Why, though?
Where was Guillermo in this world, and why was I the one maintaining this sad version of the Wheel of Doom rather than its inventor?
Since this Jed—Tinker Jed, I thought of him as—was alone and apparently unaware that his consciousness was being spied on, there was no way for me to find answers.
Then I watched as Tinker Jed went to the machine’s control panel and lifted a hinged section. I saw wires and other components I couldn’t recognize. There was a spot in the middle with several bare wires not connected to anything.
Turning away from the machine, “my” hands reached for a little canvas bag on an unfinished pine shelf. The bag looked like a miniature version of the one Elsa had stored her stolen Chavezium in. I watched myself open the bag and slip two fingers inside—the middle and ring fingers—wiggling them in an effort to pull something small from the bottom. The vision was so vivid that I could almost feel the canvas, anticipating the sensation of my fingertips reaching the hard little chunk of blue crystal that I knew Tinker Jed was feeling for.
And then the B-string on the guitar broke, severing my connection to this alternate self and putting me back here in the comfort and luxury of Jetpack Jed’s front room rather than the shabby interior where Tinker Jed was working on a strange, graceless version of the Wheel of Doom.
I set the guitar aside and wiped sweat from my brow, closing my eyes and doing my best to replay what I’d just seen. The significance of this vision was lost on me, but I knew it mattered somehow, or that it would eventually, and I wanted to remember as much as possible.
After several minutes, I opened my eyes and put the guitar back in its case. Thinking of how I’d describe what I’d just seen to Guillermo when I finally got the opportunity to speak with him again, I got up and walked around the room, ending up in front of the plate glass window where I stared out at the sliver of the Pacific I could see now that the fog had lifted.
I had hoped that a vision would give me a sense of direction, but now that I’d had one, I felt just as restless as I had before pulling Jetpack’s guitar out and tuning it. In fact, I felt more restless now as the questions that the vision had churned up made me more impatient to get back to a world where I could make things happen. I was also more frustrated that the vision had done nothing to show me how to get myself home.
Or had it?
Quickly turning away from the window, I went to the kitchen, opened the door to the garage, and went down the stairs faster than I should have. Breaking my neck on the stairs was not in my plans, but my eagerness had just jumped into high gear and I didn’t think my brakes were any good.
I had given the rooms above me a thorough search and had come up with nothing but a few things I could use as improvised weapons. But I hadn’t searched the area Elsa had used as her workshop nearly as thoroughly as I’d searched upstairs. Seeing Tinker Jed’s improvised work area, clearly located in a space not meant for the delicate work he was engaged in, had made me think of Elsa being in a similar spot—the scientist with no lab. What had she done instead?
Her improvised lab was before me—a workbench with a gooseneck lamp and a few tools on pegboard and in the nearby cabinets. This was where she had worked. Now, it was my turn.
First, I examined the lamp, turning it upside down and using a screwdriver to take the base apart. There was nothing out of the ordinary there, no hidden technology Elsa might have forgotten—or decided to abandon—so I put the screws back in and moved on.
Next, I put some pressure on the workbench’s top. It was firmly mounted to the legs. I could have gone to work taking it apart, but I doubted that disassembling the whole table would yield much. If I found nothing else, then maybe…
Instead, I dropped to the floor and looked underneath the workbench’s lower shelf where Elsa had stored her bag of Chavezium. I saw spiderwebs, mouse droppings, and furry little piles of dust in the corners, but without a flashlight it was difficult to tell if I was missing anything under there. The flashlight I’d brought to this world had left with my clothes, and instead of searching for a light here in the garage, I opted to get back on my feet, grab the workbench’s corners, and pull. The steel legs screeched in protest as they slid on the concrete floor. It was a little tough getting it started, but once the bench got moving, it slid pretty easily.
With the workbench pulled far enough away from the wall to allow me to squeeze between it and the wall, I got around behind it and then dropped back on my knees to look through the little piles of dust, dead spiders, and dried mouse turds.
And that was where I found it—a single chip of Chavezium, smaller than the nail on my little finger.
“Well, well,” I said. “I would have thought you’d be a little more careful with your rare elements, Elsa.”
I reached out and picked up the little Chavezium chip, grabbing it much more easily than Tinker Jed had been able to latch onto the crystal in the canvas bag he kept it in. Then I got up, carefully holding the sliver I’d found.
Switching on the gooseneck lamp, I cleared a spot on the workbench beneath the bulb and set the Chavezium carefully on the bare wood. This didn’t seem like the best place to put it. I should have been working in a lab, some sort of sterile environment, I thought. But then I considered the disorganized mess that was Garcia Industries, and I let out a breath of relief.
It’s going to be all right, I thought—although I didn’t know what I was referring to exactly. Finding the Chavezium was a good thing, but what was I going to do with it? One thing I knew for certain was that I didn’t have the technological know-how to assemble my own Roulette Wheel of Doom out of spare parts the way Tinker Jed seemed to have done in some other world.
There was something I could do, though. How useful it would be remained to be seen, but making the effort would at least save me from frustration and boredom, at least for a while.
