“I found another body,” Jay told him.
“Jesus,” Digger said. “Who?”
“Damned if I know.”
“Was it one of Mackie’s?” Downs wanted to know.
“I don’t think so,” Jay said. “This one was pretty ripe, but all the pieces were still attached.”
Downs climbed up the pizza box, teetered on the edge of the wastebasket for a moment, and jumped down to the floor. He landed with a grunt. “We got to get Hartmann before he gets us,” he said. “I told you how he works.…”
“Yeah, you told me,” Jay admitted. “It’s a great story. It better be, it’s all we’ve got. Your word against his. A presidential candidate versus the guy who broke the story about the Howler’s secret love child. Wonder who they’ll believe? Of course, you got substantiation—Chrysalis, Kahina, Gimli, hell yes. Too bad they’re all dead.”
“The jacket!” Digger insisted. “That’s your proof!”
“Maybe,” Jay admitted. “If we had the jacket. Which we don’t. You wouldn’t happen to know where Chrysalis hid her stash of secrets, would you?”
Downs shook his head.
“Too bad,” Jay said. “What can you tell me about Sascha?”
“Sascha?” Digger looked thoughtful. “Well, he’s a telepath. Does that help? He just skims off surface thoughts, you know? But if he was to leak what he picked up … Christ, you don’t think Sascha was tied with Hartmann, do you?”
“The notion did cross my mind,” Jay admitted.
“Jesus,” Digger repeated. “I never paid much attention to Sascha … I mean, he was just kind of there, you know? But he was there a lot … if he was reporting to Hartmann … she trusted him, goddammit. Him and Elmo, she counted on them. Sascha could pick up on trouble before it happened, and Elmo would handle it.”
“Unless Sascha was part of the trouble,” Jay pointed out. “Chrysalis ever say anything about Sascha’s girlfriend?”
Digger seemed astonished. “What girlfriend?”
Jay sighed. “Never mind,” he said. He got up.
“Where you going?” Digger asked.
“Out,” Jay said.
“When are you coming back?”
“Later,” Jay said as he unlocked the door. He needed a quiet drink. Some food would be nice, too. Not to mention sleep, but somehow he didn’t think sleep was part of tonight’s program.
Brennan tossed and turned on the lumpy bed, half-asleep and half-awake, tormented by dreams that he couldn’t separate from reality. He kicked off the confining, sweat-soaked sheets and glanced over at Jennifer. She was still soundly asleep. The clock on the bedstand beside her said that he had about two and a half hours before his meeting with Fadeout. He needed more sleep, but he doubted that it would come.
The memory of Chrysalis was a dull ache in his mind. Like Tachyon had said, her ghost was a demanding one. He fantasized dropping the card she’d given him on the body of the man or woman, ace or joker, who’d killed her. The only problem was that he could only conjure a big blank spot for the identity of the murderer.
It wasn’t Bludgeon, it wasn’t the Oddity. He couldn’t really picture Quasiman in the role of cold-blooded killer. That left Wyrm and Doug Morkle as the final possibilities from Ackroyd’s list. Wyrm, maybe. Morkle, who the hell knew?
He turned again restlessly toward the window, and froze. He wondered if he were still dreaming, or if he was just hallucinating.
The window seemed to have grown to gigantic proportions, lending credence to the notion that he was only dreaming that he was awake. It was framing Chrysalis from the neck up. He’d recognize her anywhere. It was her gleaming skull, her blue eyes, her red, pouting lips.
He stared for a good five seconds, then closed and rubbed his eyes. When he opened them, she was gone.
He lay there in bed staring at the now-empty window, telling himself to get up and go to it, but he was afraid.
He lay there and closed his eyes and told himself that it was only a dream, and after a while he’d almost convinced himself that that was true.
3:00 A.M.
“Coffee, Jay?” Vi asked him.
He’d grabbed a booth by the window. The counter drew a lot of strange people during the graveyard shift, and Jay wasn’t feeling real sociable. “Yeah, please,” he said. “And give me a patty melt, too. Extra onions, side of fries.”
“Gotcha.” Vi poured his coffee and left to place his order.
