Wild Cards V: Down and Dirty

  Mercifully there was no one in the hall when she got out of the elevator. Up here the carpet felt three inches thick, and she made no noise at all as she stepped up to Paul’s front door and rang the bell. When several minutes had passed, she rang again and began paying attention to any sound from inside. She heard nothing. She mentally scanned for any creatures inside, a mouse or a rat, but Paul’s building was much too classy for that. Failing to locate an animal inside, she pulled a pigeon across the windows. A couple of lights were on, but she didn’t see Paul.

  Great. What a night to stand her up. Good timing, Paul. Bagabond started back for the elevator with a certain lurking sense of relief that she kept shoving to the back of her mind. Riding down, she realized that she must have been expected or the security guard would not have let her up. For the first time she felt concern about Paul.

  Marty, the guard, had seen Paul come in several hours earlier. They had chatted about the fact he had actually won a case for once and had left early to relax before Bagabond came over. Marty blushed as he mentioned that Mr. Goldberg had told him to look out for her. Paul had said they would be celebrating together. There was no record of Paul’s going back out, and none of the doormen had seen him leave. Marty called another guard to take over his station and got the skeleton key for Paul’s apartment.

  As soon as the door opened, Bagabond knew that something was wrong. Following her sense of dread, she led Marty straight to the bathroom. Paul was naked in the black marble Jacuzzi. Blood swirled around him in the bubbling water. He had been shot in the eye at close range. She stared at him while Marty frantically dialed the police.

  The police took her down to the station and questioned her for hours. At first they were determined to get her to confess to the crime. When the initial coroner’s report finally came in, they gave up and began asking her about her knowledge of Paul’s activities. Who might have wanted him dead? She thought about Rosemary, over and over, but denied knowing anything.

  Could Rosemary have had him killed? Rosemary knew that she cared about Paul. Rosemary had encouraged them. Was she capable of murdering someone she had worked with and respected? Bagabond did not allow herself to answer the questions.

  It was almost six in the morning when C.C. finally got permission to take Bagabond home. Bagabond said nothing on the taxi ride back to C.C.’s loft. She reached out for the cats and mentally pulled them close to her, shivering. C.C. scooped her morning paper up off the sidewalk in front of her building and tucked it under her arm as she guided Bagabond into the lift. In the loft Bagabond stared blindly at the opposite wall while C.C. made tea.

  Bagabond realized that C.C. was repeatedly calling her name. It had brought her back to herself. She preferred spreading her consciousness across the city. It spread her pain as well. Only the urgency in C. C.’s voice made her focus on the paper in front of her.

  Rosemary Gambione Muldoon’s picture took up a quarter of the front page.

  Rosemary was icily calm. The warning had come from an obit writer who just happened to owe a lot of money in Vegas. She had bought his marker some time ago. Today had been the payoff. He had heard the excitement in the newsroom and checked it out. Seeing her picture on the front-page mock-up had been enough. He placed the call to his Family contact. Chris had pounded on her door at two A.M. and together they had thrown clothes into a suitcase.

  Chris had brought four of his best men to guard her twenty-four hours a day. The six of them sat in the black limousine that took them to one of the Gambione safehouses. Rosemary said nothing. What was there to say? Part of her life had been destroyed. Only the Family was left. As she had begun, she was going to finish.

  Rosemary sat alone in the house. Her bodyguards patrolled the exterior and kept watch on the windows and doors. Chris had left her to organize a safer retreat from which she could lead the Gambiones. She felt free and more alive than she had since she had taken over the task of living two lives. Her head swam with plans for keeping the Families alive and viable. Now that she could concentrate on the problems at hand, everything would be different. Paul had done her a favor. Pity he had had to die for it, but one couldn’t show weakness, after all. She wondered when Chris would come back. She had so much to discuss with him.

