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

by Richard Levesque

  There was another reason I wanted to get away, though, something that had been rolling around in my mind since the moment I’d realized Geneva Masterson’s role in her husband’s death. “There’s something I still need to take care of, but I’m going to need your help,” I added when I saw Guillermo hesitate in response to my request.

  He looked doubtful, his eyes searching the door I’d just come out of, and I knew he didn’t want to leave with Carmelita’s fate still in question.

  “O’Neal’s not going to make a decision anytime soon. You may as well go home for now,” I said.

  With a reluctant nod, he turned to the chair he’d just abandoned and picked his hat up. “Let’s go then. But I will come back soon. I don’t mind waiting all night if I have to.”

  I thanked him, and we headed out to the parking lot where he had parked his old green Patterson. I looked over my shoulder more than once as we walked and felt a bit relieved—but only a bit—when I pulled the truck’s squeaky door closed from inside the cab.

  It didn’t take long to get back to Garcia Industries. On the way there, I kept pretty quiet, just thinking everything through again and trying to ignore what felt like coal miners going to work on my stomach with pickaxes and TNT as I tried to puzzle my way through everything that was on my mind.

  When Guillermo parked the truck on the rutted path beside his workshop, he turned to me and said, “So, what is it you need to do, lobo?”

  “The metal case you got from Carmelita. You haven’t taken it apart or anything, have you?”

  He chuckled at this. “Not yet. I haven’t had the time.”

  “Good,” I said with a nod. “We’re going to hook me up to it.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Probably not.”

  I got another little laugh out of him at this. Then he said, “It’s in the workshop.”

  We went into the cluttered shop first, a disturbed cat knocking something over in the dark as Guillermo opened the door. He clicked a light switch and all the glorious piles of parts and supplies came into view.

  “I have to ask,” I said.

  “Que?”

  “Carmelita. How did you do it?” I looked around. “Joaquin Murrieta, Jr. is one thing. Perdita, too. But…”

  He looked surprised. “How did you figure it out?”

  “Your gun. It had no effect on her.”

  “Ah.” He nodded. “And this detective. She knows, too?”

  “Yes. She knows Carmelita didn’t kill Masterson, but she’s not sure what to do with her yet. She’s afraid Carmelita may be dangerous to the public.”

  “As long as no one bothers her, she’ll be fine.” He looked a little sad as he said it.

  “I wish I could afford to offer to help with a lawyer or something.”

  The sadness in his face shifted over to the nearly perpetual smile again in a second. “You think I can’t afford a lawyer?”

  “No, it’s not that,” I answered quickly, worried I’d just insulted the old man. But then I realized how absurd my response was in light of what I’d just said about wanting to help him hire someone, so I added, “Well…actually that is what I thought. Sorry.”

  He chuckled at this.

  “Earlier today when you came here,” he said, “you hinted that you knew something about me getting hurt in the past.”

  “Yes. I saw some old newsreel footage about an accident…your wife.”

  He sighed. “Si. Carmella.” He shook his head. “It was a terrible fire and explosion. At least she didn’t suffer, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “Me, I suffered some. But my employer took care of everything. Took care of me for life, you could say.”

  “They gave you a settlement.”

  “A big one.”

  I looked around the workshop. “You don’t make it obvious.”

  “No. Why bother? I don’t need fancy things. I like working like this, living here. Plus, this is where I found my secret, you know?”

  “The…Chavezium?”

  “Yes. Come here.”

  He led me to a spot near the back of the shop and directed me to move a few boxes from the floor to a mostly empty shelf. Then he pointed at the floor, and I could see that I had uncovered a trapdoor. “Open it,” he said.

  I got my fingers into the edges of the door and pulled up. There was a dark pit underneath and the same smell I’d come to expect from his non-lethal gun. Guillermo pulled a trouble light down from a beam above the trapdoor and shone the light into the space. The darkness sparkled with what must have been a thousand tiny blue lights as the crystals caught the glow from the bulb.

  “It’s all through here,” he said. “This house, the ones around us. Up into the ravine.” I turned from the pit to look at him. His smile broadened. “And I own it all,” he said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “All?”

  He nodded. “For years, I’ve been buying up all the land in Chavez Ravine that I could. There are still a few holdouts down the road. And no one knows why I keep buying. I only charge a few dollars a month rent on the houses. Not because I need it. Just to keep people from asking questions.”

  “What are you going to do with it all?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t have a long-term plan. I just want to control the resources. For now, anyway.” He waved in the air, signaling me to pull the trapdoor shut as he switched off the trouble light.

  “And this same stuff powers Carmelita?” I said as the door dropped into place again.

  He nodded. I must have given him an incredulous look, as he said, “You’re surprised, eh? She’s a little more…sofisticado than her big brother.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “A little.”

  With another chuckle, he said, “She’s benefited from my suffering, lobo.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You said you saw that newsreel, yeah? And how burned up I was?”

  “I saw bandages.”

  He pointed at his face. “Old man now, lots of wrinkles. But tell me. You see any burn scars?”

