The Shakedown Shuffle: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 3)

by Richard Levesque

  Peering into the shadows, I saw the bulky shape of Joaquin Murrieta, Jr., Guillermo’s first attempt at building a mechanical person. Where Carmelita was beautiful, graceful, and almost entirely lifelike, Joaquin was clumsy and clunky. At Guillermo’s command, the robot settled back into the shadows.

  “I programmed him for guard duty out here,” Guillermo said with a smile.

  “Worried about break ins?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I been hearing about kids breaking into places. Troublemakers, you know? They come in here, they’ll get more than trouble, I think.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said. Then, returning to the subject we’d been on before stepping into the workshop, I added, “I’ve seen Carmelita smile and laugh before.”

  “Si, but not like this. You stay around her for long and you’ll see. Something got turned on.”

  “And Osvaldo?” I asked.

  Guillermo puffed up his cheeks and blew air out noisily. “That boy’s mother won’t recognize him, I think. I’ll tell you, lobo. Osvaldo has never, ever looked me in the eyes. Not once! And now…” He chuckled. “You saw. He’s not just looking at Carmelita, but me, too, now. And he’s talking! More than just grunts and shaking his head. He talks to her and even a little bit to me. It’s like magic.”

  “Why do you think?”

  He shook his head and shrugged. “If I could figure it out, I’d bottle it and sell it. But…” He shook his head again. “I don’t think science is going to give me an answer on this one. Chemistry, yes. But not the kind I know.”

  “You’re sure Osvaldo knows about her? About what she really is?”

  “Of course. I explained it to him before we came over this morning, and if that wasn’t enough, he watched me open her head and put a new power source inside. He’s not like you and me, but that boy’s not stupid.”

  “And Carmelita? You think she’s capable of…feelings? Like that?”

  Guillermo shrugged again. “Feeling love—or any other emotions—that wasn’t in her original programming. But, like I’ve said before, she’s advanced from that point. Her brain has figured out how to learn all kinds of things on its own. She misses some social things still, sure. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if she started having emotions like that. Real ones. Big ones.”

  “All right,” I said. “So, what do we do about it?”

  “Do?” he asked. “I think we do nothing. See what happens. Kind of an experiment, yes?”

  I wanted to say “no” but I didn’t have the heart. Guillermo seemed so certain that it was all good, if not exactly natural. So, telling myself I still needed to stay vigilant, I said, “If you’re sure.”

  “It’s not like they can have a baby or anything.”

  “That’s good,” I said. Then I added, “You’re sure about that, right?”

  He just laughed and walked farther into the shop.

  “What about that gizmo they’re playing with?” I asked as Guillermo threaded his way through stacks of equipment and boxes of supplies. “I saw he had it with him when you came to the house this morning.”

  “That?” he asked, half turning to look back at me. He shrugged, pointed at a random box on the floor, and said, “When he first came here, I let him have a box of spare parts just like that one. To give him something to do, yes? He went right to work on it. Put that little toy together in half a day.” He chuckled. “Until today, he only seemed to play with it when he got upset. What’s the word? Like a circuit.”

  “Overloaded?”

  “That’s it! Yes, when he got overloaded, he’d watch the lights. It seemed to calm him down, let him focus again. Now, though…” He smiled. “He showed Carmelita how it worked, and they haven’t stopped playing it with it since. Not about being overloaded anymore, yes?”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  Guillermo turned to his workbench. “That reminds me. Look at this.” From the clutter on the bench, he picked up what I at first thought was a flashlight. It was a narrow canister with a lens at the end. I watched him turn a dial and push a button while he pointed the lens at me, expecting to see a bulb light up. Instead, I got the sensation of a mild electric shock.

  “Hey!” I shouted as I jumped out of the path that the lens must have created. “You could warn a guy!”

  My mischievous friend chuckled. “Sorry, sorry. I wanted you to see that it worked. A little like the zapper that Nazi lady used on you, yes?”