  All the King’s Horses

  II

  THE WATER MADE A sullen gurgling sound somewhere in the close, hot blackness. The world twisted and turned, sinking. He was too weak and dizzy to move. He felt icy fingers on his legs, creeping up higher and higher, and then sudden shock as the water reached his crotch, jolting him awake. He tore away his seat harness with numb fingers, but too late. The cold caressed his chest, he lurched up and the floor tumbled and he lost his footing, and then the water was over his head and he couldn’t breathe and everything was black, utterly black, as black as the grave, and he had to get out, he had to get out …

  Tom woke gasping for breath, a scream clawing at the inside of his throat.

  In his first groggy waking moment he heard the faint tinkle of broken glass falling from the window frame to shatter on the bedroom floor. He closed his eyes, tried to steady himself. His heart was trip-hammering away in his chest, his undershirt plastered to his skin. Only a dream, he told himself, but he could still feel himself falling, blind and helpless, locked in a coffin of burning steel as the river closed in around him. Only a dream, he repeated. He’d lucked out, something had exploded the shell and he’d gotten out, it was over, he was alive and safe. He took a deep breath and counted to ten, and by the time he hit seven he’d stopped trembling. He opened his eyes.

  His bed was a mattress on the floor of an empty room. He sat up, the bedclothes tangled around him. Feathers from a torn pillow floated in the shafts of sunlight that came through the broken window, drifting lazily toward the floor. The alarm clock he’d bought last week had been flung halfway across the room and had bounced off a wall. A series of random numbers blinked red on its digital LED display for an instant before it went dark entirely. The walls were pale green, utterly bare, and spiderwebbed with a growing network of cracks. A chunk of plaster dropped from the ceiling. Tom winced, untangled himself from the sheets, and stood up.

  One of these nights his fucking subconscious was going to bring down the whole house on top of him. He wondered what his neighbors would make of that. He’d already reduced most of his bedroom furniture to kindling, and the plasterboard walls weren’t holding up real well either. Then again, neither was he.

  In the bathroom Tom dropped his sweat-soaked underwear into the hamper and stared at himself in the mirror over the sink. He thought he looked ten years older than he was. A couple of months of recurring nightmares will do that to you, he supposed.

  He climbed into the shower, closed the curtain. A half-melted bar of Safeguard sat in a film of water in the soap dish. Tom concentrated. The soap rose straight up and floated into his hand. It felt slimy. Frowning, he gave the cold faucet a good hard twist with his mind, and he winced as the stream of icy water hit him. Very quickly he grabbed for the hot faucet—with his hand—turned it, and shuddered with relief as the water warmed.

  It was getting better, Tom reflected as he lathered up. Twenty-odd years as the Turtle had atrophied his telekinetic abilities almost to nothing, except when he was locked inside his shell, but Dr. Tachyon had helped him understand that the block was psychological, not physical. He’d been working on it ever since, and it had gotten to the point where bars of soap and cold-water faucets were candy.

  Tom stuck his head under the showerhead and smiled as the warm water cascaded down around him, washing away the last residue of nightmare. Too bad his subconscious didn’t realize his limits; he’d feel a fuck of a lot safer going to sleep, and maybe his bedroom wouldn’t be such a mess when he woke up. But when the nightmare came, he was the Turtle. Weak, dizzy, falling, and about to drown, but still the Great and Powerful Turtle, who could juggle locomotives and crush tanks with his mind.

  The late great Turtle. All t
he king’s horses and all the king’s men, Tom thought.

  He turned off the spray, shivered in the sudden chill, and climbed out of the tub to towel off.

  In the kitchen he fixed himself a cup of coffee and a bowl of bran cereal. He’d always thought bran cereal tasted like wet cardboard, and these new extrahealthy bran cereals tasted like wood shavings, but his doctor said he had to get more fiber and less fat in his diet. He was also supposed to cut down on his coffee, but that was a hopeless case—he was an addict by now.

