Jokers Wild wc-3 Read online

  "I have no comfort to give."

  "I ask for none. Only for your company." His fingers brushed lightly across her bruised cheek. "And perhaps, if you wish, I might comfort you."

  "Perhaps." And in her secret place Death reveled… just a little.

  People crushed into him from all directions. The sidewalks were jammed with costumed jokers and rubbernecking nats. He moved the same speed and direction as the crowd, letting it carry him along. There was no point in calling attention to himself. The Astronomer could be anywhere, and usually was.

  Spector didn't need to be at Times Square for over an hour. He didn't want to show up early; it might make him appear overeager. The Jokertown parade was the safest place he could think of to kill time.

  In the street a band started playing "Jokertown Strutters Ball." Spector was beginning to feel claustrophobic. He picked his way toward the edge of the crowd. A three-eyed mime wearing white tights blocked his path and signaled him to stop. Spector tensed. The mime frowned in an exaggerated manner, then stepped aside and motioned him past. Spector gave him a hard elbow in the stomach. He smiled as the joker doubled over. He hated mimes.

  Spector was thankful for his constant pain. It distracted him enough that he couldn't focus on the smell of hundreds of sweating jokers. By the end of the day plenty of nats would be green from the dead-fish scent.

  Spector looked at his digital watch. He'd taken it from a young broker he'd killed in the financial district the week before. It was only a little past ten-thirty. The day, like the pa rade, was crawling slowly by. He hadn't been this afraid since the first time he'd met the Astronomer. The old man had told him they'd rule the world. That he'd be a top dog in the new order. It was all bullshit. The local aces had stepped in and ruined everything. At least the Astronomer was going to get them, too. I hope he makes it last when he's doing Tachyon, Spector thought.

  He reached the edge of the crowd and ducked into an alley. Garbage was littered about in large piles. Three steps in he heard the howl. Spector stopped and looked up. The Astronomer, smiling, was floating down toward him.

  "I told you what would happen, Demise. You had your chance." The Astronomer howled again, a throaty, inhuman bellow.

  Spector turned and ran back into the crowd, pushing past people, knocking them down. He ignored their threats and curses and fought his way into the street. He dodged through the startled band members, then ran past a crepe float of the Turtle and into the mass of people on the other side. He was afraid to look back.

  A policeman grabbed him by the arm. Spector kneed him in the crotch and pulled away. People all around him were screaming. He could barely breathe.

  "I'm right behind you." The Astronomer's voice was close. Spector turned. The Astronomer was hovering by the policeman, who had raised his pistol to fire. Blue light leapt from the Astronomer's right hand, connecting with the weapon. The gun exploded, showering the policeman and spectators with shrapnel. More screams.

  Spector tripped over a trash basket and fell hard to the concrete sidewalk, skinning his hands. He stood slowly, his knees wobbling. He felt hands grip his shoulders, fingers digging powerfully into his flesh. He couldn't pull away.

  "No." Spector's voice sounded just like Gruber's had earlier.

  The Astronomer let go with one hand and grabbed the top of his head. "Look at me when I speak to you, Demise." Spector felt his head being spun around. There was a stab of unbearable pain, a snap, and his mouth filled with blood. The Astronomer grinned at him. "It's Judgment Day."

  Noise ran through the crowd behind them. The Astronomer turned away, distracted by something, dropping Spector like a sack of garbage.

  His body was paralyzed; he couldn't break the fall. Spector landed face first on the sidewalk, smashing his mouth and nose. He watched the pool of blood widen around his open mouth. It was time to die, again. At least he wouldn't have to see or feel what was going to happen to him.

  Side by side and bumper to bumper, the floats took up a block and a half of Center Street south of Canal. Fortunato could see Des, the elephant-faced joker, done up in chickenwire and flowers. There was Dr. Tod's blimp and Jetboy's plane behind it, complete with floral speed lines. A clear plastic balloon of Chrysalis floated overhead.

  This was deep Jokertown and there weren't so many tourists here. The tourists that came this far down didn't bring their kids. Drivers in coveralls stood by the floats, smoking and talking to each other. The worst of the crowd seemed to all be moving the same way as Fortunato, toward something that was happening up ahead.

