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

by Richard Levesque

  I hesitated above the tiny metal landing, staring at the window and wondering if I had somehow gotten the room wrong. This was definitely the fourth floor, though, and when I turned I could see the neon dentist sign that was visible from inside my room. The window I was looking at was unquestionably the one in my room.

  Gently setting the flight canisters down on the metal landing, I crept to the window and peeked inside. No one sat at the desk, and I couldn’t see anyone else in the room. Shifting slightly on my haunches, which made my ankle hurt again, I tried looking at the bed but could see only the brass bars of the footboard. There was a chance someone was sitting or lying on the bed, not the position I figured a cop would take if they were staking out the room. Considering all the possibilities, I decided the light on the desk had most likely been left burning by a forgetful housekeeper who’d given my room the once-over and then moved on.

  Even so, the anomaly of the desk lamp had me on edge. I crouched on the landing for several minutes, trying to get up enough nerve to open the window and risk detection if the room ended up being occupied. It was only after I realized the flaw in the plan Guillermo had laid out that I was spurred to action; the old man had assumed—and I’d gone right along with him—that the window would be unlocked. When I’d told him my story, I had included the bit about going out onto the fire escape the night before and trying to pick out the prone bodies of the punks from all the other dark shapes in the alley below, and I was reasonably sure I hadn’t bothered to lock the window upon going back in. But what if a housekeeper—or whoever had left the lamp on—had seen the unsecured slider that should have locked the window in place? If the window was now locked, there would be no way back into the room except down to the street and through the lobby. And if Miller had people down there waiting for me…

  I put my hands on the window frame and pushed up, holding my breath as I did out of fear that the window wouldn’t budge. My worry was unfounded, though. The window slid up, silently and with ease just as it had when I’d opened it from inside the room the night before. Once it was open about six inches, I stopped pushing, just crouched there listening for any signs of life from within. After a few seconds went by, I remembered to exhale.

  The sensation of relief didn’t last long. Paranoia rose up like an angry shadow and swatted me down again as I imagined a zealous maid or a curious cop noticing the bulge in the cushion on the little stool and finding the gun there, removing it from the room.

  Not in the mood to let that nasty possibility ride me for even another second, I reached in through the window and felt under the cushion where Miller had planted his big feet this morning. The gun was gone.

  Nearly panicking, I rose up on my haunches so I could see inside at a better angle and was relieved to see the bulge in the cushion a few inches from where my fingers had been blindly groping. Seconds later, I had the little gun in my hand.

  I could have turned at that point and walked up the metal steps to the roof again. There, I could have strapped the cylinders to my back and been on my way to Chavez Ravine, mission accomplished.

  If I had done that, everything would have worked out differently. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve lain awake since then, wondering about all the implications of the choice I made out on that landing.

  That night, though, it wasn’t infinite possibilities but rather that damned desk lamp that nagged at me. So, instead of heading off to relative security, I undid the safety on the little gun and stuck the tip of the muzzle into the open window, pulling the trigger and hoping my luck would hold out a little longer.

  As had happened earlier, I heard the whoosh and smelled the release of chemicals that accompanied the weapon being discharged.

  I waited.

  There was still no sign of anyone inside—no groan, no sound of a body hitting the floor.

  Leaning forward, I put my mouth to the open window and called out, “Who’s in there?” There was no response.

  “I’ll shoot you where you stand,” I said again. Still there was nothing, so I pushed the window all the way up and cautiously put my head and shoulders through the opening.

  Someone was lying on the bed. The desk lamp cast light on the other side of the room, leaving the sleeping area in relative darkness. With my eyes unadjusted to the change, I could make out nothing more than a shape.

  Keeping my eyes on the bed, I climbed through the window, taking care to set my feet on the hardwood floor as quietly as I could. Then, with the gun drawn—mostly for show—I advanced on the bed.

  At the first glimpse of blonde curls on the pillow, I dropped the gun to my side and rushed the rest of the way across the floor.

