Ten minutes later, we were pulling up at the curb across the street from The Tidepool Inn. It was essentially the same structure as the one I’d seen that morning in a different world while sitting in the back seat of Jetpack Jed’s hovercar, only then the building had been behind a chain link fence, its walls marred by graffiti. In this world, the three-story building was pristine, painted a light blue and with all its windows shining brightly instead of being broken out, only shards remaining in the frames.
As Carmelita killed the engine, I reached for my door handle and said, “You coming?”
She smiled. “I thought you might not want me to.”
“You got the lead,” I said. “You deserve to be in on this.”
“Thanks.”
“It might be best if you hang back a little, though,” I said as we crossed the street.
“I’m not that far along in my apprenticeship, you’re saying.”
“Something like that. You might want to put on your sunglasses, too” I added, still aware of her facial imperfections that had yet to be taken care of. The asymmetry of the left side of her face and the oddness of the left eye were things I’d already gotten used to, but I worried they would be too distracting to strangers.
She did as I suggested, and then I held open the door to the office, following her inside. It smelled like a hotel lobby—overly clean and with some sort of calculatedly inoffensive air freshener or cleanser having been applied recently and regularly. Green leather chairs were spread around the lobby along with a few sections of the newspaper on little tables. Across from the door was the lobby desk, a long counter on the other side of which stood an officious little man with sandy hair and an upturned nose. To the right of the counter was an open door, beyond which I saw a corridor that some of the first-floor guest rooms opened onto. There was also a carpeted stairway leading to the second and third floors.
“Good afternoon,” the little man said, his smile all cheerfulness. “How can I help you?”
He was all set to rent us a room—a happy tourist couple ready to lounge by the hotel’s pool or make the trek to the nearby beach. His smile was so fussy that I found it quite a pleasure to disappoint him.
“My name’s Jed Strait,” I said as I reached into my inner coat pocket for my PI license and the photo of Katrina Mulligan. Placing both on the countertop, I said, “I have reason to believe that one of your guests is in some danger, sir. If you could get her on the phone, it would be good for everyone concerned.”
His expression shifted immediately from officious to disgusted, and I could tell it had nothing to do with any disappointment over failure to rent another room for the night. He looked at Katrina’s photo for only a moment and then back at me. The smile returned, but it was a superior, smug thing now.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but we take our guests’ privacy very seriously here. We also take their safety seriously, so I’m sure that if anyone staying here is in danger out in the world, that danger isn’t likely to interfere with them during their stay.”
I nodded and put the photo and my license back in my pocket.
“Well,” I said, “sorry to have bothered you.” Then, turning to Carmelita, I nodded toward the open doorway beyond the desk and said, “Come on.”
I had taken two steps toward the door when the little man said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! I’m sorry, but you can’t go in there. Guests only.”
Giving him a smug little smile of my own, I said, “You’re going to stop me?”
“I’m going to call the police is what I’m going to do. They won’t care about your little license or anything else. We take very good care of the local police, and they take care of us in return. I can promise you they’ll be here in two minutes if I put in a call.”
His hand reached for the phone on the countertop.
It might have been a bluff, but I had no intention of being arrested a second time in twenty-four hours—even if it was in two different worlds.
“Fine,” I said. Then I tipped my hat and turned around. Carmelita followed me outside without having said a word, just like I’d asked her to.
“What now?” she asked as we walked back to the car.
“You’ve got that phone, right?”
“I do.”
“Well, let’s unfurl the antenna and see if we can catch our fish on a different line.”
Back in the car, we unwound the copper wire and clipped the lead to the phone. Then I had Carmelita call and ask for the guest in Room 254. I watched as she listened, and then she said, “I don’t know her name, but I know she’s staying in 254. She’s my best friend’s sister, and my friend—her name is Janice—she was just in a terrible accident. All she said was to call her sister at your number, room 254. I tried asking the sister’s name, but Janice passed out from the pain. I’m terribly worried she might not pull through. They’re taking her into surgery right now.”
All of this was delivered with enough realism to make the average Hollywood starlet shatter with envy, and I told myself to congratulate Carmelita on her acting abilities when she was done.
After another pause, she took an angry tone, saying, “You’re being very cruel! If my friend doesn’t survive, I’m going to make sure everyone in her family knows how awful you and your establishment have been. The papers, too!”
The threats must not have worked, as seconds later she set the receiver down and said, “He hung up on me. Do you think he knew it was us?”
“I suspect,” I said. “Should have gone with that angle first. Gotten Katrina on the phone and then told Imelda where to find her. Let her deal with the desk clerk.”
“How did you know the room number?” Carmelita asked.
“Just something I picked up on when I was in the other world,” I half-lied.
She nodded her head. Whether she bought that line or not, I can’t say. “What now?” she asked.
I sighed and leaned back in the seat. “Now…I don’t know. Maybe call Imelda anyway and tell her I’ve got a pretty good idea of where to find…”
I had an idea, inspired by the way I’d seen Katrina in the vision, sitting on the ruined hotel bed with the heroin rig laid out next to her and knowing that I’d almost surely been this close to that version of her when driving past the hotel in the back of Jetpack Jed’s hovercar.
