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

  Carmelita felt otherwise.

  “There’s something there,” she had told me a few days earlier.

  “With Flynn?”

  “No,” she said. “But she’s the key. Peale’s not telling us everything about her. Maybe we should tail him instead.”

  “Our own client? Carmelita, I thought you understood how this game runs. He pays us, see? To tail someone else. If we start tailing him, we can’t exactly bill him, can we? Besides, what would we be looking for?”

  “I don’t know, but there’s something there. I just know it.”

  “What kind of something?”

  She’d shaken her head then. “I don’t know. But I can feel it. Mullen Peale is a whiny stoat. He’s put us onto this Ginny Flynn for a reason, and it’s not the one he said. He’s hiding something.”

  “And if we find it?” I asked. “I’m sorry, Carmelita, but there’s no money in solving a mystery we haven’t been hired to look into.”

  She’d let it go, and we’d continued for a few more days. The whole thing had gotten so routine that the night before I’d let Carmelita fly solo, tailing Miss Flynn back to her parents’ house while I went to Guillermo’s to take my chances in another world.

  Now, I said to Carmelita, “If the Flynn woman sticks to her pattern, she’s going to head back to Hollywood around ten this morning. I’ve half a mind to check her there and then flip the switch on this one if nothing odd turns up. I’ll call Peale and say there’s nothing to his accusations—except maybe jealousy.”

  “That would be a mistake,” Carmelita said. “There’s something there.”

  “We’ve been over this. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I don’t care. If you don’t want to keep digging, then let me do it on my own.”

  This set off a few alarm bells in my mind, one of them sounding a lot like Detective O’Neal’s voice when she’d gotten me to promise to keep an eye on my mechanical friend. Letting Carmelita tail a dull subject for an evening was one thing, but setting her loose on the whole case was another. On the one hand, I supposed there wasn’t much trouble Carmelita could get into just sitting in a car and waiting for nothing to happen. But then again, I’d also learned during my time in LA that Guillermo’s creation had an independent streak that could definitely get her into trouble. All it would take was some little anomaly, some odd thing she might observe while sitting outside Ginny Flynn’s house and she’d take it upon herself to act in ways that would end up with O’Neal pointing an angry finger at my face and threatening Carmelita’s existence for the sake of the general public’s safety. And then, again, there was that cold-eyed stare I’d seen while crossed over. If only I’d known what had set it off, the same situation might be avoided in this world. Not knowing, though, I was left with the fact that it was best to keep Carmelita reined in as much as possible.

  “That’s probably not a good idea,” I said.

  “Why not? I won’t get into any trouble, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “It’s not that,” I lied. “We only have the one car between us. If you take it up to Hollywood, I’ll be stuck here.”

  “You can take a cab anywhere you need to go.”

  “That’s an expense we don’t need.”

  “Take it out of my pay.”

  I didn’t have an immediate comeback for this, but as I was struggling to come up with one, I was literally saved by the bell—in the form of the office phone ringing.

  “Jed Strait Investigations,” I said as I picked up the receiver.

  “It’s Mercy,” a woman’s voice said. She sounded panicked.

  “Excuse me?” I asked, confused. I didn’t know anyone named Mercy.

  “Thank God you’re there,” she went on without seeming to have heard my question. “I didn’t know if you’d work on a Saturday and I don’t think I could have waited until Monday to talk to someone.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Can you try to slow down?”

  “I’ve spent the whole night just sure I was going crazy,” she continued. “But now that it’s morning everything seems a little clearer. I know I’m not crazy now. I still can’t explain it, though.”

  You can’t fix crazy. The words from the night before echoed in my mind, and with them the memory of the little dancer on her barstool with the strange story and the rough attitude.

  “You’re the one from the High Note,” I said. “Last night. The dancer.”

  “Yes,” she said, finally acknowledging my presence on the other end of the line.

  Across the office, Carmelita raised an eyebrow, and I knew I was in for a bit of teasing, as the side of the conversation she was hearing surely sounded like Jed was having lady troubles. I tried waving her away, as if to say she had the wrong idea, but my efforts only made the eyebrow go higher as a mischievous smile crossed Carmelita’s lips.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “Did something happen?”

  “Yes! I mean…yes, something happened. And…I think I’m all right. Only…I just don’t know.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I saw Frank again!”

  “Your deceased husband,” I said.

  “Yes!”

  “Listen, Miss…I mean—”

  She laughed a little at how flustered she’d made me; a nervous little titter, the noise a bird might make if it forgets for just a second that it’s being held in a cat’s jaws. “I guess I never introduced myself,” she said. “Mercy Attentater.”

  “Atten…” I tried.

  “Can I meet with you?” she asked, clearly not worried that I’d been about to butcher her late husband’s name. “This morning?”

