Jokertown Shuffle

by George R. R. Martin

  Latham almost smiled as guards came to attention all around us. He glanced at them slowly, calmly, then looked back at me. His hands didn't move. Not a muscle twitched in his face, and his mind stayed blank.

  That frightened me more than anything he could have said.

  I couldn't follow through. He was right. Kafka was right too-bluffing really is a dangerous game.

  So I'm sorry, sorry because the Rox needs the jumpers. We need Prime and Blaise and all the rest.

  Latham knew it. I knew it.

  But I promise you. I will find another way.

  Madman across the Water by Victor Milan

  The boys from DEA paid a visit to the New Dawn Wellness Center just after morning rush when a few last late-running yuppies-if that isn't a contradiction in termswere polishing off their bulghur-wheat doughnuts and the center's famous low-cal, low-cholesterol, vegetarian "fried eggs," with tofu whites and whipped-squash yolks. Enough onlookers to be duly impressed, but not enough to get underfoot or in line for serious hurt. In the last winter of the 1980s, America's drug warriors could do no wrong in the eyes of the press, the public, or the law, but the powers that be felt that if the shithammer came down-as every member of the strike team devoutly hoped-it wouldn't do to have too many punctured civilians bleeding on camera.

  Especially at the scene of what, if it came off, would be the media bust of the decade: the DEA versus a renegade ace.

  While agents in civilian garb secured the customers and the single brush-cut, stocky, grumpy female clerk, a threeman element of the Covert Lab Enforcement Team dashed through the restaurant in their black Darth Vader togs, CAR-15s with fat suppressors shrouding the barrels clutched in their black-gauntleted hands. One of them paused to bang his Kevlar-helmeted head against the jamb of the door to the back before dashing upstairs.

  "We're waiting on you, Lynn," his buddy Dooley said as he came highstepping up to the second floor. Dooley's mask muffled his words, but Lynn knew he was grinning, with the ESP that came from being pals since eighth grade. Lynn grinned back and bobbed his head.

  He and Dooley pressed backs to either side of the door while Matteoli slipped the rubberized tip of a big orange wrecking bar between the frame and the door and popped it open. The other two wheeled inside, Lynn low and left, Dooley high and right.

  "DEA! Covert Lab Enforcement Team! Freeze, motherfuckers!"

  It was a fairyland, a fucking fairyland. It wasn't very big, but neither of them had ever seen anything like it outside a government facility or university. This was their eleventh lab bust, and they'd never even seen half the equipment in here. The only things out of place were the two men standing in the middle of all that gleaming technology. The CLET strike force had been briefed to expect the kind of scum that would hang around an overage hippie. Not a middle-aged black guy and a leaner younger Hispanic dude in jackets and ties.

  The Hispanic was in motion already, reaching inside his jacket in a motion that could mean only one thing: Dooley tracked him with his muzzle.

  "Hold it right-"

  The big vent-ribbed Colt Python roared as it came on-line, chopping Dooley off in the middle of his sentence. The bulky armor encasing his body would definitely have stopped even the high-speed. 357 slug, the face plate might have turned it. But the jacketed hollowpoint nipped neatly between the lip of his helmet and the top of his mask, punched through his right eye and right out the back of his skull.

  "Dooley!" Lynn screamed, and held back the trigger. Like everybody else in CLET, he'd had the three-round burst regulator on his assault rifle disabled the moment he'd been issued the thing. He let the whole magazine go on full rock'n'roll, felt the ripple of high-velocity slugs in passing as Matteoli did the same from the doorway.

  The Hispanic dropped the Python and did a little jitterbug dance as the white front of his shirt came all over red. The black guy dove out of sight.

  Lynn spun and dropped with his back to a lab table that would never stop a bullet but would at least hide him from sight. He dropped the spent magazine, fumbled another from a belt pouch, and rammed it home.

  "Matty, pop a stun grenade on the puke!" he yelled. "Backup!" Matteoli screamed back. "We gotta call for backup!"

  Fuck that, Lynn thought. His eyes stung with tears. Payback's a mother. He jacked the charging handle and rose. To see a black arm waving from the midst of all that mechanism, brandishing a black leather holder with an alltoo-distinctive gold shield inset.

