Jokertown Shuffle

2.

Brutus climbed up the back of the car seat and dropped down onto the van's passenger side. "Miss Jennifer has stopped bleeding, but she looks funny."

"Funny?" Brennan asked, not daring to stop even for a moment to check on Jennifer's condition.

"She's getting clear, like she's fading," the manikin said. Brennan gritted his teeth, concentrating on his driving, afraid to give full vent to his feelings. Since entering the city limits, he'd kept the van at the speed limit. He couldn't afford to be stopped by a traffic cop, not with Jennifer's life hanging so tenuously that any delay might be fatal.

He'd driven like a madman down Route 17 before reaching the city. The old road was narrower and more twisting than the Thruway but was also darker, had less traffic, and was rarely patrolled by the state troopers. And rocketing along the road like a meteor on wheels, he needed a quiet, unpoliced road.

He fought to keep his attention on driving. His mind kept wandering back nearly sixteen years to a situation that was achingly similar to this one.

It was back in Nam. Brennan and his men had captured documents that contained enough evidence to connect General Kien solidly with all his various criminal activities, from prostitution to drug running to consorting with the North Vietnamese. But they never reached base with the evidence. Brennan and his men were ambushed while waiting for their pickup. It had all been a setup by Kien. In fact, the general personally put a bullet through the head of Sergeant Gulgowski and taken the briefcase with the incriminating documents. Brennan, momentarily paralyzed by a bullet-creased forehead, was lying in the jungle surrounding the landing zone. He'd witnessed the slaughter of all his men but had been unable to do anything about it.

It had taken Brennan nearly a week to walk out of the jungle. Once he reached base, exhausted and more than a little delirious from wounds, infection, and fever, he made the mistake of denouncing Kien to his commanding officer. For his trouble Brennan was nearly thrown in the stockade. Somehow he managed to control himself, and rather than a court-martial he was let off with a warning to leave General Kien alone.

That night he'd returned to Ann-Marie, his FrenchVietnamese wife. She'd thought he was dead. Pregnant with their first child, she cried in his arms with relief, then they made love, careful of their son swelling her usually lithe form. As they slept, Kien's assassins crept into their bedroom to silence Brennan permanently. They missed their prime target, but Ann-Marie had died in her husband's arms, and their son had died with her.

"There's the entrance," Brutus said, yanking Brennan back into the present.

He pulled into the curb before the Blythe van Rensselaer Memorial Clinic, threw the door open, and limped around the front of the van before the sound of screeching brakes had died on the still night air. A fine snow fell like a freezing mist, the tiny flakes clinging momentarily to Brennan's face before melting in his body warmth.

He went through the double glass doors that whooshed open automatically as he approached and looked around the lobby. It was deserted except for an old joker who seemed to be sleeping in one of the uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs and a tired-looking nurse who was scanning a sheaf of papers behind the registration counter. He went up to her.

"Is Tachyon in? There's an emergency-"

The nurse sighed and looked at Brennan with weary eyes old beyond her years. He wondered briefly how many people had said these very words to her, how many desperate life-and-death situations she'd had to deal with.

"Dr. Tachyon is busy now. Dr. Havero is on call."

"I need Tachyon's expertise=" Brennan began, then stopped.

From somewhere came the faint whiff of salt and fish and briny water. From somewhere came the unmistakable tang of the sea.

Brennan whirled around. A cluster of vending machines was set off in the corner of the receiving area, offering soft drinks, soda, and candy. Standing before one of them was a huge figure in priestly robes, humming softly to himself as he made his selection.

"Father Squid!" Brennan cried.

The priest turned his head toward the reception desk, the nictitating membranes covering his eyes blinking rapidly in surprise. "Daniel?"

Father Squid was a stout joker, huge in his priestly cassock. A few inches taller than Brennan, he weighed about a hundred pounds more. He looked solid, not blubbery, with broad shoulders, a thick chest, and a comfortably padded stomach. His hands were large, with long, sinuous-looking fingers and lines of vestigial suckers on their palms. He had a fall of tentacles instead of a nose, and he always smelled faintly, not unpleasantly, of the sea.

He was Brennan's friend and confidant. They'd known each other since Nam, where the priest had been a sergeant in the joker Brigade and Brennan a recondo captain. "What's the matter?" he asked.

"Jennifer's been shot," Brennan said tersely, "and she's fading. I need Tachyon."

Father Squid moved quickly for a man his size. He rolled up to the desk with a smooth, fluid gait and said to the nurse, "Call Tachyon, now"

She looked from the priest, a well-known figure about Jokertown, to the mysterious stranger who'd just come barging in. "He's resting," she protested. "Dr. Havero-"

"Get Tachyon!" Father Squid barked in the voice he'd used to chivvy know-nothing joker kids when they hit the jungle for the first time, and the nurse jumped and reached for the phone. The priest turned to Brennan. "Bring Jennifer in. I'll get a gurney."

