The Shark security man had told him some disturbing things. The guy was only low-level muscle, so he wasn't exactly sitting in on policy meetings, but he was with the detachment that had come to the island with General MacArthur Johnson, the head of Shark security. They'd brought half a dozen jokers to the island with them. The jokers had been dumped at the entrance to the manor's mysterious east wing, which was off-limits to most of the staff. That was the last he'd seen of them. A few days later a young blond guy had shown up and taken residence in the living quarters in the complex's west wing. The security man had never seen him before. Rumors spread quickly among the staff that it was Pan Rudo, leader of the Sharks, in a brand new body.
Ray didn't like the sound of any of this. The body-switching was entirely possible. All the jumpers were supposed to be dead, but "supposed" isn't "certain." Ray also didn't know exactly why the Sharks needed jokers from the streets of New York City, but he knew they weren't going to treat them to two weeks of fun in the Caribbean sun. The rumors had to be true. There must really be a Black Trump, the Sharks' final solution to the wild card problem. Maybe Rudo or one of the other escaped Sharks had some of the virus and they were going to test it on the jokers. Maybe.
In any case, the answers seemed to be in the east wing. Ray would worry about tracking down the rejuvenated Pan Rudo later. He had to discover what the Sharks were doing to the jokers. And he had to be damn careful doing it. A Black Trump could bring him down as easily as the scrawniest, weakest joker.
Ray sauntered off toward the east wing. He didn't know how he was going to get in if it was off-limits to most Sharks, but that was something he'd worry about when he came to it. He was quite pleased to see his simple disguise working as he passed a couple of security men hurrying down the hall. They didn't even glance at him as they hustled by.
Sometimes it pays to be subtle, he told himself as he passed from the central part of the manor where the kitchen and service areas were located, to the mysterious east wing. He knew he had reached his goal when he came to a guarded checkpoint. There were two uniformed Sharks at the double doors leading into unknown territory. One wore sunglasses even though the lighting was soft fluorescent.
"What's up?" Ray asked as he approached.
"You haven't heard?" the one without sunglasses asked.
"Heard what?"
"There's an intruder in the perimeter," the Shark said. "One of the sentries patrolling outside was cold-cocked."
"That right?" Ray asked. He smiled at the one in the sunglasses, who looked back stonily.
"Who are you, anyway?" the talkative Shark asked. "Did you come in with the new detachment last night?"
Ray shook his head "Nope. Got here later than that."
Ray waited. The one in the sunglasses caught on first. He tried to bring his rifle up, but Ray grabbed it by the barrel and ripped it out of his hands. He swung the butt hard, catching the Shark flush on the chin. The guard shot backward, banged his head on the wall, and slid down to the floor.
Ray pointed the rifle casually at the other sentry. "You going to open that," he said, gesturing at the door with the gun barrel, "or do I blast it down through you?"
The sentry looked as if he didn't know if he wanted to be afraid or pissed. "You wouldn't."
Ray took a step forward and jabbed the rifle barrel into the sentry's stomach. "Don't bet your life on it, moron. My name is Billy Ray. They call me Carnifex. And I'm a wild carder, motherfucker."
"All right," the guard said, his voice quavering. Slowly he reached for the key chain at his side, selected a key, and put it in the lock. "This okay, huh?"
"Yup," Ray said, and clipped him on the back of the head with the rifle barrel. This was getting monotonous, Ray thought. The Sharks really needed to hire a better class of goon. He slung the rifle, then reached down and grabbed one of the sentries by the collar, the other by the pants leg, and dragged them inside. He tossed the rifle and closed the door behind him. He looked around.
"What the hell is this?" he asked aloud.
It was a laboratory, something Ray wasn't all that familiar with. He recognized glass flasks and test tubes, stainless steel sinks and scarred wooden workbenches, but that was about it. He had no idea about the autoclaves, incubators, freezers, and the electron microscope. The room was clean, orderly, very white and antiseptic-looking. Ray approved. But there was no sign of the jokers.
As Ray looked around with a frown on his face, the door in the back wall opened and a woman wearing a white lab coat entered the room. She was intent on reading her notebook, and almost bumped into Ray.