  "Narcotics Enforcement. We're NYPD, you dumb sons of bitches!"

  TWO DIE IN SHOOT-OUT AT ACE DRUG LAB, the headline said, or screamed. The subhead read, Drug Czar Calls Illicit Lab "Most Sophisticated Ever"; Nationwide Manhunt Declared.

  Dr. Pretorius sighed and looked over the half-moons of his old-fashioned reading glasses. "So a couple of your cowboys came off the handle and shot it out with New York's finest. What does this have to do with my client?"

  The youngest of the three came out of his leathercovered chair with an incoherent scream of rage. Pretorius raised an eyebrow.

  "Lynn," the eldest said, not loud but with a certain attack-dog-trainer snap. "Maybe you'd better wait outside." The young man with the shock of black hair falling into wild eyes turned and pounded the heel of one fist against a wall, making display cases with exotic insects inside dance. The he ran out of the attorney's office.

  "Whatever was that about?" Pretorius asked.

  "Agent Saxon was involved in the incident you so insensitively spoke of," said the third man. He was in his early fifties and in all ways average except for the expensive cut of his lawyerly three-piece and the bland smoothness of his face. A man for George Bush's America. "His partner was killed." He settled back, apparently looking for expressions of regret or sympathy.

  "My question still stands," Pretorius said.

  The third man's face hardened momentarily. "Under New York law, Dr. Meadows can be held responsible for violent deaths associated with his crimes."

  "We're talking capital here," the attack-dog trainer added.

  Pretorius began to laugh. The two of them stared at him as if he'd sprouted great big white wings like Peregrine's. "That is the farthest-fetched interpretation of the law I've heard in a long time," he said, taking off his glasses and wiping his eyes. "Is there no limit to the arrogant disregard you people have for concepts like `rights' and `due process' -not to mention common sense?"

  Kinder-and-Gentler smiled. "Given that seventy percent of the American public believes any measures at all are justified in combating the drug menace," he said, "no."

  The trainer pulled a sheaf of papers from an inside pocket of his sport coat. "We have something for you, too, Pretorius." He slammed a packet of official-looking papers on the desk and smiled up at Pretorius with satisfaction glinting in his steely gray eyes. Pretorius gave it a 6.5.

  "As you're no doubt aware," Kinder-and-Gentler said, as smooth as his face, "under the Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations and Continuing Crime Acts, all property belonging to drug dealers is liable to confiscation. As you're also aware, I'm sure, recent interpretations of the law permit us to seize the property of attorneys who represent such scum. We can't permit the enormous sums commanded by drug dealers to deflect justice, now, can we, Doctor?" And he smiled too.

  My, we're a happy group today, Pretorius thought. He reached for the telephone, pressed a button. When a voice answered, he said simply, "Go."

  His guests stiffened. The Attack Dog Trainer was leaning so far forward, he was in danger of toppling over and splitting Pretorius's desk with the blade of his face. "What are you trying to pull?" he barked.

  It was Pretorius's turn to try his hand at smiling, and he gave it his all. "Your latest little perversion of due process does not precisely take me by surprise, gentlemen. I was just speaking to an associate of mine waiting at the federal courthouse. If you'll be patient a few moments, a court order voiding your seizure should shortly arrive by messenger."

  They star
ed at him with eyes like boiled eggs. He reached into a drawer of his desk. The Trainer stiffened, and his hard right hand started inside his suit coat.

  Kinder-and-Gentler put a hand on his arm. "He's not going for a gun, Pat. Act your age."

  "At the very outset of the Meadows custody case,"

  Pretorius said, "I foresaw you gentlemen and your modern Star Chamber tactics might become involved. And I personally have no need for money."

  "You can't weasel out of this by waiving your fee, bunky," the Trainer said.

  "Nor did L" He trumped the trainer's sheaf with his own embossed legal envelope. "I charged Dr. Meadows my full hourly rate-payable, under the terms of this contract, directly to the March of Dimes for research into mental retardation. And if you wish to try to confiscate their assets, gentlemen, I wish you luck."

  "We're the future, pal!"

  An open-hand slap cracked across the yellow stripe dyed down the center of his close-cropped skull. Trash-clogged foreshore and sagging graffiti-crusted buildings swam in stench thick as heat haze, or maybe from the blow. The tall man hunched his shoulders and raised his arms defensively across his face.

