Dead Mans Hand

2:00 P.M.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time," Digger said. He was sitting on a stapler, next to a Coke can that was taller than he was. The pizza carton took up most of the desktop.

Jay hadn't been able to manage more than three slices, and Digger was still working on a pepperoni. In his hands it looked like a greasy red manhole cover.

"The story hadn't even run yet," Digger went on. "Nobody knew about Jessica but me, and that big farmhouse looked so cozy, y'know? I knew the kid'd always wanted a little farmer, but Daddy wouldn't allow it, so I figured, what the hey, nobody would know but me and Jessica, and she'd never tell. It seemed like the perfect hideout."

"Why the hell didn't you just leave town?" Jay asked him.

Digger shook his head gloomily. "Man, I wanted to, but it wasn't safe. What if they were staking out the airport, just waiting for me to make a break for it?" He grimaced.

"There's three airports," Jay pointed out. "Not to mention Penn Station, Grand Central, Port Authority. How many people were after you?"

"Who the hell knows?" Digger said darkly. "There's no telling who might be in on this-cops, FBI, CIA, maybe all of them. Besides, say there was only one, and I guessed wrong." He shuddered. "I got to Jessica in her school playground, and she loved the idea. Shrunk me down right there and took me home in a Flintstones lunchbox. By then I was having second thoughts, but it was too late, she was determined to keep me. The little snot-nosed brat wanted me to do chores. And that farmhouse-maybe it looks comfortable, but everything's made of plastic. There's no plumbing!"

"There's worse things." Jay told him about the carnage at his apartment building and Digger got very quiet.

"Holy shit," he said softly when Jay had finished. "Jonesy and Mrs. Rosenstein, Jesus. But why? They didn't know a damned thing."

"They were there," Jay said. "You weren't."

Digger dropped the half-eaten pepperoni and wiped his greasy palms off on his pants. "You got to believe me, I had no idea. I knew he was crazy, man, but I never-"

"You knew who was crazy?" Jay asked pointedly. Digger looked around the office. There was no one watching but Oral Amy, who looked even more surprised than usual. "Mack the Knife," he croaked in a low, scared whisper. "Mackie Messer. You think the scene in the stairway was bad, man? You don't know nothing. I seen him kill. He did the Syrian chick right in front of us, made us watch the whole show"

"The Syrian chick?" Jay was confused.

"Misha," Downs told him. "The Kahina. You know, the Nur al-Allah's sister, the one who sliced his throat open." His tiny hands were trembling. He looked down at them and laughed. The laugh was thin and bitter, on the edge of hysterical. "His hands shake, too," he said. "Oh, man, do they shake, like a blur, and then they go right through you. He touched her, you know, like he was going to play with her tit, but his fingers went right in, and the blood started. He just sliced it off, right in front of us, he sliced off her tit, and then he giggled and threw it at me. I puked my guts up. Chrysalis, she just sat watching, you know how she was. It was getting to her, too, but she never liked to look weak. This is her fault, I know it. She did something stupid, right? She wasn't talking much these last few weeks, but I'm pretty good at reading people. What'd she do?"

"She sent a hired assassin to Atlanta," Jay said. "Damn," Digger said. "Damn it. Yeah, it figures. She knew the score, but I guess' she just couldn't stomach it no more. If we exposed him, we were dead meat, he'd warned us about that. She must of decided to kill him first."

"Maybe she just couldn't live with the idea of Leo Barnett as president," Jay suggested.

Digger looked at him oddly. "Barnett?" he said. "What does Barnett have to do with it?"

Jay just stared at him.

"Not Barnett," Digger said quietly. "Gregg Hartmann." "Hartmann?" Jay said, incredulous.

Digger nodded.

The office was hot, airless, but Jay felt cold fingers tracing a path up his spine. "Maybe you better start at the beginning," he said.

"Fadeout," Brennan said into the phone.

There was a short silence, then a voice that Brennan remembered quite well said, cautiously, "Speaking."

"How did you find me?" Brennan asked.

There was another silence, then Fadeout said, "Good to hear from you so soon, Cowboy. Or should I call you Yeoman?"

"Call me whatever you like. Just tell me how you tracked me down."

"A little bird told me you were at the church."

"Lazy Dragon?"

"Exactly. I had him covering the funeral just in case anything interesting happened. When he told me you were there, I thought I'd avail myself of your offer to discuss things, so I had him deliver my message."

"I'm glad you did," Brennan said. "I didn't think a Shadow Fist captain would want to talk to me."

