“Where is it?”
“The deed says Paradise Road, but there’s no address.”
“Nothing?”
“No.”
“What else does it say?”
“It just says ten square…mountains.”
“Try again.”
“Ten square acres in the Santa Monica Mountains.”
“All right. I think that’s the one. I’m going out there.”
“Where?”
“Gold Rush Gulch. Listen. If I don’t contact you by nine tonight, call O’Neal and say where I went. Tell her I’ve got what she’s after and to come right away.”
“All right.”
“You’ll have to leave a message, but don’t take no for an answer. Do you understand?”
“Yes. Call…Neal if you’re not back by midnight.”
“No, no. Not midnight. By nine tonight.”
“By nine.”
“That’s it. Good work, Carmelita.”
I hung up then and looked at my tablet. All I’d written was “Paradise Road, Santa Monica Mountains.” How the hell was I going to find the place?
Although the light had not yet begun to fade toward dusk, a few more people were walking into Let There Be Darkness, mostly men. Watching them and the other people on the street, I considered my options. If I was correct, Frank Attentater or his brother had likely seen Mercy at a similar club early Saturday morning after she’d been escorted from the High Note; then they—or Elsa—had followed her home and, for some reason, had waited until it was light to kill her. At around ten that night, the killer had gone to the Speckled Hen and Let There Be Darkness, but I had no way of knowing which one he’d gone to first. Sometime between then and dawn, he’d accompanied Elsa to my house and had broken into Klaus Lang’s and killed him. Again, there was no way to know which had come first. So, we had two killings and at least two visits to edgy nightclubs within twenty-four hours. The question was—with all that activity on Saturday, which was more likely to happen next: that the killer would show up again at one of the same clubs, or that he would be laying low with Elsa, possibly at an old movie set somewhere in the mountains?
It didn’t take me long to arrive at an answer. I started my car and drove to a service station where I filled up the tank with diesel and bought a roadmap that included the outlying areas of the city. Then, even though it was early for dinner, I went to a drive-in restaurant on La Brea and ordered a pastrami sandwich and a beer to wash it down.
Sitting in the car and waiting for the carhop to bring my food out on a tray, I opened the map and turned to the index. There were three Paradise Roads in the county, but only one was anywhere near the Santa Monica Mountains, a strip of wilderness between the Pacific Ocean and some of the communities to the west and north of Los Angeles. The road started at Ventura Boulevard and then snaked its way through an area on the map that was all green. I noticed that as the line representing the road went farther and farther into the green, the narrower it got; I could only surmise that Paradise Road started out as a regular thoroughfare but ended up as a stretch of dirt or gravel weaving its way through the wilderness, probably ending up as a cow path in the hills above Malibu—the perfect spot for a fake western town for the old silent pictures.
“Is that where you’re waiting for me, Elsa?” I said out loud. I hoped the answer was yes. I also hoped I’d have the opportunity to return the kindness she’d done to me by barging into a place where she thought she was safe and showing her she wasn’t.
Chapter Sixteen
After eating and finishing only half of my beer, I checked the car’s trunk for a few necessary supplies. Then I headed up Coldwater Canyon and through the Hollywood Hills, ending up on Ventura Boulevard on the edge of the San Fernando Valley. This I followed west as the sun dropped toward the horizon. Dusk was gathering by the time I got to Paradise Road, and I turned on my headlights as I headed into the hills, realizing I was nervous only when my fingers started cramping on the steering wheel.
As I had expected, Paradise Road dwindled to a rutted gravel track not long after leaving the flatlands behind. Groves of oak trees dotted the hillsides amid vast stretches of wild grasses, and I caught a few deer in my headlights; they gave my car a few seconds’ careful appraisal as it approached and then dropped their heads to graze again after deeming my presence nothing to be worried about.
