The Shakedown Shuffle: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 3)

  The Shakedown Shuffle

  The Crossover Casefiles: Book 3

  Richard Levesque

  Copyright © 2021 RICHARD LEVESQUE

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN:

  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 © 2020 Duncan Eagleson

  Photos: Woman ©Nejron Photo/stock.adobe.com

  Man ©theartofphoto/stock.adobe.com, Lightfield Studios/stock.adobe.com

  Film ©Solas-ser/Pixabay

  Used By Permission

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  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

  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

  Carmelita died during the night. The end came without warning, and even though I’d known this kind of thing would happen eventually, I was still completely unprepared for the sight of her slumped over on her bed, fully clothed, her eyes and mouth wide open. Most mornings, she emerged from her room in our little house in Echo Park full of energy and ready to go. Today, though, I’d gotten through a cup of coffee and half the newspaper without any sign of life from Carmelita, so I’d opted to knock on her door to check on her. Not hearing anything, I’d gone in and found her.

  “Well, that screws up my morning,” I said.

  My stomach rumbled as I turned away from her door, igniting a little voice in my brain. Forget about her, it said. She’ll keep. Those eggs in the icebox, though…

  I know very few masters. My stomach is one of them.

  So, it was maybe another half hour before I called Guillermo.

  “She was fine last night, yes?” the old man asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said, stretching the phone cord across the kitchen so I could look through the door to Carmelita’s room. The sight of her legs on the floor and part of her torso twisted unnaturally across the bed might have made another observer look away, but I couldn’t help staring. It would have made for a particularly unpleasant crime scene photo. “She seemed totally normal.”

  “You didn’t notice her eyes blinking a lot? In a pattern?”

  “No,” I said, trying to recall in more detail my interactions with Carmelita from the night before. “At least I don’t think so. Is that a problem?”

  “It’s a good thing, actually. The pattern is a warning. System failure. If you didn’t see it…” I imagined Guillermo shrugging on the other end of the line before he continued. “…then it’s probably just her power source. Nothing to worry about.”

  “You didn’t route her power source into the warning system?” I asked, my eyes still on Carmelita’s bare legs. “What if she was driving a car? Or flying one?”

  “Accidents happen, lobo,” he said. “Usually, there would be some signs that she was running down. Maybe this last power pack was flawed. Or maybe you’ve been working her too hard.”

  There was no accusation in his tone, and I didn’t take his last statement personally. If anything, it was more of a joke; Guillermo knew all too well how ambitious Carmelita was, how she put as much of her effort and energy into going above and beyond the little jobs I gave her so that she might someday break down my resolve and get made a partner in the business where—for now—she was no more than an assistant.

  The thing was…I wasn’t in the mood to joke. I had been counting on Carmelita this morning, and now she’d been rendered useless.

  “Can you fix her?” I asked.

  “Si, si,” the old man said. “I’ll come over.”

  “Great,” I said.

  There was a pause, and I wondered if Guillermo had hung up. Then he said, “I’m going to bring Osvaldo with me. That’s okay, yes?”

  If he hadn’t sounded so hesitant, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. I took a moment before saying, “Sure. Whatever you need, Guillermo.”

  “Okay. We’ll be there in a little while.”

  We hung up and I walked back to the bedroom door beyond which my beautiful assistant lay defunct on the bed that never got slept in. Not for the first time, I wondered how I’d ever gotten myself into a life where such things were possible, and then, as I always do, I shoved the thought aside. There was more coffee to drink, and I expected Guillermo would be happy to find a fresh pot waiting when he and his new assistant arrived.

  With a flame soon dancing underneath the freshly filled coffee pot, there was nothing to do but wait, so I took the opportunity to pick up my guitar not only to pass the time but also to get in a few minutes of productivity before Guillermo arrived. I didn’t bother plugging in, just started in on the chord progression I’d been hammering away at all week in my attempt to bring some life to the lyrics Sherise had written. Not a songwriter by training, she’d come up with some unorthodox turns in the melody, making it a challenge for me to arrive at the proper accompaniment. A warm echo of her singing filled my mind as I worked through the chords I’d figured out up to this point, but I kept hitting a wall near the end of the chorus. The problem had had me so flummoxed that I’d been toying with the idea of putting Guillermo to work on it, as I wondered if he could come up with something that would analyze sound and match tones to musical notes.

  And then I made a mistake, dropping my ring finger onto the B string on a fret where it didn’t belong. It changed the chord, and the result was perfect. I stared at my fingers on the guitar’s neck, memorizing the position and trying to figure out what this strange chord was; then I went back to the beginning, playing the song and humming the melody. When I got to the end of the chorus, I played the unorthodox chord again, and it was like I’d broken through a wall only to find it hadn’t been a solid barrier after all, but rather a simple membrane, like a soap bubble I’d just passed through.

