High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

“Hey! Hold it! You’re under arrest!” People in the lobby were staring at him. A woman behind a large desk stood and reached for the phone.

  Baba Yaga ignored him. Franny gave up on modesty, pressed his arm against the bandage on his side, and ran harder. There was a jostling crowd on the sidewalk. Cops and Baba Yaga and her people. Franny assumed they were responding to a 911 call. A limo was idling at the curb.

  Franny grabbed one of the cops by the shoulder. “You’ve got to stop that woman! She’s a criminal. A kidnapper. A murderer.” The officer frowned and knocked Franny’s hand off his shoulder. “Look, I’m a cop, too!”

  Most of the officers had entered the hospital. A few were still outside. They looked inquiringly at Baba Yaga and a stone sank into the pit of Franny’s gut. He recognized privilege and payoff when he saw it.

  One of the cops said something. It sounded like a question. The Otter leaned down and Baba Yaga whispered in his ear. He answered the cop, who pulled out his baton.

  “Ah shit. Really?”

  The nightstick slammed into his shoulder. Franny spun away and the next blow landed on the wound in his side. Pain pulsed through his body and a burning light exploded behind his eyes.

  Marcus could barely believe Olena had really stepped out into the street to meet the oncoming truck. If he’d had the strength he would’ve grabbed her. He didn’t, though, and could only watch.

  For a moment he was sure the truck was going to run her down. And then he was sure that she was going to shoot the driver. Neither happened. Instead, she walked right up to the moving vehicle, stepped onto the sideboard as it passed, and jabbed the pistol through the window. Marcus didn’t hear what she said, but the gun made her pretty convincing. The truck stopped. Olena jumped down. The man climbed out, the Glock aimed at him the whole time. She made it look so easy.

  She had turned her head, flicked the hair out of her face, and said, “It’s probably better if I drive. Get in.”

  In the truck’s bed, Marcus had asked her through the open window of the cabin just who she was. Her answer, “I’m Ukrainian girl,” hardly explained it. Marcus was beginning to suspect that there was more to her than he imagined.

  It embarrassed him that she’d gotten him out of this city, that she’d taken control. But it was a shallow level of embarrassment. He was relieved that it wasn’t all on him. If it wasn’t complicated enough, he was still ashamed of the things she’d seen him do in the arena. Ugly things. Murderous things. Some of that he’d done for her, but still … he didn’t like the memories he had of it. He didn’t recognize himself in them. He just saw a monster with blood on his hands and venom in his mouth.

  Considering that, there was something about being nearly dead in the back of a truck stolen for him by a beautiful Ukrainian girl that seemed almost all right. Somebody cared, and if that was true there was still some hope left. If only he wasn’t hurting so. Bleeding still, dizzy enough that he felt near to losing consciousness …

  “Don’t sleep, my hero,” Olena’s voice said, rousing him. “Stay awake, okay? Sleep later.”

  Marcus opened his eyes. The glare of the world flashed to life again. The valley floor stretched out below them, looking dry and scraggly as it dropped down toward Talas. Around them, the foothills of the mountains rose into a series of ridges, one piled on top of the other, growing in height. That mountain? It was there, miles away, towering above a desolate, foreign landscape like nothing he’d ever seen.

  Olena stood behind the truck, holding up a jar of water for him. A little distance away a man, a woman, and several small children stood outside the door of a modest house, staring. At their feet sat the crates of cigarettes that Olena had said she was going to trade for clothes. Apparently, the barter had worked.

  She had exchanged her slinky dress for a local getup. A colorful but shapeless sort of jacket, a woolen skirt so long it brushed the ground, and a hat into which her short hair disappeared entirely. He was going to miss the little red number, and she wasn’t exactly going to pass for a local with her angelic features and high cheekbones and crystal blue eyes. But from a distance she looked the part. Kinda.

  He tried to cover up the pain of reaching for the jar by smiling. The effort of it, and of talking, was almost more than he could manage. “I like the look,” he said. “Doesn’t…” He exhaled, wondering where his breath had gone. “Doesn’t do you justice, but that’s probably a good thing.”

  “You think I’m not so pretty now,” she said.

  “God, no, I don’t think that,” Marcus said.

