Jokertown Shuffle

  Zelda didn't change expression. She merely leaned back, still smiling, and threw a side kick that snapped Loeffler's neck. His body hitting the floor was the only sound in the room. Veronica thought of the carnage in the bank and Hannah's swinging corpse. She thought she might pass out. She made herself kneel next to Loweffler's body and reach for a pulse in his throat.

  Zelda slapped her hands away. "He's dead. Trust me."

  "Jesus," Veronica said.

  "Sorry," Zelda said without conviction. " I wasn't thinking."

  "Zelda, for Christ's sake," someone said.

  "You really are a loose cannon," Toni said.

  Nobody but Veronica seemed particularly shocked or upset. Nancy looked at Veronica and said, "Uh-oh. Trouble." Toni took Veronica's hand and pulled her to her feet. "Give me your room key. We take care of this. You get across the street and catch a train home. Can you do that?" Veronica nodded.

  "Shit," Toni said. "Nancy, you go with her. We handle this."

  After they were out of the city, somewhere around Forest Hills, Nancy said: "Are you okay?"

  "It's so weird. It's like… like it was all a dream or something."

  "That's right," Nancy said. "That's all it was. Just a dream."

  It was all over TV the next day. Loeffler's body was found in an alley near Penn Station, apparently the victim of a robbery.

  That evening, Nancy came up to tell her they were in the clear. "You don't need to know how they did it," Nancy said. She seemed radiant with success. "But they got him out, and there's nothing to connect us with him at all."

  "Doesn't it bother you?" Veronica asked. "That he's dead?"

  "Look, I'm not crazy about violence either. But you have to remember. The guy was scum. With him dead, his daughter takes over GF amp;G. It becomes a women's corporation, and that's going to make things better for women everywhere." Veronica remembered Loeffler's childlike energy, the way he threw himself into sex with unrestrained enjoyment. She remembered the flowers he'd always brought her, his sense of humor. "I guess," she said.

  The next Saturday, one of the women brought in photos of Zelda and Loeffler that she'd printed up herself at work. They were passed around to much laughter and admiration.

  There was a nervousness behind the bravado. Veronica felt it, and the others probably did too, but no one mentioned it. Veronica left the meeting early, and the next Saturday she stayed in her room. No one came to invite her downstairs, and Nancy never mentioned W O. R. S. E. again.

  Donald-whoever he was-had put Veronica off her feed. She left Close Encounters and went home, put a frozen dinner in the micro, and turned on the news. They had a feature story on the Rox, a follow-up on the unsuccessful park ranger raid back in February.

  "Admit it," the reporter said to some man in a ranger uniform. "Those kids could have done a lot worse if they wanted. It was like they didn't even take you seriously. A few people got shot up, but that was all. They made fools out-of you."

  "Mister," the ranger said, "you don't know what's out there on that island. It's worse than you could ever imagine. Just pray to God you don't ever find out."

  Veronica had saved one photo of Hannah. It had been sitting on an end table, but she'd gotten to where the constant sight of it was a reproach. Now she took it out again and sat down with it in front of the TV She realized she had never cried for Hannah, not once in the sixteen months since her death. With that thought, the tears came.

  Jumpers, she thought. They made fools of all of us.

  She turned the TV off. She couldn't seem to get herself back together since that man in the restaurant. It was the past come to haunt her. Like all hauntings, it was something she'd brought on herself. It was something she'd left undone. For over a year, she'd been pushing it away, but the questions had been there all this time, fighting to get out.

  She walked nervously around the apartment. She wasn't going to be able to sleep tonight, not in this state. She had to do something, no matter how small, to buy off her conscience. She sat down and dialed Nancy's number.

  "Hello?"

  "Nancy?"

  "Yes?"

  "It's Veronica." After the odd terms they'd parted on, she didn't know how Nancy would react.

  "Yes?" she said again, this time nervous, reluctant.

  " I don't mean to bother you. It's just… there's this question I always wanted to ask you. It's about… it's about Hannah."

  "Go on."

