chavez Ravine, wondering how his plan had fallen apart.
And then I’d gone ahead and stepped into the trap he’d set in the first place. Despite my efforts to keep it from happening, I’d been played, but good.
When this realization took hold for me, all thoughts of leaving Beadle and Miller and Annabelle to themselves left my mind for good. They’d sprung a trap on me to get Carmelita, and they thought they’d won their little game. What they didn’t realize was that my piece in the game was still in play. Sure, I didn’t know Carmelita, not really. And any sense of obligation I might have had toward her for rescuing me in the desert had pretty much been wiped clean by the way she’d lied to me and gotten me in deep with the police. But none of that mattered now. Stopping Miller and Beadle was pretty much all I cared about as I took another look at the damage in Guillermo’s little house. If Carmelita got rescued in the bargain, so be it.
“He didn’t take her downtown,” I said.
“Where then?”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea.” Then I thought about something else. “When your niece came here, did she have a metal case with her?”
“Yes.”
“Did Miller get that, too?”
Guillermo gave me a sly smile.
“Where is it? No—don’t tell me. It’s better I don’t know.”
He gave me a confused look.
“I’ll explain later. Do you need to get to a doctor?”
“I don’t think so.”
I reached out to pull the rag away from his forehead, but the little dog growled at my sudden move, little yellowed teeth bared at me and a fierce look in those huge eyes.
“Perdita!” Guillermo scolded, and the little dog’s ears drooped.
“Quite a little guard dog,” I said, watching as the mutt shifted its weight nervously and watched Guillermo for further signs of displeasure.
“She’s a good dog,” the old man said with pride.
When I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get bitten, I reached out again and moved the rag to look at the cut the old man had been nursing. It was only about half an inch long, and though the bleeding had stopped, there had clearly been a lot of it earlier.
“Are you sure you don’t want to get it looked at?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I’ve been hurt worse than this before.”
“I know,” I said and ignored his raised eyebrow. “If you’re sure you’re okay, then wait here. If I’m not back in a couple of hours, go downtown to police headquarters and ask for Detective O’Neal. Tell her what happened and tell her that Miller took Carmelita to Lance Masterson’s mansion in Beverly Hills. Can you remember that?”
He tapped the undamaged side of his forehead. “It’s not completely rattled in here,” he said.
I smiled at this. “Good,” I said and started rising up from the crouch I’d been in.
“Be careful, lobo,” he said.
“I will.”
“With her, I mean. My niece…she has a very well-developed sense of self-preservation.” By way of explanation, he looked around at the devastation in the room.
I understood that Miller must have paid quite a price for his prize, but even so the old man’s statement struck me as odd. There wasn’t time for more questions, though, so I just said, “All right, Guillermo. I’ll be careful.”
As I turned away, the little dog jumped off the couch, seemingly intent on escorting me to the door. When she hit the wooden floor, though, I noticed that she made a considerable thud. The dog looked like she weighed less than ten pounds, but it had sounded like three times that amount had just hit the floor.
I stopped midstride, my gaze shifting from Perdita to Guillermo, a question in my gaze. Her eyes, I thought. It wasn’t just that they looked too big. They were too big, no doubt about it. A few tumblers clicked in my mind—the non-lethal gun that looked like the real thing at first glance, the cannisters that let a person fly, and now the little dog with eyes that were too big for its head and whose density suggested there was more to her than met the eye.
With one eyebrow raised, I said, “What gives?”
Guillermo shrugged, his expression sheepish. After a moment, he said, “Perdita is sort of a…little sister to Joaquin Murrieta, Jr.”
“By ‘little sister,’ you mean to say she came later?”
“It’s a progression. Science always improves, yes?”
I stared at the dog. It caught my gaze and sat, looking up at me with an expression that was close to expectant but not quite right. “The eyes are too big,” I said, “because they’re cameras, right?”
