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

by Richard Levesque

  I stepped through to find Guillermo standing alone in the kitchen, a forlorn expression on his face. When he noticed that I’d entered the room, he looked up and offered a feeble smile that lasted only a second before his face fell again.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  He shrugged, which was as close as I was going to get to an admission that he and “all right” were no longer on speaking terms.

  “What about Carmelita?” I asked. “Have you heard from her again? I tried calling her but she doesn’t answer.”

  His expression still suggesting he was in a bit of a daze, he said, “Carmelita? Oh, she came and left already.”

  “Before the police got here?”

  “Si.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “After Osvaldo.”

  He said it as though Carmelita’s pursuit of her beau was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “How?” I asked. “Do you know where he went?”

  “Not exactly. Come. I’ll show you.”

  He led the way out the back door and across the patch of dirt and weeds that separated his house from the workshop.

  “Do the police know Carmelita went after him?” I asked.

  “No. I kept that to myself.”

  As I had hoped, a different lock had been slipped onto the hasp that kept the workshop door secure. It took Guillermo a moment to fumble with the key, but when he got the door open, Perdida came bounding happily from inside the workshop, making figure eights around our feet as we stood in the darkness outside. The mechanical dog behaved as though nothing untoward had happened, not tonight or ever. Inside the workshop, Carmelita’s rustic “older brother” stirred, lumbering toward the door as he must have done when the burglars—or was it Osvaldo?—cut the previous lock.

  With a command for each from Guillermo, the robotic man and dog each settled down. Still standing outside the workshop, Guillermo said, “I never should have taken him out of that hospital. He was fine there. No one was hurting him. And now look what’s happened.”

  “It’s not your fault, Guillermo.”

  He shrugged again but said nothing.

  Again, I thought about the fact that the workshop and possibly the house had been targeted on a night when Guillermo had been out for a walk and when Carmelita hadn’t been staying over. Trying not to tip my hand and let my friend know I wasn’t entirely convinced of Osvaldo’s innocence, I asked, “Guillermo, you said you were coming home from a walk when you saw the car. How long had you been gone?”

  In the darkness, I thought I saw a hint of his sad smile again, but it disappeared as quickly as it came. “Maybe…an hour?”

  “Just out walking?”

  He let loose with a little sigh. “I went down the street after Carmelita left with the truck. Osvaldo gets quiet when Carmelita leaves him, so I knew he’d just go to sleep on the sofa if I left him alone.”

  “Down the street where?” I asked, feeling like Guillermo was trying to avoid the issue.

  “To Josefina’s,” he said.

  “Josefina?”

  He nodded. “Osvaldo’s mother.”

  I raised an eyebrow. The way he said her name, the way Mrs. Marquez had been crying on his shoulder…things clicked. There had been more to Osvaldo’s release from the state mental hospital than Guillermo had led me to believe. His taking on the young man as a helper had come as a result of his romantic attachment to Osvaldo’s mother.

  “I see,” was all I could manage. Feeling a raindrop hit my forehead, I looked to the sky, noting that the darkness of midnight now seemed even darker. I stepped aside to indicate that we should get into the workshop and get on with it.

  He took the hint and entered, turning on the interior lights as well as the floodlight mounted above the door. It illuminated the yard and inspired Perdida to prance toward the kitchen and back again. I noticed that she was wearing an odd-looking harness. The fact that the dog—who was programmed to heel on command—should need a harness at all was strange, but the one she wore had a little pouch sewn to the leather, as though the dog was being used to haul some very small cargo. I doubted that anything bigger than a flashlight would fit into the pouch.

  Still watching the dog, I stepped into the shop and then noticed that Perdida had paused in her return from the kitchen door. She stood in the dirt, pawing something. Curious, I walked back into the yard and cursed under my breath when I saw what the mechanical dog had discovered—the portable phone Carmelita had had with her while staking out Jeanie Palmer’s house.

  This explained why she hadn’t answered when I tried calling her back. I imagined the phone lying here in the dirt, maybe ringing impotently while the police inside tried getting information from Guillermo and the weeping Josefina. Or maybe the phone hadn’t rung at all; its antenna wasn’t connected, so maybe the signal hadn’t gone through—which would have been better. It wouldn’t have done for the police to have heard the phone ringing in the yard and come out to investigate.

  Getting hit by a few more drops, I picked up the phone, patted the little dog on its head, and went back to Guillermo, who was standing in the door of the workshop waiting for me. When he saw me hold up the phone, a look of understanding crossed his face, and he smiled a little sadly. I handed him the phone, covered in dust, and he barely gave it a glance before setting it down on a pile of electrical parts, probably to be forgotten until some new need for it arose.

  While I’d been watching the dog and collecting its discovery, Guillermo had fired up an oscilloscope on the workbench, a smaller model than the one he’d used to track the rat in its other worldly journey on Friday. The scope’s tubes warming, the screen now offered a pleasant amber glow with a bright light blinking rhythmically in the upper left quadrant.

  The old inventor looked at the screen with a mixture of sadness and pride.

  “What is this?” I asked, reasonably sure that the blinking light wasn’t marking the progress of another experimental rat.

