There were pillars around the perimeter of the room, and at the far end they gave the appearance of holding up a section of the second floor where there was an open area at the top of a winding stairway. More expensive looking people had gathered up there, and I jockeyed into position on the ground floor to get a better look at these elevated elites. It wasn’t long before I recognized Cosmo Beadle near the head of the stairs. He didn’t look exactly like the man I remembered from the movies when I was a kid—the guy with the screwy eyes and massive broom of a mustache who took pratfalls and pies in the face to the delight of his Saturday matinee audiences. This version of Beadle had aged, and the mustache was tamed down so it made him look only slightly like a beached walrus. His hair had gone white, and his figure had gone round, but the screwy eyes hadn’t changed, nor had the general expression that looked like it could elicit laughter from an audience without even trying.
Elsa Schwartz was also on the platform. She lingered near Beadle and kept darting her gaze around the room in a way that made her look extremely nervous. It didn’t take much effort for me to figure out who she was on the lookout for; the real question was whether she had given Beadle a warning about the unexpected guest who might be showing up. My guess was that she had; why else rocket her way here all the way from Catalina?
I gave Elsa only a moment’s thought, however, as someone more interesting passed close by me on her way toward the stairs and the elite group above me. She wasn’t wearing a fancy veiled hat, but the pattern of three little moles on her cheek left me with no question that I’d seen her before. Just not in this world.
In another reality, she had been a woman in the back of a fancy car, a woman with gun-toting friends who did her nasty bidding. In this reality, she received a lot of attention once she made it up to the platform. She wore a smart black dress and a string of pearls. From what I could tell at this distance, the people on the second floor moved around in eddying currents, and there were two poles of gravity that the currents swirled around. Beadle was one, and the woman with the three moles was the other. Who was she, though?
I knew I couldn’t just stand there and puzzle it out, so I kept moving, aware that a member of the wait staff would start making himself noticeable if he just planted his feet and surveyed the room; plus, I was nervous about any sign of the hubbub in the kitchen making its way out to the party. Edward might regain consciousness at any moment and come stumbling through the doorway I’d just passed through—either looking to warn Beadle of my presence or to find me and give me the pounding he’d intended, and which I probably deserved.
If Carmelita was here, she wouldn’t be left free to roam among the elegant guests, so staying among them was not for me either. No matter how much I wanted to run up those stairs and confront Beadle and Elsa and find out about the woman with the moles, I knew all of that would have to wait, or maybe be put on hold permanently. Some questions you don’t get answers to. I’d learned that a long time ago.
The mansion was massive, no doubt the biggest house I’d been in on any coast, and that meant a lot of spaces where Carmelita might be. Glancing upward periodically to keep track of Elsa and the woman in black, I worked my way through the crowd, my focus set on an opening between two pillars that I thought might lead to other parts of the mansion. Halfway there, though, I caught sight of something else on the other side of the room—a head of curly blonde hair that I would have recognized anywhere. Despite the voice in my head telling me to ignore her and continue looking for Carmelita, I moved in on her like a starving dog that’s caught the scent of a juicy steak.
Annabelle had her back to me, which made it awfully easy for me work my way over to her unnoticed. If any of the partygoers noticed me moving among them like I belonged there, I paid them no mind, my eyes darting from Annabelle to the crowd upstairs to the service doorway that I kept expecting to burst open and ruin the rough plan I was following. I managed to get right up behind Annabelle, gripping her elbow without warning and whispering, “Fancy meeting you here,” into her ear, that blonde hair smelling like lilacs when I buried my nose in it.
She didn’t start, didn’t even look my way although I was certain she knew who belonged to the hand that had grabbed her. The man she’d been talking to—a fellow both taller and older than me whose suit was probably in a higher tax bracket than I’d ever see—looked quickly from Annabelle’s face to mine and then back again.
