Death Draws Five

“I want to know what happened,” Fortunato said. Even to himself his voice sounded dry. Curiously devoid of emotion. But it wasn’t missing, only constrained. He had to dam them all up. He was afraid what would happen if he gave into the feelings burning through his brain.

“She was ambushed while being interviewed about her son’s, er, your son’s, I should say, card turning.”

“Why?” Fortunato asked.

“No one seems to know. Maybe it was a plot to kidnap the boy. He was missing after all the furor died down. But there’s been no ransom demand. They left a score of wounded bystanders. Half a dozen dead.” Finn shook his head at the mystifying cruelty of it all.

Fortunato’s heart started to race again, but he managed to control his voice low. “And Peregrine?” he asked.

“She took more than half a dozen bullets, suffering massive internal injuries and severe wing damage. Frankly, it was fortunate that her husband had immediately arranged her transportation to the clinic. I doubt that they could have dealt with the vagaries of her wild card metabolism in Vegas.”

“She’s going to be all right, though?” Digger asked.

Finn shook his head. “Too early to tell. But she’s got a chance.” Finn gestured, encompassing the extent of his tiny office. “We may not look like much, but the Jokertown Clinic is state of the art when it comes to the treatment of wild carders, even for those suffering from such mundane things as bullet wounds. Even without Tachyon, we’ve got the most knowledgeable doctors in the world. That said, we just don’t know yet about Peregrine. She suffered damage to her internal organs. Part of her liver was pulped. Lost one of her kidneys. The delicate bone structure of one wing was smashed. There’s a serious question as to whether she’ll ever fly again.”

Finn’s calm recital of Peregrine’s injuries made Fortunato feel as if he’d been shot himself. The sickness that burned in his gut because of the deaths of all the people he’d lost over the years came back. It had been gone when he’d been in Japan, but now it was back.

“Can I see her?” he asked.

Finn looked at him thoughtfully. “She’s resting. Maybe sleeping. Her husband’s with her. Just got back into town himself.” He clip-clopped over to his desk and activated the intercom. “Jesse,” he said, “check and see if Peregrine’s awake.” They waited in silence for a few moments until the nurse replied affirmatively. “Okay. Come to my office and escort mister, uh, this gentleman to her room, would you?”

While they waited for the nurse, Finn lectured Fortunato about not tiring her out. Fortunato only half-listened. He was thinking about Peregrine. About the night they had made love and made their son, and Peregrine had supplied Fortunato with enough energy to defeat the murderous Astronomer in combat high in the skies over Manhattan. The next morning Fortunato had left for Japan. He’d seen her only once after that, some months later when she’d come to Japan on the World Health Organization sponsored tour. Occasionally he’d seen her photo in some magazine or newspaper. He’d never seen their son.

The nurse’s face looked relatively human but for the brightly patterned scales that covered it in lieu of normal skin. Her arms were oddly sinuous, almost boneless, and she had too many fingers. She looked at Fortunato curiously, but was professional enough to simply say, “This way, sir.”

As Fortunato followed her out of Finn’s office he could hear the ever-optimistic Digger Downs say, “Now, Dr. Finn, about this spaceship you took back to Earth, I heard that you stopped at many planets along the way—” He heard Finn sigh as if he realized he couldn’t escape Downs’ relentless interrogation, and then they were out of earshot.

The corridor was clean, quiet, and dimly lit. It smelled like a hospital. Not even the burning pungency of strong antiseptic could wipe out the odors of fear and pain and death and, somewhere underneath it all, hope. The nurse opened the door to Peregrine’s private room, one of the few in the clinic, and shut it softly after Fortunato slipped quietly inside.

The room was darker than the hallway outside, and Fortunato’s hypersensitive senses rebelled against the hurt and pain he could discern, not all of which emanated from the bandaged form on the bed attached to a raft of tubes and machines monitoring her heart, lungs, and brain.

A man sat in a chair by the side of the bed. He looked up as Fortunato entered, fear and pain in his eyes. He looked ordinary enough, fairly handsome with blonde hair and a darker beard. He nodded at Fortunato, and stood.

“I’m Josh McCoy.”

Fortunato nodded. He had never seen the man but he knew the name. “I know. I’m—”

“Fortunato.” McCoy said. “I know.”

Fortunato moved to the foot of the bed. “How’s she doing?”

“Sleeping, now. Trying to get some strength back...” McCoy’s voice trailed off as he looked at Peregrine’s quiescent form.

Somehow, seeing her lying there made Fortunato feel inadequate and inept. Like somehow he’d failed her. “I’m sorry I wasn’t with her,” he said, surprising himself as he realized the truth of his statement.

“Not your fault,” McCoy said. “I just wish I’d been there myself.”

Fortunato shrugged. “Probably nothing you could have done, except get hurt. Or killed, maybe.”

McCoy looked at him. “But at least I would have been with her. For her.”

Fortunato frowned. He shouldn’t have to defend himself, he thought, or the decisions he’d made about his life. Not to this man. Not to any man. He was about to reply to McCoy’s veiled accusation when the sounds of movement under crisp sheets came to his ears, and both of the men turned to look at Peregrine.

She’d opened her eyes. They were drugged with pain and morphine, but it seemed she recognize them both. She held up a hand taped to a board with tubes running up to an intravenous drip that Finn had ratcheted up in potency to work with Peregrine’s souped-up metabolism. McCoy sat down in the chair next to her bed and took her hand and put it against his cheek.

“How you doing, darling?” he asked in a low voice.

A ghost of a smile passed over Peregrine’s drawn and tired face where, Fortunato thought, her beauty waited patiently to reveal itself like the sun eclipsed by dark shadows. “Been better,” she whispered. Her eyes wandered across the room and took in Fortunato.

“You’re here,” she said.

“I’m here.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

She glanced back at McCoy. “John?” she asked.

“He’s—he’s missing, but okay, as far as we know.”

Peregrine made a supreme effort and nodded. She looked again at Fortunato. “What’s this all about?”

That helpless feeling crawled around like a snake, biting Fortunato in the gut. “I don’t know,” he said. “What’s it ever all about? Some nut probably. Some fucking nut. You take care of one. Another takes his place. There’s no shortage of nuts—” Fortunato caught himself. He took a deep breath.

“I’ve never asked you for anything,” Peregrine whispered in words so low and slow that Fortunato could barely hear her. “But find him. Find him and bring him back safe.”

The snake coiled in Fortunato’s gut and clamped down on his intestines with its sharp fangs. He was being sucked into it all again, after almost sixteen years away. But how could he say no to his son’s mother? How could he not go find his son?

McCoy released Peregrine’s hand and stood up. “I’m coming with you.”

Fortunato shook his head. “No.”

McCoy’s fear and pain turned to sudden anger. “Don’t tell me no! You made him—I raised him. I changed his diapers. I helped him learn how to walk and talk. I helped him to grow into a good kid. Where were you all that time, you, you big hero?” McCoy’s voice rose with his anger. “Where were you?”

“Josh...” Peregrine said, reaching out to him.

Fortunato shook his head. “I just... I just don’t want to see anyone else get hurt.”

“He’s right, Josh,” Peregrine said in her soft, pained voice. “He’s made for this.”

I was, Fortunato thought. But that was a long time ago. Now, I just don’t know...

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Fortunato took his leave, but they had already seemed to have forgotten him. McCoy sat next to her, his head against the mattress by her side. Her hand rested on it, so weak it was barely able to stir the strands of his hair. McCoy had earned that place by her side through sixteen years of ceaseless loyalty. Fortunato had tossed it aside.

He left the room, went down the corridor and took a side staircase down to the lobby. He didn’t want to see Finn again. He sure as Hell didn’t want to see Downs. He didn’t really want to be alone either, but he didn’t have much of a choice with that.

He looked out at the street. It was fairly quiet this time at night, but there were still occasional cars, a taxi or two, trucks off on their delivery rounds. Pedestrians went by singly or in groups, without a glance his way. No one knew who he was. Why should they?

His son was out there. He didn’t have a clue where. He didn’t have a clue as to who took him or why they took him or what his condition was. In the old days he might have gone to Chrysalis. She knew everything that happened in this city, most things of import that happened in the world of wild carders. But she was dead. Once he might have gone out of his body and searched for clues himself, but those days, like his powers, were gone. He had thrown them away, just like he’d tossed Peregrine aside. And for what?

“Hey, old man.”

The voice that startled Fortunato out of his reverie was that of Carlos, spokesman for the Jokka Bruddas. He was accompanied by the behemoth with the pustule-ridden face whom Father Squid had called Ricky.

“Where’s the rest of the crowd?” Fortunato asked.

Carlos shrugged. “Don’ worry about them. It’s your skinny old ass that’s in trouble.”

If Fortunato hadn’t recently been hammered by the double emotional blows of Peregrine’s wounding and his son’s kidnapping, he would have been amused. Now he was just angry at these kids for wasting his time.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

Carlos shrugged again. “Don’ get snappy with me, dog, when I’m doin’ you a favor. Father Squid sent us to get you. He didn’t say what the problem was, but he said to get you and bring your ass back to the church andale, baby.”

Fortunato couldn’t imagine what the priest wanted, but knew that it must be important. “All right, let’s go.”

