Dead Mans Hand wc-7

by George R. R. Martin

  His voice ran down into racking sobs, and despite himself Brennan was touched with pity for the bewildered man who was so far out of his depth. He'd run into a place Brennan had only heard whispers of; jokers Wild in Rat's Alley, where the dead men lose their bones, where no one who enters is safe, where most anyone who enters is changed, never for the better.

  "Help me…" jory sobbed.

  "What do you want from me?" Brennan asked quietly. "Give me my face back," jory asked, but Brennan shook his head.

  "Cart do that," he said in the same soft voice.

  "Then buy me a bottle. They took all my money last night. All my money, and my face."

  Brennan stared at him a moment longer, then signaled the bartender and put a twenty on the counter. When the bottle came, jory took it and clutched it to his chest and scurried away. Brennan watched him disappear into the crowded room. It was then that he saw the girl with the blue mouth.

  She was with a man down the bar, drinking with him and laughing a little too loudly whenever he spoke. She was standing so close to him that her bare knees were pressing against his thigh, and she was toying with his hair, making little loose ringlets of it with her middle finger. Brennan thought she looked familiar, then realized that she was Lori, the hostess who'd escorted him to Quinn's suite the night the Eskimo was having his coming-out party for rapture. She was one of the demonstrators who had shown how safe and easy it was to take the drug.

  Brennan took his Tullamore's and moved off down the bar. He stopped before the man, crowding him so that he had to look up. He smiled down at him.

  "I'd like to talk to the lady."

  The man looked as if he were going to dispute things, then thought better of it. "Sure, buddy," he said. "Plenty of babes in this place."

  He slid off the stool and Brennan took his place. Lori watched the john hurry off, then switched her attention to Brennan. She smiled. Her blue gums and tongue made her smile look sinister against her white teeth and red lips.

  "You look like a man who likes to party," she said hopefully. She obviously didn't recognize Brennan, which was perfectly understandable since he had been wearing a Mae West mask the last time she saw him.

  "I do."

  "Good." Her smile grew wider, her eyes brighter. "Let's go upstairs, honey. I can show you something you've never seen before."

  "You can?"

  "Sure. Trust me." She urged Brennan off the stool. Her palms were sweaty, her body had a vaguely sour odor about it, an odor of perspiration drowned in cheap body scent.

  Her room was a small cubicle with a messily made bed. She closed the door after them and smiled with insincere coyness at Brennan.

  "Let's get the business out of the way, honey. Then we can be friends. Now," she went on, after Brennan had nodded, "it's gonna cost a hundred. But for only a hundred and fifty I can give you something really special. Something really different."

  "What's that?" Brennan asked.

  She was already pulling open the drawer of her cluttered, rickety vanity. "It's called rapture, honey, and it's sheer heaven."

  She held up a small vial of blue powder, much like the one Brennan had seen the night of the party. But as soon as she drew it out, she became fixated on it. She stared at it with a growing blankness and her hands began to shake a little. She unstoppered it and stared at it like it held the keys to the kingdom.,

  "What's it do?" Brennan asked, watching her closely. "Do?" As if unable to resist any longer, she dipped her forefinger into the vial and then put it in her mouth, rubbing it swiftly across her already stained gums. She smiled, and sucked her now-blue fingertip daintily, as if it'd been dipped in some sort of delicious sauce. "It makes everything so fresh and tasty and good feeling. Let me rub a little on your cock, honey, and it will be out of this world."

  "Is it dangerous?"

  Lori laughed and shook her head. "No way. I've been taking it for weeks now" She leaned closer and smiled confidentially. "Me and the guy who made it are like this," she said, entwining two fingers.

  "I'll bet." Brennan moved closer and she smiled in unfocused ecstasy, her hand dropping to the crotch of his jeans and fumbling there. He smiled at her. "No thanks," he said, and smoothly took the vial of rapture away from her. "Hey!"

  "Why can't we do it without the rapture?" he asked. "Because it's so good with it."

  "I like it plain."

  "But it's better, it really is," she said with increasing frenzy.