Brennan nodded and limped back to the van. "What's up, boss?" Brutus piped.

"We're going in," Brennan said shortly. He gathered together the blanket wrapped about Jennifer and carefully lifted her from the van. She felt no heavier than a child in Brennan's arms. She was fading away, unconsciously using her ace power to turn insubstantial to the world.

"Put her here," Father Squid said, suddenly materializing behind him with a gurney. Brennan laid her down carefully. Brutus leapt onto the cart and clung to her blanket as Brennan and Father Squid wheeled her into the clinic's receiving area.

Tachyon was standing at the desk, knuckling sleep from his lilac eyes. The diminutive alien was still wearing a wrinkled white lab coat that looked like it'd been slept in. "What's this all about? I told you-" He turned toward the doors when they whooshed open. He stared for a moment, frowning, then his eyes went wide in astonishment. "Daniel!"

He took a quick step forward, arms wide as if to embrace Brennan, then stopped short as he saw the look on Brennan's face and remembered the circumstances of their last parting. "It's… good to see you," he finished somewhat lamely.

Brennan only nodded. The two men had been through a lot together, from battling the Swarm to fighting Kien and the Shadow Fists, but Brennan still found himself unable to forget what had happened the last time they'd seen each other.

It had been over a year ago. Brennan and Jennifer had tracked down Chrysalis's murderer, Hiram Worchester, to a hotel in Atlanta. Tachyon, who had also been on the scene, made a fine little speech about how things should be handled in strict accordance with the law. Tachyon, of course, got his way since he backed up his speech by mind-controlling Brennan. Worchester, had later turned himself in to the police and copped a pea bargain that kept him out of prison. Chrysalis was dead, and Worchester had a suspended sentence. True, equitable justice.

Still, Brennan couldn't let himself brood on the past. He had another life to worry about now. Jennifer's.

For the first time, Tachyon looked down from Brennan to the gurney. "What happened?" he asked.

"Three men hit our home this morning," Brennan said shortly.

Tachyon leaned over and peeled the layers of blankets away from Jennifer. She was translucently pale, the only color about her the crimson-soaked bandage that Brennan had wrapped around her forehead.

As the ace known as Wraith, Jennifer Maloy could turn insubstantial to the physical world. She could walk through walls, sink through floors, and pass through locked doors as quietly as a ghost. But now, wounded and unconscious, her mind adrift in the uncharted depths of a black coma, there was nothing to anchor her body to the physical world. She would fade until nothing was left.

Tachyon looked up at Brennan. "We'll take her to a security room on the top floor," Tachyon said in a low voice. "I'll examine her thoroughly there."

They went down the corridor, up an elevator to the top floor, then down another corridor that was dark and obviously rarely used. The room they took Jennifer to had a steelreinforced door and thick wire mesh on the windows. Once inside, Brennan carefully lifted her onto the bed and watched anxiously as Tachyon examined her.

"Will she be all right?" Brennan finally asked after Tachyon straightened up, a distant, worried expression on his face." Her wounds," Tachyon said, "are not life-threatening. You did a good job of field-dressing them, and I can carry on from there. She should be in no danger from them." Brennan detected a hesitancy in Tachyon's voice. "She will be all right?"

Tachyon's eyes, as he looked straight at Brennan, were uncertain. "There is something else… wrong. Terribly wrong. I could not touch her mind."

Brennan stared at the alien physician. "She's dead?" he asked in a low, dangerous voice. Father Squid put a steadying hand on Brennan's right forearm as Brutus moaned softly from the head of the bed.

Tachyon shook his head. "Look at her, man. She still breathes. The blood still rushes through her veins. Her pulse is steady. Faint, but steady."

Tachyon seemed to be speaking in riddles, but the years Brennan had spent in a Zen monastery made him used to that. Tachyon was making a koan, a Zen riddle designed to teach a subtle lesson about the nature of life.

Brennan's mind seized on that familiarity of form like a life raft tossing about on the ocean of emotion raised by the possibility of Jennifer's death. "When is life like death, and death like life?" he said so softly that Tachyon and Father Squid could barely hear him. He looked from the priest to the doctor. "When the mind is gone," he finished.

Tachyon nodded. "That's correct. The strange thing is, I can detect no organic reason for her… emptiness."

"Was she attacked on the mental plane?" Father Squid asked.

