Dead Mans Hand

11:00 A.M.

Lin's Curio Emporium was located near the nebulous boundary between Jokertown and Chinatown. It was surrounded by other quality stores and expensive restaurants. Outside it didn't really look like much. Inside it was understated elegance. The carpeting was deep, rich red. The lighting was subdued and intimate. The curio cases scattered on the floor were antiques themselves. The screens and silks and statues displayed on the walls and in the cases were superb examples of Oriental art dating as far back as the Shang dynasty, more than a thousand years before Christ.

Brennan was impressed by their wares. He was also impressed by the elegant floor clerk, who was as beautiful as any of the artifacts on display. She kept a watchful, if discreet, eye on Brennan since he entered the shop.

Lin's collection of artifacts was really extraordinary. Brennan had almost lost himself in contemplation of a case full of intricately carved jade censers when he looked up to see Jennifer hovering behind the salesclerk and making urgent gestures toward the rear of the building. It was time to go to work.

He approached the clerk, who asked in a musical, lilting voice, "Can I help you?"

Brennan laid his case flat atop one of the waist-high curio cabinets and smiled at her. "I believe so." He opened it and reached inside. "I would like to get this silk painting appraised."

"Ah, yes," she said, leaning forward. A frown creased her exquisite features as Brennan pulled out a gun and pointed it at her.

"Sorry," Brennan said.

She looked at hirn quizzically as Jennifer materialized behind her and chopped her across the back of her neck. Brennan reached out and caught her before she hit the floor. "No flirting with the help," Jennifer said as Brennan lowered her to the floor behind the counter.

He ignored her statement. "What's going on in back?"

"Wyrm's in the back office, in conference with a small, middle-aged Chinese woman."

"Sui Ma," Brennan said… Who?..

"Kien's sister." He went past Jennifer and patted her cheek. "Lock the front door," he said. "It would be embarrassing if someone walked in on us."

Brennan got his bow out and assembled it as Jennifer locked the front door and put out the CLosED sign. He went through the bead curtain that separated the shop's floor from the rear of the building, and down the hallway beyond. The elegant ambience disappeared as he entered what was obviously a shipping and receiving area. It was deserted now, though dozens of boxes were lying around waiting to be packed or unpacked.

There was a small, glassed-off office in one corner of the shipping area. Sui Ma was sitting behind a desk in the office and Wyrm was standing before her, packing a small suitcase.

Fadeout hadn't mentioned Sui Ma, Brennan thought. She was Kien's sister, and head of the immaculate Egrets, the Chinatown street gang that ran the Fists' drug enterprises. She was plain and innocuous looking, but as wily as her brother.

Brennan went silently through the shipping area, creeping closer to the office until he could hear what Wyrm was saying.

"… with her dead the sssecret isss sssafffe," Wyrm said. There was no doubt in Brennan's mind as to whom Wyrm was referring. Anger burned brightly in him as he suddenly stood in the doorway, arrow drawn and aimed at the back of Wyrm's head.

It was a startling entrance. Sui Ma gaped at him in astonishment, then Wyrm also turned to stare. Brennan realized that Wyrm was packing plastic bags of blue powder into the false bottom of the suitcase. A small pile of clothes sat on the desk next to the suitcase. What looked like Wyrm's passport was balanced precariously atop the pile.

"Yeoman!" Sui Ma said sharply. She didn't blubber or bluster, but cut right to the heart of the matter. "I thought that you and my brother had a truce!"

"We did," Brennan replied, "until Wyrm killed Chrysalis."

"What?" burst from both Sui Ma and Wyrm at the same time. Their feigned ignorance seemed almost believable. "Who told you that Wyrm killed Chrysalis?" Sui Ma demanded.

"I have my sources," Brennan replied. "Besides, what were you talking about when I just came in? Whose death, and what secrets?"

Sui Ma burst out laughing. "Live for Tomorrow." Confused, Brennan lowered his bow slightly. "What?" "Live for Tomorrow," Sui Ma repeated. "It's a soap opera," she said.

Brennan felt a sense of immense dislocation. "Soap opera?"

"Yes. You see, Janice was killed in a car crash in yesterday's episode, so Jason's secret of actually being her love child is safe and he can marry Veronica."