  He remembered what Quincey had said about it a couple of days before, a drug that was so good that it makes a whore like sex.

  "What's it like without the rapture?" he asked, holding the vial away as she snatched for it.

  "Like always," she spat. "Boring. Dead. Unfeeling."

  "How about food? What's that like without a dose?" She made a face. "Cardboard and paste. Rotting compost."

  "Wine? Champagne?"

  "Tepid water with shit floating in it. Give me that!" Brennan held it up and away from her, shaking his head. "I need it. I have a friend who might want to have a look at this."

  "I'll scream," she said.

  Brennan shook his head. "No, you won't. I'm going to give you a dose, then I'm going to tie you up and you can tell everyone that I robbed you."

  "Give, me two doses. One for later," she panted. "Sure."

  Lori nodded frantically and turned back to her vanity. She gave Brennan a small tin box into which he tipped a shot of the powder. Then she handed him a small mirror. He laid out a line and she found a straw somewhere and took it all in through her nose with a long snort. She leaned back and smiled.

  "What's it like when you do it that way?" he asked curiously.

  "Good thoughts," Lori said dreamily. "Only good thoughts." He nodded and led her to the bed. She sat down obediently as he tore the sheet into strips, bound and gagged her. He left her room wondering what kind of thoughts she'd have after the rapture wore off.

  10:00 P.M.

  Digger Downs had been right about one thing: the hotel where Kahina had spent her final weeks was a real pit.

  A half-dozen elderly jokers sat in the lobby, watching an ancient black-and-white Philco while they waited to die. When Jay entered, they all looked at him with dim incurious eyes. No one spoke. The jokers, like the lobby, smelled of decay.

  The night clerk was a stout woman in her sixties with her hair worn in a bun. Her breath smelled of gin and she didn't know nothing about no Ay-rab girl, but she was perfectly willing to let Jay have a look at the files, once he'd slipped her a ten.

  The records were in just as shitty a shape as the rest of the building, but after thirty minutes with the registration cards and receipt books from May and June of 1987, Jay found what he was looking for. She'd paid two months in advance, in cash, for a room on the third floor. Less than three weeks later, the same room had been rerented, to someone listed only as Stig.

  Jay showed the cards and the receipt book to the night clerk. "Her," he said, pointing out the name.

  The corner of a ten-dollar bill was just visible under. the registration card; it did wonders for the old woman's memory. "Oh, yeah, she was the pretty one. I only saw her once or twice, thought she looked kind of Jewish. You mean she was an Ay-rab?"

  "A Syrian," Jay said. "What happened to her?" The woman shrugged. "They come, they go."

  "Who's this Stig?" Jay asked.

  "Stigmata," the old woman said. She made a face. "Disgusting. Makes me sick just to look at him, but Joe, he says even jokers need a place to stay. If it was up to me… honestly, these people are like animals. Anyway, Stig didn't pay his rent and Joe evicted him, good riddance to bad rubbish, and we rented his room to the Ay-rab girl. But then a few weeks later Stig had the money he owed us and he says he wants his room back. We hadn't seen that girl for a week or so, so we let him back in."

  "Did the woman leave any personal effects?"

  "Personal what?"

  "Any stuff," Jay said impatiently. "Letters, papers, a passport. L
uggage. Clothing. She just up and vanished one day, right? What did you find when you cleared out her room?"

  The night clerk licked her lower lip. "Yeah, now that I think about it, she had some stuff." She studied him greedily. "You family? I don't think I can give you her stuff unless you're family. Wouldn't be right."

  "Of course not," Jay said. "But it so happens that Mr. Jackson is a very close relative of hers."

  "Huh?" she said, eyes blank with confusion.

  Jay sighed a deep, put-upon sigh. "How about I give you twenty bucks for her stuff?" he said wearily.

  That she understood at once. She took a key off the pegboard behind her and led Jay down to a damp, chilly basement. A dozen cardboard boxes were stacked unevenly behind the water heater, each marked with a room number. The boxes on the bottom were green with fungus and halfcollapsed, their numbers all but illegible, but Kahina's legacy was on top.

