Lowball: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  As if a spigot had been turned the tears ended. She straightened and took his hands in hers. “So, I rented a uniform from a costume store, and I took an old retired badge out of storage and I’ve asked for a few days off, and you could do the same and we could be partners, and take my folks along like they did when that Hollywood actor came to town last year,” she ended in a rush.

  Franny pulled his hands away and held them up palms out. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. First off, I can’t take time off right now. I’m in enough trouble as it is, and I’m not going to put back on my uniform and go out on the street with an untrained file clerk and a pair of civilians. That’s a good way to get us fired, and all of us hurt or worse. And didn’t you sleep with that actor guy?” he added, jealousy making him resentful even though they hadn’t been together back then.

  “What if I did? I was with Moleka then, not you, so you shouldn’t care.”

  “It’s the pattern, Apsara, that’s what bothers me.”

  The bus farted up and with a creaking of brakes came to a stop in front of them. Four jokers flopped, crawled, and hopped off. The doors stayed open, and then the driver yelled, “You gettin’ on or not?” They shook their heads. “Then get off the damn bench!” The doors rattled shut and the bus pulled out, baptizing them with a blast of diesel fumes. Apsara and Franny retreated, coughing.

  “So, you’re not going to help me,” she said once she caught her breath.

  “If by help you, you mean play cops and robbers with you and your parents, then no, I’m not going to help you.”

  “Will you at least keep my secret?”

  “Are you going to be prancing around in this uniform?”

  “Yes.” The word was defiant, an out-and-out challenge.

  “You know it’s a crime to impersonate a police officer,” he said, still sparring, but more feebly now.

  “I’m not going to arrest anybody. I’m just going to wear the uniform at dinner, and we’ll stay away from Jokertown so no one will see us.” She paused and looked up at him, big eyes pleading, the corners of her perfect lips drooping. “Please, Frank, let me make them proud.”

  “I don’t know, and why do you need me along for this?”

  “I need you to talk about all the cases I’ve solved. If you bring it up then it won’t look like I’m bragging.”

  “And what cases would those be … exactly?”

  “Well, there was The Stripper for starters, and you wouldn’t be lying because I helped you catch that guy.”

  He didn’t love the reminder. He had just started working at the precinct when he’d solved the case of the teenage ace whose power was to blow a kiss and have the clothes disappear off the object of his gallantry. Bruce Cordova. That was his name. Some of the guys at the precinct had thought it would be hilarious to have Bruce remove Franny’s clothes day after day after day. It had been … for them.

  And Apsara had helped catch The Stripper. She had been the luscious bait walking down the street. Franny had gotten only the smallest look at her attributes that day because he’d been busy arresting Bruce. Of course now he saw those attributes almost every night. He felt a stirring in his crotch. Apsara saw his boner forming. She gave a sly smile, and pressed up against him. “Please, Frank.”

  All his resistance collapsed. “Well, okay, but so help me God, if you try to act like a real cop…”

  “Oh thank you, thank you. You are the best boyfriend.” She rained kisses on his face. Franny finally caught her lips, and they shared a long deep kiss until the whistles and catcalls from passersby on the street drove them apart.

  Road Kill

  by Walter Jon Williams

  GORDON WISHED HE HAD more time to examine the body. Not just to find out who killed the victim, but to find out how the joker was put together.

  It looked as if there were extra attachment points on the biceps brachii, for example—the normal two on the scapula, plus another, stronger attachment to some kind of disk-like rotating bone, equipped with a nasty ten-centimeter spur, which seemed to float somehow off the head of the humerus. When the biceps contracted, not only would the forearm rise but the spur would rotate forward, as if aimed at an enemy. So if the joker raised his fists in a boxing stance, say, the spurs would roll forward, and he could impale an enemy by shouldering him in the clinch. Or he could grab an attacker and pull him close, and the very act would throw the enemy onto the spur.

  And if the arms were relaxed, the spur would rotate backward to protect the head from a surprise attack from the sides or rear.

  There were spurs on the knees as well, but these looked like an anatomically simple extension of the tibia. There were also some scars to suggest there had also been spurs on the heels, but these had been amputated at some point to allow the subject to walk normally.

