The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2), Page 3

  “This isn’t good,” Carmelita said.

  “I know it. What are we going to—”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not what I meant. It’s not good that we’re making a big circle. I think when we come back around again, we’re likely to hit the hill above the Ravine.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, Jed. I’m not kidding.”

  I turned to look out the truck’s rear window but could see no sign of a looming hillside in the distance. Still, I surmised that she was right. Carmelita’s brain, despite her ignorance of its abilities, had probably calculated our path, telling her exactly where we were going, possibly down to the angle at which the truck would collide with the solid hillside. The only thing she probably didn’t know was how she knew this much in the first place.

  “Maybe when we get close to the hillside, we can jump,” I said. “Let the truck crash without us in it. Maybe we can roll away from the site when we hit the ground and—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

  A bit insulted at this, I sat quietly, not sure how to take being talked down to by the beautiful machine that had gotten me into this bind and now didn’t want to hear my ideas for how to get out. I realized after a moment that she had a point; I was being ridiculous.

  Then she said, “I’m going to shut it off.”

  “What?” I shouted.

  She ignored me. Her hand darted toward the controls and turned off the Chavezium system before I could even think of reaching out to try and stop her.

  We fell. Our descent was immediate and rapid.

  I didn’t shout. I didn’t scream. I didn’t do anything but hold on to the dashboard in disbelief as Los Angeles seemed to rush toward us at a mind-numbing rate.

  And then Carmelita must have hit the switch again, as our descent slowed and then stopped.

  We hovered in the air, maybe forty feet off the ground, not moving forward at all.

  “You’re out of your mind,” I said, only now realizing that my heart was pounding harder than it ever had during the war and that I was sweating more than if I’d just raced up a hill with a full pack on my back, Nazi bullets whizzing past me and motivating me to keep going.

  She said nothing in response. Instead, she reached for the joystick and gave it a little tap to the left.

  The truck turned.

  “That fixed it,” she said, no emotion in her voice. She hadn’t been afraid, I saw. And she didn’t gloat at having solved our problem. It had been a simple problem to be solved with no stakes involved.

  “Get us down,” I said.

  Moments later, the truck began a slow descent, Carmelita nudging the joystick as we went so that the Patterson landed perfectly on a quiet street lined with little houses. None of the people inside the homes had any idea that they had just come close to having their nice Friday night ruined by a pick-up truck falling from the sky.

  We began rolling forward on diesel power as though nothing out of the ordinary had just occurred, at which point I finally released my hold on the dashboard. My fingers ached from all the tension I’d put into them in the last few minutes.

  “Can we stop for a minute?” I asked.

  Carmelita did not question my request, but pulled to the curb without comment. The street was dark, the Patterson being the only vehicle on the road, and Carmelita opted to kill the headlights before turning toward me.

  “Are you all right, Jed?” she asked.

  It was absurd. The mechanical woman whose impulsiveness had just put me in mortal danger and whose emotionless problem solving had then gotten me out of it—albeit in an insanely harrowing way—was checking on the welfare of the human who was supposed to be her watchdog. I couldn’t help the little laugh that escaped me as I reached into my back pocket for a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from my forehead.

  “Yes,” I said after a moment, my voice conveying none of the exasperation I told myself I should be feeling. Getting angry at Carmelita now would just muck things up. Instead, I said, “That was quick thinking. I just wish you would have given me a minute to prepare.”

  She smiled in the darkness. “You would have tried to talk me out of it,” she said. “We would have wasted valuable time.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said. Really, though, there was no supposing. Her mechanical mind had assessed the situation and seen the one possible solution. She had also known—without knowing that she knew—that her reflexes were sharp enough to be able to re-engage the Chavezium drive during free-fall quickly enough to keep us from hitting the ground, a simple enough accomplishment but one that a human likely would have failed at once the panic of free-fall took over the rational mind. Carmelita didn’t have to worry about panicking. She’d apparently not been programmed for that, and I was glad for it.

  “Are you ready to go?” she asked after a short period of silence between us.

  “Yes,” I said. Under the circumstances, I didn’t really know what “ready” meant, but I knew that sitting still wasn’t going to make much of a difference. My heart rate would slow to normal and everything else in my system would dial down as well whether we were parked on a quiet street or driving through the city. “Let’s go.”

  She put the Patterson in gear and turned the lights back on. Then we were off, the tall buildings of downtown probably farther away now than they’d been when we started off from Guillermo’s.

  Chapter Three

  My gig was in a little club on Eighth Street, half a block east of Broadway. It was called the High Note, and they got some decent names to come in there and play the eight to midnight crowd. When the headliners were done, though, there were still two hours until last call, and an empty stage didn’t do anything to keep patrons in their seats or drinks in their hands. That was where I came in, at least on Friday nights.

  Following our unplanned flight, Carmelita and I had gotten a bit lost in the unfamiliar neighborhood we’d set down in. After the stress of almost falling out of the sky, though, the prospect of arriving late to my gig didn’t bother me at all; even the possibility of getting fired had no effect on me. I was happy to be breathing still and actually felt more alive than I had in a long time. All my other problems—including the fact that I was in the wrong world—mattered to me not at all now. Even though I knew the feeling was temporary, I felt exhilarated with each breath I took.