  In my surprise, I pushed through to play the next chord, excited to cycle through the song and come back to the chorus again. But in that moment of perfection, I slipped away, dropping out of my place not just in the song but also in the world. I wasn’t sitting in my sparse living room anymore, wasn’t playing the song I’d just figured out.

  Instead, I was standing in a bedroom. I didn’t recognize the setting. The room was cold, a gentle breeze blowing onto me, probably from an open window. It was a modestly appointed room, a woman’s room. I knew this not because of the lace covering on the bureau or the ornate combs and brushes laid on it. No, it was the dead blonde on the be
d in front of me that told me all I needed to know.

  I stood at the foot of the bed—or, rather, some version of Jed Strait stood there. I’d crossed over into other worlds like this enough times—always during moments of musical reverie—to know that I wasn’t looking at a real scene from my life, neither past nor yet to come, but rather that I’d intruded on the experience of a different Jed. What he was seeing, I might encounter soon. Or I might not. Or, the trajectory I was on in my world was one that would be close to this one. At any rate, these moments acted as something between a warning and a signpost, and I knew I needed to pay careful attention during the brief time I was likely to be looking through this other Jed’s eyes.

  The dead woman lay face down on the bed, her blonde hair piled high on her head to expose a graceful neck. She wore a blue dress made of a silky expensive-looking material. I could tell she wasn’t merely sleeping, not just because there was no movement in the body to indicate respiration but also because of the way her legs were twisted. In an echo of Carmelita’s unnatural posture, this woman lay with her legs bent at an odd angle, her position suggesting not relaxation and rest but rather the aftermath of convulsion and thrashing. No one could possibly sleep comfortably in such a twisted way. Near the dead woman’s right hand was an open bottle of vodka, its contents having spilled partly onto the white bedspread; next to her left hand was an empty bottle of pills. I didn’t need to lean forward to read the label in order to understand the story that the two bottles told.

  What are we doing here, Jed? I wondered. Taking a step back from the bed, I reached for this Jed’s wallet. In my visits to other worlds—both through this music-enhanced sort of trance and through the mechanical means afforded by my friend Guillermo and my enemy, Elsa Schwartz—I had learned that in other worlds I had become a musician, a private detective, a welder, a transient, and a career soldier, to name only a few. Musician and private detective were the most common occupations, sometimes both—which was what one of these other Jeds would discover about me if they ever somehow crossed into my existence. Looking now at this Jed’s fingers, I noticed no callouses from guitar strings, but in his wallet was a private investigator’s license.

  That gave me at least a little clue. Who was the dead woman, though? A client? A suspect? Or someone not related to this Jed’s work at all? I hated the thought of this Jed standing over the corpse of a lover, having been in that spot myself, but there was something about the setup and this Jed’s presence here that told me he wasn’t romantically involved with the dead woman. The tidiness of the room alone told me there was nothing going on between this version of Jed and the dead woman; no one I’d ever gotten involved with, let alone pursued, had been this neat. The thought of making love in such an ordered place gave me more of a shiver than I got from looking at the dead woman and her twisted limbs.

  Somewhere near the front of the house, the doorbell rang. The sound made me jump, adrenaline coursing through my system as I considered the possibility that whoever was at the door was going to need to be given all the right answers if I—or this other Jed—was to stay out of jail. But what were the right answers? I didn’t even know the questions.

  Regardless, I took a step toward the open bedroom door, and as my foot came down I found I was in my own front room again. There was no dead woman, no breeze, no bottles of pills or booze. There was a doorbell, though, and it rang again.

  I couldn’t remember having stood up or setting the guitar down; I had done both, though. Every time I came out of one of these little trances, the effect was disorienting, and this was no different. I glanced around for a moment, wondering how I was going to warn the other Jed to be careful in case it was the police at the door. And then I noticed Carmelita’s open door, saw her body on the bed, and knew which world I was in.

  Crossing the rest of the small space between the couch and the front door, I grabbed the knob and pulled. Guillermo Garcia stood on the other side of the screen door, his ever-present smile on his lips and two pairs of glasses hanging from cords around his neck. He held a small toolbox in his right hand.

  “Good morning, lobo,” he said. “You fall asleep again?”

  “No,” I said after taking a flummoxed moment to connect his question to the length of time it must have taken me to answer the doorbell’s summons. Then I unlatched the screen door and opened it a few inches as I stepped back to let him inside.

  As he moved aside to pull the door toward him, I realized he wasn’t standing alone on my porch. A slight young man had been waiting behind the old inventor, seemingly hiding behind his girth. For a moment, I was taken aback, but then I remembered Guillermo had said he’d be bringing his new assistant with him.