  She brushed him off with a motion of her head. “Anyway, now we are hidden.”

  He wanted to ask her how she could think a black guy with a twenty-foot striped snake tail could possibly be hidden anyplace, much less in rural Kazakh-wherever-they-were. But he didn’t. He didn’t really want to ask her. He wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that she seemed to continue not to see him as deformed. He certainly didn’t want it to end, though. He said, “You look great. Just like a local.”

  “I know where to go now.” She gestured toward the watching family, and then waved at them. “They told me about a village. A good place for us.”

  She hefted a large metal gasoline can into the bed and then climbed back up into the cab. She turned over the engine and pulled the truck back onto the long, narrow stretch of dusty tarmac that had taken them out of the city. They kept on rising into the mountains.

  “What’s good about this place?” Marcus asked through the window.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  Barbara’s sleep was restless. A dream—a nightmare, truthfully—returned, one that she’d had several times when she was younger but which hadn’t bothered her for many years now, a memory that inevitably morphed into a night terror.

  She was barely twelve when her mother died.

  As the only child without any other parent or siblings, she was acting as the shomeret for her mother, sitting watch in the funeral home. Relatives and friends remained with her that night as she sat near her mother’s wooden coffin. Her mother had died only that afternoon: a suicide bombing in Shuk HaCarmel Market in Tel Aviv. The funeral would take place the next day.

  The rabbi had come and intoned the ritual words: “Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha’olam dayan ha’emet” and torn the Kria, ripping the left side of her blouse.

  “Such a terrible loss, a terrible day. How are you holding up, my child?” the rabbi had asked her, his eyes sad and kind. She could only shake her head.

  “I don’t understand,” Barbara answered, and her voice broke with the sobs that had wracked her on and off ever since the news had come. “The police … they said that Mom told them before she died that she saw this young man walking into the market looking like he was sick or frightened, all sweating and pale, that she called out to him to ask him if he needed help. He only shouted back to her in Arabic and waved his hands at her, but Mom doesn’t speak Arabic and she didn’t know what he was saying. He ran deeper into the market, and she followed him, and that’s…” She swallowed hard. The grief in her mouth tasted like ashes and tears. “That’s when the boy, or someone else, set off the vest. Rabbi, maybe he was telling Mom to stay away. Maybe he was warning her, but she couldn’t understand…”

  “None of us can understand a tragedy like this,” the rabbi told her, but his words and the arm he put around her shoulders were little comfort to her. She kept replaying the scene in her mind: her mother following the boy, wanting to help him, the light and heat and shattering concussion of the explosion, her mother falling amid the debris and screams …

  In the nightmare memory of that night, she approached the coffin. She would be suddenly alone: the rabbi gone, her relatives and family friends all vanished. There was only the room and the coffin. She saw the lid lifting, her mother’s blood-streaked hand and arm shoving it upward. Barbara could only stare, frozen, unable to move. As the lid was pushed back with a hollow thud, her mother’s corpse slowly sat up.
Her face turned toward Barbara: a visage of raw horror, strips of flesh falling away from a shattered skull, an eye dangling from its socket, half of her jaw gone and her tongue lolling down like a fat grey worm …

  But this night, in Machu Picchu, the nightmare shifted and changed. It wasn’t her mother’s arm that lifted the coffin lid, nor her mother’s body that appeared. The arm was Klaus’s, clad in ghost armor that looked to have been cracked and broken. It was Klaus’s shattered and ruined corpse rising up in the coffin, turning slowly to stare at her with its moldering, one-eyed face.

  Klaus. Not her mother.

  In the dream, Barbara screamed, as Klaus’s body started to pull itself from the coffin that held it; as she found herself suddenly awake under the covers, shivering and terrified at the dream’s lingering memory.

  “What’s the matter?” Barbara heard Klaus ask sleepily from his side of the bed.

  She tried to calm her racing heart. “Nothing,” she told him. “Just a dream, is all. Go back to sleep.”

  Klaus grunted. She felt him turn in the bed.

