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

by Richard Levesque

  Of course, I still had the option to turn around and walk out of the shop. Joaquin Murrieta, Jr. wasn’t likely to stop me; I didn’t think he could move fast enough to catch me, and it looked like he’d be pretty easy to knock off balance. I wouldn’t have had much trouble disappearing into the night, even if Miller still had the street staked out. A few dogs might bark as I worked my way up the hill, but they’d quiet down. If I kept moving, I could probably get over the hill and back down into civilization, find a bus bench or somewhere else to shelter for the night, and then hitchhike out of LA in the morning. It would mean abandoning my search for answers, though. And it would make me a fugitive, not just in California but beyond. Even worse, though, would be the fact that my running would mean that I’d abused this old man, essentially conning him out of seventy-five dollars he clearly couldn’t afford to lose and leaving him far worse off than he’d been before he’d had the bad luck to answer my phone call.

  The war had left my conscience with a lot of heavy baggage. Now I had the opportunity to either add one more steamer trunk to the burden or lighten the load just a little by returning a favor.

  It wasn’t a hard choice. “All right. I’ll do it.”

  “Es bueno,” he said.

  “I still don’t understand how I’m going to magically check on that cop out there and then get back to my room without being detected, though.”

  He shook his head. “Not magic. Better than magic.”

  Hopping off the stool, he waved me to follow him. “I haven’t finished testing this yet, but I think you’re going to be fine. And if someone is watching your hotel, it will get you in and out undetected. You have to promise to bring it back, though. Right away.”

  I didn’t like the untested aspect of whatever he was talking about, but I was also intrigued. “Something tells me I’m not exactly going to like this idea,” I said.

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “If I was an animal, would I be more of a dog or a cat?” I asked.

  He laughed at this. “Definitely a perro,” he said. “A big one, and maybe a little mean if the wrong vato comes at him in the dark. But loyal, I think.” He gave me a long, appraising look. “Not a perro, though. More like el lobo. The wolf.”

  Chapter Ten

  Guillermo led me along a narrow pathway to the back of the shop. Along the way, I finally caught sight of one of the illusive cats, an orange tabby that watched suspiciously from atop a cluttered shelf. The old man had me help him move a wooden milk crate filled with bits of scrap metal. Underneath it was a case about half the size of the suitcase I’d left back in the Hotel Dorado. It was the kind of thing I would have expected to see a musician pull a disassembled saxophone from. There was nothing like that inside, though.

  He had me carry the case back to the workbench; it weighed maybe ten pounds. When I set it down, he scooted past me and flipped the two clasps that held the lid in place; then he raised the lid up, and I saw I had been at least partly right. It was a musician’s case, or it had started life as one anyway. Plush material lined indentations that had probably cradled some sort of brass instrument when the thing had been new, maybe twenty years ago judging by how battered the outside of the case was. But instead of there being something with keys or reeds or even a shiny finish inside, the thing that the case now housed looked more like two insulated coffee pots, metal cylinders with a dull finish that were joined together with a welded bit of much less finished metal. There were leather straps riveted to the cylinders at various points, and I could see there was more to the straps hidden beneath the cylinders, as well as a little black box about the size of two packs of cigarettes. At the bottom of each cylinder was what looked like a cap that had been adapted from a jar or some other container not related at all to the things inside the case.

  Guillermo looked at me with a gleam in his eye. He must have known I had no idea what I was looking at, but he didn’t care. The old man looked like a proud parent who has taught his child the names of all the parts of a radiator or the anatomy of a goldfinch, an accomplishment that no one else around him would be able to appreciate but that he saw as remarkable nonetheless.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Another prototype. This one I’ve tested myself, though.”

  I nodded, unable to guess at the magic these cylinders must have in them.

  “Put it on,” he said as he unfolded one of his pairs of eyeglasses and slipped them on.

  I wanted to protest, but he was lifting the cylinders out of the case and removing the lids from the bottom of each piece of the device. He started arranging the leather straps, which I now saw were a sort of harness with buckles and loops sewn in to make it all adjustable. Within a few minutes, the device was strapped to my back, and one set of straps was fastened across my chest while another came up from between my legs to buckle into the rest of the straps in front. These last Mr. Garcia let me adjust myself, which I was grateful for.

  The little black box was tethered to the straps, and Guillermo held it up for me to see. He pointed to the different buttons on the box as he explained. “This one’s your power. Once it’s on, you can’t turn it off without holding these other two at the same time. That’s for safety. You don’t want to kill the power accidentally at the wrong time, if you know what I mean.”

  I didn’t, but he pressed on before I could say anything.

  “This is left and this is right. These two dials are your pitch and yaw. You know these things?”

  I shook my head in the negative, and he demonstrated with his arm in the air, moving it one way and saying, “Pitch,” then another and saying, “Yaw. You’ll get it soon enough. Now, this one is for altitude.”

  “Wait,” I finally protested. “Altitude? This thing is for flying?”