She looked up, startled. "You shouldn't be here."
Ray smiled. "Should you?"
"What? What are you talking about?"
Ray pointed at the door through which she just came. "What's in there?"
"Are you insane?" She tried to go by Ray. "I'm getting Mr. Johnson."
Ray grabbed her arm, swung her around. "I'm sure we'll meet soon. In the meantime I want you to tell me about the jokers you brought here last week."
She looked indignant and tried to pull away, but quickly realized the futility of that. Her indignation turned to fear. "Who are you? You're not one of the regular - " She noticed the unconscious sentries lying on the floor. "Oh."
"Very observant," Ray said. "You must be a real rocket scientist." His grip tightened. "Who are you?"
"I'm not - " for an instant she seemed defiant, then Ray squeezed hard enough to bruise her arm. She winced and made an instinctive, abortive move to pull away.
"You are," Ray said. He put his face close to hers. "I've had it with this pussy-footing shit. I'm going to get some answers soon or I'm going to start breaking things. And you're right at hand, babe."
"My name is Michelle," she said quickly. "Michelle Poynter."
"Poynter." Ray thought for a second. "Oh. You're Faneuil's assistant."
"Yes. How did you know?"
"Your boss is in a cell singing like a fucking canary."
"You're from the government?"
"Yeah. And you're under arrest. Now where's those jokers? In there?"
He dragged her with him as he went through the door and into another room that was as big as the lab, or would have been if it wasn't partitioned off into half a dozen small cells, furnished only with rack-like beds, stainless steel sinks, and lidless toilets. They were separated from the main room by a glass wall rather than metal bars. There was nothing in the main room besides a desk and matching swivel chair.
Some of the cells were empty. Some weren't.
Ray looked angrily at Poynter. Subconsciously his grip tightened so hard that she went limp from pain. "What is this shit?" Ray hissed in a low, shocked voice.
Four of the cells had occupants. It was hard to say if most of the prisoners were alive. One was sprawled in a heap between his bed and the glass wall that separated his cell from the rest of the room. He lay in a pool of black, coagulated blood. He wasn't moving. Two lay in their narrow beds. One was covered to his chin - Ray thought he was male, though he couldn't be sure - by a sheet stained with blotches of blood and other, less identifiable fluids. The man's eyes were open, but he stared at the ceiling as if he were sightless. He seemed to be crying tears of blood. The other joker lay on her side, naked, her sheet twisted into a stained lump around her feet. Her skin was covered with pulpy, purple bruises, her eyes were fixed with the classic thousand-year stare, looking off into eternity. The fourth stood in front of her cell's glass wall. She was just a kid, maybe twelve years old. Her face was that of a zombie with a fixed expression and sunken, staring eyes. Suddenly, though, she focused on Ray. She put the palms of her hands flat against the wall of glass. As Ray watched, the skin on both palms broke and blood oozed from the tears. She slowly sank to the floor, leaving two smears like bloody snail-ooze on the glass. Ray couldn't hear her because of the wall between them, but he could read her bruised and pulpy lips.
"Help me," he thought he saw her say. Or perha
ps it was, "Kill me."
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Jay Ackroyd was making love to his wife when the hunchback appeared in his bedroom.
Hastet was on top, rocking faster and faster as she built toward her climax, Jay was underneath, lost in her and the moment, watching her face, the way her breasts moved as she rode him, listening to the sounds she made, feeling her wetness as she slid up and down on him.
Then her eyes opened wide and she screamed, and for a moment Jay thought she was coming, until she scrambled off him, clutching up a tangled sheet to hide herself. "Jay," she said in a choked voice, staring past him.
Jay had been pretty close to coming himself; the sudden disengagement left him a little unsteady. It took him a moment to get his breath back and look over to where his wife was staring, and even then he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Street light filtered through the shades, but otherwise the room was dark, all shapes and shadows, and in that dimness it looked for all the world as if a headless hunchback was standing in the corner.
Jay leaned over and turned on the bedside lamp.
A headless hunchback was standing in the corner.