Brennan had infiltrated the Shadow Fist Society to gather evidence to bring Kien to justice. His scheme probably would have worked, but he had been forced to blow his cover to save Tachyon's life when the Fists had taken over Tachyon's clinic.

"I'm not one to dwell in the past," Fadeout said expansively. "You caused me a few problems, but, as I said, I think we can help each other."

"Uh-huh. What would Kien say to all this?"

"Well…" Brennan could picture Fadeout's insincere smile. "He doesn't know every little thing that I do. We should talk in more detail. Not over the phone. Actually, we missed an opportunity to discuss things yesterday. That was you at Quinn's, wasn't it?"

"Yes. Sorry I didn't hang around, but I wasn't sure of the reception I'd get."

"Oh, you don't have to worry about me. I think it's very possible that we can be a big help to one another."

"I see." Evidently Fadeout was an ambitious man. He might make a helpful, if not totally trustworthy ally. Brennan checked his watch. He desperately needed a few hours' rest, then he had the will reading to attend in the evening. "I'll call you about midnight with a place where we can meet." There was a long pause as Fadeout thought it over. "All right," he finally said.

Brennan hung up, sighing tiredly. He leaned back on the sagging hotel bed and rubbed his eyes.

"Can we trust him?" Jennifer asked.

"Not too far. It sounds as if he wants to move up in the organization and he thinks I can help him. That gives us something of a basis for working together. He doesn't know everything the Fists do, but he's high enough in the organization to know about something as big as Chrysalis's murder."

Jennifer nodded. "He can give us a line on Wyrm. Bludgeon's been eliminated as a suspect, but there's still Quasiman and the Oddity.", "I have an idea how we can deal with Quasiman," Brennan said thoughtfully, "but the Oddity's still a problem."

"There's nothing to link him to Chrysalis, other than the fact I caught him in the Palace after the murder."

"Rummaging through her closet."

Brennan shook his head. "I can't see Chrysalis hiding anything important in such an obvious place." He shook his head in bafflement. "And were forgetting someone. Doug Morkle. Whoever he is."

Jennifer massaged the knotted muscles in Brennan's shoulders and neck. "It's not getting any clearer, is it?"

"No. And I have the feeling that if we don't catch the killer soon, he'll be long gone and out of the reach of any earthly justice."

"Hartmann's an ace," Digger began. "I knew it the minute I met him, at the press conference before that WHO tour took off."

"How?" Jay demanded.

Downs touched the side of his nose with a thick finger. "The smell," he said. "I got this thing, my own little ace in the hole. I can smell wild cards. Aces, jokers, latents, it don't matter, they all smell the same. Kind of spicy sweet. Nats don't have the scent. I'm never wrong. The nose knows, and it's gotten me some big stories, too. Anyway, when I got a whiff of Senator Gregg, man oh man, I figured I'd just hooked the mother of all bylines. A secret ace in the U.S. Senate, with one eye on the White House!"

"So I started asking some questions. Chrysalis got wind of it, and before long we were working together. We dug up a few interesting rumors, but nothing hard, nothing I could go to press with. Until Gimli dropped the whole story right into our hands."

"Gimli?" Jay said skeptically. "Not a real reliable source where Hartmann is concerned." The joker terrorist's hatred of Hartmann had been common knowledge.

"I know, I know. Just listen up, it all makes sense. This was last year, just a few weeks after the tour came home. Gimli meets secretly with Chrysalis. In Syria, when the Nur's sister slit his throat, all kinds of bullets were flying. One of them richocheted off the Golden Weenie and clipped Gregg in the shoulder. Went right through, a clean wound, but they had to strip off his jacket to see how serious it was. The jacket got left behind when we pulled out. Well, that was what Gimli brought to Chrysalis, that jacket, with a bullet tear in the shoulder just soaked with Hartmann's blood."

"Gimli wasn't anywhere near Syria," Jay pointed out. "He was in Berlin, conspiring to snatch Hartmann later in the trip. How the hell would he get hold of Hartmann's jacket?"

"From Misha," Downs explained. "After she gave her brother that second smile, she couldn't believe what she'd done. She got the jacket and had some blood tests run. They told her what I already knew. Senator Gregg's an ace. She came to the States incognito, with her evidence. She was working with Gimli."

Jay gave the three-inch-tall reporter a dubious look. "With Gimli?" he said. "We talking about the same Gimli now? Real name Tom Miller? A joker dwarf with a nasty disposition and a big mouth? I thought the Nur's people all hated jokers."