  I raised an eyebrow at this. He was right. There was nothing. Sure, the explosion had been a lot of years ago, but time passing shouldn’t have healed his face so completely. “No,” I said and probably couldn’t keep the fascination from my voice.

  “Watch,” he said.

  Then he raised a hand to his left cheek and started rubbing the skin below his eye. It took only a few seconds before I could tell something strange was happening. A little flap appeared in the skin where he was rubbing it, and once he got a fingernail under the flap, he started pulling the skin away from the left side of his face, rubbing a little more here and there and then peeling more away. In less than a minute, a large flap hung from his face, and I could see that it wasn’t actual skin. The real skin was underneath what he’d peeled back, and the real skin was damaged. From what I could tell, the left side of his face was a mass of burn scars, something he hid perfectly with a synthetic covering.

  I don’t know if I looked horrified, amazed, or somewhere in the middle as I stared.

  Guillermo stopped pulling at the artificial skin. “It’s ironic, I think,” he said, “but this is the stuff Carmella and I were working on when the explosion happened. We hadn’t perfected it yet, but after the accident I had a reason to keep trying.”

  “That’s…remarkable,” I said. “Is it…something people can use or is it still an experiment?”

  “Oh, it could be used. It would be good for burn victims, I think. Boys in the war, yes?”

  “Sure.” I could think of a handful of guys I knew who would never look the same thanks to the way they’d danced with German flamethrowers in the war.

  Guillermo shook his head sadly. “The government won’t approve it,” he said.

  “Why the hell not?”

  He shrugged. “No sé,” he offered. “They say it’s classified. Like most of the stuff I’ve worked on for them over the years.”

  I thought about this fo
r a moment. “Earlier…you said your boss gave you a settlement after the explosion. Your boss was the government?”

  “Si.”

  “And Carmelita’s skin…it’s the same stuff? That’s how she looks so lifelike?”

  “Now you’re getting it.”

  “And the Chavezium powers her. Is that why she wears so much perfume? To mask the smell?”

  He just nodded and smiled.

  “Okay,” I said, “but…none of that accounts for all of her…abilities. She seems so…”

  “Human?”

  “Yes.”

  He beamed with pride. “I’ll tell you. I mean…I’ve got nothing to hide now. I may be an old man, but the government still calls me up for different projects. They had me working on one during the war. The British had a code-breaking machine to stop the Nazis. Washington…sort of stole a version of it from the English, and they put me to work on copying it.” His smile grew even wider. It looked grotesque with half his cheek hanging loose and the lattice of scars visible underneath, but I tried to ignore it.

  “So, you stole it from D.C.?”

  “Stole is a strong word.”

  “And you put it into Carmelita.”

  “No, no. Not that one. That was too big. But I figured out what made it tick, and I built a smaller version.”

  “Perdita?”

  He nodded. “She was my first try. Then Carmelita.”

  “It obviously worked.”

  “It more than worked.”

  He started pushing at the synthetic skin to put it back in place, smoothing it with his fingers as he pushed it against his flesh. The artificial covering seemed to grab onto the scars and hold in place as he manipulated it.

  “What do you mean?” I asked as he worked.

  He let out a little laugh. “I was able to program her at first. And then…” He shrugged, a look of amazed incredulity in his eyes. “She started learning on her own. She’s smarter than I would have guessed her possible. Teaching herself to drive…things like that. Hmm. She knows things now that I never learned. Probably never will.”

  Considering my conversation with O’Neal from earlier, I asked, “So, is she…out of your control?”

  He seemed to think about this for a moment. Then he said, “Yes…I suppose. Some anyway.”

  “Can we get her back under control?”

  “Do we have to?”

  “To satisfy O’Neal…maybe.”

  “Well, then maybe we try. And maybe we spell out what happens if she goes bad again. She’s smart enough to figure out what to do, I think.”

  “All right,” I said. “If the police let her go, we have a sit down with her and spell it out, like you said. With luck, I can convince O’Neal that it’ll take.”

  He nodded his satisfaction.

  His face was back to normal now, so I changed the subject. “So, where’s that case?”

  He pointed to a shelf piled high with boxes, technical manuals and small bins full of parts. Under all of it was the metal case I’d first seen come out of the Swan’s trunk on my first day in the city. It took a few minutes to pull everything off the top of the case, but once it was free and the shelf was packed full again, we left the workshop, and headed to the house.

  Chapter Twenty

  Guillermo had cleaned up some of the mess from the earlier scuffle, but even so the dining table had room for only one person to sit, and there was only one chair. I figured this was the way the old man took his meals, surrounded by half-finished projects and an assortment of well-worn tools, a little mechanical dog at his feet.

  Perdita had circled us as we got things set up in the little kitchen, doing her best imitation of a real dog. Unlike the real thing, though, she didn’t yap out of pain or fear when one of us accidentally stepped on her constructed toes. Eventually, Guillermo got sick of the little mutt getting underfoot and ordered her in Spanish to go lie on the couch. The mechanical dog went, her tail drooping a little as she left the room.

