Dead Man's Hand

  “So you lent her a lot of bucks,” Jay said. He was still keeping an eye on the reflections in the laundromat window. “How much of the joint did you own?”

  “A third,” Dutton said. “She held the controlling interest.”

  “Don’t stop and don’t look behind you,” Jay said quietly. “We’re being followed.”

  “Really?” Dutton was good; his pace didn’t even falter.

  “He’s across the street, maybe a half block back, trying to slink from doorway to doorway,” Jay said. “Real amateur hour. He would have flunked slinking in detective school. He’s avoiding the street lamps, but the headlights pick him up every time a car passes.”

  “Do you know who it is?” Dutton asked.

  “The Oddity,” Jay told him. “Friend of yours?”

  “I’m afraid not. I know him only by reputation.”

  “You got any kick-ass powers you haven’t mentioned, or is it up to me?” Jay asked.

  Dutton laughed. “Does wealth count as a power?”

  “Maybe,” Jay said. “If the Oddity attacks us, try throwing some hundred-dollar bills at him, we’ll see how it works.”

  “I have a better idea,” Dutton said. He stopped suddenly.

  They were in front of the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. Dutton went up to the doors. “What the hell are you doing?” Jay asked. “The place is closed.”

  “I have a key,” Dutton said. He opened one of the doors and motioned Jay inside. “The management won’t mind.”

  “You own the place?” Jay guessed as Dutton relocked the door.

  “I’m afraid so,” Dutton said. He punched some numbers into a key box on the wall. A blinking red light went out, and a green one came on. “We’re clear,” Dutton said. “Come with me.”

  The interior of the museum was dim and cool. They went through a swinging door and down a service corridor. “This place do good business?” Jay asked.

  “Fair,” Dutton said. “You’ve been here, of course?”

  “A long time ago,” Jay said. “When I was very young. The only thing I remember is the jars. Dozen of big jars, with deformed joker babies floating inside. It really freaked me out.” The memory had been buried for a long time, but the moment he spoke, it came back so vividly Jay could taste it: endless small bodies, twisted and terrible, floating in formaldehyde behind a wall of glass. One of them, bigger than the others and especially grotesque, had been mounted on a rotating pedestal, and Jay could still remember his fear as its face slowly turned toward him. It was going to open its eyes and look at him, he had screamed, and nothing his father had said had calmed him down. “It gave me nightmares,” Jay said, astonished by the sudden realization. He couldn’t quite repress a shudder. “Jesus,” he said to Dutton. “Those are long gone, right?”

  “Sadly, no,” Dutton said. “The Monstrous Joker Babies were one of the original exhibits. The tourists have come to expect them. But I have made considerable efforts to turn this into a legitimate museum since acquiring it from its original owners, and our new attractions are quite different. Let me show you.”

  He led Jay through an access door. “Here,” Dutton said. “This is our Syrian diorama.”

  Jay peered through the glass at a dramatic waxwork tableau. In the foreground, Carnifex was wrenching an Uzi away from a terrorist, while a pregnant Peregrine raked his face with metal talons. Tachyon, dressed like a color-blind Arab fop, was out cold on the floor. Elsewhere, Jack Braun raced toward a gunman, bullets whining off his body. One of the richochets had struck Senator Hartmann; you could see the blood seeping through his sport coat. Way in back, Hiram Worchester glared up at a giant economy-sized Arab Rambo, while a woman in a black chador held a bloody knife over a fallen prophet.

  “I’m sure you recall the incident,” Dutton said.

  “Yeah,” Jay said. “From the tour. Getting wounded did wonders for Hartmann’s presidential campaign.”

  “It never hurts to be a hero,” Dutton agreed.

  Jay indicated a panel of buttons in front of the diorama. “What are these?”

  “Our new exhibits are state-of-the-art,” Dutton said. “Sound effects, dramatic lighting, animatronics. One button lights up Braun’s golden force field, another turns on the Nur’s green glow. That one at the end will actually make Sayyid fall. He’s the giant. Worchester made him too heavy to support his own weight.”

  “I didn’t know waxworks could move,” Jay said.