  Veronica could picture her standing on the faded carpet in the hallway, back stiff, eyes staring straight ahead, waiting for some inevitable ax to fall. "Ichiko told me W O. R. S. E. paid for Hannah's lawyer. I just wanted to know… I mean… how did you know she was in jail?"

  "You mean, did she use her one phone call to call us, instead of you? Is that what you're asking?"

  "I guess so. I mean, she told me she was through with all of that."

  "She was. She didn't call us. Latham, Strauss did."

  "They called you?"

  "It was Latham himself. He said they would provide Hannah an attorney free of charge, but they didn't want that fact to get out. They wanted us to say we were paying for it. It wasn't an offer I was willing to refuse at the time."

  "How did he know where to find you?"

  "I have no idea."

  "Really? You don't have any ties to Latham?"

  "We'd talked about targeting Latham for an action. Believe me, it was as much a surprise to us as it was to you." After a few seconds, Veronica said, "Are you okay?"

  "Yeah. Life goes on. You know?"

  "I know," Veronica said.

  When she hung up, her hands were shaking. Latham. She's seen him on TV: elegant suits, razor-cut hair, eyes as cold as a winter sky. Jerry's brother was the Strauss in Latham, Strauss, and he'd told her stories about him. He was so inhuman that Jerry's brother had wondered if maybe he was a secret wild card, that the virus had somehow killed all his emotions. Just the idea that he could somehow be mixed up in Hannah's death was terrifying. It was like opening up a tiny box and finding everything in the world inside it.

  There was nothing left to do that night. She went to bed but didn't sleep. Instead she lay awake, seeing Latham and Hannah. And Nancy.

  When snow fell on Long Island, it stayed. It had lawns to pike up in and kids to make snowmen out of it. Veronica had sat in her cell that December and listened to the wind howl outside.

  On Christmas Eve, Nancy brought her a bottle of white wine with a ribbon on it. Veronica had wrapped an antique silver comb just in case, and Nancy had seemed touched by it. Later, Veronica heard her crying downstairs.

  She had only been in Nancy's apartment for W. O. R. S. E. meetings. She agonized for ten minutes, then went down quietly. Nancy was stretched out on the couch, clutching a pillow. She didn't even look up when Veronica lay down next to her and took her in her arms.

  "Nobody should be alone on Christmas," Veronica said. "Everything, everything just kind of fell apart," Nancy said. "I was supposed to go to Connecticut, and then their kids got measles, and I…"

  "It's okay," Veronica said.

  "I can't believe you're being so sweet to me when everything's gone so badly. I've left you alone up there, night after night…"

  "You've done so much," Veronica said, trying to be generous.

  "No I haven't. I was jealous. Of you and Hannah. We used to be…" She didn't seem able to finish.

  "You were lovers."

  "Years ago. But she got tired of me."

  Veronica kissed the top of her head. Nancy looked up at her, helpless and vulnerable. Veronica unhooked Nancy's glasses and put them on the table, then kissed her on the mouth.

  They made love awkwardly, with vague passion and no conviction. Veronica was ashamed of her body. With nothing to do all day, her addict's metabolism had developed a craving for sugar that she couldn't control. It took all her strength to stay on methadone and off heroin. There was no strength left to diet. In a month and a half she'd already gained fif
teen pounds and was still gaining.

  Nancy's body was covered with fine dark hairs, and her skin seemed unhealthily pale. The taste of her vagina seemed odd and sour. Veronica would find herself remembering Hannah, then have to force herself to go on.

  Eventually they moved into the bedroom. They held onto each other through the night but didn't try to make love again. Toward morning, Veronica woke to find that Nancy had turned away and was snoring softly into her pillow. Veronica got up a little after dawn and got into her clothes. She came back to kiss Nancy lightly on the forehead. Nancy woke long enough to squeeze her hand, then went back to sleep.

  After that, Veronica stayed in her room. She stayed there through the bitter cold of January, into the worse cold of February. One Sunday, the temperature fell below zero, and all of Long Island was covered in ice. Veronica was unable to get out of bed. She thought about Hannah, about the things they'd done together. She thought about the scene in the bank, the change that had come over Hannah's face just before she took the guard's gun and started shooting. She thought about Hannah hanging in her jail cell, dead.