  “Yes,” I answered grudgingly, remembering too well the way Elsa Schwartz had hit me with more than one current of electricity from a nasty little gun she’d built. I reminded myself not to tell Guillermo about any other weapons I ran across, lest he set about building one for himself and use me as a guinea pig again. Maybe it would be all right to let him know about Leonora Rigsby’s fancy pen, but even that might be dangerous in the old inventor’s hands.

  “Here,” Guillermo said. “Put this in your pocket.” He tossed me a little disk. It looked to be made of some sort of polymer, transparent with a network of wires inside it and a little chip of rock that I assumed was Chavezium.

  “What’s this going to do?” I asked doubtfully. “Knock me out?”

  “Just do it.”

  With a sigh, I dropped the disk into my jacket pocket and gave him a hangdog look, ready for more abuse. I cringed as he pushed the button on his zapper again, but this time I felt nothing. Then, with some alarm, I watched as he turned the dial on the little weapon, cranking up its output. Still, I felt nothing. At the very end of this experiment—that I hadn’t signed up for—I felt a slight tingling as the dial reached its limit, but that was it.

  Guillermo’s smile was wide. “Not bad, eh?”

  “No,” I said. “Not bad. I wish I’d had that thing at Gold Rush Gulch. Would have saved some wear and tear on both me and Carmelita.”

  I pulled the disk from my pocket and made to toss it back to him, but he shook his head. “No, no. You keep it.”

  “Why?”

  “In case the Nazi comes back. She’s maybe not done with you.”

  I thought again of the station wagon and again dismissed the possibility that Elsa had been driving. “Maybe,” I said. “Thanks.” And I slipped the disk back into my jacket pocket. “I assume that’s not what you brought me out here for, though, is it?”

  Still smiling, he said, “No. Not that.”

  He stepped away from the workbench and pushed a rolling cart out of his path to reveal an oddly shaped object that was covered by an old sheet. Without ceremony, he pulled the sheet free to reveal his latest contraption.

  I would say it was his latest invention, but that wouldn’t have been accurate. The thing before him had already been invented by someone else—namely, an old German scientist name Klaus Lang who’d also had the unhappy experience of getting to know Elsa Schwartz. Lang hadn’t come through the encounter as well as I had. He’d been killed for the very technology that Guillermo now showed me. Since the Lang debacle had played itself out, Guillermo had been hard at work with Carmelita’s help, deciphering the other ancient scientist’s cryptic notes and putting together the machine he looked at now with as much pride as I’d ever seen on his face.

  It was about six-and-a-half feet high, maybe four feet across. At first glance, it looked like a set of tubes—maybe neon—mounted to a platform that also had a console built into it. The console had dials and switches all over its face as well as a few small screens like you’d see on an oscilloscope.

  “What do you think?” Guillermo asked.

  I nodded, hoping my feelings of apprehension and consternation weren’t showing. “It looks just like the pictures from Klaus’s notebook,” I said.

  “More than looks like,” Guillermo returned.

  Recalling what he had said in Carmelita’s bedroom earlier that morning about the machine being almost ready for use, I said, “You’re saying it’s finished?”

  Now I knew a bit of the dread I was feeling had crept into my voice, b
ut I was beyond caring.

  “I think so,” the old man answered.

  “You think so,” I echoed. “Is that good enough?”

  “For now.” Then, still without ceremony, he simply said, “Watch” as he flipped a switch on the console.

  The apparatus started humming, and the glass tubes lit up, an orange glow filling the workshop. The humming grew louder, and I could feel the machine’s vibrations in my feet.

  Considering the minor mishaps that had occurred in my experience with some of Guillermo’s other inventions, I raised my voice a little to be heard over the humming and said, “Are you sure this thing is safe?”

  “Si, si,” he said with a dismissive wave of one hand. “You worry too much.”