  He tapped the screen where the light was blinking. “Carmelita,” he said.

  I didn’t understand, but Guillermo wasn’t in the explaining mood just yet.

  He switched a knob on the scope’s control panel. The blinking light jumped to another quadrant.

  “And that’s Osvaldo,” he said.

  Another click of the knob, and both lights appeared but now in two different quadrants.

  “Carmelita and Osvaldo,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “But how?”

  Now the smile I was used to finally emerged—broad and toothy, the wrinkles around his eyes growing deeper as the smile traveled up his face. Turning to the workbench, he pushed a coil of wire aside and picked up a small electrical device no bigger than a pair of dice. Black electrical tape had been wrapped around it, and I could see there were parts that had been soldered.

  “What am I looking at?” I asked.

  “A tracking device.”

  “Like you used on the rats,” I said, “when you sent them through your machine.”

  “That’s right,” he said with a nod.

  “You put one in Carmelita when you changed her battery.”

  “Right again.”

  “And Osvaldo? He doesn’t have batteries, does he?”

  “No, lobo. But he carries something that does, yes?”

  “His toy. That light wand.”

  “Yes. That’s it.”

  He nodded enthusiastically.

  “Why, though? How did you know you’d need to track them?”

  “I didn’t. I just thought it would be a good idea with Osvaldo when I got him out of the hospital. When I saw how attached he was to the globe he made, well…” He shrugged. “I took it one night when he was asleep and put the tracker in. Now, I know it wasn’t necessary. But when he first came, I didn’t want to take a chance he’d wander off.”

  Not with your budding romance on the line, I thought. Losing his girlfriend’s son certainly wouldn’t hav
e scored Guillermo any points.

  “Why Carmelita, then?”

  He shrugged again. “I was thinking about it for a while. I lost her once. And then you brought her back to me. Now, we can’t lose her…even if she ever decides she wants to be lost again.”

  I nodded and smiled, grateful for Guillermo’s ingenuity and foresight.

  “So, now what?” I asked.

  “Now, we wait for Carmelita,” he said, tapping the screen again.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Watch. The lights are slowly getting closer together.” Moving his finger across the glass, he said, “Carmelita’s going to catch up with the people who took Osvaldo.”

  I raised an eyebrow, confused again. “But how does she know where he is?”

  “She’s tracking him just like we are. There’s a smaller scope. We put it in the pick-up truck when she got here, and then she took off. Just before the police got here, too.”

  He chuckled, apparently thinking of how close he’d come to needing to explain the flying truck to the officers.

  I didn’t share in his good humor. Still not wanting to slip him the idea that Osvaldo might have been a willing passenger in the car rather than an abductee, I said, “Guillermo, we don’t know who’s in that car with Osvaldo. They could be dangerous.”

  “Yes, but Carmelita…she’s dangerous, too.”

  And blinded by love, I thought, imagining her confronting Osvaldo’s “captors” only to find that her lover was in league with them. Her guard would be down, way down.

  Trying to save Guillermo from this scenario, I said, “You’re right, but what if Carmelita stumbles onto them without being one hundred percent alert?”

  “Not possible.”

  “Did you think it was possible for her to fall in love?”

  He said nothing, just shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  I nodded to the scope. “You said Carmelita took the other one of these. It runs on Chavezium?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does this one?”

  “Of course.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “Go?”

  “Let’s get it into my car. I’m going after them.”

  “I’m coming, too.”

  Hoping to spare him the unpleasant truth I’d been imagining about his harmless assistant, I said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Guillermo. It might be dangerous.”

  He shrugged. “I guess you’re going to have to protect me then, eh lobo?”

  Chapter Eleven

  The lights of downtown were still visible in my rearview mirror when I switched on the windshield wiper. Barely adequate at best, the little strip of rubber was soon making no difference in my ability to see the road ahead. It cut through the water on the windshield, only to have it replaced as soon as it completed its arc across the glass. The car’s headlights bore twin holes into the torrent, but it was a light that petered out so near to the front of the car as to be almost useless. Worse, the pulsing lights on the oscilloscope were directing me north, toward the mountains, and as the car approached the foothills, the rain only increased.

  “Can you see well enough?” Guillermo asked. He sat in the passenger seat, his legs spread with the bulk of the scope between them.

  “No,” I said, “but that never stopped me before.”

  On the seat between us was an unfolded map, and several times I had to pull to the curb to consult it, my eyes darting from the grid of streets to the blinking lights of the scope. Then Guillermo and I would consult for a moment before deciding which of the streets around us were most likely to get us closer to the sources of the blinks. It was an agonizing process. Several times, we made wrong decisions, taking streets whose direction soon caused the blinking lights to move farther from the center of the scope rather than toward it. This meant turning back to try another option—a frustrating waste of time made even worse by the steadily shrinking distance between the pair of blinking dots that meant Carmelita was getting closer and closer to Osvaldo, as well as potentially closer to a confrontation that I didn’t want her to have to face without me.

  “Why is Carmelita’s dot not cutting back and forth the way ours is?” I asked. “Isn’t she making wrong turns, too?”