  She’d been barely twelve when her mother died …

  The nightmare of seeing the ravaged, shattered body of her mother rising from the coffin would haunt her teenage years. In reality, at the funeral the following morning as the coffin was lowered into the earth, Barbara’s card would turn. As Barbara cried out in pain and anguish and fright, the chanting of the rabbi became nothing more than nonsense syllables, and frightened onlookers could only shout incomprehensible questions to the sky.

  None of them could any longer understand the other. Like her mother and the young man in the market …

  For long minutes, Barbara stared into the darkness of the ceiling above her, pondering what this altered dream meant, afraid for some reason that this was some portent, some warning. She wrestled with herself, insisting that to think such a thing was irrational and ridiculous, but the feeling persisted even under the logic.

  When sleep—blessedly dreamless this time—finally came to her again, it was followed far too soon by the stern beeping of her phone’s morning alarm.

  The first thing Franny saw were large feet encased in heavy steel-toed shoes. His eyes felt gummy and his mouth tasted of blood. He had apparently bitten his tongue. Slowly he identified the noise he heard as a car engine. He was on the floor of the limo wedged between the facing seats. They went over a bump and Franny gasped in pain. He looked up. Baldy, Stache, and B.O. were seated on the jump seat.

  A hand twisted in his hair and he was rolled over to face Baba Yaga. His gown was twisted and hiked up over his hips. Bad enough to be in the custody of a psychopath but having his dick and balls exposed somehow made it even worse.

  She tapped a forefinger against her lips and studied him. “You are a great deal of trouble,” she said.

  “So why bring me?”

  “You might prove useful. If you aren’t I will kill you. Clear?”

  “Crystal.”

  They continued to drive. The Otter was murmuring into a cell phone. Everyone else was silent. Franny cleared his throat. “So, where are we going?”

  “Shut up.”

  Ten minutes later he tried again. “May I get on a seat?”

  “No.” Baba Yaga was a woman of few words.

  Eventually they came to a stop and Franny was pulled out of the car. He groaned as pain flared in his side and his shoulder. They were back at the casino. Not a place he’d ever wanted to see again.

  Franny suggested they leave him in the car with the Otter, but Baba Yaga didn’t seem to be the trusting sort. Baldy had shoved a gun in his back (it was very cold against his bare skin), and Franny followed the old lady into the casino. It was a mess. Overturned roulette tables, chips scattered across the floor, the garish colors clashing against the paisley of the expensive carpet. The faces on the strewn cards looked surprised as they trod across them. The blood also didn’t look all that good on the carpet.

  There were a couple of evidence techs going about their business. They straightened, and gave Baba Yaga respectful nods as she moved past them. Clearly the old criminal owned the cops in Talas. As if being beat like a drum on Baba Yaga’s say-so hadn’t been enough of a hint, Franny thought.

  A skinny man dressed in a Gandhi-like diaper hurried through a door off the casino floor. The lights shone on the viscous slime that coated his body, and gleamed on his shaved head. A pungent odor had Franny’s eyes watering. It was the joker Vaporlock, aka Sam Palmer, a well-known figure around Jokertown, a pathetic loser known to the cops as a small-time thief, and a traitor to his fellow jokers. Based on Wally Gunderson’s statement Vaporlock had helped kidnap jokers for Baba Yaga’s fight club. That accusation was now proved.

  “Shit, Baba Yaga … ma’am. We thought you were dead. I mean, man, were we worried when that big-ass snake whacked you. Some of the guys believed that. But not me. I knew you’d be back. Nobody can take you down.” The words emerged tight and fast.

  Baba Yaga didn’t actually address Vaporlock. Instead she turned to Baldy and said simply, “Bring him.”

  They started across the casino floor with Vaporlock twitching and bouncing along next to the old woman. “So what’s the plan, ma’am? We gettin’ out of here? Some of the guys have gone nuts to even think about challenging you.” Baba Yaga ignored him.

  There were still bodies sprawled around slot machines and under tables. Franny reflected that being dead in a tux didn’t add any more dignity to that state. Some of the dead sported bullet wounds. Others were just dead. Probably victims of IBT’s poisonous tongue.

  Contemplating tuxedos brought to the fore Franny’s most pressing concern. “Hey. I need some clothes,” he said.

  “We are not a haberdashery,” Baba Yaga said.