  “We’ve been moving away from wax on the animated exhibits,” Dutton said. “Sayyid is three-quarters plastic.”

  “Doesn’t he crush those other figures?”

  “He never hits the ground,” Dutton said. “The children love it. They all squeeze their little fists, pretending to be aces.”

  “Hiram will be so thrilled,” Jay said dryly.

  “Come, let me give you the tour,” Dutton said.

  “Only if we skip the Monstrous Joker Babies,” Jay said. “I got enough problems without running into them again.”

  Dutton laughed, and escorted him through a maze of dim-lit corridors where heroes and villains of years gone by watched from the shadows. They passed Jetboy, the Four Aces, the Lizard King. Hardhat and the Radical stood locked in eternal combat, while a squad from the Joker Brigade stood off Charlie in some hellforsaken part of Nam. In the Hall of Infamy, the Astronomer hung from a wall, embedded in the brick with only his face and hands visible. The mortar had turned red with his blood. Nearby Gary Gilmore stood surrounded by pillars of salt, and Gimli exhorted a maddened crowd with upraised fist. The dwarf’s glass eyes seemed to follow them.

  “Great waxwork,” Jay said. “Looks real.”

  “It is,” Dutton said. “Gimli’s empty skin was found in an alley not far from here. There was no family, so we, ah, acquired the remains.”

  Jay gave him a look. “You stuffed him.” He’d heard that story on the streets somewhere, but somehow he’d forgotten.

  Dutton cleared his throat. “Yes. Well. He has been quite a popular attraction.”

  “I think I’ve seen enough,” Jay told him.

  “Fine.” Dutton took him across a cavernous hall where the Turtle’s old shells hung suspended from the ceiling. The adjoining gallery was still under construction. Dutton guided Jay through the tangle of ladders, tarps, and sawhorses to a snack-room square in the center of the building. He turned on the lights and stood in front of a bank of vending machines.

  “Would you prefer coffee or a soft drink?” he asked.

  It was chilly in here, Jay realized suddenly. They must use the air-conditioning even at night on account of the waxworks. “Coffee would be real good,” he admitted.

  Dutton fed quarters into the coffee machine and came to the table with two cardboard cups. He gave one to Jay. They sat. “So what do you think of my little museum now?”

  “Museums are like graveyards,” Jay said. “Full of dead things. Dead things depress me.”

  “The Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum is a Jokertown institution.”

  Jay blew on his coffee. “The Palace is an institution, too.”

  “Yes,” Dutton said. “Of a different sort.”

  “And now you own it, too.”

  “Under the terms of our partnership agreement, the surviving partner assumes full ownership of the Crystal Palace, yes.”

  “That why you had her killed?” Jay suggested casually.

  Dreams came again, but this time they were vague, formless things that chased Brennan through a cloying mist as he tried to find his way back to a home that didn’t exist. The landscape was silent but for the unknowable twitterings of the things chasing him; then he heard someone softly, but insistently, calling his name. It was a woman’s voice. It was Jennifer.

  He felt her cool hands on his face, and she was kneeling before him. She was dressed in a bathing suit this time, and she was softly saying his name over and over again. He tried to reach out to her, but he was still tied to his chair. She reached out
and touched his bonds, and they dissolved. He tumbled forward. She broke his fall and they both landed on the floor, Brennan on top.

  She was beautiful. He kissed her for a long, long moment, but then she squirmed away.

  “We have to get away, Daniel, we have to get out of here before they come back.”

  Brennan nodded. “We will,” he said, “we will,” and tried to kiss her again.

  She pushed him away. He fell off her to the floor and looked at her with hurt in his eyes. “Just like my other dream,” he said, and had an overwhelming urge to cry.

  “This isn’t a dream,” Jennifer said firmly, but lowly. “This is real.”

  She grabbed Brennan’s hand and held it. Her hands were warm and solid. Brennan reached out and touched her face.

  “You are real,” Brennan said wonderingly.

  “I am.” She stood, and pulled on Brennan’s arm.

  He tried to stand too, and immediately was struck by an intense attack of vertigo. He leaned on Jennifer, who staggered, but started him shuffling toward the door.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Rescuing you. No time to talk now.”