  “Not if she’s in the air,” Guillermo said.

  The thought of the Patterson flying through the low clouds and sheets of falling rain made me even more agitated. Though the night was cold, sweat beaded on my forehead as I pushed my car harder, my whole system riding on hope—hope that Carmelita wouldn’t get to Osvaldo before we got to her, hope that the Patterson didn’t fall out of the sky, hope that lightning wouldn’t hit the pick-up and short out its flying mechanism or the brain of its pilot, and hope that I didn’t crack up on the wet streets or draw the attention of a police officer whose own battles with hope right now probably centered around getting through the night without having to get out of his car in the pelting rain.

  Finally, in the foothills west of Alta Dena, we hit upon a road that took us farther into the mountains. By now, Guillermo and I had figured that the car carrying Osvaldo could be going nowhere but up, maybe planning on cutting through the mountains and going all the way to the desert beyond or else winding its way up to the observatory at Mt. Wilson or the resort at Mt. Lowe. Why it was going in this direction, I couldn’t guess, but the route seemed less and less to me like the one a burglar would take after a heist went wrong.

  Wary that pushing the Winslow too hard would send Guillermo and me tumbling to our deaths if I missed a curve or the tires’ traction gave out at a crucial spot, I alternated between gunning the engine and easing up. Now I wasn’t taking my eyes off the road at all, not to look at the map and not to check the blinking lights on the scope. Guillermo kept me updated, though.

  “They’re getting closer together,” he said.

  “Can you tell how far away we are?”

  “Still a little ways.”

  “Five miles?” I asked. “Ten?”

  “More like two, I think.”

  This news spurred me on, and I gave the car more diesel, putting more faith than I thought I could muster into the little ridges of rubber that met the road beneath us.

  “She’s almost there,” Guillermo said a few curves later.

  “How soon?”

  “Soon. Soon. She’s almost on top of him.”

  “You think she’s still airborne?”

  “Can’t say.” Then a few seconds later, his voice almost a shout, he said, “Now! She’s there!”

  I pulled my eyes from the road to look at the scope. The blinking lights had merged, the single dot still looking impossibly far from the center of the screen.

  “Damn!” I said and looked back at the road.

  “What’s wrong? She’s going to save him.”

  “I’m glad you’re so sure of that. I’m not.” Then, my hands so tight on the wheel that I thought I might never be able to let go, I added, “Tell me if they start moving again.”

  “All right,” he said. The energy I’d heard in his voice a few seconds earlier was gone. Now, he sounded defeated, and when I glanced over, I saw his lined old face in the reflection of the scope’s green light, a deep sadness in his eyes. A wave of guilt washed over me, as I knew the sense of foreboding he now felt was all because of me. There was nothing for it, though, so I did my best to push back against the tide.

  It was maybe five more minutes before Guillermo said, “Almost there.” He sounded afraid of what we’d find, and still I said nothing to offer him assurances. Anything I tried would feel empty, and he’d know it.

  Then, just as he was saying, “Almost” once more, we rounded a corner and I caught sight of taillights in the distance. “There!” I said at the same time as Guillermo spoke. He looked up as another outcropping of mountain blocked our view.

  “Did you see?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I couldn’t tell if it was your truck or not.”

&
nbsp; “Me neither.”

  We took the next three curves in silence, and then we were practically upon the parked Patterson, halfway in the road.

  “I don’t see the other car,” I said as I slowed the Winslow.

  “Maybe it went off the side.”

  “With Osvaldo?”

  Guillermo tapped the scope. “He’s here. They’re both here.”

  I stopped behind the truck and killed the engine. Rain still fell hard on the scene, my car’s headlights cutting a swath through the downpour to illuminate the back of Guillermo’s truck but nothing on the road in front of it.

  “Wait here,” I said. Pulling my gun from my shoulder holster, I flipped off the safety and grabbed my hat from the back seat. Then I was out of the car in the rain, running in a crouch to the back of the truck where I stopped and tried to listen for any sign of life on the road ahead of me. After a moment, I thought I heard a moaning sound, a sound more animal than human but low and almost lost in the steady hiss of rain hitting the pavement and all the trees that lined the winding mountain road.

  The gun aimed in front of me, I crept around the side of the truck, memories of dozens of French and Belgian towns and farmhouses flooding my brain as I tried to focus on the situation in front of me, not the myriad soldiers I’d hidden from, fired on, and skulked around during the war. When I reached the driver’s door, I made a swift move to wrench it open with one hand and point my weapon inside with the other, but as soon as I had done so, I saw that the cab was empty. Then, through the windshield and the rain dripping off the brim of my hat, I saw the source of the strange moaning.

  Carmelita sat on the side of the road, her hair bedraggled and her clothes soaked through. With her knees drawn up almost to her chin, she was rocking back and forth, her mouth slightly open and that strange sound coming from it. Still wary of the possibility of an ambush from the nearby tree line, I reached into the Patterson’s cab and killed the headlights. Then I ran through the dark to Carmelita’s side.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  She made no response, just continued rocking and moaning.