I couldn’t see Annabelle’s expression, but I did my best to give him a look that said he’d be much more likely to continue enjoying his afternoon if he just turned and walked away. It worked. He gave Annabelle a nod and then faded into the crowd like expensive smoke, leaving the poor girl no other choice than to turn and look me in the eye.
“You shouldn’t be here, Jed,” she said.
“I had no choice,” I said, still holding her elbow. “You let me play with your toy this morning and didn’t give me a chance to return the favor. You wouldn’t want me to feel like I’d been rude, would you?”
“This isn’t the time for games, Jed. You need to get out of here, or you’re likely to get hurt.”
Without thinking, I pressed up against her and said, “If anyone’s getting hurt, it’s gonna be you.” At the same time, I reached into the jacket pocket to put my hand on Guillermo’s gun and then I nudged forward with it, holding it so she wouldn’t have any doubt as to what was pushing into her lower back.
My actions were automatic, almost like someone else was in charge. Did Crazy Jed have the reins again? Was this what the private detective version of me had felt when I took over his body in the other world? There’d been no sign that he’d been in there with me, but what if he had been? What if I’d been making him feel just as crazy as I’d felt in the Break O’ Dawn?
While worrying about this, I tried reasoning with myself. It’s Guillermo’s gun, and it can’t hurt her, I thought. No one’s getting shot. Not here.
“What do you want?” Annabelle asked, her voice on the edge of terror.
I felt awful that I was scaring her, but I couldn’t take the gun away from her side.
Sweat broke out on my brow as another thought crashed into my consciousness. You sure you didn’t get the guns switched, Jed? What if it’s the Luger in your pocket and Guillermo’s gun in your waistband?
Trying to ignore my paranoia and the nagging fear that I might have been wrong about not being crazy, I managed to say, “The woman. Gemma Blaylock. I know you gave Miller everything you squeezed out of me. He brought her here, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know anyone named Miller.”
“You’re lying,” I said, the words slipping through my lips without my having to think about them. They were my words, the ones that followed, too. I’d thought them all beforehand, had let them rile me up as I considered the way I’d been used, but I hadn’t planned on saying them, especially not with a gun pressed into her side. It was all too close to what had happened in the Break O’ Dawn. And still the words came out. “Miller told you I was at the Dorado, didn’t he? He set you on the scent. And you helped him find the woman the Crossovers have all been looking for, only she didn’t want to come here willingly. That’s accessory to kidnapping, Annabelle. You really want a part of that?”
She said nothing.
“The cops are on their way, sweetheart,” I said. “If they don’t find her here, there’s going to be trouble, and I’m going to make sure it gets aimed straight at you.” I paused and looked up toward the elites on the second floor. “And the Nazi bitch you threw me to on Catalina.”
I shouldn’t have looked up. Elsa had come to the railing of the second story platform; Annabelle and I were right beneath her. And just as I tipped my face upwards, Elsa looked down, right into my eyes.
There was nothing else for it. Before Elsa could shout or do anything else to raise the alarm, I bolted, still acting automatically and dragging Annabelle along with me. She was on high heels, and I knew she wasn’t going to be up fo
r a sprint even if she’d been a willing partner, but I also knew I needed something of a shield at least for the moment, so I pulled her toward the nearest exit even though she threatened to fall at just about every step.
The commotion we caused caught most of the people around us off guard, so I was able to get her through a doorway without any kind of pursuit. And then, as though in a nightmare, I spun her around and pushed her against the wall, Guillermo’s gun coming out and pointing right at her face while I held her there with my other hand against her shoulder. It wasn’t the same as what had happened in the Break O’ Dawn, but it was awfully close.
“The woman upstairs,” I said. “The one in black that everyone seems to want a piece of. Who is she?”
