Jokertown Shuffle Read online

Blindly, he reached for her. Her eyes glowed in shadowed sockets, and columns of flame pulsed in her throat. "You'll keep me safe, won't you?" she said.

  He felt masks sliding away one by one. He felt less safe than he had in years.

  "I'll do what I can," he said.

  Shelley slept like a baby. Shad prowled the two-room suite, trying to work things out in his head. Strange little Miles Davis etudes sang through his thoughts. He kept hoping the situation would define itself, that he'd look out the window and see a human eyeball on the sill outside staring at him; then he would know what needed doing.

  No eyeball. No clue.

  He kept thinking about that green landscape glowing on the sidewalk. There, maybe, people wouldn't need masks. In the pale predawn Shelley woke with a laugh. She threw up her arms and rolled across the Carlyle's sheets, giggling like a girl. Then she glanced up at Shad, who sat on the edge of the bed. Her eyes narrowed. "What's that on your shoulder?" she said. She reached out, touched the skin. "It's the CBS eye," Shad said.

  Her face wrinkled in puzzlement. "You had it done? Why?"

  "Scar tissue," Shad said. "Somebody carved it into me when I was little."

  Shock rolled across her face.

  "I don't want to talk about it," Shad said.

  She sat up in bed, put her arms around him. "I can't understand how somebody could-"

  "Somebody did. And somebody jumped you and put you in a joker body."

  And some people string others up from lampposts. "People do these things," he said.

  She rested her cheek on his shoulder. "I can't believe I didn't see those scars before." Her eyes narrowed. "Is that another one around your throat?"

  Where the garrote had sawn into him and the tracheotomy had gone into the windpipe. Shad nodded. "The light's at the right angle or something. It happened years ago. It's hardly visible anymore."

  She looked at him. "So what do you do with your time? You just live in hotels and carry a lot of cash with you and help people feel safe?"

  "What are you going to do?"

  She seemed surprised. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, what are you going to do? You've got money, a new body. A credit card that's probably good for a few more hours. So what's your plan?"

  She lay back on the sheets. He looked at the dark nipples atop her soft mature breasts, and he couldn't help remembering the breasts of the old Shelley-smaller, firmer, with a dusting of freckles.

  "I don't know," she said. "I feel too good to think about it right now. All I know is that I want to be safe again."

  "People are going to start looking for Lisa Traeger in a little while, and I don't figure you want to be found."

  "No." She leaned forward again, propped her chin on her knee. "I can pay you back your twenty grand. I've got enough with me."

  "You don't have to. It wasn't my money anyway."

  "You steal it or something?"

  "Yes." Looking at her. "That's exactly what I did."

  "Anyone get hurt?"

  "Lots of anyones."

  She frowned at him. "You're not making me feel safe anymore."

  He shook his head. "I've never been what you'd call safe, Shelley."

  She signed. Carefully her eyes queried his. "I know how to be safe if I have to."

  "Yes?"

  "I take the jumpers up on their offer. And I do the jump again and again, until I'm rich beyond my wildest dreams of avarice. And then I get jumped into a body more my own age-you know this Traeger body is all of thirty-eight?-and I live happily ever after in the Bahamas or wherever it is that retired jumpers go."

  He looked at her. "I think you should quit while you're ahead. You don't want anything more to do with those people."

  "I've lost twenty years. This body is going to be wanted by the police. And you say I'm ahead?"

  "You're ahead of where you were a week ago. I'd settle for that."

  "Twenty years." He saw tears in her eyes. "I've lost damn near twenty years. I don't want to be thirty-eight."

  "Shelley." He reached out, took her hand. "Bad things are going to start happening to those people."

  "Bad things. Meaning you."

  "Me and about two hundred million other people. They can't keep this up. Not all those impersonations. Not people like Tachyon or Nelson Dixon or Constance Loeffler."

  "Connie Loeffler?" Shelley sniffled, then shook her head. "She isn't being ridden."

  "Then what does she have to do with all this?"

