High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  The cop didn’t sound reproachful, just curious. She was a tall woman, almost the Angel’s height but the Angel probably had forty pounds on her. She had a lean body and a lean, sharp-featured face. Her hair was long and blond, her eyes a mild blue.

  “Just once,” the Angel said.

  The detective’s left eyebrow quirked. “With what?”

  The Angel gestured silently toward the remains of the desk scattered around the body.

  “Nice,” the female cop repeated. “I’m Inspector-Detective First Class Joan Lonnegan.”

  The Angel nodded. She’d heard of her. “I’m Bathsheeba Fox—”

  “I know,” Lonnegan said. “The Midnight Angel.” Her intent regard, the Angel thought, was frankly curious. “If you don’t mind a personal question, what’s it like being married to Billy Ray?”

  The question threw her for a moment. Was she serious, or just testing her in some way. “Endlessly exciting,” the Angel finally said.

  Before Lonnegan could reply they were interrupted as a tall, slim black detective in a nice suit entered the room.

  “And this,” said Lonnegan, indicating the handsome young man, “is Detective Third Class Michael Stevens.”

  “CSI is on the way,” he said. He stopped before the Angel, turned to face her, and extended his hand. His features were expressionless as they shook. “Ma’am.”

  The Angel, startled as she was, also remained expressionless as she palmed the small folded bit of paper he passed to her.

  “I checked with the desk clerk,” he reported to Lonnegan. “This is SCARE agent Jamal Norwood’s hotel room.”

  “Is, or was?”

  “Is. But he hasn’t been seen for more than a day.”

  Lonnegan turned her attention to the Angel. “Ms. Fox?”

  “Call me Bathsheeba—or Angel, as you prefer,” the Angel offered, and Lonnegan inclined her head.

  “Yes. It’s true. I’ve been looking for him.” She wondered how much she should tell the detective, then decided that she couldn’t expect to get info if she didn’t offer any. “He missed a medical appointment today.”

  Lonnegan’s eyebrows rose and Stevens’s face took on a concerned expression.

  “Was he ill?” Lonnegan asked.

  The Angel hesitated. No sense in making this too easy. “I can’t say. I will tell you that officially he was on medical leave.”

  With this news the detectives exchanged worried glances.

  “So,” the Angel said, “this Andrei the Ice Man…?” She let her voice trail off.

  Stevens looked at Lonnegan. When her expression didn’t change he apparently took it as a sign of acquiescence.

  “One of the Brighton Beach boys.”

  “Russian Mafia?”

  Michael nodded in confirmation. “Hit man. One of the best—or should I say the worst? He was here alone?”

  The Angel shook her head.

  “Short, fat guy in a ponytail and loud clothes?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s his partner in crime—and in life—Shadow.”

  “They’re a couple?” the Angel asked. She was only briefly surprised. A decade by Ray’s side made you receptive to the unusual.

  “Marriage made in hell,” Lonnegan volunteered.

  “I’d like to be present when you question him.”

  “Well, in the state you left him, that may be a while.”

  The Angel shrugged. She stood, turned to drop the towel she’d been holding over the top of the chair, and slipped the note Michael had passed her under the cuff of her gauntlet. She turned and faced Lonnegan and Stevens.

  “Nevertheless,” she said. “I’d be very interested in why the Russian Mafia was trying to kill one of our agents.”

  “So are we all, Bathsheeba.”

  Lonnegan, the Angel realized, was going down the tight-lipped route for now. That was all right. She glanced at Stevens, who was studiously looking elsewhere.

  “Thank you, Detective.” She looked at Michael and nodded. “Detective.”

  She didn’t look at the note that Stevens had passed her until she was alone in the elevator going down to the lobby. It read in hastily scrawled letters: “Meet me at Uncle Chowder’s in three hours. Important.”

  She stopped at reception. The desk man handed her the computer she’d given him along with a fifty-dollar bill when he’d brought her the towels she’d requested.

  “Thank you,” she said politely.