He started down the street, but Carlos grabbed his sleeve.

“This way, esse. We got a drive waiting.”

Following Carlos down the street, he turned left into the alley running alongside a wing of the Clinic, and suddenly thought, Where’s Ricky? He turned around to see the hulk behind him, grinning like a melting wax dummy as his fist descended in a blur.

Fortunato’s last thoughts were, Christ, I am getting too old, and darkness dropped on him like a falling cliff.

The Angel moaned softly as the Witness’s clenched fist opened and caressed her cheek, down along her jaw line. She had always been sensitive there. But she didn’t want him to touch her. Did she?

He stared dreamily into her eyes and said, “Knock, knock. Time to hit the road, Angel.”

She woke up, startled and confused. Billy Ray was standing in the open doorway between their connecting rooms. She realized that she must have left it unlocked when she’d collapsed into bed... how long ago, exactly?

She sat up, pulling the sheet up to her shoulders.

“What time is it?” she mumbled.

“Ten thirty two,” Ray announced crisply.

“I—it was already later then that—”

“In the A.M., sweet cheeks.”

She blinked at the realization that she’d slept so late, and blinked again when she realized that she was naked under the sheet, and Ray was staring at her.

The government ace, dressed in another impeccable suit, looked like he’d just rolled out of bed fresh from an untroubled night’s sleep. The bruises had disappeared from his face and all visible cuts had healed. He came into her room moving apparently without pain, though the Angel noted he moved gingerly when he sat down on the room’s other bed. Any other man she’d ever known would still be in a hospital. He smiled at her as he sat down, with none of the wild ferocity she’d seen when he was in the midst of battle. He had seemed to like the fighting. More than that, he’d reveled in it—

“What’s the matter?” Ray asked, his grin still in place.

“Oh.” The Angel forced herself to focus. “Nothing. What’s the plan?”

“The plan? We can discuss it in the car.” He stood and stretched like a sleek and self-satisfied cat. “You still look pretty beat, but we have things we have to do. Although,” he said with a thoughtful look, “if you want to catch a few more winks —“

The Angel sat up, wrapping the sheet around herself almost angrily.

“You don’t have to coddle me,” she said.

“No, but I’d like to,” Ray said with a leer. She just looked at him, and he shrugged. “Go take a shower. It’ll wake you up.”

That, the Angel thought, was a good idea.

“I could soap your back—” Ray offered as she stood with the sheet firmly wrapped around her. She stepped over the sweaty pile of clothes she’d discarded by the side of the bed, grabbed her duffel bag and headed for the bathroom. She slammed the bathroom door and, finally thinking clearly, locked it. “Anyway,” Ray called out through the door, “you can grab some more zzz’s in the car if you’re still tired.”

Car? The Angel thought. She turned the shower to cold and stepped under it. The icy torrent took her breath away and made her heart beat faster. For a moment she thought that it would be fun to have someone to soap her back. Maybe her front as well. Her hands slid over her flat abdomen, skirting the eight-inch scar that crawled over it like an ugly snake and the touch of it against her fingers banished all impure thoughts. She turned off the water. She dried herself, all but her hair, letting that hang down her back in an unmanageable curly mass. She took her spare underwear and black jumpsuit out of the duffel bag and dressed. When she came back into the bedroom. Ray was lying on the extra bed, legs straight out and crossed at the ankles, hands behind his head, watching some weird movie with masked wrestlers on the Spanish station. He glanced up at her.

“What?” the Angel asked, though she knew the look on his face meant that there was lust in his heart.

“Nothing,” Ray said. “That was fast. All right. Let’s go.”

“Where exactly are we going? If you don’t mind telling me?”

“Not at all.” Ray grinned. When he smiled like that he looked years younger, and just about as dangerous as a pussycat. “We’re going to take a trip outside of town and drop in on the Living Gods. One of them, Osiris, is a precog, and may have some insight as to what the Hell is going to happen next. Maybe even where they took the kid.”

The Angel dropped her duffel bag on her bed, thinking that somehow Ray had managed to wrest all control of this mission out of her hands. She didn’t like that. Also, she was hungry. “Well—”

“What?” Ray asked as her voice trailed off.

“Do we have time for breakfast?”

Ray made a show of checking his watch. “It’d be more like brunch, but, sure, why not?”

That’s something, at least, the Angel thought.

They paused in the corridor as they left the room; the Angel making sure her door was really locked. She didn’t trust those credit card-like keys.

“I hope he wasn’t the one who got greased,” Ray said.

She looked at him as they went down the hotel corridor. “Greased? You mean one of them was killed?”

“So the cops told me yesterday when I went down to the station.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you finally reported to the police?” the Angel asked. “Or bring me along?”

Ray shrugged. “What, let them bother you too? It was bad enough that I had to deal with them.”

“Did you tell them about The Hand?” the Angel asked anxiously.

He just looked at her. “You think that I was going to tell them that we’re here in Vegas to rescue Jesus Christ from a bunch of crazed Catholic cultists?”

The Angel breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t believed Ray capable of such subtlety. It was good to see that he had unexpected depths. “What about the Living Gods?” she asked as they made their way through the lobby to the coffee shop. Too bad, the Angel thought, they didn’t have a buffet.

“Like I said. One of them bought it during the attack on the Mirage. The cops didn’t know which one. Funny thing, the body’s already been released. Some kind of religious mumbo-jumbo.” He put his hands out as the Angel glared at him. “Not that I have anything against religious mum—ah, religion.”

A shame, the Angel thought, ruminating on the Living Gods. They were pagans, but in their own way they were innocents.

They seated themselves in the coffee shop and the Angel ordered the he-man breakfast from the menu, pancakes, three eggs (sunny side up), hash browns, ham, bacon, and sausage, with toast on the side. Ray, saying he’d eaten earlier, only had coffee.

She watched him watch her as she ate. She thought of ordering another side of ham, or maybe grits, but Ray’s scrutiny was making her feel self-conscious. She didn’t want him to think she was a glutton. Besides, she was all too conscious of the fact that she had no money to pay for the food she was consuming.

Ray didn’t seem to mind, though. He cheerfully slapped down his credit card and then added a way-too-generous tip that bought a smile to the attractive young waitress serving them. The Angel didn’t like that. She didn’t think it was proper for young women to use their physical attributes to gull susceptible men into giving them money. And if there was one thing she knew about Ray, it was that he was susceptible.

They exited the Mirage through the lobby and a valet bought a car up to them as they waited at the curb. The Angel looked it over disapprovingly. She didn’t know what model or year it was, but it was big, shiny, and expensive. “At least it’s not an SUV,” she muttered as she got into the front seat.

“What?” Ray asked.

“Nothing.”

Ray was a fast, yet precise and careful driver. He didn’t speed. Excessively. He didn’t change lanes. Excessively. He drove like he fought. Quickly, instinctually, and seemingly effortlessly. The car responded to his touch like a trained beast. It seemed to purr as it glided down the strip. Its seats were comfortable. The soft whisper of the dual climate control fanned her like sensual tropic breezes.

She ached only slightly from yesterday’s battle, and was still hungry despite her large breakfast. The batteries that drove the awesome engine of her body were still not entirely recharged. She was still tired, more than she realized. Somewhere, after Ray hit the highway beyond the city limits, lulled by her comfortable surroundings and the smooth glide of the road beneath their feet, the Angel fell asleep.

She dreamed her interrupted dream again, and thought it true. She and the Witness faced each other, only this time there was love in his eyes, not contempt. They were fully dressed, and then they were naked as they day they’d been born, and the Angel felt no guilt about it. Well, not much anyway.

Any trace of guilt vanished when he touched her. His hands were gentle on her face, caressing her cheek, slipping softly to her throat. It was amazing that such a large and strong-looking hand could be so gentle as it trickled down the column of her neck lightly as the wings of a dove. It went lower and she shivered at the touch of his hand on her right breast. Cupping it gently. Whispering over her stiffening nipple.

She closed her eyes and their lips met in a soft, yet increasingly demanding kiss. The Angel’s breath started to come faster. He eyes opened and she was shocked to see that she was no longer in the Witness’s arms, but was being embraced by Jonah, the only boy she’d ever kissed, ten years ago.

That meant... that meant...

Suddenly her mother burst onto the back porch, screaming at them, saying vile dirty things. She swung a broomstick at them, snapping it across the Angel’s shoulders. She started to cry. Jonah bounded up from the back porch swing and lit out like the hounds of Hell were on his trail, and they may well have been. The Angel put her arms over her face and contracted into a ball as her mother screamed at her, waving the broken stick ferociously.

Only, as she opened her eyes again, it wasn’t her mother standing over her. It was Billy Ray. And it wasn’t a stick he was waving.

The Porsche suddenly swerved and the Angel awoke, startled. She reached out, not sure where she was, and caught in a spasm of sudden terror, grabbed the door handle and ripped it off.

Ray glanced sideways at her.

“Insurance isn’t going to cover that,” he said with a frown as she stared at the door handle in her hand. “Sorry I woke you. I had to swerve to miss a turtle in the road.”

“Tortoise,” the Angel corrected. It was better to babble nonsense rather than think about the meaning of her dream.

