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

by Richard Levesque

  I knew when I was beaten and relaxed my hand.

  Taking my things, I sat on a bench to lace my shoes. Then I put on my watch and slipped the ring on my finger before dropping the hat on my head and standing to feed the belt through the loops on my pants.

  The guard opened a door opposite the one we’d passed through earlier. The Los Angeles night was on the other side of the door. I heard it shut behind me with heavy finality, leaving me alone on a little side street next to the jail building. Cars lined it on either side, several of them black and white.

  I was on the street, a free man. For a moment, I thought my fears had all been overreaction.

  But then a man stepped out of the shadows.

  He wore an expensive looking suit, pastel blue with perfectly matching shiny shoes. With no hat on his head, there were no shadows to obscure the face.

  I felt the strong urge to lunge at him, to use my fists on the face that was identical to my own, to grab him by the flashy lapels and throw him to the ground. All the times I’d occupied the minds of other Jed Straits, looked through their eyes at the face in the mirror, I hadn’t felt anything like this revulsion. Seeing the man—myself—in the flesh, however, made me feel like a thousand ants had just crawled across my skin, half of them heading straight for my heart and the rest to my groin.

  Maybe he felt it, too. He didn’t say anything as he stopped at least five feet away from me. His jaw was set firmly and his eyes bored into mine—the expression saying he’d known what to expect but still wasn’t ready for the reality of the situation. I expect my expression was similar.

  When he finally spoke, all he said was, “Where the hell did you come from?” His tone was icy.

  I nodded toward the building. “Right through that door. Didn’t you just see me come out?”

  He shook his head. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I know. And I could ask you the same question. That jetpack story…did you think people were actually going to believe it?”

  “You want to make me ask again?”

  “Not really. If you’re anything like me, you hate having to repeat yourself,” I said. “But I need to know…what makes you think I’m not from around here?”

  He shook his head again and narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t have thrown Annabelle’s name around like that if you hadn’t known the truth about me. And you couldn’t know the truth unless it was your truth, too.”

  My double had had the last few hours to think things through, apparently not plagued by moments of being crossed into by yet other versions of us. He clearly didn’t have everything figured out, but he’d worked out a few things. I’d worked out a few myself, but I felt like he was ahead of me.

  “I have a question of my own,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything, but the little tilt of his head told me he was at least willing to hear my query.

  “Why are you using your radio show to find that old man?”

  He half smiled at this, but the expression looked dangerous rather than friendly. I told myself I should practice that one in the mirror a few times so I could pull it up at will when I felt the need to intimidate someone.

  “You first,” he said.

  I shrugged. “There was an accident. I was in the army, guarding an experimental weapons compound. My whole unit got wiped out. Apparently, I just got zapped into this world.”

  He gave a slow nod, clearly pondering what I’d said. “And Annabelle?” he finally asked.

  “That wasn’t the deal,” I countered. “Your turn to answer my question before you get to ask another, right?”

  He said nothing.

  Seeing that there wasn’t much point in playing the tough guy with myself, I said, “She’s the girl I left behind. When I went looking for her in this world, she wasn’t there. I played a hunch on the phone so I could get a minute of your time. Looks like she was your girl, too.”

  He still said nothing, but I knew I was right.

  “Now,” I said. “Your turn. Why do you want to find that old man? Garcia, right?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Because he’s the only one who can get me and Annabelle back together again.”

  “And you know this how?”

  I expected him to spill the answer I’d already arrived at while looking at the jailer’s newspaper, imagining him throwing it like a trump card that he intended to cow me with—he was after Guillermo because a woman named Elsa Schwartz had fed him a story about needing to find an old man who could do amazing things like build machines that opened portals to other worlds.

  Instead, he said, “I know this because in my world, I worked for that old man. He ran the factory where I was working when I got zapped into this world, kind of the same way you just described what happened to you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Jetpack Jed led the way to his hovercar, parked at the curb halfway down the street. I felt torn as I walked with him—wanting on the one hand to turn and run and on the other hand to stay and finish the job I’d intended to do when crossing into this world. If I ran, I figured I could lose my double pretty quickly in the dark streets before making the hike back to Echo Park and the freedom to be found in a dark little garage; I had no intention of taking a chance on another cab ride. But running would mean missing out on the chance to poke at Jetpack Jed’s story, to discover how truthful it was, and maybe to find out something that could help me in my world, a way to put an end to the invasions I’d been experiencing. Staying was dangerous, as I didn’t feel good about trusting my double, and going would get me back to Sherise sooner. But leaving now would do nothing but force another trip, one where I’d come into this world of jetpacks and hovercars a little more alert but without much more concrete information than I had now.

  So, still weighing my options, I went with the well-dressed version of myself after he suggested we should go someplace where we could compare notes a little more comfortably. When the doors of his fancy vehicle popped open, I slid inside and watched as he pulled his expensive blue jacket off and tossed it into the rear compartment. Then he got in next to me and started working the controls.

