Wild Cards III: Jokers Wild

by George R. R. Martin

  Hiram found he could not look at her. He took out a wallet, gave her a five-dollar bill. As she took it from his hand, his fist clenched, and he cut her weight in half. It wouldn’t last, but for a little while it would be easier for her.

  A fire was burning in the vacant, debris-strewn lot beside the Crystal Palace. A dozen small twisted forms were huddled around it, and an animal of some sort was turning on a spit above the flames. At the sounds of footsteps, some of the creatures got up and vanished into the ruins. Others turned to stare, eyes hot as embers in the darkness. Hiram paused. He didn’t often come down to Jokertown, and now he remembered why.

  “They won’t bother us,” Ackroyd said. “This is their time, when the streets are empty and the world’s asleep.”

  “I think that’s a dog they’re cooking,” Hiram said.

  Jay took him by the arm. “If you’re that interested, I’ll have Chrysalis get you the recipe. Come on.”

  They climbed the steps, knocked.

  The sign on the door said CLOSED, but after a moment they heard the dead bolt slide back and a man stood before them. He had a pencil-thin mustache, oily dark hair, and an expanse of taut skin where his eyes should have been.

  “Sascha, Hiram,” Jay Ackroyd said. “They here?”

  Sascha nodded. “In the taproom. Only two. They’re clean.”

  Hiram heaved a sigh of relief. “Let’s get this over with, then.” Sascha nodded, and led them through a small ante-chamber to the main taproom of the Crystal Palace.

  The only lights were those behind the long bar. The room smelled of beer and cigarette smoke, and the chairs had been upended on the tables. They sat in a booth, three of them. In the dimness, Chrysalis looked like a skeleton in an evening gown. The end of her cigarette glowed like the eyes of the lost souls outside. Loophole Latham was impeccably dressed in a charcoal gray three-piece, and his briefcase was on the table in front of him. Between them, wrapped in shadow, was the third man.

  “Thank you, Sascha,” Chrysalis said. “You can leave us now.” When the echoes of his footsteps had died away, it was deathly quiet in the taproom.

  Hiram wondered once again what the damnation he was doing here. Then he thought of Gills, swallowed hard, stepped forward. “We’re here,” he announced, his deep voice full of confidence he did not really feel.

  Latham stood up. “Mr. Worchester, Mr. Ackroyd,” he said, as easily if this were just a business lunch.

  The third person hissed. Something long and thin flickered out of his mouth and tasted the air. “We weren’t assure you would come.” He leaned forward, thrusting his gaunt reptilian face into the light. He had no nose, just nostrils set flat into his face. His forked tongue moved constantly. “Ssso we meet again.”

  “Sorry you had to rush off like that this afternoon,” Jay said. “I didn’t quite catch the name.”

  “Wyrm,” the reptile man said.

  “Is that a first name or a last name?” Jay asked.

  Chrysalis laughed dryly. Latham cleared his throat. “Let’s get on with this,” he said. He sat down, spun the combination locks on his briefcase, clicked it open. “I’ve consulted with my client, and your terms are acceptable. No legal action will be taken against either of you, and the false-imprisonment charges will be dropped. I have the papers here, already signed by Mr. Seivers, who waives all his claims against you for the amount of one dollar.”

  “I’m not going to—” Hiram began.

  “I’ll pay the dollar,” Latham said quickly. He handed a sheaf of legal papers to Ackroyd. The detective looked through them quickly, signed them in triplicate, returned two sets. “Very good,” the attorney said. “As for the fish market, without admitting any prior guilt or involvement, my client and his organization will henceforth take no interest in that area of the city. This is not something that can be committed to a legal instrument, of course, but Chrysalis is a witness to these proceedings and the organization’s reputation is your surety.”

  “Their business is built on trust,” Chrysalis confirmed. “If they’re known liars, no one will deal with them.”

  Hiram nodded. “And Bludgeon?”

  “I reviewed his case after our last conversation, and frankly, he is not the sort of man Latham, Strauss, cares to represent. We’re dropping him.”

  Wyrm’s smile showed a mouth full of yellowed incisors. “Would you like his head ssserved up on a platter?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Hiram said. “I just want him to go to prison for what he did to Gills.”

