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

by Richard Levesque

  “That’s not how Carmelita made it sound.”

  I took a shot at offering a disarming smile, but it probably didn’t carry much weight. “He went to the office, and Carmelita was worried he might show up at my place. I’m not in the directory, though. There’s no way he can find me there. Especially if I’m not home.”

  “I’m in the directory,” she said.

  “Yes, and I wish you weren’t. He’s got no way of connecting me to you, though. It’s nothing. Something I’m going to take care of tomorrow.”

  “And tonight?”

  I waited a few seconds before saying, “I was hoping I could make up to you for being so stubborn at Alphonso’s.”

  She nodded. “So, this thing Carmelita was describing? That’s not what happened at the restaurant?”

  I smiled. “It would probably be smart of me to say it was and play the sympathy card with you, but…no. That was all me. I’m sorry if I wrecked your plans.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m sorry that I made plans without telling you.”

  “That’s all right, too.”

  She stood up on her toes and gave me a kiss. Then she said, “Are you all right, though? Should I be worried?”

  “Come on,” I said. “You drive, and I’ll explain.”

  I gave her the whole rundown as we drove to her apartment building, including not just the moments I’d been crossed into by other Jed Straits but also the highlights of my adventures with Elsa and Jetpack Jed.

  As Sherise parked her Vixen on the street in front of her building, she said, “So, you’re going to have to go back? To get the Chavezium away from her?”

  “I suppose,” I said. “But not tomorrow. I need a little bit of time in this world, or I’m going to come apart at the seams.”

  We entered the courtyard and walked up the stairs. Sherise’s second floor apartment was on the corner of the building—a nice feature that meant she had neighbors on only one side. She sorted through her keys as we walked toward her door. The sound of her keys clinking together seemed far away to me, and I felt like the walk from the top of the stairs took much longer than it should have.

  At first, I feared that I was being crossed into again.

  Not now, I thought. Not when we’re about to walk into her apartment. Her bedroom.

  But the feeling stopped when we reached her door, replaced by a razor of clarity.

  I put my hand on Sherise’s, stopping her from playing with her keys.

  “What is it?” she asked. She looked at me strangely, and I could tell she had just gotten worried that the odd behavior Carmelita had warned of was making itself manifest.

  “The interview,” I said, my voice just above a whisper.

  “What?”

  “On the radio. My name. Your name. I said back at the club that Hennigar had no way of connecting us, but…it’s gone out over the whole city.”

  She shook her head. “Jed, you’re paranoid.”

  Again, she moved to put the key in the lock, and again I stopped her.

  “Let me,” I said, taking the key from her hand. “Stay back a second.”

  “This is crazy,” she said as I took Guillermo’s gun from my pocket.

  Instinct told me I didn’t need Sherise’s key. When I reached for the knob and felt it twist, I turned to her and tipped my chin, trying to send a signal that she needed to stay back. She’d been watching my hand on the knob, and her eyes shot up to meet mine now. She shook her head, sending a signal of her own that she wasn’t interested in laying low.

  How did I end up with a woman as crazy as me? I wondered, and then I pushed the door open.

  It was dark inside and silent. I stayed to the side of the door and reached around the jamb to find the light switch. The apartment inside looked fine—at first. I’d been expecting to find the place ransacked, but at first glance everything appeared in its place.

  But when I walked in, Sherise so close to my heels that I would have sworn I could feel her breath through the fabric of my jacket, I looked across the front room and saw that her bedroom door was hanging on only its top hinge.

  It hadn’t been a hotel suite I’d seen in my vision. As my consciousness had cycled through connections with a few different Jed Straits, one or two had been in hotel rooms where Katrina was holing up. But at least one had been in Sherise’s apartment, and I hadn’t made the connection. Had Sherise been clinging to that Jed’s shoulder as he pushed on the damaged door the way she now clung to mine? Or had he been alone, arriving too late, finding the apartment empty and quiet, Sherise gone?