  This was the first time I’d sat in the front seat of one of these things, so it was the first time I got a good look at how the hovercars worked. It appeared not to have any pedals on the floor. There was a lever on the console next to the driver’s seat, and I watched as Jetpack Jed worked it—sliding it forward to accelerate, relaxing pressure on it when the car reached its desired speed, and pulling back on it to slow or stop. Actual maneuvering was handled through the steering wheel, which looked about the same as in any other vehicle I’d ever been in. I did notice another lever built into the dashboard; it looked like it could move in different directions not unlike the controls Guillermo had built into his flying pick-up truck.

  As we drove away from the police station, I asked, “So, where exactly are we heading?”

  “I figured my place if that’s all right with you. This radio station money has been pretty remarkable. Bought a house out near the beach. There are plenty of guestrooms and no one to fill them up at the moment. That okay?”

  His territory. I didn’t like that. But, thus forewarned and still trying to get as far into his head as I could manage, I said, “It’s fine. I could use an actual bed that I’m not sharing with things that crawl in the night.”

  “Cheap hotels?” he asked as the car turned onto a major street and entered the flow of traffic.

  “They make ‘cheap’ sound luxurious.”

  “Sounds like where I’m from.”

  I still felt a low-grade revulsion every time I looked at him, and I expect he had the same instinctual, primitive response to me. But I was managing to suppress the brute desire to smash his face against the window, and I can only assume he was similarly struggling for control. The resulting conversation was more of a masquerade, but it was one we both managed to pull off.

  “Not a nice place?” I asked.

&
nbsp; He shook his head. “Terrible,” he said. “Police on every corner. Factory smoke turning the sky gray. People…miserable. Sick. Hungry. It’s an awful place. When I got knocked into this world, I thought at first that I’d died and ended up in paradise. But I was still hungry, so I changed my mind pretty quickly. It’s not paradise, but it’s damned close.”

  “Tell me about the accident,” I said. And then, hoping it didn’t sound like fishing, I added, “And this old man you worked for.”

  “Guillermo?” he began. “I don’t really know him. He runs a big factory over on the other side of the river. In my world, I mean. Makes mostly weapons. For the government, you know? But he’s brilliant. An old inventor from way back. They say there’s no problem he can’t solve. I was just a cog in his machine, working an assembly job. The company got a new order for a weapons system from the government, and I got put on that detail. One day, I went in to work like normal. Just working the line like any other day. And there was this flash of light. And then the building was gone. I was standing in a vacant lot a hundred yards from the Los Angeles River. There was smoke coming off my clothes like I’d just run through a burning building.”

  He laughed a little at the recollection and added. “I was facing east. When I turned around and saw downtown Los Angeles, I dropped to my knees. You’ve seen the buildings? All glassy and smooth?”

  “Like kids’ toys,” I said, glad to have found something intelligent to say while my mind raced at the implications of what he’d just described.

  He shook his head. “Not the kind of toys kids get where I’m from. A kid gets something shiny, it’s probably a blade that he can use in his first stick-up.”

  The more he talked, the less convinced I was that Elsa had gotten to him in the time she’d been in this world. His story about how he knew of Guillermo seemed legitimate, which would make his quest for the inventor something he’d come up with on his own, not something my missing Nazi had put him up to in an effort to get the encoded diagrams in Klaus Lang’s notebook turned into something tangible—and dangerous.

  “Why in the world would you want to go back to a place like that?” I asked.

  “Go back? Are you kidding? I don’t ever want go back there.”

  “Then why look for the old man?”

  He turned his face toward me in the dark interior of the hovercar and said, “Annabelle.”

  I understood then. He wanted to bring her over with him, to save her from that awful world—where she was now having to get along without him. I could relate.

  “Have you looked for her?” I asked. “Here, I mean.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve got a private detective on the job, but he’s come up with nothing.” He shook his head. “Even if he did, though, even if a version of her is here…she’s not my Annabelle. She might be with this world’s Jed Strait already—if there is one. Or she might be with someone else. Either way, if I show up on her doorstep with a story about getting knocked into this world from a different one…well. You know how that would go.”

  “She’d call you crazy,” I said.

  “And call the cops. No. I don’t need that. I need my Annabelle brought over, and only Guillermo can do that.”

  “You’ve had no luck finding him?”

  The traffic was slowing ahead of us, and it seemed as though Jetpack Jed was approaching the stopped taillights rather rapidly. As soon as I’d asked my question, I stopped caring about the answer, more concerned now with the man in the driver’s seat not getting both of us killed. When we were about twenty feet away from the hovercar in front of us, he reached out for the lever on the dashboard and pushed it upward. Immediately, the hovercar rose higher off the ground, sailing forward at about the same speed it had been traveling along the road but high enough now to clear the roofs of the stopped cars in front of us.

  I must have had a shocked expression on my face, as Jetpack Jed started laughing while glancing over at me.

  “Don’t panic,” he managed to say. “It’s all quite normal.”

  When the traffic eased up, he pulled down on the lever, and the vehicle slowly dropped down to where it had been before, skimming along some ten or twelve inches off the ground instead of several feet.

  “Why doesn’t everybody do that?” I asked.