The scene was so peaceful that I started worrying about the sound of my car’s engine. Not knowing how far into the hills the old movie set was, I was concerned that Elsa or Attentater or anyone else squatting on Cosmo Beadle’s real estate would hear me coming from a long way off. Forewarned by my chugging diesel, they might bolt; they might also dig in and have their weapons aimed at me, ready to fire the second my car’s lights came into sight. Neither possibility struck me as desirable.
I decided to pull off the gravel road beside a stand of oak trees. Turning off the engine, I sat still for a moment with the windows rolled down and listened in the gathering darkness. It took a few seconds for the sounds of nature to work their way into my ears, replacing the mechanical sounds that had dominated my senses for the last few miles. I heard crickets getting ready to start their evening’s ruckus and not much else: no sounds of the city, no sounds of people doing any kind of living up in these hills. The relative silence told me I’d likely stopped the car soon enough to have avoided detection from my quarry. From here, I’d need to move as silently as possible.
After taking the time to unclip the antenna from Guillermo’s phone and roll the wire into as tight a spool as I could make, I put the little case and the wire into my coat pocket. Then I got out of the car; I heard some scurrying in the nearby underbrush and figured I’d spooked a lizard or a squirrel with my big human feet. I took a breath after this and stood still for a moment, looking at the ground and wondering if I wasn’t about to step on a rattlesnake. It was too gloomy to know for sure, so I nodded to my surroundings and went back to the car’s trunk where I kept a flashlight and a few other things I figured I’d need.
The moon was rising, but it was only at quarter strength and wasn’t going to do much to help me see through the darkness, which I wasn’t enjoying. After fumbling for the flashlight and finally finding it, I swung an arc of light at the oak trees and grass just to make myself feel better. Then I turned back to the trunk where I had mounted a little lockbox to the wall of the car. Inside this was a .38 revolver—a twin to the one I kept by my bed at night—and a box of ammunition. I checked the gun and loaded it; then I slipped the box of bullets into my other coat pocket and the gun into my waistband with the safety still on.
That job done, I turned my attention to the larger case I also kept in the trunk. Inside was another of Guillermo’s gadgets, one I had previous experience with. Powered by the same element that kept Carmelita going and that had gotten the Patterson pick-up to get off the ground, the gizmo in the case consisted of two canisters and several straps. It had been a while since I’d had the opportunity or the need to use it, but once I started slipping the leather straps over my shoulders and fastening the buckles around my waist, chest and crotch, I felt pretty well at home with Guillermo’s flight pack.
Pulling at all the straps one more time and satisfied that they were tight enough to keep me from wishing I’d never gotten out of bed this morning, I closed the trunk and locked the car door. Then I slipped my keys into my pants pocket and checked my coat pockets to make sure the bullets and phone were secure. Satisfied, I took a deep breath and switched on the flight pack.
A whoosh-ing sound greeted me along with the strong chemical smell of the Chavezium heating up inside the canisters strapped to my back. With a deep breath, I clicked on the controller in my left hand and felt my feet leave the ground. As had happened when I’d used the flight pack before, I felt gravity pulling at my weight against the straps, and it wasn’t terribly comfortable in the crotch. Once I got about ten feet off the ground, though, I adjusted the controls so that I
was more fully suspended underneath the mechanism. Now I was in a position parallel to the ground and my weight was more evenly distributed against the straps, so it felt a little better.
I gave the command to rise higher into the air, and soon my car looked very small beneath me. Leaving the grove of trees behind, I began flying forward into the hills, scanning the ground ahead of me for any sign of Gold Rush Gulch. At this height, I soon realized that it had probably been a mistake to try and find the old movie set in the darkness. Paradise Road, or what was left of it, had disappeared in the dark countryside below me, and though I still flew in the direction the road had been heading in when I’d stopped driving, there was no way to know if it continued in this direction or not. Tilting my head upward, I could see nothing but more darkness ahead of me as the hills stretched into the night, and farther away it looked like an even greater wall of blackness. I assumed this was the ocean, and if I got that far I’d be forced to turn around and start crisscrossing the opaque wilderness below me, hoping I’d stumble onto Gold Rush Gulch somehow.