Carefully watching the Chavezium lest it vibrate off the edge of the bench’s top, I pushed the workbench back into place and pulled the stool up, echoing the setup Elsa had been using. Next, I pulled the mostly spent paralyzer from the pocket of Jetpack’s coat and set it on the workbench. Then I set to work, using the same screwdriver I’d used on the lamp and loosening the paralyzer’s rear cover. Nervous that I would damage rather than restore Elsa’s nasty little device, I took great care in prying the cover off, using the smallest screwdriver I could find and wedging its tip into the space at the edge of the cover. When I got the back off, the two halves looked about the way I remembered the other paralyzer when I’d seen it there on the workbench the night before.
But now what?
I stared at the array of wires and circuitry, clearly seeing the Chavezium chip that Elsa had inserted into the former garage door controller but not sure of what to do next. Elsa had left behind solder and her soldering iron, but I wasn’t adept at working with such things. If it had been a gun that needed oiling or a guitar that kept going out of tune, I would have known what to do; electronics was a different story.
“Nothing ventured,” I muttered and plugged the iron into an electrical outlet behind the workbench. While it heated up, I ran upstairs and grabbed the guitar with its broken string. Then, before heading back downstairs, I checked the phone for its dial tone just to be sure Katrina could still get hold of me. My paranoia satisfied, I returned to the workbench, resting the guitar across my knees and unwinding the broken string from both ends of the instrument.
It took a bit of practice, but before too long I had gotten pretty good at soldering pieces of guitar string together or fastening them to the steel frets on the guitar, making the poor instrument look like it had little whiskers sprouting up and down its neck. My first efforts included a lot of glopping on of big dollops of solder, but after a few tries, I was able to get the job done relatively neatly.
When I decided I’d abused the guitar enough, I turned back to the Dor-a-Matic controller. The Chavezium chip inside was wrapped in a metal collar, whic
h was in turn soldered to two wires. Gripping the collar with a pair of needle nose pliers, I started heating the solder that fastened the wires to it. Once those were freed, the collar still wouldn’t lift out of the array of technology. Looking closer, I saw that the collar was also soldered to a piece of metal next to it, so I went to work freeing that as well. Finally, with the collar freed, I unwrapped it from the spent Chavezium and then carefully wrapped the metal around the fresh piece I’d found.
Only then did it occur to me that the crystal I’d found on the floor might have been there for a reason—discarded by Elsa after she’d already used up its energy by experimenting with the paralyzer. There was no way to know, of course, so I soldiered on and soon had the collar in place and the wires fastened to it. All that was left was to fasten the cover onto the unit and then go out into the neighborhood and find some stray dog or cat I could test it on. Pleased that I’d gotten the job done without too much mess and without burning myself, I put the screws in place and started tightening them.
With one screw remaining, however, I stopped what I was doing, freezing there at the workbench as though I’d been hit with the paralyzer myself.
A squeak from the stairs behind me had made my adrenaline spike.
“If you move a muscle, I’ll drill you right there,” said the man on the stairs.
I knew without turning around that he’d have a gun pointed at me, possibly a non-lethal one.
I also knew without looking that—when I did get permission to face the intruder—his face would be terribly familiar. That was because the voice I’d heard was my own.
Chapter Ten
I did as I’d been told—sat still and awaited further instructions.
From behind me, footsteps grew nearer.
Then I heard my voice again. “Where is she?”
Jetpack Jed, I thought.
“I assume you mean Elsa,” I said.
“Of course, I mean Elsa. Where is she?”
“Cast off already?” I asked. “How the hell did you get back here?”
“What are you talking about?” my double said.
This was not the response I’d expected.
“Can I turn around?” I asked.
“Hands up first. High.”
I complied, calmly setting the screwdriver on the workbench and then scooting around on the stool. My double had a gun aimed at me, but it wasn’t one of Guillermo’s. I recognized my revolver in his hand. I also recognized the suit he was wearing and—most importantly—the fedora.
Oddly enough, I felt no compulsion to launch myself off the stool and tackle him the way I’d felt when I first encountered him outside the downtown jail building.
I watched him look me over. Then his eyes drifted to the guitar leaning in the corner beside me.
“What did you do to your guitar?” he asked.
“My guitar? It’s…” The blood drained from my face, and I said, “You think I’m Jetpack Jed, don’t you?”
He raised an eyebrow, and it looked like his grip on the gun—my gun—got tighter.
Knowing I was taking a chance at getting shot, I added, “And I thought you were Jetpack Jed.”
“You’re saying we’re both wrong?” he asked.
I nodded.
“It’s his guitar, not mine.”
“If you’re not Jetpack Jed,” he said, “then who the hell are you?”
I took a deep breath. “I’m you. But…which you, I’m not sure.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
“Can I lower my hands?” I asked.
“No. Prove to me you’re not Jetpack.”