  “The permit costs a small fortune,” he said. “If everybody could do it, we’d have cars bouncing along at every height imaginable. It would be chaos. So, the city sells only a few permits to get one of these lifters installed.” He tapped the console near the little lever. “In this world I’m rich as hell. In that other, no one cared what I could do with a guitar. Could just as easily have choked myself with the strings for all the good it did me.”

  I nodded. “So that story about getting discovered in the square downtown?” I asked.

  “That part’s true. After I was here a day or two, I stopped thinking I was in paradise and started thinking I’d lost my mind. I had nowhere to go, nothing to eat. I ended up in the downtown library, digging through trashcans on the sly for scraps just to survive. After a while, I decided there might be some other explanation for what had happened to me since nothing else about the way I was thinking felt any different from the way I’d been before the accident at the factory. So, I started looking around in some of the books there in the library. And eventually found something that helped me make sense of it all.”

  “A book about alternate worlds,” I said, thinking about Cosmo Beadle’s tome, Other Worlds Than This.

  “You say it like you found the same thing.”

  “I did,” I said, and I rattled off the title of Cosmo’s book.

  He nodded. “Sounds like the same sort of thing I found. Only it was more than one. There’s a whole branch of science devoted to the idea.”

  “So, once you knew you weren’t crazy…”

  He shrugged. “It wasn’t immediate. I still wonder. Don’t you?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Anyway, about a week after I found those books, I got a job as a dishwasher. Moved up from the library to a flophouse. I saved my money and bought a cheap guitar that I played in the square when I wasn’t washing dishes—collecting money from tourists, you know? That’s when a producer from the station heard me playing and that was it.”

  “Lucky man,” I said.

  “What about you?” he asked

  I gave him a short version of what my experience had been, forgoing all reference to the world I’d been in since my own accident. The longer I was around my double, the more it seemed he was telling the truth, and the feeling of irrational loathing that I’d first felt for him had ratcheted down just a little. Even so, I still didn’t trust him completely and wanted to keep from him any knowledge of the life I’d lived since coming to the Los Angeles of Carmelita, Sherise, and Jed Strait Private Investigations.

  “So, why’d you head west?” he asked when I’d finished my bent version of the truth.

  I shrugged. “There was nothing for me in the east. Nothing I could latch onto, and once I read that book about other worlds, I figured if everything had changed on me, then I needed to change, too. New location, new opportunities. Imagine my shock when I got here and heard you on the radio.”

  He chuckled lightly at this and said, “Why didn’t you try contacting me?”

  “I thought about it. Just wasn’t sure, though. I was biding my time. And then I got arrested. Accidentally tried passing money from my world and got caught.”

  “And that forced your hand.”

  The hovercar had been steadily heading west, and now I saw that we were descending this world’s version of the California Incline and dropping down to the Coast Highway, heading north. The Pacific off to our left was a black void, and the road ahead of us was peppered with the lightbars of southbound vehicles traveling through the early morning hours.

  “So, what happens if there is no old inventor who can help you get your Annabelle back?” I asked.

  He shrug
ged. “I guess I move on. Hate to do it, but…”

  “Nothing else you can do,” I said, knowing it sounded cold but not really caring.

  Not long after dropping down to the coast road, Jetpack Jed slowed near an intersection and got ready to turn right. Looking out the window, I strained to see where we were, but there were no familiar landmarks. And then, as the car turned, I caught the road sign—Sunset Boulevard. We were in the vicinity of Peter Mulligan’s house, the site of Penny King’s death and the neighborhoods I had visited the day before in a different world.

  When Jetpack Jed turned left again a short distance away from the Coast Highway, I felt goosebumps spread up my arms again. He had turned into the same neighborhood as the murder house, and I felt an uncanny certainty that in this world Penny King had died elsewhere and that it was Jetpack Jed who lived in the fancy house above the deadly garage. What this would have meant, I couldn’t say—and I still can’t, as it turned out that Jetpack Jed stopped his hovercar two houses away from the spot I’d identified the day before as Peter Mulligan’s.

  As the car slowed to a stop, I could see the trailhead at the end of the street that I had traversed in my world, the same path Penny King had followed to her death. When he turned the car to face his garage door, the lightbar illuminated the murder house for a moment.

  “That place looks familiar,” I said. “Do you have famous neighbors or something? Seems like I’ve seen that garage before.”

  He pointed. “A woman got murdered in there about ten days ago. I slept through the whole thing.”

  “That actress, right?”

  “She’s the one.”

  “You know her?” I asked.

  “I haven’t exactly been the neighborly type,” he said.

  There was a little raised section on the dashboard in front of Jetpack Jed. I had noticed while we were driving but hadn’t given it any thought. Now, he reached up to it and must have pushed a button on what I realized was a little metal box mounted to the dash. Immediately, the garage door in front of us started rising automatically. A mechanical garage door opener. It was an absurd and yet ingenious innovation, a luxury that would make the rich feel pampered by technology, freed from the inconvenience of having to get out of their cars and lift a simple door. How it worked, I couldn’t guess.