  "They did jump her, yes. Put her in a joker body, one of the really disgusting ones, for a few hours. That was all it took." She shrugged. "She was a pretty young woman, okay? A pretty young woman with money, like I used to be. She jumped-heh, sorry-she jumped at the deal they offered. She pays fifty grand a month protection and allows them use of some of her cars and facilities. And she's living in L.A. now, to keep away from them, but that won't keep them away if they want her. The only way to keep safe from these people is to do what they want."

  "That's not safe," Shad said. "It's as safe as I'm going to get."

  "Listen," Shad said. "I can make you disappear. I can get you new ID, a place to live, whatever it takes…"

  "And I put my new money in a trust fund, right? And then someone in the trust department gets jumped, and-"

  "It doesn't have to be New York."

  "There are more jumpers all the time, right? It's a mutant wild card-like what that carrier spread a few years ago, only slower. In another few years there won't be anyplace safe. The only way to keep safe is to keep on their good side."

  A melancholy warning bell tolled slowly in Shad's heart. "I told you once," Shad said. "I told you bad things would start to happen. You didn't listen then."

  "What about my missing years? How do I get them back?" Her voice was a wail.

  "Think of the years you've got left. Make those the important ones."

  "Shit! Shit!" She turned away and beat a pillow with her fist.

  He reached for her, tried to stroke her shoulders and back. "You're ahead of the game. You've got lots of options."

  "I was young!"

  She clutched a pillow to her. Tears spilled from her eyes, and Shad's nerves twisted. "You were a joker," he said. "You're not anymore."

  "I want to be safe."

  "There isn't anyplace safe. The Rox least of all."

  A vision of cool green fields passed before his mind. Shad held her till she stopped trembling. Then she jumped up and went to the bathroom to find some tissues. A few minutes later, she was back, red-faced and red-eyed, and began to pick up her clothing.

  "I should think about getting out of here," she said. "I can hide you."

  She frowned, considered, shook her head. Stepped into her underpants. "I want to be free," she said. "Free to make up my mind without any pressure."

  "Don't hurt people, Shelley."

  A little muscle in her cheek jumped. She gave him a resentful look. "The worst that'll happen to them is to end up in Lisa Traeger's body. You seem to think that's a good place to be."

  "'That's not exactly what I said."

  Shad watched her dress and felt hope trickling out of him. He reached for his own clothes.

  Leave her alone. Let her make up her own mind. He couldn't tell her what to do-he'd made too many wrong decisions himself to tell anyone else how to behave-but he knew that decisions had consequences, that karma worked on that level if no other, that nothing good could come out of any of this.

  But he couldn't really think of any way to make it better any other way, either. What had happened to Shelley was like what happened to people in prison. You got fucked up. It didn't matter if you were in for an unpaid traffic fine and were the best prisoner in the world, because prison fucked you over anyway. What you learned there was only good for survival in prison, and what you learned was only how to manipulate people and keep everyone at a certain distance and play the game to get what you want and not care about anyone else. And you couldn't help it, bec
ause that was what you had to do to survive the slams. And when those reflexes carried over to the outside, bad things would happen.

  He buttoned his shirt, looked up at her. "Don't tell them about me."

  Her look was scornful. "What, kind of person do you think I am?"

  "I'm here to tell you I'm not going to hurt you, okay? I know you're not the enemy."

  "Violet wasn't the enemy. She went off the roof anyway."

  "I didn't push her."

  "That doesn't mean it wasn't your fault."

  Shad didn't have an answer for that one. "741-PINE," he said. "Leave messages. I'll get them eventually, and I want to know you're okay. But I don't live by the phone. You can't trust it in an emergency." He looked at her hopelessly. "If someone pushes you off a roof, I can't help."

  Her look was slitted, hidden. Like someone gazing out from behind a hundred years of hard time. She sighed, reached out, touched him. Became Shelley for a little while. "I won't shop you," she said. "You helped. I'd still be a joker if it wasn't for you."

  He put his arms around her and held her close. Her life had turned nightmare, and she wanted it all back, the youth and beauty and trust fund. Maybe she'd get it.

  What she would never get back was that miraculous innocence, the racing exuberant joy.

