Jokers Wild

  “Have mercy,” he groaned, one hand twisting in her braids.

  “All right.” She drew back.

  “The Ideal, you leave me like this?”

  “Then let’s go somewhere.”

  “The speech.”

  “Afterwards.”

  “Oh God!”

  The subway car’s metal wheels squealed as they pulled into Times Square. The doors hissed open and Spector got up, feeling better than he had all morning. The Astronomer had to figure he was dead, and the old man was having a very busy day. There wouldn’t be any time for second thoughts about him.

  He dug dried blood out from between his teeth with a fingernail and slipped through the standing passengers toward the door. A surge of people entering the car pushed him back; he shoulder-cut his way through them and out onto the platform in front of a couple trying to enter the car. The doors closed.

  “Hey, man, you made us miss the train.” The man was young and Hispanic with a snap-brim hat and purple pinstripe suit. A girl was holding onto the sleeve of his sealskin coat. He pushed Spector back and shook his head. “You goddamn space case. Can’t go anywhere in this town without running into jerks. Don’t worry, baby. There’ll be another along a few minutes.”

  Spector was looking at the girl. She was tall and slender, with dark hair and eyes. She was wearing a heavy metal T-shirt with the name FERRIC JAGGER on the front. The pimp was carrying a soft-sided floral-print suitcase that was ob­viously hers. There was something about her that demanded attention. Spector could have some real fun with this one. Not sex, he didn’t do that. He’d liked killing girls with the Astronomer, though. It was the only thing that got Spector off anymore. It would be a real charge to feel the life go out of this little number.

  “Hey, man, what you lookin’ at?” The pimp pushed him again, hard.

  Spector’s hatred and pain clawed their way out. He stared hard into the pimp’s eyes. The other man made a soft sound as the air went out of him and he collapsed onto the platform. People nearby looked uncomprehending at the body for a few moments, then voices began to call out for a doctor.

  He tugged at his mustache, happy at the pimp’s death. The girl was staring down at the body, but there were no screams. Not yet.

  He pulled the suitcase from the pimp’s hand and smiled at the girl. “New in town? I can show you a thing or two. Local sights, whatever you want.”

  She pulled the suitcase from him and turned away. She didn’t say a word.

  Spector saw a transit cop moving in. He sifted into the crowd. It was a shame about the girl, but, overall, things were beginning to look a little brighter.

  The Happy Hocker Pawnshop was in the Flatbush sec­tion of Brooklyn, on Washington Avenue and Sullivan Street. Jennifer took a cab to within a few blocks of the address and walked the rest of the way. It was located among other small, family-run businesses, including a del­icatessen, a clothing store, a shoestore, and a small pizzeria. Everything but the deli was closed and the street around the pawnshop was virtually deserted, but down a couple of blocks and across the street a large crowd was gathered outside Ebbets Field for the Dodgers’ annual Wild Card Day game. According to the sign across the main gate the Dodg­ers were playing the Los Angeles Stars. The teams were old rivals, and since the Dodgers were in the midst of another close pennant race, it looked like the crowd already stream­ing into the stadium would stretch the seating capacity of the old ballpark to its limit.

  Jennifer glanced at her wristwatch. It was a few minutes after eleven. Tom Seaver, who’d been pitching for the Dodg­ers for almost all of Jennifer’s life, was scheduled to go against Fernando Valenzuela, the Stars’ young Mexican hurler. There was still time to get tickets, and watching the ballgame would be a more pleasant way to spend the afternoon than lunching with Gruber.

  She peered through the dusty window of the pawnshop. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought that it was closed along with most of the other small stores on the block. But Gruber had never broken an appointment with her before.

  She tried the front door. It was unlocked, and she went in. Inside the pawnshop it was dark and still. Its narrow aisles and tall shelves crammed with unwanted merchan­dise, most of which had been around since the time of Gruber’s father, always gave Jennifer a touch of claustrophobia. Guitars with broken strings, televisions with burned-out tubes, toaster ovens with frayed electrical cords, stained and torn coats and shirts and dresses, crowded the shelves in the dingy room, the ink on their pawntags faded to illegibility.

