Divergent Jed stepped through the portal again. I didn’t want Jack to see him. The sight of my double would only confuse the kid more than he already was.
“Stay in the car until they come, all right? And keep down? No one else is going to shoot, but there might be some confusion. You just stay down until I call you, okay?”
He nodded and went, never turning toward the other end of the tunnel or the version of me who was circling the Winslow now.
Why Divergent had returned, I couldn’t guess. Maybe there’d been some other development with Hennigar that he felt I should know about.
I saw him stoop a few feet away from the car. When he stood up, I saw that he had my gun in his hand. Then he looked to the west end of the tunnel and saw me.
Immediately, he started walking toward me. The same icy sweat I’d felt at the sight of Sherise in Hennigar’s clutches returned now—along with the same revulsion I’d felt when I’d first met my double in Jetpack Jed’s world.
This Jed walked with a limp.
Not Divergent.
And, I guessed, not Jetpack either—even though I now knew that Jetpack had one leg shorter than the other.
When he was still about twenty feet away, the portal near the Winslow blinked shut. The approaching Jed stopped mid-stride, looking back toward the car and the gateway that had just closed. Then he started walking again, seemingly with renewed purpose.
His face broke into a cruel smile when he got to within five feet of me. Now that he was closer, I could see that his clothes looked shabby, like he’d slept in them. He wore a fedora that looked like it had been crushed and reshaped. His face showed a few days’ growth of stubble.
“Looks like you had quite a party here, Jed,” he said.
And that was when I saw that he was missing the top end of the index finger on his right hand. Tinker Jed.
“What do you want?” I asked. Despite my being waylaid by Earl Buckman’s bullet, I wanted nothing more than to get to my feet and take a swing at him. I didn’t have it in me, of course, but the urge was strong nonetheless.
He shrugged and took a few steps closer. Close enough to see Sherise now, he said, “She’s a looker.”
I wanted to say that if he didn’t take his eyes off of Sherise, I’d rip them out of his skull, but I restrained myself. Doing so took about as much strength as it did to keep from doubling over from the pain of the bullet in my chest. Somehow, I found the power to repeat my first question instead of clubbing him with a threat: “What do you want?”
“Not much. What you’ve got. Your world. That’s not so much, is it?”
After tucking my gun into his waistband, he turned his attention to the two corpses on the ground, rolling each one over and taking their weapons without seeming to have any qualms about disrespecting the dead. He dropped one gun into each of his coat pockets. Next, he turned his attention to Buckman’s wallet, which Divergent had dropped next to the body. Tinker Jed picked it up now and emptied it of cash. He did the same to Hennigar’s wallet and stuffed all the money in his coat pocket.
“I won’t do you the indignity of rifling through your pockets, Jed,” he said. “I’ve got enough of what I need. For now.”
He gave Sherise another long and wolfish leer. Then he tipped his fedora and said, “See you ‘round…Strait.”
My heartbeat seemed to triple its pace then. Tinker Jed was Hijack Jed.
I wanted to bellow in my rage. Somehow, I held it in.
With one more cruel smile, he limped past the cars and into the darkness. It felt like watching a new horror being let loose on this world that I wanted nothing more than to protect now that it was my own. I could do nothing but watch him go.
“Jed?” I heard Sherise whisper.
Turning my head quickly, I saw her eyes fluttering open.
“Sherise? You okay?”
It was a stupid question, but there it was.
She ignored it. “Was that…were there two of you?” she asked.
“Yes, sort of. That was…”
I stopped speaking, seeing confusion and fear in her eyes.
“Fedora,” I said. “Okay? Fedora.”
She nodded, her expression instantly more at peace. “Are you hurt?”
“A little. I’ll be all right.”
“What about…?”
“Hennigar’s dead. Out of our hair. Everyone else has been taken care of.”
“Jack?”
“He’s fine, too. He’s calling the police.”
“That man in the car, who—”
“Don’t worry about that right now. It’s all over.”
“And we’re not dying?”
“No,” I said. “Not even a little. You got grazed and you probably hit your head, but you’re going to be fine.”
She smiled and reached a hand out for mine. I squeezed it.
“I’m sorry I let him get me.”
“Hush,” I said. “It’s all over now.”
She ignored this. “We were going to the club. Almost made it to the car in the parking lot when he pulled up. He had his gun out. If it hadn’t been for Jack, I think…”
“Please don’t tell me you would have fought him. Not with a gun pointed at you.”
She did me the favor of not saying what I knew she’d been on the verge of telling me.
“When we get ourselves recovered, it’s going to be time to get you a gun of your own. I’ll give you lessons on how to use it.”
I could tell she didn’t like this, but she didn’t argue either.
Instead, she turned her head a bit to the left, looking past Hennigar’s car and into the night sky beyond the mouth of the tunnel. Her eyes opened a little wider as she said, “Are you sure I’m not dying?”
“Yes. Positive.”
In the distance, I could hear a siren approaching. Jack had done his job with the phone, and now there was no Earl Buckman to intercept the distress call.
“If I’m not dying,” Sherise said, “then why is there an angel coming down from the sky?”
