Dead Mans Hand

4:00 P.M.

Brennan peered through the peephole when the doorbell rang. It was Fadeout, looking bothered and impatient. Brennan smiled and opened the door.

"All right, Quinn," Fadeout said as he stomped into the entranceway to the Magic Kingdom, "what's all this… about…?"

His voice faded as he spotted Brennan standing before him, and so did he. But Brennan was ready.

He slammed the door behind the ace, and as Fadeout disappeared, Brennan threw the contents of the metal canister he'd been holding right at him. A fine white powder fluffed out from the container, coating Fadeout from head to toe and sprinkling the floor all around him.

Fadeout blinked astonished eyes, and sneezed. His tongue came out and licked the corner of his mouth. "Jesus Christ!" he exploded. "That's cocaine!"

Brennan nodded.

"Do you know how much money you just threw at me? Jesus Christ! We're talking millions!"

Brennan dropped the canister and drew and aimed his. 38 right between Fadeout's eyes. "We're talking dead," he said flatly.

Fadeout backed away with enough white powder clinging to him to make him look a six-foot-tall sugar donut. "You're angry," he said to Brennan.

"You're right," Brennan said. "Calm me down."

"What do you want?"

"Chrysalis's diary." Brennan gestured with his gun. "Or your head, either one. I figure you've read it already. I figure that I can find Deadhead somewhere. I figure he's hungry"

Fadeout barely suppressed a shudder at the mention of Deadhead, the psychotic ace who could access people's memories by eating their brains.

"Well, okay, I guess we can come to some kind of accommodation. It's at my apartment. We can go and pick it up-"

"You can call and have it delivered."

"That's fine, too."

"This way." Brennan gestured with his gun, and Fadeout walked ahead of him, slowly and carefully. "In here," Brennan said.

He led the way to Quinn's combination boudoir and rumpus room, where Quinn himself was already installed in the chair that Brennan had once been held captive in.

"Bummer," Quinn said when they entered the room. He apparently was off his 'lude low and his brain was functioning somewhat normally.

Fadeout fixed him with a steady glare. "We'll talk later," Fadeout said.

"Sit there," Brennan ordered.

Fadeout sat on a chair next to Quinn, and Brennan tossed him a straitjacket he'd found among Quinn's collection of bondage devices. Fadeout slipped it on wordlessly, then Brennan awkwardly tied him into it. To make doubly sure, he further tied Fadeout into the chair using some leather restraints that were also part of the Eskimo's unusual collection.

"Now, about that call," Brennan said.

Fadeout, who by now had given up all pretense at invisibility, grumbled, but did as he was told.

Brennan sat and watched the two as they waited for the delivery to be made. Once or twice Fadeout tried to start a conversation by offering apologies and excuses, but Brennan was having none of it. A look at his face was enough to shut Fadeout up.

Finally the doorbell rang, and Brennan went to answer it. A Werewolf in a Mae West mask was at the door. He handed Brennan the leather-bound journal and looked at him expectantly.

"That's it," Brennan told him. "You're not a delivery boy. You don't get a tip."

The disappointed Werewolf went down the driveway as Brennan went back into Quinn's bedroom.

"Well, it's been delivered," Fadeout said. "How about letting us go?"

Brennan turned to Quinn. "You have servants?"

"Yeah, man. Sunday's their day off."

"So they'll be back tomorrow?" Quinn nodded.

"They'll let you loose then," he said, and turned to go.

"Okay by me," Quinn said. "Guess I'll cook some acid and meditate on the lessons I learned today."

Fadeout, though, was not so phlegmatic. "Hey, Cowboy!" he called. "Let me loose!"

Brennan shook his head. "Don't push it. You're lucky I'm not leaving you dead."

"Come on!" Fadeout implored, but Brennan just kept walking. "You bastard!" Fadeout yelled, and then he broke into shrill, mocking laughter. "You think you're so damn smart! You'll see what good that stupid book does youl"

Brennan kept walking and left the house, leaving its door open, hoping against all odds that some burglars would come by and empty it. He stopped before Fadeout's brand-new BMW and decided to take it back to the city. He thought about Fadeout's mocking words as he hot-wired the car, and his curiosity compelled him to open the journal.

As he scanned the pages, he realized that in a sense Fadeout was right. There was not a single fact, a single piece of concrete data in the whole book. It was a personal journal where Chrysalis had kept her thoughts, where she wrote in clear, plain, feeling words about her doubts, fears, and anxieties.

Brennan turned to the entry for the day, well over a year and a half ago, when he had offered her his protection and love and she'd turned him down. That was the last day he had seen her alive.

"What," she had written, "am I so afraid of? I'm not afraid to show my hideous deformity to the world every day-in fact I revel in the discomfort my appearance causes, in the revulsion it evokes. I have to live with it every day; so should everyone else."

"I make men make love to my ugliness as the price for the information they seek. Why can't I give myself to one who might love me for myself? Is it fear? Fear that he doesn't really care, that he's using me, that he'll drop me the moment he achieves all he wants?"

"I'm such a coward."

"Good-bye, my archer, I shall miss you. I shall miss what might have been between us."

The journal hung loosely in Brennan's hands. He didn't want to read any more. He hadn't the right. No one had. He only skimmed the last few entries to make sure they contained nothing that could possibly relate to her death. Then he took the cigarette lighter out of Fadeout's brand-new BMW and burned the journal to ashes there on Quinn's thick, green lawn.

"So fresh," Blaise said. "Intense. Exquisite."

He was naked on the mattress, Ezili spread out beneath him, cocoa-colored thighs spread, her legs locked around his waist as he thrust into her heat. She was covered with a fine dew of perspiration, and she screamed every time the boy pushed into her.

"Slowly, my precious one," Blaise commanded, but of course it wasn't him at all, it was the creature that clung to him like a pale white leech, its mouth pressed to his neck, its tiny eyes closed so it might better enjoy the sensations flooding through the boy's body. "This mount has never known a female," it said. "It grows very excited. Slowly, Ezili-je-rouge, slowly."

Obediently, Ezili slowed beneath them. She showed her teeth when she laughed. "I will make it last," she promised. Her fingers reached up and played with the boy's nipples.

Jay turned his face away from the tableau and found Hiram Worchester standing above him. The huge ace looked as anguished and helpless as Jay had ever seen him. "Untie me," Jay whispered. "Now, while they're occupied."

Ezili was screaming again, her voice husky with pleasure. For a long time, Hiram Worchester said nothing. There was only the wet, angry sound of flesh on flesh, and Charm's guttural singing from the next room. Finally Hiram turned away and walked off without saying a word.

"Now!" Ti Malice said in Blaise's voice. The boy's body jerked in orgasm. Ezili's legs tightened around him, and she laughed.