  Brennan’s bow and quiver was by the door, as were assorted knives and other items Quincey had taken from him. They stopped to pick up the bow and quiver, but there was no time for anything else.

  It was dark outside. Brennan wondered foggily how long he’d been unconscious. They just managed to stumble behind a tall, thick hedge when they saw Fadeout enter the front door accompanied by a brace of Werewolves. Brennan took a deep breath. The night air seemed to help revive him, or perhaps the drugs had simply worked through his system. He followed Jennifer under his own power through the garden. They were past the lawn and into the trees before they heard an alarm raised back at the house.

  “My car’s this way,” Brennan said.

  “I know. I’m parked next to it.”

  “How did you find me?” Brennan asked.

  Jennifer glanced at him as they made their way through the trees, their path lit by the light of a nearly full moon.

  “It took some doing. I spent a good part of yesterday and most of today looking through your old haunts, and finally tracked you down to the hotel. But you were gone, of course, and I’d never have found you if it hadn’t been for the phone call.”

  “Phone call?”

  “Yes. She said you were here, that you’d been captured.”

  They broke out of the trees to the roadside. Brennan’s keys were gone, so they piled into Jennifer’s car and roared off down the road with Jennifer behind the wheel.

  Brennan ran through a breathing exercise, trying to clear his head. Jennifer kept her eyes on the road, occasionally glancing at him.

  “The funny thing,” she said, “about the phone call.”

  She fell silent and glanced at Brennan again.

  “Yes?” he prompted.

  “I could swear that it was Chrysalis on the other end of the line.”

  Brennan slumped back in the car seat. There were a thousand things he wanted to say to Jennifer, but he couldn’t speak. His head whirled with her revelations and the aftereffects of the drugs Quincey had pumped into his system. Something was wrong here, very wrong, and there was perhaps only one person who could set them straight, only one person who would know for certain if it was Chrysalis’s shattered body that’d been found in her office.

  The man who had discovered it.

  Dutton sipped from his cardboard cup very calmly. “Would you prefer that I spill my coffee in shock or just quietly turn pale with guilt?”

  “Either one, just so you confess,” Jay said, “I’m not fussy.”

  “Assuming that I was guilty, isn’t it a bit naive to expect that I’d own up the moment I’m accused?”

  “Hey, it always works for Perry Mason,” Jay said. “You can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  Dutton put down the coffee, took off his cloak, and draped it over the back of a chair. Beneath the banks of fluorescent light, his skin was a ghastly shade of yellow, here and there mottled with dry, dead patches of brown. “I happen to look like the popular image of the grim reaper,” the joker said. “Sometimes that causes people to make unfortunate assumptions about me. I did not kill Chrysalis.”

  “Not personally,” Jay said, “but you had the bucks to hire it done. And you had the motive.”

  “Did I?” Dutton seemed amused. “The land on which the Palace stands is worth quite a bit, agreed. The saloon itself is a good tax loss. I may keep it open and I may not, but I’d hardly kill for it.”

  “Her other business was real profitable,” Jay pointed out. “Tax-free, too.” He took a sip of coffee. It was so hot it burned the back of his mouth going down. “You own part of that one, too?”

  “No,” Dutton said. “Oh, she willingly shared certain pieces of information whenever she heard anything that might affect my business interests, and there was never any charge to me. That was part of our arrangement. But otherwise her little hobby was her own.”

  “Only now it’s yours by default,” Jay suggested. “You wouldn’t want to put all those snitches out of work.”

  “Perhaps not,” Dutton said. “Undoubtedly her files contain items of considerable interest, and others of considerable value; I won’t pretend otherwise. Still, it’s nothing I’d bloody my hands for. I could have bought and sold Chrysalis a dozen times over, I didn’t need to murder her.”

  “So who did?” Jay asked.

  “I’m mystified,” Dutton said. “She was privy to a great deal of dangerous information, of course, but that very thing kept her safe. Alive, she could be dealt with. Kill her, and who knows what skeletons may come out of the closet.”

