Jokertown Shuffle Read online

  "You're free," Shad said. His mouth was dry. "Follow the others to the stairs."

  She made a nervous gesture with her hands. "I left you a message earlier."

  "I forgot to check."

  " I haven't told them anything."

  He opened the door. "Better get out of here."

  She took her blanket and left without looking back. Shad walked to the next door. Peering out the window was a scar-faced woman in an eye patch whose distinctive features he'd last seen in the New York Post.

  Dr. Cody Havero.

  "I've been looking for you, Doc," Shad said, and turned to the dinosaur. "Hit nine!" The lock buzzed, and Shad pulled open the door.

  "Listen," Cody said.

  "You're free," Shad said. "Take the stairs to the roof, go down the fire escape, and head for the police station."

  "No. Wait. My name is Cody Havero."

  "Hit ten!" Shad looked at her. "I know who you are. The whole city's been trying to find you. Hit eleven!"

  "Listen." Following him. "I know things. A lot of what's going on, here and on the Rox. I know a lot of the people they've lined up as targets. And-"

  Shad heard one of the freight elevators start up and put a hand over Cody's mouth. Night rose from the floor, covered them both. Cody gave a little shiver as her vision darkened.

  The elevator platform rose, and Shad could see through the old-fashioned folding elevator door that Tachyon was on it. He looked pale and about a hundred years old. Even the plume on his hat drooped. He was carrying a tray with plastic-wrapped sandwiches and paper cups of coffee.

  Shad was already moving, a memory flaming in his mind of Shelley in the hound joker body, little bits of tissue sticking- to her fur as she wiped away tears…

  Tachyon slid open the elevator door before he noticed anything was wrong, and Shad turned everything to night, reached into the elevator, and grabbed Tachyon by the throat.

  Hot coffee spattered the floor. Shad slammed Tach's head into the side of the elevator, then swung him around and out of the elevator and smashed him into the brick wall of the main room. Tachyon went limp.

  Shad reached down, took the alien's collar in his hands, applied an X-hand choke hold, pressing not only on the windpipe but on the blood vessels on either side of the neck, cutting the arteries that fed the brain. Whoever was inside Tachyon was going to have to die before he jumped out.

  He tightened his hold. The darkness fell away, and Cody screamed.

  "No! Leave her alone!"

  Tachyon was moving feebly, trying without success to tear Shad's hands away. Cody ran to him, grabbed one of Shad's arms in both her own, tried to haul him off the alien. "That's not Tachyon!" she said.

  "Either way," said Shad, and tightened his grip, pressing hard. Tachyon's eyes rolled up. Shad remembered the way the garrote had sliced into his throat when he was a boy, the way the police had to give him a tracheotomy after they kicked down the door, dug a hole in his windpipe, and how he didn't understand what was happening and tried to fight them, thinking they were trying to kill him too.

  Cody tugged on him. "It's just some girl named Kelly. She's not really anybody."

  Shad looked at her. She took a step back, her eyes widening as she saw his expression, and then determination entered her face, and she yanked on his arm again. "She's Blaise's girlfriend. That's all she is. She does what they tell her."

  Shad looked down at the alien body, its face turning purple, and released his hold. Tachyon thudded to the floor, clutched at his throat.

  "Blaise is the bad one," Cody told him. "He's behind the whole thing. He's evil."

  "Didn't think he was a choirboy," Shad said. His throat ached as if in sympathy with Tachyon's.

  "He killed the real Tachyon months ago. Blaise told me." Tachyon's not dead, Shad thought in surprise. He's on the Rox.

  He was about to tell Havero that, but suddenly the room was filled with the flat unmistakable boom of a Kalashnikov. Shad's nerves screamed as he dove forward and rolled, willed his opaque black cloak around him. He flattened himself against the metal wall of the prison complex.

  The overhead mesh rattled. Cody, he saw, had reacted well, throwing herself flat, and she was now low-crawling toward cover. Her Vietnam reflexes seemed intact.

  The AK boomed again. Shad extended his opaque field and climbed up the wall of the cage complex. There was a fountain of sparks from the control console, and the yellow dinosaur fell back, arms waving.

