The Fedora Fandango: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 5)

by Richard Levesque

  “No, no, no,” he said with a wave of his hand and a shake of his head. Almost immediately, though, he went back to the stool, and I thought I saw a hint of discomfort. Maybe shaking his head had made him dizzy. “Is that old actor still over there?” he asked. “On the other side?”

  “Yes, and he can stay there as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Well…maybe, I think. He might change things on that side. Things that he shouldn’t, yes?”

  “He might. But I can’t keep going over to chase after people who don’t belong there. He told me he’s only got a little bit of time left. Cancer. I don’t think he’s going to do much damage over there. He’ll probably just walk around looking at those bright skyscrapers with his mouth hanging open and then he’ll get picked up for vagrancy and live out his last days in a jail cell or maybe a state-run old folks’ home if they have that sort of thing over there.”

  Guillermo looked a little sad as I said this. Maybe I had triggered some of his feelings about mortality. Regardless, he said, “Whatever you think is best.”

  “Have you gotten anywhere on tracking my fedora?” I asked.

  “Oh, si,” he said, as though finding my errant hat was the easiest thing he’d done all day.

  He pointed to the oscilloscope, a bright green dot flashing against the grid on a darker green background. There was an old roadmap folded in half on the workbench, and he pulled this toward him so it rested in the ring of brightness provided by the trouble light that hung from the two-by-four above him. Tapping a spot on the map with one of his pudgy fingers, he said, “Your hat is somewhere around here. I can’t say about the Nazi.”

  I leaned forward and peered at the map. Guillermo was pointing at the general vicinity of the Hollywood Hills, but I knew from experience that his technology would be able to pinpoint the fedora’s location more specifically once we made the search mobile.

  “Good work, Guillermo. Can I take the scope in the car?”

  “Si, si. It’s portable.”

  “All right.” Turning to Carmelita, I said, “Let’s get going.”

  “Wait, lobo,” Guillermo said, putting a hand on my forearm. “Wait. I need to know…without your hat, has anything else happened?”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding to Carmelita to indicate that she should start loading the oscilloscope into the car.

  “Tell me,” Guillermo said.

  I sighed. “I got hijacked last night. The other Jed…he tried to take advantage of a woman over there. I got control again before anything bad happened, but I really want to get that hat back.”

  “I understand. It was all good before? When you still had the hat?”

  “Yes. But now I’m even more sure it’s been the same Jed hijacking me.”

  “I don’t like that,” Guillermo said.

  “Me neither.” Then I added, “There’s one other thing. When I was still stuck over there, I picked up Jetpack Jed’s guitar. I was hoping to prompt a vision, just to see if it might give me some idea of what to do to get myself out of there.”

  “And it worked?” he asked, clearly amazed.

  “Not exactly. I didn’t learn anything that helped me find a way home, but I did succeed in tapping into a vision intentionally.”

  “What was this vision?”

  “I was looking through the eyes of another version of myself. He was in a workshop, but it was full of junk. It looked like a place that was really falling apart, but this other Jed was making it work. And it was pretty clear to me that he was putting together a version of the crossover machine.”

  He shook his head. “You sure you weren’t seeing what you wanted to see?”

  “No, I’m not sure of anything. But if I was going to see something I wanted to see, it wouldn’t have been that. It would have been a way out of the fix I was in.”

  “But how could another Jed build a crossover machine?”

  “You don’t think I could?”

  He shrugged. “You’re a smart man, lobo. You could learn, I think. But you seem better with a gun than a capacitor.”

  “Granted,” I said. “But this other Jed…He was doing it all. It was primitive, but I recognized all the parts.”

  “You sure this was really another Jed? Maybe you passed into a Guillermo.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s possible. Do you? Every time I’ve had a vision while playing music, it’s been me looking through the eyes of other versions of myself—seeing the things they were doing at what I assume was the same time as I slipped in and shared their consciousness. Why would that change now?”