  Chapter Eleven

  Annabelle lay on her side, her face toward the wall. She looked to be wearing a full-length green slip, and she was on top of the worn bedspread. Bending over her, I saw that her eyes were closed and her mouth was open just a little. I didn’t need to check for a pulse, as I could hear her breathing steadily.

  I stood over her for a few minutes, the gun still in my hand and my mind racing.

  Having crossed a continent and put myself through a few kinds of hell to find the woman who’d jilted me, I wasn’t sure what I should do now that I’d reached that goal.

  But then I told myself that I really hadn’t found her. She’d found me.

  How, though? And why?

  Myriad questions caromed off each other, the inside of my head dinging like a hopped-up pinball machine with curiosity and apprehension acting as the little silver balls. Whether they’d lead to the bright lights of understanding or the disheartening buzz of “game over,” I didn’t know.

  Foremost in my mind was the question of what she was doing there, followed by how she’d gotten into my room. Beyond that, I wondered what I should do now that she was here. Play dumb and let her lead? Play the spurned lover? And what then? What would I do with the information she fed me?

  I couldn’t know, not any of it. So, instead of formulating a plan as I gazed down at her sleeping form, I resolved to let things unfold in whatever way seemed natural. At the same time, I promised not to forget her letter, the way she’d turned her back on our history and the possibility of a future together. I knew that once she was awake, though, once I heard her voice and felt her breath on my cheek, it was going to be tough to remain firm in my resolve.

  Squeezing the gun’s handle, I recalled with a mental twinge the feeling of pressing a different gun against her abdomen. The memory scared me even as I reminded myself that the “incident” had occurred in a different place than this hotel room and that Annabelle, at least part of the time, had had red hair. It was still gloriously blonde now, which I took as an insurance policy that the unpleasant things I’d experienced before were not about to repeat themselves. Regardless, I asked myself if I still would have pulled the trigger outside the window if I’d known it was Annabelle waiting in the room, and I knew the answer was yes. It was the only definite thing I had.

  When I heard her breathing change a little, it brought me out of my reverie. With no idea how long the gun’s effects would last, I turned away from the bed, telling myself it wouldn’t do for her to wake up and find me holding a gun on her. I assumed that, since she hadn’t reacted to my opening the window earlier, she must have already been asleep when I arrived on the landing outside and that Guillermo’s trick gun had sent her into unconsciousness, from which I figured she’d emerge before too long. Looking around, I saw a fancy black dress hanging from a hook on the hotel room door and Annabelle’s shoes tucked into the space under the bed. I also spotted her purse on the bed beside her; I didn’t want to risk opening it or getting caught peeking inside, but I did take a chance and lift it, relieved to find it was far too light to be concealing a Luger.

  It was easy to imagine her sitting at the desk waiting for me and then growing tired as the evening stretched on and on until she finally gave up, took off her shimmery dress to keep it nice, and lay down on the bed
to wait for me. Maybe she hadn’t planned on falling asleep, but that didn’t matter. She was certainly asleep now.

  I put the gun back in my jacket pocket and took advantage of her condition by returning to the window and hauling the flight pack inside. Not in the mood to have to explain the cylinders to Annabelle, I opened my mostly empty suitcase and dropped the flight pack inside, wedging in my extra socks and underwear to make a nice, neat package once the lid was closed and latched again.

  After that, there was nothing to do but sit on the edge of the bed and wait for the effects of the Carmelium—or was it Chavezium?—to wear off. Almost twenty minutes passed before Annabelle’s eyelids fluttered into wakefulness.

  “Jed?” she asked, her voice still groggy and her deep blue eyes barely alert.

  “That’s me,” I said. “You okay?”

