Wild Cards V: Down and Dirty

by George R. R. Martin

  “Come on, honey. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” The dwarf started to pull her off the stool.

  “No, please,” she said, trying to twist her arm out of his grasp. “I have to see someone.” She knew where she was now and it was the only place she could have come to find what she needed; Chrysalis or someone around Chrysalis would know where she could get a drug that would fill in the void Ti Malice had eaten away in her. She turned to look at the bartender. “Please, I’m not going to hurt anyone—”

  “Get her out,” the bartender said urgently. “I can’t stand the way she feels.”

  Jane looked around wildly and then spotted Chrysalis at a corner table. She gave a mighty tug and slipped out of the dwarf’s grip.

  “Hey!” he yelled.

  Ignoring the stares of the other patrons, she darted between the tables to the corner where Chrysalis was sitting, watching with those strange, floating blue eyes.

  “Gotcha!” The dwarf seized her around the waist, and she fell to her knees, crawling the last few feet to Chrysalis’s chair, dragging the man with her.

  Chrysalis lifted a finger. The dwarf’s arms loosened but he didn’t let go of her completely.

  “I need information,” Jane said in a low voice. “About a drug.”

  Chrysalis didn’t answer. Whatever expression might have been on her peculiar face was impossible to read.

  “I’ve been addicted to something against my will. I need—I need—” She dug in her pants pocket and miraculously there was money there, a small, flat fold of bills. Hurriedly she unfolded them and held them out. “I can pay, I can pay for—”

  Chrysalis flicked briefly at the bills Jane was thrusting at her. Jane looked; there were three bills, two tens and a twenty. Forty dollars. Bad joke.

  Chrysalis shook her head and waved a hand.

  “Like I said, honey,” the dwarf said, “you were just leaving.”

  She leaned against the side of the building with the bills crumpled in her hand. The void in her widened until she thought the craving had to split her open right there.

  “Excuse me.”

  Kim Toy.

  She blinked and then realized it wasn’t Kim Toy after all. This woman was younger and taller and her features were different.

  “I saw Chrysalis give you the bum’s rush. Some nerve she’s got, huh. The twerp took you by my table, and I couldn’t help thinking I knew you from somewhere.”

  Jane turned away from her. “Leave me alone,” she muttered, but the woman moved closer.

  “Like, I think you used to work for Rosemary Muldoon. Didn’t you?”

  Jane stumbled away from the woman and then fell to her hands and knees, shaking all over. Underneath the ache she felt something else, a sickness that was more physical. As if she were coming down with the flu or something worse. The idea was so absurd she could almost have laughed.

  “Hey, are you sick or something?” The woman bent down, putting concerned hands on her shoulders. “You strung out?” she asked in a low voice.

  Jane could feel herself weeping without tears.

  “Come on,” said the woman, helping Jane to her feet. “Any friend of Rosemary Muldoon’s is a friend of mine. I think I can help you out.”

  In spite of the hollowness eating away at her, Jane was overwhelmed by the luxurious apartment. The sunken living room was as large as a ballroom. The predominant color was a delicate, pearlized pink, even to the silk wallpaper and the enormous crystal chandelier.

  The woman led her down the steps and sat her on an overstuffed sofa. “It’s something, isn’t it? Looks like a dump on the outside and heaven on the inside. Had to grease a lot of palms to keep the CONDEMNED sign out front. Just finished the place last week, and I’ve been dying to entertain. What are you drinking?”

  “Water,” Jane said weakly.

  Across the room, at the ornate wet bar, the woman looked over her shoulder with a near smile. “Thought you could get your own.”

  Jane stiffened. “You—you know—?”

  “Didn’t I say I knew you? You think I’d really bring anyone here I wasn’t sure of?” The woman brought her a cut-glass goblet of ice water and sat down next to her. “Of course, it isn’t all mine. It really belongs to the people I work for. Best job I ever had, needless to say.”

  Jane sipped her water. Her hands began to shake uncontrollably, and she handed the goblet to the woman before she could spill it. The physical illness was crawling over her again, like a cramp, except it was all over her body. She held very still until it subsided.