  Once I saw that there was no Andrik Hennigar waiting for us in Sherise’s bedroom, I turned to her and scooped her into my arms, holding her tight with one hand pressed against the small of her back while the other still held Guillermo’s gun. She clung to me as well, neither one of us wanting to look at the way Hennigar had laid waste to her bedroom.

  In the glimpse that I’d gotten before turning to her, I’d seen drawers pulled from the bureau, clothes scattered across the floor and the bed. Framed photos and bottles of perfume littered the floor as well, and the mattress was pushed halfway off the box spring the way I’d seen one of the hotel beds in my vision.

  After at least a minute of silently holding each other, Sherise said, “Why?” She sounded angry, not scared.

  “To show that he can,” I said. “He picked your bedroom, not the front room. He wants us to know we can’t keep him away. He can get in wherever and whenever he wants.”

  We broke the embrace, and I turned to look at the room again.

  “Do we call the police?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Only one thing remained on Sherise’s vanity—a folded piece of paper.

  I shuffled across the floor rather than step on Sherise’s clothes, picking up the paper and unfolding it. Scrawled on the page in black ink was this message: “Mr. Strait must deliver Dr. Schwartz. He has until midnight on the night of the 23rd to deliver her to the Griffith Park tunnel. He and Dr. Schwartz shall approach from the east side. If the deadline passes, a bit of disarray will be the least of your problems. Don’t call the police.”

  Turning back toward Sherise, I reached across the chaos to hand her the letter.

  “Today’s the 18th,” I said as she read. “That gives us five days.”

  She looked up from the note and said, “What do we do?”

  “Call the police.”

  “But he said not to.”

  I shrugged. “We’ll get O’Neil involved. She’s police but not the police. She’ll know how to handle it.”

  “All right. Then what?”

  “Then?” I asked as I made my way back to the broken door and encircled Sherise with my arms. “Then I’m going to produce Elsa Schwartz just like he said. It’ll probably be in a silk-lined box, though. And then I’m going to drop him in right next to her.”

  * * * * *

  The adventure isn’t over. Jed Strait will be back in Book 5 of The Crossover Case Files soon. If you want to be notified of the next release, make sure you sign up for Richard Levesque’s email list, follow Richard on BookBub, or subscribe to his blog.

  Author’s Note

  Thank you for coming along on Jed Strait’s latest journey. Writing this series has become so gratifying for me, and I’m glad to see that so many people are sticking around to see what happens next.

  It’s been a lot of fun envisioning a version of 1940s Los Angeles that blends the noir setting I love in old books and movies with a science fiction aesthetic similar to what might have been found in the old pulps of the time—only in those cases, most writers would have been setting their stories far into the future (maybe even the 2020s).

  With this book, I had the opportunity to create yet a different version of Los Angeles, and I went with a different sort of retro-future than I’ve used in the previous books in the series. I hope you enjoyed Jed’s adventures in this new version of a future-past.

>   There’s more to come, of course, and I hope you’ll stick around to follow Jed on the rest of his adventures. You can stay up to date on the next release by signing up for my newsletter, following me on BookBub, or subscribing to my blog.

  If you enjoyed The Jetpack Boogie, I would be most grateful if you would leave a review. As an indie author, reviews are a key part of my ability to get my books in front of readers, so if you could post even a short note about what you liked about this book, you would be helping me an awful lot.

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  About the Author

  Richard Levesque was either born too late or too early.

  You decide.

  On the one hand, he’s consumed with writing the kind of stories Raymond Chandler might have come up with if he’d been interested in time travel and aliens rather than murders and femmes fatale.

  And on the other hand, he likes taking those noir-ish ideas and projecting them into the near future, a time where he imagines our technology has overtaken us and where the kind of integrity found among some of those detectives from old literary LA might still come in handy.

  When he’s not thinking of intricate plots for his characters to struggle their way out of, he’s busy teaching English at Fullerton College in Southern California, where he’s lived most of his life. He does not own a fedora or a trench coat, but he is a sucker for wet, dark streets, long, ominous shadows and a gritty soundtrack playing somewhere in the background.

  You can learn more about Richard and at his website.

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