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

by Richard Levesque

  “This doesn’t look all that friendly,” I said.

  “These are just for demonstration,” Annabelle said through the microphone. “Movies and other entertainment will come once they’ve got all the little problems worked out and can get more images onto a disk.”

  “But why all so…dark?” I asked.

  I felt her take my hand then and pull it forward. She placed it on the machine so that my fingers were touching what felt like a dial.

  “Uncle Cosmo is very interested in things that have gone wrong, disasters that could have turned out differently in the other worlds. He likes to study these things.”

  “So, this is his machine?”

  “It’s here for anyone to use. Now, make a selection.”

  I turned the dial and saw an arrow appear next to the label on the first disk—Natural Disasters.

  “That one?” she said.

  “Yes. I guess.”

  She moved my fingers off the dial and onto what felt like a round button. “Press it when you’re ready.”

  I didn’t really know what “ready” meant in this situation, but I pressed the button anyway.

  Newsreel footage of a flood in Alabama began playing on the goggles’ lenses, and the sound of the dramatic narration played in my ears. It was like I was sitting in a Saturday matinee with the newsreel coming on after the cartoon and before the feature film. I watched and learned about the flood and its victims, and then the film switched to coverage of a typhoon in the South Pacific. Footage of the earthquake that took out San Francisco in ’42 followed that.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” I heard Annabelle say, but now she sounded farther away, the disembodied narrator’s voice dominating my auditory experience while the woman who was within arm’s reach seemed like her voice was coming to me from one of Cosmo Beadle’s alternate worlds.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Even though the subject matter was depressing, I couldn’t help looking. The images coming at me through the goggles were so intimate, so immediate that I couldn’t have looked away if I’d wanted to.

  When the disk reached its end, I didn’t wait for Annabelle’s direction. My fingers went back to the dial, and I switched it so the third disk would play; images of warfare were not something I wanted to see even if they were going to be as compelling as the natural disasters had been.

  As I sat there in rapt attention watching the fire in the Empire State Building from when I was a kid, I heard Annabelle say, “What’s your favorite color, Jed?”

  “Dark green,” I answered without giving it a thought.

  “What was your mother’s name?”

  “Mary,” I replied.

  “Do you like green beans?”

  “Hate ‘em.”

  “That’s good, Jed.”

  My answers came out of my mouth without any kind of intention. She asked, and I answered, never even wondering why she was asking or whether I should keep the information to myself.

  I was watching footage of the aftermath of a plane crash in 1938, a trans-continental flight that didn’t make it all the way. Listening to the narrator describe the scene and then watching interviews with survivors in the hospital, I was captivated, and Annabelle’s questions were just on the periphery of my consciousness, like a fly buzzing somewhere in a large room, clearly there but inconsequential.

  “Do you know Gemma Blaylock?” she asked.

  “No,” I answered.

  “Then who did you ride into town with two days ago?”

  “Carmelita Garcia.”

  “Is Gemma Blaylock not her real name?”

  “No. It’s Carmelita Garcia.”

  The story about the plane crash ended, and a new one began, this one starting with a sensational headline: “Factory Fire Kills All but Lone Survivor.” The film began playing on the lenses, a huge building in flames with several fire engines all around it. Flames leaped into the sky along with plumes of black smoke while firemen tried dousing it from their ladder trucks as well as down on the ground.

  “Did she kill Lance Masterson?” Annabelle asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you kill Lance Masterson?”

  “No.”

  The narrator in the film was describing the enormous conflagration, a factory in downtown Los Angeles that had gone up in 1930, killing everyone inside except for one worker. Then the narrator said, “The sole survivor, Guillermo Garcia, escaped with severe injuries but is expected to make a full recovery.” Images of a man appeared in the lenses now; he was in a hospital bed with half his face bandaged, and I recognized a younger version of the inventor I’d met just the night before. “Sadly, Mr. Garcia’s wife and two sons worked in the factory with him, and all perished,” the narrator added. The film closed in on Garcia’s face as he offered the camera a sad smile.

  “Why does Carmelita use a false name?” Annabelle asked from far, far away.

  “I don’t know,” my mouth said while my brain was trying to process the old newsreel with Garcia in it. The images on the screen had moved on to a coalmine disaster in Kentucky, but I was trying to hold onto what I’d seen just a minute before. Something was wrong with it, a detail that just didn’t fit. Crews were digging to get the surviving miners out of the ground, and the camera showed anxious wives and children watching from a safe distance, and then I heard something else, something from far deeper in my mind—Garcia’s voice from the night before as he said: “We could go inside and sit, but my wife and grandkids are asleep inside, and I’d hate to wake them. It’s a small place, you know?”

  “Where is Carmelita Garcia?” I heard Annabelle say.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Guillermo Garcia had lied to me. I knew it in only the fuzziest way possible, but the thing it suggested to me seemed as clear now as the images coming through on the goggles. There could have been a hundred reasons the old man hadn’t wanted me inside his house; he might have remarried, he might have some other woman in there, or he might even have been using his kitchen to store a cache of gold that Joaquin Murrieta, Jr. had stolen from prominent Angelinos. I knew none of those things made sense, though. They didn’t fit with the rest of the way Guillermo had behaved during the time we’d spoken together. He’d had a more immediate and pressing need to keep the truth from me.

