Jokertown Shuffle Read online

  Tight-lipped, Blaise glared at him. Anger seethed, but there was still Latham. "Don't threaten me," he said sullenly. "He's not threatening you, Blaise," Bloat said earnestly. "I don't tolerate threats. He's concerned for you. You're one of my people too."

  Like hell I am. "You look to use him, don't you? You think he'd be a big help when the nats come for you." Bloat said nothing. Nameless sounds rumbled from the depths of him.

  "All right. But what if something happens to Meadows that I don't have anything to do with?" God, he hated truckling to these beasts. "He's a fugitive. He's wanted by the authorities."

  "You're being clever, Blaise," Bloat said. He almost sounded sharp. "I hate it when you're clever. But if Meadows falls afoul of circumstances beyond your control, there's no way we can hold you to account."

  "Then we are understood. Mark Meadows is safe from me." Blaise bowed again, much lower than before. "Gentlemen, I wish you good day." -

  A furry joker and a nat with his hair shaved in sidewalls and a coiled dragon tattooed on either side of his skull were going at it ankle-deep in the sludgy water. Somebody cranked up the Butthole Surfers on a box by way of sound track. Mark ducked his head reflexively between his shoulders and just walked on with his hands deep in the pockets of his Goodwill windbreaker. Other residents of the Rox, living less in the shadow of the Summer of Love, thronged like so many seabirds on a rock and watched with interest.

  He hadn't brooded as much about K. C.'s being in on his secret as he thought he would. He was too full of the need to do something for Sprout to give much room to other emotions. What he could do he had no idea. Having been all on fire to get here to the Rox, having gotten here alive only because he wanted to so badly, he now was all on fire to get off again. But he had nowhere else to go.

  A change in the crowd noise made him stop and look up. A squad of nat-looking youths were moving in on the fight, led by a tall kid in black T-shirt, tight jeans, and a leather jacket. His hair was a startling rich red, blood red, and cut in a brush. He looked somehow familiar.

  The spear carriers stopped and cracked their knuckles a respectful three yards away. The redhead walked, not quickly but purposefully, between the combatants. A braided tail hung down the back of his jacket.

  Words changed hands. The joker squalled and aimed a roundhouse punch at the interloper. He blocked with a forearm, doubled the joker with a fist in the gut, dropped him with a hammerhand to head, right in the surf.

  The tattooed nat lunged at his back. The newcomer half turned, drove a thrust kick into his solar plexus. Dragon Boy staggered back. His antagonist stepped in and kicked, stepped in and kicked, driving him back deeper into the filthy slog of the water. Finally he spun a balletic backkick into one dragon tattoo, his tail scything behind his head, and walked ashore, leaving his opponent bobbing gently.

  "You asked about my boyfriend," a voice behind him said. "There he is."

  He turned as the jumpers ran to fish out the tattooed kid. She was perched on the prongs of a rusted-out front-end loader, squatting with elbows on trim thighs. "You may have noticed things don't run so smoothly around here," she said. "They don't seem to run at all."

  She jutted the chin. "He's trying to put a stop to that. Start getting things a little organized."

  "Looks like it's weighted kinda heavily in favor of head busting."

  "A lot of these wags don't capisc' much else. " She shrugged. "He's kind of like an ace, too, he's got very advanced mental powers. He does things this way a lot, though. To show he's real. That's the kind of leadership the Rox needs."

  "'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.'"

  She dropped light to the sand. "I don't need tired old hippie shit."

  He grinned at her. For some reason he was enjoying this. "I'm a tired old hippie."

  "Yeah. Gone prematurely orange, like Ron Reagan, except more electric. And it's more maybe pineapple, on the sides, anyway. What made you do that to your hair? You look like a total dick."

  They were walking now, along a line of makeshift structures jumbled together of fiberboard and plastic. A couple of kids-whether nat or joker it was impossible to tell under the grime-cooked what Mark hoped wasn't really a cat on a metal rod over an oil-drum fire.

  "It was for the custody trial over who got Sprout-that's my daughter-my ex-old lady or me. She's gone real Park Avenue, and my lawyer told me to cut my hair or I'd get blown out of the water in court. So I did."