  He turned on the small TV next to the microwave and watched CNN as he sat at the kitchen table. The city was launching a full-fledged investigation of corruption in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which seemed like the least they could do now that one of their assistant DAs had been exposed as a Mafia don. Indictments were promised. Rosa Maria Gambione, alias Rosemary Muldoon, was still being sought for questioning, but she’d vanished, gone underground somewhere. Tom didn’t figure she’d be turning up anytime soon.

  He’d felt guilty about ignoring Muldoon’s appeal for ace volunteers when the gang war had begun raging in the streets of Jokertown. It wasn’t like the Turtle to ignore a plea for help, and if he’d had a working shell or the money to build one, his resolve might have softened enough to bring the Turtle back from the dead. But he hadn’t so he didn’t and now he was glad of it. Pulse and Water Lily and Mister Magnet and the other aces who had responded had put their lives and reputations on the line, and now they had hack politicians going on the evening news demanding that all of them be investigated for ties to organized crime.

  It was times like this that made Tom glad that the Turtle was dead.

  On the tube, they moved to the international desk for an update on the aces tour. Peregrine’s pregnancy was already old news, and there had been no new violence like the incident in Syria, thank God. Tom watched footage of the Stacked Deck landing in Japan with a certain dull resentment. He’d always wanted to travel, to see distant exotic lands, visit all the fabulous cities he’d read of as a child, but he’d never had the money. Once the store had sent him to a trade show in Chicago, but a weekend in the Conrad Hilton with three thousand electronics salesmen hadn’t fulfilled any of his childhood dreams.

  They should have asked the Turtle to be on the tour. Of course transporting the shell might have been a problem, and he couldn’t get a passport without giving them his real name, which he wasn’t prepared to do, but those problems could have been handled if anyone had cared enough to bother. Maybe they really did think he was dead, though Dr. Tachyon at least ought to have known better.

  So here he was, still in Bayonne wth a mouth full of high-fiber bran, while the likes of Mistral and Fatman and Peregrine were sitting under a pagoda somewhere, eating whatever the hell the Japanese ate for breakfast. It pissed him off. He had nothing against Peri or Mistral, but none of them had paid the dues he had. Jesus Christ, they’d even invited that scumbag Jack Braun. But not him, oh no, that would have been too much fucking trouble; they would have had to make special arrangements, and besides, they had so many seats allocated for aces and so many for jokers and nobody knew quite where the Turtle fit.

  Tom drank a mouthful of coffee, got up from the table, and shut off the TV. Fuck it all, he thought. Now that he’d decided that the Turtle was going to stay dead, maybe it was time that he buried the remains. He had a notion or two about that. If he handled it right, maybe by this time next year he could afford to take a trip around the world too.

  Concerto for Siren and Serotonin

  II

  CHECKING TO SEE THAT no one was watching, Croyd dropped a pair of Black Beauties with his espresso. He cursed softly as a part of the sigh that followed. This was not working out as he had anticipated. All of the leads he had tried during the past days had pretty much fizzled, and he was further along into the speed than he cared to be. Ordinarily this would not bother him, but for the first time he had made two separate promises concerning drugs and his actions. One being business and one being personal, he reflected, they kind of caught him coming and going. He would definitely have to keep an eye, or at least a few facets, on himself so as not to mess up on this job, and he didn’t want to turn Water Lily off on their first date. Usually, though, he could feel the paranoia coming on, and he decided to let that be his indicator as to his degree of irrationality this time around.

  He had run all over town, trying to trace two leads who seemed to have vanished. He had checked out every possible front on his list, satisfying himself that they had only been randomly chosen rendezvous points. Next was James Spector. While he hadn’t recognized the name, he did know Demise. He had met him, briefly, on a number of occasions. The man had always impressed him as one of the sleazier aces. “If it’s Demise, don’t look in his eyes,” he hummed as he signaled to a waiter.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “More espresso, and bring me a bigger cup for it, will you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “For that matter, bring me a whole pot.”

  “All right.”

  He hummed a little more loudly and began tapping his foot. “Demise eyes. The eyes of Demise,” he intoned. He jumped when the waiter placed a cup before him.