She looked confused for a moment and then tried moving her shoulder, testing me to see if I really meant business. I didn’t let up on the pressure, and I didn’t move the gun even though part of me—a part that wasn’t in control—knew I should drop the gun before this went any further. Oddly enough, at that moment I recalled the fate of the cowboy actor from the newspaper, Wily Pomeroy, and knew the damage Guillermo’s gun would likely do if it went off this close to Annabelle’s pretty face.
“You’d really shoot me, Jed?” she asked.
“You’d really hypnotize me and leave me in the care of a gun-toting Nazi scientist?”
She just stared back at me. I couldn’t tell if there was still any version of the Annabelle I’d known for years in there. Maybe it wasn’t just me whose hold on reality was slipping; maybe she’d been taken over by another Crossover Annabelle, a tourist from some other reality.
“Who is she?” I repeated.
“Geneva Masterson,” she said without blinking, her voice cold now. It reminded me of the way the redhead Annabelle had called her Jed Strait a bastard as he bled, smoke from her Luger’s barrel trailing into the air.
“The widow?” I managed to say.
“The same.”
Something told me this was important, but I couldn’t have said why.
“Where are they keeping Gemma Blaylock?”
“She’s not here,” she said, but she looked away as she said it. It was a clear tell.
I shook my head. “She’s here. I know Miller got her, and I don’t think he’d take her back to Catalina. He brought her here, where Beadle is. What are they going to do, have some sort of sacrifice on an altar?”
“You don’t understand, Jed.”
“You’re right.”
And then, it was like a spell was broken. The compulsion to hold Annabelle against the wall, to threaten her with a gun and scare her into submission…all of it went away. If there was another Jed Strait who’d just crossed over into my mind, then that was when he left. Or maybe it was merely the end of a chunk of time where my existence and another Jed’s got tangled, where we were both in charge and not in charge at the same instant. For all I knew, the other Jed was none other than the version of me who’d been playing guitar in the Break O’ Dawn and who’d somehow jumped forward in time and was now back where he belonged, looking at his bloody fingers and getting ready to race out of the crowded nightclub.
At any rate, my free will—or what was left of it—returned to me. I made a quick choice and let Annabelle go. Her averted gaze had told me all I was going to get from her. Carmelita was somewhere in the house, but I didn’t think Annabelle knew where, and trying to drag her along on my quest was just going to slow me down and add to the danger that she might still get hurt.
Before Annabelle could react, I bolted down the hallway. The place may as well have been a maze, but it wasn’t the first time I’d been made to feel like a rat. All I knew for sure was that the encounter with Annabelle had ended with neither one of us getting shot, and I felt a great sense of relief as I ran, almost as though the outcome of this crazy adventure no longer mattered now that I’d passed through that gauntlet and come out the other side unbloodied and no guiltier than I’d been when I went in.
I reached the end of the corridor at the same time the door I’d crashed through with Annabelle was thrown open behind me.
“There he is!” I heard Elsa shout, and I didn’t turn around to look at who or what she had with her. I just kept going, dashing through the doorway at the end of the hall and being faced with an immediate choice: another perpendicular hallway that offered me closed doors to the right and left and also the opening to a narrow spiral stairway right in front of me.
I glanced up the stairwell and saw no sign of anyone coming down. Recalling what I’d seen of the house from the outside, I remembered the tower. It seemed a fitting place to hold a woman in distress; if nothing else, climbing to the top would offer me a good spot to put up some resistance until the police arrived—which I was counting on, thanks to Margaret West. If Detective O’Neal ended up being uninterested in the note I’d asked the cabbie to deliver, then I supposed the top of the stairs would be the end of my California adventure. If nothing else, it would provide me a nice enough spot to jump from.
Chapter Eighteen
Up the stairs I went. Despite being pursued and feeling like I was heading into a situation I wasn’t likely to get out of, I felt relieved to have gotten past the moment with Annabelle without either of us having pulled a trigger. There were shouts from below, but I kept going, turning in circles with the spiral as I climbed. I heard a man back in the hallway yelling for me to stop, calling me by name, and I had to assume it was Beadle. He wasn’t all that persuasive.