  He turned away from the machine even as its humming and vibrating continued to increase while the bulbs seemed to glow even brighter. On a shelving unit near the machine was what appeared to be a box covered with a towel. Guillermo pulled the towel aside to reveal a small cage with half a dozen white lab rats inside.

  I didn’t like where this was going but said nothing as the old man opened the cage door and, speaking soothingly in Spanish, removed one of the rats before snapping the latch closed again. He turned toward me, holding the rat close to his chest with one hand and petting it with the other. At his feet, Perdida looked up at the rat and whined.

  “Callate!” he said to the mechanical dog, and it immediately fell silent, turning twice before sitting obediently at its master’s feet. He moved across the shop to his workbench and set the rat on it, pinning the creature with one gentle hand while opening a nearby drawer with another. He pulled out what looked like a hose clamp with a matchbox mounted onto it, but when I looked closer I saw the box was made of metal. Moving deftly, like he’d done it many times before, he slipped the clamp over the rat’s head and past its front legs. Then, using a screwdriver, he tightened it just enough to make it snug.

  Picking the rat up again, he said, “It’s not perfect. He’ll squirm out of it in a few minutes, but I don’t want to hurt him. Still, it gets the job done.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Transmitter.” His smile grew wider. “Watch!”

  Turning to one of the scopes on his workbench, he began twisting dials, his gaze shifting between the scope and the box that was now attached to the rat. In a few seconds, the scope began making a high-pitched beep, and I saw a corresponding flash of green light on the screen.

  “Here,” he said and handed me the rat. I wasn’t thrilled to be handling it, my experience with rats before this having been limited to scurrying critters in New York alleys and the more brazen inhabitants of smoldering European battlegrounds. The latter had feasted on the dead. At first, my comrades and I had shot at them in disgust, but eventually we’d given up, outnumbered by rats and, sadly, complacent to the horror of their meals after only a short time in combat. The rat squirmed in my hands for a moment but then settled down as I resisted the temptation to drop it on the floor—where it would doubtless have disappeared in the clutter before I’d had a chance to blink.

  “What am I doing with it?” I asked.

  Guillermo chuckled at my uneasiness. “Just walk over there.” He nodded toward the sliding door we’d passed through.

  I did as I was told, moving as quickly as I could among the piles and boxes while trying to ignore the twitching of the rat’s nose against my fingers.

  “That’s good,” Guillermo said. I stopped and looked back at him, seeing him pointing at the light on the scope. He waved at me. “Come back, but watch the lights.”

  Again, I did as he’d bid me, only this time I kept my eye on the scope. The display wasn’t large, but it was big enough for me to see that the green light had moved about an inch away from the center of the field as I’d walked to the shop’s door. Now, the light pulsed steadily back toward the center as I returned to Guillermo.

  “You see?” the old man asked. “We can track him as he goes.”

  I looked at the still humming contraption and said, “You mean, goes?”

  His only answer was to reach for the rat, which I surrendered gladly. Then, still petting and speaking softly to it in Spanish, he took the rat over to the vibrating machine and, as gently as he could, tossed the rat into the opening framed by the neon tubes.

  The rat should have landed on the ground on the other side of the machine, but it didn’t. Instead, it passed between the tubes and disappeared.

  I was dumbfounded at its sudden absence even though I knew—at least in theory—where the rat had gone.

  “That’s it?” I asked. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” Guillermo echoed. Then he turned and pointed to the work bench. “And look,” he said.

  I followed his gaze and watched in amazement as the light that represented the rat still blinked near the center of the scope’s screen and then, after a few seconds, it started moving—slowly at first and without a clear sense of direction, but then the rat must have gotten its bearings or an awareness of its newfound freedom, and it took off like a punctured balloon, the blinking light that represented its progress moving rapidly away from the center of the screen until, a few seconds later, it reached the edge of the circumference and disappeared.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He ran away,” Guillermo said, his smile wide.