  He'd ridden to the Rox in a giant jellyfish in search of shelter. It didn't surprise him much to find there was no shelter there, either. It did made him kind of sad.

  He wasn't sure how many joker boys were on him. He'd never had much head for detail on a macro scale. It didn't really matter. Make Love Not War were the words he'd always lived by.

  In his proper person, anyway. Which was all he had to help him now.

  An attacker slammed the scarred pale Hormel ham he carried instead of a hand into the midriff of the tall man's faint paint-dappled Pendleton shirt. He whoofed and doubled and staggered back, and the empirical part of him noted that there had to be at least two assailants since another was, sure enough, down on all fours behind him to take him behind the calves and send him sprawling. That trick had been a constant companion in childhood and early adolescence. Made him nostalgic, almost.

  Coughing and sobbing for breath, he tried to remember what the survivors of the Czechago Convention had told him: Curl up, get small, try not to give them a crack at your joints or skull.

  Mayor Daley's disorder preservers had had nightsticks. These boys had body parts a la wild card. Like the calcareous hoof somebody was slamming rhythmically into the small of his back, aiming to pulp his kidneys.

  "Hey, nat! You ain't gettin' any younger. And maybe (kick) you ain't getting (kick) any older either!"

  The others laughed their jackal laughs, and as painspikes jolted up his spine and down into his scrotum, the tall man wondered if he was actually going to survive. And he thought the thing he'd always sworn he never would: If my friends were here, you'd never dare treat me like this!

  Laughter. "Hey, old dude, you got no friends! Or didn't you figure that out yet?"

  There. It was out. He'd even spoken it aloud without meaning to. Shame as much as anger and pain and fear made his eyes run suddenly hot with tears as the impact of their limbs and their laughter redoubled.

  And then a voice, cutting like a busted-off car antenna. "What the fuck is going on here?"

  The blowstorm stopped. He rolled over and sat up, curiosity overcoming caution.

  A woman-a girl-stood facing the joker quartet. Her hair was short, moussed into a nondescript-colored spike palisade to guard her scalp. Silver bangles and skull-and bones swung from one ear. "I said `What the fuck?' Don't try to hide from me, Foureyes," she added to the smallest, who had maneuvered himself behind his companions.

  "Hey, hey," the joker said defensively, blinking his namesakes furiously. "Just trashin' this old nat, you know? Passin' the time."

  "Whofuck you tellus wha'do?" the biggest one said, the one with the premium ham for a hand and a face that was all fissures and flanges, like a leaf-eating bat. Saliva shot from his face like Silly String when he spoke. "Juzda dumb cunt."

  "Cool it, Tyrone," Foureyes said urgently. "She's a jumper." A slim black kid, normal-looking except for the hoof with which he'd tried to do street surgery on the tall man's kidneys, put a sneer on his chiseled handsome face. "She big time. She his squeeze." He added a head flip on his.

  A quick steel veronica: balisong, a butterfly knife, unfolding its wings very pretty, like in the movies, and then just the tip stuck up the black kid's right nostril. "That's K.C. Strange to you, Footloose. And I don t need anybody's help to fuck up a bunch of detached assholes like you, capisc'? And don't be trying to circle around behind me anymore, Zero, or your friend here's gonna start looking lots more like Tyrone. In fact-"

  Stung, or thinking he'd seen an opening, the gigantic Tyrone had begun to roll forward. K.C. smiled.

  Footloose stepped back, looked Tyrone dead in the eyes, and laughed shrilly. Then his face changed, and he tried to take a step forward. The hoof didn't want to move. He pitched facefirst into sand caked with something dark, sticky, and sweetly fetid.

  Tyrone stopped dead. He raised his hands to his face. The clubbed hand blundered heedlessly into his eye.

  He screamed.

  Zero was dancing around the perimeter. "What? Foureyes, what's going on?"

  "Oh, fuck, oh, Tyrone, you useless fuck!" Foureyes moaned. Footloose raised his head to stare at him. Foureyes began to kick him. "She multiple jumped the stupid bastards, swapped their fucking minds."