"Yeah, yeah, the abominations of Allah, don't ask me why they were working together. They were. They wanted revenge but they knew nobody would believe them. So Gimli gave the jacket to Chrysalis. He wanted her to check it out and then go public with it. She had the credibility they didn't, right?"

"I'm with you so far."

"Yeah, well, Gimli got croaked right after that. They found his skin in an alley and he wound up stuffed and mounted in the Dime Museum. Meanwhile, Chrysalis had some tests run on the, quiet, and they confirmed everything the little asshole had said. The blood type matched Gregg's, the jacket was his size, and the test showed the presence of the wild card in the blood. We had him dead."

"So why didn't you go public?" Jay asked.

Downs looked unhappy. He got up off the stapler, stuck his hands in his pants pockets, paced restlessly around the pizza, then glared up at Jay. "Okay, okay, we got too fucking smart for our own good. The thing that Gimli didn't realize was that Chrysalis had her own priorities. She didn't want to destroy Hartmann, she just liked the idea of maybe having a little leverage over our next president. And me, I got to thinking, too. I mean, I write the story, it's a big sensation, maybe I win a Pulitzer, but a year from now, who cares? Maybe there was a better way. Presidents need press secretaries, right? I could do that, get a little respect. I wouldn't have Tachyon pouring drinks over my head or irate boyfriends punching me in the mouth. I might even get a decent table at Aces High." He sighed. "You got to remember, we knew Hartmann was an ace, we even guessed he had some kind of hinky mind control, but that was it. So maybe he made Kahina slice her brother's throat from ear to ear that day in Syria, so what? Better his neck than mine, right? And the Nur was going to off all of us."

"So you thought Hartmann was a good guy," Jay prompted. Downs nodded. "We set up a meeting, he said gloomily. He looked off into the distance, toward Oral Amy, remembering. "We thought we had the situation under control. We were wrong." His voice had gotten very somber. Oh, man, were we wrong," he said. "That was when Gregg and Mackie Messer put on their little show. Hartmann knew everything, don't ask me how. The hunchback delivered Kahina in a tarp, naked, covered with blood. He told us how he'd already raped her in the ass, and he went to work on her, humming `Mack the Knife' the whole time. When he was done, he walked out through a wall." Even talking about it made Downs go shaky.

"If Hartmann's everything you say, why didn't he have his killer eliminate you and Chrysalis right then?"

"Well, he didn't want two more deaths to explain. Instead he put us in charge of the cover-up. He told Chrysalis to get rid of the body and warned me that if anything appeared in the press even hinting that he was an ace, Mackie would come for me."

"And you went along with this shit?" Jay could maybe believe it of Digger, but Chrysalis hated being told what to do. He couldn't imagine her being easy to intimidate.

"You weren't therel" Digger snapped. "Hartmann's little leather boy walks through walls, man] I checked up on him afterward. He's German, part of the gang who grabbed Hartmann in Berlin, but somehow Gregg turned him around and made a house pet of him. Five'll getcha ten he's the one made sushi of the other kidnappers. Interpol's still hunting his twisted little ass."

"Then why not tell the cops?"

Digger laughed bitterly. "Oh, yeah. Go tell them that the former chairman of SCARE is in league with the terrorist who helped kidnap him, right. And pray that word don't leak to Gregg. Except it always does, somehow. Either he's a mind reader or he's got one working for him, I don't know. The point is, we couldn't trust no one. Chrysalis had some idea about getting Yeoman to help us out, but she was never able to get in touch with him. So we just played along and stayed alive."

"Until Monday," Jay said. "The name George Kerby mean anything to you?"

Downs shook his head. "She wasn't talking to anybody near the end. I don't even think she trusted me."

It made sense, Jay thought. The fewer people who knew, the fewer people who could betray her. But if Digger was telling the truth, someone had betrayed her anyway. And fast-she'd barely set her plan in motion and she'd been lying dead on her office floor. Hartmann, if that was who it was, didn't waste any time. "What about the jacket?" Jay asked.

"The jacket," Digger said. He snapped his fingers. "She kept it. Hidden somewhere. It was her last line of defense, she said. It was like a stalemate. If we went public with all we had, we'd be killed. But Hartmann had to watch out, too. If he left us with nothing to lose, we could use the jacket and bring him down."

"Real good," said Jay. "So where is this jacket?"

"In a safe place," Downs said, with a helpless shrug. "That's all she'd say. I told you, she didn't trust no one. Have you checked her closets?"

"No," said Jay, remembering what Brennan had told him, "but I know someone who has. How much do you know about the Oddity?"