The Blacktop Blues: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 1)

by Richard Levesque

  It was a sad story, and I shook my head at the waste of it. Even so, it was nothing to the kind of carnage and stupidity I’d been subjected to for the last few years, and by the time I had finished mopping up my gravy, I was skimming stories about graft and political scandals, the dead actor all but forgotten.

  My plate of food was gone long before I’d exhausted the newspaper, so I made sure to tip the waitress a little extra for tying up her table. By the time I got out of the coffee shop, it was a little after five o’clock, and the autumn sun was already setting. The streets were gray and the city looked like it was fading in the twilight; as I had anticipated, a cool breeze blew through the canyons of buildings, making me glad I’d opted for a jacket before leaving the hotel. My stomach full, I found it depressing to think of heading back to my empty room with a whole evening stretching out before me, so I started walking instead.

  I had the vague intention of finding a pawnshop where I could unload the little prop gun. At least that’s what I told myself. At the same time, Broadway was full of distractions, and if I’d been thinking I should stop a passerby and ask after the closest pawnbroker, my motivation to do so grew weaker and weaker as I walked along.

  As the sun sank lower, the marquee lights on all the theaters switched on to do battle with the dark, and the rest of the street became a corridor of red and blue and orange neon: the promise of prescriptions and stationery and a thousand other mundane things made spectacular by the graceful curves of gas-filled glass tubes. The people I passed were no less remarkable—stunning women, handsome men; even smart little dogs at the ends of leather leashes—all looking like they’d just stepped out of limousines as they ambled past theater alcoves, coffee shops, and soda fountains. And high above it all an airship glided between the tops of the buildings and the bottoms of the clouds, bringing travelers and tourists from who knows where, about to add a few more bodies to the mix before me.

  Every time I spotted a blonde on the street, especially one with curly hair, I took a good look to make sure it wasn’t Annabelle. Sometimes that meant picking up my pace and then casting a not so subtle glance to the left or right as I passed one of these women. But when I made my way past a hair salon and spotted all the promises on the posters in the window, I stopped short and stared. It seemed that the fashion in this city included alterations on a grand scale. The red-haired woman on the poster in front of me sent chills into my scalp as I considered whether my search for blondes was pointless. What if Annabelle was a redhead now? And what if one of her new friends had given her a Luger to pack?

  If I saw her looking that way, I knew my only option would be turn tail and run—straight to the nearest mental hospital. I’d gladly face a strait jacket and intravenous feed of whatever nightmare chemicals they offered me.

  These thoughts racing through my mind, I no longer wanted to look at the women on the street—not the blondes, not the redheads, not any of them.

  Agitated, I turned from the salon and window and started walking again, much more quickly now. It felt like I was running from something, but at the same time I knew my aimless footsteps might just as easily lead me right into the thing I was afraid of; in a city this big, the chances of bumping into Annabelle on the street were incredible small, but they weren’t zero. Fearing the very encounter I’d come west to have, it was almost an automatic response when I ducked into the first theater alcove I spotted, surrendering most of the change in my pocket for an eighty-six-minute diversion.

  The movie was a Spike Tolliver comedy called Wrong Way Romeo that ended up not being all that funny. Even so, the movie succeeded in distracting me despite its stale gags. As a result, I emerged from the dark of the theater to the gaudy brightness of Broadway feeling calmer than when I’d walked in. So, I guess I didn’t waste my time or my money.

  Walking back up the street, I succeeded in keeping my mental health at a distance. And when I came to the same diner where I’d eaten, I pulled the last nickel from my pocket and got a cup of coffee at the counter. There was no newspaper to read this time, so I didn’t stay long.

  Once outside in the cool night air again, I remembered what the woman at the Hotel Dorado had said about cutting through the alley to get to Broadway. Without giving it a second thought, I decided to take that path back to the hotel rather than continuing down the street and around the block.

  There were no lights in the alley, and it took several paces for my eyes to adjust to the darkness after being in the artificial illumination of the street at my back. I suppose that accounts at least partly for what happened next. In my defense, I would also add that it had been a long day, and I wasn’t at my most alert. Still, I tell myself I should have known what I was getting into long before I was in it. A guy who made mistakes like that wouldn’t have lasted five minutes going house to house in the little French villages I’d helped liberate over the last few years, not when shadows could hide Kraut snipers or when a darkened alley like this one might be crisscrossed with tripwires just waiting to make something nasty go boom.

  There were six of them, and they were spread out behind the Hotel Dorado and the office building next door. If they’d been clustered together and egging each other on, I would have noticed them sooner. As it was, they were here and there, lingering in the darkness and keeping quiet while one of their members was busy up against a wall. I smelled the paint and heard a strange hiss before I realized what was going on. And by that time, they were aware of me.

  I found myself facing off against a wall of angry, youthful flesh. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness by this time, and the flashing neon dentist sign visible from my room also shot its glow off the buildings’ sides so I could see that the punks had been marking their territory by painting a large black star inside an upside-down triangle on one of the walls. The leader of the gang wasn’t the biggest in size but probably had the largest personality. He had dirty blond hair slicked back with oil, and in his right hand he held an aerosol can. It took me a second to realize the can had been the source of the hiss and the paint although the idea of paint being sprayed out of a can was entirely new to me, another change that had come about stateside while I’d been busy overseas trying not to get killed.