Someone had left a rumpled Daily News in the booth. Jay smoothed it out and read the lead story. The Democrats had started voting down in Atlanta. Hartmann had broken well in front, and he was gaining strength with each ballot. Leo Barnett was several hundred votes behind, followed by Jackson, Dukakis, and Gore. Much as he hated to admit it, Digger was right. He had to do something. But what?
He pushed aside the newspaper, took his list from his pocket, and looked at the names again. Wyrm, Quasiman, Bludgeon, the Oddity, and Doug Morkle. Yeoman swore it wasn’t Bludgeon. If the mystery player was really Hartmann and not Barnett, that deep-sixed Quasiman’s motive. Jay hadn’t turned up a damn thing pointing at the Shadow Fists, and the M.O. was all wrong for Wyrm anyway. He still didn’t know who the fuck Doug Morkle was, but by now he didn’t care. It had to be the Oddity. Didn’t it?
Jay dug out the list of flight times he’d swiped off the scratch pad by Ezili’s phone. He took a sip of coffee. “Fuck it,” he said aloud. It didn’t have to be the Oddity.
Atlanta was too damn close. It looked like the flight time averaged about two hours, nonstop. The earliest departure left at 6:55 in the morning, and got into Atlanta at 9:07. The killer could have caught the last plane out of Atlanta Sunday night, dropped by the Crystal Palace in the early hours of the morning to murder Chrysalis, and still made it back to Georgia in time for the opening of the convention. Which meant that some of the other names on the list deserved a second look.
If Downs was telling the truth, Chrysalis had sent her assassin after Gregg Hartmann. She hadn’t told anyone, yet somehow Hartmann had found out. The leak had to be Sascha. Elmo had been hiring the assassin just about the same time Chrysalis was getting killed, which meant somebody had known what she was going to do before she did it. New York had too damn many telepaths as far as Jay was concerned, but Sascha was the only one who was close to Chrysalis.
Jay took a swallow of coffee, grimaced, and cursed himself for a fool. He should have seen it much earlier. Sascha had been there when Jay found the body; even without eyes, he’d sensed an intruder in the building. So why hadn’t he sensed the killer?
Or had he?
Okay, so Sascha picks the assassination plot out of Chrysalis’s mind and leaks it to Hartmann, who sends Mackie Messer to make sushi out of Digger Downs, and someone else, someone with superhuman strength, to take Chrysalis out of the game. The Oddity? Maybe …
But Jack Braun was a Hartmann supporter, and Billy Ray was the senator’s bodyguard. The brutality of the murder seemed out of character for Braun. Carnifex had a nasty reputation … but maybe that didn’t matter. According to Downs, the Syrian girl claimed Hartmann made her slit her brother’s throat, so maybe he compelled Braun to do his dirty work the same way.
Vi came bustling up with his patty melt in one hand and a fresh pot of coffee in the other. She set down the plate and refilled Jay’s cup. He folded up his papers and put them away. “Who you like for president, Vi?” he asked the waitress.
She snorted. “They’re all crooks,” she said as she walked off. “I wouldn’t vote for none of them.”
Jay stared at his patty melt. The onions were grilled almost black, just the way he liked them. He tried a french fry. It needed ketchup. “Hey, Vi,” he called out, but by then she was back behind the counter, waiting on a couple of hookers who’d just strolled in off Forty-second Street.
The Oddity was still a better candidate than Golden Boy or Carnifex, Jay decided. Hartmann would have had to have learned of the assassination the night before to
get either Braun or Ray on a plane on time, but if he had known that far in advance, why the hell did it take him so long to send Mackie after Digger Downs? And why not have Mackie take care of Chrysalis, too? Why use two killers, either of whom could implicate him? And why dispatch someone from Atlanta when he had local talent on the scene? That is, assuming Mackie had been on the scene. Maybe he’d been in Atlanta, too. That would explain why it had taken him so long to make his try for Downs.
The hell of it was, if Hartmann was an ace, every name on the goddamned list would need a second look; Troll, Ernie the Lizard, Doughboy, hell, they were probably all Hartmann fans. None of them seemed to have any particular motive for killing Chrysalis, but maybe they didn’t need one, maybe they were Hartmann’s unwilling pawns, like Kahina. So where the fuck did that leave him? Jay took a bite of his patty melt and chewed thoughtfully.