  “Anytime,” he replied, and watched with great admiration as she sashayed to the front door.

  In all fairness, the Angel thought, she could hardly expect Detective-Inspector First Class Lonnegan to show her hand when she was holding her own cards so close to her bosom.

  “Miss Pond, Miss Sweet, please look over here.” The photographer pointed toward the loft’s south-facing windows, and Michelle and Peregrine immediately took his direction and started giving him pose after pose.

  “You know,” Peregrine whispered, “if they hadn’t told me you were doing this campaign, I might not have done it. But ‘Women of Power’ looks like it’s going to be good.”

  A jolt of happiness surged through Michelle. She had admired Peregrine for years. “Well,” she whispered back, “I was thrilled when I found out you were going to be part of this, too.”

  “How would you feel about coming on Season Nine of American Hero and doing a guest shot? We have some interesting kids, and you’d probably kick all their asses.”

  “I don’t know,” Michelle said with a laugh. “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. This campaign, and I’m still on part-time with the Committee. Also, as tempting as it would be to come back to American Hero, I’m not sure I’m the right fit.”

  Peregrine nodded and tossed her head a little. “I understand,” she said. “I might have left myself, but they’re paying me a fortune to stay.”

  They were both dressed in stovepipe black slacks, white shirts, and black platform shoes. Posed in front of a white backdrop, they were supposed to be showing off their wild card powers. And Michelle had made sure she had enough fat to bubble through the session.

  “Miss Sweet, Miss Pond, can you give us some buddy shots? You know what we want: look like you’ve known each other for years. And Michelle, can you make those bubbles a little bigger?”

  Amare gave the photographer an imperious look. “Dear boy,” she said, “we have known each other for years. Ever since she was on the first season of American Hero.”

  The photographer didn’t look chastened at all. “Both of you have appointments after this,” he said with a sigh. “And I promised I’d get you out of here quickly. Get off my back, Amare.”

  Peregrine laughed, and her wings fanned out behind her. “Oh, Jimmy, I do so love it when you get all businesslike. I remember snorting coke with you off some bar in Jokertown in the eighties.”

  Jimmy started taking more pictures while they chatted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, snapping away. “Besides, you’ll give the kid the wrong idea.”

  Michelle draped an arm around Amare’s shoulders and floated three cantaloupe-sized bubbles in front of them.

  “Jimmy, you know very well I grew up modeling. Nothing surprises me.”

  Peregrine laughed and opened her wings wide, framing both herself and Michelle in white and brown feathers. Then she rose a little off the ground.

  “That’s the shot,” Jimmy said.

  The Angel had a room in a Holiday Inn Express right over the border from Jokertown in a slightly more respectable Manhattan neighborhood. It was small and not exactly luxurious, but it met her needs. It was nice, unostentatious, conveniently located, and cheap. For Manhattan. Anything more glamorous would have made her feel uncomfortable—her poverty-stricken small-town upbringing still affected her greatly—and although she was of course on an expense account her innate frugality always made her budget conscious. Although Billy kept telling her that one agent’s expenses didn’t mak
e a gnat’s ass worth of difference to the budget, she still liked to do the best she could to keep the notoriously underfunded agency in the black. The room was comfortable and cosy and she didn’t need anything more.

  She set Jamal’s computer on the nightstand beside her neatly made single bed, sat down on the chair next to the deskette, took off her gauntlets and unlaced and removed her boots. She stood and shimmied out of her leather jumpsuit. It was a little damp and although it had been a warm early summer day, her finely-toned skin was clammy in places where the deluge from the hotel’s sprinklers had eventually leaked through. She unbound her braided hair and feathered it across her shoulders and chest, and stood again, looking at her body in the deskette’s mirror.

  She’d been lucky enough over the years since she’d joined SCARE not to add any scars to it. She pulled her heavy-duty sports bra over her head and let it fall to the floor. She’d been lucky, too, with her explosive metabolism, that she hadn’t gained an ounce, either. It’d only been since being with Billy—and it had taken several years, even then—that she could look at herself in the mirror and feel pride in what she saw instead of shame. Almost unconsciously, her hand traveled across her flat stomach and traced the long, curving scar that stood out against her pale skin just as clearly as it had the day her mother had caught her kissing a boy on the front porch and after running him off their property had taken a kitchen knife and cut out her uterus while screaming and calling her terrible names.