  The joker was crouched, the AK shouldered and leveled, and there was a ripping sound as the guard unloaded a full magazine in the direction of the escaping prisoners.

  Shad screamed in anger and ate every photon in the joker's body. It took several long seconds. Shad's heart seemed to swell with sudden heat. The joker pitched forward, frozen; there were little crystalline sounds as bits of him broke off and rattled downward through the mesh. Shad ran for the table, saw the dinosaur lying splayed with his brain oozing down the brick wall behind him, the yellow body twitching in its final throes. Shad looked wildly for Shelley and saw her-saw Lisa Traeger's body-running up the iron stairway, panic stamped on her face but otherwise unharmed. Two more of the prisoners were down, wounded. The rest of the swarm of bullets had only pocked the red brick walls. Either the guard was a bad shot, or he'd been seeing triple from his head injury.

  Cody Havero ran forward to render first aid, her hands snatching automatically at her pockets as if for medical instruments.

  A telephone on the control panel began to purr. Shad picked it up. His eyes tracked to the stair.

  "What's happening? Who's shooting?" The voice sounded female and young.

  "What's happened-" He felt himself smile. "-is that I just killed your guard. The question is, what do you think you can do about it?"

  He put the phone down. "Everybody out," he said, and hit the remaining switches. Jokers burst out of cells and staggered for the exits.

  "Help your friends!" Shad said, pointing to the two wounded. "Get 'em out."

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tachyon rise to an unsteady crouch, then fall headfirst down the stairs. Shad suppressed an impulse to pursue and instead hit the switches labeled floods and managed to kill most of the floodlights. An alarm buzzer began its cry, repeating its grating message every three seconds. Shad walked toward the stairway, darkness swirling off his form like dancing mist.

  The first two jumpers bounded up the stairs with UZIs in their hands. Shad dropped night around them, watched the panic grow in their eyes, then drew heat from their bodies till they went unconscious and stumbled back down the stairs. He heard someone scream down below. Shots bounced up the stairway, fired blind by someone out of sight.

  Shad jumped over the barrier to the freight elevator that Tachyon hadn't used, then walked down the side of the elevator shaft. Peering around the corner, he saw a cold-eyed mastiff of a joker and a chubby-faced young white girl braced behind some packing crates, the joker with another AK and the girl with a Dirty Harry revolver far too large for her hands. Both were staring at the stairway with its two bluefaced figures. A white boy in a flash Italian jacket and Bart Simpson T-shirt was trying to kick-start a vintage Triumph motorbike, but in his panic he'd flooded the engine.

  Shad didn't see Tachyon anywhere.

  Van Gogh's Irises hung on one of the walls under a row of track lights. The warning buzzer was still crying.

  Shad took them all out, dropping them with hypothermia, one after another. It took a long time because Shad's body had already absorbed a lot of energy, but the targets were helpless, and he took all the time he needed. When the boy dropped with the Triumph on top of him, the joker began firing wild, bullets whanging off brick, and when Shad began consuming his heat, he held the trigger down and emptied the magazine into whatever crates were nearest him.

  Shad slipped from out of hiding, searched the area for Tachyon, and didn't find him. The red metal fire door in back was open; maybe the Tachyon body had simply bolted. Shad
handcuffed each of the shivering victims, cuffed their feet as well, and put a garbage bag over each head. A hand-lettered tag attached to each bag identified each as a jumper. The police or emergency-room personnel would remove the bags at their peril. The jumpers couldn't jump anyone they couldn't see.

  Shad wandered for a moment amid the stacks of loot. There were lots of paintings, some of which had just taken some 7.62-mm rounds. More prefabricated detention facilities, German in manufacture, designed to be ready for use in any insurrection, revolution, or instant concentration camp. Enough weapons to start a revolution, each labeled in its packing crate-grenades, mortars, antitank weapons. Some of the lettering was Cyrillic, some Chinese. Most seemed to have been transshipped from Texas. Medical supplies. Bearer bonds. Gold bars. Serious amounts of drugs, presumably not for use, rather an investment. File cabinets filled with reports from lending institutions, credit-check companies, credit-card companies, and private detectives hired to scour the neighborhood for new victims.

  It was bigger than Shad had imagined. His heart blazed. This was the kind of thing he was meant for.

