The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2) Read online

  The Double-Time Slide

  The Crossover Case Files

  Book 2

  Richard Levesque

  Copyright © 2021 RICHARD LEVESQUE

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental. Any historical figures, setting, or events described in this book are also a product of the author’s imagination and are not intended as depictions actual people, places, or events.

  Cover design & composite ©2020 Duncan Eagleson- duncaneagleson.com

  Cover images: Man © Scott Griessel/ theartofphoto/stock.adobe.com

  Nazi woman: © ksi/stock.adobe.com

  Woman: © GoldenEyes71/stock.adobe.com

  Used By Permission

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to several people for their help in the writing of this book, including Jefferson Smith and my wife Karianne Levesque, all of whom read early drafts and helped point the book in the right direction. I’m also grateful to Duncan Eagleson and Corvid Design for his work on the cover. Finally, as always, I’m grateful to my friends and family for putting up with me as I work on these books and for always believing in me, no matter how crazy the ideas may seem.

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  Chapter One

  I took a sip of the bartender’s least terrible whiskey and set the glass on the bar. The whiskey burned, but that was what I’d been expecting. What I hadn’t expected was the shout from the end of the bar that came before I had a chance to take a second sip.

  “Son of a goat!” came the yell along with the sounds of a scuffle.

  I turned toward the commotion and saw a red-faced man, rage practically dripping off him. He was refrigerator-thick and balding, somewhere in his late 40s. The cords in his neck bulged as he strained against the power of two other patrons of the bar, most likely the angry man’s friends, who held his arms, restraining him. It took me only a moment to size up the situation and to recognize that these other men were nowhere as big as the angry man. They wouldn’t be able to hold him long. Worse, the angry man’s enraged eyes were staring right at me. And if there had been any doubt as to the subject of the man’s ire, it evaporated moments later when he let fly a few more words, along with a spray of spit. “You’re a dead man, Strait!” he shouted.

  Moments before, I’d wanted nothing more than to sip the lousy whiskey that was going to come out of my pay and, when finished with it, head back to the stage where a sleek black guitar was waiting for me. Having already figured out that the Jed Strait whose mind and body I occupied was not the one I was after, my plan had been to play for the mostly drunken audience until my friend Guillermo summoned me. Considering the angry man straining to get at me, though, I no longer wanted anything of the kind. I wanted out now.

  Bring me home, Guillermo! I thought. If it would have made a difference, I’d have shouted the words, but I knew there was no point. I’d get pulled out of this mess when Guillermo thought I’d been here long enough to figure things out, probably in about an hour from the time I’d arrived. Without looking at my watch, I figured that was at least another fifteen minutes—plenty of time to get flattened by the angry, red-faced man.

  Not wanting to give my would-be assailant an opportunity, I said goodbye to my cheap whiskey and pushed away from the bar. The little nightclub was crowded, a good-sized group there to listen to the music and drink away their woes. This should have made me feel good, knowing that—at least in this world—some other version of Jed Strait was doing just fine for himself slinging tunes for lubricated listeners; he had a girl, too, a dark-haired lovely. I’d checked this Jed’s wallet and found the woman’s photo, her smile almost a sneer. In my present situation, though, I didn’t give myself the opportunity to bask in this other Jed’s professional successes or his love life. In fact, the goodly crowd made it a little tough to get away from the man who wanted Jed Strait’s blood, regardless of which Jed Strait it happened to be. Even so, I dove in, pushing my way into the crowd without paying attention to the rude manner in which I jostled the club goers, both male and female.

  A greater commotion behind me forced me to turn in the direction of the bar before ducking behind a rotund bald man with a fancy cigarette holder in one hand and a blonde’s hip in the other. The big man at the bar had broken free of his friends and was charging into the crowd, looking and acting like an angry bull bent on bloodshed. Worse, I saw that I hadn’t lost him as I’d woven my way through the crowd; the man’s eyes locked onto mine the second I turned my face in his direction, and the connection did nothing to calm him. He yelled more loudly and charged forth with more fury.

  Knowing the big man with the cigarette and the blonde would do me no good as a shield, I increased my speed and moments later dove for the stage. I’d like to think it was a graceful move—me gliding through the air to land in a somersault that I sprang out of with confidence, one hand effortlessly reaching out to grab my guitar by the neck as I ran past, heading for the curtains and freedom beyond. In reality, I expect I landed halfway on the lip of the stage and then clambered up, clawing my way across the polished wood surface and half-crawling, half-stumbling my way toward the guitar, which I grabbed more as a means of keeping myself from pitching forward onto my face rather than anything else. At any rate, I made it to the curtains before my pursuer made it to the stage.