  “Prissson it isss, then.” His eyes were fixed on Hiram, and his tongue flickered out greedily. “And now, Fatman, you have all you wanted. Give usss the booksss! Now!”

  There was a moment of tense silence. Hiram looked at Jay. The detective nodded. “Looks like all the bases are covered.”

  “Good,” Hiram said. Now all that remained was to get it done, and get out of here alive, back to the sanity of his own life. He was about to speak when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something move behind the bar. He turned.

  Wyrm said, “I want the booksss. Quit wasssting my time.”

  “I thought I saw a reflection in the mirror,” Hiram said. But there was nothing there now. The polished silver surface gleamed softly in the dim light, but no one moved.

  “Where are the booksss?” Wyrm demanded.

  “I’d like to know the answer to that question myself,” another voice added.

  He was standing in the door, a black hood pulled over his face, a complex bow in his hands. An arrow was nocked and ready.

  Wyrm’s hiss was pure poison.

  Hiram gaped. “Who in damnation are you?”

  As he spoke, a young woman wearing a black string bikini and nothing else stepped out of the mirror behind the bar.

  “Oh, shit,” Popinjay offered.

  Wyrm grabbed Chrysalis by the arm. “You ssset usss up, cunt. You’ll pay for thisss.”

  “I had nothing to do with this,” she said. She wrenched her arm free of his grasp, and looked at the masked man in the door. “Yeoman, I don’t care for this,” she told him.

  “My regrets.” He raised the bow, drew back on the arrow. “Unless the book is handed over, I’m going to put an arrow in the right eye of the gentleman in the three-piece suit.”

  Latham regarded him emotionlessly.

  “And you’re always telling me to dress better,” Jay Ackroyd said to Hiram. “See what it gets you?” He turned to the bowman. “The book isn’t here. You don’t think we’d be dumb enough to bring it with us?”

  “Wraith, pat them down.”

  The woman in the bikini walked right through the bar and approached the table. Suddenly Hiram recognized her. She’d been wearing rather more clothes at Aces High, but he was sure she was the same young woman who’d vanished through his floor when Billy Ray had tried to apprehend her. It made him sad. She was young and attractive, far too lovely to be a criminal. Undoubtedly she’d been corrupted by evil companions.

  She frisked Jay first, then Hiram. When she touched him, her hands seem to go insubstantial, sliding through the fabric of his clothes and even his skin as they moved up and down, searching. It gave him a shiver. “Nothing,” she said. The archer lowered his bow.

  “You know, I’m a little slow,” Popinjay put in. “You’re the bow-and-arrow vigilante, right? The ace-of-spades man. How many guys have you killed? Gotta be in double figures, right?”

  Wraith’s eyes went to her partner, and she looked a little startled. An innocent in over her head, Hiram thought. His heart went out to her. He had read the accounts of the ace-of-spades killer in the Jokertown Cry and the Daily News, and he couldn’t imagine how a sweet young lady like her had gotten involved with such a homicidal lunatic.

  “Where’s the book?” the archer said.

  Hiram stared at the arrow. He ought to have been cold with dread, but curiously, he felt nothing but annoyance. It had been a very long day. “In a safe place,” he said. He too
k a step forward, his fist clenching his side. He had had entirely enough. “Where it’s going to stay.” He began to walk toward the door, his bulk shielding the others behind him. “I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to set this up, and I’m not having Gills hurt or Bludgeon freed because you want these books for your own undoubtedly criminal purposes.”

  The eyes behind the mask looked absolutely astonished as Hiram strode forward. The archer hesitated, but only for a second. Then the bow came up again, Hiram tensed as the string was pulled back smoothly, pulleys turning, and Hiram clenched his fist as the gravity waves shimmered around the arrow, invisible to all but him, the moment of truth almost at hand, and—

  —there was a pop, and the archer was gone.

  Hiram heard Wraith gasp, and then Wyrm screamed in sibilant triumph. The lizard-man shoved at the table that trapped him inside the booth, and it came out of the floor with a metallic ripping sound. Wyrm hurtled over it toward the woman, who back-stepped away from him. “Leave her alone!” Hiram yelled.