Was Hartmann a secret ace? Digger said so, him and his goddamned nose. Some evidence; a smell that no one else could smell. The cops would just love that. The only way to prove Digger’s story was to find that jacket. Jay tried to think where he might hide if he was a jacket, but the only thing that came to mind was a closet, and all the obvious closets had been checked pretty thoroughly.
The patty melt needed ketchup too. “Vi,” Jay called loudly.
She came over with the coffeepot in hand and stopped when she saw his cup was still full. “Whatcha need, honey?”
“Ketchup,” Jay said.
Vi looked disgusted. “Honest to Christ,” she said. “What do you think that is?” She pointed.
Jay blinked. The ketchup bottle was right there on the table, over against the window between the napkin dispenser and the salt-and-pepper shakers. Vi gave a put-upon sigh and walked off. Jay picked up the bottle, unscrewed the top, and poured a good-sized puddle on his plate. How stupid could he get, the damn thing was right there in front of him all the time.
Then it hit him.
4:00 A.M.
The forgotten cemetery, left untended for several decades, had become a pocket wilderness in the city. Many of its graves had collapsed during the years of neglect. Its weathered tombstones, most bearing names as forgotten as the cemetery itself, were canted crookedly throughout the rank undergrowth. The graveyard had an air of melancholy decay about it, but Brennan didn’t mind. He liked its silent darkness. It was almost as quiet and peaceful as the country.
He wore dark clothes and carried his compound bow, assembled and ready for use. The bow was the proper weapon for this place, stained as dark as the night that hid Brennan and as quiet as the corpses that kept him company as he waited.
The silence was finally broken by the approach of a car that Brennan heard but couldn’t see from his hiding place in the bushes. He could hear the driver park outside the crumbling brick wall that surrounded the graveyard and kill the engine. Doors opened and slammed shut, and there was silence again.
Then Brennan heard something heavy move through the undergrowth.
He froze. From the sounds it made, Brennan could tell that it was big. He took a deep breath, but could smell nothing beside the annoying city odors that penetrated even here. He stood still, holding his breath in a night so quiet that he could hear the blood rushing through the capillaries in his ears. He heard it move through the bushes and high grass, searching for him.
He ran through the undergrowth, moving away from the thing as silently as he could. It paused and took a great snuffling breath as it tasted the air for his scent.
He kept moving, circling around the deteriorating mausoleum where once he’d ambushed a group of Immaculate Egrets who were using an alien teleportation device to smuggle heroin into the city. He paused a moment when he heard a vast, satisfied hissing, as if a dozen steam pipes had burst and were happy about it. The thing hunting him had found his trail.
Faster now, careless of sound, Brennan bounded over the broken tombstones and through a tangle of lilac and wild rose, his way lit by a late-setting moon a few days short of full. He pushed through the undergrowth, ignoring the thorns that tore at him, and reached the base of the crumbling brick wall that surrounded the cemetery.
There was a loud crash at his back as something long and sinuous smashed through the stand of lilac and wild rose and stood shining in the night, moonlight glistening off its silver and gold scales.
It was a twenty-foot-long dragon, slender as a snake. Its four feet bore razor-sharp talons; its face was an elaborate Oriental mask with knifelike teeth, bulging red eyes, and clouds of steam puffing from its flaring nostrils.
It had to be Lazy Dragon. Fadeout had sent him to the meeting as something far removed from a mouse or a cute little kitty cat. Brennan automatically reached for the quiver velcroed to his belt, though he doubted that even his most powerful explosive arrow could harm such a formidable-looking beast.
The locks were nothing special. Caution made the job take three times as long as it should have, but finally he managed to slide back the dead bolt. Jay opened the door a crack and moved inside the cool, dark interior of the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum.
A red light blinked silently in the key box mounted on the wall. Jay went to it and punched in the sequence of numbers he’d seen Dutton enter on Tuesday night. He had a good memory for things like that; the flashing red light was replaced by a steady green.