  With the metal case on the table, I sat in front of it while Guillermo moved boxes and a disassembled oscilloscope away from the wall, looking for an outlet to plug the thing into. It didn’t take long to have me connected the same way I’d been in Annabelle’s room on Catalina. I’d needed to push thoughts of Annabelle away throughout the afternoon, and I needed to do it again now as I explained to Guillermo what I wanted him to do.

  “Just any questions?”

  “I don’t think it matters,” I said. “Whatever you want to ask. Just to get me into that state. I don’t know if I’ll go all quiet when the transition occurs—if it occurs. I might even look like I’ve passed out. Just leave me be ‘til I come out of it on my own, okay?”

  “Okay,” I heard him say. Then he helped my fingers find the controls, and I was watching newsreels again.

  The disks loaded into this machine were identical to the ones Annabelle had had, and this gave me some reassurance. I didn’t know if it was the machine itself or the things it had shown me that had served as a catalyst for the metaphysical journey I’d taken out on Catalina. On the drive to Chavez Ravine, I’d worried that if it was the disks themselves, I might be in trouble, as nothing at all might happen or—potentially worse—I might slip into yet another version of reality than the one where I’d been scooped up by that other Geneva Masterson’s thugs. That potential problem no longer an issue, I let the machine run, playing the discs in the same order that they had played on Catalina, and hoped for the best.

  Sounding as though he was far away, Guillermo asked me my name.

  “Jed Strait,” I answered.

  “Where were you born?”

  “Queens, New York,” I said.

  “What did you do in the war?”

  “I killed people.”

  “How many?”

  “Seventeen that I know of for sure. Probably more.”

  “What’s your favorite color?”

  “Dark green.”

  It went on like that. Somewhere in the middle of the third disc, I began to feel hazy. There might have been some questions I didn’t answer, and some I didn’t hear. Soon, there were no more questions, and I wasn’t in Guillermo Garcia’s kitchen anymore.

  Instead, I was walking down a lonely stretch of highway. The ocean was off to my right, and cliffs rose up to my left on the other side of the road. I saw cars in the distance, both coming toward me and fading into blurs as they got farther and farther away. The fact that my feet didn’t hurt told me I hadn’t been walking too long and hadn’t yet tried sticking my thumb out for a ride. What did hurt was my head, and when I reached up with a tentative hand, I felt a nasty goose egg in the spot where the gunsel had hit me in the back of Geneva Masterson’s limo. When I dropped the hand into my pocket, looking for a handkerchief to wipe the sweat away with, I felt sand, and I noticed more was in the cuffs of my pants.

  It wasn’t too hard to figure out. Geneva’s boys had thumped me good to prove their point, and then—to bring home the fact that they could do with me as they pleased—they’d driven me out to a remote stretch of beach and dumped me there. How long I’d been passed out, I couldn’t have guessed. I might have woken up and then sat still for a long while before trying to get to my feet, looking—I supposed—like a guy who’d opted to take the day off and soak up the sun and sea air rather than someone in need of assistance.

  Having become a bit of a veteran at this crossover stuff, I didn’t panic at the situation I was in or at its difference from the kitchen table where I knew my actual body still sat. Neither did I worry that I was losing my mind. I felt, instead, like I’d found it.

  I walked on. Ahead of me, the highway looked like it intersected with another road that came down from the hills and reached its terminus at the coast, and some considerate person had decided to put a filling station at the intersection. That was my goal, and I put one foot in front of the other as the convertibles and sedans of unknown make passed me in either direction. As I went, my eyes were draw
n to the glassy blue of the sea beyond the breakers, and when I saw something move out there, I stopped to watch. A few seconds later, I saw it again—a curving shape rising above the water for just a second and then disappearing again.

  A dolphin, I thought. Not one of Annabelle’s flying fish, not a fish at all, but close enough. The sight dredged up regrets and the same weighty sense of loss I’d felt before the interview with O’Neal. Knowing that Annabelle might still be alive in this world gave me some comfort, and I wondered how hard it would be to find her, what her situation might be, and whether she’d welcome the sight of me or not.

  I had to push such speculation aside when I reached the filling station. Looking at the street signs at the intersection, I saw that I was at the spot where Sunset Boulevard connected with the Pacific Coast Highway. Walking up to the station, I found a phone booth next to the restrooms. I pulled the glass door shut and fished some coins out of my pocket. The sign on the phone said “5¢” and that was good, the same as it would have been in my world. Not having a nickel, I dropped one of the odd little Roosevelt dimes into the slot and let my fingers dial my office even though my conscious mind didn’t seem to know the number.

  Peggy answered on the first ring.

  “Is that you, Jed?” she asked, dropping any attempt at answering professionally.

  “Yes, it’s me. I had you worried, didn’t I?”

  “You bet! You’ve been gone for hours. I was ready to call the police.”

  “Well, I’m going to need you to.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to go into all the details right now. Let’s just say I had an unscheduled meeting, and it didn’t go well.”

  “Do you need me to come get you?” There was real concern in her voice, and I liked that. It told me that this Jed Strait had done a good job in hiring Peggy.

  “No,” I said. “I’m going to call a cab in just a minute. Listen, I need to ask you something, and it might sound kinda screwy. I’m…I’m not entirely myself right now, so just work with me here, okay?”