  He shrugged. “It probably wouldn’t. Still…we don’t know everything that’s going on, yes?”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Regardless, it’s at least possible that another Jed—or maybe more than one—has figured out how to build his own version of the Roulette Wheel of Doom without your help. I don’t like that. I don’t want a lot of other Jeds running around between worlds. This whole thing we’ve started…it has to stop.”

  He smiled and nodded. “It will.” Then the light in his eyes grew a little brighter. “What if this other Jed, this inventor Jed…what if he’s been looking through your eyes at me? At Carmelita? While we worked on the machine?”

  “I think I’d have known.”

  “No,” he said, and then for emphasis added, “no, no, no. When you see through their eyes—just see, not take over—they don’t know you’re there, yes? You’re just looking.”

  “That’s true, but it’s usually jumbled. I’m seeing several Jeds’ experiences all mashed together and I have to try and sort it out.”

  “Yes! And so this other Jed, maybe he’s seen through many other Jeds’ eyes, too. But he’s mostly been looking when they were watching the machine get built. Or Carmelita translate the code. It could be, yes?”

  “It could,” I said, hating the possibility but knowing it couldn’t be denied categorically. “Either way, there’s nothing to be done about it.”

  Guillermo sighed. “Yes. That’s true. Still, maybe we should be careful what we talk about sometimes.”

  The thought gave me a paranoid shudder as I considered all the moments in my life that other versions of me might have looked in on without my knowledge. “I can’t think about this anymore, Guillermo. I need to get that hat back. Maybe that will block all this craziness once and for all.”

  “Si,” he said. “Get your hat. The rest will come together.”

  “I hope so.”

  The sun was edging toward the horizon by the time Carmelita and I pulled away from the little house in Chavez Ravine, the portable oscilloscope balanced on the seat between my legs. I still had the gun I’d taken off of Divergent and the paralyzer I’d refurbished in Jetpack’s garage. My own weapons—including Guillermo’s non-lethal gun—had all come into this world with Elsa, and I planned on getting them back. On our way to Hollywood, I had Carmelita swing by our place in Echo Park so I could grab my spare gun and extra ammunition from my nightstand. I also grabbed a chicken leg from the icebox and, thus armed, was ready to go looking for Elsa Schwartz for what I hoped would be the last time.

  Half an hour later, we were on Mullholland Drive, curving our way along the spine of the little mountain range that separates Hollywood from the San Fernando Valley. Lights on either side of peaks were coming to life, the city and the suburbs looking like a million fireflies waiting to burst into the air. Carmelita drove, and I navigated, my eyes darting from Guillermo’s old and abused map to the blinking light on the scope that represented much more than my stolen fedora.

  “Coming up on Coldwater Canyon,” Carmelita said.

  “We’re getting closer, but we’re going to have to head over to our left soon. Down the hill, I think.”

  “On Coldwater?”

  I thought about it, looking at the map as I tried to decide. “No,” I finally said. “I think we cut through the intersection and then down Franklin Canyon.”

  “There’s nothing in Fra
nklin Canyon. Just trees.”

  “I think that’s why she’d choose it for a hideout. Look at these houses, Carmelita.” Even in the fading twilight, we could see the mansions spread out on the hilltops, and I knew that if we took Coldwater Canyon down toward Beverly Hills, the real estate would only get more extravagant. “Elsa Schwartz isn’t living like royalty up here. She didn’t make off with a bunch of Cosmo’s money. If she had, he’d have been much more eager for me to find her all this time she’s been on the run. No, she’s got a hiding place, but it’s really hidden. Not a mansion where she could be easily found.”

  “All right,” Carmelita said, her tone suggesting I was guessing wrong but that the boss was always right. When the light at Coldwater turned green, she navigated across the intersection and worked her way into the preserved wilderness of Franklin Canyon.

  The road through the canyon is narrow, lined with chaparral in places, trees in others. There are trailheads and spots for picnickers, but at this time of day, the canyon looked empty. At one point, as Carmelita navigated a tight curve next to an open field of tall grass, our headlights caught a coyote staring at us, his eyes reflecting the Winslow’s high beams for a moment before he ducked into the grass and was gone.