"A soap opera?"

"Yes. Wyrm had missed a few episodes. I was filling him in while he packed his, uh, delivery."

"Sure," Brennan said mockingly. He turned to Wyrm. "So you watch soap operas?"

The hatred was still in Wyrm's eyes, but also something of a shameful expression, as if it'd just been revealed that he was some kind of hideous pervert. "Ssssometimesss," he said defensively.

Brennan increased the tension on the bowstring and aimed right between Wyrm's angry eyes. "That's possibly the stupidest lie I ever heard. You'd better start talking or you're one dead lizard. Right now"

"About what?" Wyrm hissed angrily.

"About Chrysalis!" Brennan shouted. "Why did you kill her?"

Wyrm was about to make an angry reply when Jennifer suddenly stepped into the office through the wall. "Wait," she said. "We'd better check this soap-opera stuff." She turned to Wyrm as Brennan lowered his bow a little. Wyrm stared at her with the hate and anger that he usually reserved for Brennan. "So you watch Live for Tomorrow?" she asked.

"That'ssss right!" Wyrm spat out. "Well then, who's Erica married to?"

Wyrm gave her a cold look. "She just married Colby lasssst month," he said, "but what she doesn't know isss that Ralph, her first husssband, isss not dead. He hasss amnesia, and isss being exploited by terroristsss, who have convinced him that he issss Prince Rupert, a Takisian lordling, who hasss come to Earth to cure the virusss, but isss really-"

"All right," Brennan interrupted. He turned to Jennifer. "Is that crap right?"

Jennifer nodded silently.

"Christi" Brennan lowered his bow. His feeling of frustration redoubled, he fixed his attention on the bag Wyrm was packing. "Where are you taking that?"

"Havana," Wyrm said sullenly. "Step away from the desk."

As Wyrm did, Brennan edged forward carefully. He released the tension on the bowstring so that he could hold the arrow on the string with one hand, and picked up Wyrm's passport from the desk. He looked at the last stamped page. Apparently this wouldn't be Wyrm's first trip smuggling rapture to Havana. He'd been in Cuba the day Chrysalis had been killed.

"Damn," Brennan said, throwing the passport back on the desk. Brennan's anger flared to an uncontrollable peak. He drew back the arrow he had ready. Wyrm hissed as it flashed by him, and then whirled to see that it had skewered a rat that had been sitting by the wall and eagerly observing the confrontation. When Wyrm looked back at Brennan, the archer had another arrow nocked and ready.

"It appears," Brennan said angrily, "that I got some bad information. The truce is still on."

Wyrm hissed angrily as Brennan backed up out of the office. Jennifer followed him, watching Lazy Dragon's rat as it shrank and turned into a hunk of soap pinned to the office wall by Brennan's arrow.

Noon

"What's going on?" Jay said when the jokers fell in beside him. No one answered. No one even seemed to hear him. There were a dozen or more, grim-faced, quiet, sober. An old man was sobbing, very softly, to himself. Jay looked back over his shoulder and saw more jokers following behind them. Everyone seemed to be headed in the same direction.

The garment bag was awkward. Jay moved it to his other shoulder, dropped back, fell in alongside a hulking joker whose green translucent flesh shimmied like lime Jell-O as he walked. "Where's everybody going?" Jay asked him.

"The Omni," the Jell-O man said.

A woman bobbed in the air above him. She had no legs, no arms. She floated like a helium balloon, her pretty face red from crying. "She lost the baby," she told Jay. Then she flew on up ahead.

Jay let himself be swept up in the human tide that flowed through the streets of Atlanta,. thousands of feet all converging on the Omni Convention Center. Slowly, piece by piece, he got the story out of the jokers who walked briefly beside him. Early this morning, Ellen Hartmann, the senator's wife, had suffered a tragic fall down a flight of stairs. She had been pregnant, carrying Hartmann's child. The baby had died.

"Is Hartmann going to withdraw?" Jay asked a man in a motorized wheelchair whose ragged clothing covered his deformities.

"He's going on," the joker said defiantly. "She asked him to. Even through this, he's going on. He loves us that much!" Jay couldn't think of a thing to say.