  “There are a lot of closets in the Crystal Palace,” said Jay.

  “You take my meaning then,” Dutton said. He shrugged. “I wish I could give you something more to work on. Truly I do.”

  “It’s okay,” Jay said. He took a last swallow of coffee and stood up. “Well, time to shuffle home to bed. You got a back door on this place?”

  “A side exit on the alley,” Dutton said, rising. “Come, let me show you.”

  The joker led him back through the labyrinth of silent wax, their footsteps echoing down the long corridors. They were crossing a small rotunda when Jay heard something behind them.

  He stopped, looked back. Nothing moving. “Are we alone here?”

  “Quite,” Dutton said. “Is something wrong?”

  “I heard something,” Jay said. “And I’ve got a funny feeling. Like we’re being watched.”

  Dutton smiled. “That’s very common. It’s the waxworks. People say their eyes follow you around the room.”

  Jay glanced around. They were passing through the Gallery of Beauty. In the shadows he glimpsed Peregrine, Aurora, Circe. “Peregrine’s eyes can follow me anywhere,” he quipped, but somehow he didn’t think that was it.

  “This way,” Dutton said.

  They turned a corner. Jay took Dutton firmly but quietly by the arm and pulled him back into a dark alcove beside a towering metal-and-wax likeness of Detroit Steel. Jay held a finger to his lips. Dutton gave a small, quick nod.

  In the stillness, Jay heard soft padding footfalls.

  Coming toward them.

  It couldn’t be the Oddity. Whatever it was was light-footed as a cat. And barefoot by the sound of it.

  Jay shaped his hand into a gun.

  A shadow darted past them, faster than Jay thought possible. It was small, no more than knee high, and it was out of sight before Jay could react. He jumped out of hiding, saw it—a hairless gray monkey thing, with too many arms—and pointed. Only it was faster than he was. It skittered up the front of a diorama, sliding over the glass quick as a lizard, and Jay popped a waxwork joker right out of his orgy and into the Aces High meat locker.

  “Damn,” he swore. He pointed again, but the monkey thing jumped before he drew a bead, swung on a fluorescent lighting fi
xture, and somersaulted right over Jay’s head. He turned to give chase and bumped into Dutton. “Where did it go?” he said.

  “Into the rotunda,” the joker said, “but…”

  Jay ran. It was gone when he hit the rotunda, but he caught a glimpse of motion down one corridor. He sprinted after it, turning the corner just in time to see it grab hold of an overhead pipe. It paused long enough to hiss like a feral cat, then ran down the pipe into a pitch dark room. Jay went after it. He was looking up at the ceiling pipes, running flat out. He never saw the display pedestal.

  It was like running into a telephone pole. Jay clutched his stomach and sat down hard, gasping with pain. The pedestal wobbled back and forth, and toppled over on top of him. Glass shattered. Liquid drenched him, and something soft and pale and slimy flopped onto his chest with a wet squish. There was an overwhelming smell of formaldehyde. He closed his eyes.

  There were footsteps behind him. “Are you all right?” Dutton’s voice asked.

  “No,” Jay said.

  “I tried to warn you,” Dutton said. He flicked on the lights.

  “Am I where I think I am?” Jay asked, eyes still closed. He thought he sounded surprisingly calm, all things considered.

  “I’m afraid so,” Dutton replied. “Welcome to the Monstrous Joker Babies. Can I do anything for you?”

  “Yes,” Jay said. “You can get it off me!”

  By the time he did, the monkey was long gone.

  11:00 P.M.

  Brennan smelled Ackroyd even before he opened his apartment door. Moving with sure, swift grace, he caught him by the elbow, propelled him in a half circle, and slammed him against the wall. Jennifer materialized from nowhere and shut the door.

  “Keep quiet and don’t move,” Brennan ordered. He had Ackroyd in a painful wrist lock, grinding the detective’s forearm into the small of his back.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ackroyd muttered aggrievedly, his face mashed up against the wall. “I think you broke my goddamn nose.”

  Brennan’s own nose twitched. “What the hell have you been drinking? You smell like you’ve been dipped in a vat of bad booze.”