  Half a block away he could see the lines of power in the air. Like heat waves, shimmering, distorting everything around them. It was a signature that wasn't really a signature, a set of psychic eraser marks. He'd seen them for the first time seventeen years ago, in a dead boy's room not far from here, where women had been brutally cut to pieces as part of a conspiracy that ended with the great, devouring monstrosity of TIAMAT orbiting the sun.

  He was lightheaded and his pulse was going crazy. He realized that he was scared, really, honest-to-Christ terrified, for the first time in seventeen years.

  He sent a wedge of power out in front of him and ran toward the place where the lines came together. People spun away on both sides of him, shouting at him but unable to touch him.

  Demise screamed. Even over the noise of the crowd Fortunato could hear the crunch of mangled bone and cartilage and the thud of a body hitting the sidewalk.

  As he broke through the wall of people, they were already turning, trying to get away. Somebody dragged away a wounded cop, his right hand burned black, his face pocked with blood. There was a ten-foot circle of sidewalk, empty except for Demise.

  Demise lay on his back, the lapels of his gray suit and the open collar of his scruffy shirt exposed. His head was turned completely around, his face flat against the pavement. Blood ran out of his mouth and nose.

  A man in the crowd was screaming. "There! He's right over there! He's getting away! Stop him, for God's sake!" He was pointing at nothing at all. All Fortunato could see was a blur of faces, like he was trying to look too far to one side, even though he was staring straight ahead.

  Jamming me, he thought. He focused his power and slowed time, until the man's voice and the moans of shock and disgust around him dropped to a subsonic rumble. A tornado of psychic energy hungin the frozen chaos around him, Demise's power, Fortunato's own, the viral energy of the jokers. It was hopeless.

  He let go and time came up to speed. There was nothing he could do. Demise was dead. It was not much of a loss.

  Most of what he knew about Demise was second- or thirdhand, picked up from cops and bystanders after the riot at the Cloisters. He was a loser a middle-class failure who'd caught the wild card and died of it in Tachyon's clinic. Tachyon brought him back and Demise never forgave him for it. He'd come back a projecting telepath, so they said, and what he could project was the memory of his own death, strongly enough to kill with it. For a while he'd sat at the Astronomer's right hand, until Fortunato and the others had destroyed their base at the Cloisters and Fortunato had blasted their Shakti device into atoms.

  He'd have done the same for Demise and the Astronomer if he'd been able. But now Demise seemed inconsequential. From a sense of wounded aesthetics Fortunato got on one knee and twisted Demises head the right way around. He was about to walk away when Demise said, "Thanks. I needed that." Fortunato turned back, his skin crawling. Demise squatted on his heels, rubbing the swollen purple lumps in his neck where blood vessels had burst. Already the bruises were turning yellow, healing as Fortunato watched.

  Demise smiled. His mouth was a little too long and thin, and it came up too high on one side. The smile was full of terror and the man's hands shook so hard he held them up and laughed at them. "Didn't know about that little trick, did you? I got my little black message I can send and I got this other thing, too. Even the Astronomer didn't know about it. I can heal, brother." He hacked up a gob of blood and
it was a solid brown crust by the time it hit the sidewalk.

  "Then he thinks you're dead," Fortunato said.

  "Christ, I hope so. Not that he wouldn't have gone ahead and ripped my heart out, just to be sure, if you hadn't shown up. Son of a bitch even told me he was going to do it. If I had stayed in Brooklyn maybe I could have kept out of his way." He coughed up another lump. "If the dog hadn't stopped to piss he would've caught the rabbit."

  "Why does he want you dead?"

  "Thinks I sold him out. All it was, after that shit at the Cloisters, I started thinking another line of work might be healthier." Demise stared at him. There was a spark back there. Fortunato could see it. If not genius, at least some craft and cunning. Most people wouldn't see it because people didn't spend much time looking into Demise's eyes. One way or another.

  Behind the spark was something else. Fortunato had seen it before, seventeen years ago, when he brought a dead boy back to life. It was the black despair of having looked at death too closely.

  "In fact," Demise said, "I'm surprised he didn't take you out while he was here. Unless he's saving you for dessert."