  He went through the carton in a deserted corner of the lobby. There wasn't much: an English-language edition of the Koran, a street map of Manhattan, a paperback copy of The Making of the President 1976 with the chapters on Gregg Hartmann dog-eared and underlined, some odd bits of clothing, a box of Tampax. Jay sorted through it twice, then carried the carton back to the desk. "Where's the rest of it?"

  "That's it. Ain't no more."

  Jay slammed the carton down on the desk, hard. The woman jumped and Jay winced as his broken rib made him pay the price for the gesture. "You've got forty bucks of my money and all I've got is a box of trash. You telling me this woman flew in from Syria with nothing but a few tampons in a U-Haul box? Gimme a fucking break! Where's her luggage? Where's her clothing? Did she have any cash, any jewelry, a wallet, a passport… anything?"

  "Nothing," the old woman said. "Just what's in the box, that's all we found. These jokers, they don't take care of their things like you and me. The way they live, it's disgusting."

  "Show me her room."

  Her eyes narrowed. "What's in it for me?"

  That did it. Jay shaped his fingers into a gun and pointed. "Ta-ta," he said, popping her away to the runway at Freakers. Thursday night was all-nude female joker mud wrestling. He hoped she was in better shape than she looked.

  The soft pop of her disappearance made a few of the jokers across the lobby look up. If they wondered what Jay was doing behind the desk, rummaging among the keys, they didn't wonder enough to do anything about it.

  Of course, there was no elevator in the building. Jay trudged up three flights of stairs, grateful that it wasn't five, and then up and down the poorly lit hallway until he found the right door. His head was pounding and his side hurt like a sonofabitch. There was light flooding through the transom, he saw, and the noise of a television from within. Jay was in a rotten mood by then. He didn't bother knocking.

  When he pushed the door open, the room's lone resident jumped off the bed in alarm. "What do you want?" It was suffocatingly hot in the room, with no hint of a breeze coming through the open window. The gaunt, wasted-looking joker was dressed in a pair of gray jockey shorts that might once have been white. A black rag was knotted around his temple like a crude bandage. The palms of his hands were wrapped in black, too. So were the soles of his feet. Wider strips of black cloth wound round and round his abdomen. The bandages were crusty with dried blood. There were more clots in his thinning hair, and a red-brown stain on the front of his jockey shorts.

  Jay felt his anger drain away from him. "I peed to ask you a few questions, Stig," he said.

  Stigmata looked at him warily. "Questions? That's all?" When Jay nodded, the joker seemed to relax. He edged over toward his television. It was a big new color Sony. Stigmata turned down the sound, but kept the picture on. On the screen a man was falling, arms and legs wheeling as he plummeted down, past floor after floor, in the vast interior atrium of some building. A golden light played around him as he fell.

  Jay stared. "That's Jack Braun," he said. Uninvited, he sat down on the edge of the bed.

  "There was an assassin," Stig volunteered, almost eagerly. "Didn't you hear? It was on all the channels. Some ace. Pitched the weenie right off the balcony."

  Jay went cold. Golden Boy was the nearest thing there was to an invincible ace, but a fall from that height… "Is he dead?"

  "Dan Rather said the fat guy saved him. Made him light."

  "Hiram." Jay breathed a sigh of relief. Hiram and his gravity power. Jay had been there the night the Astronomer had flung Water Lily from the top of the Empire State Building. Hiram had saved her life by making her lighter than air. Now it looked like he'd done it again. "The assassin…" Jay began.,

  "He was like a buzz saw. I bet he was after Hartmann." The joker's voice was bitter. "They won't let him win. Just you wait and see. It'll be Barnett, or one of them other fuckers. I wish they would all just eat shit and die. They don't care about us." Just talking about it got him angry. "What do you want anyway?" he demanded. "You got no call just walking in here. You nats think you can just walk in anyplace. This is my room."

  "I know it is," Jay said, placatingly. "Look, I need to know a few things about the woman who had the room before you- "

  Stig didn't give him the chance to finish. "It was my room first!" he interrupted. "They kicked me out, just 'cause I got a few months behind. Nine years I was here, and they just kick me out and give my room away. Welfare was the ones screwed up, it wasn't my fault I didn't have the money. They kicked me out of my own room and locked up my stuff, where was I going to go?"

