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

by Richard Levesque

  I knew the look. I had seen it in Jetpack’s living room when I’d frozen Divergent in his tracks, and I could see it right now in the half-finished gestures of Elsa Schwartz as she’d been about to nail me to the ground with her own paralyzer. The drawing was of people similarly frozen, but the beams came from the airships, paralyzers on a massive scale.

  There was one other thing, though. Not all the people in the picture were frozen. Soldiers appeared to move among the paralyzed. And on one corner of the page was a detailed drawing of one soldier’s insignia, the sight of which gave me a chill. It wasn’t a swastika on the soldier’s uniform. Rather, it was a little round disk, in the center of which was a black dot—a version of the Chavezium disk Guillermo had made to protect me from Elsa’s electronic gun. It was easy enough to see that she was envisioning a similar use for the crystals she’d brought into this world, only they would be used to shield an army from the paralyzing ray that was incapacitating the enemy.

  I closed the journal and turned my attention to my fedora, which was on the table in front of Elsa, upside down. She had clearly been examining the technology inside the hat, but it didn’t look like she’d taken anything apart. It was also clear that she hadn’t yet figured out that Guillermo had built a tracking device into the hat; if she had grasped that such a thing was inside, she would surely have gotten as far from the fedora as possible.

  Seeing everything I’d been chasing all laid out in front of me like that felt too good to be true. I angled myself so I could reach the hat without getting any part of my body caught in the paralyzer beam. After giving the hat’s insides a closer look, I dropped it back onto my head, a sense of relief washing over me. Then I pushed the canvas bag farther away from Elsa before picking up the journal and sliding it into my back pocket.

  I gave the rest of the room a quick survey. In the corner opposite the crossover machine was a narrow bed, big enough only for one. Underneath the window nearest the door was a large chest, its lid open. Inside, I saw a loaf of bread and some canned food. Somewhere nearby, I expected, there would be an outhouse and probably an old pump. All the comforts of home.

  “Let’s trade,” I said.

  Carmelita walked backward to me, the gun still trained on Jetpack. I passed her the paralyzer.

  “Keep your finger on the trigger the whole time, no matter what you do,” I said. “And just keep it trained on her.”

  She nodded, and I took the gun as I approached Jetpack.

  He made no move as I got closer, still giving no indication that he was even aware we’d burst into Elsa’s hideout.

  “Jed,” I said and then repeated his name louder. “Jed!”

  Still nothing.

  I extended my left hand and snapped my fingers in front of his face and then again right next to his ear. Not getting any response at all, I put my hand on his face, tipping his head back a little and then walking my fingers up to his closed eyes. I pulled one of the lids up. The pupil looked normal. When I let go of his eyelid, the eye stayed open, so I did the same with the other. Now, he was looking at me, but it was clear he wasn’t seeing me.

  Next, I clamped his nostrils shut. He opened his mouth almost right away, his breath sputtering. Then I let go of his nose and gave his cheek a little slap. When this got no reaction, I gave it another one, harder.

  Finally, he blinked at me. I could tell he was awake now, but there was no recognition in his eyes and no confusion either. His expression remained neutral. The man seemed oblivious to the fact that he was eye to eye with his exact double.

  “Do you know who I am?” I asked him.

  He said nothing. And then, a moment later, I caught the slightest movement of his head, indicating the negative.

  “Do you know who you are?” I tried.

  Again, a miniscule shake of the head.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  No reaction at all now.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Carmelita asked from behind me.

  “I can’t say. My guess is Elsa did something to him. She probably modified that little toy of hers and then used it on Jetpack here as a test subject.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “If that’s what happened,” I responded.

  “What do we do?”

  I let out a long breath, thinking things through. Then I said, “Give me the paralyzer. I’ll watch them both. Go out to the truck and see if there’s some rope in the bed. Anything we can use to bind his hands. I’ll also need a little bit of wire if you can swing it. Keep your ears open, though. I’ll call if it looks like he’s coming back to being himself.”

  “My ears don’t close, Jed,” she said as she handed me the little box that was keeping Elsa at bay.

  “Just go.”

  A few minutes later, she was back with a frayed and grease-stained length of rope and a foot-long piece of insulated wire. The latter she gave to me as she took the gun.

  “Perfect,” I said as I got busy wrapping the wire around the paralyzer, tightening it so it kept the trigger engaged. Setting the device on the table with the red bulb pointing at my nemesis, I said, “I learned this trick from you, Elsa. Such a good idea.”

  Taking the gun back from Carmelita and training it on Jetpack, I said, “See if he’ll stand up, and then tie his hands behind his back. Tight.”

  When Carmelita had Jetpack nicely trussed, I said, “All right. Good. Now, I want you to take him back to Guillermo’s. Have Guillermo take a look at him and see if he can figure out what’s going on, but don’t waste too much time on it. Whether or not Guillermo can figure it out, I want you to open a portal and deposit him in his world. He’ll be in the middle of the rocketball stadium, but that’s all right. Security’ll find him and maybe they’ll call the police. If he needs medical attention he’ll get it, and if he’s just arrested for trespassing, I think he’s got enough money in that world to be able to get himself out of the mess.”