The jokers had begun drifting over as soon as the word had reached their encampments in Piedmont Park. Atlanta police and convention security watched the crowd swell with growing unease, but made no move to disperse them. Memories of the convention riots in New York in '76 and Chicago in '68 were still fresh in too many minds. By the time Jay arrived, the jokers had closed all the streets surrounding the convention. They sat on the sidewalks, covered the fenders of parked cars, filled every little patch of grass. They sat peacefully, wordlessly, under a blazing Georgia sun, with every eye fixed on the Omni. There was no shouting, no chants, no placards, no cheers, no prayers. There was no talk at all. The silence around the convention hall was profound.

Eleven thousand jokers squatted together on the hot pavement, a sea of tortured flesh pressed shoulder to shoulder in a silent vigil for Gregg Hartmann and his loss.

Jay Ackroyd moved through them gingerly. He felt fuzzy and exhausted. It was over a hundred in the shade, as humid as an armpit. Jay didn't even have a hat. The sun beat relentlessly against his head, and his headache was back screaming vengeance. His resolve had broken down and he'd swallowed a couple of painkillers, but even that hadn't done more than dull the throbbing in his side and the pounding behind his eyes.

There was nothing anyone could do for the sick feeling in his gut. All around him, the jokers sat silently, watching, waiting. Some wept openly, but tried their best to stifle the sound of their sobs. Others hid their faces behind cheap plastic masks, but somehow you could still feel their grief. Jay found that he could scarcely bear to look at them. None of them knew who he was or what he was doing here. None of them knew what he carried in the garment bag slung awkwardly over his shoulder, or what it would do to their hopes and dreams. But Jay knew, and the knowledge was making him ill.

He took up a position across from the main doors of the Omni, where he could see the delegates and journalists come and go under the watchful eyes of security. Time seemed to pass very slowly. It got hotter and hotter. TV crews panned their minicams endlessly across the sea of faces. News choppers hovered above them, and once the Turtle glided past overhead, his passage as silent as the crowd, the shadow of his shell giving the jokers a momentary respite from the sun. Later, a small woman in black satin tails and top hat emerged briefly from inside the convention hall and surveyed the crowd through a domino mask. Jay recognized her from the news: Topper, a government ace, assigned to bodyguard Gore, probably reassigned now that her man had dropped his candidacy. He thought about trying to get her attention, handing over the bloodstained jacket, making it somebody else's dilemma. Then he remembered her-colleague Carnifex, and thought again.

When Topper went back inside, a gaggle of delegates emerged through the open doors. One was a huge man with a spade-shaped beard who moved lightly in spite of his size; his impeccable white linen suit made him look cool even in this terrible heat.

Jay got to his feet. "Hiram!" he shouted over the heads of the jokers, waving his arm wildly despite the dull flare of pain in his side.

In the silence of the vigil, Jay's shout seemed like some obscene violation. But Hiram Worchester looked up, saw him, and made his way through the crowd, as ponderous and stately as a great white ocean liner sliding through a sea of rowboats. "Popinjay," he said when he got there, "my God, it is you. What happened to your face?"

"Never mind about that," Jay said. "Hiram, we got to talk."

"What was all that about?" Jennifer asked.

Brennan was still seething. "A setup. A goddamned setup."

"What?"

Brennan looked at Jennifer. "We weren't set up. Wyrm and Sui Ma were."

"I see. I think."

"Let's find a phone."

There was one on the corner. Brennan dialed and Fadeout picked it up on the second ring. "Hello."

"I don't like to be lied to," Brennan said softly.

"Well, Cowboy. Nice to hear from you at a decent hour."

"Did you hear what I said?"

"Well, sure. What's it in reference to? I didn't get the dope on Morkle wrong, did I?"

"That was fine," Brennan said. "The dope on Wyrm wasn't quite as accurate."

"Oh?"

"He had nothing to do with Chrysalis's death. He was in Havana when she was killed."

"Oh. Well. Sorry."

Greasy weasel, Brennan thought. "I'm not your private executioner," Brennan said grimly.

"It was an honest mistake-"

"Don't compound the lie," Brennan said. "I'll be in touch-"

"Wait," Fadeout said before Brennan could hang up. "Anything on Chrysalis's files yet?"

Brennan put the phone down without answering.