  “You want to get back to your hotel without being seen, yes? This is the way.” He tapped the cylinders on my back and then said, “Landing is the only tricky part. You can’t be in a hurry. Just reverse the altitude, but slowly while adjusting the pitch and yaw so you’re upright again. Comprendes?”

  “No,” I said. “This is crazy.”

  He shrugged and made to start unbuckling the chest strap. “Your choice, lobo. You can face that detective out in the dark if you prefer.”

  “God damn it,” I muttered.

  Garcia took this for acquiescence and withdrew his hand from the buckle while his smile grew even broader. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “I haven’t lost an assistant yet.”

  “Which I assume means you’ve never had one,” I said.

  His eyes twinkled behind his glasses, and he turned away.

  A chain hung from the tin ceiling in a back corner of the shop. I looked up when Garcia started pulling on it and saw the chain was connected to a pulley, which was also mounted next to a series of rails fastened to the roof. As he pulled, a large section of the tin slid aside, revealing the starry sky above Chavez Ravine.

  “This is a joke,” I said.

  “Push the power button,” was his only response.

  I looked at the little black box, took a deep breath, and pushed the button, ready for flames to start shooting out the bottoms of the cylinders. Nothing happened at first. Then I felt a vibration against my back. It was almost pleasant. At the same time, I smelled the same chemical odor I had picked up in the ally after discharging the non-lethal gun.

  “Just touch the up button for a second and then let go,” Garcia said.

  I hesitated and then did as he’d asked—and then I felt myself rise into the air. My feet were a few inches off the ground, and I could feel my weight against the straps that held me to the cylinders. The expression on my face must have mirrored my incredulity, as Guillermo burst into a merry chuckle while he gazed at me from his secure spot on Earth.

  “This is for real,” I said.

  “As real as my non-lethal gun, which you are now going to retrieve for me, yes?” He nodded toward the opening in the roof. “Go on. Push the button again
and rise up. Take a few minutes to get used to the controls, and then go.”

  “You’re sure this is safe?”

  He shrugged, not the gesture I was hoping to see. “At night it’s maybe tricky, but that’s how I’ve always used it. I wasn’t ready for anyone else to see yet. You just have to make sure you’re high enough to avoid trees and power lines, but not so high that an airship might clip you.”

  “You get a lot of airships flying over this neighborhood?”

  “No, but you never know when things are going to change, do you?”

  “You certainly don’t.” I cleared my throat and looked down at the ground, not enjoying the way the straps were putting pressure on my body and assuming it would only get worse the higher and faster I flew. “Well, let’s get this over with,” I said.

  “Wait a second,” Guillermo said. He turned and went back toward the doorway, expertly threading his way through the piles of junk and spare parts. When he reached the opposite wall, he reached for the light switch, and then the cluttered workshop was all darkness.

  “What gives?” I asked.

  “The detective,” his voice came to me through the darkness. “If he’s watching, now there’s no light coming through the roof, so he won’t see you leave that way.”

  “Great,” I said. “I guess you think of everything.”

  “Not everything,” he said.

  I didn’t like that, not one bit. But instead of asking what he might have forgotten to think about, I opted to take a deep breath and then pushed the up button again. This time, I didn’t let go.

  In seconds, I was about a hundred feet above Garcia Industries and all the other little houses in Chavez Ravine. Some had lights on, but many were dark. When I looked straight down, I could see into the workshop. Guillermo had turned the lights on again, the old man standing in the square of light that the opening in his roof made, and he was waving up at me in what I chose to assume was a gesture of encouragement rather than warning. It would be perfect, I realized, for the inventor to have forgotten some crucial bit of information until I was too far away to hear it, but I made a conscious effort to let that thought go.

  During the war, I’d had the lovely experience of a nighttime parachute drop into the French countryside. My comrades and I had landed squarely in a mess, getting shot at by German soldiers within a few minutes of touching down. I’m not ashamed to say that my nighttime flight over Chavez Ravine brought me back to that night during the war pretty quickly, and remembering that hot landing and all the men who never made it out put me in a pretty dark place for a minute, something I knew I had to shake off if I was going to do anything more than make a quick descent and throw in the towel.

  Telling myself it was a good night to die, I started playing with the controls.

  It took a little while to learn; I kept getting the controls wrong in the dark, and I’m sure I hit the “power” button more than once, grateful every time that Guillermo had thought to make powering the unit off a much more deliberate action. My problems with the controls did serve to get my head out of the war, however, so my immediate difficulties soon pushed aside the memories of my past scrapes with death. After several minutes of going up when I wanted to go right and feeling the yaw adjust when I wanted to go down, I finally began to feel slightly less than incompetent and doomed. When I experimented with the pitch and yaw, I found that I could turn my body so I was hanging beneath the cylinders, which took some of the pressure off the crotch straps and put more on my chest and shoulders. This was preferable in every way.

  Still making mistakes, I decided to get on with it regardless of my skill level. After narrowly missing more than one tree, I flew a little higher to get my bearings. Then I zeroed in on the dark car parked a short distance away from Garcia Industries. It was impossible to tell from this distance if it was the same car I’d ridden in that morning or who—if anyone—was inside. Flying over the car and coming down behind it, I was able to get a better look.