  Well. Time to be a hero. He got on the Triumph, started it, heard the tail pipe boom off the echoing warehouse walls. He drove to the loading dock, opened the door, rolled the bike out. The cold street waited. Shad accelerated, cape snapping out behind him, and turned the corner.

  A turreted NYPD armored car sat like a squat insect on the eroded city asphalt. Police in helmets and flak jackets were setting up sawhorse barriers and stretching out yellow tape.

  The Triumph's headlight rolled over them, and Shad saw them start nervously, a general movement toward weapons. Shad decelerated and held up a peaceful hand.

  "Chill," he said. "I'm on your side."

  A tiny Asian woman in a flak jacket-Captain Angela Ellis, he knew-gave him a narrow look. She had never met Shad, but she'd met one of his identities who had worked out with her in the same karate school. She was talented, Shad judged, but impatient. From her look, maybe the bells of memory were beginning to chime. Her M-16 was pointed slightly to the right of Shad's heart.

  "Who are you?"

  "The warehouse is full of loot," Shad said. "Gold bars, paintings, drugs, and a whole lot of guns. There are some kidnap victims I've let go-"

  "We've picked up some." A flat declaration. "Some are wounded."

  Captain Ellis nodded, raised her walkie-talkie, spoke a few words.

  "I've subdued the kidnappers and bagged them for you. Some are jumpers, so be careful."

  Ellis nodded again.

  "They've been jumping the rich," Shad continued. "The city comptroller, Nelson Dixon, other people with access to cash. There are files in there that should give you a lot of names."

  She looked at him with unforgiving jade eyes. "You never answered my first question. Who the fuck are you?" Shad's smile broadened, and he couldn't resist a low, calculated laugh. "Call me Black Shadow," he said.

  She stroked her chin and nodded.

  He laughed again, exultant. This was, all of it, what he was born for. He looked at her, the laughter still rolling from his throat. "Somebody else got jumped," he said. "Somebody important."

  Her eyes were most unfriendly. "Who?"

  What should have happened was that he spoke the name of Tachyon, ate every particle of light for about ten yards around, gunned the Triumph, and disappeared like the Lone Ranger into the night, trailing triumphant laughter. What happened instead: The world suddenly spun in his head, and then he was looking up into a starless New York opalescent night, and he could feel his own limbs twitch and spasm as if they were not his own. Shelley looked down at him with a sneer on her face. She was wearing a lot of mascara and the wrongcolored eye shadow. Her breath was warm and smelled of gin.

  "Asshole," she said. "Son of a bitch. I should blow your brains out." Brandishing a chrome-plated. 38 revolver. Shots banged off hard brick walls. Shad could hear shouts and screams. Shelley grabbed him by the collar, jerked him left and right. He couldn't seem to make his body do what it wanted. Roof asphalt and pebbles grated on his back.

  It wasn't Lisa Traeger doing this to him but the old Shelley, the young girl he'd first met. He recognized the bridge of freckles across her nose.

  "Hear that?" Shelley said. "That's Diego in your body, and he's kicking police ass." She laughed. "Cops are gonna come looking for you."

  He had been jumped. The thought pierced Shad's mind like an icicle. He gasped for breath and tried to rise, arms and legs thrashing.

  Shelley laughed contemptuously and shoved Shad back onto the roof. Police shotguns boomed out. "Relax," she said. "You'll be back in your body real soon, and you won't like it."

  Shad's mind whirled. He had just worked out who he was, and now he wasn't himself anymore.

  The hell he wasn't.

  I am Black Shadow, he thought. There had to be a way to make this body work for him. He lay back on the cold roof and concentrated on making one finger move. It seemed to do as he commanded.

  Okay. A start.

  I am Black Shadow, he thought.

  Shelley went to the roof parapet and looked down. "Diego, shit!" she said. "Get outta there! Jump! You've made your point."

  She wore a white evening dress, a fur wrap, and an incongruous pair of battered red sneakers. Her hair was longer and punked up with mousse. She and her friend had probably just come back from a night of club-crawling and seen the police setting up their barricades. You needed a twenty-one-year-old body to get into the kind of clubs where jumpers probably wanted to hang out. Shelley had provided one. Maybe that's all they really wanted her for and the trust fund was just a bonus.