“What?”

“They don’t have turtles in the desert. They have tortoises.”

“Oh. Well. That’s good to know.” Ray drove on while the Angel looked at the door handle in her hand.

“Hang on,” Ray warned her. “I’m going to turn again. Don’t get all scared and rip the door off this time.”

“Sorry,” the Angel said in a small voice.

“Jeez,” Ray said, looking stolidly out the windshield. “Lighten up. I’m just kidding. Wreck the whole frigging car if you want. I put it on Barnett’s card.” He took a sudden turn, swinging onto a dirt road that meandered seemingly off to nowhere. “But wait until we get back to Vegas, okay? I don’t feel like legging it back through the desert.”

He glanced at her. She smiled back, briefly, but said nothing. He must think I’m a hysterical fool, the Angel told herself. And he’d be right.

The dirt road curved like a snake through the desert, leading finally to the mouth of a small canyon set into a meandering line of hills that provided the only topological relief in sight. Ray drove carefully, but they still jounced roughly, Ray swearing at every pothole and washout he hit. Though he didn’t blaspheme, so the Angel cut him some slack.

“I hope that was the right turnoff,” Ray muttered. “These hicks don’t mark their roads very clearly—yeah, there it is, ahead.”

It was a ranch, a hacienda of some kind that looked old to the Angel’s eye, but she was no architecture expert. She couldn’t even see the main house at first, because the grounds were surrounded by an adobe wall that had definitely seen better days. The Angel imagined that it had been built to keep marauding Indians out, but now it couldn’t keep out a herd of marauding cows. Though it was still twelve or fourteen feet high in some places, most of it had fallen to nearly ground level. Repairs were in progress, but although tools and ladders and mud bricks were all over the place, no one was actually currently working.

The gate stood wide open, the cross arm barely hanging by a single hinge. The wooden sign over the entrance was mostly in Arabic, with the English words “The Oasis—Welcome” neatly lettered below.

“Do you think we should just drive in?” the Angel asked.

Ray shrugged. “We’ve come all this way,” he said, and carefully pulled onto the looping dirt driveway that was bounded by a border of whitewashed stones. He stopped after the first curve and they stared out the windshield and then looked at each other. “I’ll be damned,” Ray said.

“Don’t blaspheme,” the Angel said automatically.

Suddenly, they were in paradise. It was as green as Ireland inside the walls of the old ranchero, with plants and flowers of every type and description abloom in vivid color. The grass looked like putting greens. Rows of corn, mostly hidden behind the main building, grew as tall as an elephant’s eye. Tomato vines thick enough to swing on climbed groaning trellises, green beans hung on netting draped between the vines, and squash the size of pumpkins and pumpkins like boulders were scattered among them. A pond of rather larger proportions than you’d expect to see in a desert was tucked into one corner of the grounds, surrounded by reeds and cattails. Lilies and lotus of every conceivable color covered its surface, providing shelter for the exotic waterfowl diving for aquatic bugs along its margins.

“These Living Gods are some gardeners,” Ray understated as he edged the car forward. He went slowly, careful not to squash any of the fancy-feathered chickens pecking among the driveway gravel. The birds squawked indignantly at the car’s approach, loud enough to alert those inside the hacienda. By the time Ray and the Angel had parked and gone up to the front door, a tall, bird-beaked joker opened it before Ray could knock. He looked sad, the Angel thought, though it was difficult to read the expression on his odd features.

“Hello, Thoth,” Ray said.

“Mr. Ray. Miss...?”

“This is Angel,” Ray said, and somehow the Angel suppressed the urge to correct him. “She’s my partner. Listen, I know this is a difficult time—”

The bird-beaker joker stepped aside and opened the door wide. “Come in,” he said.

The interior of the old house was cool despite the desert heat. Its floors were tile, the walls adobe brick. There was little furniture in the rooms they went through, but a riot of colorful rugs covered the floors and walls. Thoth led them out the rear entrance, where he stopped and turned to them as they stood on the threshold of the back yard where the other Living Gods were picking flowers from among the riot of blooms that grew there, or just standing talking or sitting silently, comforting each other as best they could.

“We are preparing our brother Sheb for burial,” he explained in a sadly ominous voice punctuated by weird clacking of his long beak. He gestured toward a square, blank-walled shed in the back. Out in the far reaches of the enclosed yard, out beyond that square shed, the Angel could see two of them digging a grave in the soft sand of the desert floor.

“You’re not,” the Angel heard herself blurt out, “mummifying him?”

Ray glanced at her with pursed lips and a frown, but Thoth didn’t seem to mind. “No, Miss Angel,” he said. “I’m afraid that we are a much simpler people than our ancestors were. We have neither the time nor the money to do the job properly, but—”

He fell silent for a moment as one of his comrades came from the shed. Brown and thin and weathered as an old stick, the old man carried four small jars made from white stone. He looked at Thoth, nodded, and took the jars to a woman who had obviously recently been weeping. On a small table before her were a number of small human-like figurines, no more than six inches high, made of clay or stone

“—We do the best we can for our brother. He goes west with his vitals safe in their canopic jars, his ushbati to provide for him in the land of the dead, and our prayers for Anubis to aid him during the time of judgement.”

It didn’t sound all too different to the Angel than a Christian burial. Except that part about the canopic jars. And the ushbati figures. And, actually, Anubis. She felt bad that the poor man would be condemned to Hell because he was a pagan. Anyway, it was all the Allumbrados fault. It was something else that they had to pay for.

“That’s all he could ask,” Ray said.

The Angel stared at him, surprised at his unexpected compassion, as Thoth nodded his bird head. The other Living God—blasphemous as that thought was—gave the jars to the mourning woman and then joined them. He looked normal, if under-nourished and over-tanned by years of exposure to a harsh sun.

“This is my brother, Osiris. He speaks little English, but there is something he would tell you.”

Ray nodded. “His fame is great. I dared to come and interrupt your grief with the hope that he might have news of the boy.”

Osiris spoke rapid Arabic. Ray nodded. The Angel could scarcely believe that he knew what the man was saying.

“Alf shukr,” Ray said. “A thousand thanks for all. Our sorrow for your loss is great.”

“Our strength is spent,” Thoth said. “We are now all old, or weak. We only wish to pass the remainder of our lives peacefully among the oasis we have created in this desert, which reminds us so much of the home we have lost. We can aid you no more.”

“You’ve done enough,” Ray said.

Thoth shook his head. “We wish we could do more. But we have two favors to ask of you.”

“Name them,” Ray said, stepping on the Angel’s foot when she started to interrupt.

“Save the boy. Save the beloved of Ra,” Thoth said. “He is the great light who will illume the world.”

“We will,” Ray said. “And the other thing?”

“Avenge our brother,” said Osiris in heavily accented English.

Ray smiled. It was not the simple grin the Angel had seen earlier. It was not a reassuring sight to the Angel’s eyes. “That,” Ray said, “I can promise.”

Osiris grinned back, while Thoth grimaced like a vulture.

“No need to disturb you further,” Ray said. “We can see ourselves out.” He made a gesture of farewell to the old men, who bowed as Ray grabbed the Angel’s hand and hustled her back into the house.

“What did he tell you?” the Angel demanded.

“Where the kid is,” Ray said, smiling.

“How’d he know?”

Ray shrugged. “He’s a prophet. He sees things.”

“He’s a pagan!” the Angel said.

Ray shrugged again. “So?”

They went through the house. The Angel shut the front door carefully behind them. “So where is he?” she asked, her concern and aggravation growing.

“Now?” Ray asked.

“OF COURSE NOW.”

Ray grinned. She felt like punching him. “Osiris isn’t sure. He thinks somewhere in New York City. Some kind of jail, or hospital, or something.”

“That’s helpful,” the Angel said as they slid into the front seat of the car.

Ray twisted around and looked at the Angel. “But soon,” he said with a smile that had a tinge of crazy, “he’s going to camp.”

“Camp?” she repeated, as Ray started the car, gunned the engine, and then took off at a sedate pace up the driveway, and the rutted desert road beyond.

New York City: St Dympna’s Home for the Mentally Deficient and Criminally Inclined

Since he had the rank accorded an ace and was also a perfecti in the Allumbrados, Nighthawk had a private room set aside for his use in St. Dympna’s, though he rarely took advantage of that dubious perk.

The place made his skin crawl. Back in the mid-nineteenth century up through the latter part of the twentieth, when Dympna’s was a going concern run by a nursing order of the Church, it had housed hundreds of patients within its grim stone walls. Most were kept in the large dormitory-like rooms on the first floor, segregated by sex, if not always by mental malady. The private rooms on the second floor had been reserved for more affluent patients, while the third floor was for the staff. No one ever said much about the basement and what went on in there, not even now.

Officially, Dympna’s had closed some time in the 1970s and stood empty for over two decades before coming to Contarini’s attention. Interested in strengthening his power base, the Cardinal had secretly activated the decrepit pile of stones for use as a training station for credenti, the lowest rank of the brotherhood. The basement rooms also made a fine storage place for those who angered or inconvenienced the Cardinal.