  “Me?” she asked, sounding a little confused about why I’d asked. And then the confusion spread across her face, as she must have realized that something untoward had prompted the question. For just a second, I could see that she sensed something was wrong, that what she’d just awoken from had been deeper than sleep. And then, just as quickly, the concern left her face as though she’d just realized it was visible and that it made her vulnerable, exposing more of her true self than the green slip did. In an instant, she was the same old Annabelle again—vivacious and good humored, the woman I’d thought I was coming home to. “I’m fine, Jed,” she said. “How about you?”

  I nodded. “Right as ribbons. A little broke and a little worn out at the moment, but…” I raised my arms in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get gesture. “Same old Jed, right?”

  “Same old Jed,” she echoed a little sleepily.

  We smiled at each other for a few seconds. I was looking for any sign of that vulnerability revealing itself again. And Annabelle…I don’t know what she was looking for or if she found it anywhere in my face.

  She half turned and raised her arms in a welcoming way, meaning for me to fall into them, I suppose. But as she rolled onto her back, I caught sight of a little black tattoo above her left breast, part of it hidden by the slip’s strap. It was smaller than the one Masterson’s corpse had sported, easy to conceal under a fancy dress like the one that hung on the back of my door, but it was the same design—no doubt about it.

  My skin went cold when I saw that ink. In that instant, I knew who’d lured her to the west coast. I knew why she’d left the Hotel Dorado. And I had a pretty good guess about where she’d gone from there. What I didn’t know was why she’d come to my room.

  I found out a moment later.

  “Come here, Jed,” she said, the Siren’s song barely above a whisper.

  And in spite of what I knew and what I didn’t, in spite of her break-up letter and my fears that I was losing my mind, in spite of the tattoo and everything it hinted at, I hesitated only a second before doing as I’d been bidden, dropping onto the bed and into her arms, a missing man getting found. I felt a hunger I didn’t know I was capable of, a hunger tinged with the anger I’d felt upon receiving her letter and the confusion I’d felt when another version of myself was holding a gun on her; strangely enough, the anger and confusion made me want her more in that moment than I’d wanted her during all the time I’d imagined her waiting for me, faithful and sweet, her skin unmarred by ink. Her lips were magnets that drew me in and held me like a mine latching onto a passing freighter. It was the kind of embrace that would have to end sometime, but it felt awfully permanent in the moment.

  * * * * *

  We never bothered with the desk lamp or the window shade, so if there were lurking pigeons on the fire escape that night, they got a pretty good show.

  Later, once our breathing had returned to normal, I felt all my conflicting emotions bubbling up in me. I could resist them only so long.

  “That’s not exactly the kind of greeting I thought I was going to get,” I said. “Not after you wrote that letter.”

  Her expression turned from blissful relaxation to a regretful pout. “I’m sorry about that, Jed. I really am. It was wrong of me to write that letter and leave without giving you a chance to see if you wanted to come with me.”

  “You would have come out here anyway?” I asked. “Even if I’d come home and told you I didn’t want to go?”

  I was asking her if she would have been willing to choose Beadle’s Crossovers over me. It was a question I already knew the answer to, but I asked it anyway. Already I was regretting the way I’d given in to the temptation of her charms because now I was feeling more confused than I’d been before. I suppose asking that question was my way of trying to regain some ground, trying to get back to where I’d been before I’d found her in my bed—back to the Jed Strait who was lost and confused, jilted and a little crazy if not downright delusional, the Jed who’d been wronged and who’d come to California not to reclaim his lost love but rather his sanity.

  “It sounds kind of awful when you put it that way,” she said.

  “Well, it felt kind of awful getting that letter.”

  “If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have done it the same way. I wouldn’t have treated you like that, Jed. I promise.” There was a moment’s silence between us, and then she went on. “And now that you’re here, can I make it up to you?”

  “How?” I asked, doubtful.

  “Well…” she said with a smile. “I kind of made a start at that just now, didn’t I?”

  “You did,” I said, and it was hard not to smile back. “How’d you get in here, anyway?”

