The Jetpack Boogie: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 4)

by Richard Levesque

  “Mister, you do know how to lay down a line of talk,” she said.

  “Where I come from, it’s not just a line. They don’t hold women back just for being women.”

  “And where is this magical place?”

  “It’s a little town back east,” I lied. “You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

  “How did you know my name?”

  I shrugged. “You look like a Brenda. Plus, I heard someone say Brenda would be back in a minute when that cop led me in here. I put two and two together.”

  “And you think that earned you an extra phone call?”

  “Just a chance,” I said. “It’s up to you.”

  She nodded. And then she looked around to see if any of the cops at their desks were paying attention. That was when I knew I’d at least cracked her defenses.

  “The thing is,” she said as she tapped a finger on her phone, “the calls out are tracked. If I make another call to directory assistance right away, it might get flagged as a second call for you.” She nodded toward the list she’d pulled from her drawer. “No one else on that list has a call lined up for this time.”

  “But I don’t need the operator this time,” I said. “I already know the number.”

  She gave me a cool stare. “Mister, if this gets me in trouble, I’m going to make sure you pay.”

  “A risk I’m willing to take.”

  She handed me the phone. I wasted no time in turning it on and then dialing 16015D.

  It rang four times and then someone picked up.

  “Radio K800,” I heard a man say. “Home of Jetpack Jed.”

  I couldn’t tell if he sounded bored or just tired.

  “I need to talk to Jetpack Jed,” I said.

  “You want to make a request?”

  “No,” I said. “I just need to talk to him.”

  “Is it about the contest?”

  “No,” I said again. “I just—”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s not a call-in show.”

  There was a pause, during which I was afraid the man was going to hang up. Then where would I be with O’Neil?

  “Just tell him I have a message from Annabelle,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as desperate as I was starting to feel.

  “Annabelle?”

  “Yes. Just tell him that, and I guarantee he’ll want to talk to me. Off the air, though.”

  The man sighed into the phone and then said, “Hang on. We’re going into commercial in a minute.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  I looked at O’Neil, who had been paying careful attention to what I’d been saying into her phone. It must have seemed obvious that I had stopped speaking to the other party, as she said, “Are you on hold?”

  “For just a minute.”

  “Are you really trying to get that guy who’s on the radio?”

  “I am.”

  “And you think he’s going to help you?”

  “Certain of it.”

  She shook her head. “You’re crazy, pal. Maybe not as crazy as I am for letting you get away with this, but…”

  I stopped listening.

  There was a click on the line and then a voice—my voice—angrily saying, “Who the hell is this?”

  “Is this Jetpack Jed?” I asked, making it obvious that I wasn’t reacting to his anger.

  “You’ve got ten seconds, buddy.”

  “Okay. My name’s Jed Strait and I’m in jail. I need someone to bail me out.”

  “Who is this really? What do you know about Annabelle?”

  “I told you. My name’s Jed Strait. Just like yours. We have a lot in common. And as for Annabelle, well…I don’t actually have a message, as I haven’t seen her in a while. Her last name’s Anderson. Unless she’s married now. She has three moles on her left shoulder blade; they form a little triangle about an inch across.”

  “You son of a bitch!”

  “Calm down, Jed. I can explain it all if you just come downtown and bail me out.”

  He didn’t say anything, but I could hear him breathing hard.

  Do I do that when I’m angry? I wondered.

  “My show’s over at eleven,” he said. “I’ll come for you by midnight.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but the line clicked before the word was half formed.

  O’Neil looked amused. “Did it actually work?” she asked.

  “It seems to have.”

  “What was that bit about the moles?”

  I smiled and shook my head. “A gentleman never tells,” I said.

  “You don’t strike me as a gentleman.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because you just told.” She pointed at the phone, which I handed back to her. She dialed an in-house number and said, “I’ve got one for the hive.” After a moment more she said, “Thanks,” and hung up as she looked at me and added, “Your escort will be here in a minute.”

  “Thanks again for your help. Don’t forget what I said. You could run circles around most of these guys.”

  “Not that I’ll ever get the chance.”

  I shrugged. “Look for the opportunity. Who knows what could happen?”

  It didn’t take long for me to be led away, this time by a different officer—one who looked like he could shave. He also looked like he could throw a pretty good punch, so I was careful not to rile him as he led me back into the maze of hallways. Soon enough, he was locking me in a cell different from the holding cell I’d been in earlier.

  The cell was about eight by six with bunks on the left side and a toilet on the right. There was a man in the top bunk. He raised his head when the key thunked into the lock and the door squeaked open. I made eye contact with him for a moment—a young fellow with short blond hair and a scar that ran up one eyelid and through the eyebrow. He looked more indifferent than mean, which was fine with me. All I wanted was to be left alone until I made bail.

  As the door clanged shut behind me, I glanced again at my bunkmate to see if he was going to engage with me. When he did nothing more than drop his head back onto his pillow, I felt relieved. There was no clock visible from this cell like there’d been in the holding cell where I’d been before arraignment, so I would have no way of knowing when it would be midnight. That was all right, though. I felt confident that Jetpack Jed would come for me. What I would do after that to get back on the search for Elsa’s trail was unclear to me, but I was confident that I’d be able to get away from my benefactor. If getting away meant no more than getting back to the Echo Park garage that was my ticket home, then that would have to do for tonight.