I let out a long breath and tried to recall what Guillermo had taught me about the fact that the universe had all these worlds in it and the way many of the worlds had different versions of Jed Strait in them. Most vivid was a drawing he’d done for me once, showing a line forking into two, forming a Y, and then each branch of the Y splitting off into others, an infinite tree sprouting more and more universes at each fork. I wasn’t sure how this recollection was going to help me convince my double to lower his gun, but I was determined to try and started talking, figuring things out as I went.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s see…If you know who Jetpack is, and you came to this world to find Elsa, then that means you were here before. Elsa and Jetpack took you to the Hall of Records, right?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s good,” I said. “You’re cagey like me. Don’t give anything away that you don’t have to.” I cleared my throat and went on. “When you got to the Hall of Records, you went into the men’s room, where you and Jetpack fought. You zapped him with Guillermo’s gun.”
“If all that stuff happened, there’s nothing you’re saying that Jetpack wouldn’t already know.”
“Fair enough. But he wouldn’t know that along with that gun inside the paper towel dispenser, there were also a handful of silver dollars you brought over from your world. Our world.”
My double appeared to think about this for a moment. I thought I’d convinced him, but then a new light came into his eyes. “After I left you there and you regained consciousness, you could have gotten up and looked inside the towel dispenser. You would have seen the coins in there.”
He had me there. “All right. After that, you went to Elvira Ruiz’s. She’s Guillermo’s daughter. And, yes, Jetpack might have been able to figure that out, too, if he has friends on the police force and pulled a few strings. But he wouldn’t know that Elvira showed you—us—a little mechanical bank that her version of Guillermo made her when she was a girl. And that she told you about her dog, Perdida, who got run over when she was nine years old. Am I right?”
As I spilled these last details about my first meeting with Elvira, the other Jed’s expression went from smug superiority to dumbfounded incredulity. Instead of answering my question, he lowered his gun.
“If you’re not Jetpack Jed, then…what happened here? How are we…split? And where did Jetpack and Elsa go?” he asked.
“Good questions,” I said, glad to see that the gun barrel was no longer in a position to ventilate me. The situation was actually a bit exhilarating now that there was a puzzle to solve. “Let’s figure it out. You remember that time Guillermo explained the alternate worlds with his little diagram with the letter Y?”
“I do.”
“Sometime after that meeting with Elvira, there was a split. So, when did it happen?”
He shrugged. “Let’s compare notes,” he said.
We each started describing what we did after fleeing Elvira’s house, and the details matched up: the jetpack flight from the police, finding Carmelita in the Echo Park garage, traveling to Santa Monica and passing back into this world to find Katrina Mulligan and then returning to our world to find her again and turn her over to the cops. Everything else that followed for days after seemed to be things we each experienced identically. We had both accompanied Sherise to her apartment and found the threatening note from Hennigar. We had both gone to Guillermo with the ring he’d devised to capture the moments when we lost consciousness. We had both cooled our heels while waiting for Guillermo to find a way to allow us to cross over safely so we could grab up Elsa Schwartz and put an end to the threat she and Hennigar posed.
“Did you get hijacked again?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not once. That’s what’s so frustrating. Guillermo wouldn’t let me cross back to this world, and he forbade Carmelita from helping me until he’d made it safe. But there didn’t seem to be any danger. Not after the last time in that jail cell.”
This was interesting. “You didn’t end up in a gambling den a few nights ago?”
“A gambling den? Are you kidding me?”
“I wish I was. Maybe that was it. I got hijacked and you didn’t. That could have been the place where our worlds split.”
“All right. What do we do with this information, then?”
I shook my head. “I don’
t know. Let’s see…Did O’Neal show up at your door a couple nights ago? In the rain?”
He raised an eyebrow at this. “No. She showed up at your place?”
I nodded, trying to work it out.
“Have you heard anything in the news about the District Attorney being murdered? Possible murder/suicide with his wife?”
“This is the LA DA you’re talking about?” he asked, incredulous.
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“No. News has been pretty quiet the last few days. What happened?”
“Hard to say at this point, but the official line is that the wife killed him and then herself. It’s more complicated than that, though.”
“And O’Neal’s involved?”
“To a degree.” I got off the stool and paced back and forth in front of the hovercar while I pondered this information. Thinking out loud, I said, “So, there’s two possible splits. Which is the real one?”
“Does it matter?”
I shrugged. “Probably not. Still, it’d be nice to understand at least one thing in all of this.” Cracking my knuckles as I paced, I said, “Some other Jed hijacks me and takes me to a crap game. And on the same night the DA and his wife get popped…I feel like that was the one. The deaths happened before I got hijacked.”
“So, what does that have to do with us?”
“It doesn’t. The world split, though. At least, the worlds we’re in. It’s splitting all the time, according to Guillermo. Infinite worlds. In the world before the split, the killer ponders the murder. Maybe the wife, maybe not. Either way, the decision prompts a cleaving. In my world, the killer pulls the trigger. In the world that split off, the Wheatleys have a pleasant evening. But a new reality is generated, and you’re in it.”
He nodded at this and then said, “But how do you know it wasn’t your world that split off? What if you’re the new Jed?”
The Fedora Fandango: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 5) Page 12
