Dead Man's Hand

  “Do you know where she lives?”

  “Hey, she’s not in my league. I’ve seen her around. Face of an angel gone bad. Weird red eyes and a body that’d tempt a saint to sin. I’d give a leg to get a piece. ’Course, I got more legs than I know what to do with anyway.”

  “What about the police? Was she ever mixed up with them?”

  Tripod shrugged. “Maybe. She’s spent a bundle on drugs. You gotta figure the police have been at least interested.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “You name it, she’s bought it. H, crack, coke, speed, ludes, pot, PKD, dust, designer stuff like rapture. Christ, if the rumors are half-true she’s bought enough dope to send an army up the highway to heaven.”

  Brennan frowned. Perhaps Sascha had gotten hooked on something that’d put him under Ezili’s control. Perhaps he’d let slip something to Ezili, who told Quincey, who told Wyrm. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. “Where does she hang out?”

  “Couple places.” Tripod gave him the names of some clubs, none of which had savory reputations.

  Brennan finished his drink, put the glass down on the bar, and surreptitiously dropped two twenties on the floor.

  “Thanks.” He turned to leave, stopped, looked back at Tripod, who was slipping the bills into his ankle pocket with the oddly articulated toes of his middle foot. “One last thing. Ever hear of an ace named Doug Morkle?”

  “Morkle? What the hell kind of name is that for an ace?”

  Brennan shook his head. “Damned if I know.”

  The back half of Dr. Finn looked like a palomino pony; the front half looked too young to be a doctor. “What happened?” Finn asked as he taped up Jay’s ribs.

  “I was looking for a sport jacket,” Jay said morosely.

  “Remind me never to use your tailor,” Finn replied. He finished the taping. “There. How’s that feel?”

  “Tight,” Jay complained. He tried to flex his arm and winced at the pain. “Makes it hard to move.”

  “Good,” Finn said. “I wouldn’t want you doing too much moving until that rib knits. You’re very lucky, Mr. Ackroyd. A few more inches, and the bone might have punctured a lung.”

  “What about my head?”

  “The X-rays show only a very mild concussion,” Finn told him. “Nothing to worry about, as long as you take it easy.”

  “Might as well,” Jay said, “can’t dance.”

  “Too bad,” Finn said. He grinned and did a quick little four-legged softshoe. “I cut quite a rug myself.”

  “I’ll just bet. Do I get anything for the pain? This headache would be killing me if I wasn’t so distracted by my rib.”

  Finn took a pad out of his pocket and scrawled a prescription. “Here,” he said, ripping off the top sheet and handing it to Jay. “This ought to help.”

  “Thanks.” Jay hopped down off the examination table. It was a mistake, and the broken rib let him know that right away. “Oh shit,” he said, gritting his teeth.

  “Don’t want to go around jarring yourself that way,” Finn said, altogether too cheerfully for Jay’s taste. “I wouldn’t drive in your condition either. Do you have a ride home?”

  “I’ll take a cab,” Jay said. Charles Dutton had taken him to the clinic, after he’d satisfied himself that Jay had nothing more of value to tell him, but he didn’t imagine that the joker had hung around in the waiting room. Even if he had, Jay figured he’d had more than enough of Dutton and the Oddity for today. “You did the autopsy on Chrysalis, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Finn replied. “The police always call us in on joker autopsies. The coroner doesn’t feel qualified to deal with our unique joker physiology.” The little centaur looked away and shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “A terrible thing. We see a lot of murder victims here in the clinic and it’s never pretty, but the way her body was mutilated…” Finn shook his head.

  “Yeah.” Jay touched his bruised and swollen face, thinking that he knew just how she must have felt.

  5:00 P.M.

  Brennan awoke still soaked with sweat and numb from a half-remembered dream in which all of his friends and lovers were killed slowly and excruciatingly by some unseen agency he was powerless to stop. He was reassured somewhat when he spotted Jennifer sitting in the room’s only chair, listening distractedly to the transmitter they’d planted on Quasiman. She heard Brennan stir, turned to watch him sit up and run his hands through his hair.