  K.C. smiled and made her knife disappear. "You're not as dumb as I thought you were. "

  "Shit! Shit, we gotta get outta here," Zero gobbled. He grabbed Footloose his body, anyway-under the arm and dragged him upright as he began to roar incoherently. Foureyes caught hold of the weeping Tyrone-Footloose and hustled him away along the stinking beach.

  "Come back tomorrow and ask nice, I may sort your little minds out again," she called after them. Then she shook her head. "Damn. The way we fight each other, all the Combine has to do is wait. We'll do the job on ourselves, and they won't have to worry about how to crash the wall." She looked down at the tall man. He slumped there, rubbing the ache in his face while the filthy waves of Upper New York Bay shot needles of sunlight in through his eyes and up to the roof of his skull. A twitch of breeze sent crinkled Ding Dong wrappers and styrofoam cup shards skittering like small animals to the shelter of his thin haunch. "So who are you?" she demanded.

  "M-mark," he said. His lips felt big as basketballs. He saw no reason to lie to her. "Mark Meadows."

  But she was looking away across the water, at the Circle Line ferry beyond the cordon of Harbor Police boats that surrounded the Rox, chugging toward the foreskin tip of Manhattan.

  "Wha-" he gagged, spat sand that tasted like stuff you flossed from between your teeth, "what's the Combine?" She tossed her pointy little chin after the ferryboat. "Them. The straights, the nats, the outside world. The government. Everybody but us wretched refuse huddled here on the Rox, brother."

  Oh. That was nothing new… a light dawned.

  "Hey, man, I remember now. Randall McMurphyl He's the one with the Combine. Like, Nurse Ratched and them." She laughed. "You're the first person I've met on this damned island who knew that." She walked away whistling.

  Some social worker had given her the small pink-plush elephant, back at another of the dim cold places with echoing halls. Now it lay on her metal-frame bed, slashed open, its cotton entrails strewn everywhere.

  Tears filled her eyes. She didn't understand. Didn't understand the jeering taunts of the other girls, the makebelieve caring of the doctor people, the rough unconcern of the people who actually took care of her, to the extent anybody did. She had grown up with love and warmth and a constant glow of happy safety. Now, in only a few months' time, she'd learned to treasure being ignored. She began to gather up the fragments of the stuffed toy.

  She didn't understand what she was doing here. The other girls said they were here for doing bad things, but she had never done anything bad. Her daddy always said she was a good girl. The doctor people said she wa
s special. When she asked if that was why she was inside, they told her no, it was because her daddy was a bad man.

  She sniffled. Her daddy wasn't a bad man. He was Daddy.

  She threw herself down on the bed. Her roommate wasn't in. She liked this roommate. She didn't pick on her, didn't pay any attention to her at all.

  The tears were overwhelming her now. Most of all, she missed her daddy, tall and strong and always there for her. He wasn't a bad man. And she knew that he wouldn't let her stay here forever. Someday he'd come for her. No matter what.

  And a voice inside her head told her, You're what the other girls say you are. Just a stupid. You're going to be here forever and ever.

  Alone.

  She gathered the sad empty head of the elephant to her cheek. Its black-disc pupils rolled up in its plastic-button eyes. She hugged it to her and drifted into sleep, weeping for the death of her friend.

  Head thrown back to let the dawn wind ruffle his red brush cut with bloatblack-stinking fingers, Blaise walked through the Rox's gray huddle. He was just in via the Charon Express from a night run with the jumpers. Just a casual cruise to see how some of their investment properties over in Manhattan were doing, and he was on top of the world.

  You always lectured me about the proper uses of power, grandpere, he thought, and his smile turned edged and ugly. And I must hand it to you, you have indeed taught me to use it.

  It came to him then that it might be time to go down below the medical building for a new lesson in the use of power. He was still fairly fresh, with a sixteen-year-old's endurance, and these little jaunts into town tended to leave him unsatisfied and maybe a trifle bored. His jumpers were too simple, too American. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy the same things they did. Only not as long.

  And he wanted more. Putting the expensively cultured body of a millionaire's daughter through its paces while its owner looked on had its rewards. But mostly it served to draw his appetite thin and tight like the skin on a starving man's ribs. He could taste real power. That was what their victims commanded, why they were chosen.