  “Where would she go?” Annabelle pressed.

  “Somewhere safe,” I said. My mind didn’t consider in even the smallest way the possibility that I shouldn’t be answering Annabelle’s questions. It seemed the most natural thing in the world.

  “And where would that be?”

  “Her uncle’s house,” I said. The newsreel disk of manmade disasters had reached its end, and I didn’t move my hand to start the next disk. For a second, I wondered what was going on as I stared at nothing but a black screen, and then I felt Annabelle’s hand brush mine where it rested near the knob on the machine. She must have selected the next disk, as the “Notorious Crimes” narrative began to play.

  “And where’s that?”

  Jolted into the new images, I didn’t understand her question.

  “Where’s her uncle’s house?” she asked again.

  “Chavez Ravine.”

  “Is there an address?”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “Then how do I find it?”

  “Garcia Industries,” I said. “There’s a big sign.”

  I think I remember feeling her kiss the top of my head then, and that was it. Her voice was gone, and everything else—her footsteps, the sounds of her getting dressed and leaving the room—were all blocked out by the earphones. I was left to watch the aftermath of horrific crime after horrific crime as the narrator droned on about man’s inhumanity to man, and as awful as it was, I soaked up every second, oblivious to what was going on around me.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When I returned to my senses, I wasn’t on Catalina Island anymore. I wasn’t in a fancy bedroom in a hilltop estate either. And
I certainly wasn’t hooked up to a record player that showed movies.

  Instead, I was sitting behind a desk in a dusty little office, a report on the desktop in front of me. A burning cigarette was between my fingers, and the ashtray at the desk’s edge was full of butts. I never got the smoking habit, but that didn’t stop me from taking a drag and letting temporary satisfaction course through my body. Across from the desk was a coatrack where a jacket and hat had been hung, and next to that was a closed door with a frosted glass pane taking up the top half; I could see black letters in reverse painted on the pane so that anyone on the other side of the door would see the word “Private” and stay out—unless I invited them in, of course.

  The thin report in front of me appeared to be a file on a woman named Veronica Clark. A small black and white photo of a young woman—pretty but not to excess—was paper clipped to the top sheet, and beneath that was a typed page detailing Mrs. Clark’s situation: married to a mid-level movie exec who suspected her of being involved with someone else.

  It happened again, I thought, and panic welled up in me. It was the Break O’ Dawn all over again. The sensations were just as real as anything I felt at any other time, but I had somehow…jumped. It was me, Jed Strait. It was my body. But it wasn’t the right me.

  I looked at my hands. Real. They had the same scars, the same callouses. But then the right hand reached for the cigarette again, of its own accord. I tried to stop it, just as I had tried in that other experience to keep myself from pushing Annabelle against the wall and pressing the gun into her abdomen. Then I took a drag on the cigarette, holding the smoke in expertly for a few seconds before exhaling toward the ceiling in a way that felt as natural as anything else I might do. I was myself and yet alien at the same time, just like before.

  There was a difference, though, and it wasn’t in the location I was in or the emotions I felt. This time, I had something other than madness to hang this on.

  Cosmo Beadle, I thought.

  I recalled the line Annabelle had fed me in her plush bedroom. She’d called this kind of thing a vision, but I knew that wasn’t right. It also wasn’t the same thing as a dream, not even close, nor was it a hallucination.

  Instead, I was certain that this was what it felt like to be one of Uncle Cosmo’s Crossovers.

  This was what Beadle had experienced when he’d gone to that world where he was a shoe salesman rather than an actor, and again when he’d gone to a world where the United States had gotten mixed up in the Great War.

  Branches, Annabelle had explained. The world wasn’t just the world. It was a whole series of branches, infinite numbers of them. And I had jumped from my branch—what I couldn’t help thinking of as the right branch—and onto another one. In this one, Jed Strait had made decisions that led him to be sitting in an office marked “private” rather than a fancy bedroom on Catalina.

  And the jump, I felt certain, had originated somewhere in Annabelle’s fancy little machine, which meant that—in spite of how real everything around me felt—I was still actually in her room in Beadle’s mansion, the goggles and earphones secure on my head just as I’d never really left the stage at the Break O’ Dawn when I’d crossed over and shot or been shot by Annabelle.

  No, I thought. Not “or.” It was “and.”

  In that first experience, I hadn’t just crossed over into a different world where there was a lot of gunplay and no trust between Annabelle and me. I’d crossed over into two worlds, one where Annabelle was a blonde and another where she was a redhead, one where I pulled the trigger and one where she did.

  What I still didn’t understand was how or why.

  If the machine with that Nazi eagle on it had somehow led me to cross over this time, what had caused the jump in the Break O’ Dawn?

  Recalling the things Annabelle had said to me about all the possible worlds that could have branched off from each other and all the variations on our actual lives that could be going on in those alternate realities, I looked at my left hand and was glad to see no ring there. Sorry, Annabelle, I thought. I just might not be the marrying kind in any of your worlds.