  "The woman," Jay said, trying to get him off the world's injustice and back on Kahina. "Do you know who she was?" Stigmata sat down on the bed and examined one of his hands, picking at the black, bloodstained fabric. "She was one of us. She didn't look like a joker, but she was, she had fits. I saw one." He looked at Jay. "What happened to her?" he asked.

  "She was murdered," Jay said.

  Stig averted his eyes. "Another dead joker," he said. Scrawny fingers toyed with the bandage across his palm, scratching away the dried blood. "Who cares about another dead joker?"

  "What happened to her things?" Jay asked.

  The joker's eyes flicked up nervously, met Jay's, looked away again. "Ask downstairs. They took it, I bet. They locked up my stuff. Nine years and they lock me out and take my stuff, it's not right." All the while his fingers played at his scabs.

  "You're kind of nervous, aren't you?" Jay asked. Stigmata jumped up. "I am not!" he said. "I don't have to answer these questions. Who do you think you are? This is Jokertown, you stinkin' nats don't have no business here." Jay was looking at his hands. At the bandages. Plain cotton, dyed black, torn in ragged strips to bind his wounds. "I'm not a nat," he said, putting a little ice in his voice. "I'm an ace, Stiggy." He made a gun with his fingers.

  Pink droplets of moisture ran down Stigmata's forehead, blood mingling with his sweat. "I didn't do nothing," the joker said, but his voice cracked in midsentence.

  "That's a nice TV," Jay said. On the screen was a police composite of the suspected assassin, a scrawny teenage hunchback dressed in leather. "How'd you pay for that TV, Stig?"

  "Looks kind of expensive. Where'd you get the money to pay your back rent, Stig?"

  Stigmata opened and closed his mouth.

  "The cheapskates who own this dump never change the locks, do they?" Jay said quietly.

  The look in Stig's eyes was all the confirmation he needed. The joker backed away from him. Some aces could shoot fire from their hands, toss bolts of lightning, spray acid.

  Stigmata had no way of knowing what Jay's finger could do. "She was gone," he pleaded. "I never hurt her. Please, mister, it's the truth."

  "No," Jay said. "You didn't hurt her. You just robbed her. You still had your key. So after she was dead, you just came in here and helped yourself. She must have had a nice chunk of cash. Enough to pay off your back rent and buy you a new television set, at least. What else did she have? Luggage, jewelry, what?"

  Stigmata didn't answer.
r />   Jay smiled, aimed, and pulled back his thumb like a hammer.

  "No jewels," Stigmata said as beads of blood left pink trails down his forehead. "Just her luggage, and a bunch of clothes, that's all. Honest, it's the truth. Please."

  "Where is it?" Jay asked.

  "I sold it," Stigmata said. "It was all girl's clothes, it wasn't no good to me, I sold it. The suitcases, too."

  It was the answer Jay had expected. "Yeah," he said, disgusted. "Figures. You sold it. Except for the chadors. Not much market for used chadors in jokertown, right? So you kept those." He pointed at the joker's hands. "She must have had quite a few, if you're still ripping them up for bandages a year later."

  Stigmata gave a tiny, guilty nod.

  Jay sighed and put his hands in his pocket. "You're not going to hurt me?" Stig said.

  "Nothing I could do would hurt you any more than the wild card has done already," Jay told him. "You poor sad sorry son of a bitch." He turned to leave.

  He actually had his hand on the doorknob when the joker, out of some strange sense of relief and gratitude, said, "There's one other thing. You can have it if you want. They wouldn't give me nothing for it at the Goodwill."

  Jay turned back. "What?" he said impatiently.

  "A sport jacket," Stig said, "but I don't think it's your size. Anyhow it's no good. It's got a tear in the shoulder, and someone got blood on it."

  "Blood?" Jay said.

  Stigmata must have thought he was angry. "It wasn't me!" he added quickly.

  Jay could have kissed him.