  Her smile broadened. “I got friendly with one of the chambermaids when I was staying here,” she said. “And she let me know someone had come around asking about me. I knew it couldn’t be anyone but you. It was pretty easy to talk her into using her key to let me wait in here ‘til you came back.”

  She sat up at this, and the sheet she’d been covered with fell partly away. My eyes didn’t go where she probably expected they would but rather to the tattoo above her breast. I raised an eyebrow.

  “That’s new,” I said with a little nod.

  “Oh, this?” she said after a glance downward in the direction my eyes had traveled. She got an embarrassed look on her face and pulled the sheet up again. “That’s just something my friends are doing. They talked me into getting one, too. Just to go along with the crowd, kinda. You know?”

  “I know,” I said. A little sadness must have crept into my voice, that and confusion. Two things that, before the war, I hadn’t been used to feeling where Annabelle was concerned, and things I was even less inclined to express.

  She must have misread my response, as she said, “It doesn’t make you mad, does it?”

  “No,” I said.

  She smiled again, the embarrassment seeming to fade.

  “Why don’t you turn that light out?” she asked, a hint in her voice of what she’d want once again after it was dark in the room.

  The tattoo and everything it suggested brought a moment’s hesitation, that and the fact that Guillermo was still waiting for me to return with his gun and his flight pack. “I’d love to,” I said. “But…I’ve got a friend waiting for me. I borrowed something of his, and he’s expecting it back right away.”

  She pouted at this. “It can’t wait ‘til morning, Jed?”

  “No. It can’t.”

  “What if I offered to take you back to the place I’ve been staying? I’ve got a car. We could drop your what’s-it with your friend and then be free to do whatever we want.”

  It was an enticing offer, the tattoo and its implications notwithstanding.

  “I don’t know,” I said. And I didn’t, not really. And then I ventured another question, one that had been nagging at me since I’d first asked about her down at the reception desk the day before. “Just where have you been staying, anyway?”

  “Oh, it’s a nice place. It’s out on Catalina Island, and the people there are just the nicest you’ll ever want to meet. You won’t ever wa
nt to leave.”

  I nodded at this, recalling what Detective O’Neal had said about Cosmo Beadle’s cult being centered on Catalina. Questions raced through my mind—about how exactly Annabelle had been sucked into the old actor’s cultish group and whether there was any similarity between Beadle’s claims of visiting other worlds and the experience I’d had in the Break O’ Dawn. If that was the case, did it mean I wasn’t crazy? Or did it mean that Cosmo Beadle and his followers were all as batty as me?

  “That sounds nice,” I said, mainly because I could think of nothing else to say.

  “That’s what I was hoping you’d say.” She was still smiling as she spoke, but then as I watched it was like a cloud passed across her face. “Jed?” she asked. “I need to know. Has there been anyone else? Since…you know?”

  The guilt I’d felt over my wrong choices during the war still felt like a freshly picked scab, so much so that I didn’t want to have to own up to those choices now, not even after the break-up letter and all the anger I’d felt toward Annabelle over the miles I’d traveled since. It was an opportunity to stick the knife in and get a little one-upmanship on her, but I wasn’t ready for that.

  “Do we have to talk about that?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “I suppose not. But…” Her voice trailed off in uncertainty.

  “What is it?”

  “When you got into town yesterday…you weren’t alone, were you?”

  I felt myself grow cold at this, the same feeling I’d gotten earlier when the cops had started asking me about the woman who’d driven me into the city. “How did you know that?”

  “The chambermaid. She said the cops were asking about you, about a murder…and a woman.”

  I nodded, remembering that Miller and O’Neal had already known a lot about me and my stay when they’d knocked on my door this morning; they’d clearly talked to the clerk from the day before, and probably a few others. Word had probably spread throughout the whole hotel.

  “She’s nothing, Annabelle. My car died out in the desert, and she gave me a ride into the city. That’s it. I had no idea what she was mixed up in when she picked me up, and I’m not mixed up with her now.”