  Not sure what else to do, I decided to ride this out until I crossed over again. At least in this version of things, there appeared to be no immediate peril. The strange sense of being both myself and at the same time alienated from myself persisted, and even though I had Uncle Cosmo’s bizarre theories to hang my paranoia on this time, the split between the Jed Strait I was in my mind and the other Jed Strait whose body I was occupying still had me worrying that I might be crazy. If so, there was nothing I could do about it.

  Looking at the report again, I decided this Jed Strait must be some sort of a private detective and that Mr. Clark had hired me to tail his wife. The report read like something I would have written, and as I read on I saw that this version of me had followed Mrs. Clark’s car—something that went by the clunky name of “Packard”—through various parts of the city, mostly in the Bel Air and Beverly Hills neighborhoods where the Clarks and most other movie types lived. I hadn’t seemed to find any evidence that she was doing anything to justify her husband’s fears—until two days before when she’d dropped out of sight. I had apparently spent much of the previous day cruising a street called Sunset Boulevard looking for signs of her, but to no avail.

  At the end of the report was a hand-written note, and here I definitely recognized my own deliberate penmanship. The note detailed an interview I had conducted with a service station attendant whom I’d found working on the corner of Sunset and Beverly Glen. When this hallucinatory version of myself had shown the attendant a picture of Mrs. Clark, the man had spit on the ground and called her a lousy crook. Apparently, on the day she’d gone missing, she had come into the station with a nearly flat tire, which the attendant had repaired, and then she’d discovered she was without any money to pay him. Promising to return shortly, she had gone up Beverly Glen but had never come back. The note ended with a description of how “I” had spent the next couple of hours driving up and down Beverly Glen looking for any sign of the Packard without turning anything up. It sounded like a rather frustrating way to make a living.

  Private detective, I thought. How the hell did I end up being a PI?

  I put out the cigarette and saw that my watch showed 10:00. Without thinking about it, I got up and put on my hat and coat. Then I opened the door.

  Whatever this world was, I must have been doing all right in it. The outer office wasn’t swank but it wasn’t a dump either. A young woman in a professional looking jacket and hat sat behind a desk in the cramped little lobby. She looked up with a smile when I came in.

  “Ten o’clock already?” she asked, and I read in her expression and her smile not only that we’d never been intimate but also that we never would be. She wasn’t interested and saw me instead as a brother figure or maybe a little lost boy, not as anyone worth promoting to the bedroom. That was fine with me, and the fact that it was fine told me I had something else going in this reality, but who she was I couldn’t guess. Maybe Annabelle, maybe not.

  “Ten o’clock,” I answered with a smile. “See you in a few minutes, Peggy,” I added, the stranger’s name coming to my lips without effort.

  I left the office, trying to figure how I’d known the woman’s name. The query vanished, though, once I was distracted by the blocky letters on the outer door: “Jed Strait, Private Investigator.” I nodded at this and headed down the hall. It felt strange for my body to know where I was going while my head had no idea, but that seemed to be about the size of it. It was like I was a passenger riding around in this other Jed Strait’s head. I let my feet guide me down the hallway to the stairs, and then I headed down three flights, coming to a glass door at the bottom. On the other side was a busy Los Angeles street.

  Stepping onto the sidewalk, I took a look around. Traffic rolled slowly past me a few yards away, and a couple of pedestrians bumped against me as I stood there in a daze. None of the cars looked
familiar, and they moved slowly enough for me to see words like Ford and Buick emblazoned in chrome accents on their sides and tails. There were tall buildings all around, forming a sort of canyon that I could see up and down when I looked to the left or the right. In the distance, I could make out a crazy sign high on a hillside that just said “Hollywood” rather than “Hollywoodland” the way it was supposed to, and right next to me was the box office of a movie theater. My office was in the same building, and I supposed that if I looked up, I’d see the office window I’d been on the other side of a few minutes ago. The theater’s marquee was advertising a film starring two guys named Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. I’d never heard of either one.

  Halfway down the block was a newsstand, and I somehow knew that it was this Jed Strait’s habit to get a paper every morning around ten o’clock. With no interest in bucking the system, I walked to the newsstand and picked up a copy of a paper with Los Angeles Times written on the masthead. Never heard of it, I thought as I handed the vendor a quarter; he gave me my change, which included two phony looking dimes. Taking a closer look, I saw Franklin Roosevelt’s profile and just stared at it.

  He’s dead, I thought, shocked at the idea. It was either that or the laws had changed, allowing a living entity to be pictured on American money.

  I glanced at the date on the newspaper and saw it was what I expected it to be. The headline, however, made me forget the coin. “President Truman Warns That Soviets May Have the Bomb,” it said. I just stared, trying to process everything that was going on around me.

  Turning away from the newsstand and the general tumult of the crowded street, I started walking, one eye on the newspaper and the other on what was right in front of me. I didn’t give any thought to where I was going, just let myself wander among the other pedestrians as I tried to take everything in.

  I suppose I should have been more observant. If I had been, I might have noticed the black car that had pulled up to the curb and the man who got out of the back door. The first I knew of him, he was standing uncomfortably close to me.