“Where did you get that?” I asked as I reached for the book.
“That?” she asked, distracted as she flipped open the illusive compact. “It was in the dirt not far from Guillermo’s truck. The phone, too. I picked them up yesterday when I went back to the truck for my purse.”
This made no sense to me at first, but then I recalled the way I’d slammed Elsa’s car door closed in my effort to distract Elsa and the remaining Klaus in the middle of Carmelita’s rampaging charge. The only explanation I could arrive at was that I had swung the door so hard that it hadn’t seated into the latch in the car’s frame, effectively bouncing free from the mechanism before it could catch. Elsa had sped off not long after. If the door had swung open in her frantic attempt to get away from Carmelita, the book and phone might have flown out. I could imagine Elsa feeling torn between the urge to retrieve the book and the urge to stay out of Carmelita’s grasp. Survival had won out. Of course, it was also possible she hadn’t even noticed that anything had flown out of the car until she was a long way from Gold Rush Gulch.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had it?” I asked.
She shrugged. “You were so focused on telling me the plan for what to do with the police and everything else. It just slipped my mind.”
Hesitating, I flipped open the front cover, expecting to find handwritten notes in German.
“Is it important?” Carmelita asked.
Had she asked a moment earlier, I would have answered in the affirmative. With my eyes on the first page, however, my initial excitement faded. I flipped the pages of the book, stopping randomly throughout and feeling my disappointment grow with each page I looked at. The pages were covered in what I guessed was an elaborate code—numbers, symbols, shapes and letters that didn’t at all look like they were part of any alphabet I’d seen on either side of the Atlantic. There were a few diagrams, but they appeared to be labeled with complete gibberish.
“Maybe,” I answered. “It’s going to take some sort of genius to crack this, I’d say.”
“Really?” she asked, reaching out for the book. “I glanced through it yesterday afternoon, and it doesn’t seem too difficult.” I watched as she opened the book to the first page, not daring to hope for what she’d hinted at. Then in amazement I heard her say, “November 3, 1916. Frankfurt. What follows are the theoretical underpinnings of my research into the possibility of the existence of parallel worlds and a means by which to travel to them.” She shifted her gaze back to me and said, “It’s not that hard if you understand German first and then the basic principles of code generation. This one is a little tricky since some fundamentals have been modified, but once you account for that, it all slips into place.” A smile followed.
“I…didn’t know you understood German,” was all I could manage to say.
“Some,” she said as she closed the book.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, Carmelita’s brain having had its origins in a British machine meant to break German codes during the war. Recalling the coded language she’d shown me a few days ago when going over her notes about the death of Felix Madrigal, I told myself that I should probably give myself a good thump in the head for having thought I would need to take the codebook to someone else to have it cracked.
“Do you think you can decode the whole thing?” I asked and then added, “For Guillermo?”
“Of course,” she said as though it was the most natural thing in the world. And, for her, I suppose it was.
“Well…that’s good” I said, my mind a whirl as I recalled the resolve I’d arrived at just minutes before to let Annabelle go and see if there was any possibility of kindling something with Sherise Pike. Now, that resolve crumbled as I considered what Guillermo could do with Klaus Lang’s notes.
I might really be able to get back to my world.
And yet there was a part of me that was no longer sure I wanted to go.
Then, making a conscious effort to ignore the quizzical look Carmelita gave me from the passenger seat, I added, “…I guess.”
* * * * * *
The adventures don’t stop here. The Crossover Case Files continue with Book 3: The Shakedown Shuffle.
It’s not easy being a private detective in a town full of secrets and lies. Can he find the truth without getting his clients killed?
Jed Strait knows that Hollywood is a town built on deception. But when he can’t trust his clients to tell him the truth, how can he keep his fledgling business afloat? When his trusty robot assistant goes AWOL just as his only case takes a deadly turn, Jed is forced to make a difficult choice.
He can fight to save his shady clients, possibly from themselves. Or he can fight to save Carmelita from the mysterious new boyfriend who seems too good to be real. No matter how Jed plays it, someone is bound to lose now that he’s riffing to The Shakedown Shuffle.
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Author’s Note
Thank you for reading The Double-Time Slide, the second 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 continue following along with Book 3 which you can pre-order now.
If you enjoyed The Double-Time Slide, 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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The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2) Page 27