  The leader tossed the can to one of his compatriots and then pulled a knife from his back pocket. He held it at his side, keeping what looked like a pretty tight grip on it as he tried staring me down, his lip slightly upturned in a satisfied grin at the prey that had just wandered into his web.

  “How you boys doing?” I asked, my eyes on the knife. “Nice night for a stroll.”

  “Nice night to give up your wallet and go back where you came from,” said the leader.

  “You don’t want my wallet,” I said.

  “You don’t know what I want, pops.”

  I was at the most twelve years older than this punk, and he was calling me “pops.” It made me smile.

  “You think I’m joking?” he asked, and he held up the knife. It caught what little light there was in the alley, a nasty gleam.

  I hadn’t come all this way to get sliced up and left to bleed out behind a lousy hotel, so I did the only thing that made sense. The gun came out of my jacket pocket, and I pointed it straight at the punk’s chest. Instinct and training had guided my thumb across the safety even though I knew the thing was a prop. The punk didn’t know that, though.

  “No,” I said. “But I’m not joking either. What do you say you go your way and I’ll go mine?”

  The little bastard had some spunk. I have to give him that.

  He didn’t hesitate but came at me even as his compatriots scattered.

  Given what I knew about the gun, it would have been smarter of me to sidestep so I could avoid the knife. I could have raised my hand and brought the handle down across the punk’s face while he lunged at me and missed, but the same instinct that had led me to disengage the safety also led me to put some pressure on the trigger as I planted my feet firmly in the alleyway to meet th
e assault.

  The gun didn’t fire—which is to say there was no report, no explosion of gunpowder—but it did make a noise. A loud whoosh came out of the barrel, and I felt a kickback even though there’d been no muzzle flash. The punk—maybe a yard away from me—acted like a mule had just kicked him in the gut. He doubled over, and his feet left the ground as he flew back about ten feet before coming to land in a heap on the cracked concrete of the alley. The two gang members who’d been closest to the leader also crumpled in their tracks, going down on their knees and then being laid out on the alley floor while all the rest bolted toward Hill Street and were gone.

  I looked in disbelief at the gun in my hand. It felt warm but not hot, and a strange, chemical smell came from it. I wanted to get rid of it but couldn’t bring myself to toss it just yet. The gang leader hadn’t moved. I crept toward him and kicked the knife away from his hand before reaching down to check for a pulse. It was there, and it was strong, which gave me some relief. I could see no blood on his shirt or any other sign that I’d done him serious damage. What I did see when I pulled back at his collar was the same star and triangle design as he’d been painting on the wall; he had it tattooed on his upper chest. I’d never seen the sign before and told myself I should avoid it if I ran across it again in this crazy city where outsiders seemed to be seriously unwelcome.

  “All right, punk,” I said as I got up. “I hope you don’t die from this thing, whatever it is.”

  Walking away from his prone form, my foot glanced across what I assumed was a bit of trash, sending it skidding a few feet across the alley floor. In the dim light cast by the distant neon, I saw that it was a thin little paperback book, skinnier than the reading material most of us GIs had received in care packages from well-meaning state-siders during the war. After taking a moment to check the punk’s unconscious companions, I stooped and grabbed the little book before making my way out to the street.

  At the alley’s entrance, I paused and looked up and down the street to make sure the rest of the scattered gang wasn’t regrouping for another assault. I still held the gun, but I kept it low against my thigh and used my body to hide the weird little weapon from any pedestrians who might see me lurking at the alley’s entrance. Satisfied that I wasn’t going to be accosted any further—at least not by the same punks—I tucked the gun back into my jacket pocket; then I looked down at the little book in my hand. It had the same triangle and star pattern on the flimsy cover, printed between the title and the author’s name—More Worlds Than This: My Journey to the Other Earths by Cosmo Beadle.

  There was something about the name that struck me as familiar, but I wasn’t about to go back into the alley so I could wake up the ringleader and ask him for more information after I’d gone to all the trouble of knocking him out in the first place. I thumbed the pages of the little book to see if anything familiar jumped out at me. It had lots of print and a few crude diagrams. After a few seconds perusing it, I tossed the little book to the ground where the punks might or might not find it when they came to.

  Taking one more look around, I raised my hand to my nose to see if my skin had picked up any of the acrid odor from the gun. It was there, but I hoped no more noticeable than any other smells one might pick up while passing through an alley. Hoping for the best, I took a deep breath and ambled into the lobby of the Hotel Dorado.

  The same woman was at the desk. I gave her a quick glance and tipped my fedora as I crossed the lobby and made straight for the stairs. She just stared, her expression suspicious. That was nothing to worry about, I thought. She seemed to have only one facial expression at her disposal.

  Keeping as far away from the front desk as possible so the strange smell from the gun might not be detected, I said nothing as I got to the stairs and started climbing them in what I hoped looked like a relaxed gait. Once I was on the second floor, though, I started taking the stairs two at a time.