  And they both knew it.

  Two days later, Shad was ready. He had the jumpers scoped out, knew their movements, knew that things were as ready as they'd ever be. Shelley hadn't called him, but every day that went by was another day in which she could decide to rejoin the jumpers, and he wanted to make his move in the interim.

  The only delay had been caused by the building's alarm systems. The warehouse had new state-of-the-art alarms, but the building had first got electricity a century ago, and the junction box in the alley out back was a spaghetti maze of hundreds of different-colored dusty old wires. It had taken Shad nineteen hours of work, crouched twelve feet off the ground as he worked with his meter and alligator clips, before he had the proper wires isolated. He was lucky it hadn't taken weeks. All he had to do, come the proper moment, was bypass the alarms with current from a six-volt battery, and then it would be time to rock and roll.

  He decided to move early the next morning, when any guards would be tired and maybe asleep. He went to his apartment off Gramercy Park and watched the news and played Cannonball Adderley's Savoy Sessions and tried to sleep.

  At four in the morning, he got up, went to the wardrobe, and unlocked it. He got out a heavy belt and a bunch of gear and laid them out on the carpet. Then looked at the clothing, all the identities lined up on the rack awaiting his habitation. His eyes drifted to the Black Shadow costume: the navy-blue jumpsuit, the black cloak, the domino mask.

  The costume sang to him of readiness, and he felt his soul answer.

  There was a chalk drawing on the wall next to the junction box. It showed only the junction box blown up to enormous size, its mass of wires rendered in bright, almost surrealistic detail, with a giant pair of hands working with alligator clips and a voltage meter.

  Shad found his nerves keening again, his head gymballing madly as he looked for the street artist, but he knew she was long gone.

  The cloak floated about him as he crouched on the wall next to the junction box and attached his homemade bypass box to the alarm system. He took a cellular phone from his belt, dialed 911, and told the police that there were jumpers holed up with their loot in the warehouse and that they had captives in there. He finished by saying that he'd heard shots fired and that they'd better cordon off the neighborhood and get a team ready to send in.

  "Give me your name, sir," the operator insisted. "Black Shadow."

  Why the hell not?

  Shad hung the phone on his belt and walked up the wall of the warehouse. Night spilled from his cloak, raced through the sky. He sucked photons until the darkness billowed out ten yards in all directions, until his nerves sang with pleasure. He picked the lock on the roof access and went down a fluted nineteenth-century cast-iron staircase. Torn, graffitiscarred wallboard revealed crumbling red brick and slabs of unreclaimed asbestos.

  Below, on the upper floor of the warehouse, were the tiger cages.

  It looked like a brainwashing academy out of The Manchurian Candidate. Solid prefabricated metal-walled cells had been built and riveted together, each with a single steel door and a slot though which food could be passed. The cells were open on top and screened with metal mesh. Catwalks lay atop the mesh so that sentries could march along them and peer down at the inmates. Each cell was equipped with a cot, a mattress, a washbasin, a pitcher of water, and a slop pail. February cold filled the place; the prisoners were wrapped in blankets and secondhand winter clothing. Spotlights juryrigged to the graceful brick arches of the roof kept the prisoners in perpetual daylight. Cameras peered down from above. There was a stairway and a pair of empty freightelevator shafts that led to the floor below.

  The smell was not good.

  Shad saw two guards, both jokers. One, a slouched figure in a hooded cloak, paced atop the cages and carried an AK complete with bayonet, while another, a slab-sided gray skinned elephant man, drowsed naked in a chair to one side of the cages, sitting in front of a collection of electronic equipment that looked as if it had been kludged together by Victor von Frankenstein: video monitors, rheostats, switches, red and green Christmas-tree lights, Lord knew what. Both sentries were wearing shades against the glaring light.

  The thing Shad found most pleasing about this setup was that there were a lot of photons to rip off.

  He covered himself in darkness, inverted himself, and walked along the ceiling until he was over the cages. Most of the people in them were lying down, trying to sleep, arms thrown across their eyes to cut off the incessant light. Most were jokers, many badly deformed. One of them wore a straitjacket and was chained to the door of her cell. Little rhythmic moans came from her slitlike mouth.