  The only light in the room came from a naked bulb dangling from electrical wires in the cage behind the counter, Gruber’s customary lair. But Gruber wasn’t there.

  She called out his name, but her words echoed hollowly and she had a sudden feeling of wrongness. She walked closer to the cage and the sole of her right shoe stuck in something tacky, like a blob of chewed-out gum. She looked down.

  A puddle of thick, rich liquid flowed out from one of the aisles. She took a step forward and peered around the edge of the shelving into the aisle, and stared.

  It was Gruber. His pale, soft face was frozen into a rictus of intense horror. His pale, soft hands were clutched tightly to his stomach, but they hadn’t prevented his blood from running out and collecting around him in a sticky, shallow pool.

  Jennifer hung over a low counter that was filled with cheap jewelry and cheaper guns and lost her breakfast. She leaned shakily against the glass counter after vomiting up everything in her stomach, letting it take her weight.

  After a moment or two of utter blankness she wiped her lips and forced herself to look back at what was left of Gruber. It was the first body she’d ever seen. She stared in fascinated horror, thinking she ought to do something, but not knowing what.

  “It’sss her.”

  A hissing, sibilant voice sounded behind her, starting her heart jumping like that of an aerobic instructor on speed. She whirled around in a half-crouch and stared at the three men who had silently entered the shop through the back entrance.

  Two were norms, or looked to be. The third was a joker, a tall, slim man who looked like a lizard walking on two legs. He was the one who had spoken. Jennifer stared at him and his long, forked tongue rolled out of his mouth again and flickered at her.

  “Ssshe’sss the one,” he hissed. “Get her.”

  “Christ,” one of the others muttered. “She killed him.”

  The two norms looked at each other uneasily and Jen­nifer’s brain finally began to work again.

  She recognized the reptilian joker. He had been in Kien’s condo, he had shown up when the joker in the jar started screaming. How’d he trace her here? She glanced at Gruber’s corpse. Gruber was a possibility, but she’d never be able to ask him if he’d turned her in. But how would he have known she’d stolen the stuff from Kien?

  This was no time to worry about it. The men with the reptiloid had just about convinced themselves to tackle her. They approached her slowly, pistols out, while the joker stood by watching.

  Jennifer ghosted.

  She stepped out of her clothes, conserving only the bikini that she normally wore and the small bag that had the books in it. She glanced back over her shoulder as she stepped through a shelf crammed with hocked junk. The two norms stared at her with open mouths, the joker cursed with a hissing sibilance.

  She kept going through the shelves, the wall, and the alley between the pawnshop and the next building, leaving the men far behind. She caught her breath, metaphorically, and then solidified. She was in the clothing store.

  She grabbed a pair of jeans, a blouse, and sneakers, threw them on, stopped to take two twenties from her bag and put them into the cash register, and then fled through the front door.

  Kien’s men were nowhere in sight. They were, she suspected, baffled by her disappearance, but she couldn’t count on their bewilderment to last for very long.

  She looked down the street. To the right was Ebbets Field, still filli
ng with baseball fans. To the left was Prospect Park with an inviting offer of greenery and isolation. Somehow, though, she felt like being around other people. She’d be safe around people. No one could try to kill her. She’d have time to think things out.

  She ran down the street and joined the end of the line filing into the stadium just as Kien’s men came around the far end of the block, shaking their heads in exasperated anger.

  They crowded into Hiram’s office, all of them. The cleaning crew, the dishwashers, the kitchen staff, even the electrician who’d come up to fix the faulty wiring in one of the chandeliers. They sat in the chairs, on the floor, on the desk and cabinets. Many stood. No one said a word. Even Paul LeBarre was silent. All eyes were on the television. Geraldo Rivera was interviewing one of the Howler’s sisters. Hiram hadn’t known the Howler had a sister. It turned out he had four of them.

  It was like the day Kennedy had been shot, he thought, or the Day of the Wild Card, the first one, forty years ago, when Jetboy had died and the world had changed forever.