When I got to the top of the stairs, I found a locked door. It looked like solid oak. There was no point in knocking. Switching Guillermo’s gun to my left hand, I pulled Elsa’s Luger from my waistband and fired into the wooden doorframe right next to the knob. It had been a long time since I’d fired a real gun, and pulling the trigger within the confines of the little alcove at the top of the stairs did wonders for my ears. The ringing blocked out everything else; for all I knew, my pursuers could have been a yard away or still thirty steps below me.
The bullet succeeded in shattering the doorjamb, but the lock still held, so I fired one more time, holding the gun closer to the target. Splinters burst from the point of impact, a few of them lodging into my hand. It felt like I’d just lost an arm-wrestling match with a porcupine. I wanted to shout at the pain; I wanted into that room even more, though, and now there was nothing holding the door’s bolt to the frame.
Standing back and to the side of the doorway, I used my foot to push the door open. From where I stood, I could see only a corner of the room. It gave me no sense of what was on the other side of the door.
“I just want the girl,” I said, not even knowing if anyone was on the other side of the door to hear my demands. “No one needs to get hurt.”
“I’ve got a gun on her,” came a man’s voice from inside. “You step in here and she dies.” I recognized the voice as Miller’s. My lucky day, I thought, but it was an absurd kind of luck. With so many people coming at me from below and the rogue detective on the other side of this door with who knew what kind of firepower at his disposal, my discovery of Carmelita Garcia seemed to be a hollow victory. It was like finding out you’ve won the lottery right before being struck by lightning.
“The cops are on their way, Miller,” I said, hoping that was true. “You shoot her now and you’re done for. Let her go, and you might be able to squeak free of a kidnapping charge.”
“The hell with that,” I heard Miller say.
The ringing in my ears had eased, and I could tell there was movement on the stairs behind me. I supposed that the gunshots from above had slowed Beadle and whoever else was with him, but now the sound of voices from the tower must have prompted the pursuit to resume. Having one enemy in front of me and an unknown number behind was hardly the situation I wanted to be in; I could think of only one way out, and it wasn’t even close to an ideal solution. Even so, I was stuck with it.
So, I pulled the same trick I’d used on Annabelle when I came in thro
ugh my window at the Hotel Dorado. I pointed Guillermo’s gun into the room, knowing I was risking Miller taking a shot at my exposed hand, and pulled the trigger without giving myself a chance to second guess the situation. There was a thudding sound and a clatter; I had expected two thuds and worried that maybe Miller had been bluffing and that Carmelita was somewhere else altogether. For a fraction of a second, I let myself consider one other possibility—that Carmelita hadn’t fallen to the floor because Miller had already knocked her out, or worse.
Nervous about what I’d see, I poked my head around the corner and saw a pleasantly appointed hideaway with a plate glass window and two overstuffed chairs facing away from me, designed to afford the sitters a perfect view of the Masterson estate that included a good-sized lake behind the house, complete with swans and a Japanese-looking temple at the far end. Between the chairs and the door was a little table with two other, less luxurious chairs pulled up to it. Miller was spread out on the floor beside one of the chairs, his police revolver on the tile floor beside him; that had been the source of the clatter.
A woman sat in the other chair, her back to me. I had to assume it was the woman who’d called herself Gemma Blaylock, my savior from the desert, the errant niece of Guillermo Garcia. On the table in front of her was an open metal case, and she was hooked up to it just as I had been in Annabelle’s room this morning. She had the goggles and earphones on, and the turntable in front of her was spinning crazily. Her uncle’s gun appeared to have had no effect on her whatsoever, and for a second I thought the gun had lost its potency, having enough power in its blue crystals to take out only one target instead of two. Since Miller appeared to have been farther from the gun than Carmelita was when I stuck it through the open door, however, that theory didn’t make much sense.
The Blacktop Blues: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 1) Page 21