  “About time you woke up,” she said. “I’m suffering from terminal boredom listening to Quasiman stumble through his day.”

  “Nothing to link him to the murder?”

  She shook her head. “Either he’s incredibly clever, which frankly I doubt, or he has no connection with Barnett’s crowd.”

  “What’d he do today?” Brennan asked.

  “Got up early. It took him a while to figure out how to use the mop, then he washed the church’s floors. Went up on the roof for a coffee break and forgot to come down. Father Squid called up to him to remind him to mow the lawn in the graveyard. That was a tough one. By the time he figured out the lawn mower, it was lunch. He spent the afternoon mowing and trimming. Once the transmitter stopped sending for forty-five minutes. I think it accompanied Quasiman into whatever alien dimension it is that he slips into.

  “You ask me, he’s just what he appears to be. A sweet, terribly afflicted church handyman.”

  “Figures.” Brennan picked his jeans up off the floor and slid into them, then rummaged through the bureau for a fresh T-shirt. “I got a possible line on Sascha this morning from Tripod. It seems he has a girlfriend—”

  He stopped and stared at the plain white envelope that was lying on the worn carpet just inside the door to the hotel room.

  “How long has that been there?” he asked Jennifer.

  She turned, looked at the envelope, and frowned. “I don’t know. I didn’t notice it before.”

  Brennan crossed the room and picked up the envelope. It was unsealed and unaddressed. He opened it and took out the single piece of paper it held with a message scrawled in a familiar childish hand.

  “Sorry how things turned out befour,” it read. “I only want to help you. If you want to find a reel rap-head, go to Chickadee’s.”

  “Damn,” Brennan muttered to himself. “Just what the hell is going on here?”

  6:00 P.M.

  “Jesus,” Digger said. “What’s wrong with your face?”

  Jay closed the office door behind him and looked down at the reporter. Digger was almost eight inches tall now. In a couple more days he might be able to pass for a dwarf. “I’m disguised as a guy who got the shit beat out of him,” he said. He moved slowly across the office and sat down. The radio was babbling something about the convention. It made his head hurt even more. He turned it off.

  “God, it hurts just to look at you,” Digger said. “You realize that half your face is purple?”

  “Good thing I don’t wear a tie. The colors might clash.”

  “Don’t worry about it, in a day or two the swelling will go down and the bruise’ll turn green.” Downs sounded like a man who had been there himself; sometimes the public didn’t appreciate crusading journalists. “Where the hell you been?”

  “Sleeping,” Jay said. The painkillers made him groggy.

  “Sleeping? Jesus, Ackroyd. All hell is breaking loose down in Atlanta, Hartmann’s something like three hundred votes from the nomination, and you decide to take a nap?”

  “Downs,” Jay warned, “I just woke up, my head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton, I’ve got a concussion and a broken rib but I don’t dare take any more painkillers because I can’t think straight when I do, and I lost the goddamned jacket, so if you don’t shut the fuck up right now, I’m going to pop you to the middle of the Holland Tunnel to play in traffic, okay?”

  Digger made a noise like a man whose aged grandmother had just been run over by a semi. “You lost the jacket!” he screeched.

  Jay sighe
d. “Dutton destroyed the damned thing before I could get to it,” he said wearily.

  “Jesus,” Digger said, his irritating little voice in a panic. “Jesusjesusjesus, what are we gonna do?”

  “We’re running out of options,” Jay admitted. “Not to mention time.” He tried to think. It wasn’t easy, the way his head was pounding. “Look, maybe Kahina had something else beside the jacket. Blood tests. Letters. Anything. I know, it’s a long shot, but what else is there? How much do you know about her?”

  “I did a little digging after … after she died,” Digger said. “Very low key, y’know? I didn’t want to stir nothing up. The chick was in the country illegally, I know that much. With her background, I didn’t think it was likely she smuggled herself in, so she must have had help, but whoever did it was a pro, covered up her trail real nice.”

  “What about after she got here?”

