Dead Mans Hand

10:00 P.M.

Digger Downs had been right about one thing: the hotel where Kahina had spent her final weeks was a real pit.

A half-dozen elderly jokers sat in the lobby, watching an ancient black-and-white Philco while they waited to die. When Jay entered, they all looked at him with dim incurious eyes. No one spoke. The jokers, like the lobby, smelled of decay.

The night clerk was a stout woman in her sixties with her hair worn in a bun. Her breath smelled of gin and she didn't know nothing about no Ay-rab girl, but she was perfectly willing to let Jay have a look at the files, once he'd slipped her a ten.

The records were in just as shitty a shape as the rest of the building, but after thirty minutes with the registration cards and receipt books from May and June of 1987, Jay found what he was looking for. She'd paid two months in advance, in cash, for a room on the third floor. Less than three weeks later, the same room had been rerented, to someone listed only as Stig.

Jay showed the cards and the receipt book to the night clerk. "Her," he said, pointing out the name.

The corner of a ten-dollar bill was just visible under. the registration card; it did wonders for the old woman's memory. "Oh, yeah, she was the pretty one. I only saw her once or twice, thought she looked kind of Jewish. You mean she was an Ay-rab?"

"A Syrian," Jay said. "What happened to her?" The woman shrugged. "They come, they go."

"Who's this Stig?" Jay asked.

"Stigmata," the old woman said. She made a face. "Disgusting. Makes me sick just to look at him, but Joe, he says even jokers need a place to stay. If it was up to me… honestly, these people are like animals. Anyway, Stig didn't pay his rent and Joe evicted him, good riddance to bad rubbish, and we rented his room to the Ay-rab girl. But then a few weeks later Stig had the money he owed us and he says he wants his room back. We hadn't seen that girl for a week or so, so we let him back in."

"Did the woman leave any personal effects?"

"Personal what?"

"Any stuff," Jay said impatiently. "Letters, papers, a passport. Luggage. Clothing. She just up and vanished one day, right? What did you find when you cleared out her room?"

The night clerk licked her lower lip. "Yeah, now that I think about it, she had some stuff." She studied him greedily. "You family? I don't think I can give you her stuff unless you're family. Wouldn't be right."

"Of course not," Jay said. "But it so happens that Mr. Jackson is a very close relative of hers."

"Huh?" she said, eyes blank with confusion.

Jay sighed a deep, put-upon sigh. "How about I give you twenty bucks for her stuff?" he said wearily.

That she understood at once. She took a key off the pegboard behind her and led Jay down to a damp, chilly basement. A dozen cardboard boxes were stacked unevenly behind the water heater, each marked with a room number. The boxes on the bottom were green with fungus and halfcollapsed, their numbers all but illegible, but Kahina's legacy was on top.

He went through the carton in a deserted corner of the lobby. There wasn't much: an English-language edition of the Koran, a street map of Manhattan, a paperback copy of The Making of the President 1976 with the chapters on Gregg Hartmann dog-eared and underlined, some odd bits of clothing, a box of Tampax. Jay sorted through it twice, then carried the carton back to the desk. "Where's the rest of it?"

"That's it. Ain't no more."

Jay slammed the carton down on the desk, hard. The woman jumped and Jay winced as his broken rib made him pay the price for the gesture. "You've got forty bucks of my money and all I've got is a box of trash. You telling me this woman flew in from Syria with nothing but a few tampons in a U-Haul box? Gimme a fucking break! Where's her luggage? Where's her clothing? Did she have any cash, any jewelry, a wallet, a passport… anything?"

"Nothing," the old woman said. "Just what's in the box, that's all we found. These jokers, they don't take care of their things like you and me. The way they live, it's disgusting."

"Show me her room."

Her eyes narrowed. "What's in it for me?"

That did it. Jay shaped his fingers into a gun and pointed. "Ta-ta," he said, popping her away to the runway at Freakers. Thursday night was all-nude female joker mud wrestling. He hoped she was in better shape than she looked.

The soft pop of her disappearance made a few of the jokers across the lobby look up. If they wondered what Jay was doing behind the desk, rummaging among the keys, they didn't wonder enough to do anything about it.

Of course, there was no elevator in the building. Jay trudged up three flights of stairs, grateful that it wasn't five, and then up and down the poorly lit hallway until he found the right door. His head was pounding and his side hurt like a sonofabitch. There was light flooding through the transom, he saw, and the noise of a television from within. Jay was in a rotten mood by then. He didn't bother knocking.

When he pushed the door open, the room's lone resident jumped off the bed in alarm. "What do you want?" It was suffocatingly hot in the room, with no hint of a breeze coming through the open window. The gaunt, wasted-looking joker was dressed in a pair of gray jockey shorts that might once have been white. A black rag was knotted around his temple like a crude bandage. The palms of his hands were wrapped in black, too. So were the soles of his feet. Wider strips of black cloth wound round and round his abdomen. The bandages were crusty with dried blood. There were more clots in his thinning hair, and a red-brown stain on the front of his jockey shorts.

Jay felt his anger drain away from him. "I peed to ask you a few questions, Stig," he said.

Stigmata looked at him warily. "Questions? That's all?" When Jay nodded, the joker seemed to relax. He edged over toward his television. It was a big new color Sony. Stigmata turned down the sound, but kept the picture on. On the screen a man was falling, arms and legs wheeling as he plummeted down, past floor after floor, in the vast interior atrium of some building. A golden light played around him as he fell.