  “Can you tell if we’re getting closer?” Carmelita asked.

  “It seems like it.”

  The map was useless now, as it showed nothing but the snaky line of road through the canyon, a road we had no choice but to stay on as we dropped down along the hillside in the gathering darkness, made thicker by the growing density of large trees undisturbed by the region’s hungry developers.

  When the road leveled off a little and more spaces opened between the trees, Carmelita slowed the car and said, “Which way?”

  “Keep going,” I said, not sure why she’d stopped.

  “What about in there?” she asked, pointing to the left.

  At first, I didn’t see what she was pointing at, and I think if we’d been passing through the canyon in daylight, I still might have missed it. But then, peering into the darkness, I made out what looked like two ruts branching off the road and disappearing between the trees.

  “Is that a road?” I asked.

  “It looks like it.”

  Checking the scope, it seemed to me that the blinking light was to our left now. Staying on the main road would soon take us past the signal. I leaned toward the windshield, looking up and to the left. The dark wall of the canyon’s side rose high above the road, and at its top I could make out a few right angles that told me houses were up there, probably accessed from Coldwater with Franklin Canyon serving as their back yards. Between here and the canyon wall, it looked like nothing but trees and bushes; if there was an old road through the rustic area, it might lead to the kind of place that Elsa would find desirably secluded.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “How far do you think we are from the source of the signal?”

  I looked at the scope and shrugged. “What do you think?”

  She leaned over. “Maybe…five hundred feet,” she said. “We should leave the car out here on the road. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else out here now. If we drive in, she’ll probably hear us coming.”

  “I didn’t bring a flashlight.”

  “You brought me,” she said as she set the parking brake and killed the engine.

  Soon, we were working our way slowly along the rutted road. Since I could see almost nothing, I relied on Carmelita’s superior night vision, which meant walking behind her, one hand on her shoulder while she led the way. In my other hand, I carried my revolver, but the weapon felt useless in the nearly complete darkness of the canyon.

  After several minutes of slow going, Carmelita stopped and whispered. “There’s a light ahead. Do you see it?”

  Squinting into the darkness, I made out a faint glow coming through the foliage. “Yes. Can you tell what it’s coming from?”

  “Not yet. Shall we continue?”

  “It’s what we’re here for.”

  After another twenty feet along the rough road, we came to a clearing, stopping at its edge where the trees and bushes still gave us some cover. In the middle of the clearing, I could see a structure. It looked like a small house with a sloping roof, maybe the kind of thing that was here long before the city government decided not to allow development in the canyon. There were two squares of light coming from the little building on the side we faced, and one other on its western side. From the light that shone through this side window, I was able to see something next to the building that I thought I recognized.

  “Is that Guillermo’s truck?” I whispered.

  “Yes,” came the hushed reply.

  “And the building? Is it a house? Or some sort of service building?”

  “I think it’s a house. The walls are made of stones. It looks old.”

  Maybe some old pioneer house, I thought, imagining an 1850s denizen of what would someday be Beverly Hills leading an isolated life up here in the canyon.

  “Any sign of movement from inside?”

  “No.”

  “All right. Let’s get a closer look.”

  No longer having to worry about staying in the ruts in the road but still concerned that I might blunder over a rock or step in a gopher hole, I linked my left arm in hers and aimed the gun ahead of me in the general direction of the little stone house. Thus clinging together, we crept across the clearing. When we were about five feet from the building, Carmelita stopped me. In the dark, I saw her point down toward the ground.

  “There’s a trip wire,” she whispered. “About six inches in front of you. I can’t tell what it’s fastened to.”

  “Probably a bell or something like that,” I replied, doubting that Elsa would go to the trouble of rigging explosives out here.

  Relaxing her hold on my arm, Carmelita took a big step forward and then brought her other leg over the wire. Then it was my turn.