  The ones they couldn't afford to let go. People like Shelley they could release after a few days, but not Nelson Dixon or the city comptroller. Not the ones with access to accounts they could loot forever.

  Shad looked down at the joker guard and felt certainty filling him like a swarm of buzzing photons. He'd hidden himself away, turned himself into other people. No Dice,

  Wall Walker, Simon, other phantoms of his imagination or of the street. All dealing with penny-ante shit. Now he was himself again, working on something worthy of his time. Readiness filled him like a welcome draft of springwater.

  Photons dopplered along his nerves at the speed of light. The joker guard was right below him. Shad dropped from the ceiling, turned himself upright in air, and landed just behind the guard. The wire mesh boomed. One hand twitched the hood off the joker's head and jerked him backward, the other drove a palm heel into the joker's mastoid. There was a nasty sound of bone caving in. The joker fell onto the mesh with a crash like a falling tree. Shad didn't figure he was dead, but of course skull fractures were unpredictable. And Shad was already on his way to the other guard.

  The elephant man had come awake and was staring at Shad, blinking hard, shading his eyes against the glaring light and trying to make out what had just happened in the boiling cloud of darkness that had dropped atop his cages. It was far too late to do anything by the time he realized that the cloud of darkness was heading for him.

  The cape crackled in Shad's ears as he sprang off the tiger cages and landed on the joker's chest with both booted feet. The chair went over backwards, and both Shad and the joker spilled to the floor. Shad rose to his feet and considered his handiwork. The elephant man was flat out of the picture, half his ribs broken, blood oozing from a scalp wound where the back of his head had hit the floor.

  "Hey! Hey! Let me out!" The voice boomed in the huge room. Apparently one of the captives had noticed that his guard had been flattened right over his head.

  "Put a lid on it!" yelled someone else.

  The darkness swirled away, revealing
Shad's form. He looked at the scarred homemade plywood desk that supported all the electronic gear. There were a series of numbered switches that Shad concluded operated electric locks in the cells.

  "Let me out! Let me out!"

  "Shut up, fuckface!" Another weary voice.

  Shad peered toward the cells. "Which number are you?" he shouted.

  "Six! Six!"

  Shad pressed number six. There was a loud buzzing sound, a door slammed open, and a yellow-skinned, roundbottomed bipedal dinosaur, wearing nothing but a polka-dot necktie, flung himself out, looking wildly left and right, and started heading for the stairs leading down into the warehouse. "Not that way!" Shad yelled. "Over here!"

  The dinosaur reversed direction and started running again, heading for the stairs to the roof. Shad intercepted him and grabbed him by the necktie.

  "Hey! Lemme go!"

  Shad started dragging the dinosaur toward the console. "This way," he said. "We're letting everyone out."

  "Me first!"

  "What you're gonna do is push buttons. And then maybe I'll let you leave. Okay?"

  Shad got the dinosaur in front of the console, then walked toward the first of the tiger cages. The door had 01 stenciled on it. Inside was a purple joker with flippers for hands.

  "Hit one!" Shad said. He pulled the door open and turned to the joker. "You're free. Take the stairs to the roof, then down and out of here. Tell the police."

  The joker ran for the stairs as if he were afraid Shad would change his mind. Shad walked down the line of cells, opening one after the other. Captives moved toward the exits. The woman in the straitjacket had to have her chain torn off the door by main strength-Shad sucked a lot of photons and boosted his muscles-and then she ran, hooting, for the stairs without waiting to have the canvas jacket unbuckled.

  "Hit eight!" The door buzzed and Shad looked up into Lisa Traeger's eyes. She seemed a more privileged class of inmate; she wore an opaque sleep mask propped up on her forehead and had an electric blanket for her cot. She was dressed well in Guess jeans and a cashmere rollneck. A delicate gold chain winked around her neck.

  There was a dossier open on the bed, with photographs and xeroxes of bank statements. She was studying her next target. They didn't let their people out after they knew who the target was. A good piece of security, Shad thought.