Cameo currently occupied one of those basement rooms. Or, perhaps more accurately, cells. Nighthawk had hoped to spirit her away almost immediately upon their arrival, but the old horror pit was alive with unexpected activity. Usually staffed by a few sleepy credenti and some new recruits in the dormitory-like rooms on the first floor, now it was swarming with gunmen babbling about the day’s events in Vegas.

No obsequenti were present, but Nighthawk had learned from a couple of credenti that Butcher Dagon and the Witness had actually succeeded in their mission of capturing the Anti-Christ and had bought him back, bound, from Las Vegas. The Witness had gone to the Waldorf to report to the Cardinal (At least Contarini would be somewhat mollified, Nighthawk thought, by the success of the second prong of his master plan.) and Dagon was in the third floor infirmary, along with several injured credenti, recovering from wounds sustained in the boy’s snatch and grab.

The purported Anti-Christ now occupied a cell in the oubliette, probably next to Cameo, under close guard. Security was at an unprecedented peak. The old asylum hadn’t been as tightly locked down since ‘57 when an ace-powered psychopath had escaped the oubliette and slaughtered thirty-seven patients in the dormitory before being over-powered by a mysterious patient from the second floor who’d been catatonic for almost a decade before suddenly waking and stopping the carnage by seemingly draining the psychopath’s mind. The cryptic ace/patient had then escaped St. Dympna’s in a manner unknown to the rumormongers who delighted in telling such horror stories about the history of the old sanitarium.

Nighthawk could well imagine the torments a sensitive like Cameo was suffering while being locked in a cell that had housed generations of drooling psychotics, but there was nothing he could do except bed down in his tiny room on the third floor, wait awhile, and hope that something would break for the better in the coming hours.

He needed the rest, anyway. He wasn’t as young as he once was, though he was younger than he used to be.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Las Vegas: The Mirage

It was late afternoon by the time Ray and Angel got back to Vegas and had dinner at an all you can eat buffet. At first he tried to keep up with her, plate for plate, but gave it up after the fourth helping. She could eat like a bastard. It was a good thing, he thought, that she was so frigging active, otherwise she’d look like a balloon.

After dinner they’d gone down to the police station and tried to get an interview with Dagon, but the local donut chokers went coy on them. They wanted an order from Ray’s superior, and since Ray didn’t particularly want them to know who his current superior actually was, they left the station saying they’d come back. But they didn’t.

They didn’t know where the kid would be for at least a day, so the only constructive thing Ray could think of was to try to get Angel into the sack, but it would have been easier to break into maximum security to interview Dagon.

Ray lay in his bed in the Mirage alone, trying hard not to think of Angel on the other side of the connecting door. It had been a long, not very productive couple of days. Sure, he’d gotten to kick some ass, but those frigging Allumbrados had managed to get away with the kid, Peregrine was laying in a hospital somewhere with tubes stuck into her arms, and as yet he hadn’t even managed to get a chuckle out of Angel, let alone a civil word.

That Witness, though...

Ray added his name to the list of jerks whose ass he’d like to kick. He didn’t like the way Angel had looked at him when they’d first come face to face. He especially didn’t like the way the pretty boy had treated her. It’s one thing to best someone in combat. It’s another thing to humiliate them. Ray hated bullies, and it was clear that this Witness was one.

But maybe Angel had learned a lesson. She’d done okay after initially putting herself in a hole by letting the Witness get the upper hand. Ray had thought about stepping in to even things up a bit, but he knew how he’d feel if someone had done that to him. It wouldn’t have made him happy.

And speaking of being not happy, Ray thought. He leaned over to the phone, suppressing a groan as his still unknit ribs scraped against each other, and got an outside line. He dialed a number he knew well, and it was picked up on the second ring.

“President Leo Barnett’s office.”

“Alejandro?” Ray asked. Of course it was the kid. Who else would answer in that irritatingly perky manner? “Gimme Barnett.”

There was a brief silence. “Uh, sorry, mis—uh, Billy. No can do. He’s in closed conference with Sally Lou.”

Ray was about to ask, At this time of night? but instead grinned sourly at the phone. “Is that what they’re calling it now?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” Ray said. “Listen, you been following events here?”

“Yes, sir,” the kid said. “President Barnett’s not real happy.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve smiled more in my life,” Ray said. “What’s the latest news?”

“There’s not much in the way of recent developments. It’s not general knowledge, but we found out that Peregrine’s husband had her flown out of Vegas on a medivac Lear, back to New York. Thought they could do a better job for her at the Jokertown Clinic than in the Vegas hospital. John Fortune’s still missing. So’s his bodyguard.”

“His bodyguard’s a shapeshifter,” Ray informed the kid. At least, it seemed likely from the info he’d gleaned from Osiris’s tale. “So I figure he impersonated Butcher Dagon—who’s in a Vegas lockup —and took off with the kid.” Ray frowned into the phone. He had to keep his kids straight.

“Well, that’s something,” his kid said. “What happened to Dagon?”

“I kicked his hairy ass,” Ray said. “Angel helped,” he added, to be fair.

“Boy, she’s something,” the kid said.

“You got that. Listen. Tell Barnett that me and Angel are taking the first flight tomorrow morning to Tomlin.”

“How come?” the kid asked.

“We have a line on Fortune,” Ray said. “Something that weird old fart Osiris told me. He’s not sure where Fortune is right now. He thinks he may be in New York City—which at least narrows it down a little. But soon the kid—Fortune, that is, is gonna show up in some summer camp in a whistle-stop called New Hampton, just north of the city. Angel and I will be there to meet him.”

“Okay,” the kid said. “You got it, Billy. Gee, I wish I could be with you and the Angel doing something useful instead of sitting around here in the office while President Barnett takes meetings.”

Ray shook his head. “No you don’t, kid,” he said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. Besides, I’m not really sure we could use your talents. Yet.”

“Ah, it’ll all work out fine, Billy. You’ll see.”

“Yeah.”

“But you and the Angel be careful, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Say Hello to the Angel for me?”

“Yeah.”

“Good ni—”

“Good night, kid,” Ray said, and hung up. He still had things to do, and he didn’t want to spend twenty minutes getting off the phone. He called the airport and got reservations for two on the first plane in the morning headed east. It was an early flight which didn’t leave much time for sleep. He sighed, called the desk for a five o’clock wake up call for him and Angel both, and settled back down on the bed. He wasted most of the night thinking about Angel in the room next to his, while his body went about the business of repairing itself, muscle, bone, sinew, and nerve.

It was quite used to that, by now.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New York City: St Dympna’s Home for the Mentally Deficient and Criminally Inclined

It was still some hours before dawn when Nighthawk heard a soft knock on his door. Years of strenuous living had taught him how to awake instantly and fully.

“Yes,” he said, sitting up in bed.

“Phone call for you, Mr. Nighthawk,” a respectful voice said softly.

“I’ll be right with you.”

He was wearing his shorts and tee shirt in lieu of pajamas, so he took a moment to put on pants, shirt, shoes, and jacket and run a brush through his hair. Nighthawk always figured that since he could meet his end at any second, he should always be well dressed when he went out in public. If he was going to end up in Hell, he certainly wanted to look his best. And if he was going to Heaven, he was sure it would be expected. When he opened the door to the corridor an unfamiliar face awaited. Nighthawk figured that he was a recently recruited credenti. The new recruits always got stuck with the jobs nobody else wanted, like nighttime security.

“Yes?” Nighthawk asked.

“It’s Usher. He’s calling from the Waldorf and wants to talk to a perfecti.”

“All right.” He followed the credenti to the office where a couple of Allumbrados were hanging out, supposedly guarding the building but, Nighthawk suspected, actually bullshitting and eating donuts. At least, the open, mostly empty donut boxes and half-filled coffee cups near every hand led him to suspect that that was the case. The three of them, including the message boy they’d sent to get Nighthawk, watched with interest as he took a seat behind the old-fashioned desk.

“Usher,” Nighthawk said into the telephone.

“John,” the big man said with surprise. “Good thing you’re still there.”

“I didn’t feel like coming back into the city after getting Cameo settled.”

“Yeah.” Since Usher and Magda were acting as Contarini’s private bodyguards, they’d returned to the Waldorf right away after escorting Cameo and Nighthawk through Dympna’s wrought iron gates. “Listen. We may have a problem.”

“What else is new,” Nighthawk said, sorting through the leftover donuts on the desk stop. “Ah. Raspberry filled.” He took a bite and chewed softly.

“No time for snacks,” Usher said. “We’ve discovered that Butcher Dagon apparently isn’t really Butcher Dagon.”

“Really?” Nighthawk said. He looked pointedly at the coffee cup that one of the credenti held until the recruit scrambled to his feet and got Nighthawk one for himself.

“Who is he, then?”

“We’re not sure,” Usher said. “It seems the real article is in a Vegas jail cell.”

“Interesting,” Nighthawk said. “I’d better check it out.”

“We can be there in half an hour.”

“You’d better. I don’t have much confidence in the local talent.”

Suddenly the three credenti were looking everywhere in the room but at Nighthawk.

“Okay, John. We’re on the way.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me and Magda and the Witness.”

“Which one?”

“The big one.”

“All right,” Nighthawk said. He hung up the phone and stared thoughtfully into space for a moment while he finished his coffee and donut. The Bigger Asshole. He’d better, he decided, move fast.