  I lay down on the bottom bunk, crossed my hands across my chest and started waiting.

  Falling asleep wasn’t part of the plan, but sometime later, I opened my eyes with a start.

  Oddly enough, I wasn’t lying down anymore. Instead I was sitting on the edge of the bunk and had no memory of having sat up.

  My cellmate was standing by the door on the other side of the cell. He looked frightened, not seeming to want to take his eyes off me while he wrapped the fingers of his left hand around the bars on the door. It looked to me like he was ready to rip one of the bars loose. If he could have gotten farther away from me in the cell, I was convinced he would have. As it was, he was as far away from me as the cramped cell allowed. What had him so upset, I couldn’t guess.

  And no sooner had I told myself there was no way to know why things were so disorienting, I figured it out.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  The blond man shook his head, clearly not keen on engaging with me.

  “What happened?” I repeated. “Did I say anything?”

  “Is that like…sleep walking or something?” he asked.

  “A little,” I said. “What did I say?”

  He shook his head again in seeming disbelief. Then he said, “You started cursing. I mean…I been in the Navy the last four years and I never heard combinations like that.”

  “Anything else?”

&
nbsp; “You sprung up off that bunk like it was full of snakes. Then you charged the bars and yelled about wanting to get let out. That’s nothing new for around here, so you didn’t get no attention.”

  “What then?”

  “You don’t remember none of this?” he asked, sounding incredulous.

  “None.”

  He shrugged. “I hopped down and told you I was gonna wrack your bones if you didn’t freeze it. You turned on me like you was gonna come at me, but I gave you a shove and you landed right there on that bunk.”

  I nodded. Thanks to Guillermo’s explanation, I understood—at least partly—what had happened, but it was still rather astounding to listen to the man’s description of my behavior.

  Then it got a little more astounding.

  “That’s when you started crying,” my cellmate said.

  I put my hands to my cheeks and found they were wet. Who was this Jed Strait who’d crossed into me?

  “You said you’d kill the woman who had put you in here. Then you said you’d kill me if I told anyone you was crying.”

  He shook his head in disgust.

  “Did I say the woman’s name?”

  Sherise? I wondered. Annabelle?

  “Carina, I think. Or Katrina.” He shrugged, clearly indifferent.

  This caught me off guard. Some other Jed Strait was clearly having a difficult time with Katrina Mulligan, so much so that he’d been quick to blame her for his inexplicable arrival in jail.

  “And then?” I asked.

  “And then nothing. You started asking me what happened and I told you. And now I gotta figure out if you’re blackjack psycho or flyin’ on something I wish I could get my hands on.”

  For the first time, I noticed lines of needle marks on his arms. He saw the direction my eyes had gone and made no move to cross his arms or hide the marks in any way. Instead, he looked at me a bit eagerly.

  “Not flying,” I said. “And not psycho either. At least, I don’t think so. Might be something close to that, though. Sorry I came at you like that. I wasn’t myself.”

  He scoffed but said nothing.

  When the cops had booked me earlier, they’d taken what few possessions I’d had: my hat and belt and shoelaces—and the metal ring from Guillermo. If it had been on my finger when I’d had the episode my cellmate had described, it might have given Guillermo something to work with when I finally made it back to Echo Park. As it was, I was going to have to tell him we’d lost another opportunity to understand what was happening to me.

  I nodded toward the marks on my cellmate’s arms. “That what you’re in here for? The needle?”

  “Not the needle so much as what goes in it.”

  His predicament made me think of the darker version of Katrina Mulligan I’d seen the day before while singing with Sherise. In my vision, Katrina had been in a ruined hotel room with heroin paraphernalia spread around her. I wondered if that Katrina was closer to the one who lived in this world or the one I’d come from.

  “Say, if you don’t mind my asking, if a person was interested in finding some of the stuff that goes in those needles, where would be a place to look around here?”

  He looked me over for a moment, his expression skeptical. “What are you in for?” he finally asked.

  “Counterfeiting.”

  His eyebrows rose and he whistled one low note before saying, “How’s a guy get into that?”

  “I’m falsely accused.”

  He laughed at this. “You and everyone else in here.” Then he cleared his throat and said, “Why you wanna know about the junk?”

  “Asking for a friend,” I said. “She may be in trouble.”

  “Ah,” he replied with a knowing look. Then he shrugged and said, “Junk’s everywhere, pal. You just gotta know who to ask.”

  “What if the person asking is a wealthy woman?”

  “She white?”

  “Yes. Does that matter?”

  He shrugged. Without answering my question, he said, “Someone like that…I expect she’d find her fix in the beach cities. Beaches…” He shook his head and focused on something far away, like he was re-living a favorite memory. “Most of the beach towns I’ve been in have made me feel like a kid in a candy store.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  He stood silent for a few more seconds and then said, “You done with the blackjack business?”

  “You mean acting crazy?”

  He nodded.