  "So what happened?"

  "I got blown out of the water."

  She spat. "Combine justice. Where'd you get the twotone head?"

  "I figured nobody in the world would connect Cap'n Trips the federal fugitive, with his long flowing locks and his goatee, with some trashed-out punker." He stopped and looked down at her. It was a long way; at six-four, he was a good foot taller. "But you did," he said. "How'd you recognize me?"

  "I-I read the papers sometimes. And you told me your name, for Christ's sake. You still have a lot to learn about security"

  "Oh," he said, crestfallen. "But, I thought -I mean, you said I was among friends…"

  "Yeah, which is why you were getting your skinny ass kicked 'in when I found you."

  Suddenly the knife was in her hand, its sharp little point poking under his chin, tipping his head back. "There aren't any friends, any where. Capisc'?"

  He nodded, gingerly. The knife hilt parted and snapped around, devouring the blade.

  "Learn that and you've gone a long way toward surviving on the streets," she said, walking on. He followed a beat late, still shaken by the crazy intensity he'd seen in those silver eyes. "Tell you the truth, I didn't make the name at first. It was only when you got that about the Combine. I suddenly thought, who else but an old flower child would know about Ken Kesey? Then it clicked."

  "How'd you know, then? You're no flower child. You're hardly any older than Sprout."

  "She's thirteen, and I'm a lot older than that. Centuries, maybe. Don't look surprised; I've been checking you out." She laughed, a sound brittle and edgy as old copper. "Tyrone and his butthole buddies would be shitting live rats if they knew who they'd been messing with-you got some powerful references among our heavier jokers. They still remember what you did for Doughboy, like you're some kind of martyred hero or something."

  He looked away, embarrassed. He'd heard a few things along those lines, never taken them too seriously. Still, there was the joker who'd warned him to blow the record store…

  "On the other hand, we have a few prominent citizens right here on the Rox who might be even happier to have their hooks in you than your friendly local DEA. Might be some of them remember the Cloisters-and don't go all pale and shaky and start having a coronary on me. You've still got your secrets. I don't make a habit of running my head. As I may have told you, snitches ain't welcome on the Rox."

  "Does your… friend know?"

  "Hey, Blaise is my main man, honey. You're just some bum I picked up on a beach. More'n that, he's the main man for the Rox, in a way poor Bloat can never be. If I think he needs information, he's got it. Okay?"

  It wasn't, but he didn't see what he could do about it. He had his head cocked, as if listening for an echo. Something she had said… Sometimes it seemed as if he were walking along a slope with depression hanging over him like snowdrift cliffs, and every once in a while it'd land on him in an avalanche, muddle his thinking more than years of constant marijuana buzz ever had.

  Whatever bond there'd been between them seemed broken now. He looked at her. "What did you say your boyfriend's name was?"

  "Blaise. Blaise Andrieux. He's-"

  Mark's head snapped around. The red-haired boy was walking along the beach toward them, and Mark wondered why he hadn't recognized him at once.

  He jumped to his feet and lurched into an ankle-deep run. "Blaise! Blaise, how are you doing, man?"

  Blaise walked with tight-butted dancer's grace through the clinging reeking sand. A satisfied smile was fitted tightly to his fa
ce, even if it was taking some effort to keep from shaking his right hand in the air. He'd caught the kid with the dragon tat wrong with a backfist knuckle to the cheekbone and it stung something fierce. But he couldn't show pain. It wouldn't do to have his bannermen getting the idea he was human.

  He'd bulked up amazingly in the months since he first ran away from his grandfather. His body was just a volcano of boiling growth hormones, and the hot adolescent anger that ran in his veins like live steam had kept him keen on the martial-arts exercises and weight training his grandfather had insisted he maintain. He was already larger than almost anybody of Takisian stock had ever been-anyone who grew so far beyond the classic somatotype would be destroyed as a monster-and his Takisian-derived muscles were denser and more efficient than a human's, his neurons firing and recovering quicker.

  All of which was to say that while he'd grown a bit bored with the effortless control his mind power gave him, he had discovered the existential pleasures of kicking ass.