  I nodded, not sure of what I was supposed to make of this demonstration. After a few more seconds of staring at the screen, I ventured, “And what does this tell you?”

  Before answering me, Guillermo hit a few switches on the glowing machine and it began powering down, the neon blinking out and the humming dropping in volume right away. “It tells me,” he said as he turned back toward me, “that the journey didn’t kill him. Maybe stunned a little, but only a little. And then…” He snapped his fingers and laughed. “Gone! Yes? You saw how he ran. Nothing wrong with that rat.”

  I thought about this and then offered, “At least not in the short term.”

  Guillermo shrugged. “I suppose. I haven’t figured out how to get one back yet. I tried a leash, but it wouldn’t hold. Once something goes through, it’s through. There’s no halfway in, halfway out.”

  “The leash just fell limp?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “But the rats have all been fine. I set the signal stronger on others so I could track them farther. Eventually, they just stopped moving, but I realized they were getting free of the clamps.”

  “How do you know they’re not going a few feet and then dying?”

  “Because there was no consistency. Some ran for twenty yards. Some half that. It depended on how tight I made the clamps. If I had the heart, I’d do surgery on one to make the transmitter permanent, but…” He looked at the cage where several more rats were looking out, their little hands on the bars like expectant prisoners, and his expression turned sad.

  “I see your point,” I said. Then, looking back at the now quiet machine, I said, “And you’ve sent your little friends to different places? Different worlds? Or all the same?”

  “Several tests on three different worlds,” he said.

  From the workbench, he picked up a clipboard and showed me a piece of paper fastened to it. Columns of numbers and letters filled it, all in his neat but—to me—incomprehensible script.

  “I’ve been keeping track. Just like I’ll keep track when we’re ready to send you through.”

  I sighed at this.

  Guillermo must have caught the nervousness my exhalation could not conceal, as he said, “Don’t worry, lobo. We’re not going to send you through anytime soon. I need to find a way to get one of the ratos back here where he belongs first so we can make for sure that everything is all right with them.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s good, Guillermo. But…”

  I hated to do it, not just because of everything the old man had done for me since I’d arrived in Los Angeles but also because of the absolute joy
he’d so clearly been taking in pursuing the reconstruction of Klaus Lang’s crossover machine. Still, I knew it couldn’t be put off any longer. I’d been playing out possible conversations with Guillermo for more than a month now, but no perfect opportunity had yet arisen for me to say what needed to be said. This wasn’t a perfect opportunity either, but I knew it was about as close as I was going to get.

  “What is it?” he asked, concern in his voice.

  I sighed and went ahead. “I’m grateful for everything you’ve been doing with this,” I said. “And everything before with the first machine.”

  “But?” Guillermo asked.

  I nodded. “Yeah, there’s a ‘but.’ And it’s not something I was counting on when we started all of this. It’s just…”

  Seeing me struggle, he did the thing I’d already come to count on him for. He stepped in to save me. “You’re not sure you want to leave this world now.”

  Not unlike the version of Osvaldo I’d seen this morning, I had been looking at the floor, trying to find my courage in the clutter around our feet. Now, I looked up, amazed that he had seen through my hesitation and zeroed in on the truth.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head and smiled. “No apologies. I understand. You’ve been here for a while. You’ve settled in. Made a life. A career now.” He patted his chest with both hands. “Friends, yes?”

  “Yes.” I hesitated and added, “And…now there’s Sherise.”

  He stepped forward and put a hand on my shoulder. “I understand, Jed,” he said, and I was startled to hear him speak my name rather than use the lupine nickname that he’d come up with shortly after we met. “You lost Annabelle when you first came here, and then you thought you could get her back. And everything else you lost. But now…you have grief and you heal, yes? It’s natural. Even if you’re in the wrong world.”

  “That’s…exactly what I wanted to say, Guillermo. I feel like, the longer I’m here, the more I’m really here, not misplaced. You remember the nightmares I was having when I first got here?”