I nodded. “All right. The rest I remember,” I said.
It was the same Jed. It had to be. Somehow, each time he had a clear inkling that his control of my body and mind was about to slip away, prompting him to make his promise that he’d be back.
Who the hell is this guy? I wondered, but I already had an answer: Hijack Jed. There could be no better name for him. How he was able to keep slipping into my consciousness and taking me over was not something I could start to guess at, nor did I know what was giving him the signal that his time in my body was coming to an end. Regardless, he was making a habit of slipping in to my mind, which I didn’t like one bit. Worse, I knew he’d be back again if I didn’t find a way to get reunited with my modified fedora.
“Are you all right?” Katrina asked.
I nodded and said, “I think so. Or at least I am now. But…I need to go. Thank you for letting me in and…I’m sorry for what happened. I shouldn’t have tried to take advantage of you like that.”
She looked a little sad and said, “It’s all right. I didn’t mind, honest.” Then with a little rising of one eyebrow and a hint of a lascivious smile, she said, “Are you sure you have to go?”
I could have stayed. No one in my world would ever know.
But then I thought of the vision I’d had in Guillermo’s kitchen. All those women. Had Hijack Jed been busy making conquests in all the worlds with Jed Straits in them? And did I really want to be a party to that now that I was in my right mind again?
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But yes. I do have to go.”
I turned toward the open garage door but stopped after taking a few paces in that direction.
“Do me a favor, Katrina.”
“Sure,” she said, a bit of hopefulness tempering the obvious disappointment she must have felt at the prospect of returning to an empty bed. “What is it?”
“Don’t let me in again. At least…not when it’s just you and me, all right?”
She hesitated a moment before saying, “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure. There’s one more thing, though. Do you remember the woman who was with me when I found you in that hotel?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“There’s a chance she’s going to come here looking for me. She’ll probably show up here in the garage.”
“How’s she going to get in?”
“That’s not important. She just will, okay? If she does, I need you to call me at the house two doors down. I’ll be there. I’m not going anywhere.”
“All right,” she said, a little doubtfully. “I don’t have the number, though.”
I nodded. “That’s fine. I’m going to go back there now and write it down. Then I’m going to come and slip it under this door. You understand?”
“This is awfully strange.”
“It is,” I said. “And I don’t mean to frighten you with any of this. It’s just that this is the way it has to be, all right?”
“If you’re sure,” she said.
“I am.”
I went out the door and pulled it closed behind me.
Back in Jetpack’s house, I went up to the kitchen and looked at the phone to find the number. Then I wrote it down on a scrap of paper and did just as I’d promised—taking it back to the neighboring house and slipping the number under the garage door. It was impossible not to imagine Katrina on the other side of the door, picking up the paper and considering breaking her word about keeping the door between us. If she thought about it, though, she didn’t act; moments later, I was trotting back to Jetpack Jed’s.
I had thought I’d feel better once I was back inside the house, a few locked doors between Katrina and myself. But instead I felt worse. Without the modifications Guillermo had made to my fedora, I was easy prey for Hijack Jed should he find his way back into my mind again. I hated the fact that if he wanted me to get in the hovercar and find this world’s version of a brothel or a gambling parlor or an opium den, he could do it, and I’d be helpless to stop him. Oblivious. Dormant.
Sleep wouldn’t save me.
Neither would finding Jetpack Jed’s stash of liquor and getting myself roaring drunk.
The only thing that I felt had a razor thin chance at working to keep my mind and body under my control was to stay busy—intensely and exhaustingly busy. Maybe concentration would be enough to put up a shield that Hijack Jed couldn’t break through.
I started by searching every inch of Jetpack’s house, going through every drawer and every pocket in every closet. Anything that could be used as a weapon, I set aside—kitchen knives, razors, a length of pipe leaning against the corner of a utility closet. All of these things I stacked on the kitchen table, thinking about how I should plant them throughout the house as insurance against the possibility that either Jetpack or Elsa might return.