  He told K.C. it was to set an example for the others, of course. To show that he wasn't just some effete egghead ace, just a wimp, like-well, like his grandfather. That was because K.C. wasn't tough, even if she was smart and, when the mood hit her, as happily savage as any of the jumpers. She liked to rationalize Blaise's violence by imagining that he was crafting a New Order of some sort out of the Rox rabble. Since she amused him, it amused him to play along.

  Meanwhile, he was enjoying the animal pleasures, the morning light almost warm on his face, the breeze blowing stiff enough from seaward that he could smell the ocean over bloathlack and New Jersey, the tingling muscle memory of flesh-on-flesh impact, his bannermen murmuring respectfully behind him. "Did you see the way he straightened those fuckers out?"

  He heard someone calling his name. He looked up. The sensual mood turned to dust and blew away. The hated stilt figure of Mark Meadows was running like a horrible scarecrow with an orange do, right along the beach, right at him, waving his arms and calling his name.

  Blaise was stupefied. He must be some kind of monster. How can he be so bold?

  "Blaise! Blaise, man." Meadows stopped a few feet away, looked him up and down. "It's good to see you. How long has it been? A year?"

  "I, uh. I think so, Mark."

  Merde! He makes me feel thirteen again.

  "You're lookin' good, man. Growin' up and fillip' out. "

  I should have fucked your daughter in the ass the way Latham fucked me. She was a beautiful little vegetable. She could have been a marvelous toy, and I could break her and throw her away if I wished…

  "Thanks," he said. His lips tasted like paper.

  Mark's watery gaze flicked past Blaise at the bannermen, then back to the boy. "So what, uh, what brings you to the Rox, man? Pigs come down on you too?"

  "Yes. Yes, Mark, I guess they did."

  Meadows nodded sagely. "Nail that stands out must be hammered down, huh? These're tough times to be different, man."

  Yes, they are. And I'll show you just how tough… "So, have you seen your grandpa recently, man? I, I really need to talk to him about something."

  Blaise felt himself smile. It wasn't feigned. "Real recently."

  "He's doing very well. What do you need to talk to him about?"

  "It's kind of personal, man. I'm sorry."

  Blaise gave a petulant little flip of his shoulders.

  "Hey, I'd tell you if I could, you know that. But you're young, and I just hate to involve you, y'know?" He glanced around. "Well, I guess I'll catch you around. Good seeing you again, man." Meadows turned and walked away.

  Incredible, he thought at the narrow retreating back. Such arrogance. Tell me now he doesn't wish me harm, dear Governor.

  But he's still safe from me. Oh yes, so very safe.

  K.C. was still hunkered on the sand where he'd left her. Her arms were around her knees, and her eyes were hooded. "Tell me one thing," she said, "and tell me straight. Is that true what you said, that the reason you came to the Rox, the reason you blew off your store, your being an ace, your whole comfortable little fantasyland life, was all for this daughter of yours?"

  "Yes."

  She stood. "You're a real case, buster. See you around."

  He didn't see her the next day. He didn't expect to, and was disappointed anyway. In the chilly, fetid, humid dorm that night he reflected that he always seemed to be attracted to women who didn't see him the next day.

  Ha. Attracted to her. There's a thought. For a moment, the voice n his head sounded like the familiar banter of JJ Flash, Esquire. But sharp-edged as he was, Flash was never quite that gratuitously nasty. And Mark's friends had dwindled away to nothingness within weeks after the trial. Actually, they'd drowned in booze for a few weeks, like the rest of his mind, and when he got a grip on himself they were gone. He wondered if he'd ever get them back.

  Maybe he didn't deserve to. He had deserted them, after all-flushed them down the john on his lawyer's advice, to avoid a holding rap that would scuttle his chances of hanging onto his daughter. He had kept five vials, one for each persona. Three had been broken, one had sufficed to save the life of a child-at the cost of his secret, his life aboveground, and Sprout. The final one had gotten him out of Family Court just as the DEA was closing in on him. He had abandoned his friends. Maybe he had murdered them. And it hadn't done one damned bit of good. He wouldn't come back if he was one of them.

  He went to sleep.