  Her mother had been insane, of course, probably even before she’d met the college boy who’d seduced her, gotten her pregnant, and abandoned her. The Angel had forgiven her now long-dead mother, but it had been only the luck of the wild card that had turned her ace and saved her life that day.

  Her life with her mother had always been hard. As a toddler and into her teens she’d been dragged from place to place and from church to church, her mother searching for the peace she’d never found. But her mother’s terrible deed had made the Angel what she was and eventually had given her Billy Ray, which had completed her in ways she had never even imagined and had made all her prior suffering and misery worthwhile.

  God, she reflected for not the first time, worked in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.

  She snagged a towel from the small bathroom and rubbed herself down until she was totally dry, then went to the bed and sat upon it cross-legged. She took Norwood’s computer and said to herself, “Now, let’s see what you’ve been up to, Jamal.”

  She turned it on. It didn’t take any magic to access it. As Jamal’s team leader she was privy to his password for both safety and security reasons. She scanned the files that popped up in the directory, and was pleased to see, superficially at least, that he’d followed rules and hadn’t put personal info or data on the computer, just docs relating to business. Of course, he could be hiding things under innocuous file names, but she’d check that later.

  She called up the most recently opened file and read for a good ten minutes, a sudden frown deepening as she scanned the doc.

  “Oh my God,” she said, and the way she said it was a prayer not a curse. She read for a few more moments and stopped. She went to the soggy jumpsuit that she’d hung over the chair before the deskette, extracted her cell phone from a zipped pocket, and speed-dialed the first number on her list. He answered after the second ring.

  “Hello?” His voice was guardedly gruff. It felt so good to hear it again, although she’d already called him earlier that very morning.

  “Hello, Billy.”

  “Angel!” Billy Ray was the baddest dude she knew in or out of government service and over the last decade or so she’d met a lot of bad dudes. He was the greatest martial artist she’d ever seen in action and over the years she’d seen a crap-ton of that kind of guy and gal. He was probably the only man or woman she herself would be afraid to take on because he was absolutely relentless and fearless and nothing but the hand of God, himself, would ever stop him if he was on your case. And, frankly, she was actually a bit unsure about that. She smiled as she heard the gladness in his voice when he realized it was her on the phone.

  “How’s your day been?”

  “Ah.” His voice turned edgy again. “These God—er—fucking budget meetings. I swear to—I mean, this crap just drives me batshit.”

  The Angel smiled to herself. She loved it when he was being sweet.

  “Did you track him down?” Ray demanded before Angel could say anything.

  She paused a moment to gather her thoughts. “No.” She could hear him growl in frustration. “Billy, how long will it take you to get here?”

  There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line.

  “That bad?” he finally said.

  “Yes.”

  “Two hours.”

  “Good. It’s complicated and I’m not totally sure what’s happening, but Jamal is in trouble. He—he seems to have gone to Kazakhstan with a detective from Fort Freak and the help of that teleporter who calls herself Tesseract.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “What?”

  “Yes—it’s about all the jokers who’ve gone missing lately. You’ve got to get here ASAP. As you see, it’s beyond complicated—the jurisdiction issues alone are a nightmare come true. Call me once you get on the plane and I’ll fill you in further. But get here fast—fast.” She checked the small clock on the nightstand. “If you can get here in two hours you’ll be just in time for the meet.”

  “Meet?”

  “Yes. An admirer has been slipping me secret notes.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Ray said. There was more than a hint of menace in his voice. The softness of his tone told the Angel that he was angry and that anger, the Angel knew, was directed at her revelation about Jamal’s situation and not her banter about a secret admirer that she’d hoped would divert him, at least a bit. Both she and Ray had been worried about Jamal’s apparently deteriorating medical condition, partly because it paralleled what Ray had been going through himself lately. Partly because Jamal was under Ray’s command and responsibility. And partly because they both liked the cocky young agent. Though, of course, Ray wouldn’t come right out and tell him that.