  Gordon thought that the wild card was sometimes capable of great beauty, even genius, in its adaptation of human anatomy; but it was also capable of forgetting that someone apparently designed as a street fighter might also need to walk.

  Gordon would have liked to dissect the shoulder just to understand the mechanism. But that wasn’t part of his job.

  His job was ascertaining cause of death, here in his morgue annex in the basement of the Jokertown precinct, a room that smelled of antiseptic and plastic body bags and the bitter-cherry scent of death, where deformed bodies lay on steel tables coated in blue-gray porcelain, and where police officers paced as they drank coffee from paper cups and waited for information.

  “So,” said Detective Sergeant Gallo, “it was the hit-and-run did him in?”

  Gallo stood a respectful distance from the body, by the door. He wanted to be in the room during the autopsy, but he didn’t have a compulsion to stand right by and watch the pathologist at work. Maybe he didn’t like corpses, Gordon thought, or maybe he’d seen so many that he was no longer interested.

  Which was not something that could ever be said of Gordon.

  “No,” Gordon said. “He was dead by the time the vehicle hit him.”

  “The vehicle hit a corpse,” Gallo said.

  “The vehicle was pretty unusual,” Gordon said. “It had slick tires—the prints on the victim’s body and clothing were absolutely featureless, no tread marks at all.” He looked at Gallo and blinked. “What uses slick tires besides a drag racer?”

  Gallo shrugged. He was a tall, broad man, dark-haired, blue-eyed. His right arm was in a fluorescent red fiberglass cast and carried in a sling, and he wore a black leather jacket on the left arm and thrown over the shoulder on the right. His pistol was tucked into the sling for ease of access.

  “Coulda been a drag racer, I suppose,” he said. “Though it wasn’t going very fast when it hit the victim. But if the vic died from the beating, there’s no point in chasing down the driver.”

  “It wasn’t the beating,” Gordon said. “El Monstro didn’t kill him.”

  Gallo was startled. “Who?”

  “El Monstro.”

  Gallo was New Jersey State Police and not from New York, so he wouldn’t have had a chance to meet El Monstro. Certainly the joker was hard to miss—nearly eight feet tall, horned, with chitinous armor plates covering most of his body—and plates on his knuckles as well, plates that left a very distinct imprint.

  “His real name’s José Luis Melo da Conceição Neto,” Gordon said. “Brazilian kid, raised in Jokertown. I testified on his behalf about fourteen months ago, in an assault case.” Gordon gestured with one hand at the distinctive bruising on the dead man’s upper arms and torso. “El Monstro pretty clearly left these marks. Nobody else has fists like that.”

  Gallo reached for his notebook, juggled it one-handed for a moment, then put it on one of the counters that surrounded the room. “Can you give me that name again?”

  Gordon did. “Neto isn’t really part of the name,” he said. “It just means ‘grandson’—grandson of the original José Luis Melo da Conceição.”

  Gallo wasn’t used to writing left-handed an
d it took some time to get the name down.

  “He was a nice kid,” Gordon said. “He’d be about nineteen now. Works a couple jobs, trying to support a disabled mother and get through NYU. I was able to show the court that he suffered at least half a dozen defensive injuries before he put his assailant in a coma with a single punch. The assailant had a history of violence and robbery, so El Monstro walked.”

  “He walked all the way to Warren County,” Gallo said, “where he killed this other joker.”

  Gordon shook his head. “No,” he said. “He didn’t kill this John Doe.”

  Gallo’s tone turned aggressive. “If the truck didn’t kill him, and your El Monstro didn’t beat him to death, what the hell did put his lights out?”

  Gordon looked up from the body. “SCD,” he said.

  Gallo stared at him in disbelief. “Sudden cardiac death? You’re telling me the John Doe had a heart attack?”

  “Not a heart attack. Cardiac arrest caused by aortic valve stenosis.” Gordon gestured toward the victim’s heart, which was sitting in a plastic container on the counter. “His aortic valve narrowed to the point where the heart couldn’t pump enough blood into the aorta, which caused the heart to pump faster and faster until it went into ventricular fibrillation, and then…” Gordon made a vague gesture. “Asystole, cardiogenic shock, loss of circulation, death. It happens pretty fast, sometimes within seconds.”

  “What caused the, ah, stenosis?”