“Your new trick,” I said, “with the portal. Do you still have the coordinates for the world I was in this morning?”
“Of course.”
“And you can open a portal right here?”
“If you want me to.”
“Let’s go somewhere a little more private and then…yeah, I think this can work.”
I nodded toward the ignition, and as she turned the key, she said, “What exactly are we doing?”
“Just go around the corner up there. We’ll see if there’s a quiet spot where we can make the jump.”
“I don’t know about this, Jed. Guillermo said making too many crossings might be dangerous. Look at what’s already been happening to you.”
“Don’t worry about Guillermo,” I said as she pulled away from the curb and headed for the next corner. “If Klaus Lang could make crossing after crossing and still function at the level of a genius well enough to get away from German high command, then I think I can jump into a world where there’s a banged-up hotel and back again.”
She said nothing, just took the corner like I’d asked her. It was a business district, and I spotted an alley between a dry cleaner and a bookshop. “There,” I said and pointed.
We parked at the curb and got out. As I led the way to the alley, it occurred to me that anyone watching us might think we were looking for a secret spot for a lustful assignation, but I didn’t let that stop anything. Carmelita wouldn’t care about anything like that, and my reputation was tied up in other things. Let them talk, I thought as we left the street behind.
Standing in the doorway at the back of the bookstore, I said, “All right. Turn on your light
, and let’s go.”
“You’re sure this is a good idea?”
“The best.”
She rolled her eyes and then got a look of intense concentration on her face. Moments later, the portal appeared two feet in front of Carmelita. When it had formed, her expression returned to normal. She considered the glowing circle and then looked at me with pride.
“You’re sure the coordinates are right?” I asked.
A raised eyebrow and skeptical look were all I got in exchange.
“All right, then. Let’s go.”
Without ceremony, I stepped through and looked around cautiously to make sure the location of our crossover was similarly out of the way in Jetpack Jed’s world. I was still in an alley, and if anything, it looked more isolated than the one I had just left.
Carmelita followed me through moments later. A few seconds more and the circle of light blinked into nothing.
“Good work,” I said and started back to the street.
“I still don’t understand how being here is going to fix your problem in our world,” Carmelita said as she followed.
“We can get into the building in this world,” I said. “And then go back once we’re in. It’s sort of the ultimate back door to sneak through.”
“I’ll say.”
Back on the main street, there was a traffic jam. All the hovercars were lined up bumper to bumper, and in the distance, I could see flashing lights. An accident, I thought. Different world, same problems. None of the drivers stuck in the gridlock must have had Jetpack Jed’s resources to be able to rise literally above the fray. Some had shut their vehicles off, their frames dropping to the asphalt and their windows open as they waited for the blockage ahead to be removed. Carmelita and I walked past all of them, and I found it a bit amusing to be able to move more quickly than the vehicles by employing the primitive method of foot travel.
I could see Carmelita taking it all in, her head darting from side to side as she soaked up all the details of this world. It must have been torture for her, I realized, to have gotten her wish and been able to cross into another world the night before—but only to spend her time there stuck in a dusty garage waiting for her errant boss to show up in need of rescue. Now, she had no such restrictions, and while it looked like she was expressing the enthusiasm of a fresh-off-the-airship tourist, I knew she was actually compiling all the data she could grab.
Up ahead, there was a breach in the fence that surrounded the hotel, providing easy access for vandals and squatters. Glad that I was still armed with both of the non-lethal weapons I’d been traveling with since leaving the Hall of Records, I nudged Carmelita with an elbow when we got to the opening, and we both ducked through the rift. We were in full view of the stuck drivers nearby, but I didn’t care and didn’t bother glancing back to see if any of them were monitoring our progress as we quickly made our way along the inside of the perimeter.
We found a side door whose lock had been forced and went inside, but when I closed the door behind us, all was darkness. The power was off and I had no flashlight.
“I can see,” Carmelita said, and she reached for my arm. “Come on.”
She guided me along, telling me to watch out for debris on the tile floor. As we went, our shoes clicked on the hard surface, the sound seeming terribly loud in the abandoned building.
“I think we’re in a service area,” she said. “Housekeeping maybe. We just passed a door with a sign saying ‘linen’ posted on it.”
“All right. Do you see anything that looks like a door out into the main area of the hotel? We need to get upstairs to the guestrooms.”
“Yes. I think. Down there a little farther.”
She led me along the corridor, and it was so dark that I didn’t know we’d reached the door until she stopped and opened it. The hallway beyond was dimly lit, and when we stepped into it, I saw that it was mostly lined with doors to the former guestrooms but that there were also regularly spaced windows that opened maybe onto the street and maybe onto an inner courtyard. These provided the light in this hallway, the bulbs in the wall sconces all being dead. As I glanced up and down the hallway, I saw evidence of considerable damage—some doors broken open, some off their hinges, graffiti on the walls, and trash scattered on the floor.