While I knew it would be logical to create a sort of search grid from the air, I also had very little patience for the hours it would take to cover the expanse below me in such a methodical way. Instead, I followed impulse, veering off the path to the sea and telling myself I’d search this way for an hour; if I got nowhere, I’d come back in the daylight, maybe with reinforcements.
It took close to forty-five minutes before I spotted a light in the wilderness beneath me. I stayed high in the air above it for a while, flying in small circles as I tried to determine the source of the light and whether or not the dark shapes beneath me were trees or a cluster of buildings. With the moon doing a lousy job of lighting up the landscape, I had no choice but to fly lower, keeping my eyes intently on the ground the whole time in case I detected movement from below. If I was going to get shot at, I wanted to know it was coming so I could take whatever evasive action the flight pack would allow.
There was no movement from below, however, and it didn’t take long for me to be able to see that I was, in fact, above what looked like a little town—two rows of buildings laid out on either side of a narrow space that could easily have passed for a street with the right movie magic misdirecting viewers’ eyes. Several of the buildings looked like nothing more than facades, but there were a few that looked like complete structures, and it was from one of these that the light I’d seen from above was emanating. More importantly, a car was parked near the building with the light, and while I couldn’t say for sure if it was the same one that had sped away from my house in the early morning hours, it did look like it was at least the right size and type.
Satisfied, I broke off from my pattern of descending circles and veered off to the south. A strip of vegetation at the base of a nearby hillside suggested that a stream might be flowing through this portion of the LA wilderness, and I headed for it, hoping to get some cover for my landing and a place from which to weigh my options without being vulnerable in the open spaces around the ersatz mining town. As I dropped lower, I saw that the vegetation was actually a stand of oak trees, which struck me as perfect cover.
Slowing my descent with Guillermo’s controls, I dropped through the leafy branches and came to the ground amidst the stand of oaks. With my feet firmly on the ground again, I switched off the flight pack and stood still for a moment, listening in the dark for any sign that my landing had raised an alarm in the building where the light was coming from. I heard nothing but stood still for at least a minute. If someone had been aware of my descent and was watching silently, waiting for me to emerge from the trees, I didn’t want to give away my position by snapping a twig or rustling some dried leaves under my feet.
When I felt it was actually safe, I let out a long breath and started loosening the straps that had held me to the cylinders. Once freed from Guillermo’s machine, I carried it to the edge of the little group of trees and then looked for one of the oaks with a crook in its main branches low enough for me to reach. Finding a good candidate, I set the canisters on the ground and wrapped the leather straps around the flight pack before lifting it into the crotch of the tree. I tried wiggling the canisters to see how secure they were and, once I was satisfied that they weren’t likely to fall or get nudged to the ground by a curious racoon, I let my eyes pass over the group of buildings in the near distance.
About a hundred yards separated me from the nearest part of the fake mining town, and I could see that the building where the light shone from was in the middle of the structures. Given the isolation of the old movie set, I assumed that Elsa felt pretty secure in her hiding place and doubted she would have Attentater or anyone else standing guard over her or the little cluster of buildings. Even so, I stood in the shadows and watched for at least ten minutes, looking for any sign of life besides the light.
Then, seeing nothing but a dark, anachronistic street in the faint moonlight, I pulled my .38 from my waistband and moved in. The effort was not unlike the efforts I’d made in more than one village in France and Germany during the war—only in those cases I’d had well-armed GIs at my back, taking aim at the dark shapes I was running toward and poised to start taking out anything that moved or caused a muzzle flash. Being without such backup now wasn’t the worst thing, but the realization did cause me to remember that this wasn’t wartime and that relying on the instincts I’d honed during years of conflict might make me overconfident. As a result, I crept forward at a crouch rather than run through the darkness with my head down.