  “I hope so,” the Angel replied.

  “How’s John?” Michelle asked. It was a touchy subject, but Michelle knew Peregrine’s son from her early days with the Committee.

  Amare was undressing and handing her clothes to Jimmy’s assistant without an ounce of embarrassment. Michelle was doing the same. They’d both done enough runway shows that getting naked in front of assistants didn’t seem peculiar.

  “He’s okay, I guess,” Peregrine said, pulling on a floral-print sundress designed to accommodate her wings. “He doesn’t call enough. But, well, he’s never in one place too long. I keep getting postcards from everywhere. Occasionally we Skype. But he’s not the same anymore. After … you know.”

  Michelle did know. John Fortune had lost all of his powers. She couldn’t imagine living without her ability to bubble. The thought made her feel sick.

  “You okay?” Peregrine asked. She reached out and laid a hand on Michelle’s shoulder.

  “I’m okay. Just, well, what John went through…”

  Peregrine nodded. “I know,” she said. Her voice trembled. “His life has been so difficult, and there’s nothing I can do to help.”

  “I have the same problem,” Michelle said. “I want to protect Adesina, but the older she gets, the more difficult it’ll be.”

  Peregrine gave her a hug. “It’ll be fine. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.” She took a deep breath, then smiled a little too brightly. “I think we’re filming a commercial next week. I’ll see you then!” She kissed Michelle on the cheek, then breezed out the door.

  Michelle pulled her clothes on quickly, then looked in the mirror. She glanced at her phone. There was no time to take off her makeup. Fortunately, her hair looked halfway normal, but really it didn’t matter. She
coiled it up and stuffed it under her baseball cap.

  Slowing the truck where a dirt road veered off from the highway, Olena pointed at a cluster of cottages nestled on the hillside above them. “There. That’s it.”

  “You still haven’t told me what’s so special about this village,” Marcus said. Certainly, from this vantage, it hardly looked like a prime destination.

  “They will help us,” Olena said. That was as detailed as she would get on the matter, though Marcus had been pushing her since she first mentioned it. Shifting the truck into gear with a jolt, she turned off onto the side road and began the ascent.

  They crawled into the village with the big engine rumbling loud enough to announce them to anyone within earshot. Marcus was glad when she turned it off and climbed out of the cab. The place seemed deserted. Ramshackle. Simple, run-down-looking houses, a few barnlike structures, black windows, and closed doors. The hulk of an old car perched on blocks, wheel-less. The silence was almost unnerving in the high, thin air, whipped by gusts of wind that only made the place seem more like a ghost town. A raptor of some sort screeched in the sky, dipped and dove.

  Marcus shivered. He’d gotten cold the last few miles, a bone-deep cold that seemed to come from inside him.

  Olena called out in Russian. She tried a few different phrases, turning as she did so and projecting her voice.

  Marcus whispered, “There’s nobody here.”

  Olena pinched that thought between her teeth a moment and then said, “Come down so that they can see you.”

  “So who can see me? There’s nobody here!”

  At her urging he slid painfully from the bed of the truck. He rolled awkwardly to the packed dirt, head swimming from the motion. He leaned against one of the truck’s large tires, panting from that small exertion.

  Olena began calling out again. Something about hearing her lone voice in the place made his spirits dive. At that moment, dressed as she was and speaking as she was, she seemed completely foreign to him. It reminded him how lost he was, how out of his depth and so very, very far from the things he knew. And there was nobody here. It finally, fully bloomed on him—the understanding that he was going to die here. He could feel the life draining out of him. He wondered, for the first time, where he would go when he died. Father Squid knew. He was there already. Maybe, if he was lucky, the priest would be waiting for him on the other side of life. If they were to go to the same place. He hoped so. He truly hoped so.