  “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  The man began to fill the cup.

  “Don’t stand behind me while you’re pouring. Stand off to the side where I can see you.”

  “Sure.”

  The waiter moved off to Croyd’s right. He left the carafe on the table when he departed.

  As he drank cup after cup of coffee, Croyd began thinking thoughts he had not thought in a long while, concerning sleep, mortality, transfiguration. After a time he called for another carafe. It was definitely a two-carafe problem.

  The evening’s snowfall had ceased, but the inch or so that lay upon the sidewalks sparkled under the streetlamps, and a wind so cold it burned whipped glittering eddies along Tenth Street. Walking carefully, the tall, thin man in the heavy black overcoat glanced back once as he turned the corner, breath pluming. Ever since he’d left the package store he’d had a feeling that he was being watched. And there was a figure, a hundred yards or so back, moving along the opposite side of the street at about the same pace as himself. James Spector felt that it might be worth waiting for the man and killing him just to avoid any possible hassle farther along the way. After all, there were two fifths of Jack Daniel’s and a six-pack of Schlitz in his bag, and if someone were to accost him abruptly on these icy walks— He winced at the thought of the bottles breaking, of having to retrace his path to the store.

  On the other hand, waiting for the man and killing him right here, while holding the package, could also result in his slipping—even if it was only when he leaned forward to go through the man’s pockets. It would be better to find a place to set things down first. He looked about.

  There were some steps leading up to a doorway, farther along. He headed for them and set his parcel down on the third one, against its iron railing. He brushed off his collar and turned it up, fished a package of cigarettes from his pocket, shook one out, and lit it within cupped hands. He leaned against the rail then and waited, watching the corner.

  Shortly a man in gray slacks and a blue blazer came into sight, necktie whipping in the wind, dark hair disheveled. He paused and stared, then nodded and advanced. As he came nearer, Spector realized that the man was wearing mirrorshades. He felt a sudden jab of panic, seeing that the other possessed an adequate first line of defense against him. It wasn’t likely to be an accident either, in the middle of the night. Therefore, this was more than some strong-arm hood on his tail. He took a long drag on his cigarette, then mounted several steps backward, slowly, gaining sufficient height for a good kick at the other’s head, to knock the damned things off.

  “Yo, Demise!” the man called. “I need to talk to you!”

  Demise stared, trying to place him. But
there was nothing familiar about the man, not even his voice.

  The man came up and stood before him, smiling. “I just need a minute or two of your time,” he said. “It’s important. I’m in a big hurry and I’m trying for a certain measure of subtlety. It isn’t easy.”

  “Do I know you?” Demise asked him.

  “We’ve met. In other lives, so to speak. My lives, that is. Also, I believe you might once have done some accounting for my brother-in-law’s company, over in Jersey. Croyd’s the name.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I need the name of the head of the new mob that’s trying to take over operations from the kindly old Mafia, which has run this town for half a century or so.”

  “You’re kidding,” Demise said, taking a final drag on his cigarette, dropping it and moving his toe to grind it.

  “No,” said Croyd. “I definitely require this information so I can rest in peace. I understand you’ve done some work other than bookkeeping for these guys. So tell me who runs the show and I’ll be moving along.”

  “I can’t do that,” Demise answered.

  “As I said, I’m aiming for subtlety. So I’d rather not work this the hard way—”

  Demise kicked him in the face. Croyd’s glasses flew over his shoulder, and Demise found himself staring into 216 glittering eye-facets. He was unable to lock gazes with the points of light.

  “You’re an ace,” he said, “or a joker.”

  “I’m the Sleeper,” Croyd told him as he reached out and took hold of Demise’s right arm, then broke it across the railing. “You should have let me be subtle. It doesn’t hurt as much.”

  Demise shrugged even as he winced. “Go ahead and break the other one too.” But I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  Croyd stared at the arm hanging at Demise’s side. Demise reached across and caught hold of it, twisted it into place, held it.