  “Whatever you’ve got, I hope it isn’t catching,” the woman said, not unkindly. “What happened—you fall in with one of those sleaze-bags around Rosemary and get turned on to junk?”

  Jane shook her head. “Not Rosemary.”

  “Oh? That’s too bad. I mean, I was sort of hoping you were still in touch with Rosemary because I’d like to see her again.” She leaned over to open a pink laquered box on the oversize coffee table. “Joint? It’ll take the edge off. It really will. This is like nothing you’ve ever had before.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Jane said, looking away from the proffered joint.

  “What are you on, anyway?”

  “It’s something that goes straight to the pleasure center of the brain. You don’t want to know.” Or perhaps she would, Jane thought suddenly. Her thoughts began to coil toward a plan. What if she could get this woman to go back to the apartment with her and offered her to Ti Malice? He loved new mounts, she knew that …

  “Oh, that’s easy,” the woman said.

  “What?” Jane looked at her, startled.

  The woman tilted her head to one side, eyeing her curiously. “I’ve got an associate who’s developed something that’ll go straight for the pleasure center of the brain.”

  “Who is it?” Jane said, grabbing the woman’s shoulder. “Can I meet him? Where can I find him? How—”

  “Whoa, whoa now. Slow down.” The woman plucked Jane’s hand off herself and moved away slightly. “This is top secret stuff. Stupid of me to mention it, but you being a friend of Rosemary’s and all, I kind of forgot myself. Come on. Mellow out and let’s talk about Rosemary,” She lit the joint with a crystal table lighter, took a deep drag, and offered it to Jane.

  She accepted the joint and tried to do exactly as she’d seen the woman do. The smoke burned in her lungs, and she coughed it out.

  “Keep practicing,” the woman said, laughing a little. “It’ll really take the edge off.”

  A few drags later she had gotten more than just the hang of it. So this was what they meant by getting a buzz on, she thought. It was a buzz you felt rather than heard, and it would have been pleasant, except that it couldn’t get between herself and the gnawing void. She tried to give the joint back to the woman, but she told Jane to keep at it, she needed it more. Instead she put it out carefully in the cut-glass ashtray on the table.

  “Don’t like it?” the woman said in surprise.

  “It’s … okay,” Jane said, and her voice seemed to stretch out and out and out like long, slow elastic. Her head felt ready to float off her shoulders like a helium balloon and rise up to the ceiling. She wondered if Hiram knew about this.

  But the woman wanted to talk about Rosemary, and between trying to keep her head on her shoulders and fighting against the need for Ti Malice, it was hard to keep track of what she was saying. If the woman would just shut up, she might achieve some kind of equilibrium, something that would steady her long enough to break the water glass on the table and use one of the shards on her throat. That was the only answer now; the dope was helping her see that. She would never be free of the need for Ti Malice, and if she went back—when she went back—she could only look forward to worse things, more degradation, more killings, all done willingly, just to feel the bliss of his presence within her. All the things she had wished for Hiram, that he would find someone to make his life complete, she had inadvertently gotten f
or herself, except it was Ti Malice instead of the vague, unidentifiable man she had always dreamed of, who had sometimes resembled Sal and sometimes Jumpin’ Jack Flash and sometimes even Croyd. Another bad joke in an ongoing series. It had to end.

  The woman kept on talking and talking. Occasionally there were long periods of silence, and Jane came out of her fog to find that the woman was no longer on the couch with her. She would lie back against the cushion, glad of the silence, and then the woman would magically rematerialize next to her, going on and on and on about Rosemary Muldoon until she thought she might cut her throat just to get away from that voice.

  But that was awfully ungrateful. The woman was just trying to help her. She knew that. She should do something in return. Offer her something.

  Rosemary’s phone number swam to the surface of her mind and waited for her to pick it up. And after a while she did, and the woman disappeared for the longest time ever.

