“I got no Margaret anybody,” the dispatcher said.
The response left me confused, wondering if I’d messed up the driver’s name or if my traveling between different worlds had left me befuddled. In a flash of paranoia, I wondered if it was possible for me to have returned to the wrong world, one where there was no cabbie name Margaret West.
But then the dispatcher said, “Oh, wait a minute. You mean Peggy.”
“Peggy?” I asked, my confusion and paranoia evaporating.
“Yeah, yeah. Peggy West. Her real name’s Margaret.”
Peggy, I thought. I’d only seen the other Jed Strait’s secretary for a few seconds when I’d been on my way out to get a paper, and I’d only seen part of Margaret West’s face from the back of the cab, her hair tucked up under her cap. The resemblance was there, though, more than a resemblance. How had I missed it? If the visual cues had been lost on me, my mind should at least have been triggered by the sound of Peggy’s voice on the phone as she’d helped with the other Masterson situation; it was the same voice as that of the woman who’d driven me across town in her little cab. I’d been too distracted; there was no other explanation.
“Peggy is a nickname for Margaret, isn’t it?” I said, and though the statement hadn’t been addressed to Beadle, I saw him nod.
“I never understood that,” said the dispatcher.
“Me neither,” I responded.
“So, you want me to have her meet you at the dock?”
“If she’s on duty.”
“Seems like Peggy’s always on. Never lets you down.”
“I’m not surprised.”
I hung up the phone.
“Is everything in order?” Beadle asked.
“It is,” I said, and I couldn’t help smiling. “More than I thought.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” I said. “I not only have my eye on an assistant, but it looks like I just found my new secretary.”
“Very good. I’m pleased for you. And for myself, having secured your story.”
He led the way to the sliding door and out into the rest of the house. On the way in, I’d noticed a few people lounging in the great room, but during the time I’d been in Beadle’s office, more of the mansion must have come to life. As Beadle escorted me toward the fancy double doors, I saw several of the “friends” starting their day at the old man’s expense. And this time, one of Cosmo’s guests saw me as well.
“Mr. Strait!” I heard a man say as we passed through the room.
I knew from his accent who it was before turning my head toward his voice. The Chinese fellow who’d let me play his electrified guitar had spotted me from across the room and was approaching excitedly now, a newspaper in his hand.
“Hello,” I said, embarrassed that I’d never gotten his name.
“You two have met before?” Beadle asked.
“Yes, the night I came here the first time.”
“With Annabelle,” the other man said. If he knew she’d been killed, his expression didn’t show it, and I supposed that made sense. If Beadle wanted to maintain control of his followers, it wouldn’t do for word to get around that one believer had shot another at the Masterson wake. It would get out eventually, I was sure, but by then Beadle would have found a way to use the story to meet his ends.
“Yes,” was all I said to the Chinese man. “It’s good to see you again.”
He waved the paper at me, clearly wanting to keep me from leaving. “I heard your song on the radio,” he said. “I think someone stole it from you.”
“My song?” I asked. “The one I played the other night?”
“Yes. That’s the one.”
I smiled and shook my head. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, mister…”
“Choi.”
“Mr. Choi. Thank you. It’s not my song, though. It was something I learned when I was overseas. I just picked it up and played it for you the other night. I’m still surprised it hasn’t been a stateside hit before now.”
“But that’s the thing,” Mr. Lee said. He opened the paper and pointed to a feature.
The headline read, “Ex-POW Strikes Gold with Blacktop Blues.”
A bit confused, I skimmed the article. It explained that Travis Perkins, newly returned from the war in Europe, had recorded a song he’d written “in his head” while incarcerated in a German POW camp. Called “The Blacktop Blues,” the song had been released the day before and was already shooting up the charts and being praised as a new hybrid sound, unlike anything else previously released.
“This Perkins fellow,” Mr. Choi was saying, pointing at the story. “He couldn’t have written that song. You played it for us the other night, before anyone knew about the record. Maybe he got it from you overseas? Were you a POW, too?”
I barely heard him.
It didn’t add up.
And yet…it did.
I could feel the blood pounding in my ears as my thoughts raced. Recent memories flooded my mind, images of things I’d encountered since returning from the war: the differences in Annabelle that had made her susceptible to the lure of her new “friends” in Manhattan, the desert checkpoint designed to keep riffraff like me from making it into the promised land, the way I’d felt odd about staring at my reflection in the window at the Hotel Dorado, the way I’d slipped so easily between worlds when no one else in Beadle’s cult had done so despite all their training and effort. And now…this.
I thought back to the last time I’d felt truly normal, truly myself, surrounded by things I could count on without having odd occurrences skewer my sense of what was normal.
And that was when I knew.
When trying to track down Margaret West on the phone a few minutes earlier, I’d experienced a touch of paranoia, worrying that the Exetron had sent me back to the wrong world the night before.