  Carmelita didn’t drop me off outside the High Note until 11:56, time enough to hustle in, get on the stage, and plug my orange Harmon into the club’s amp—but barely. With no time to check if the guitar was still in tune, I broke straight into the latest song I’d been working on, a jumpy number in the “Blacktop Blues” style that I had brought with me from my proper world. The song didn’t have a name yet, and I didn’t even give myself the chance to warm up before launching into it.

  That’s the kind of self-sabotage I thrive on, the same way I always leave a blank spot when I practice my solos, knowing I’ll have to figure something out onstage with the audience’s eyes and ears on my efforts, no time to guess and no room for errors. The adrenaline always spiked when I hit those moments in a song, even if my audience consisted of a jowly, sad-eyed drunk and a jaded cocktail waitress who was one slap on the rear away from a murder rap. Tonight, the audience was a little livelier than that, which gave me even more reason to be on edge about the potential holes in my performance. So, when I hit the blank spot in this song, I let all my earlier stresses over the Patterson debacle come out through my fingers. I ran my digits across the fretboard without the slightest idea of where they were going to end up, riding the blues scale like it was that flying pick-up heading for a deadly smash-up and pulling it out at the last minute with a bend to the B string that sent a screech through the bar and made everyone from the bartender to the busboy to the rats out in the alley stop what they were doing to see if I was going to be able to get down off that note without a ladder.

  I did. And everyone clapped—well, maybe not the r
ats.

  I quickly returned to the melody then, ready to put the song to bed with a last little run down the neck.

  But that wasn’t what happened.

  Instead, I crossed over.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d done it without the benefit of technology—Nazi or otherwise. And while the sensation didn’t start me fearing for my sanity, it was still unnerving. As had happened once before, it seemed that my being at one with my music put me in a state where I could slip free from this world I barely had a foothold in and cross over into another.

  I was no longer in the High Note.

  I was outdoors in a rustic setting; to the east, the sky was starting to lighten with the approaching dawn. There was a car beside me, but it wasn’t the Winslow. I heard a woman’s voice to my left, but the Jed Strait I had crossed into wasn’t letting anything distract him from the more immediate problem in front of him. Carmelita was coming toward me, her expression murderous. She looked at me, but I could tell she wasn’t seeing me. I don’t know who or what she thought she saw, but I could tell that she wanted to kill whatever her circuits told her was in front of her.

  “Wait!” I heard myself shout. “Carmelita! It’s me! It’s Jed!”

  My words had no effect.

  She kept coming, and I started taking backwards steps away from her. I knew that if I started running, it would spur her into pursuit, and that would be it. My best chance of surviving her wrath was breaking through whatever misfire was running her mind, and to do that I’d need to be close enough to make eye contact.

  When she was even with the car’s front wheels, I had reached the car’s rear end. I told myself to lock my eyes onto hers and keep talking. The other woman, whoever she was, had ceased speaking in the near distance, and I guessed she was probably watching in awe as the Jed Strait she knew came close to meeting his fate. Was it Annabelle? Or possibly the dark-haired woman I’d just encountered in yet another different reality? There was no way to know.

  “It’s Jed, Carmelita!” I tried again. “Look! It’s me!”

  There were many things wrong with what I was looking at, but now one more thing registered in my panicking brain. Carmelita wore a flower print dress, and right in the center of its front, about ten inches below the collar, was a dark, round hole. In the slowly lightening dawn, I saw the material of the dress was scorched around that hole.

  “Carmelita!” I shouted again. “You’ve been shot! You’re…you’re malfunctioning! Do you understand? You’re not human, Carmelita! Your circuits are jammed. You need to stand down! Stand down now!”

  I was addressing her the way I would have an enemy soldier who was making a last stand in a Belgian village, or the way I might have scolded a GI who’d had too many drinks and was bent on proving himself a man, equating that goal with giving me a pummeling.

  But Carmelita was not a soldier of any kind, and she couldn’t be reasoned with.

  If something didn’t happen quickly, this Jed Strait was going to be in serious trouble.

  And then I was back in the High Note.

  The audience was clapping, some shooting shrill whistles into the smoky air. Even Janet, the jaded waitress on duty that night, had set her tray down on a patron’s tiny table to clap her hands with believable enthusiasm.

  I looked down at my hands, expecting to see them bloodied like the last time this had happened to me. No such trauma this time, though. Maybe I was getting used to this slipping between worlds when I least expected it.

  At any rate, this experience didn’t cause me to think I was losing my mind. I’d learned a lot about myself since the first time I’d had an experience like that. I won’t say I took it in stride; people in the audience might have noticed that I looked a little shaken, but I’m pretty sure I did a decent job of masking my feelings of disorientation.