  The newscast cut to a police press conference. Hiram listened, and felt sick.

  “Jesus.” That was Peter Chou, the slim quiet man who was in charge of Aces High security, Peter who collected depression glass and black belts in assorted martial arts, and who never raised his voice or used profanity. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said now. “Nerve toxin. Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “It don’t make sense,” one of the dishwashers said. “Man, it don’t make no fucking sense, man, that fucker could scream down walls, I saw him do it, man, I saw him.”

  Then everybody started talking at once.

  Curtis tapped Hiram’s shoulder, gave him a questioning look and nodded toward the door. Hiram rose and followed him. The floor seemed cavernous and empty now with everyone jammed into Hiram’s office.

  “Outside,” Hiram said. They went out onto the Sunset Terrace, and stood looking down over the city. The Empire State’s public observation deck was on the floor above them, and above that was the old mooring mast that had once been intended for zeppelins, but except for that, there was no higher spot in New York City, or the world. The sun shone down brightly, and Hiram found himself wondering if the sky had looked as blue to Jetboy on the day he died.

  “The dinner,” Curtis said simply. “Do we go ahead, or cancel?”

  “We go on,” Hiram said, without hesitating.

  “Very good, sir,” Curtis said. His tone was carefully neu­tral, neither approving nor disapproving.

  But Hiram felt he needed to explain. He put his hands up against the stone parapet, gazed off blindly to the west. “My father,” he said. His voice sounded strange and halting, even to himself. “He was, ah, a robust man. As large as myself, in his later years. He was a man of, ah, healthy appetites.”

  “British, wasn’t he?” Curtis said.

  Hiram nodded. “He fought at Dunkirk. After the war he married a WAC and came to America. A male war bride, he called himself, not that he wore white. He’d always add that, and my mother would always blush, and he would laugh. God, but that man could laugh. He roared. He did everything in a large way. Food, liquor, even his women. He had a dozen mistresses. My mother didn’t seem to mind, although she would have preferred a tad more discretion. He was a loud man, my father.”

  Hiram looked at Curtis. “He died when I was twelve. The funeral was . . . well, the sort of function my father would have loathed. If he hadn’t been dead he never would have attended. It was grim, and pious, and so quiet. I kept ex­pecting my father to sit up in the casket and tell a joke. There was weeping and whispering, but no laughter, noth­ing to eat or drink. I hated every second of it.”

  “I see,” Curtis said.

  “I have it in my will, you know,” Hiram said. “A certain sum has been set aside, a rather handsome sum I might add, and when I die, Aces High will open its doors to my friends and family, and the food and drink will keep flowing until the money is gone, and perhaps there will be laughter. Perhaps. I don’t know Howler’s wishes in that regard, but I do know that he could eat and drink with the best of them, and he was the only man I ever knew who laughed louder than my father.”

  Curtis smiled. “He shattered several thousand dollars’ worth of crystal with one of his laughs, as I recall.”

  Hiram smiled. “And wasn’t the least bit abashed, either. Tachyon was the one who’d made the witticism, and of course he felt so guilty I didn’t see his face for almost three months.” Hiram clapped a hand on Curtis’s shoulder. “No. I cannot believe that Howler would have wanted us to cancel the party. We go on. Most definitely.”

  “The ice sculpture?” Curtis reminded him gently.

  “We will display it,” Hiram said firmly. “We’re not going to try and pretend that Howler never existed. The sculpture will remind us that . . . that one of us is missing tonight.” Somewhere far below, a horn was blaring. A man was dead, an ace, one of the fortunate handful, but the city went on as always, and as always someone was late for something. Hiram shivered. “Let’s get it done, then.” They went back inside.

  Peter Chou was crossing the floor in their direction. “You have a phone call,” he said to Hiram.

  “Thank you,” Hiram said. He went back into his office. “I know all of you are interested in the news,” he told his staff. “So am I. But in a few hours, we’ll be feeding a hun­dred and fifty-odd people. We’ll pipe in the latest bulletins, rest assured. Now let’s get back to work.”