  Digger shrugged. “She was living in Jokertown under an assumed name. You shoulda seen where she was staying, a real dump. The girl had guts, I’ll give her that, but it wasn’t like she knew what she was doing. She couldn’t of been more conspicuous if she tried. The day she arrived, she was even wearing one of them black Moslem things, you know, whatchacallit, a chador. She switched to American clothes pretty quick but it didn’t help much, she was still the only nat in the hotel, and it was obvious she just loathed jokers.”

  “Then what the hell was she doing working with Gimli and Chrysalis?” Jay said bluntly.

  “She wasn’t working with Chrysalis,” Digger said. “That was Gimli’s idea, Kahina was against it all the way. They had some huge fight about it. They fought all the time. Religion, politics, strategy, they didn’t agree on anything.” He shrugged. “Hey, politics makes strange bedfellows, right?”

  Jay frowned. “How do you know all this?”

  “Chrysalis told me,” Digger admitted. “Gimli had a leak in his little conspiracy, and you know how it was, if anything leaked anywhere in Jokertown, you could bet your sweet ass that Chrysalis would hear it.”

  “Yeah,” said Jay thoughtfully. He got slowly to his feet.

  “Where you going now?” Digger asked.

  “Jokertown,” Jay said. “I got an urge to see Kahina’s last known address for myself.”

  7:00 P.M.

  Brennan looked around Chickadee’s helplessly, wondering what to do now that he was here, alone. Jennifer was waiting for him outside, this not being the type of club where she could go and not attract attention. He went up to the bar and ordered a Tullamore. He was nursing it silently, letting thoughts crawl lazily, fruitlessly through his mind, when a slurred, drunken voice said, “You’re the one was my little girl’s friend.”

  He glanced down annoyedly, did a double take, and stared. The man who had spoken looked like Joe Jory, but he had been changed. His chin was virtually gone. His nose had been turned into a pig snout, and two-inch-long incisors protruded from his helplessly grinning mouth. His eyes were beady and red, as if he’d been drinking, or weeping, for hours.

  “What happened?” Brennan asked.

  Jory gave a helpless shrug, as if nothing mattered anymore. “I don’t know. I went to a bar last night. It was in an alley and the doorman was dressed all in black. He smiled a real strange smile and let me in for nothing, he said, nothing at all. I told some of the people inside about my little girl, about how beautiful she’d been and what the virus done to her, and they brought me drinks and told me how sorry they were that my child was a joker and they told me to tell everyone about it. I got up on a stage and told everyone how awful it was, how we didn’t have jokers in Oklahoma and people laughed at me. They laughed and laughed and someone yelled, ‘You do now!’ and this ugly bouncer threw me out of the bar. I went to another place and people still laughed at me and I realized that something horrible had happened, like someone put a mask on my face but I couldn’t take it off. I drank till I passed out and in the morning I went back to the bar to make them turn my face back so I could be a real person again, but the bar was gone. It wasn’t there.…”

  His voice ran down into racking sobs, and despite himself Brennan was touched with pity for the bewildered man who was so far out of his depth. He’d run into a place Brennan had only heard whispers of; Jokers Wild in Rat’s Alley, where the dead men lose their bones, where no one who enters is safe, where most anyone who enters is changed, never for the better.

  “Help me.…” Jory sobbed.

  “What do you want from me?” Brennan asked quietly.

  “Give me my face back,” Jory asked, but Brennan shook his head.

  “Can’t do that,” he said in the same soft voice.

  “Then buy me a bottle. They took all my money last night. All my money, and my face.”

  Brennan stared at him a moment longer, then signaled the bartender and put a twenty on the counter. When the bottle came, Jory took it and clutched it to his chest and scurried away. Brennan watched him disappear into the crowded room. It was then that he saw the girl with the blue mouth.

  She was with a man down the bar, drinking with him and laughing a little too loudly whenever he spoke. She was standing so close to him that her bare knees were pressing against his thigh, and she was toying with his hair, making little loose ringlets of it with her middle finger. Brennan thought she looked familiar, then realized that she was Lori, the hostess who’d escorted him to Quinn’s suite the night the Eskimo was having his coming-out party for rapture. She was one of the demonstrators who had shown how safe and easy it was to take the drug.