Next, I perused all the documents I could find that related to Jetpack’s financial dealings, as I needed to consider that it might be quite a while before Guillermo figured out that it had been the wrong Jed who’d come through the portal with Elsa. In that case, I’d need to eat. I had no intention of reporting for work at the radio station where my double had found such success, but I had no problem with draining his bank account if it came to that.
Down in the garage, I found that Elsa had taken the half-finished project she’d been working on when I’d first interrupted her. Having gotten a better look at the paralyzer she’d used on me, I guessed that the disassembled device I’d seen on the workbench had been another paralyzer in progress.
I took the paralyzer from the pocket where I’d had it since running out into the night. Then I pulled up the stool Elsa had sat on and put the device on the workbench, switching on the gooseneck lamp and examining it under the light. There was a brand name stamped into the metal, Dor-a-matic. This struck me as odd. When I looked at the little bulb on the business end of the thing, I realized that it wasn’t anything Elsa had added. The bulb and everything else about the paralyzer’s exterior looked like it had been manufactured for a specific purpose. It was the guts of the thing Elsa had changed.
Puzzled, I looked around the garage for a sign of anything similar. Whatever the device had originally been intended for, Jetpack Jed had had two of them. Maybe there were more. All I saw, though, were a few tools hanging on pegboard and cabinets filled with things like rope, wire, a broom and dustpan. I walked around the car but saw nothing there either. And then I looked up and saw the red garage door mechanism. Dor-a-matic was painted boldly on the bottom for anyone to see.
Elsa had adapted the automatic garage door controller. The Chavezium chip in this one had all but worn itself out in keeping me under control, but she had one more in my world now, and enough Chavezium to finish the job she’d started here at the workbench.
What she planned on doing with her paralyzer, I couldn’t guess.
All I knew for sure was that it couldn’t be good.
And that I could do nothing to stop her.
Chapter Nine
I finally went upstairs and found a couch to sleep on. There were beds in the rooms on the house’s upper floor, but I couldn’t bring myself to sleep in a bed where Jetpack or Elsa might have slept—or where they’d done things other than sleep. I remember thinking two things before I drifted off into uneasy sleep. One was that I now had less than twenty-four hours until the planned meeting with Andrik Hennigar. The other was the very real fear that when I woke up, I might not be in this house; if Hijack Jed found his way back into my head before morning, there was no telling what unpleasant situation he might get me into before I could take control of my consciousness again.
Fortunately, when the dull light of a coastal morning started creeping into the room, I awoke without any evidence that I’d done anything other than sleep for the last few hours. I unfolded myself from the couch and walked to the picture window, looking out at a fog that had rolled in. It was almost impenetrable. I knew that on the other side of the street was another house,
and beyond that was the Coast Highway, but I could see none of it through the fog, making me feel as though the house could be anywhere, in any world. I didn’t like it and turned away from the window.
Jetpack had coffee and a pot and enough grub in the icebox for me to be able to throw a little breakfast together. As the coffee heated on the stove, it was tempting to think of this as a normal morning in this house with Jed Strait getting up and fixing breakfast. The only problem was that it was the wrong Jed Strait in the kitchen. Still, the playacting at normalcy made me wonder if this world’s Jed Strait got the paper delivered and, if so, would a normal morning consist of him eating eggs and drinking coffee while perusing the headlines?
Before the coffee was ready, I opened the front door and went down the stairs, finding the cool, wet air a little exhilarating as I made my way to the street barefoot. Just as I’d hoped, there was a paper, neatly folded and bound and resting quite naturally at the foot of the stairs. If I ever saw Jetpack Jed again, I’d have to tell him to tip his paper boy nicely.