Confused, I dropped my head a little to be able to get a better look out the opening of the tunnel. Doing so made the pain in my chest jump from acid-tipped barbs to diesel-powered jackhammers, but the pain didn’t blur my vision.
Sherise was right. An angel was descending from the heights of the Hollywood sky. There was nothing otherworldly about her arrival, though. It was just Carmelita coming in for a slightly undignified landing with her skirt billowing and the jetpack I’d borrowed from Elvira Ruiz in another world strapped to her back.
Chapter Sixteen
“The nurses really put up with that?” O’Neal asked the next day after I was out of recovery from my surgery.
I reached up and tipped my fedora at her. “They took it off in the ambulance, but I made sure it got back on as soon as I came out of the ether,” I said. “I’ve got a reputation as a tough-as-nails PI to maintain, after all. Can’t be without my trademark, can I?”
“If you say so,” she replied with a smile. Then she nodded toward my bandaged chest. “I assume there’s no call for sending flowers to the funeral parlor.”
“None. Bullet broke a rib and parked there. I’m going to be sore for a time, but it’ll be a little while before anyone needs to shop for a Jed Strait headstone.”
“That’s good.”
“You getting sentimental on me?”
“Not hardly,” she said. “It’s just that the favors are so far out of balance now. You helped so much with Jack that I need to ensure your continued health just so I can get a chance to even things out.”
“Helped with Jack?” I asked. “Is that all I did? What about crack the case?”
She shrugged. “I’d have gotten there soon enough. You just put your foot on the throttle when no one else had even figured out we were driving yet.”
I nodded and said, “So, Carrie Buckman confessed?”
“Sang like a soprano. All I needed to do was tell her we had a witness to
the murders who was telling us Miss Carrie had done it, and she flipped. I didn’t even need to trot out the letters we found in Mrs. Wheatley’s safe deposit box.”
“That’s good. So, what did she say?”
“Well…” She turned and looked toward the door to my private room and then walked over and shut it. “This is all off the record. Some lawyer corners you before the trial and says you need to spill what I’ve told you, then you’re playing it dumb, right?”
“Dumb is one of my most natural states.”
“Good. All right, so I’m not sure how long the affair was going on, but it looks like Mrs. Wheatley found some letters that Mrs. Buckman had written to Mr. Wheatley. She called him ‘Sweetly’ just like you said she did. They were only signed with the initial C, but the handwriting team would have been able to put the pen in her hand, and that would have played nicely for a jury if it had gone that way. How’d you get that angle, anyway?”
“Can’t say, Detective. Sorry. It showed up as an offshoot to something else I was working on, and that’s all I can give you.”
She gave me a skeptical look and said, “Mm-hmm. That favor scale is getting closer to balanced every minute, isn’t it?”
“However you want to play it.”
She gave this no response. “Anyway, we found the letters in Mrs. Wheatley’s box at the bank along with another short one in her husband’s hand that said something like, ‘I’ve called it off. There’s no need for lawyers now.’ My best guess is that Mrs. Wheatley confronted her husband, threatened to divorce him if he didn’t put an end to the affair, so he did. And then Mrs. Buckman panicked, realized those letters could be traced back to her. Once she realized that playing the good political wife would get her a shot at the governor’s mansion, she tried to get the letters back and erase all trace of the affair.”
“But Mrs. Wheatley wouldn’t give them back,” I said.
“That’s what Mrs. Buckman said in her statement. She hadn’t planned on killing them. At least that’s what she’s claiming now. But she’d brought a gun—an untraceable one she’d gotten from her husband—and when things got heated, she pulled it to try and make her point. She claims the first shot was an accident, a slip. Says she didn’t even think it was loaded, which I don’t buy, but we’ll see how that plays with a judge. Seth Wheatley took that bullet, and then she took out the missus in a panic, planted the gun to make it look like a murder/suicide and ran out, forgetting all about the boy.”
“Who ran from the house in fear.”
“Exactly. Ended up in Atwater Village where Wanda and her brother picked him up.”
“Did Buckman kill the dispatcher, too? Or was that his wife?”
“She’s saying it was him, but when we pushed her in the interview, she finally broke on being an accomplice, driving up to the mountains while her husband drove Irma’s car and sent it over a cliff.”
I nodded. “What do you think’ll happen to her?”
She shrugged. “Normal circumstances, someone’s guilty of double murder, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and a few other charges, they’d get the end of a rope. Since she confessed, though, I expect she’ll live. Some judges would want to make an example of her. Others would give her the pity treatment because she’s a woman. Either way, she’s not going to see the light of day for a long, long time.”
“Good to know,” I said. “And Jack? How’s he doing?”
“He seems all right. Now that Buckman’s dead, there’s no threat. We’ve got him in the system, and there’s an aunt who’s already coming forward to take him in.”
“I’d like to see him again if I can,” I said. “To thank him, you know? He did a brave thing making that call, even if it did almost get me killed.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” O’Neal said. “And as for the rest of it, that whole scene up in the tunnel…anything you can add to what you already told the officers who responded to the call?”
“No. It’s all a bit of a blur.”