"Oh, great," Jay said, disgusted. His erection was gone by then, and his balls hurt. "This is going to be one of those nights, isn't it?" he said to no one in particular.
Hastet held the sheet against her breasts and looked at Jay suspiciously. "Another one of your friends?" She'd been on Earth long enough to realize that her husband knew some peculiar people.
"Quasiman," Jay said. "Not exactly a friend, but I know him. He lives down at Our Lady of Perpetual Misery."
"What's he doing in my bedroom?" Hastet hissed in annoyance.
Jay shrugged. "Nothing much, at the moment." The hunchback was standing by the wall, his hands clenching and unclenching slowly with the rhythm of his breath. He didn't seem to have noticed that his head was gone. Or maybe he had, it was hard to tell.
Jay got out of bed and pulled on his pants. Whatever the hell this was about, he didn't want to deal with it naked.
Hastet took it all in stride, more or less. That was one of the things Jay loved about her. "Where's his head?" she asked.
"It'll be along shortly," Jay assured her. "Parts of him drift off to other dimensions from time to time, but they usually drift back before too long."
Hastet got to her feet with all the dignity she could muster, and started gathering up her underwear. "Next time, tell him to knock," she said as she padded off to the bathroom. A moment later, he heard the shower running.
Jay pulled on an undershirt and sat on the bed to wait for Quasiman's head to show up and explain. He wondered how the hunchback had managed to teleport himself here. Jay Ackroyd was a projecting teleport himself, but he could only pop things off to places he knew and could picture in his mind. So far as he could remember, Quasiman had never been up to his bedroom before. How did he even know where Jay lived? Hell, he barely knew where Quasiman lived. The hunchback's teleportation must work differently from his own. That was half the fun of the wild card, Jay reflected sourly; everybody got to make up his own rules.
Quasiman's head appeared suddenly and blinked. His eyes were glazed and a thin line of drool ran from one corner of his mouth. "Jay Ackroyd?" he said uncertainly.
"Real good." Jay stood up. "What can I do for you?"
"Father sent me to find you," Quasiman said. "To tell you." His voice trailed off into silence.
Jay nodded. So far so good. Father Squid was the joker pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Misery. Quasiman worked for him, kind of a part-time handyman and part-time gargoyle. When he wasn't sweeping out the vestry he was crouched up on the steeple, staring off at nothing. "To tell me ..." Jay prompted.
"To tell you," Quasiman echoed, nodding.
"To tell me what?" Jay asked.
Quasiman frowned, his brow beetling with concentration. "Hannah," he said. "Hannah got away."
"Real good," Jay said. He didn't have to ask who Hannah was. Hannah Davis: the arson investigator who had exposed the Card Shark conspiracy. She'd taken her evidence to Gregg Hartmann, the former senator, and Hartmann had hired Ackroyd and Creighton Investigations to check out her allegations. They'd managed to confirm enough of it to give Jay a lot of sleepless nights. Then Hartmann got himself killed and stiffed them on the bill.
"The other one got away too," Quasiman said. "The yellow man with the legs. Hartmann."
"Hartmann is dead," Jay told him. Quasiman shook his head. Jay made it a point never to argue with a hunchback. "Does Father Squid need to see me about something?"
"They took him," Quasiman blurted. You could almost see the memory come flooding back into him. His eyes seemed brighter, his manner suddenly animated, even agitated. "They took them all." He vanished suddenly with a pop of inrushing air, the same noise Jay made when he teleported something with his finger, and reappeared just as suddenly across the room. "Mr. Dutton, Dr. Finn, Dr. Clara, Oddity, Troll, everyone who knew. They would have taken me too, but I carried him away and went home. Sometimes I forget but not this time. Only the church was empty. I waited and waited up on the steeple but no one came so finally I went to Father and he said to find Jay Ackroyd so I went to your place but you weren't there and the looking-at-you man said that you were home so I came here."
"The looking-at-you man?" Jay said.
"The stinking badges man," Quasiman said. "The play-it-sam man. You played it for her, you can play it for me."