But that wasn’t the case. I was in the same California I’d been in since the day Carmelita had pulled the Swan to a stop in front of me. It wasn’t the one I belonged in, though. My problems had started long before I’d smashed up that Meteor on a desert highway.
It was a different accident I was thinking about now, the one that had melted Buddy Stiles and a dozen others into unrecognizable corpses while I had been spared. I saw the parallel then between Carmelita and myself. Guillermo’s gun had had no effect on her, but it had knocked Miller unconscious. In my case, for whatever reason, the electrical pulse that fried the brains and nervous systems of my brothers in arms had done something completely different to me, sending me bodily into a different world, an alternate world, one in which Cosmo Beadle ran a bizarre cult from his island mansion, one where leather-clad lady cops rode expensive motorbikes and carried little chrome cameras, one where I’d felt compelled to chase a dream that had turned into a nightmare—a nightmare that I knew there was no waking from.
And the other Jed Strait? The one from this world? The one who belonged here? Had he been guarding that same weapons compound on this side of things? He must have been, or else things wouldn’t have paralleled between his life and mine so perfectly. If that was the case, then the electronic pulse that should have killed me had zapped him as well—which meant that right now he was in my world, holding my Annabelle, the Annabelle I should have come home to. Instead, I had come back to his, and found her gone. I imagined my Annabelle regarding this other Jed Strait in their first embrace, a look in her eye that said there was something not quite right about the man who’d come back to her, and then letting it go, writing it off as the damage done by time and distance and the trauma of warfare.
In a daze, I gave Choi his paper. Without saying another word to him or Beadle, I showed myself out of the mansion, my feet moving of their own accord, and made my way down to the dock and the little yacht that had taken Annabelle and me across the dark channel on a night that seemed much longer ago than it had actually been. Nothing felt real, and yet everything felt real at the same time.
I’m in the wrong world,
I thought, and the words kept looping. I’m in the wrong world. I’m in the wrong world.
Somehow, I made it onto the boat and sat on the top deck, not wanting to go below, not wanting to be where I’d been with Annabelle on our trip across the black water, dark as lost memories. Instead, I sat and waited for the engines to growl into life so they could drag me across the water, back to the mainland where Peggy and Guillermo and Carmelita would be waiting.
The sea air helped me feel a little better, a little more like myself, but not much.
When the yacht began to move, I told myself I was starting a new leg of a journey I hadn’t known I was on, a journey whose end I couldn’t even start to guess at.
Maybe today, I thought, I’d finally see one of those flying fish.
* * * * *
You can follow Jed Strait’s adventures in The Crossover Case Files Book 2: The Double-Time Slide. Click here to pre-order now!
A chance encounter with a burlesque dancer drags Jed Strait into the sleazy alleys of Los Angeles, where he finds the police following a string of murders along a path that will lead them straight back to his own robot assistant. But Jed’s efforts to unravel the truth and clear Carmelita’s name are frustrated when his witnesses keep turning up dead. Is the killer onto him? Could Carmelita be playing him for a fool? It’s all on the line as Jed races to find the killer—whoever it is—before he himself becomes the sour note at the end of The Double-Time Slide.
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Author’s Note
Thank you for reading The Blacktop Blues, the first in my series of dieselpunk novels featuring Jed Strait. If you’ve read some of my other books, you’ve probably found that I have a soft spot for stories about fish-out-of-water types like Jed and for stories set in past versions of Los Angeles and other parts of California. It’s been my plan to inject something new into that setting with the Crossover Case Files, and I hope you’ll stick around for the ride, starting with Book 2 which you can pre-order now.
If you enjoyed The Blacktop Blues, I would be most grateful if you would leave a review. As an indie author, reviews are a key part of my ability to get my books in front of readers, so if you could post even a short note about what you liked about this book, you would be helping me an awful lot.
And don’t forget that you can also sign up for my free newsletter. If you do, I promise not to bother you with anything other than notices about discounts on books and news about new releases. Plus, if you sign up, you’ll get a free copy of my short story anthology, Rough Edges, which isn’t available through any online retailers.
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About the Author
Richard Levesque was either born too late or too early.
You decide.
On the one hand, he’s consumed with writing the kind of stories Raymond Chandler might have come up with if he’d been interested in time travel and aliens rather than murders and femmes fatale.
And on the other hand, he likes taking those noir-ish ideas and projecting them into the near future, a time where he imagines our technology has overtaken us and where the kind of integrity found among some of those detectives from old literary LA might still come in handy.
When he’s not thinking of intricate plots for his characters to struggle their way out of, he’s busy teaching English at Fullerton College in Southern California, where he’s lived most of his life. He does not own a fedora or a trench coat, but he is a sucker for wet, dark streets, long, ominous shadows and a gritty soundtrack playing somewhere in the background.
You can learn more about Richard and at his website.
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OTHER BOOKS BY RICHARD LEVESQUE
The Blacktop Blues: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 1) Page 28