  Brennan took his Tullamore’s and moved off down the bar. He stopped before the man, crowding him so that he had to look up. He smiled down at him.

  “I’d like to talk to the lady.”

  The man looked as if he were going to dispute things, then thought better of it. “Sure, buddy,” he said. “Plenty of babes in this place.”

  He slid off the stool and Brennan took his place. Lori watched the john hurry off, then switched her attention to Brennan. She smiled. Her blue gums and tongue made her smile look sinister against her white teeth and red lips.

  “You look like a man who likes to party,” she said hopefully. She obviously didn’t recognize Brennan, which was perfectly understandable since he had been wearing a Mae West mask the last time she saw him.

  “I do.”

  “Good.” Her smile grew wider, her eyes brighter. “Let’s go upstairs, honey. I can show you something you’ve never seen before.”

  “You can?”

  “Sure. Trust me.” She urged Brennan off the stool. Her palms were sweaty, her body had a vaguely sour odor about it, an odor of perspiration drowned in cheap body scent.

  Her room was a small cubicle with a messily made bed. She closed the door after them and smiled with insincere coyness at Brennan.

  “Let’s get the business out of the way, honey. Then we can be friends. Now,” she went on, after Brennan had nodded, “it’s gonna cost a hundred. But for only a hundred and fifty I can give you something really special. Something really different.”

  “What’s that?” Brennan asked.

  She was already pulling open the drawer of her cluttered, rickety vanity. “It’s called rapture, honey, and it’s sheer heaven.”

  She held up a small vial of blue powder, much like the one Brennan had seen the night of the party. But as soon as she drew it out, she became fixated on it. She stared at it with a growing blankness and her hands began to shake a little. She unstoppered it and stared at it like it held the keys to the kingdom.

  “What’s it do?” Brennan asked, watching her closely.

  “Do?” As if unable to resist any longer, she dipped her forefinger into the vial and then put it in her mouth, rubbing it swiftly across her already stained gums. She smiled, and sucked her now-blue fingertip daintily, as if it’d been dipped in some sort of delicious sauce. “It makes everything so fresh and tasty and good feeling. Let me rub a little on your cock, honey, and it will be out of this wor
ld.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  Lori laughed and shook her head. “No way. I’ve been taking it for weeks now.” She leaned closer and smiled confidentially. “Me and the guy who made it are like this,” she said, entwining two fingers.

  “I’ll bet.” Brennan moved closer and she smiled in unfocused ecstasy, her hand dropping to the crotch of his jeans and fumbling there. He smiled at her. “No thanks,” he said, and smoothly took the vial of rapture away from her.

  “Hey!”

  “Why can’t we do it without the rapture?” he asked.

  “Because it’s so good with it.”

  “I like it plain.”

  “But it’s better, it really is,” she said with increasing frenzy.

  He remembered what Quincey had said about it a couple of days before, a drug that was so good that it makes a whore like sex.

  “What’s it like without the rapture?” he asked, holding the vial away as she snatched for it.

  “Like always,” she spat. “Boring. Dead. Unfeeling.”

  “How about food? What’s that like without a dose?”

  She made a face. “Cardboard and paste. Rotting compost.”

  “Wine? Champagne?”

  “Tepid water with shit floating in it. Give me that!”

  Brennan held it up and away from her, shaking his head. “I need it. I have a friend who might want to have a look at this.”

  “I’ll scream,” she said.

  Brennan shook his head. “No, you won’t. I’m going to give you a dose, then I’m going to tie you up and you can tell everyone that I robbed you.”

  “Give me two doses. One for later,” she panted.

  “Sure.”

  Lori nodded frantically and turned back to her vanity. She gave Brennan a small tin box into which he tipped a shot of the powder. Then she handed him a small mirror. He laid out a line and she found a straw somewhere and took it all in through her nose with a long snort. She leaned back and smiled.

  “What’s it like when you do it that way?” he asked curiously.

  “Good thoughts,” Lori said dreamily. “Only good thoughts.”

  He nodded and led her to the bed. She sat down obediently as he tore the sheet into strips, bound and gagged her. He left her room wondering what kind of thoughts she’d have after the rapture wore off.