  During the war, I’d had my share of boobytraps to dodge, most of which would have been linked to ordinance of some kind. I never had a robot helping me avoid those things, though, so stepping over this one seemed like a mild inconvenience in comparison.

  Past that obstacle, we finished our stealthy approach, coming up to one of the windows and peeking in.

  The window revealed a room that looked like it took up all the space inside the place, a one-room hovel. Now that I was right next to it, I saw that Carmelita had been right; it was a stone house, and its unfinished interior revealed more stones mortared together to form the four walls. I also saw a fireplace on the wall across from the window, but no fire burned there. Instead, the light was coming from four kerosene lanterns—two that hung from the ceiling and two more on tables. From my vantage point, I could see a woman sitting at one of those tables, her back to me, and I had to assume it was Elsa. I couldn’t tell what she was doing at the table, nor could I see Jetpack Jed.

  What I could see, though, was the Roulette Wheel of Doom. It was on the other side of the table that Elsa sat at, near the fireplace. The infernal donut of lights wasn’t glowing—something I was glad to see.

  “Do you see Jetpack?” I whispered in Carmelita’s ear.

  She nodded and pointed to the left. I moved a little to my right to get a better angle and saw that next to the second table and the kerosene lamp that rested on it was a wooden chair with Jetpack slumped over in it. The posture he’d assumed—back curved and head lolling forward on his chest—did not look like the position of a man who’d just fallen asleep in a chair. He looked more like someone who’d been asleep there for a long time, possibly incapacitated, and I had to wonder if Elsa had drugged him for some reason. The main thing I focused on, though, was that he wasn’t wearing my hat. I tried looking all around the interior and couldn’t see the fedora anywhere.

  I tapped Carmelita’s arm and nodded to my right, indicating that I wanted to step away from the window so we could do a little planning. She nodded, and I took her
arm again so she could keep me free of any other tripwires that might be in the yard.

  “Do we go in?” she whispered once we were far enough away from the window.

  “Yes. We have to. You take this, though.” I handed her my gun and pulled the paralyzer out of my pocket. I still had the gun I’d taken from Divergent Jed, and I tucked this into my waistband where I could grab it easily. “I go in first. This should neutralize Elsa. You follow and keep that on Jetpack. We’ll figure the rest out from there.”

  She nodded and then started toward the door on the side of the house where Guillermo’s truck was parked.

  I put my left hand on the doorknob while fingering the paralyzer’s trigger in my right. Then I tested the knob. It didn’t turn, but then I realized it was probably as old as the house and wasn’t meant to turn. I gave the door a little push, and in I went.

  Elsa turned immediately, a stunned look on her face, and then she froze as the paralyzer hit her. I glanced toward Jetpack and saw that he hadn’t moved. Behind me, Carmelita pushed into the one-room house and walked up to my double, the barrel of the gun pointed squarely at his chest.

  “Don’t get too close,” I said. “Just cover him for now.”

  Turning back to Elsa, I saw that she held the paralyzer she’d taken from Jetpack’s garage. The weapon hadn’t been finished then, but she’d clearly gotten it in working order since and had been on the verge of using it on me when I’d beaten her to the blow. I wondered if she’d modified the weapon even further, doing something with it that accounted for Jetpack’s apparent stupor. Approaching Elsa slowly, I was able to see past her. The canvas bag of Chavezium and Klaus Lang’s notebook were there on the table along with my fedora and Guillermo’s nonlethal gun.

  While I wanted nothing more than to reach for my fedora and all the security it afforded me, my attention was drawn first to the notebook, which lay open on the table, some of its last pages exposed. What I saw there looked nothing like the diagrams Lang had made; those had all been at least thirty years old and, in some cases, faded. The drawings before me were fresh, the lines dark and crisp. They depicted airships over a city, rays or beams shooting downward. At the bottom of the page were drawings of people whose limbs looked odd, unnatural, as though captured mid-motion by a camera rather than drawn with a pencil.