  Still thinking Get me out of here, Guillermo! and wondering if there wasn’t some warning system my friend could build into this whole process that would allow me to signal him that I wanted—or needed—to be extricated, I raced down a dimly lit hallway, knowing an exit must be at its end.

  Before I could find that wonderful doorway, however, I heard the man bellow behind me. “Strait! You coward! I’m gonna make you pay!”

  His voice was much closer than I wanted it to be, and without looking back to see, I imagined him only an arm’s length back, his massive paw reaching through the air to grab my collar and yank me into some darkened dressing room.

  And that was when a door opened to my left. A dark-haired woman stepped into the hallway; I recognized her as the beauty whose photo was in this Jed’s wallet, the same sneering smile on her lips. She wore a strapless black dress that made her for a performer of some type, which told me how she and this Jed had met and become an item. The dress and her smile barely held my gaze, though. The gun in her hand—with its formidably wide barrel—held my attention much more firmly.

  Saved, I thought, and I practically skidded to a halt, half turning to see that the big man had also seen the gun and was fighting to put a stop to his momentum.

  The woman looked first from me to my pursuer a
nd back, the gun moving from one to the other of us to match her gaze.

  That was when I realized she might be just as dangerous to me as the man who’d been shouting for my blood.

  Both the big man and I stood there panting, our eyes riveted to the gun barrel.

  “What did you do this time, Jed?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” It was an entirely truthful answer.

  “Like hell you don’t,” the other man shouted, and when it looked like he was going to lunge toward me, the woman turned the gun on him again, and he checked his movement.

  “Why don’t you tell me what he did?” the armed woman asked.

  “He kissed my wife. Probably more!”

  The woman raised a perfect eyebrow, and the smile shifted all the way over into the sneer. “Jed?” she asked, her tone now making her sound like an exasperated teacher who’s caught the class cut-up bending the rules to the breaking point. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I don’t know this guy’s wife,” I said, and it was the truth—even if the Jed whose consciousness I was occupying did have knowledge of the woman, of any kind.

  She shook her head, and I could see she didn’t believe me.

  “Honest,” I said. “I never did anything like that. Never.”

  “I’ve half a mind to just let him have you,” she said. “Then I’ll see what kind of revenge I can take out on the pieces that are left over.”

  The only way out of this was going to come from Guillermo, and I had no way of getting in touch with him. All I had were my questionable wits, an apparently failing sense of morality, and a pretty nice-looking guitar. For a moment, I thought of swinging it in the man’s direction, bashing the beautiful instrument over his head, but even if I succeeded in using the instrument as a weapon, its smashed remains would do nothing to get me away from the gun that was still pointed at me.

  My breathing having almost returned to normal now, I said, “Look, pal. I don’t know you, and I don’t know your wife. I’m sure this is just a mix-up, but…if you’ll bring her around, I’m sure we can straighten this out. She’ll get a good look at me and me at her. And then whatever happened will come clear.” I turned toward the sneering woman. “For everybody.”

  Neither of them seemed moved by the solution I was proffering.

  “And…” I added, grasping at possibilities, “if it turns out that I’m wrong and there is some…justification for your apparent irritation with me, then…” I was out of options and let fly with the first thing that came to mind: “Then I’ll give you this guitar.”

  “What?” both the man and woman said at the same time.

  “Sure. You can sell it. Keep the money as a…payment for the inconvenience.”

  “You’re saying you did it?” the woman asked.

  “No!” I answered quickly. “No, not at all. It’s just…sometimes things get mixed up, and I don’t want to get shot or…killed or anything.”

  She nodded, a knowing look in her eyes. “And how’re you planning on paying the bills without your guitar?” she asked.

  “I’ll find a way,” I said. Then I waved my hands in the air and added, “But it won’t come to that. You’ll see. His wife’ll say it wasn’t me.”

  “You saying she just kissed some other guy?” the man asked, his ire rising again.

  “No!” I said, answering him just as adamantly as I had answered the woman. “What I’m saying is that some other guy kissed her. Without her consent, of course. You see how that could be, right? And she said it was me. Simple case of mistaken identity.”

  The man looked like he was thinking this over. He also looked like the process of thinking was one not often engaged in. The woman with the gun still looked skeptical, and I gave her the most confident smile I could muster.

  But that was when I started feeling a little dizzy, the dimly lit hallway starting to seem even more dim and the floor not so solid under my feet.

  You couldn’t have done this five minutes earlier, Guillermo? I thought as I put one hand against the wall to keep this other Jed’s body from falling over in the transition. He might still fall, might even slump against the dark-haired woman and cause the gun to go off. There was nothing I could do about it. As much as my sense of self-preservation had prompted me to push for this other Jed’s survival, there was a part of me that knew he’d kissed the other man’s wife—and probably more. Worse, it likely wasn’t the first time he’d gotten himself into this kind of mess, and there was a part of me that wanted him to have to pay for his indiscretions.