  I hadn’t planned on meeting with anyone this morning; my only thought had been about convincing Carmelita that it was time to wrap up the Flynn business. But the little dancer from last night seemed awfully desperate. “Sure,” I said, knowing my agreement to meet this woman was essentially canceling our plans to surveil Ginny Flynn. “Why don’t you give me your address?”

  She rattled it off and I wrote it on a notepad, repeating it back as I wrote.

  “All right,” I said. “This is on the west side? I think I can be there in—”

  She cut me off. “Can I come see you instead? In your office? You’re there today?” she asked.

  “Yes, sure. You can come in if you prefer, but I really don’t mind going to you.”

  “I have to get out of this house. I’ve been climbing the walls waiting for you to answer the phone.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I’ll be here the rest of the morning. You’ve got the address?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I’ll take your information when you get here and see if my assistant and I can be of any help.”

  “I can pay you,” she said.

  “I certainly hope so. I don’t run a charity here, Mrs. Ahtentoter.”

  “Attentater. Thank you, Mr. Strait. I can be downtown in…half an hour.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  I hung up and steeled myself for Carmelita’s reaction.

  Listening to half of the conversation, she must have figured out that I wasn’t speaking with last night’s conquest but rather with a potential client, as her amused expression had faded by the call’s end. A serious gaze replaced it, and I could see that she wasn’t pleased with me. “So that’s it?” she said as soon as the phone was in its cradle. “You’re just letting go of the Flynn case after everything we’ve put into it? And after I just got done telling you there’s more to it than meets the eye?”

  “You got a better idea? The Flynn case is going nowhere, and Mullen Peale is going to balk at paying after much longer. This case might not be much, but it’s something we can sink our teeth into.” And by we, I definitely meant I but figured it would be best to keep Carmelita thinking she had a stake in my choices.

  “Let me go to Hollywood, Jed,” she said, seeming to ignore what I’d just stated.

&
nbsp; “We’ve been over this.”

  “Let me go,” she repeated. A new light crossed her expression, her eyes opening wider. “Let me go, and if I’m right…if there’s something going on that we haven’t figured and I crack it, you’ll make me your partner.”

  “My partner?” I asked. I suppose it came out as something between a gasp and a croak.

  “Yes. Not just your assistant. I’m more than that, and you know it. Assistant sounds like I’m…Peggy or something. Like I answer the phone or carry your coat or write down the things you say when we’re on a case. That’s not what I do, Jed. I share the work. You sent me out alone last night to watch Ginny. You trust me to do that and a lot more. I…I even saved your backside last night when the truck wouldn’t fly right.”

  “Which you took into the air without Guillermo’s permission,” I interjected.

  She ignored the comment and talked over me, ending her argument with the simple statement, “Make me your partner.”

  I shook my head. It was all so absurd—my android ward was bargaining for half of my business, a business I’d only included her in to keep her from finding out she wasn’t human. Sure, I could deny her, but she’d probably just storm out and start trouble that I’d have to get her out of again.

  And then the paranoid thought crossed my mind—what if this was the flipping of the switch, the activation of a circuit that would eventually lead to Carmelita’s malfunctioning and turning on me? I knew this wasn’t something I could live in fear of, but it was also something I couldn’t shrug off as impossible. My previous crossover experience had borne itself out in this world, after all—only it hadn’t come together the way I’d first experienced it. What were the variables this time? And how could I use my knowledge of what might go wrong to keep it from actually going wrong?

  I leaned back in my chair, sizing her up. She looked excited, enthused. I’d have sworn her cheeks were flushed, but I knew that wasn’t possible. After a few moments, I said, “I’ll tell you what. Partner’s too much to hang on just one case. You want a raise, I’ll give you a raise. A small one. But you’ve got to build up to partner. Prove yourself over several cases.”

  “How many?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. We can discuss it as we go along.”

  She nodded. “You’re counting on me forgetting about this.”

  “To the contrary. I know you don’t forget much.”

  I was pleased with myself. Carmelita’s “salary” amounted to not much more than an allowance, the bulk of which I had her funnel right back to me in the form of rent on her half of the little house in Echo Park. Increasing her pay by a small percentage wouldn’t cut into my bottom line very much, and it would keep her happy for a while—if I ended up having to give her a raise at all, which I didn’t think was going to happen. I was still certain that she had it all wrong, that Mullen Peale hadn’t had anything sinister in his head when he’d hired me, that there wasn’t anything for her to solve. If I was right, Carmelita would play her hunch without getting mad, and when she’d finally convinced herself she was wrong, things could settle back to normal. And if I was wrong…well, I knew I wasn’t.

  “You have three more days,” I said. “And then we put the Flynn case in a box and seal it away.”

  “And if I solve it in three days, you up my pay by how much?”

  “How’s three percent sound?” I asked, knowing I was low-balling her.

  “Five,” she said, her eyebrow rising again.