  Carmelita nodded at my instructions. “What then?”

  “I want you to come and meet me at the Mt. Hollywood tunnel in Griffith Park. I’ll be at the eastern opening.”

  “At midnight?” she asked.

  “No. Earlier. Hennigar thinks I’ll be there at midnight, but I want to get the jump on him.”

  “And then?” she asked.

  “And then you complete the task I’ve set for you. Have you found any other good candidates?”

  “A few. They seem terrible.”

  “Excellent.” Then I added, “One more thing. We need to load the crossover machine into the pick-up. Maybe we should tie his feet, too, so I can help you.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” Carmelita said. She walked around the little wooden table to where the Roulette Wheel of Doom sat in front of the fireplace and took a moment to size it up before squatting before the machine and wrapping her arms around its base. Then she stood up, lifting the steel frame and everything that went with it, apparently without effort. Walking while holding the machine looked a little awkward, and she almost bumped the edge of the table with the base of the machine as she went by me, but then she got it out the door and, several seconds later, I heard the scrape of metal on metal as she slid the infernal device into the Patterson’s bed. She came back in, smoothing her dress and smiling at me.

  “Anything else?”

  I smiled back and said, “Why don’t you go back to the road and bring my car down here. And you can take the notebook and the bag of Chavezium out to the pick-up on your way out.” She gathered up the canvas bag after I handed her Lang’s notebook, and then she was gone, leaving me alone for a few minutes with my immobilized and seemingly incapacitated quarry.

  Turning my attention to Jetpack, I said, “No hard feelings, all right? I’m doing what I need to do, about the same way you did to me when you left me in your garage. I told you she’d stab you in the back first chance she got, didn’t I? Maybe next time you’ll listen when someone tries to give you a little bit of good advice
.”

  My double blinked at me but said nothing and gave no indication that he really understood anything I’d just said.

  “Speaking of your garage,” I added, “when you get back there, you’ll find that I left things in a bit of a mess. You might just want to buy a new guitar rather than try to fix that one.”

  Still, no response.

  Moments later, I heard the Winslow’s engine approaching, and through the open door, I caught sight of the headlights coming into the clearing. A minute later, Carmelita walked back in and set the keys on the table where Elsa had been working.

  “Is there anything else?” she asked, her tone teasing now that she’d completed all the tasks I’d laid out for her.

  “No,” I said. “Just be careful with this guy. If he starts giving you any trouble on the drive back to Guillermo’s or you catch him trying to wriggle out of that rope, just thump him in the head right on the spot. You don’t have to warn him or anything. Then open a portal and drop him through it right there. Will you do that?”

  “With pleasure.”

  I turned back to Jetpack. “You hear that? Don’t push your luck.” Then, turning back to Carmelita, I added, “And one other thing. No matter how tempted you might be right now, do not fly that pick-up back to Guillermo’s. And the same goes for coming to meet me in Griffith Park. Wheels on the ground, no exceptions. This is too important to let a bug in Guillermo’s technology mess things up now. You understand?”

  “Absolutely,” she answered.

  I gave her the gun. “Just in case.”

  She walked past me then, got behind Jetpack Jed, and put one hand on his bound wrists, the other between his shoulders. Then she pushed him forward, and he moved with no resistance.

  “I wish you were this easy to handle,” she said as the pair walked by me.

  “Keep wishing,” I said and watched her guide him out the door.

  I retrieved the paralyzer from the table and, still aiming it at Elsa, I backed toward the door, turning my head from Elsa to Carmelita and back again so I could keep an eye on the Nazi while making sure my assistant ran into no trouble in getting my double into the truck. I hadn’t thought about the truck’s keys, but Elsa must have left them in the ignition, as moments later Carmelita had the engine purring and the truck in reverse, turning it around in the clearing and then heading for the ruts that led back to the main road.

  Still shifting my gaze from Elsa to the truck, I watched as the tail lights faded into the foliage beyond the clearing. Then, as I went to turn my head and look back at Elsa, I found I could not move.

  I heard the scraping of the chair’s legs on the floor and then footsteps approaching.

  “Why did you not think to take the paralyzer out of my hand when you were able, Mr. Strait?” I heard Elsa say from behind me. “Now it’s too late, you see? I think the power source in the device you brought back with you must have burned out a little prematurely. Such a shame.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I was very happy to hear about my friend Andrik,” Elsa said as she circled around me and pushed the heavy wooden door closed, cutting off the receding sound of the old Patterson’s engine. “It’s a surprise that he’s in town, you see. I suppose he came looking for me while I was trapped in that idiot’s world.” Her eyes narrowed. “You speculated with your mechanical woman that I was responsible for Mr. Jetpack’s incapacitation, but not so. Which is not to say that I might not have arrived at such an option if only to render him silent. But still, the change that overcame him was none of my doing.” She pointed at the fedora on my head. “That, though. The technology your Guillermo installed…what did it do to Jetpack’s mind?”

  Under the influence of her paralyzer, I could do nothing but stare in response to her question.