  “Far as I can tell.”

  “Good. Do it again and I’m liable to thump you.”

  “It would probably do me some good.”

  Without another word, he hopped back onto the top bunk. I stayed seated, not eager to lie down again.

  It was maybe half an hour later when a distant door opened and I heard footsteps approaching. The guard stopped outside the cell door and tapped it with his nightstick.

  “Strait,” he said. “You made bail. Let’s go.”

  “That was quick,” said my cellmate.

  “Friends in high places,” I said as I got to my feet. “Thanks for helping me out earlier.”

  “That’s fine. Don’t go crazy no more, you hear?”

  “I’ll try to remember.”

  The guard opened the cell door and then closed it behind me. He didn’t cuff me as he led me past the other cells and through a scarred door. On the other side of it was an office with another jailer who was reading a newspaper behind a long countertop, beyond which were rows of steel shelves all loaded with boxes. The guard who’d escorted me from my cell had a piece of paper in his hand, and he read my name and case number off of it.

  His compatriot was an older man; the bags under his eyes were bigger than the eyes themselves. Upon hearing my case number, he peeled himself away from his paper, opened a file drawer and pulled a sheet of paper from it. In an appropriately bored tone, he read off my name and the crimes I was accused of and then the date that had been set for my next court appearance followed by a paragraph of legalese, the gist of which was that I’d forfeit the bail amount if I failed to appear.

  Done, I thought. Jetpack Jed wouldn’t be getting his bail money back, and that was all right with me. I felt no guilt at double-crossing my doppelganger.

  When offered a pen to sign with, I gladly accepted, picturing myself ducking out of the police station and then heading straight for Echo Park and the world I called home before Jetpack Jed had any idea that the ink was dry. Sure, it would mean missing out on grilling him about the real story of how he’d come to Los Angeles, but I’d had enough of this world altogether and wasn’t interested in meeting up with anyone unfortunate enough to be my double—not when Sherise might be waiting for me in the version of Hollywood I was familiar with.

  As the keeper of shoelaces and belts went to retrieve my belongings from one of the shelves, my eye caught a headline on the paper he’d been reading. I was looking at it upside down but was able to make it out nonetheless, and when I did, I felt the blood drain from my face. It all seemed to go to my hands, which started throbbing to the beat of my heart.

  Turning to the first guard, I said, “You mind if I look at this for a second?”

  He shrugged, which I took as permission.

  I flipped the paper around and started reading, my heartbeat pounding harder as I went through the story underneath the headline: “Guillermo Garcia Radio Stunt Set to End.”

  “Almost two weeks ago,” the article read, “Radio Station K800 started a contest on the popular Jetpack Jed show. The host promised to give away $1000 to anyone who could bring him a certain Guillermo Garcia. The winner had to produce a very specific man by that name—a man in his eighties who had an aptitude for invention and mechanics. Citizens of Los Angeles were given ten days to produce this mysterious figure or lose the chance at the money forever.

  “Since that time, there have been stories in the press and various other news outlets detailing abuse of telephone directories and operators as cash-hun
gry Angelenos scoured the city looking for the elusive Garcia. Even the Hall of Records has been overrun with amateur sleuths all bent on delivering Mr. Garcia to the radio station and cashing in.

  “Editorials in this paper and others have skewered Mr. Jetpack Jed and the radio station management for engaging in such a publicity stunt, leading—as it has—to the destruction of property and undoubtedly the harassment of many a good family with the surname Garcia.

  “When asked why he had chosen this person as the subject of the contest, the increasingly popular Jetpack Jed said, ‘The reason is not important. All that matters is that Mr. Garcia be found.’ When pressed further about the rumor that the octogenarian inventor is nothing more than a figment of the radio host’s imagination—dreamed up for the purposes of increasing his ratings—Jetpack Jed was adamant: ‘Guillermo Garcia is real, I tell you. As real as you or me. And he’ll be doing us all a great service if he comes forward, or allows himself to be brought forward by a lucky listener.’

  “As of press time, no winner has come forward although there have been reports of other men named Guillermo Garcia being forcibly taken to K800 only to be set free once disqualified as the Garcia in question.”

  I looked up from the paper as the jailer with the baggy eyes approached the counter with a little box containing my belt, shoelaces, watch, ring and fedora.

  “I don’t want to be bailed out,” I said.

  “What?” asked the guard who’d pulled me from my cell.

  “I don’t want to be bailed out,” I repeated.

  The two men looked at each other, incredulity in both their expressions. The man behind the counter tapped the form he’d filled out and said, “Buddy, you’re already bailed out. You signed. No going back now.”

  “Can’t you tear it up?”

  The first guard said, “Are you crazy, pal?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And you need to lock me up again.”

  He shook his head. “Come on. Let’s go. I got better things to do.”

  Feeling desperate, I balled my fist.

  The guard spotted it and read my intentions. “You go ahead and take a swing at me, pal. Mike and me’ll tune you up good and toss you in the alley. So, you’ll still be bailed out, see? Only bailed out and bruised up. You know the kind of paperwork I’d have to go through if I wanted to re-arrest you now for assault and battery?”