“What is it?” one of the credenti asked. Nighthawk looked at him steadily until he added, “Sir?”

“Possible security breach,” Nighthawk said, rising from behind the desk.

“Want us to come with you, sir?”

Nighthawk shook his head. If they saw what he was planning to do, he’d have to kill them all, and Nighthawk just wasn’t that bloodthirsty.

“No. Give me the keys to the infirmary.” One of them took a ring of keys off his belt and handed the proper one to Nighthawk, who nodded his thanks and crossed the room in his soft, measured tread. He stopped at the door and added, “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, come after me.” He thought twenty minutes should give him plenty of time, if things went well. If they didn’t... it probably wouldn’t matter. “In the meantime, finish your donuts.”

He closed the office door softly behind him and went down the corridor lit dimly by infrequent night lights. It’s just like the Cardinal, Nighthawk thought, to be stingy with the electricity. You’d think he was paying the bills personally.

The infirmary was a three-room suite with an entrance off the corridor. The key fit the outer door, but, surprisingly, Nighthawk discovered that it was already unlocked. He opened it quietly and slipped into the reception area, which was dark and silent. A closed supply room was attached to the reception area. The infirmary itself, where the sick or injured were bedded, opened off the reception room, and by order was also locked at night when there was no nurse or doctor in attendance. Contarini had a loyal medical staff on call, but they only spent the night if a patient was in danger. In this case, Nighthawk understood that they’d transported a badly wounded credenti to a friendly hospital where there’d be no questions about how he’d gotten hurt.

Nighthawk stopped before the infirmary door. It was ajar. He listened intently, but heard only random rustling movements of sleeping men. Moving as quietly as approaching death, he took the glove off his left hand and then slowly opened the door wide enough for him to look inside. There were four beds. Three were occupied by injured men, now sleeping, none of whom looked like Butcher Dagon. The fourth, with disturbed bedclothes, was empty. Nighthawk glanced at the inside of the door, and frowned. A smear of blood on the lockplate was still dripping sluggishly to the floor. He touched the stain gingerly, then rubbed his fingertips together. The blood was still relatively fresh.

He checked the outer door and discovered that it too had a bloodied lockplate.

“Curious,” Nighthawk said quietly to himself, wiping the blood on his fingers on a tissue he took from the box on the reception desk.

He moved like a ghost into the dimly-lit corridor, swiftly and silently, and went down the stairway that led to the floors below.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New York City: Jokertown

It must have been a tough day at the monastery, Fortunato thought as he awoke and tried to sit up. I hurt all over. He paused, frowning. And my tatami smells like someone’s pissed on it.

He opened his eyes suddenly remembering a fist the size of a small boulder crashing into the back of his head. He sat up, groaning, and looked around. He was no longer in the alley. It was dark and he couldn’t tell exactly where he was, but it didn’t look good and it smelled worse.

After a moment his eyes adjusted to the gloom, and he realized that he was in an abandoned building. Probably not in an interior room because light was filtering through holes in the walls and down through the floors above. It was artificial light, and it wasn’t abundant. The building was apparently located in an area with few functioning streetlights.

Fortunato wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with buildings that looked like they’d gone through the blitz and then been taken over by clans of cave-dwelling troglodytes who weren’t picky about personal sanitation or garbage disposal. When he was a kid he’d often played in similar ruins. Sometimes he and his friends would stumble across drunks and jokers while exploring derelict structures, but such creatures were usually more scared of him than he was of them. Though there had been exceptions.

He swiveled unto his hands and knees, grimacing in disgust at the urine, blood, and come stains on the mattress the Jokka Bruddas had dropped him on. At least, he thought, they didn’t just dump me on broken glass and nail-studded debris. But he wasn’t in the mood to be particularly forgiving to the thugs who’d ambushed, then kidnapped him. He was in the mood to hit back. Hard.

He pushed himself to his feet, swaying as a wave of nausea threatened to overwhelm him.

Concussion, damn it, he thought.

He clenched his teeth and staggered like a drunk, sending bits of building debris and a couple of empty liquor bottles skittering across the floor, eventually colliding against a wall mostly reduced to naked studs. The few wall panels that remained were covered with gang graffiti.

Not much has changed since I was a kid, Fortunato thought. This must be the Bruddas hangout. The center of their turf. The desire to get even with the joker punks was suddenly quenched by the realization that he was in danger. Potentially fatal danger. Got to get out of here.

He pushed away from the wall and stood straight, scowling darkly at nothing. He suddenly realized that he was thinking like the old Fortunato, not the Fortunato who had spent fifteen years trying to learn how to cloak himself in serenity. Worry about that later. Worry now about getting your ass out of here before those punks show up and finish you.

“Well look who’s awake,” a voice said from behind him. “That crazy old Fortunato.”

Too late, he told himself grimly.

Carlos and his gang of tormentors came from somewhere inside the abandoned structure where probably the rooms were intact and the garbage less ubiquitous. Their numbers had been augmented by an extra eight or ten other jokers. Fortunato squinted at them blearily. Some of the newcomers were possibly female.

Ricky, the giant, stooped low so he could get through the doorway into Fortunato’s room. His high voice squeaked something that Fortunato’s still-dazed brain couldn’t quite make out. Most of the others laughed.

“Careful, Ricky,” Carlos said in mock fear. “He’s Fortunato! He’s a mean old ace. Why, my Dad told me that he can fly. He can throw lightning with his hands. Watch out, hermano. All you can do is hit him. Like you done before.”

The girl (at least Fortunato assumed it was a girl) clinging to his arm tittered, and repeated, “Hit him, hit him, hit him!”

The rest of the Bruddas took up the chant. Ricky smiled as he approached, bowing at the waist so his face was almost level with Fortunato’s. Fortunato stood as straight as he could, even though his head whirled with vertigo and he felt like puking. He moved fast and was almost on target. His fist struck the joker in the cheek, and stuck there.

Ricky’s flesh was coated with a layer of slime with the consistency of thick mucilage. Fortunato pulled, and the joker’s skin stretched a good half foot until it was taut, but he couldn’t yank his fist free. Ricky laughed. He grabbed Fortunato around the waist with his titan-sized hands and lifted him high, smashing him against what was left of the room’s ceiling.

Fortunato grunted, absorbing the blow as best he could, though nausea-tinged pain washed through his system like a tidal wave.

“Don’t break him, Ricky,” Carlos said. “Let us play with ‘em, too. We wanna teach the old bastard a lesson. Let us show him who’s the power in J-town, now.”

His fellow gangbangers howled as Ricky tossed him contemptuously to the floor. Fortunato felt glass shards rip his clothes and score the flesh beneath as he skidded half a score of feet to right in front of the Bruddas. He looked up, groaning in pain. All he saw was a sea of horrific faces surrounding him. He knew they were eager for his blood.

“You know what’s funny, old man?” Carlos asked with a mocking smile. He reached into his back pocket and took out a rolled up magazine, an old issue of Aces! Digger, no doubt, Fortunato thought, would be pleased. The joker finally found the page he was looking for, opened the magazine and held it out for Fortunato to see. Fortunato squinted at it, but he couldn’t quite make out the photo. “You are Fortunato.” Carlos looked back and forth from the photo in the magazine to Fortunato, lying in the debris at his feet. “At least, you look like the old motherfucker. Well, whatever.”

Carlos tossed the magazine over his shoulder, where it landed on the floor with the other, less savory garbage.

“It don’ matter,” he said, explaining the situation to Fortunato. “We win, in any case. If you are Fortunato, we beat you until you nice and tender, then we cut you, we cook you, and we eat you.” Carlos smiled. “I get your liver. I hope you not a drinking man, because I like them nice and tender. It’s, like, a sacrament. Body and blood, man. Body and blood. If you not, if you just a crazy old man, we still get a nice meal. See, fucker, any way, we win.”

He drew a knife from a sheath he carried in the small of his back. It wasn’t a fighting knife. It was a filleting knife.

Fortunato tried to stand as they closed around him. He couldn’t rise. His head hurt like a beaten gong. His insides felt wrong where Ricky had squeezed him. All he could do was roll over on his stomach, pull his knees in and cover his head with his arms as the blows started to fall. Some of the jokers kicked him, some beat him with boards and pipes and other handy weapons. He quickly lost track of what was happening as he drowned in an ocean of sudden pain.

I’m Fortunato, he screamed silently. I’m Fortunato. It can’t end like this. Blood thundering in his ears, agony washed across him like a tidal wave. He screamed, “Help me, someone help me.”

As total blackness claimed him, he couldn’t even be sure that he had spoken aloud.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New York City: St Dympna’s Home for the Mentally Deficient and Criminally Inclined

Jerry stood before the locked door, twisting his forefinger like a key in a lock. There was a click as the lock sprung, and he extricated his finger from the keyhole. A couple of inches of bone, shaped like a key, protruded from the tip of his bloody forefinger. A skeleton key, Jerry thought.