  Shad tried to move his left foot, was successful, and managed to move the left leg a few inches. More or less as he intended. Then he tried the right leg.

  I'm Black Shadow. Black Shadow. The words becoming a mantra.

  More guns fired. Shelley paced back and forth at the parapet, muttering. Shad wondered if the police were winning. "Yeah! Yeah!" Shelley chanted. "Run for it!"

  A storm of fire erupted. Shelley leaned out over the parapet, apparently following someone escaping around the corner, and then she sighed. "Good." She came back to stand by Shad's side and looked down at him. "You're gonna get yours, asshole."

  Black Shadow. Black Shadow. I'm Black Shadow.

  He looked at the woman next to him. And you're not Shelley.

  Shad moved. His coordination wasn't very good, so he chose a move that could be done without any real precision. His kenpo teacher called it sticks of Satin. He dropped his right leg against the front of Shelley's ankles, then slammed his left leg against the back of her knees. His accuracy was none too great, but the leverage was still good enough to pitch Shelley forward, landing hard on hands and knees.

  Shad lunged upward and grabbed her gun arm by the sleeve, then dragged her toward him. He clubbed one fist and tried to bring it down on the back of her neck, but his accuracy was wretched, and he hit the back of the head instead. He kept hitting. Shelley struggled, almost got free, but Shad lurched atop her and bore her down to the asphalt.

  "I'm Black Shadow," he said. "Black Shadow." His arms wrapped Shelley's head, right forearm folding across her jaw, left cupping the back of the head.

  "No," Shelley begged. "Don't." Shad's heart twisted. "Black shadow!" he screamed, and snapped Shelley's neck.

  He pulled the. 38 from twitching fingers and staggered to his feet. The sky whirled around him. He tottered to the parapet and looked down.

  The Triumph was on fire. Angela Ellis was on the pavement, moving feebly as police figures crouched over her shouting into their radios. Other officers lay sprawled across the pavement, some in pools of blood.

  They'd blame Black Shadow for it, he realized. How could they do anything else?

  There was a noise on the fire escape, and Shad spun to face the sound. Dizziness almost brought him sagging to his knees. Black Shadow rose from the darkness. He looked at Shad and the sprawled f
igure of the lifeless jumper.

  The cloaked silhouette approached. He was carrying a police M-16. "Man. I thought I was cornered there for a second. I musta jumped twelve times before I ended up back in this body." He dropped the rifle and grinned. "Turns out this guy can walk up walls. Lucky for me." His look turned puzzled. "Why are you in my body?" Thinking Shad must be his friend. He looked from one to the other again, then alarm entered his eyes. "What are="

  Shad lurched toward him, swinging up the pistol on the end of his right arm. "I want my body back, motherfucker." Black Shadow looked uncertain. Then he smiled. "Maybe," he said. "If you drop that gun."

  "Bullshit." The gun swayed. Shad grabbed it with both hands.

  Black Shadow's eyes narrowed inside the mask. "Maybe I can cross that distance before you pull the trigger."

  "Just try it, motherfucker. I know I ain't faster than a speeding bullet, and neither are you."

  The jumper hesitated. Apparently he didn't know that he could hide himself in darkness or freeze Shad solid, because he didn't try it. Maybe he hadn't been alive to read Aces magazine in 1976.

  Shad blinked sweat from his eyes. The gun jittered in his hands.

  "You don't seem too coordinated, asshole," said Black Shadow. "Why don't you put the gun down?"

  "I want my body back," Shad said, "and if I don't get it, I'm gonna hurt you."

  Black Shadow looked at him. "How you gonna do that?" He grinned insolently. "I'm in your body. You aren't gonna hurt this body, are you? Look at yourself. You're fifteen years old. I'm a grown-up."

  Bang.

  Black Shadow's eyes widened as the bullet whipped over his head. "Shit!" he said. "Will you put that thing down?" Shad blinked eyes dazzled by the muzzle flash, a problem his regular body didn't have. "If you give me my body back," Shad said, "you can have this body. This body has a gun, motherfucker. Maybe you can kill me with it before I snap your fucking neck."

  Black Shadow hesitated, licking his lips. "Let me think." Bang.