  Telling myself I should feel relieved to have slipped out of that reality and back into a safer one, I still worried about what was going to happen to that other version of Jed. There was a chance, after all, that he was the one I’d been looking for all along, and now he might be dead at Carmelita’s mechanical hands. Another nagging question: what if he deserved it? What if he’d been the one who shot Carmelita, and now he was going to learn what a mistake that had been? I couldn’t imagine the circumstances that would lead me to shoot Carmelita, but then again, that other Jed wasn’t me, and that world’s Carmelita might not be an exact double of the one I knew. If that Jed had pulled the trigger, I could only hope he’d had a good reason.

  When the applause died down, I nodded to the crowd before tentatively plucking at my Harmon’s strings again. Taking a deep breath, I launched into a slower piece, planning on keeping the audience at a simmer rather than bringing them to another boil—and at the same time intent on keeping myself firmly rooted in this world. As I played the simpler piece, though, it was a little too easy to let my mind wander, replaying the encounter with Carmelita, her angry and determined face right there in my mind’s eye. There was something else, though, something nagging at me that had nothing to do with what I’d crossed over to. It was something here in the High Note that had struck me as wrong when I’d nodded to the crowd a moment before. That was all I could come up with, though, just a vague sense that there was something not quite right.

  Maybe it was a sense of lingering paranoia, an after-effect of the crossover experience. Regardless, I kept looking around as I played, surveying different quadrants of the club the way I would have done recon at the edge of a public square in France, checking high windows for Nazi snipers or shadows that might hide tripwires. Then, about halfway through the song, I figured out what was bothering me.

  Not everyone in the High Note was rewarding my playing with rapt attention. Some were having conversations or maneuvering their way into or out of one sort of seduction or another. Some were drunk and sad, staring into their nearly empty glasses and facing all the questions that those last drops of liquor conjured. All of that was normal for a place like the High Note.

  There was one patron at the bar whose disaffectedness stood out, though. She sat with a full drink in her hand and a thousand-yard stare in her eyes. I’d seen that same look on a lot of faces overseas and had probably worn it myself more than once. She was short—her legs didn’t come close to the floor as she sat on that stool—and a little pudgy; long auburn hair with curls at the ends framed a face that was still pretty despite the dead look in her eyes. My gaze had passed over her in the moments after I’d crossed over and come back, and in that moment my unconscious mind must have picked up on something while my conscious thoughts were ricocheting in the aftermath of Carmelita’s angry approach. And now that unconscious thought had made its presence impossible to ignore, like the one wilting flower in the bouquet or the single sour note in a solo.

  I let my gaze linger on her for a moment and then turned my attention back to the Harmon. In between licks and runs up and down the neck, I kept stealing glances at the woman. During one of these furtive observations, I saw her sip her drink after looking almost startled at finding it in her hand. She’d been somewhere else, I saw, somewhere far away, and now she seemed surprised to find herself in a dingy club surrounded by lonely people and with a joker up on the stage slinging a six-stringed axe.

  A few songs more, and I’d earned a short break, so I took it. The woman was still at the bar, still turned with her back to the bartender and her face toward the stage, which she’d continued to ignore while I’d played. Now I moved right in next to her, more curious than anything.

  As I took a spot at the bar, though, it was difficult not to note how similar my actions were to those of the Jed I’d occupied earlier in the evening. The bar the other Jed Strait had been in was a bit smaller than this one, a bit sketchier, and his guitar was black and sleek where mine was orange and wide with fancy f-holes cut into the body. Even so, sitting at the bar felt eerily similar, and I hesitated when the bartender put my drink in front of me, worrying that I might h
ear an angry man yelling my name after I took the first sip. Taking a look around, I saw no one who looked remotely like my assailant from that other world, so I reached for my glass and was rewarded when the liquor ran down my throat smoothly, not burning at all.

  Relieved, I turned to the woman beside me and said, “If you think you’re ever going to finish that one, I’ll be glad to buy you another.”

  She turned her face toward me, a look of annoyance in her eyes.

  “I’m not in the mood for company tonight,” she said and looked away.

  “That’s fine,” I said. Then, still thinking about how badly things had gone in that other bar, I added, “I’ve had about all the company I can stand for one night myself.”

  “Then why are you bothering me?”

  “Is that what I’m doing? I’m sorry. You just looked a little…unhappy was all. I thought I’d do the friendly thing and see if I could help you out of that pit you seem to have fallen into. If you’re not interested, that’s fine. I’ll leave you be.”

  She said nothing to this. I sipped my drink and thought of heading back to the stage where my guitar would be much better company. Before I could muster the will to move, however, the woman said, “What’s it to you, anyway?”

  “Excuse me?” I asked and turned toward her just as she reached back with one hand to grab the bar so she could swivel around without using her feet.

  With her whole body turned toward me now, she looked me in the eye, a hard look and deep. “What it’s to you,” she repeated, “if I’m unhappy?”

  I shrugged and took another sip of my drink. “This is going to sound hammy as hell, but I make my living helping people get out of trouble. Usually someone’s unhappy when I start work, and by the time I’m done, they may not exactly be happy, but they’re usually a bit…relieved. Not that I’m throwing you a sales pitch or anything. It’s just something I can’t help thinking about, even when I’m not on the job.”