  She curled deeper under the covers. She'd gained another ten pounds, and now she felt heavy all the time. Liz settled into the small of her back, and the two of them slept through the day.

  By nightfall, Veronica was sick.

  It was like nothing she'd heard or imagined. Suddenly she was outside her body, filling the room, lighter than air. Distantly she felt her body begin to convulse. Vomit trickled out of the distant body's mouth, and Veronica knew, distantly, that if the body did not roll over, it would likely strangle. The body did move, fortunately, when a fit of coughing made it double up on its side.

  Nancy came upstairs to see what had happened when Veronica fell out of bed and crashed onto the floor. She found a bottle of Hydrocodone and made Veronica swallow three of them, forcing them past her raw and swollen throat.

  It was another quarter hour before the spasms passed. "I have to get out from under this," Veronica whispered. "I don't care what it costs."

  The next morning, she boarded Liz at the vets and checked into Mt. Sinai's drug-treatment program. It took six weeks. She lost all the weight she'd gained, then put it back on again. Handfuls of hair came out of her scalp, and the crow's feet that grew out of her eyes never went away, even when she finally got clean and was able to sleep again.

  She still had money left from her hooking days, enough to get her through the end of the year, as long as she stayed out of the hospital. But she needed something to fill the empty days. No one seemed to be looking for her. She had her hair cut in a pageboy and bought herself new clothes, pants and sweaters, all dark, all loose-fitting.

  She found her own apartment, a few blocks from Nancy's. Nancy only nodded when Veronica told her the news, cried a little when Veronica brought the last of her things downstairs. "I haven't been much help to you, have -I?" Nancy said.

  "You saved my life."

  Nancy squeezed her, then let her go.

  Veronica took a job typing and filing at a Lynbrook insurance office. She made minimum wage and watched while the boss flirted with another of the secretaries, a hardened thirty-year-old who chewed gum. Veronica had less than no interest in a toupeed insurance salesman in a doubleknit suit. Still, it was the first time in her life a man had ignored her. And why not? She had taken herself out of the game. Overweight, severe haircut and clothes, no makeup or perfume, her sallow skin broken out from all the sweets.

  It was late summer, the summer of 1989, before she saw how the world around her had changed. Instead of going home after work, she sat on the lawn of the library and watched the kids playing in the grass. It was a perfect afternoon, the skies clear, a light breeze rattling the leaves. She was able to look at it and realize, objectively, how beautiful it was. It seemed possible to her, for the first time in years, that one day she might be able to look at a sunset and actually feel it, and not be overwhelmed by Hannah's absence or her own fear of being discovered, or her worries about her weight and what she was to make of her life.

  She suddenly wondered what was happening in the world. She hadn't even bothered to plug in the TV at her new apartment. She bought a newspaper, sat on the bench, and started to read.

  The headlines were full of something called jumpers. She had to force herself not to skip ahead, ignoring the buzzing in her ears and the unease in her stomach. Teenage gang members all over the city had developed the ability to somehow trade consciousness with unwilling victims. The teenagers would ride around in the shanghaied bodies, killing and looting and terrorizing, and then would jump back into their own bodies when they were done.

  Once more, Veronica remembered the scene in the bank, the handsome blond kid whose eyes had dulled at the same time that Hannah's had changed.

  Hannah had been jumped.

  The press-and everyone else-was convinced that this was a new manifestation of the wild card. It had cranked the anti-wild-card hysteria in the city to a new pitch. It was a good thing she'd kept quiet about her ace power. All the wild card victims were being treated with fear and hatred. New York State had started a "voluntary" registration for aces. Editorials argued for internment camps, and letters cried out for blood.