Jay stared. "That's Jack Braun," he said. Uninvited, he sat down on the edge of the bed.

"There was an assassin," Stig volunteered, almost eagerly. "Didn't you hear? It was on all the channels. Some ace. Pitched the weenie right off the balcony."

Jay went cold. Golden Boy was the nearest thing there was to an invincible ace, but a fall from that height… "Is he dead?"

"Dan Rather said the fat guy saved him. Made him light."

"Hiram." Jay breathed a sigh of relief. Hiram and his gravity power. Jay had been there the night the Astronomer had flung Water Lily from the top of the Empire State Building. Hiram had saved her life by making her lighter than air. Now it looked like he'd done it again. "The assassin…" Jay began.,

"He was like a buzz saw. I bet he was after Hartmann." The joker's voice was bitter. "They won't let him win. Just you wait and see. It'll be Barnett, or one of them other fuckers. I wish they would all just eat shit and die. They don't care about us." Just talking about it got him angry. "What do you want anyway?" he demanded. "You got no call just walking in here. You nats think you can just walk in anyplace. This is my room."

"I know it is," Jay said, placatingly. "Look, I need to know a few things about the woman who had the room before you- "

Stig didn't give him the chance to finish. "It was my room first!" he interrupted. "They kicked me out, just 'cause I got a few months behind. Nine years I was here, and they just kick me out and give my room away. Welfare was the ones screwed up, it wasn't my fault I didn't have the money. They kicked me out of my own room and locked up my stuff, where was I going to go?"

"The woman," Jay said, trying to get him off the world's injustice and back on Kahina. "Do you know who she was?" Stigmata sat down on the bed and examined one of his hands, picking at the black, bloodstained fabric. "She was one of us. She didn't look like a joker, but she was, she had fits. I saw one." He looked at Jay. "What happened to her?" he asked.

"She was murdered," Jay said.

Stig averted his eyes. "Another dead joker," he said. Scrawny fingers toyed with the bandage across his palm, scratching away the dried blood. "Who cares about another dead joker?"

"What happened to her things?" Jay asked.

The joker's eyes flicked up nervously, met Jay's, looked away again. "Ask downstairs. They took it, I bet. They locked up my stuff. Nine years and they lock me out and take my stuff, it's not right." All the while his fingers played at his scabs.

"You're kind of nervous, aren't you?" Jay asked. Stigmata jumped up. "I am not!" he said. "I don't have to answer these questions. Who do you think you are? This is Jokertown, you stinkin' nats don't have no business here." Jay was looking at his hands. At the bandages. Plain cotton, dyed black, torn in ragged strips to bind his wounds. "I'm not a nat," he said, putting a little ice in his voice. "I'm an ace, Stiggy." He made a gun with his fingers.

Pink droplets of moisture ran down Stigmata's forehead, blood mingling with his sweat. "I didn't do nothing," the joker said, but his voice cracked in midsentence.

"That's a nice TV," Jay said. On the screen was a police composite of the suspected assassin, a scrawny teenage hunchback dressed in leather. "How'd you pay for that TV, Stig?"

"Looks kind of expensive. Where'd you get the money to pay your back rent, Stig?"

Stigmata opened and closed his mouth.

"The cheapskates who own this dump never change the locks, do they?" Jay said quietly.

The look in Stig's eyes was all the confirmation he needed. The joker backed away from him. Some aces could shoot fire from their hands, toss bolts of lightning, spray acid.

Stigmata had no way of knowing what Jay's finger could do. "She was gone," he pleaded. "I never hurt her. Please, mister, it's the truth."

"No," Jay said. "You didn't hurt her. You just robbed her. You still had your key. So after she was dead, you just came in here and helped yourself. She must have had a nice chunk of cash. Enough to pay off your back rent and buy you a new television set, at least. What else did she have? Luggage, jewelry, what?"

Stigmata didn't answer.

Jay smiled, aimed, and pulled back his thumb like a hammer.

"No jewels," Stigmata said as beads of blood left pink trails down his forehead. "Just her luggage, and a bunch of clothes, that's all. Honest, it's the truth. Please."

"Where is it?" Jay asked.

"I sold it," Stigmata said. "It was all girl's clothes, it wasn't no good to me, I sold it. The suitcases, too."

It was the answer Jay had expected. "Yeah," he said, disgusted. "Figures. You sold it. Except for the chadors. Not much market for used chadors in jokertown, right? So you kept those." He pointed at the joker's hands. "She must have had quite a few, if you're still ripping them up for bandages a year later."

Stigmata gave a tiny, guilty nod.

Jay sighed and put his hands in his pocket. "You're not going to hurt me?" Stig said.

"Nothing I could do would hurt you any more than the wild card has done already," Jay told him. "You poor sad sorry son of a bitch." He turned to leave.

He actually had his hand on the doorknob when the joker, out of some strange sense of relief and gratitude, said, "There's one other thing. You can have it if you want. They wouldn't give me nothing for it at the Goodwill."

Jay turned back. "What?" he said impatiently.

"A sport jacket," Stig said, "but I don't think it's your size. Anyhow it's no good. It's got a tear in the shoulder, and someone got blood on it."

"Blood?" Jay said.

Stigmata must have thought he was angry. "It wasn't me!" he added quickly.

Jay could have kissed him.