  Franny pointed at a dead man. “He’s not using them. Can we take a couple of minutes?”

  Baba Yaga contemplated him in his open-backed hospital gown and the tattered slippers on his bare feet. Something almost like a tiny smile quirked her withered lips. “Fine.”

  He found a man who was roughly his size, and stripped him out of his coat, shirt, trousers, socks, and shoes. Franny figured he’d go commando. Wearing a dead man’s underwear was a bridge too far.

  “Bathroom?” Franny asked.

  Baba Yaga didn’t bother to answer. Just gave him a look. Franny turned his back and dressed. The pants were too big and the shirt too tight, but he felt far less vulnerable. He had barely tied the shoes, a painful operation because bending over pulled at the stitches in his side, when Baba Yaga started moving again. A not-too-gentle push from B.O. propelled Franny back into motion.

  Vaporlock, having given up on any conversation with Baba Yaga, dropped back to walk next to Franny. “Hey, I recognize you. You’re a cop, right? At Fort Freak?” Franny nodded. “So, if I help you out you’d put in a good word for me, right?”

  “You’re not very bright, are you?” Franny said softly.

  “Huh?”

  “You might want to rethink talking about cutting a deal with me while you’re walking with her.”

  “Uh.” Vaporlock raised his voice. “I meant only if she doesn’t need me. I’m totally with her unless she wants me to leave—”

  “Sam.” Vaporlock looked up at Franny. “Stop digging,” he said softly.

  They went through another door at the back of the casino and up a staircase. The second floor over this wing of the building was living quarters. Franny didn’t think much of the decor. It was cluttered with furniture in competing styles. Leather-covered armchair next to a Louis XIV chair with incongruous leather upholstery. Fringed-edged ottomans, and numerous knickknack tables.

  Baba Yaga, trailed by two of the guards, went into the bedroom. A string of what were clearly expletives erupted from the bedroom. Franny went to the door to look. Baba Yaga was staring at an enormous jewelry case on the dresser. It was conspicuously empty.

  She brushed past him, hurrying back into the living room. A nod to one
of the goons and he threw back the edge of the oriental carpet to reveal a floor safe. She knelt and twisted the dial. Franny sensed the goon’s eyes on him, and he made an obvious show of looking the other way. All this damn furniture crammed into such a small space …

  “She … changes people. And not in a good way. We’re talking about furniture.”

  The words of the disgraced and now arrested Hollywood producer Michael Berman came floating back. Franny looked more closely at a large armchair. That didn’t look like normal leather. He moved so he could see the front of the chair. The seat held a face. A terrified, openmouthed face. The feet of the chair appeared to be clawed hands, and human feet with the toes tightly clenched. Franny reeled back from the grotesque sight.

  A chuckle like dried leaves across concrete. Baba Yaga was stuffing handfuls of various kinds of currency, gem-encrusted jewelry, and gold coins into a leather satchel, but her gaze was fixed on him. “If I kill you, boy, you won’t die easy.”

  She’s enjoying my disgust and distress, Franny realized. He schooled his features and gave a shrug. “Then I sure hope you just shoot me. Sucks to admit it, but I’m kinda getting used to it.”

  Franny tried not to look at the furniture, but it was like trying not to think about elephants. Clearly Baba Yaga was a wild card. He wondered how she did it. His desperately wandering gaze fell on Vaporlock. His eyes were flicking from the satchel to the three goons to the door of the living quarters. Franny tensed and felt the pull in his side and shoulder.

  Baba Yaga was pulling out a stack of passports held by a rubber band. Before she could place them in her bag Vaporlock swept a hand across his chest and jammed the slick, smelly mess into the face of Baldy, who stood closest to Baba Yaga. As the man gagged and slumped Vaporlock grabbed his pistol and fired wildly at Baba Yaga while reaching for the satchel with his free hand.

  Franny was in motion long before the shot. He knew better than to try to grab the slippery ace. Instead he snatched a heavy metal and enamel icon off the desk, and slammed the heavy framed edge down on Vaporlock’s forearm. The shot went wild, slamming into a nearby sofa. Instead of pale stuffing the bullet sent up a cloud of red- and flesh-colored particles.