“That’s right,” Guillermo said with a chuckle. “I couldn’t get them any smaller. I didn’t have that figured out ‘til I’d already built the rest.” He shrugged. “We all make mistakes, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. The urge to reach down and pet the mechanical dog was strong—her eyes practically begged for attention—but I resisted. The little machine was extremely impressive, and I wanted to ask Guillermo all about it, how he’d gotten it to look so realistic, but I knew that was going to have to wait for another day. “You two take care of each other,” I said. “And don’t forget what I said about Detective O’Neal, okay?”
“It’s all in here,” he said, tapping the uninjured side of his head with a calloused old forefinger.
I went outside to find my driver still waiting on the narrow road with the cab’s back door hanging open just as I’d left it. As I stepped over Guillermo’s little wall, I called out to her: “Is it okay if I sit in front?”
“Sorry,” she answered, waving her thumb toward the back seat. “Company regs.”
I sighed at that and squeezed myself into the back again.
“Where to?” she asked.
“That’s a good question,” I said. “All I’ve got is a name, and I know the house is in Beverly Hills.”
“You trying to play with me now?” she asked, half turning in the seat and giving a curious glance. She wore a cabby’s cap and had her hair tucked up under it. Again, I was struck by the thought that I’d seen her before, but I couldn’t get anything more concrete than that vague feeling, especially with the cap’s big brim covering so much of her face in shadow.
“No,” I said. “Not at all. I was kind of hoping you’d have some idea what I can do. If not, maybe you can just take me back downtown to police headquarters. Someone there might be able to figure it out.”
She raised an eyebrow and let out a long breath. “You don’t look like the type who wants to be anywhere near the police.”
“That may be.”
“This name you’ve got…it wouldn’t be anyone famous, would it?”
“Kind of. A director. Lance Masterson.”
She turned back toward the front of the car and let out a whistle. “The starch I read about in the paper this morning?”
I watched her lean forward and open the little car’s glove box. As she started rummaging through it, I said, “That’d be the one.”
She pulled what looked like a brochure from the cluttered compartment and started unfolding it. Then, apparently realizing I should be clued in to her process, she held the brochure up for me to see. It was bright red with a gold star
in the middle of the cover. The words “Maps to the Stars’ Homes” were printed around the star. After giving me a glimpse, she pulled it toward her and finished unfolding it.
“You think he’s in there?”
“There’s a chance. A lot of these things are crap, but I have it on authority that this one’s pretty accurate.”
“You get a lot of fares looking for stars’ homes.”
She let out another long breath. “You’d be surprised. Pain in the neck driving up through all those windy roads, but the fares are good.” After a few more seconds of looking, she shook her head. “No good. Masterson either wasn’t famous enough to rate gawkers or he was rich enough to keep his name out of these stupid maps.”
I had grown hopeful when I saw she’d had an idea. Now I was back to being disappointed. “All right, then. Thanks for trying.”
“Hang on, hang on,” she said, folding the map again and shoving it back into the glove box. “I’ve got more than one ace up my sleeve.”
The little taxi had a dispatch radio mounted to the dashboard, and the driver reached for the handset once she was finished with the map. “Mutt, you copy?” she said into the microphone while she used her other hand to turn the volume knob on the main unit.
Static cascaded from a hidden speaker. Then a man’s voice said, “Base station, copy.”
“Mutt, this is 32. Got a fare who needs to get to that wake up in Beverly Hills. They had it in the paper this morning? Only he doesn’t have the address.”
“You think it’s in the paper?”
“I doubt it, but if you could check for me. If not, maybe see if you can pick up any chatter on the radio. I expect other guests have been coming in from the airship station. See what you can do?”
“Like I got nothing better going on?”
“Come on, Mutt. My fare is sitting in the back of the car right now, and he can hear you. Don’t be rude. These people are in mourning, after all.”
There was silence for a few seconds. Then the other voice came over the speaker again, sounding contrite now. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do. Hang tight for a sec.”
The Blacktop Blues: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 1) Page 19