  One by one they filed out. Paul LeBarre put a hand on Hiram’s shoulder before shuffling past. On television, Sen­ator Hartmann stood in front of Jetboy’s Tomb, promising a full SCARE investigation of the Howler’s murder. Hiram nodded, touched the mute button, and picked up his phone.

  At first he didn’t recognize the voice, and the fragmentary words, spoken with so much difficulty, didn’t seem to make much sense. The man kept apologizing, over and over, and he was saying something about gasoline, and Hiram couldn’t seem to focus on any of it. “What are you talking about?”

  “Lops . . . lobsters,” the voice said.

  “What?” Hiram said. He sat bolt upright. “Gills, is this you?” It certainly didn’t sound like him.

  “Sorry . . . sorry, Hiram.” He began to wheeze. Then someone took the phone away from him.

  “Good morning, Fatboy,” said a voice strange and shrill, a voice like a razor blade scratching down a blackboard. “Gills don’t talk so good. He’s still spitting out teeth.” Hiram heard someone laugh in the background. “What fishface is trying to tell you is that we just got done marinating your fucking lobsters in fucking gasoline, and if you want ’em you can fucking well come down here and pick ’em up yourself, ’cause his fucking truck is on fire.” Another laugh. “Now listen good, asshole, I don’t care if you are a fuckin’ uptown ace, you cuntface, you fuck around with me, this is what you get. You listening?”

  There was a moment of dead air, and then a scream, and a sharp sound like a bone breaking.

  “Hear that, cuntface?” the razor-blade voice said. Hiram didn’t reply. “Did you fucking hear it?” the voice screamed.

  “Yes,” Hiram said.

  “Have a nice day,” the voice said, followed by a click.

  Hiram slowly returned the phone to its cradle. The day could not possibly get any worse, he thought.

  Then the phone rang again.

  Fortunato picked up the phone and dialed a Brooklyn extension. As soon as he was sitting down, the cat got in his lap and began kneading the legs of his jeans. The phone rang twice and a woman answered. “Hello, is Arnie there?” he asked. He could have sent his astral body, but he was already running on about half a charge and it was time to save his strength.

  “No, this is his mother. May I help?”

  “My name is Fortunato—”

  “Oh, heavenly days. I’ve heard Arnie talk about you forever. He’ll just die when he finds out you called and he wasn’t home.”

  “If you could
just tell me where he is, ma’am, I’ll try and find him myself.”

  “Oh, he’s headed for Jetboy’s Tomb. His father takes him down there every Wild Card Day. They left about an hour ago. I don’t know if you’ll be able to find him in all those crowds. He’s not in any trouble, is he?”

  “No, ma’am, nothing like that. I’m sure I’ll be able to find him.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I guess you do have your ways, don’t you? It’s just that I’m a little nervous, what with the Howler and all.”

  “The Howler?”

  “Oh, you haven’t heard. Oh dear. They found the Howler just a little while ago. He was murdered. Some kind of nerve poison or something. It was just on the TV.”

  Fortunato hung up. He’d written the list on paper, just to focus his thoughts. The aces who had been at the Cloisters. Kid Dinosaur. Tachyon. Peregrine. The Turtle. Modular Man. The Howler. Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Water Lily.

  He crossed the Howler’s name off the list. So it was true, he thought. It wasn’t just Demise’s raving. It was happening, had already started.

  Of the ones that were left, Flash and the Turtle could take care of themselves. Tachyon couldn’t, but that was Tachyon’s problem.

  He called Hiram at Aces High. He didn’t think Hiram would be on the Astronomer’s hit list; he’d only been in­volved peripherally with the TIAMAT business and hadn’t been at the Cloisters at all. Still he deserved a warning.

  He told the story as simply as he could, and then said, “Listen, there’s something you can do if you’re willing. I need a command post. Somewhere safe to bring the ones I find, and somewhere for people to leave messages.”

  “Of course. Nobody would attack Aces High. It would be insane .”

  “Right,” Fortunato said. “But just in case. Do you have some way of getting hold of that android? Modular Man?”