  At any rate, I figured he’d survive the encounter. And as the hallway faded into complete blackness, I knew for certain that I had survived it as well.

  I opened my eyes and pulled a pair of goggles off my head. I was sitting at Guillermo Garcia’s kitchen table, the light from a bare bulb shining down on me. Guillermo sat across from me, an eager look on his wrinkled face. On the tabletop between us was the gizmo he’d rigged up that sent my consciousness into other worlds, enabling me to occupy the minds and bodies of different versions of Jed Strait. Like the prototype we’d liberated from a nasty Nazi named Elsa Schwartz, the little machine had goggles and earphones wired into it, but unlike the shiny discs that other machine had used to create a hypnotic effect on the person using it, Guillermo’s device generated a little light show that played on the goggles’ lenses. It had taken some trial and error for him to get this right, but once he had, the machine had acted as a portal for me to explore alternate worlds, one where Jed Strait had followed paths different from my own. Interesting as these worlds were, however, I was interested in one only.

  “Was it right this time?” Guillermo asked once my eyes focused firmly on his.

  “No,” I said, my voice carrying a bit of an echo in my perception of it. The old man’s machine always made me feel like this for a few seconds when I came out of its influence, like I had water in my ears.

  “Which Jed was this? One you’ve already visited?”

  He had a notebook on the table next to the device where he’d written columns of figures, none of which I understood. The numbers and letters represented different settings he’d dialed into the machine before sending me off on some new exploration. I was glad he was keeping track of everything, as some of the worlds I’d visited were not ones I wanted to return to.

  “No,” I said. “This was new, but close to some of the others.”

  It had taken Guillermo some time to get the machine into working order, and I couldn’t use it as often as I wanted since I had other responsibilities to attend to. Even so, I’d managed to make several jumps into other worlds in the last couple of weeks. According to the old man’s notes, I’d occupied the bodies and minds of three private investigator Jeds, a welder Jed, two destitute Jeds, a shoe salesman Jed, four soldier Jeds, and three starving musician Jeds.

  “How so?” Guillermo asked as he eagerly took up his pencil.

  “Musician. But he looked a little better off than the others. Playing solo in a club, not part of a band. And his guitar looked a lot nicer. Girlfriend, too.”

  Guillermo raised an eyebrow at this. “Annabelle?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No soap. Not this time.”

  Annabelle had shown up in several of the worlds I’d visited, sometimes married to Jed and sometimes just seeing him, but it was never the right Annabelle, and I knew this because it was never the right Jed. The version of me I was looking for would have been a war vet with an interest in making music, since that’s the guy I’d been before I’d gotten yanked into this world full of Nazi gadgets and mechanical women and backpacks that let you fly if you strapped them on securely enough. Not only was the Jed I sought a musician, but he would have been bonded to Annabelle unless something screwy had happened after the war—and, if not bonded to her, he would have had some knowledge of her.

  But every Jed I’d occupied who fit the bill in crucial ways—musician, veteran, etc.—was either linked to a woman
other than Annabelle or knew her only as a distant memory, someone from before the war with whom he’d lost contact during the crazy years of combat and survival.

  And now I had one more Jed to add to the list, a musician with a dark-haired sometime girlfriend and a propensity for other men’s wives. He didn’t sound like me at all, and I felt annoyed with him as I watched Guillermo write this other Jed’s details on his tablet.

  The old inventor looked up from his work and caught my gaze. I must have looked as unhappy as I felt.

  “Don’t give up hope, lobo,” he said, using the nickname he’d saddled me with the night we’d met. “Science is like this, yes? Experiments. They go bad all the time. Wrong results. Then try again.”

  “And again,” I said, irritation in my voice.

  He either missed it or ignored it. “Yes!” he said with enthusiasm. “And again and again until you get results that matter.”

  “Or you give up.”

  He shrugged at this. “Not very scientific, but…maybe. I suppose.”

  Then he went back to his notes.

  As I sat there getting my bearings, Guillermo’s little dog, Perdida, circled my ankles and rubbed against them, acting in every way like the real dog Guillermo had designed her to pass for. Knowing what the mechanical mutt wanted, I reached down and patted her between her synthetic ears, still amazed at how realistic the little dog looked and felt.

  When Guillermo finished his notes, he laid the pencil down and looked up at me with a sad smile. “Don’t be discouraged, lobo. We’ll find the right Jed if we keep trying.”

  “And when we do?” I asked. “Then what? I can’t engineer some new electrical pulse to switch us back. I don’t even know what that thing was that I was guarding when I got zapped into this world. How the hell are we going to recreate what it did so I can switch back with the Jed who belongs here?”