Back upstairs, I unfolded the paper at the kitchen table where, not too long ago, I’d been manacled to a chair and subjected to threats and interrogation. Now, I was a little more in charge—albeit trapped in the wrong world. I poured my coffee and laid out my eggs and toast, telling myself I’d have to get a little more proactive before the morning drew on much further but that for now it was fine to soak in a little bit more of Jetpack Jed’s world.
I was about done with my breakfast and halfway through my first cup of coffee when I got to the first page of the paper’s second section. There, I saw a photo below a headline that made me put my fork down and forget the rest of the food. “Former Rivals in Romance Now Allies in Politics” read the headline, and the accompanying photo showed the chief of police standing with Seth Wheatley, a smiling brunette between them. Both men had an arm around the woman, whom I did not recognize.
Carmelita had told me about Wheatley still being alive in this world thanks to the paper we’d grabbed at the downtown newsstand the day before when Elvira had dropped us off. This bit about romance, though, was something new. I started reading.
“In a strange twist that only romance writers could dream of getting away with, Mrs. Earl Buckman, the wife of Los Angeles’ Chief of Police, may be playing a key role in securing her husband’s first major endorsement in his bid for the governor’s chair. At the recent gala fundraiser on the expanse of lawn outside the Griffith Observatory, Mrs. Buckman answered reporters’ questions about the rumor that the Chief and District Attorney Seth Wheatley were once rivals for her affections before either man rose to prominence.
“‘Yes, I dated both Earl and Seth back then,’ Mrs. Buckman said with a cavalier smile. ‘But it was Earl who swept me off my feet and Seth who gracefully bowed out of the competition when he saw that the game was up.’
“All of this took place more than twenty years ago, when all three were college students and before either of the men had even considered going into law enforcement—let alone politics.
“When asked what her favorite memory of either man was from that period, the Chief’s wife joked, ‘I had a pet name for Seth back then. Sweetly. Isn’t that funny? For S. Wheatley, of course. And now look. He’s still sweet—coming out tonight to help Earl on the first step of this next big adventure.’
“A reporter asked Mr. Wheatley how he felt about being referred to as ‘sweet’ when he has such a reputation for being tough on crime. The District Attorney responded by saying, ‘I am sweet. Just not with criminals. And I’ll be glad to see my old friends in the governor’s office. Chief Buckman has done a great deal of cleaning up crime in this city, and he’ll do even more for the state.
“The event concluded with a band playing near the steps of the Observatory, and Mrs. Buckman was seen dancing both with her husband and her husband’s former rival, all quite good-natured and with no hint of awkwardness.”
Remembering my coffee, I took a sip while staring at the picture beneath the headline. The coffee had grown cold, though, so I set the cup down and considered the face and eyes of the man who was dead in my world. There was no reference anywhere in the story to Wheatley having moved on to start a family of his own after losing his old girlfriend to Earl Buckman, nor was there reference to any children.
I smiled at the thought of what Detective O’Neal’s expression would be if I were to bring this story back to my world and show her. The smile faded right away, though, as thoughts of my world led straight back to worry over what was happening there in my absence. Once I got back—and I was sure that I’d return at some point—I told myself I was never going to leave again. Such a promise did nothing good for my mood, though, as it only accentuated the fact that I was currently stuck here, in this world, while Elsa, Jetpack, and Hennigar were roaming free in mine, building up to whatever mischief they had planned while I languished here, powerless to stop them.
Getting up, I checked the telephone to make sure it had a dial tone. The steady hum eased my paranoia, telling me the line was working, which meant that Katrina would be able to reach me whenever Carmelita or Guillermo figured out what had happened the night before and came to my rescue. That was good, at least.
I didn’t put the phone away, tapping it nervously instead while I pondered it. After a few seconds, I dialed Elvira’s number. She answered on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Elvira? It’s Jed Strait.”
A pause and then. “Jed? Are you…here?”
“Yes,” I said. “In your world. Stuck here, actually, at least for a little while.”
“I see. Is there some way I can help you?”
“I just had a question, something I can’t really ask anyone else in this world without giving myself away as a…what am I? A visitor, I guess.”