Tachyon shook his head. "I could detect no damage to indicate forcible entry and removal of her mind. It's almost as if it'd been lost… somehow…"

"Can you find it again?" Brennan asked.

Tachyon looked at Brennan, uncertainty in his eyes. "I wouldn't even know where to begin," he said simply. Brennan groaned and grabbed the bed's headboard with enough force to crush a section of its tubular piping. "There's Trace," Father Squid said.

"Trace?" Tachyon snorted and shook his head. "That charlatan!"

Brennan looked at Father Squid. "What are you talking about?"

"A mysterious ace who calls herself Trace. No one seems to know much about her, but she has strange mental capabilities. She can find nearly anything that's been lost by `looking' back on its pathway of existence."

"Can she find lost minds?" Brennan asked. "I doubt it," Tachyon said firmly.

Father Squid shook his head. "I don't know," the priest said. "She has other rather odd powers. Or claims to."

"Get her," Brennan said. "Get anyone who can help."

"I'll try," Father Squid said doubtfully.

"If you can't bring her here," Brennan said forcefully, "I will."

The priest shook his head. "No amount of coercion would ever work on Trace. If she wants to help you, fine. If not, nothing on earth will ever make her change her mind. And she is the wrong person to anger."

"So am I," Brennan said.

"Don't make a hard situation more difficult," Father Squid pleaded.

"Okay." Brennan took deep breaths to calm himself. "Go make the call, or whatever it takes to get this Trace here. Tell her I'll do anything I can, anything she wants, if she'll only help."

Father Squid, eyes closed, nodded. "I already have," he said.

Latham chivvied the last bit of eggs Benedict onto his fork with the last half of the last muffin on the plate sitting on Kien's desk. "Bloat is getting to be something of a problem," he told Kien.

Kien poured himself another glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice from the decanter on his silver serving tray and washed down his caviar-covered muffin. He loved freshly squeezed orange juice almost as much as he loved wielding authority. Almost. Combining the two into a power breakfast was the perfect way to start the day. "Can we do without him?" he asked his lieutenant.

Latham considered the question as he chewed and swallowed, and finally shook his head. "Not yet. Perhaps soon." He fastidiously wiped his lips with his linen napkin. "I created another three jumpers last week. Soon we'll have a force big enough to deal with all the grotesque jokers Bloat has accumulated on the Rox."

"Three?" Kien repeated, impressed. Latham had gone without sex, as far as Kien knew, for the first twenty years he'd known the man. Now that his ace had turned, the heretofore abstemious lawyer was acting like a damn rabbit. Still, it was all to Kien's benefit in the long run. Latham created the jumpers, and Kien controlled them through his loyal lieutenant. Soon they'd be potent enough to add as a third main branch to the tree of the Shadow Fists: Immaculate Egrets, Werewolves, and jumpers.

Kien, in fact, had already availed himself of their services, obtaining through them this fine ace body that had once belonged to one of his less-loyal lieutenants.

The jangle of the telephone sitting on the edge of his desk cut through Kien's reverie. "Yes," he said quietly into the receiver as Latham looked on curiously.

"It's Lao."

Lao was the head of the assassin team he'd sent after Brennan and that bitch of his. Kien didn't like Lao's tone of voice.

"Yes." Kien's reply was sharper this time, and Lao hesitated. "We-we ran into some unexpected difficulties," he finally said.

"Is he dead?" Kien asked in a hard voice. "The woman is… I think…"

"You `think,"' Kien ground out. He growled deep in his throat, his fury robbing him of the ability to articulate. He waited for the blaze of emotion to fade so he could speak clearly again. "All right. You and the others come in. I shall give you a chance to redeem yourselves."

There was another long silence, and then Lao said, "The others are dead."

Kien swallowed his fury. "All right. I will give you another chance. Do not fail me again."

He didn't hear Lao's voluble reassurances as he hung up the phone. Good help, Kien reflected, was so hard to find these days. Wyrm was dead, Blaise-well, there was a possibility, but it was difficult to control the little bastard. The Whisperer-impossible to reach on short notice. Warlock and the Werewolves… another possibility, but Kien had secrets, many secrets, that he didn't want exposed. Latham, though, already knew most of them.

"I might," Kien said, struck by sudden inspiration, "have need of your jumpers again. Round up three or four that you can trust."

Latham nodded slowly. "All right. Three or four trustworthy, disposable jumpers."

"`Disposable,"' Kien repeated. "Good point."

They could get rid of them after the job and keep Kien's newest secrets even more closely held. Latham stood, folded his napkin down neatly on his breakfast tray, nodded, and left the room. Kien scarcely realized that he was gone. He was wondering what it would feel like to wear, like a newly purchased coat, the body of his longtime enemy.