  Veronica went home and studied herself in the bathroom mirror. In October, less than a month from now, she would be twenty-seven. It seemed beyond belief that so much of her life was already gone. She'd been hiding out almost a year. No one would recognize her the way she looked now. Reading the Times had reminded her how much she missed New York. She was strong enough now, she thought, to stay clean. It would be easier, really, once she was back in the city where there were places to go and things to do. The temptation was always lurking in Lynbrook because of sheer boredom.

  It was time to go home.

  On the Friday after Ichiko's funeral, Veronica got up with bags under her eyes and'a feeling of dread in her heart. Before she left for work, she called Latham, Strauss. She asked for Dyan Mundy, Hannah's lawyer. Mundy wasn't in, but Veronica got an appointment with her for that afternoon. Lunch at Close Encounters was the office tradition on Friday, followed by very little work getting done the rest of the afternoon. Their usual table for six was waiting for them when they got to the restaurant. Veronica looked around the bar nervously as she walked in, afraid she would see the man in the suit-Donald-again. Instead she saw a woman at the bar and froze where she stood.

  Veronica could only see her from behind. She had dark brown hair worn loose past her shoulders. She had on a blue lame dress, cut below the waist in the back, completely inappropriate for afternoon.

  It was Veronica's dress.

  The woman turned slowly on her stool. Veronica knew, with the certainty of a nightmare, what she was about to see. She was right. The woman had her face, her old face, the one she'd had when she was hooking. Lean, languidly sexy. Lots of makeup. She stared at the firm breasts and trim waist that had once been hers.

  The woman stared back.

  Okay, Veronica thought, this is clearly not happening. I am clearly dreaming this.

  The woman reached into her purse, and Veronica thought, she's going to pull out a gun and shoot me; then I'll wake up. She waited for the eternity it took for the woman's hand to come up out of the purse. It held a photograph, torn out of a newspaper. It showed a blond boy in a tuxedo-handsome, sensual, smiling with the confidence of money. It was the boy from the bank. The one who'd jumped Hannah.

  "What do you want?" Veronica whispered.

  The woman stood up, wrapped herself in a shawl. She took a few tentative steps toward Veronica, unsteady on her four-inch heels. "To talk," she said. It was Veronica's own voice. "Will you listen to me?"

  Veronica nodded and followed the woman outside.

  "I'll make this quick," the woman said. "I know a lot more about what's going on than you do. The kid's name was David Butler. He was seventeen. He was a summer intern at Latham, Strauss. As far as I can tell, he was the one running th
e kid gang when all this jumping business started."

  "'Was'?"

  "He's dead. But the jumping is still going on."

  "Who are you?"

  "Never mind that now. The point is, this is some kind of wild-card phenomenon. It's not just a coincidence that all these kids developed the same power. The wild card doesn't work that way. Somebody is giving it to them."

  The way Croyd gave it to me, Veronica thought guiltily. Then, in an instant, her brain flashed from her own infection to what she had learned about Jerry. About how he could change the way he looked. Change everything.

  The woman was saying, "We have to find-" Veronica took a step backward. "Jerry? Is that you?" The woman broke off. "What?"

  "It is you, isn't it? You bastard, how did you find me?"

  "Your mother. I convinced her it was life and death."

  "Change back. Change back now. I can't stand looking at you like this."

  "I haven't got anything else to wear. I'm not going to stand here as Jerry Strauss in a dress."

  "Do something."

  The woman's features melted and reformed. It was like a coat of facial mud washing off. Now Veronica was talking to the young Ingrid Bergman.

  "Oh Christ," Veronica said. "Did my mother give you the dress, too?"

  Ingrid nodded, blushing.

  "What do you want from me? What am I supposed to do?"

  "Help me find who's behind this. Whoever is creating these jumpers is responsible for my brother's death."

  "Kenneth?"

  "That's right. They killed him. Last fall. They killed Hannah, too. Doesn't that mean anything to you?" Veronica slapped her, then swung her purse at her head when she tried to cover up. "Don't you tell me what Hannah meant to me. You bastard! Get out of my life and stay out!" Suddenly she saw the women from the office, watching her out the window of Close Encounters. They'd seen everything, of course. Her life was in a shambles again.