  I shrugged. “Four.”

  “Deal.”

  I rolled things around in my head for a few more seconds. “Let’s get something clear,” I said. “If by solve it, you mean proving either that Peale was right about Flynn sleeping with their boss or that Peale had something completely different in his pocket when he hired us, then…yeah. You’ll see a four percent raise.”

  Carmelita’s smile was completely human, and for a second I thought she was going to cross the office and hug me. She restrained herself, though, and forced a professional demeanor again. It was a far cry from the murderous glare I’d glimpsed in another world, and though I felt lousy thinking it, I told myself that the angry Carmelita was some other Jed’s problem. Maybe he’d answered her request in a different way.

  Then, as though some switch had just clicked over in her brain, Carmelita picked up her purse and said, “I’ll take the car.”

  “And what if I need it?” I asked before she could whirl around and head for the door. “Or what if I need you? I want you to check in every hour.”

  “But that would mean leaving my post.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  She hesitated a moment before saying, “I do.”

  Opening the clasp on her purse, she took out a tin box about the size of a cheap detective novel. I knew right away it had come from Guillermo’s workshop. It had all the earmarks of his rustic genius. The box had a hinged cover, which Carmelita flipped open, and from inside she pulled two black wires, at the ends of which were what appeared to be a mouthpiece and a little speaker; both looked like they’d been taken from a dissected telephone. Turning the box over, she revealed a dial apparatus fastened to the metal back.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  “It’s a phone,” she said. “Portable.”

  “Impossible.”

  From her purse, she pulled one more item: a coil of copper wire with an electrical lead attached to one end.

  “Antenna,” she said. “Just clip this end to the box and unreel the rest. Uncle Guillermo says the longer the wire is stretched out, the better the reception.”

  “Did you steal this from his workshop?”

  “No.” She put the mouthpiece and speaker back in the box and closed the lid. The little apparatus and the wire went back into the purse. “I asked him if I could borrow it, and he said yes.”

  “The same way you borrowed that gun you had when I first met you?” I asked, recalling the trouble Guillermo’s non-lethal weapon had started. Carmelita hadn’t exactly had his permission to run off with it, but that’s what had happened.

  “No,” she said. “Not like that. You shouldn’t bring that up, Jed. You don’t know the whole story. You’re just…assuming things about me, and it’s not fair.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  I wasn’t really, but I knew some battles weren’t worth fighting. Nodding toward her purse and the phone tucked inside, I asked, “That thing got a number I can reach?”

  “Here.”

  She crossed the room and wrote a phone number on the same piece of paper where I’d jotted Mercy Attentator’s address.

  “Thanks,” I said as I reached into my pants pocket and handed her the car keys. “Don’t do anything to get either one of us in trouble, will you?”

  “Of course, Jed,” she said. “All the trouble I know seems to come only from you.”

  Great, I thought, and does it make you want to kill me?

  She gave me a playful smile that was difficult to imagine as having come from Guillermo’s workshop, and then she headed out the door.

  When she was gone, I checked my watch, figuring I had maybe twenty minutes until Mercy arrived. That was twenty minutes in which to stew over the question of whether I was making a colossal mistake by sending Carmelita out on her own.

  Trying to push the thought away, I gave the office the once over to make sure it looked presentable for a potential client, and then I sat down at my desk to wait. My chair squeaked when I rocked it back, but I rocked it back anyway, and to keep it in that position I put my feet up on the desk. It wasn’t the most professional pose to strike, but I told myself I’d drop into a more respectable posture when I heard the outer office door swing open, and Mrs. Attentater would be none the wiser.

  I didn’t plan on falling asleep.

  It had been a late night, though, and an early morning had followed it.

  The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing.

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nbsp; Carmelita, I thought, imagining her in trouble and trying to get Guillermo’s ridiculous portable phone to connect with the office. I picked up, expecting to hear panic in her voice.

  The earpiece to my head, I said, “Hello?” without thinking I should try to answer the phone more professionally. On most days, it was Peggy who took the calls, which then got routed to me if necessary. Polite and professional was her gig more than it was mine.

  It wasn’t Carmelita on the phone.

  A woman’s voice, familiar but not exactly registering with my sleep addled mind, said, “Is this Mr. Strait?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Before I could ask who was calling, the woman said, “Hello, Jed. This is Detective O’Neal.”

  Of course, I thought, now able to connect the voice in my ear with the image in my mind of the no-nonsense investigator I’d met on my second day in the city. The good feeling I got at recognizing her voice vanished almost immediately, though. I hadn’t talked to O’Neal since she’d put me in charge of Carmelita rather than follow her instinct and have the mechanical woman scrapped for the public good. Now I told myself the only reason the detective was calling was because something had gone wrong with Carmelita.

  “Is something the matter?” I asked, dreading the answer.