  Someone was shaking her awake. The first thing that hit her was the need, and she doubled over, beating her fist on the couch cushion because it wasn’t Ti Malice there but a slender Oriental man kneeling on the carpet next to her, smiling polite concern at her.

  “This is the associate I was telling you about,” the woman said, pulling her to a sitting position. “Roll up your sleeve.”

  “What? Why?” Jane looked around, but the room wouldn’t come clear yet. Her head felt heavy and thick.

  “Just my way of saying thanks.”

  “For what?” She felt her sleeve being pushed up and something cold and wet on the inside of her arm.

  “For Rosemary’s phone number.”

  “You called her?”

  “Oh, no. You’re going to do that for me.” The woman tied a piece of rubber around Jane’s upper arm and pulled it tight. “And in return, you get a trip to heaven.”

  The Oriental man held up a syringe and grinned as though he were a game show host showing off a prize.

  “But—”

  The woman was shoving a cordless receiver into her hand. “You’d like to see her again, wouldn’t you?”

  Jane let the phone drop to her lap and wiped her face tiredly. “I’m not so sure, really.”

  “Then maybe you’d better get sure.” The woman’s voice hardened. Jane looked up at her in surprise. “I mean, I’m sure. I have a lot to talk about with Rosemary. The sooner you contact her, the sooner you go to heaven. You want to go to heaven, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know if I can—I don’t know if she’ll even take my call—”

  The woman leaned down and spoke directly into her face. “I don’t see where you’ve got a choice. You’re strung out and you’ve got nowhere to go. I can’t let you stay here indefinitely, you know. The company that owns this place might not want me to have a roommate. Of course, they’d feel differently if you did something for me.”

  Jane drew back a little. “Who do you work for?”

  “Don’t be so nosy. Just make the call. Get her to meet you here, if possible, anywhere else if necessary.”

  She was about to say no when the craving gnawed at her again, shutting off the word in her throat. “This drug,” she said, looking at the syringe. “It’s—good?”

  “The best.” The woman’s face was expressionless. “You want me to dial?”

  “No,” she said, picking up the phone. “I’ll do it.”

  The man put the point of the needle to the inside of her elbow and then held it there, waiting, still wearing his wide, game-show-host grin.

  She could hardly keep her mind on Rosemary’s voice; there was no way she could keep her own voice steady. At first she tried to sound friendly, but Rosemary got it out of her that she was in trouble. The man and the woman didn’t seem to mind what she said, so she plunged on, begging Rosemary to come to her.

  But maddeningly, Rosemary kept telling her she would send someone to pick her up, and she had to insist over and over that that wouldn’t do at all, she didn’t want anyone but Rosemary. Nobody else, especially no men. She would run away if she saw any men. This seemed to please the man and the woman a great deal.

  And at last she got Rosemary’s consent and read the address to her off a card the woman held in front of her. Rosemary hesitated, but she pleaded again, and Rosemary gave in. But not there, not at that address. Someplace out in the open. Sheridan Square. A glance told Jane that would be fine with her new friends, and she told Rosemary she would be there.

  “Once a social worker, always a social worker,” the woman said, hanging up the phone. She nodded at the man. “Give it to her.”

  “Wait,” Jane said weakly. “How can I get there if—”

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” said the woman. “You’ll be there.”

  The needle went in and the lights went out.

  The lights came up dimly and she saw she was leaning against the side of a building. It was the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and she was waiting to get in to see a play. Late performance, very late, but she didn’t care. She loved the Ridiculous Theatrical Company best and she’d been to lots of theatres, the small ones in Soho and the Village and the Jokertown Playhouse, which had closed down shortly before she’d gone to work for Rosemary …

  Rosemary. There was something she had to remember about Rosemary. Rosemary had betrayed her trust. But perhaps that was only fair, since she was such a great disappointment to Hiram—

  It hit her so powerfully she thought it had to knock her down, but her body didn’t move. Warm maple syrup was running through her veins. But underneath the warmth and the languor the void remained, wide open, eating away at her, and whatever this lassitude was only made it possible for the wanting to crunch at her bones without a struggle. Her stomach did a slow forward roll and her head began to pound.