The interior of the museum was even creepier now that he was alone than it had been when Dutton had led him through it. The wax figures stared at him as he crept down the halls, and he kept imagining Monstrous Joker Babies lurking in every shadow. He got lost twice before he finally found the Syrian diorama.
All the lights were out. Jay could barely make out the outlines of the wax figures behind the glass, each frozen in a moment of time; Sayyid poised on the brink of collapse, Hiram squeezing his fist, poor lost Kahina with the bloodstained knife in her hands. Somewhere in the middle was Hartmann.
It was too dark to see the senator clearly. There had to be some way inside. He looked over the row of special-effects buttons, picked one, and pressed. Inside the diorama, hidden lights bathed Jack Braun in a golden glow. Long dusky shadows grew from the wax figures. The dim light stained Carnifex’s white costume yellow as a dandelion, glittered off Peregrine’s metal talons. Off to one side, barely visible against the painted backdrop, Jay saw the faint outline of a door.
He released the button and looked around until he found a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. The accessway was pitch black, airless, and narrow. Jay lit a match and fumbled his way along with one hand on the wall. The door to Syria was unlocked.
Jay dropped the burnt-out match and lit another. Its reflected twin burned faintly in the dark glass, and the flame made the wax figures seem to twist and move. Jay stepped carefully over Dr. Tachyon, unconscious on the ground in his Arab finery, edged between Golden Boy and the Oddity, and passed under Sayyid’s awesome looming presence to where Gregg Hartmann stood.
Hartmann’s tie was deftly knotted, his dress shirt pressed and starched. He was in his shirt sleeves. Jay blinked in confusion. Then he heard the soft footfall behind him.
He turned just in time to see the huge black-cloaked figure looming over him, and glimpse the fist whistling out of darkness. The first blow nearly took his head off. The second smashed him square in the chest, and he stopped breathing. Somewhere in there he lost the match. A fist like a cinder block caught him along the side of his head and knocked him sideways. Jay bumped into a wax terrorist and went down hard.
It dawned on him, as he lay dazed, that the Oddity hadn’t gone on that WHO tour.
He didn’t have to think about it long. Jay felt hands grab him, fingers like steel cable digging into his flesh. He was jerked upward, and then he was flying. Glass shattered all around him, and something hard and cold came up to smash into him. He thought maybe it was the floor.
Brennan suddenly realized that he was about to shoot at the wrong target. He swiveled, grabbed the top of the crumbling brick wall that surround
ed the cemetery, and pulled himself up.
Fadeout was leaning against the hood of the car parked in front of the cemetery gate, smoking a cigarette. Brennan scowled, grabbed an arrow, and raised his bow and fired.
Fadeout did a double take as the arrow punched through the hood of his car, penetrating deep into the engine.
“Jesus Christ!” He stared at the shaft for a moment, turned, and looked into the night. “Yeoman?”
“Call off Dragon,” Brennan answered, “or the next one goes into your right eye.”
Fadeout hesitated.
“I mean it!” Brennan shouted, calculating his chances of releasing the shaft he had nocked to his bowstring, finding an explosive arrow in his quiver, stringing it, and hitting the dragon before the beast pulped him.
His fingers twitched, ready to release the arrow he had aimed at Fadeout; then the Shadow Fist captain called out, “Okay, it’s okay. I just wanted him to scout the cemetery. Dragon, go back to your body! Now!”
Brennan stared at the creature. It looked back impassively and then started to twist and shrivel, collapsing upon itself until it was only a small bit of intricately folded paper that blew away on the night wind. A moment passed, then Lazy Dragon got out of the back of the car and stood by Fadeout.
Brennan relaxed the tension on his bowstring. “Come in through the gate,” he called, “if you’re done playing games and want to talk.”
Fadeout and Dragon exchanged glances. Fadeout was older, taller, a fit-looking man in an expensive-looking suit. Dragon was a young Asian, smaller, frailer looking, but he had the more dangerous ace power of the two. Fadeout, though, was the boss, and Dragon would take his cue from him.
“You can’t blame me for being cautious,” Fadeout said, leading the way into the cemetery through the sagging wrought-iron gate. “You killed a lot of Fists at Tachyon’s clinic.”
Brennan jumped down lightly from the top of the wall.
“Do you really care about that?” he asked.