“What’s your question?”
“Is cancer a thing in this world?”
“Cancer?”
“Yeah. Stomach cancer, actually.”
“Yes. I’m afraid we’re still struggling with all sorts of maladies. Is cancer still an issue in your world?”
“Definitely.”
“You’ve made me curious,” she said.
“Sorry. There’s another person from my world who made the jump over here without my knowledge. He says he’s sick with stomach cancer and might be looking for a miracle cure. If I can drag him back where he belongs kicking and screaming, I will. But something tells me he’s slipped out of my grasp.”
“Is he dangerous?”
“I don’t think so. Ideologically, maybe. If you get word of someone starting a cult built around traveling to other worlds, that’s him.”
“A week ago, I would have said that was crazy.”
“Now?”
She let out a little laugh and said, “Now, I think maybe I should start a cult like that myself.”
“If I end up stuck here too long, I might beat you to it.”
“You don’t know how long you’ll be here?”
“No,” I said. “It depends on people on the other side. Guillermo and his helpers. If they can figure out that I’m stuck here, they’ll come get me. Until then…”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” she said. “If there’s anything else…”
“Thanks. I’ll let you know.”
We hung up.
“Now what do I do?” I said to the empty room.
It didn’t answer.
So, I went back to wandering the house, looking for a way to stamp out my uneasiness. Jetpack had a guitar in one of the upstairs rooms. I took it down to the front room and tried to play, but it felt wrong. There was nothing amusing about the situation I was in, so I suppose any form of amusement or distraction would have seemed mechanical.
But then I had a little revelation. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and made myself launch into “The Blacktop Blues,” willing myself to let the song carry me away. It seemed risky, I knew, as dabbling with the fluidity of my conn
ection to this world—or any world—seemed like it could open the door to my consciousness again, providing an opportunity for Hijack Jed to slip into my mind again and take over.
At the same time, it was the only thing I could do, the only connection I had to other versions of Jed Strait in other worlds. Those other Jeds had shown me things before, things that had helped me make sense of the world I was in. Maybe they could show me now.
As I finished the song and launched into another, I imagined getting a glimpse of the world through Jetpack Jed’s eyes. Wouldn’t it be something if slipping into a trance let me see what was happening in my world, looking through the eyes of the man who’d taken my place there?
I thought of other moments where the music had taken me away, opening secret doors and connections I’d never thought possible—in the Break O’Dawn, in the High Note, in Darkness, in Guillermo’s kitchen. And as I thought of those moments, my fingers flying through the minor scale of their own accord, I slipped away just as I’d hoped would happen.
The other thing I’d hoped for—a glimpse through Jetpack Jed’s eyes—hadn’t occurred. Instead, I was looking at a rustic version of the crossover machine, and my hands—or those of the Jed Strait whose mind I had entered—were using a wrench to tighten bolts that secured the machine’s frame to its base. The machine wasn’t in Guillermo’s house or his workshop, and it certainly wasn’t in Peter Mulligan’s garage. Instead, it looked like the machine was in an abandoned house or, if not abandoned, one that was in serious disrepair. I could see windows covered with cardboard and a bare bulb hanging from the remnants of a broken light fixture. And Guillermo’s Roulette Wheel of Doom itself appeared to have been made of a conglomeration of castoffs; the frame appeared to be part bicycle frame and part steel shelving unit. It had wires hanging loosely from its side instead of being threaded neatly through the mechanism. If Guillermo had presented such a version of Klaus Lang’s creation to me, I never would have trusted it to work.
Finished with the bolt, this Jed set his wrench aside, and that was when I saw that he’d lost the end of his right index finger, the digit ending in a round stump just above the middle knuckle. I saw the disfigurement for only a moment. Then his hand dropped out of sight as he walked around the machine, apparently surveying the work he’d done.
The Fedora Fandango: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 5) Page 11