  "Dessert?"

  "This is it, man. Judgment Day, he calls it. I'm gonna die, you're gonna die, every one of you fuckers that hit him at the Cloisters is gonna die, and it's all coming down today. With all this other shit going down in Jokertown he doesn't have to worry about cops or anybody else getting in his way." Fortunato had a sudden hunch, a convergence of invisible power lines. "You know anything about some stolen books? Or a man named Kien?"

  "You ask a lot of questions."

  "I just saved your life."

  "No. No to the books, no to whatever-his-name-was."He was telling the truth, but Fortunato still felt the connection. "A man named Loophole, or Latham?"

  "Sorry. No dice."

  Fortunato started to turn away. "Hey, listen," Demise said. "I didn't mean to get snippy. Maybe you could hide me out for a while? Just till this time tomorrow'?"

  "Why tomorrow?"

  "Just the way the man was talking. 'Parting shot' and shit like that. I got a real strong sense that by tomorrow morning you can color me gone. So what do you say? Got someplace to stash me?"

  "Don't push your luck," Fortunato said.

  Demise shrugged. The gesture was a little stiff, but otherwise his neck looked almost normal. "I guess I better turn up something on my own, then, hadn't I?"

  The ice sculptures arrived at half past ten, in a refrigerated truck that had fought its way through the holiday crowds from the artist's loft in SoHo. Hiram went down to the lobby to make certain that there were no mishaps as the life-size sculptures were transported up the service elevator. The artist, a rugged-looking joker with bone-white skin and colorless eves who called himself Kelvin Frost, was most comfortable at temperatures around thirty below, and never left the frigid comforts of his studio. But he was a genius in ice-or "ephemeral art," as Frost and the critics preferred to call it.

  When the sculptures were safely stored in the Aces High walk-in freezer, Hiram relaxed enough to look them over. Frost had not disappointed. His detail was as astonishing as ever, and his work had something else as well-a poignancy, a human quality that might even be called warmth, if warmth could exist in ice. Hiram sensed something forlorn and doomed in the way Jetboy stood there, looking up at the sky, every inch the hero and yet somehow a lost boy too. Dr. Tachyon pondered like Rodin's The Thinker, but instead of a rock, he sat upon an icy globe. Cyclone's cloak billowed out so you could almost feel the winds skirling about him, and the Howler stood with legs braced and fists clenched at his side, his mouth open as if he'd been caught in the act of screaming down a wall.

  Peregrine looked as though she'd been caught in some other act. Her sculpture was a recumbent nude, resting languidly on one elbow, her wings half-spread behind her, every feather rendered in exquisite detail. A sly, sweet smile lit that famous face. The whole effect was rnaguificently erotic. Hiram found himself wondering if she'd posed for him. It was not unlike her.

  But Frost's masterpiece, Hiram thought, was the Turtle. How to bring humanity to a man who'd never once shown his face to the world, whose public persona was a massive armored shell studded with camera lenses? The artist had risen to that challenge: the shell was there, every seam and rivet, but atop it, in miniature, Frost had carved a myriad of other figures. Hiram walked around the sculpture, admiring, picking out detail. There were the Four Aces at some Last Supper, Golden Boy looking much like Judas. Elsewhere a dozen jokers struggled up the curve of the shell, as if climbing some impossible mountain. There was Fortunato, surrounded by writhing naked women, and there a figure with a hundred blurred faces who seemed to be deep in sleep. From every angle, the piece unveiled new treasures.

  "Kind of a shame it's going to melt, isn't it?" Jay Ackroyd said from behind him.

  Hiram turned. "The artist doesn't think so. Frost maintains that all art is ephemeral, that ultimately it will all be gone, Picasso and Rembrandt and Van Gogh, the Sistine Chapel and the Mona Lisa, whatever you care to name, in the end it will be gone to dust. Ice art is therefore more honest, because it celebrates its transitory nature instead of denying it. "

  "Real good," the detective said in a flat voice. "But no one ever chipped a piece off the Pieta to put in their drink." He glanced over at Peregrine. "I should have been an artist. Girls always take off their clothes for artists. Can we get out of here? I forgot to bring my fur muumuu."