  It wasn’t until I was back in my room with the door closed and locked behind me that I was able to relax even a little. The first thing I did was take the gun out of my pocket and flip the safety back on. Then I gave it as thorough a look as my untrained eyes were capable of, the result of which was upping my knowledge of its workings by a factor of zero. Once again, I was left to contemplate the little metal plate with the name “Garcia Industries” engraved on it, and that was that. Holding the thing up to my nose, it seemed to me that the odor was fading. I still had no idea how the thing worked; all I knew was that it was powerful as hell and that it would have come in awfully handy during sweeps of those supposedly empty villages in France.

  Not entirely satisfied that my examination of the gun was complete, I set it down on the little writing desk near the window, which I turned my attention to next. I cringed in anticipation of the squeak of the rollers as I prepared to pull up on the window. Surprisingly, however, it slid open with ease and with almost no sound at all; some diligent housekeeper must have soaped the mechanism. Once I had the window open, I slipped out onto the fire escape where I took a deep breath of the cool night air and then peered down toward the alley. I’d already told myself it would be too dark down there for me to see if the punks I’d dispatched were still lying on the concrete. At best, I hoped to be able to catch a sign of movement, maybe as one of them regained consciousness and made his unsteady way to the street. I saw nothing, though. Just darkness. They were either still down there, lying prone in the dark, or they’d already staggered off into the night. There was no way to know the duration of the gun’s effects, and I had no opportunity to run any experiments to find out.

  Feeling a bit more satisfied, I went back in and closed the window. Then I sat down at the desk and counted my money. After my meal, the tip I’d left the waitress, the movie, and my cup of coffee, I was down to nineteen dollars and sixty-eight cents.

  Rummaging in the desk, I found a few sheets of hotel stationery identical to what Annabelle had used to write the callous farewell letter to her grandmother. There was no fancy pen, though—just a dull pencil at the back of a drawer. I wrote $19.68 at the top of a sheet of stationery and subtracted from it in four-dollar increments. If I didn’t spend money on anything else, I could stay here for another four nights and still have $3.68 left over. Of course, I’d need to eat, but I could probably find cheaper meals than what I’d had tonight. And I didn’t need to spend any more on movies or coffee. Maybe I’d be able to get three or four bucks for the gun if I could convince a pawnbroker it was a genuine movie prop; I would just need to keep to myself the truth about what it could do. That would get me a guilty conscience and another night in the hotel—a real bargain, any way you sliced it.

  A better option, I thought, would be to see about finding this Garcia Industries and seeing if they’d be interested in buying the gun off of me. Given what the gun could do, there was a good chance they’d pay me for it.

  I wrote “Garcia Industries?” at the bottom of my column of figures. And next to that “Pawn Shop?”

  One way or another, I’d get a few extra bucks tomorrow. And I could also look for more of a fleabag flop, maybe one without its own bathroom, where I could stay for less than four a night.

  I wrote “Find new digs” under my other notes.

  And then, under that, I wrote “Library.”

  They’d have phonebooks in the public library, and there was a chance Annabelle was listed somewhere. She’d been here long enough to have possibly gotten herself established. Maybe she’d gotten a job. Maybe she’d left the Dorado because she’d found a little apartment somewhere, maybe even a place with a phone. If the phonebooks yielded nothing, I’d hang around the Hotel Dorado for another day or two and chat up as many of the staff as I could, hoping someone remembered something about Annabelle, some little detail that I could follow up on.

  Feeling reasonably confident in my plans, I set the pencil down on the stationery. And then I picked it up again. For no reason other than my impulsiveness, on the lower half of the sheet
I wrote the name “Cosmo Beadle” and sketched the star and triangle pattern the punks had been painting on the wall when I’d surprised them. Then I just looked at the image for a minute, feeling the weight of the day on my eyelids.

  I told myself that neither the name nor the pattern was important, but I still had a deep, ugly feeling that they were.

  Chapter Six

  I don’t remember having had nightmares during the war. Living a nightmare must have made my subconscious shrug and walk away, knowing it was beaten in the horror department. But afterward…during the confusion of waiting for word that I was getting shipped back home and during that whole trip across the ocean crammed into a ship with a few thousand other guys, I’d find myself waking up in a gasping panic, sweat covering my body and my mind filled with the worst images from the war, magnified by what turned out to be the gleeful sadism of my subconscious, now back in the saddle and ready to ride me hard.

  That first night in California, I must have done okay until just before the morning. But then I was back in it, and the dream I had was a recurring one that brought to life my last and worst experience from the war but with an added bit of horror that only a bent mind could come up with.

  I was guarding a compound at night, just the way I’d been doing in the real world a few months back. On the other side of the fence was a top-secret weapon, one that was reputed to be on the verge of bringing the Nazis to their knees. My rifle held to my shoulder, I patrolled up and down a length of fence; every few passes at the section I was responsible for ended in a quick face to face with Buddy Stiles, a GI I’d shared more firefights and foxholes with than I’ll ever be able to remember. The dream went along like that, boring and quiet—routine just like the military wanted it. But then, I heard a clicking sound, like a Geiger counter going nuts. And when I got to the edge of my section of fence, there was Buddy Stiles coming the other way.