He rarely had the opportunity to use this aspect of his shape-shifting powers. Even though it kind of hurt when he extruded the bone through the meat of his fingertip, it pleased him when he had the chance to exercise this particular talent. As far as he knew, it was unique in the wild card world. He turned and waved a silent good-bye to his erstwhile companions. Their presence had been something of a pain in the butt, as he had to wait until he was sure they were all asleep before he made his escape, but they had also helped him in their own way. First, one of them had supplied Jerry’s current outfit. Jerry had waited until he was sure that they were all asleep before rummaging through their clothes to find something that fit, but it was better making his escape in the sweaty and bloodstained fatigues than in a hospital gown with his ass sticking out.

Second, they were all more severely wounded than Jerry was pretending to be, so he was able to wave most of the medical attention away from himself, insisting that the nurse check them out before turning to him. It would have been pretty embarrassing if they’d discovered that Jerry wasn’t really injured at all. In fact, one of his companions had been so badly hurt that they’d taken him to a real hospital. The medics hadn’t yet returned to the infirmary, which made Jerry’s escape all the easier.

He crossed the dark reception room and listened carefully, his ear against the door, but there was no sound in the corridor outside. He inserted his finger in the lockplate of the door to the corridor, hoping that he wouldn’t have to grow another key. It took time to mold the bone around the intricacies of a lock, and he wasn’t sure how much time he had before a guard might show up. He wasn’t sure if the corridors were guarded at all, but even if they weren’t there was always the chance of running into someone going to the kitchen for a snack. The last thing he wanted to do was raise an alarm. He was one against how many he couldn’t even began to guess. He could only trust to the efficacy of his Dagon impersonation, and to lessen the chance of someone penetrating it, move quietly and stealthily. Jerry was good at that, but he had a feeling he would need more than skill to spring John Fortune. He would need luck as well, and that was something he hadn’t been blessed with.

It could be worse, he thought. I could really be hurt as bad as Dagon had seemed to be.

The corridor was quiet and dimly lit by infrequent nightlights. Following the way he’d originally come, he found the staircase, and, as they did on the way up, by-passed whatever was on the second and first floors and went directly to the basement.

That area of the rambling old building was not quite as well appointed as the rest of the structure. The walls were rough-dressed stone blocks. The floors were actually flagstone. The basement reminded Jerry uncomfortably of every dungeon he’d seen in every medieval epic ever filmed. The rooms leading off the main corridor were dungeon-like cells with stout oaken doors that had tiny iron-barred windows set into them. All that was missing was the fat, hairy-stomached turnkey with a hunchback and black hood.

Jerry stopped to look down a corridor lit even more dimly than those on the floor above. His noise suddenly crinkled in disgust. “What’s that smell?” he asked himself quietly.

It was dampness compounded by a rank animal odor that was teasingly familiar. Jerry cat-footed by the first cell, heard an odd sound and stopped and looked in through the tiny window set in the cell door. In the dim light he could discern a twisted shape, human turned animal. He realized that this was also the source of the peculiar smell, as waves of it streamed through the window, gagging him.

It was the joker they’d led around by a leash, the one they called Blood. He was sleeping curled up in a pile of straw in one corner of the stone-floored room. Something about the very sight of the creature made Jerry shiver.

Then he woke up and looked right at Jerry. His lips curled back from his protruding teeth in a silent snarl.

Jerry froze. He didn’t want the joker to raise a ruckus and alert whatever guards may be lurking around the dungeon. He smiled. “Good boy,” he said lowly in as kindly a tone as he could muster. “Good do—good fellow.”

Blood cocked his head in an inquisitive manner, and got up from the pile of hay, stretching luxuriously. He went to a corner of the cell, lifted his leg and urinated on a pile of newspaper spread out evidently for that purpose while Jerry kept his feelings of disgust off his face. There was no telling how smart this creature was, and he didn’t want the thing pissed at him. Blood stretched again and ambled over to the door, looking up with what Jerry took to be a hopeful expression.

“What do you want?” Jerry looked around for something to placate the joker, and noticed a large can of Spam sitting on the floor near the cell door. He picked it up and held it in the window for Blood to see. Blood started to drool.

“Quiet now!” Jerry ordered as the joker showed signs of growing excitement. Somehow Jerry was certain that opening the can would be beyond the joker’s capabilities, so he detached the key and cranked the lid open himself. He slid the slab of glistening meat by-product from the can and tossed it through the barred window. Blood caught the slab in his mouth and capered back to his pile of hay where he carefully arranged himself and started to bolt it down as Jerry wiped his hand on his pants, fighting the queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“I’ve got to get out of this place,” he told himself.

He went on down the corridor, glancing into every cell he passed, fighting the impulse to call out loud to John Fortune. Most of the cells were empty. A few were occupied by men who were either sleeping or gazed at Jerry with dull, lifeless eyes that seemed to be without a spark of intelligence. He moved past these rapidly, afraid that they might say something, might make a plea that he couldn’t answer.

He arrived at the next to last cell in the row. He still had the entire other side of the corridor to check, but he was getting fearful that something had gone wrong, that they’d already taken John Fortune somewhere, that they’d done something awful to him and he’d never get the kid back. When he looked in the cell he saw in the dim light a slim, youthful body standing half hidden in the darkness and hope again flared to life.

“John,” he whispered urgently, and the body moved, quick as a cat, running silently to grip the bars of the window set in the thick door, and he knew right away from the shape of it, from the long, flowing hair, that this was not John Fortune.

“Who are you?” she cried. “Did Nighthawk send you?”

“Nighthawk?” Jerry asked, confused.

It was a young woman. She was beautiful, but with her face was screwed up so tightly that he knew she was barely clinging to this side of sanity. Her familiarity gnawed at him until he realized that she was Cameo, a somewhat well-known ace who would have been much better known if she’d actively sought out publicity.

“What are you doing here?” Jerry asked in a low voice.

“Nighthawk brought me here,” she said in a quick whisper, almost more to herself than Jerry. “The Cardinal made him. He said he was going to free me soon, but he hasn’t come. I can’t—I can’t take this place much longer. This place is mad, insane with death and misery. It drips from the walls, running in puddles up to my knees—”

“All right,” Jerry said in low, soothing tones, “all right.” Her voice was rising, almost hysterically. He tried to shush her, but it was already too late.

“Quiet out there!”

The command came from inside what looked to be a larger room at the end of the corridor, perhaps the office, or the hangout, or whatever you wanted to call it, of the freak show’s keeper. Jerry could hear someone moving around, probably in response to Cameo’s growing frenzy.

“Can’t sleep with you yelling like a crazy woman! You make me come out there and I’ll give you something to yell about!”

“All right,” Jerry said. “I’ll get you out of here.”

“My hat,” Cameo demanded. “Get my hat!”

“All right,” he repeated again, helplessly making placating gestures. “Just be quiet for a minute.”

“My hat,” she repeated, insistently.

Jerry nodded vigorously, striding towards the guard room to discover the modern day equivalent of a medieval torturer manning the dungeon as he practically bumped into a large, fat, and unshaven man coming out of the room with a snarl on a face that could have only been improved if it had been wiped clean and redone. The man started and blinked dumbly for a few moments as he stared at Jerry. He was wearing a dirty undershirt, dirty jeans, scuffed shoes, and, of all things, a battered fedora.

“Bu-Bu-Butcher Da-Da-Dagon,” he stuttered with a degree of fright that was almost comical. “Wha-wha-wha are you do-doing he-he-here?”

Jerry kept his smile to himself. At least his disguise was working. He had no idea what Dagon’s voice was like, so he modeled his British accent on Roger Moore.

“I’ve come for Cameo,” he said. He remembered something that she’d said, and inspiration struck him. “The Cardinal wants her.”

The dungeon-keeper bobbed his head in mute and complete agreement. He turned and led the way back into his office. There wasn’t much too it. A wooden table with a scarred surface that looked like someone had been playing mumblety-peg on it. A few wooden chairs that looked scarcely capable of supporting the guard’s bulk. A large handbag teetered on one corner of the table with a pile of junk spread out before it.

“This her stuff?” Jerry asked.

“Uh-huh,” the jail keeper replied.

Clearly someone had dumped her over-sized purse and searched through the accumulated mass of feminine paraphernalia. There was a lot of stuff, most of which Jerry didn’t care to examine too closely. For a moment he was worried, because the all-important hat she’d demanded wasn’t present. Jerry turned and looked at the turnkey, frowning.

“Where’s the hat?” he asked as flatly as he could, discovering that it was hard to be menacing and yet sound like Roger Moore.

“Uhhh.” It seemed to be the guard’s favorite word. Sheepishly, he removed the battered fedora that was perched jauntily on his head, exposing a forehead that couldn’t have contained a teaspoon full of brains. He held it out apologetically to Jerry.

Jerry had expected some kind of female-type hat, but if this was the one in the bag, this was the one she must have been talking about. He swept all of Cameo’s other paraphernalia into the purse, figuring there might be some other vital bit of equipment she needed. He took the hat from the guard as he swept out of the room, paused in the doorway and took a key ring that was hanging from a spike hammered into the wall. The keys were iron, appropriately massive for the old cells. Jerry had thought he’d be able to do his skeleton key trick to open up the cell doors, but judging by the size of the keys in his hand, he’d have to stick two or three fingers into the massive lockplate to be able to duplicate the key, and he didn’t think that would have worked too well.