Reaching the first building, I stopped and pressed my body against the rough wood of the little structure, giving myself a chance to catch my breath and listen for signs of life. I heard nothing, so I moved on, running to the corner of the next building and repeating the pattern. This continued until I was in the middle of Gold Rush Gulch and at the corner of a building opposite the one where the light shone through the window.
Still satisfied that I’d gone this far undetected, I ran as quietly across the street as I could, coming to a stop at the corner of the lit building. From there, I crept forward, gun held at the ready, until I was beside the window. Holding my breath, I leaned in to let my right eye see a sliver of the building’s interior.
I saw a small room with a table and four chairs around it. At least two kerosene lanterns illuminated the sparse little space that could have been used as a stand-in for a miner’s cabin in the old silent film days. Elsa Schwartz sat at the table, her face pointed in my direction but her eyes directed at five playing cards held in her hand. Besides the deck of cards, I also saw a military canteen and something small and rectangular on the tabletop near Elsa’s elbow. Behind her was an open doorway, nothing but darkness beyond it. Opposite Elsa, his back to me, sat a man whom I guessed was either Frank Attentater or his long-lost twin brother. I watched as he dropped a card onto the table and drew another from the deck between them. Then, as Elsa looked about to raise her gaze to his, I ducked away from the edge of the windowpane.
My heart racing, I contemplated the door on the other side of the window, wondering if it was locked. I doubted these movie-set doors had even had locks installed when the place had been built, nor did it seem likely that Elsa would have gone to the trouble of setting up any sort of make-shift lock, like wedging another table under the doorknob. If that was the case, I had her at a disadvantage. If not, then the advantage was Elsa’s, and I was about to get myself into some serious trouble. Remembering what I’d told Carmelita about sending in the cavalry if I didn’t get in touch with her before much longer, I stepped away from the building and moved into the middle of the street.
Standing still for a moment, I took a deep breath and then took five or six bounding steps toward the door, ending my charge by slamming into the old slab of wood with my shoulder and pushing it open into the room. At the moment of contact, I ducked and rolled so I actually entered the room near the floor, coming up onto my knees with my gun barrel pointed right at Elsa’
s head.
She leaped backwards, knocking over her chair even as I shouted, “Don’t move!”
I saw her freeze then, and I waved the gun barrel toward her male companion, who was much closer to me. At this distance, I was able to see that I’d been right the other morning—if it wasn’t Frank Attentater returned from the grave or from some other bizarre absence, then the man before me was Frank’s exact double. He looked at me with complete shock, but rather than making a move toward a concealed weapon, he had been about to lunge toward me before the black mouth of my .38 told him he should make a better choice. Now he just stared at me, both of us breathing hard but not moving.
“This is unexpected,” Elsa said.
“Isn’t it?” I answered. “Your visit was so nice and neighborly the other morning. I thought I’d return the courtesy.” Directing the gun back at her, I said, “Why don’t you sit down again. Then you can introduce me to your friend here.”
She hesitated a moment and then took her seat again. I didn’t like the smug look on her face. It wasn’t the look of someone who’s staring down a loaded gun. Rather, it was the look of a cardplayer who knows the top card before it’s been revealed.
Trying to ignore her expression, I said, “So which is it? The long-lost Franz Attentater or his brother? Fritz maybe?”
Elsa stared but said nothing.
Then her smug look spread to a nasty smile.
“You think you’re so smart, Mr. Strait.”
“No,” I said. “Just tenacious. Like a terrier. And you’re the rat I’m chasing out of its hole.”
“If I’m the rat, then what does that make Bruno here?”
“Bruno?” I asked, looking back at the man she’d been playing cards with. “I don’t know exactly, but he’s Frank Attentater’s twin brother. That much I know. And I know that Mercy was wrong when she thought he was her husband. What I haven’t figured out yet is why he killed her, but I’ll get there.”
The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2) Page 18