  She answered it herself, pacing back and forth in front of me while holding out the paralyzer in an almost casual way, looking like a woman absently holding a lit cigarette while going about her business, somehow managing not to burn anything with the end while at the same time seeming unaware of its potential for destruction.

  “It seemed to scramble his brain. At first, he grew listless and quiet. Then he started speaking in non-sequiturs. And finally, he appeared almost catatonic. Yet you wore the same hat before he took it off your head, and you wear it now. I don’t think it will muddy your mind the way it did his. But why?”

  She shook her head.

  “I suppose there’s a tracking device wired into it. That’s how you found me. I should have known. Is that all it is, though? A way for that old man to keep track of you when you moved from world to world? But tuned to your specific brain function?”

  Standing next to the table where the Chavezium and my hat had been when I burst into the little stone house, she tapped her index finger on the rough surface where she’d worked.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? The technology in the hat is tuned to your brain chemistry, and when your doppelganger put it on, it impacted his brain negatively. That old man is full of tricks. I really should have grabbed him up when I came through last night, but I thought I had everything I needed. I’ve finally broken Lang’s code, you see. Of course, now your mechanical woman has taken the journal and the crystals, which means I will need to retrieve them after I work things out with Andrik.”

  She shrugged.

  “That’s no concern, though. I’ll have everything I need before long. Midnight I heard you say? Or was it earlier? So you could ‘get the jump’ on Andrik?” With a shake of her head, she went on. “Fool. He’d have killed you before you even knew you were in danger. Andrik is a very talented man. He and his associates are going to be so pleased at the ways our plans will come together now.”

  Approaching me now, she performed a quick frisk, finding the gun in my waistband and removing it. Turning it around and taking aim at me, she let go of the button on the paralyzer, and I was free again. My hands dropped to my sides, and the spent paralyzer I’d used on her dropped from my grip. It took a few seconds to feel like I’d regained control of my limbs.

  “Over there,” she said, keeping the gun on me while pointing with her other hand. She wanted me to sit in the chair where Jetpack had been, and she was backing away from me now to make plenty of room for me to cross the little room without having a chance to lunge at her and risk grabbing the gun.

  I complied. As I moved to the chair, I said, “There’s something I don’t understand.”

  “And you think I’m going to help you with your problems?” she asked, her tone haughty.

  Ignoring this, I pressed on. “The night you broke into Guillermo’s shop and shot Carmelita, you said you weren’t interested in working with the Third Reich anymore, that they were too short-sighted for you.”

  She raised an eyebrow but said nothing, so I went on.

  “I saw your little cartoon in the back of Lang’s journal just now. It’s obvious to me that you’re planning on mass producing your paralyzer and also making some sort of shield to give your people—whoever they are—the ability to move freely around a city where everyone else has been rendered immobile.”

  “Thank you for verifying my artistic abilities,” she said, all sarcasm.

  “So, here’s the part that I don’t get. That night at Guillermo’s, you didn’t have the paralyzer yet. And you didn’t know about the disk. So, what did you promise this Hennigar and whoever else he’s working with? Were you just winging it and hoping Guillermo or someone else would save your skin at the last minute? If you ask me, I did you a real favor by convincing you to slip into that other world when I did. It gave you a chance to figure out how to save face with your new friends.”

  She smiled. “What I promised or didn’t promise my new associates is none of your business, Mr. Jed,” she said, her name for me an echo of what Jack Wheatley had called me in Sherise’s hotel room. “All you need to know is this: now that you’ve had your mechanical woman take the crystals and the journal back to your friend Guillermo, I
have no choice but to go back to his ridiculous little workshop and take back what is mine. This time, I will bring my friend Andrik with me. The robot will be on her way to the rendezvous, so we shouldn’t have any of the problems with her that I had before. If we do, I know how to dispatch her now. The same goes for the old man.”

  “You were awfully desperate to get him just a few weeks ago.”

  “Things change,” she said. Then she hit me with the paralyzer again and with a little tilt of her head set the device on the floor in front of me. With a little flourish, she let go of the trigger, and I stayed frozen in place. She backed away, her cruel smile broad.

  It was obvious that she had modified the device even further so that now it was no longer necessary to have anything wrapped around it to keep the trigger engaged. Now, the trigger stayed active on its own, probably until getting pressed again.

  Ignoring me now, she crossed to the area near the fireplace, out of my line of sight. I could hear her rummaging around over there near the little bed. I suppose it’s possible to get used to a thing like having a paralyzer ray render one motionless, but if so, that wasn’t my experience. Sitting there helpless and waiting for Elsa to finish whatever tasks she’d set for herself left me seething. Still, I’d also learned that there was no resisting the paralyzer, at least not until the Chavezium ran down, so I pushed back against the urge to try flexing my muscles; doing so would only exhaust me, and I wanted to be ready should a break come my way.

  A few minutes later, Elsa came back into my field of vision carrying a carpetbag that looked about half full. I suppose it had been under the bed when I’d first surveyed the room. She set it on the chair where she’d been sitting when I’d first come into the little stone house and then took a moment to make a casual circle around the place, staying out of the path of the paralyzer beam as she went.