  It definitely was not a Peregrine. This car was smaller than the one I'd ridden in on my trip to jail this morning, with two doors instead of four. If it was a cop inside, then the car’s presence wasn’t likely part of official police business. I didn’t know what to make of that information but filed it away for later.

  Floating about ten feet in the air behind the car, too high to be visible in the rearview mirror, I nudged to the left so I could get a glimpse of the driver without being seen—unless the driver happened to be looking over his shoulder and up into the sky at that moment, something I was banking on as highly unlikely. In my new position, I could easily see that the driver was a blond man; he was looking straight ahead at the darkened exterior of Guillermo’s house and shop. Edging a little closer and growing more and more paranoid that the man was going to react to some unknown stimulus and turn to look at me, I was able to make out enough of his profile to see that it was, in fact, Detective Deke Miller.

  Well, I thought. Personal grudge or sent here on a mission from O’Neal?

  It didn’t matter. All I really cared about was that he was here and, in a few more seconds, I wouldn’t be. I wondered how long he’d wait for me to make my next move and tried to imagine how he’d feel when he finally figured out that I’d made it without him knowing, that I’d slipped away into the night somehow right out from under his nose.

  Only it had been over, not under.

  Looking down at the control panel, I made a very deliberate selection of the “up” button and shot into the sky. Now was not the time to experiment, as it wouldn’t have been at all suitable to blindly hit the wrong control and go crashing into the ground right next to the detective’s car. Instead, I was soon high above it, wondering when—or if—I’d ever see the hotheaded cop again.

  Safe in the sky once more, I took a moment to get my bearings. The tall buildings of downtown were not too far away, and I knew that the Hotel Dorado was in that direction. Mindful of the warning I’d received about power lines, I stayed high in the air, flying much higher up than the tops of the tallest buildings. Despite the perspective my altitude gave me, it still took a while to find Pershing Square—the city’s version of Central Park; when I did finally spot it, I knew I was close, as the Hotel Dorado was within walking distance of the Square. It was closing in on eleven now, and the streets below me were quiet. If anyone was in the park—drunks or kids hoping to dodge the cops—they weren’t visible to me, and if I was visible to them, I figured there wouldn’t be much they could do about it. Hovering over the open space and making a slow 360-degree turn, I picked out the neon dentist sign that was visible from my hotel room, and with that as a guide it was pretty easy to find the hotel itself.

  Landing was tricky, as Guillermo had warned. Not only did I have to reverse all the steps I’d taken to get myself in the air and correctly positioned, but I also had to figure how close the hotel’s roof was to my feet. It’s one thing when you’re walking down steps, even in the dark, but it’s another when there’s a force actually propelling you downward and you need to control that force rather than let it slam you down onto the surface you’re trying to land on. As it was, I came down with more of an impact than I’d wanted, making a bit of noise on the roof and jamming one of my ankles pretty good. I killed the power to the machine but didn’t unstrap it.

  The flight pack was small enough for me to walk comfortably still wearing it, so I kept it on and made my way to the front edge of the building. My ankle ached as I went but not so bad that I was worried about it; I’d had the opportunity to shake off more serious bumps in the past, so I told myself to walk this one off.

  I looked down from the building’s edge and scanned the street below, looking for any sign that the police had the hotel under surveillance for my return. There was nothing—or at least nothing obvious. There was no parking on Hill Street, so I wasn’t expecting to see a squad car or an unmarked job like the one Miller had driven into the ravine. If the cops were watching for me to come ba
ck to the Dorado, they might have planted someone in the shadows on either side of the street, or maybe even down in the lobby. In either case, I couldn’t make a tail from up on the roof and wasn’t sure what I was looking for at any rate. I looked anyway until I was satisfied and then made my way to the back of the building and the fire escape.

  Before starting down the metal staircase, I unstrapped the flight pack, not wanting the cylinders to clang against the rails as I descended. I wrapped the straps around the cylinders and cinched them together, and then I headed down toward my room on the fourth floor, carrying the flight pack by the straps like it was the strangest piece of luggage ever devised.

  I was feeling pretty good as I descended, convinced that I had gotten one over on Miller and imagining his face if he ever found out how I had made it back to the hotel undetected. But when I was about to step down onto the fourth-floor landing on the fire escape, my feelings of smug superiority evaporated.

  When O’Neal and Miller had led me out of my room this morning, the only light had come from the sun shining in upon the desk and the little footstool where Guillermo’s gun was hidden. There would have been no reason to turn on a light, but one was burning now, the little lamp that rested on the edge of the desk, the same one that had illuminated my ill-fated scribblings from the night before. Crouching on the landing, I struggled to remember if Miller had turned the lamp on when he’d discovered my notes on the stationery, or if O’Neal had switched it on to get a better look at what her partner had found. I could remember nothing of the sort—which meant that someone had been in my room since. Maybe housekeeping, I thought, telling myself it would not be out of the question for a maid to have left a light on accidentally after finishing her rounds in my room.

  But maybe not housekeeping. Maybe cops.