He paused and turned to the guard. “Stay here. I don’t want to disturb your rest any further.”

He hoped that he’d managed an appropriately sinister turn of voice and the jailer would obey. He didn’t want the man peering over his shoulder while he went through the cells freeing not only John Fortune and Cameo, but all the prisoners.

He went back out into the corridor, and his heart suddenly seemed to catch in his throat as he saw a dark figure. For a moment he panicked, and then he realized that the man seemed to have more of a waiting than lurking attitude, and he didn’t seem very menacing at all. He was a small, older-looking, very dark-skinned black man neatly dressed in a dark suit with a faint pinstripe, white shirt, and polished black shoes that would have been very stylish fifty, sixty years ago. It looked, in fact, like something Bogart would have worn in Casablanca. The old man carried it off very well. He looked sharp, in the parlance of an earlier generation. Except for the black glove that he wore on his left hand. What’s up with that? Jerry wondered.

“You shouldn’t be prowling around the oubliette alone, Dagon,” the old man said in a sweet, soft voice that revealed his deep south roots. There was, however, a peculiar emphasis on the word “Dagon” that Jerry didn’t like.

“Just checking things out,” Jerry said, trying to sound like Dagon but suspecting already that he was wasting his effort.

The old man nodded. “Perhaps we should introduce ourselves,” he said formally. “My name is John Nighthawk. I am in the employ of Cardinal Romulus Contarini, whose hospitality you are currently enjoying at Saint Dympna’s Home For The Mentally Deficient And Criminally Inclined. And you are?”

“Butcher Dagon?” Jerry asked, trying but failing to keep an interrogatory tone out of his voice. He knew now that his cover was blown, but at least he wasn’t being confronted by a pumped-up muscle head like Witness or a stone killer like Dagon. He figured that he should be able to handle this old man, though he realized that appearances in the wild card world could be utterly deceiving.

John Nighthawk shook his head. “Time to put all the bullshit aside, son. I’m afraid that Butcher Dagon is currently a guest of state of Nevada, city of Las Vegas. I’m afraid also that if we want to get out of here, we don’t have much time. A team of heavily armed mercenaries backed by aces is going to show up in a very few minutes. It’d be better if none of us were here to answer their questions.”

Jerry sighed. Once again, it seemed as if nothing were really as it seemed. He was getting tired of playing this game. “What do you want?” Jerry asked.

“I want Cameo,” Nighthawk said. “I want to get her out of here. Since you came here with John Fortune, I assume you want him, and you also want out. I have no objection to that.”

“Just what do you people want with him?” Jerry asked. “Who the Hell are you, anyway?”

Nighthawk shook his head. “There’s no time for long explanations. Let me just say that Contarini is the head of an order known as the Allumbrados, which means ‘The Enlightened Ones.”’ They believe that John Fortune is the Anti-Christ—”

“What?” Jerry couldn’t believe his ears.

Nighthawk held up a forestalling hand, the gloved one. “We can talk about this or we can get the Hell out of here.”

Jerry nodded. “All right. Let’s get the Hell out.” He and John Fortune could ditch this crazy old coot as soon as they hit the fresh air. “Cameo’s this way.”

He led the way to her cell where she was still clinging to the bars, her eyes just this side of crazy.

“Nighthawk!” she hissed. “You promised—”

“I know,” the old man said placatingly. “I’m here now. Let’s just get out of here, and you can chew me out as much as you want.”

That seemed to mollify her a little, but when she saw that Jerry had her bag, she thrust her thin arm through the barred window. “Gimme!” she demanded.

Jerry could see that the bag wouldn’t fit through the bars, so he just handed her the hat. She snatched it from him and pulled it through the narrow opening, further squeezing it out of shape. She clapped it on her head without bothering to smooth it back into form.

“Open the door,” she said.

“Working on it,” Jerry said. Fortunately there were only half a dozen or so over-sized keys on the ring. He dropped her bag with the rest of her stuff by the door and started trying keys. The third one worked on Cameo’s door. As soon as he heard the lock click he pushed against the massive door, opening it slightly. He turned, looking down the corridor, and he moved on to a cell just a few doors down and across the way where he saw hands glowing a faint, pleasant yellow-orange gripping the bars.

“Jerry!” John Fortune called out in his excitement, perhaps too loudly.

“John, I’m here.” He went to the window and looked in at the kid clinging to the bars, a lost, scared look on his face.

“Jeez, I’m glad to see you,” John Fortune said. He fell silent, looking worried. “Voices in the corridor just woke me up. It really is you, isn’t it, Jerry?”

“It’s me all right. We’ll get you out of there in a second.”

He tried one key. It didn’t work. He put a second in the lock and failed to turn the tumblers. He rattled a third key as a voice said, “Step away from that door. We’ve got you covered.”

Jerry looked over his shoulder to see two men standing in the mouth of the corridor. Damn it, he thought. Nighthawk!

They both had guns. Rifles. In the darkness Jerry couldn’t be sure what kind. They did have him covered. “I said,” the one on the right reiterated, “step away from the door.”

Jerry complied, swearing to himself under his breath. He’d been so damn close!

The two men were so focused on Jerry that they didn’t see the door to Cameo’s cell swing open silently. They didn’t see Cameo herself, witchfire dancing like fireflies around and between her hands as she held them up. They didn’t see her, until it was too late.

Sparks crackled between her hands like a Jacob’s ladder in the lab set in the old Frankenstein movies and then balls of electricity shot from her pointing fingers, striking the barrels of the men’s rifles, running up the metal and dancing over their bodies like sparkling aurora borealis. The men themselves danced a brief jitterbug, and when the sparks faded they fell silently to the floor. The air suddenly smelled of hot metal and burned flesh. In his kennel, Blood howled hopefully.

“Jesus,” John Fortune said in his cell.

Jerry agreed. He turned back to the door and fumbled through the rest of the keys before he was able to open it. It finally swung wide and John Fortune came out. “Am I glad to see you,” he said, hugging Jerry.

“Me too,” Jerry said, holding him tight for a brief second. “We’ve got to move.”

“That’s right,” a voice said from a pool of blackness where no light touched an area of the corridor. John Nighthawk stepped out into visibility, putting his glove back on his left hand.

“Jesus Christ,” Jerry said, “are you goddamned invisible?”

Nighthawk shook his head. “That’s not one of my powers.”

“Why were you hiding there?” Jerry asked, as Cameo joined them in the corridor. She still wore the hat. Jerry didn’t care to look into her eyes.

“I had a vision while you opening the door to the boy’s cell.”

“A vision,” Jerry asked.

“That is one of my powers.” He turned to look at John Fortune, and frowned. “He is very powerful. Much more powerful than even you know. But he is not the Anti-Christ.”

“What?” John Fortune asked.

“You will take him out of the city,” Nighthawk said to Jerry. “I saw that. Others will follow. Some will be your enemies. Some will be friends. Some will be strangers. Some will help you.”

“Could you be any more specific?” Jerry asked.

Nighthawk shrugged. “That is the nature of visions,” he said. “They’re always open to interpretation. All I know is that you will go north, out of the city, to a place of forests and fields and happy children—”

“Hey!” Jerry said suddenly.

“You know this place?” Nighthawk asked.

Jerry nodded. “I think I do.” He paused, and looked from Nighthawk to Cameo, who still looked a lot scarier than a beautiful, ethereal blonde had any right to look. “What about you two?”

“Our paths have crossed yours only briefly. We have other things to settle. But—” Nighthawk paused, frowning. “I don’t think I’m done with you all yet. I don’t...”

“We’ve got to go,” Cameo prompted as his voice ran down.

Nighthawk shook himself, as if trying to escape unpleasant memories of future events.

“Yes, we do. But first—the other cells—”

Jerry nodded. Anything to cover their tracks, anything to spread confusion, would be a good thing. It took only moments to free the other prisoners. There were five of them. A couple of them weren’t in very good shape, but their fellow escapees helped them up and out of their cells. Jerry was expecting trouble from the jailer in his little guardroom, but he’d heard the commotion in the corridor. He probably smelled the stench of burned flesh. For once his pea-sized brain processed the information correctly, and he decided to stay safe and snug in his little room.

The escapees went by the bodies of the two men at the foot of the stairs. John Fortune paused for a moment, looking at them, at their burned skin and smoke still rising off their cooling corpses. Jerry was glad that the light was dim.

“Should—should I try to help them?” the kid asked Jerry.

Jerry shook his head. “Remember what your mother said. You can’t help everybody. Some people are beyond your help. Some people don’t deserve it.” He glanced down at the bodies. “I’d say these guys fit into both those categories.”

John Fortune nodded and they went swiftly up the stairs hearing lonesome, hopeful keening coming from Blood’s cell.

Jerry and John Fortune crossed the Hudson at Tarrytown just as dawn was breaking in a car they’d taken from the parking lot at St. Dympna’s. It was a dark, late-model Mercedes. Not flashy, but nicely appointed with a comfortable, smooth ride and a powerful engine. Once they’d gotten safely away from the asylum, Jerry took the precaution of stopping to switch plates with a car parked on a dark, quiet street.