She gave me a dubious look. “So, you’re sticking to your story that you don’t know who shot Buckman?”
I shrugged, and it hurt. She must have seen me grimace a little, as she cracked a tiny smile at my expense. “I don’t remember. The chief got out of his car. He and Hennigar were both waving guns around, and Sherise was there with Hennigar. I pulled mine, too. The next thing I knew, I was on my back with a bullet in my chest. If I fired, I can’t say. I also can’t say if I hit anything or anyone. Somehow, I got to my feet and stumbled down to where Sherise was.”
“And these hoodlums showed up?”
“That’s right. Probably hanging out in the park after hours. Heard the shots, I suppose. They came walking through the tunnel, picked up my gun and the other two.”
“And emptied Buckman’s and Hennigar’s wallets?”
“Yes.”
“But left yours alone?”
“I must have looked like a threat.”
“Unarmed, shot in the chest, and them with all the guns?”
I raised an eyebrow. “What can I say? I intimidate the hell out of some people. Maybe they figured I wouldn’t hold a grudge if they left me alone.”
She nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t buying what I was selling. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d looked the other way as a means of returning a favor, going through the motions for decorum’s sake. “Can you describe these hoodlums?”
“Just generally. There were five of them. All white. Leather jackets. Motorcycle boots. Bad attitudes. But young. Fifteen or sixteen. Like they didn’t know what to do with the guns now they’d picked them up. Little boys playing soldier. Those guns’ll probably end up in a pawnshop or get tossed in the LA River once they figure out how much trouble they could get into if they get caught with them.”
“Is that what you would have done when you were a young hoodlum?”
I got a flash of Hijack Jed in my mind at these words: his limp, his stubbly face and battered hat. Hoping my face betrayed none of what I was imagining, I said, “I was never a young hoodlum, Detective.”
“How about an old hoodlum?”
I smiled. “I’m going to have to get old first before we find out.”
After giving me a cynical smile, she turned back toward the door and opened it again. “Looks like visiting hours are starting. You’ve got some friends outside, so I’ll leave you now.”
“Thanks,” I said, and then I added, “How’s Dietrich doing?”
She smiled. “She’s all right. Thanks for asking. This whole thing’s been hard, but she’s going to be okay.”
I nodded and said, “Tell her I’m glad.”
She gave me a little salute and turned to leave. I heard voices in the hallway as she spoke to whoever was out there, and then my next visitor came in.
My eyes went right to the fedora, and I felt my face grow flushed. I almost called out to O’Neal to get back into the room, that I didn’t want to be alone with the man in the hat, but then I realized it wasn’t Hijack Jed.
It was Guillermo.
He looked quite dapper in a suit and tie, his gray hair under a hat that looked a lot like mine. His forehead was still bandaged, but the dressing was much smaller than it had been when I’d last seen him.
“Lobo!” he said with a broad smile.
“Hi, Guillermo. You look you’re going to a funeral.”
He laughed at this and shuffled over to the foot of my bed.
Carmelita came in behind him with Peggy beside her. And then one more visitor—Sherise.
She had a white bandage wrapped around her head at an angle so her left ear was covered along with most of her forehead. Our eyes locked as she crossed the threshold, and she took my expression as the invitation I’d meant it to be. She walked around the other three and took a seat on the edge of my bed, her hand immediately seeking mine.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I think I’m supposed to be the one asking that question.”
I
smiled but said nothing, waiting.
“If you must know,” she said after a few seconds of just returning my smile, “I feel like I got hit in the head with a hammer, but beyond that, they tell me I’m all right.”
“I see you’re not wearing your hospital duds.”
“They released me about an hour ago.”
“O’Neal come see you?”
“She did.”
“All smooth?” I asked.
“All smooth,” she answered.
We had arrived at our story in the moments before the police made it to the tunnel, keeping it short and simple and going over it a few times while Carmelita ran down to my Winslow and retrieved the paralyzer from where it had fallen from Elsa’s grip.
“Enough of that, though,” she said now. “How are you feeling?”
“Like a mule hit me in the chest with a couple of hammers.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m fine. They’re telling me I’ll be here for another five days. Then I’ll need a nurse to take care of me. You up for the job?”
“Absolutely.” She squeezed my hand and said, “How long until you’re able to play?”
“At the club?”
“No. On our next record.”
I smiled. “It shouldn’t take too long. Singing’s another story, though.”
She let out a little laugh. “You’re not singing on the next one, Jed. ‘Do Me Wrong’ is all me on vocals. I just need your strings.”
“Well, that’s good timing. So…an instrumental for the flipside?”
She shrugged and said, “I guess that’s only fair.”
There was a moment’s silence between us, and Peggy took the opportunity to jump in. “What did the detective want?”
“Just to clarify what happened in the tunnel and to let me know how things shook out with the Wheatley case.”
“Do I need to start shifting your resources around to pump up your legal defense funds?”
“Good thinking, but no. We’re okay on this one. Did you square things with our stand-in?”
“I did. Mailed a check out this morning for services not rendered.”
The Fedora Fandango: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 5) Page 21