“They might have a hard time keeping their four-star rating,” I said as I pointed to the left, in the direction where I saw an opening about twenty feet down that looked like it might lead to a stairway.
I was right, and we started climbing. On the landing between the first and second floors, I stopped our progress to take a look at a woman sleeping on the carpet. It was dim in the stairwell although not as dark as the first hallway Carmelita and I had started in.
“Can you see her face?” I asked.
Carmelita bent toward the woman and then shook her head. “It’s not her.”
“She breathing?”
“Yes. Do we do anything to help her?”
I shook my head. “Not our problem.” Then I nodded toward the stairs, and we started climbing again.
On the second floor, we left the stairway. It took only a moment to tell that 254 would be to our right, so I led the way. When we reached the high 240s, I silently indicated to Carmelita that we needed to approach quietly. She nodded to show her understanding.
We got to 252, and I motioned to Carmelita that she should hang back. I approached the next door on my own, not surprised to see that the brass 2 had gone missing. As I’d done in my vision, I reached for the knob rather than knock. It turned in my hand, the lock either broken or the occupant beyond caring about who found or didn’t find her.
The room I looked into was not quite as destroyed as the one I’d seen in my vision. The mirror had broken, and pieces of it were scattered on the carpet. The mattress was askew on the box spring. But the window hadn’t been broken, so the breeze from outside couldn’t come in and flutter the curtains. It also couldn’t relieve the smell of the place, which was awful. Smells of excrement and vomit and decomposing garbage competed with each other, adding to a clear case of human misery.
Katrina Mulligan wasn’t sitting on the bed with heroin paraphernalia next to her. Instead, she was lying there, wearing only the white slip that I’d seen in my vision.
She’s dead, I thought. If I’d been trying to help this world’s Peter Mulligan, we’d have both been out of luck. It was just as well I didn’t belong here.
From behind me, I heard Carmelita quietly say, “She’s breathing.”
I turned my head to see she’d followed me to the doorway, sticking her head into the room. Her superior vision could pick up what I couldn’t in the dimly lit room, all the light coming from the lone window. I supposed that Carmelita had always had the ability to see in the dark and record phone calls; she just hadn’t known these were abilities, such had been the strength of the programming that had kept her from finding out that she wasn’t human. Now that those protocols had been broken, she was embracing all of her abilities, and I wondered what other surprises she still had in store for me.
Moving to the bed, I bent over the prone woman and touched her throat, looking for a pulse. It was there, and it was strong. She was only sleeping. My touch caused her to stir, but before she came fully to wakefulness, I grabbed her left wrist and pulled her arm straight. I didn’t need Carmelita’s super sight to see bruising and needle marks similar to what I’d observed on my cellmate’s arm the night before. Looking around at the scattered trash, I couldn’t see her kit, but I knew it was around here somewhere, probably the only thing in the room precious to her.
“Who the hell are you?” she said as her eyes fluttered open and she tried and failed to yank her wrist free of my grip.
I could have left at that point, could have told Carmelita to open a portal back to our world and ended up in the hallway outside the proper Katrina’s room. But just as I’d felt compelled to stay on Elvira Ruiz’s doorstep after I’d figured out the truth about her father, so
was I not yet ready to walk away from this broken version of the woman I’d been sent to find.
“I’m your guardian angel,” I said. “Come to save you from yourself.”
“Go to hell,” she slurred.
“Sounds like you don’t know how angels work, Katrina.”
Speaking her name was like hitting her with a live wire. Her eyes opened wide and she sat up like she’d been spring-loaded. The only thing she didn’t manage to bring to life was enough strength to pull free of my grip.
Now that she was up and I was able to look at her squarely in the face, I saw that she wasn’t quite the same beauty as in the picture Imelda Bettencourt had armed me with. This version of Katrina wasn’t wearing any make-up, but that wasn’t the difference. Instead, it was a seriously crooked nose, like it had been broken badly and left to heal without medical attention. There was no bruising around her eyes, so I guessed that whatever injury she’d suffered had happened a while ago. Still, it seemed odd; the newspaper I’d read in the diner on my first night here had mentioned Katrina as connected to Peter and the murder of Penny King, but it struck me as strange that the wife of a powerful Hollywood producer like Mulligan would not have had her face fixed when it had so clearly been broken.
“We’re not here to hurt you, Katrina. I’m not even here to take you out of this place. I can’t stay as long as any of that is going to require.”
“What do you want then?” she said, fear and anger in her voice.
“I want to know what happened to Penny King.”
She looked away, and the light from the window caught the crooked nose.
“Did Peter kill her?”
No reaction.
“Or did you?”
Now she whipped her head back in my direction, her breath coming fast and her jaw clenched tight.
“I touch a nerve, Katrina?”
“You son of a bitch,” she hissed.
Ignoring the insult, I said, “Walk me through it. Penny comes back late after Peter told her not to, so he locks her out, leaves her to sleep in the car down in the garage. He’s a bad guy, Peter, isn’t he? He do the same thing to you if you’re late?”
The Jetpack Boogie: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 4) Page 20