  She caught up with him the next day, just after noon. They went for a walk again, and just talked. About books, about the fucked-up world they lived in, about the things Mark had been through, as an ace or beyond. Never about her, though; the times he asked she went quiet and spiky, and he quit after a while. She was a bright, bitter, and all-tooknowing kid, cynical and vulnerable by random turns.

  She was also beautiful. He tried not to think about that. He settled into the routine of life on the Rox. Or nonroutine. Aside from the steam tables, which came to life sometime in the morning and sometime toward sunset, the only rhythms the Rox knew were the sun and the tides and what people felt like cranking through their ghetto blasters. Mark was going mad. Somewhere his daughter was trapped in a nightmare she couldn't possibly comprehend. He had to help her. But not even Pretorius-sticking his neck way out-had been able to turn up clue one to her whereabouts.

  "I can't tell him."

  The night wind unreeled flame and light from the tiki torches like a kid jerking at a roll of toilet paper. Pairs of jumpers sparred with one another on the landfill margin behind the Admin Building in the uncertain light.

  Blaise paused in mopping his forehead with a towel. He always insisted on clean fresh towels being brought over from the mainland for his showers and workouts. He got them.

  "What do you mean, you can't tell him?" His voice took on a dangerous edge.

  "It means so much to him. I feel like I'm… like I'm using him."

  Anger hit him. Trembling anger. She saw it in his face and stepped back.

  You bitch. You bitch! Are you beginning to feel loyal to him?

  "You haven't used people before? You haven't used people up? Think, K. C. Think hard. You're a jumper, remember? Jumpers use people. Especially burned-out old nat pukes."

  "He's not a nat, he's an ace"She stiffened as if expecting to receive a blow. "Besides… besides, I'm through with that. You know that. We need to build something out here, something strong that the Combine can't just sweep away like a kid knocking down a bunch of blocks."

  "You're starting to sound like Bloat."

  "I thought I was sounding like you. You with your talk of a New Order. Is that all that it is, just talk?"

  I should kill her now. But the thought fell like a dead leaf through his consciousness, without heat, without weight. He already knew he was through with her. But instead of destroying her here and now, he would use her. Use her up in the destruction of Captain fucking Trips.

  I'm learning patience, Grandpere. You'll be so proud of me
when I tell you.

  "No. And that that's why you're going to tell him. We need his help. We, we need his ace power when the Combine comes to call. Besides, you'll be giving him what he wants most in the world, won't you?"

  She looked at him a moment, eyes glinting like coins in the firelight. She stood tiptoe to kiss his cheek. "Yeah," she breathed huskily in his ear, and kissed him on the adolescent down of his cheek. "Sometimes, Blaise, you're almost human." She turned and ran away.

  I'll pay you for that one too, he thought.

  "She's in the Reeves Diagnostic and Development Institute, in Brooklyn. Borough Park area. It's a Kings County joint; there's some kind of deal down between the city, the state, and the counties to share custody, so they can keep her circulating."

  He was sitting with his butt planted in damp frigid sand, squinting at the occasional stab of a patrol-boat spotlight. It was cold as hell tonight, but you had to be flat desperate to retreat into one of the crumbling turn-of-the-century buildings crammed together on Ellis. She hunkered behind him, seemingly inured to cold in her thin jacket and thinner pants. "'Diagnostic and Development'?" he said.

  "Yeah. Combine sure talks purty, don't it? Pig Latin for `kid jail,' pal. It's in a pretty decent neighborhood, never run too far down, starting to maybe catch a case of the yuppies. Not too bad. As hellholes go."

  He turned and looked at her, disbelief struggling with the will to believe on the battlefield of his face. "How could you find out, when the best lawyer in Jokertown drew a blank?"

  "Best lawyer in Jokertown is by definition not a juvenile delinquent, darlin'. Capisc'? `You wanna find a missing kid, ask an outlaw,' or words to that effect."

  He jumped up, walked toward the water, walked back, sidestepping a drunk or drugged joker face down in the sand. He began to pace in front of K. C. "I have to make plans. I have to do this right. Think now, Mark. Think." He plumped down in the depression he'd made before, feeling heavy and overwhelmed.