"Humphrey Bogart," Jay said. He was astonished. Not that Bogie had told Quasiman to look for him at home, that part he'd figured out at once, but Quas knowing all those movie lines, that blew him away. He wondered who or what the hunchback had been before the wild card had changed him. "Who took Father Squid and the others?" he asked.
That was evidently a stumper. Quasiman groped for words, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly. Distantly, Jay heard the sound of the shower cut off.
"Was it the Card Sharks?" Jay asked.
"Card Sharks," Quas agreed.
"Or was it the police?"
"Police," Quas agreed.
Jay sighed. "Try to remember. Were they wearing uniforms? Did they tell the Father that he was under arrest? Did anyone show you a badge or a warrant?"
"We don't need no stinking badges," Quasiman said, smiling, his memory stuck on Humphrey Bogart. For a moment, Jay wished his junior partner was there, so he could give him a good slap.
"Were any of them aces?" Jay asked, groping.
"Aces," Quasiman agreed. He pointed an angry finger at Jay. "Don't call me Snotman!" he warned.
"Ah," Jay said. Snotman. Well, that was something, anyway. A place to start.
"Card Sharks, police, aces," Quasiman chanted. "Ring around a rosy, pocket full of posey, ashes, ashes, all fall down."
"Eenie meenie minie moe," Jay replied, "catch a hunchback by the toe. No offense, Quas, but the next time Father Squid wants to send me an urgent message, maybe he could consider Western Union."
Quasiman wasn't listening. The hunchback's left hand had disappeared. Quas stared curiously at the end of the arm where it had been just a moment ago. Then he looked up at Jay, his eyes wide and bright and curiously innocent. "Save us," he whispered urgently. "The Black Trump." Then he vanished.
When Hastet returned from the bathroom, wrapped in a terrycloth bathrobe with her hair up in a towel, Jay was pulling on his socks. "Your friend leave?" she asked.
Jay nodded. "Think of all the money he saves on doors," he said. "Where's the mate for this sock?"
"Why? You're not actually going to wear matching socks, are you? Is this some sort of disguise?"
"The whole Ilkazam harem falls madly in love with me and I have to marry the Henny Youngman of Takis," Jay said. He found the matching sock, pulled it on, and looked around for his shoes.
"Where are you going?" Hastet asked him.
"Down to the office," Jay told her. "I have a bone to pick with Humphrey Bogart. Don't wait up."
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Ray turned to Poynter in sudden fury. He shook her, snapping her head back and forth like a tree branch in a hurricane.
"How can we help them?" he said between gritted teeth.
"St-st-st-stop," Poynter stuttered. Blood dripped from her mouth as she bit her tongue.
Ray somehow controlled himself. "How can we help them?" he repeated.
Poynter shook her head dazedly. She put her hand to her mouth and looked in stupefied fascination at the blood on it. "We can't," she said. "They're in the final stage. They won't last long."
"Is it the Black Trump?" Ray asked.
Poynter looked at him as if afraid to answer. He let some of his strength flow from his hands as he squeezed her arms again, not caring if he broke them. "IS IT?"
"Yes," Poynter admitted.
He dragged her to the glass cage that held the girl. She lay huddled in a miserable pile. She focused on Ray as he approached. There was no nope in her eyes, only pain and knowledge of imminent death.
Ray had never felt so helpless in all his life. There was nothing his speed or strength could do. He grabbed Poynter by the back of the neck and shoved her face against the glass wall.
"You did this, didn't you? I should break your fucking neck."
She was crying, but Ray didn't care. He felt his fingers tightening on Poynter's neck.
"Wa-wa-wait," she stuttered. She was crying, whether from pain or fear Ray didn't know, or care. "Don't. I can tell you - I can help - "
"Tell me what?" Ray asked.
"Rudo's journal. About the Black Trump - "
"Where?"
She pointed a trembling hand at the desk.
Ray let her go. She moaned and slipped down against the glass until she too was huddled on the floor, a mirror image of the dying girl on the other side of the wall.
"Stay put," Ray ordered as he went to the desk. An orderly stack of papers sat in the center of a dark green blotter. Some were memos, some were letters addressed to Dr. Rudo.