  Wyrm ignored him. He lunged, hissing, clawed hands grasping to embrace her, and passed right through her body, smashing hard up against a barstool. Popinjay laughed.

  Wraith spun around wildly, wide eyes searching for her ally for a moment before she gave up and ran. She dashed through the bar again and vanished back into the mirror, its silvered surface closing over her like a pool of mercury.

  “Nice of you to drop in,” Popinjay called after her. He turned back to the others. “I don’t suppose anyone got her phone number?” He sighed. “Oh, well . . .”

  Wyrm climbed back to his feet, screeching in dismay. “I’ll kill her! I’ll kill them both!”

  “Later,” Loophole suggested. The lawyer folded his hands as if the little interruption had never happened. “Do we still have an understanding?”

  “I don’t want the damnable books,” Hiram said. “If you’ll honor my terms, they’re yours.”

  “Fine. Where are they?”

  “We hid them,” Hiram told him, “in Jetboy’s Tomb. In the cockpit of the JB—1 replica.”

  “If they’re there, our agreement will be honored.”

  “If not,” Wyrm added, “you’ll all be very sssorry.”

  Chrysalis crossed to the bar and took down a bottle. “Perhaps we should have a little toast, to the successful conclusion of a difficult transaction.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have the time,” Latham said, closing his briefcase. Hiram wasn’t listening. He was staring past Chrysalis, staring at the silvered surface of the long mirror where—for just an instant—he thought he had seen something move.

  She watched him struggle against the current, his stick-thin arms flailing wearily at the dark water. A dying water spider skimming hopelessly toward shore. Roulette had waited for him to die in the sky over Manhattan. Instead he had fallen like a tiny fleshy meteor, and her imperative continued. Now, watching his battle against the water, she again waited for him to die. The small dark knobof his head vanished, but she forced herself to wait. The Astronomer had cheated death before.

  His head broke the water, and the violence of his thrashings shattered an oil slick into a hundred rainbow drops. Die, Roulette prayed, but the black, oily waters of the East River were carrying him to the refuse-strewn shore.

  The Astronomer came crawling out, the vomit of the river. His naked body, pink flesh showing between the cracking flame-seared skin, lay like a rotting animal among the rusted cans and soggy hamburger wrappings like tiny disintegrating paper hillocks on the muddy shore. His left hand gripped his glasses, and slowly, skin flaking and cascading from him with every move, he tried to replace them.

  Roulette, the heels of her dainty strap sandals sucking at the ooze, ran to him. Her kick caught him in the back of the hand. Fingers jerked open like scattered twigs, the glasses flying free to lie glinting on the mud. Roulette fell on them as if they contained the essence of the Astronomer, the soul of Tachyon. Drove down with a heel only to have it slide harmlessly off the thick lens and bury itself in the mud. The muck released her with a sad, repellent sound. Sobbing, she scooped up the glasses.

  “Cunt! Filthy whoring pussy! My glasses, give me my glasses!” His voice spiraled to a frenzied shriek.

  A splintered plank offered support. Pulling off her shoe she knelt in the mud, and hammered at the glasses with the sharp heel. The rhinestone studs cut into her hand, drawing blood. She tightened her grip on the blood-slick leather.

  “Kill you! Kill you!” howled the Astronomer, groping about on his belly, hands outstretched, touching and re-coiling from the various bits of detritus.

  One lens broke with a sharp crystal sound.

  “No!”

  The second.

  “Kill me? You can’t even see me. Where will you run to this time? They’re hunting you. Who will you kill to find the power? Tachyon’s coming. Then only one of you will be left. For me. Better crawl.”

  His face, nose burned away, mouth a pale slit, eyes red from rupturing capillaries, was turned to her. “Over, all over,” he quavered. His hands dug deep into the mud, fingers squeezing shut on the noisome ooze as if remembering other, more glorious, moments.

  Finally he began to crawl, and Roulette followed. Bare feet slapping on the slick mud, hem trailing, chain of her evening bag cutting deep into her shoulder from the weight of the Magnum.