  Hiram locked the freezer and escorted Ackroyd back to his office. The detective was a nondescript sort of fellow, which was probably an asset in his profession. Mid-forties, slender, just under medium height, carefully combed brown hair, quick brown eyes, an elusive smile. You'd never look at him twice on the street, and if you did, you'd never be sure if you'd seen him before. This morning he wore brown loafers with tassels, a brown suit obviously bought off the rack, and a dress shirt open at the collar_ Hiram had asked him once why he didn't wear ties. "Prone to soup stains," Ackroyd had replied.

  "Well?" Hiram asked, when he was safely ensconced behind his desk. He glanced up at his muted television. A color graphic was showing sound waves coming out of the mouth of a yellow stick man and knocking clown a wall. Then they cut to an on-the-scene reporter speaking into the camera. Behind him, a dozen police cars cordoned off a brick building. The street was covered with shards of broken glass, winking in the sunlight. The camera panned slowly over rows of shattered windows and the cracked windshields of nearby parked cars.

  "It was no big thing," Ackroyd said. "I nosed around the fish market for a hour and got the general idea fast enough. You've got your basic protection racket going down."

  " I see," Hiram said.

  "The waterfront draws crooks like a picnic draws ants, that's no secret. Smuggling, drugs, the rackets, you name it. Opportunities abound. Your friend Gills, along with most of the other small businessmen, paid the mob a percentage off the top, and in return the mob provided protection and occasional help with the police or the unions."

  "The mob?" Hiram said. "Jay, this sounds suitably melodramatic, but I had the impression that the mob was made up of ethnic gentlemen partial to pinstripes, black shirts, and white ties. The hoodlums who were troubling Gills lacked even that rudimentary fashion sense. And one of them was a joker. Has the Mafia taken to recruiting jokers?"

  "No," Ackroyd said. "That's the trouble. The East River waterfront belongs to the Gambione Family, but the Gambiones have been losing their grip for years now. They've all ready lost Jokertown to the Demon Princes and the other joker gangs, and a Chinatown gang called the Egrets or Snowbirds or something like that has run them right out of Chinatown. Harlem got taken away a long time ago, and the bulk of the city's drug traffic no longer flows through Gambione hands. But they still controlled the waterfront. Until now" He leaned forward. "Now there's competition. They're offering new and improved protection at a much higher price. Maybe too high for your friend."

  "His son
is in college," Hiram said thoughtfully. "The tuition is quite substantial, I believe. So what I witnessed this morning was a little, ah, dunning?"'

  "Bingo," Ackroyd said.

  "If Gills and his fellow merchants have been paying the Gambiones for protection, why aren't they receiving it?"

  "Two weeks ago, a body was found hanging from a meathook in a warehouse two blocks from Fulton Street. A gentleman by the name of Dominick Santarello. He was ID'd by fingerprints, his face having been beaten into ground round. A colleague of Santarello's, one Angelo Casanovista, turned up dead in a barrel of pickled herring a week prior. His head was not in the barrel with him. The word on the streets is that the new guys have something the Gambiones don't-an ace. Or at least a joker who can pass for an ace in a bad light. These things do tend to get exaggerated, but I'm told he's seven feet tall, inhumanly strong, and ugly enough to make you wet your pants. He goes by the charming nom de guerre of Bludgeon. The Gambiones are overmatched, I'd say." He shrugged. Hiram Worchester was aghast. "And what about the police?"

  "Gills is afraid. One of his friends tried talking to the police, and his body turned up with a flounder shoved down his throat. Literally. The cops are investigating."

  "This is intolerable," Hiram said. "Gills is a good man, an honest man. He deserves better than to have to live in this kind of fear. What can I do to help'?"

  "Lend him the money to make his payment," Ackroyd suggested with a cynical smile.

  "You can't be serious!" Hiram objected.

  The detective shrugged. "Better idea-hire me to be his full-time bodyguard. Does he have a nubile daughter, by any chance?" When Hiram didn't respond, Ackroyd got up and slid his hands into his jacket pocket. "All right. There might be something to be done. I'll work on it. Chrysalis might be able to tell me something useful, if the price is right."