  “At his age, it was most likely congenital. Happens to men more often than women.”

  For the first time Gallo approached the body and looked at it thoughtfully. “So he got beat up by this El Monstro guy.”

  “The wounds were antemortem, though not very far in advance of death.”

  “And then the vic has SCD, and drops dead on the road, apparently, and was then hit by a drag racer?” The fingers of his left hand reached into his cast and scratched the fingers of his right. He looked up. “He can’t have been pushed out of a car or something?”

  “No drag marks. No skid marks.” Gordon shrugged. “Lividity hadn’t developed when the vehicle hit him, so he was run over less than twenty minutes after death.”

  Gallo shook his head. “This is the worst case of bad luck in all history,” he said. He made a disgusted noise. “What was he doing on Route 519? Rural New Jersey, for cripe’s sake!”

  The victim wasn’t, technically speaking, Gordon’s business. New Jersey had its own forensic pathologists. But jokers weren’t very common in northwest New Jersey, and when the body turned up beaten, run over, and naked except for an athletic supporter and a pair of Adidas training pants, it had been taken to Jokertown for an examination by a specialist in joker bodies.

  By Otto Gordon, M.D., known to his colleagues as Gordon the Ghoul.

  Gordon adjusted his glasses. “You sure there weren’t any prizefights in the vicinity?” he asked. “Cage fights? He’d been through a beating.”

  “Nothing in that area but dairy farms. We didn’t see any crowd leaving, any sign of anything unusual.”

  “Footprints? Tire tracks?”

  “Zilch. And certainly no sign of anyone like El Monstro.”

  “Well.” Gordon shrugged. “Let me stitch up the body, and you can take it home. I’ll send you the report when it’s done.”

  “And I’ll liaise with NYPD to see if we can pick up this Monstro guy.”

  Gallo left to do his liaison work. Gordon closed the Y-shaped autopsy incision, made sure the plastic containers with the victim’s organs were properly sealed and labeled, and then called his diener, Gaida Hanawi, to help shift the victim back into the body bag he’d arrived in.

  Gallo returned along with the uniformed trooper who had driven him into the city from Warren County. Gaida and the uniform began wheeling the body out to the loading dock, past a couple local cops who looked at him in surprise. The trooper’s sky-blue jacket with its gaudy yellow patches and the gold-striped black trousers were a considerable contrast to the more severe dark blue uniform of the NYPD.

  “How’d you hurt your arm, anyway?” Gordon asked.

  “Hit by a vehicle when I was trying to make an arrest,” Gallo said. The uniformed trooper snickered.

  “Shut up,” Gallo told him.

  “It was a skateboard,” the trooper said. “The detective got hit by a kid on a skateboard, and now I have to drive him everywhere.”

  “Fuck you,” Gallo said.

  “Kid got away, too.”

  “Fuck you twice.”

  They went to the loading dock, and loaded John Doe onto the vehicle from the Jersey morgue. “I’ll be glad to get out of here,” the trooper said. “These jokers give me the creeps.”

  “Moriarity,” Gallo said, in an exasperated tone. The trooper looked at him.

  “What?”

  Gallo rolled his eyes toward Gordon. The trooper looked skeptical, then turned to Gordon. “You’re not a joker,” he asked. “Are you, Doc?”

  Gordon considered the question, and then gave a deliberate laugh, heh heh heh. “If only you knew,” he said. He went back into the clinic, and as the door sighed closed behind him, he heard Gallo’s growling voice. “Jesus Christ, Moriarity, the guy looks like a praying mantis on stilts, and you don’t think he’s a fucking joker!”

  Gordon returned to the morgue and looked at himself in the mirror. Tall, thin, hunched, thick glasses beneath short sandy-brown hair. Praying mantis on stilts. That was a new one.

  He returned to the morgue and found Detective Black waiting for him. Franny Black was dark-haired and ordinary-looking and young—too young for his job, or so Gordon had heard it said. He was the son of one of Fort Freak’s legendary officers, and he had so much pull in the department that the NYPD had violated about a dozen of its own rules to jump him to detective way early.

  This hadn’t made him popular with his peers.

  “Okay,” Franny said. “Now you’re done entertaining the folks from out of state, maybe you can do what you’re actually being paid to do, which is work on stiffs from this side of the Hudson.” He gave a snarl. “What about my Demon Prince body?”

