Dead Mans Hand

7:00 P.M.

Brennan looked around Chickadee's helplessly, wondering what to do now that he was here, alone. Jennifer was waiting for him outside, this not being the type of club where she could go and not attract attention. He went up to the bar and ordered a Tullamore. He was nursing it silently, letting thoughts crawl lazily, fruitlessly through his mind, when a slurred, drunken voice said, "You're the one was my little girl's friend."

He glanced down annoyedly, did a double take, and stared. The man who had spoken looked like Joe Jory, but he had been changed. His chin was virtually gone. His nose had been turned into a pig snout, and two-inch-long incisors protruded from his helplessly grinning mouth. His eyes were beady and red, as if he'd been drinking, or weeping, for hours.

"What happened?" Brennan asked.

Jory gave a helpless shrug, as if nothing mattered anymore. " I don't know. I went to a bar last night. It was in an alley and the doorman was dressed all in black. He smiled a real strange smile and let me in for nothing, he said, nothing at all. I told some of the people inside about my little girl, about how beautiful she'd been and what the virus done to her, and they brought me drinks and told me how sorry they were that my child was a joker and they told me to tell everyone about it. I got up on a stage and told everyone how awful it was, how we didn't have jokers in Oklahoma and people laughed at me. They laughed and laughed and someone yelled, `You do now!' and this ugly bouncer threw me out of the bar. I went to another place and people still laughed at me and I realized that something horrible had happened, like someone put a mask on my face but I couldn't take it o$: I drank till I passed out and in the morning I went back to the bar to make them turn my face back so I could be a real person again, but the bar was gone. It wasn't there…"

His voice ran down into racking sobs, and despite himself Brennan was touched with pity for the bewildered man who was so far out of his depth. He'd run into a place Brennan had only heard whispers of; jokers Wild in Rat's Alley, where the dead men lose their bones, where no one who enters is safe, where most anyone who enters is changed, never for the better.

"Help me…" jory sobbed.

"What do you want from me?" Brennan asked quietly. "Give me my face back," jory asked, but Brennan shook his head.

"Cart do that," he said in the same soft voice.

"Then buy me a bottle. They took all my money last night. All my money, and my face."

Brennan stared at him a moment longer, then signaled the bartender and put a twenty on the counter. When the bottle came, jory took it and clutched it to his chest and scurried away. Brennan watched him disappear into the crowded room. It was then that he saw the girl with the blue mouth.

She was with a man down the bar, drinking with him and laughing a little too loudly whenever he spoke. She was standing so close to him that her bare knees were pressing against his thigh, and she was toying with his hair, making little loose ringlets of it with her middle finger. Brennan thought she looked familiar, then realized that she was Lori, the hostess who'd escorted him to Quinn's suite the night the Eskimo was having his coming-out party for rapture. She was one of the demonstrators who had shown how safe and easy it was to take the drug.

Brennan took his Tullamore's and moved off down the bar. He stopped before the man, crowding him so that he had to look up. He smiled down at him.

"I'd like to talk to the lady."

The man looked as if he were going to dispute things, then thought better of it. "Sure, buddy," he said. "Plenty of babes in this place."

He slid off the stool and Brennan took his place. Lori watched the john hurry off, then switched her attention to Brennan. She smiled. Her blue gums and tongue made her smile look sinister against her white teeth and red lips.

"You look like a man who likes to party," she said hopefully. She obviously didn't recognize Brennan, which was perfectly understandable since he had been wearing a Mae West mask the last time she saw him.

"I do."

"Good." Her smile grew wider, her eyes brighter. "Let's go upstairs, honey. I can show you something you've never seen before."

"You can?"

"Sure. Trust me." She urged Brennan off the stool. Her palms were sweaty, her body had a vaguely sour odor about it, an odor of perspiration drowned in cheap body scent.

Her room was a small cubicle with a messily made bed. She closed the door after them and smiled with insincere coyness at Brennan.

"Let's get the business out of the way, honey. Then we can be friends. Now," she went on, after Brennan had nodded, "it's gonna cost a hundred. But for only a hundred and fifty I can give you something really special. Something really different."

"What's that?" Brennan asked.

She was already pulling open the drawer of her cluttered, rickety vanity. "It's called rapture, honey, and it's sheer heaven."

She held up a small vial of blue powder, much like the one Brennan had seen the night of the party. But as soon as she drew it out, she became fixated on it. She stared at it with a growing blankness and her hands began to shake a little. She unstoppered it and stared at it like it held the keys to the kingdom.,

"What's it do?" Brennan asked, watching her closely. "Do?" As if unable to resist any longer, she dipped her forefinger into the vial and then put it in her mouth, rubbing it swiftly across her already stained gums. She smiled, and sucked her now-blue fingertip daintily, as if it'd been dipped in some sort of delicious sauce. "It makes everything so fresh and tasty and good feeling. Let me rub a little on your cock, honey, and it will be out of this world."

"Is it dangerous?"

Lori laughed and shook her head. "No way. I've been taking it for weeks now" She leaned closer and smiled confidentially. "Me and the guy who made it are like this," she said, entwining two fingers.

"I'll bet." Brennan moved closer and she smiled in unfocused ecstasy, her hand dropping to the crotch of his jeans and fumbling there. He smiled at her. "No thanks," he said, and smoothly took the vial of rapture away from her. "Hey!"

"Why can't we do it without the rapture?" he asked. "Because it's so good with it."

"I like it plain."

"But it's better, it really is," she said with increasing frenzy.

He remembered what Quincey had said about it a couple of days before, a drug that was so good that it makes a whore like sex.

"What's it like without the rapture?" he asked, holding the vial away as she snatched for it.

"Like always," she spat. "Boring. Dead. Unfeeling."

"How about food? What's that like without a dose?" She made a face. "Cardboard and paste. Rotting compost."

"Wine? Champagne?"

"Tepid water with shit floating in it. Give me that!" Brennan held it up and away from her, shaking his head. "I need it. I have a friend who might want to have a look at this."

"I'll scream," she said.

Brennan shook his head. "No, you won't. I'm going to give you a dose, then I'm going to tie you up and you can tell everyone that I robbed you."

"Give, me two doses. One for later," she panted. "Sure."

Lori nodded frantically and turned back to her vanity. She gave Brennan a small tin box into which he tipped a shot of the powder. Then she handed him a small mirror. He laid out a line and she found a straw somewhere and took it all in through her nose with a long snort. She leaned back and smiled.

"What's it like when you do it that way?" he asked curiously.

"Good thoughts," Lori said dreamily. "Only good thoughts." He nodded and led her to the bed. She sat down obediently as he tore the sheet into strips, bound and gagged her. He left her room wondering what kind of thoughts she'd have after the rapture wore off.