  A shadow by her feet chittered softly. She looked down. A squirrel was staring up at her as if it were actually considering her in some way. Squirrels were just rats with fancier tails, she remembered uneasily, and tried to edge away from it, but her body still wasn’t moving. Another squirrel chittered somewhere above her head, and something else ran past, almost brushing her legs.

  When was the theatre going to open so she could get away from all this vermin? Sheridan Square had gotten really bad since she’d last been there, to see the late Charles Ludlam in a revival of Bluebeard. Charles Ludlam—she’d loved him, too, and it had been so unfair that he’d had to die of AIDS.…

  She sighed and a voice said, “Jane?”

  Rosemary’s voice. She perked up. Had she been going to the theatre with Rosemary? Or was this just a happy coincidence? No matter, she’d be so happy to see her—

  She tried to look around. It was so dark. Was there really a performance this late? And the squirrels, chittering and chittering to the point of madness—it would have been exquisite with Ti Malice, but by herself it was only excruciating.

  A thin flashlight beam cut through the darkness and she winced.

  “Jane?” Rosemary asked again. She was closer now. “Jane, you look awful. What happened? Did someone—”

  There was the sound of claws scratching on the side of the building. Jane turned in the direction of the sound and saw Rosemary standing a few yards away. The dim illumination from the streetlamps made her little more than a detailed silhouette. Funny, Jane thought suddenly, that the theatre had no outside security lights to discourage burglars or vandals. A darker shadow was flowing back and forth around Rosemary’s ankles; it eventually resolved itself into a cat. Rosemary looked down at the cat and then up at Jane again.

  “What kind of trouble are you in, Jane?” she asked, and her voice had a slight edge to it.

  “The worst,” said a man’s voice. “Just like you, Miss Muldoon.”

  Jane shook her head, trying to clear it. Something was coming back to her, something about an Oriental woman who was not Kim Toy, and a man with a needle, and dialing the telephone …

  A larger shadow swept up behind Rosemary, and suddenly she
was standing with an arm around her throat and the barrel of a gun jammed up against the side of her face.

  “It is appropriate we meet in the shadows,” a man’s voice said. Rosemary stood perfectly still, staring past Jane. Jane followed her gaze and saw the other man leaning casually at the opposite end of the building with his own pistol up and ready. Jane felt herself starting to nod out and forced herself to hold her head up. Her face felt itchy and uncomfortable and the craving for Ti Malice burst on her with a strength that made her want to double over. But her body could manage no more than a mild spasm. They lied, she thought miserably. The woman and her friend lied. How can people lie so easily?

  There were more people, more men, melting out of the darkness to surround her and Rosemary. Even through the soupy fog that was her mind, Jane could sense the weapons and the malignant intent. The woman who had taken her home had been no friend of Rosemary’s, or hers, either. But it was a little late for clever deductions.

  “Aren’t junkies funny, Ms. Muldoon?” said the man holding Rosemary. “That one sold you out for a mere dime of garden-variety heroin.”

  No, no, it isn’t true! she wanted to scream, but her voice was stuck in the craving. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness now, and she could see that Rosemary was staring at her with a stricken expression.

  “Jane,” she said, “if there’s anything left of the person you used to be, you could turn this around—”

  “N-not … junkie,” Jane said heavily. Her eyes began to roll up.

  “Hopheads don’t make great aces,” the man said with a laugh. “She’s not about to—” There was the sound of wings and something whirred out of the night, fluttering and flapping directly onto his head.

  “Hey!” he yelled, letting go of Rosemary, who pushed away from him. She tripped and went down on her hands and knees just as several other things raced past Jane, parted themselves fluidly around Rosemary, and launched themselves at the men.

  “Bagabond—” Rosemary said breathlessly, and then there was an explosion of angry cries and wails, both human and not. The man who had been standing so insouciantly at the other end of the building was now batting at a pigeon flapping around his head while he tried to kick something loose from his pant leg. Rat, Jane realized dully. She had never seen a rat so bold.