  Franny wasn’t naturally this belligerent, or so Gordon thought—he was just talking tough in hopes of acquiring a respect that most of the cops around here weren’t willing to give him. “The Jersey body might be yours, too,” Gordon said. “Have you checked Father Squid’s list of the missing?”

  Franny’s eyes flickered. “You have a copy of the list here?”

  “No. Father Squid keeps dropping off handbills, Gaida keeps throwing them away. She likes a tidy lab.” He cocked his head. “But,” he said, and flapped a hand, “when a mysterious joker appears in Jersey, he had to have come from somewhere.”

  Franny seemed impatient. “Maybe,” he said. “But how about the Demon Prince?”

  Gordon indicated a body laid out on a gurney and covered with a sheet. He’d looked at it earlier and seen that its wild card deformities had made the banger uglier, but not necessarily tougher. “I only had a chance to give your victim a preliminary inspection,” he said. “But it looks like the murder weapon was oval in cross-section, tapering to a point from a maximum width of about point seven five centimeters.”

  “Like a letter opener?” Franny asked.

  “I’d suggest a rat-tail comb.”

  Franny frowned to himself. “Okay,” he said.

  “Your perpetrator is between five-four and five-six and left-handed. Female. Redhead. Wears Shalimar.”

  Franny for his notebook. “Shalimar,” he repeated, and wrote it down.

  “Your victim,” Gordon said, “had recently eaten in a Southeast Asian restaurant—Vietnamese, Thai, something like that. Canvass the restaurants in the neighborhood, you’ll probably find someone who’s seen him with the redhead.”

  Franny looked puzzled. “I thought you said you’d only done a preliminary,” he said. “You’ve already got stomach contents?”

  Gordon shook his head. “
No. I just smelled the nuoc mam on him—the fish sauce.”

  “Fish sauce.” Scribbling in his notebook.

  “High-quality stuff, too,” Gordon said. “Made from squid, not from anchovy paste. I’d check the pricier restaurants first.”

  “Check.” Gordon lifted the sheet, revealing the pale corpse with its tattoos and wild card callosities. “You can give it a whiff if you like. Check it out for yourself.”

  A spasm crossed Franny’s face. “I’ll trust you on that one, Doc.”

  “I’ll let you know if I find anything else.”

  The subsequent autopsy revealed little but the bùn chả in the stomach and some gang tattoos, not surprising since the victim was a known member of the Demon Princes. The question for Franny was going to be whether the killing was gang-related, or something else—and since rat-tail combs were not a favored weapon of the Werewolves, Gordon suspected that the homicide was more in the nature of a personal dispute.

  Gordon and Gaida zipped the body up into its bag, put the bag in the cooler, and then it was time to quit.

  “I’m heading uptown tonight,” Gaida said. She was a Lebanese immigrant, a joker, who wore her hair long to cover the scars where her bat wing–shaped ears had been surgically removed. “Going to take in Don Giovanni at Lincoln Center.”

  “Have a good time,” Gordon said.

  “You have plans for the weekend?”

  “The usual.” Gordon shrugged. “Working on my moon rocket.”

  The diener smiled. “Have a good time with that.”

  “Oh,” Gordon said, “I will.”

  Gordon hadn’t mentioned to Sergeant Gallo that he owned a house in New Jersey, a two-bedroom cabin in Gallo’s own Warren County where Gordon went on weekends to conduct his rocket program. Though Gordon followed all precautions and did nothing illegal, it had to be admitted that he kept a very large store of fuel and explosives on his property, and he figured that the fewer people who knew about it, the better. Especially if the people in question were the authorities.

  He took the train to Hackettstown and picked up his Volvo station wagon from the parking lot near the station. On the way to his cabin he found a nice fresh piece of roadkill, a raccoon that probably weighed twelve or fourteen pounds. It was a little lean after the long winter but would make a fine dinner, with cornbread-and-sausage stuffing and a red wine sauce. He picked up the raccoon with a pair of surgical gloves, dumped the body in a plastic bag, and put the bag in his trunk. Once he got to the cabin he put the raccoon in his refrigerator. He’d cook it the next day, when Steely Dan came by to help him make his rocket fuel.