  Osvaldo Marquez was in his early twenties. His black hair looked wild, like it hadn’t made the acquaintance of a comb or a barber in a long time. He wore coveralls and workman’s shoes, and he stood behind Guillermo with his head down and his eyes on the porch’s floorboards so I couldn’t really make out his features.

  Guillermo crossed the threshold and Osvaldo followed. The wrinkled old man was still spry and walked with confidence and purpose while the younger man trailed behind him, seeming to take special care to put his feet in the same spots where Guillermo had stepped. Instead of offering to help Guillermo with the toolbox, Osvaldo filled his hands with a single, small tool that looked unfamiliar to me. It was a steel-handled gadget with a globe on one end, and sticking out of the globe were several small, colored bulbs. The thing made me think of a magic wand or an electronic scepter. It was clearly lighter than the toolbox, and I felt myself growing annoyed that the younger man had not offered to take the greater burden and let Guillermo carry the little tool that I assumed would be used to test Carmelita’s condition.

  I had known about Osvaldo for a while, but this was the first time I’d seen him. Guillermo had explained that he was taking him on as an assistant not because old age was catching up to him but out of a sense of duty to the young man and his mother, who was one of Guillermo’s tenants in the small community in Chavez Ravine where Garcia Industries was housed. Apparently, Osvaldo had some mental deficiencies that had gotten him placed in the state mental hospital in Camarillo when he was sixteen or so. There was nothing violent or dangerous about the kid, Guillermo had assured me; he was just non-communicative and had difficulty functioning in society. He’d been placed in Camarillo after a simple encounter with a police officer had resulted in an altercation—the officer having mistaken Osvaldo’s reticence for recalcitrance. A bit of a scuffle had followed and a judge had deemed the boy a danger to society.

  The thing was—as Guillermo told it—the boy had responded beautifully to the routine he’d been forced into in Camarillo. When his mother had seen how well he was doing in his new environment, she’d dropped all her efforts to get Osvaldo out. He’d been locked up for five years before word had gotten to Guillermo that the staff at the hospital had discovered Osvaldo’s mechanical abilities. Apparently, he’d been repairing everything from toasters to bicycles to radios without ever having had a lesson in engineering, electronics, or anything else. And, of course, there had been no compensation for any of this labor, which had burned Guillermo pretty good when the boy’s mother had casually boasted of Osvaldo’s proficiency and new sense of purpose in the hospital.

  It hadn’t been too difficult for Guillermo to get the kid sprung—with the understanding that he’d be hired on as a worker at Garcia Industries and that Guillermo would take responsibility for Osvaldo’s well-being and his re-introduction to society. As far as I knew, things had gone well so far, but the young man had been in Guillermo’s care for only a few days, helping in the old man’s workshop during the days and splitting his nights between the couch in Guillermo’s living room and his mother’s place in Chavez Ravine.

  “I don’t know, lobo,” Guillermo had said on the phone the evening of Osvaldo’s first day out of the hospital. “Sometimes I think he might be one of those geniuses, but at the sa
me time it seems like he’s about to get lost walking from the kitchen to the toilet.”

  And now the two of them were in my modest living room, tasked with reviving my mechanical assistant. Guillermo stopped when they’d both reached the area in front of the couch. He turned and said, “Jed, this is Osvaldo Marquez. Osvaldo, this is my good friend Jed Strait.”

  He said it because it was the normal thing to do, and yet I could tell from the old man’s tone that he was not expecting anything like a normal introduction to follow. He was right.

  “Hello, Osvaldo,” I said even though the other man had made no effort to raise his eyes from the floor or do anything else to acknowledge what Guillermo had just said. “It’s good to meet you,” I added, hoping that I was managing to hide the mild irritation I’d felt at Osvaldo’s decision to let Guillermo carry the toolbox. This, too, got no response, which prompted me to look to Guillermo for a little help. When the old man shrugged, I could do nothing but return the gesture.

  “She’s in there?” Guillermo asked, tipping his head toward Carmelita’s room.

  “Yes,” I said, realizing I’d been using my body to block his view of Carmelita’s open door—probably in an unconscious effort to protect Carmelita’s privacy now that Osvaldo had entered the house. Genius or not, the young man’s demeanor had made me start having second thoughts about the wisdom of letting him in, even if Guillermo needed help reviving Carmelita, which I doubted. Under the old man’s guidance, this young pup was about to see Carmelita at her most vulnerable, and it made me uneasy, like Guillermo and I were engaged in a betrayal of her trust.

  If Guillermo picked up on any of my second-guessing, his expression didn’t show it at all. “Gracias, lobo,” he said. Then, turning back to his assistant, he added, “Come on, Osvaldo. This way.”