  CHAPTER 24

  5:00 a.m.

  The streets were finally emptying. Only the hardiest revelers were left to cry up the dawn, or the least hardiest who had passed out—or worse—and were lying like abandoned rag dolls in the street.

  The Crystal Palace was about a mile from Jetboy’s Tomb. Jennifer knew that there was no way she was going to beat them to the mausoleum. It was difficult to run in the thonged sandals Brennan had lent her, but it was better than going barefoot down the refuse-littered streets.

  Brennan. What in the world had happened to him? The little guy had pointed a finger at him and, whoosh, he was gone. Just like that. Well, she thought, her breath coming a little faster as she ate up the blocks between the Palace and the Tomb with an easy, long-legged stride, she had started this caper by herself, and she would finish it.

  Big talk, she thought. Already she was missing Brennan’s gruff presence. She hoped he was all right.

  The great edifice that was Jetboy’s Tomb was a looming black silhouette before the quiet waters of the Hudson River. It looked deserted, but there was a long limousine, brother to the one Jennifer and Brennan had borrowed, parked next to the twenty-foot-tall statue of Jetboy that stood in front of the Tomb’s main entrance.

  There was no one in or around the limo. Wyrm and the others, Jennifer realized, must already be inside the vast building.

  She went quietly up the marble steps, as silent as the namesake she had chosen for herself, stripped off the cloak Brennan had lent her, and kicked away the sandals. A surge of adrenaline pushed back the weariness that threatened to overwhelm her.

  It’s been a long day, she told herself. But soon it’s going to be over. One way or another.

  The tomb was vast. A full-sized replica of Jetboy’s plane, the JB-1, hung from the ceiling, bathed in muted light shining from hidden lamps also hanging from the inside of the dome.

  The light filtered to the floor of the tomb where it vaguely illuminated three men staring up at the plane hanging from the ceiling. She recognized Wyrm, of course, and the man called Loophole. The third was a stranger, of average size and build, his features unrecognizable in the gloom.

  Jennifer smiled to herself. Unless one of them could fly, there was no way they could reach the cockpit of the mock plane. It was a different matter, of course, for her.

  She worked her way around to the far side of the tomb, keeping to the dark shadows along the walls. The acoustics inside the place were excellent and she could hear the men discussing what to do.

  “That fat ssson of a bitch mussst have fffloated up to the ceiling and put the bookssss
there.”

  “It doesn’t matter how they got there,” the unidentified man said in a hard, angry voice. “I want them down. Immediately.”

  They argued the problem as Jennifer reached the rear of the building. Still in shadows, she ghosted, fighting off a brief wave of vertigo, and pulled herself up through the wall to the ceiling. That was the easy part. Now it got a little tricky. She kept the body of the plane between her and the men below as she slipped into the cockpit and saw a small plastic bag, the bag she’d put the books in—was it only this morning? It seemed like a year ago.

  She couldn’t risk solidifying herself and checking them. She touched them, ghosted them, then, instead of feeling the triumph she anticipated, an uneasy tremor passed through her insubstantial form.

  She was reaching the end of her endurance. She had pushed herself hard, ghosting more in the last twenty-two hours than she’d ever done in her life, and she hadn’t had much food or rest between her periods of insubstantiality. She had only a little time left to get solid, or else she’d be in trouble.

  She slipped out of the cockpit, but was careless in her haste. Loophole had walked around the plane to get another viewing angle, and he saw Jennifer’s insubstantial form, shimmering like a Halloween specter as she was silhouetted against the wing.

  “It’s her again! She’s got the books!”

  She looked down and was assaulted by a sudden wave of dizziness. She had to get solid fast. Instinct took over and she stepped off the wing of the plane.

  She floated as gently as a feather to earth, barely conscious, and when she touched ground her body took over and became solid. The transformation ate up all her energy reserves, and she blacked out.

  “But what about Cordelia?” Bagabond said, as they carried the packages down through the City Hall station toward the passageways leading to Jack’s home. The cats had joined them, the calico and the black rubbing contentedly against Bagabond’s legs.

  “The Cajuns have a saying,” said Jack, opening the metal access door.