Cameo, of all people, had proved surprisingly adept at hot-wiring cars, utilizing some innocuous-looking tool she’d taken out of her capacious handbag. Even Nighthawk had looked surprised as she quickly started two cars, one for her and Nighthawk, the other for Jerry and John Fortune.

They had to leave the other freed prisoners to fend for themselves. Some had gone into the parking lot with them and scattered into the night. Some had opted to stay in the asylum walls, committing mischief that Jerry was afraid to contemplate.

Jerry last saw Nighthawk and Cameo get into a Cadillac Seville as he and John Fortune had roared out of the parking lot. He still had no idea who the Hell Nighthawk really was and what the Hell he was really up to. At that point, Jerry didn’t care. He’d rescued the kid, and they were heading off to safety. Jerry didn’t know if he could trust the old man, but he could conceive of no possible scenario in which Nighthawk would help them flee, only to connive at their recapture. That just made no sense. And using the camp as a sanctuary was a great idea. Once there they could take the time for a deep breath, and a long, refreshing sleep. Jerry could call the office for reinforcements. And they’d be safe. No one would ever find them because although it was located only sixty miles or so north of the city, that part of New York was essentially one big empty space.

Jerry had been there a couple of times when they were getting the camp up and running. It was a favorite charity funded to a large degree by him and Ackroyd, and administered by Father Squid and a committee drawn mainly from his parish. Located on a couple of dozen acres set in the middle of nowhere which were owned by a friend of the joker priest, Camp Xavier Desmond was a year round retreat whose purpose was to get poor joker and nat kids out of the city so they could hang out together and learn about each other. It was open all summer and on weekends when school was in session, just to give kids a breath of fresh air, to show them what a tree looked like and maybe help them realize that nats and jokers weren’t so different after all.

Once they’d crossed over the Hudson River on the Tappan Zee Bridge, Jerry avoided the Palisades Parkway feeder road, sticking to the thoroughfare leading to old Route 17. He could have taken the 87, also known as the Thruway, which was wider, straighter, and faster. But he didn’t want wide, straight, and fast. He wanted narrow, crooked, and obscure, and old 17 was that in spades.

The little traffic there was on 17 consisted of commuters heading south to New York City. Virtually nobody was traveling on his side of the road. He kept to the speed limit and drove conservatively, glancing every now and then at John Fortune, who had conked out in the front seat next to him well before they’d crossed the Hudson. The boy had been through a lot, and this was probably the first time he’d felt safe enough to get a good rest. Jerry himself was going on the last dregs of adrenaline his body had left. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept, and food was nearly a forgotten concept. He could have stopped at one of the diners that catered to travelers on the old road, but he had no wallet, no I.D., no money. Doggedly, he drove on.

Wanting real obscurity, he turned west on 17A as soon as possible, entering the empty big space on the road map. As always, he found it kind of hard to believe that there was so much nothing so close to New York City. A confirmed city boy, the nearness of so much unused land always bothered him. More than once he found himself thinking that what these open fields needed was a couple of good apartment complexes to fill them up, but intellectually he realized that these open space were not really wasted. The rich soil was burgeoning with crops of all kinds—corn, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, celery, and other vegetables that would eventually make themselves useful at one salad bar or another. He was just not used to seeing them in the wild.

It was slow going, and even slower once he’d reached the sleepy hamlet of Florida with its one traffic light. He turned from 17A to the network of county roads that spread through the rural landscape like capillaries meandering off larger blood vessels. The traffic was now at a minimum, mainly locals headed for their jobs at metropolises like Middletown and Goshen, places whose populations didn’t exceed that of a decent-sized apartment complex.

Half relieved to find the place again, he pulled into Camp Xavier Desmond just as it was waking up to face another beautiful summer day. He was still wearing Butcher Dagon’s face and body, not thinking it prudent to take the time to transform in the middle of their escape, but was still easily able to establish his bona fides with the camp superintendent while keeping John under wraps in the car. It was before office hours at Ackroyd and Creighton, but he called to check in and leave a message, saying where they were and that they were all right. He got the kid settled into an empty guest cabin, had a big, satisfying breakfast, and went to the cabin himself and crashed.

He slept well and deeply, knowing that he’d earned every moment of the rest he took.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Las Vegas: Airport

They had to rush through breakfast to catch their early morning flight. The Angel wasn’t happy about that. All she wanted was to get her money’s worth (Well, she reminded herself, The Hand’s money’s worth.), but there was also the fact that they were going to be on the plane for a good part of the day and plane food was notoriously bad. And scanty.

Breakfast unfortunately turned out to be the high point of the day, which went downhill really fast.

The Angel and Ray boarded the plane half an hour before take-off. The flight was already full. Ray grumbled endlessly about the fact that they’d gotten stuck in the main cabin because they’d had to buy their tickets at the last second. He was, the Angel thought, acting like a spoiled child. Their seats were perfectly adequate.

They had two seats in a row in the cabin’s central section. Ray offered her the aisle seat, but she declined. That was her first mistake. Her second was being nice to the man who sat down next to her, smiling at him when he first plopped down. He was young, rather handsome with lean, dark good looks. Almost Mediterranean, with thick, wavy hair and dark, puppy-dog eyes. She was somewhat suspicious of him at first, but she told herself not to stereotype. Not every Italian-looking man was an Allumbrado.

She had her first qualm when she smelled the liquor wafting off him in waves, the smell of which was undisguised by his rather potent hair tonic, skin lotion, and cologne. It was an uneasy combination of odors to experience so early in the morning and it didn’t help any when their take-off was delayed for unspecified reasons and the air-conditioning was turned off as they sat on the runway and waited. And waited. And waited.

The passenger sitting next to the Angel wanted to while away the time drinking, but the flight attendant refused him alcohol. He then turned his attention to the Angel and she finally realized that he was hitting on her when she felt his hand on her upper thigh.

“Take your hand off me,” she said in a cold voice.

He only smiled back at her. Ray, who had been focused in on his own little world, turned his head and frowned as she spoke. “You want to take it down a notch, Jack?” he asked.

“Please, Billy—” the Angel began, but the drunk interrupted her.

“I’m not poaching your private preserve, am I?” he asked Ray.

Ray frowned. “No, but—”

“Hey,” the drunk interrupted again, “she’s free, white, and twenty-one, ain’t she?”

Ray’s expression went cold. “How’d you like to be drunk, dead, and thirty-five, dork?”

“Billy!”

“You threatening me?” the drunk asked belligerently.

Ray laughed in his face. The drunk turned red, stood, and drew his fist back. The Angel caught it in her palm as he tried to punch Ray.

“Stop it!” she ordered.

The drunk tried to pull free. She twisted his wrist a little harder than she’d intended, and heard something snap. He screamed, “You broke my fucking arm, you fucking bitch!”

Then his face turned puce and he gagged.

“No,” the Angel said. “Oh, no.”

He threw up in her lap.

Ray was out of his seat and standing in the aisle before the spatter could hit him. “Son of a—” he started to say when a swarm of flight attendants descended on them. Some of them tried to placate Ray, some tried to help the Angel and a couple others led the still-retching drunk away.

“I saw it all,” one of the stewardesses said. “It wasn’t your fault. Not at all. But I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the plane so we can clean... this... all... up.”

The Angel saw Ray muttering to himself, barely under control.

“My name is Billy Ray. I’m with the Secret Service. This is my associate. We have to get to New York as soon as possible—”

”I sympathize,” the stewardess said. “But surely you can’t expect to travel in this condition.”

Ray took a deep breath as if to calm himself, then screwed up his face when he got a good whiff of the Angel.

“No,” he said woodenly. “Of course not.”

“I’m sorry,” the Angel said. She grimaced at the vomit-covered front of her pants and blouse, holding her arms out from her body in dismay. “I didn’t mean—”

“No one’s blaming you,” Ray said. He glared at the stewardess. “Are they?”

“No, certainly not, sir. We all saw that she was simply protecting herself from an obnoxious drunk.”

“That’s right,” chimed in an interested passenger. “We all saw it.”

The captain came down the aisle, frowning. “What’s going on here?” he asked. “Trouble?”

“No, sir,” the Angel said in a meek voice. “No trouble at all.”

But of course they had to deplane. She had to clean up, using one of the airport shower facilities to wash off the vomit that had soaked her to the skin. Ray had to buy her another outfit, because all the clothes she had in the world had finally taken off for New York City. Then the cops came and she had to tell the story. Then more cops came and they had to tell the story again. Then they had to tell it one more time, officially, for their statement. Ray’s status helped, but he didn’t want to push it because he didn’t want the locals to look at them too deeply. It was afternoon by the time they’d cut their way through the red tape, and having had the satisfaction of seeing the obnoxious drunk hauled off to the poky with his arm in a sling.

They were saying their good-byes to the airport cops, who, the Angel thought, were googling at her all too avidly in the tight jeans and form-fitting tee-shirt that said “I Lost It In Vegas” that Ray had purchased for her. Fortunately she’d been able to salvage her bra. Without it she would have been too much of a spectacle to be endured. She should have made Ray go back to the airport stores and find something a little more appropriate for her to wear. She supposed it wasn’t his fault. She was difficult to fit in the best of times, and the clothing selection in an airport mall was not exactly extensive.

They were leaving the security office when one of the cops who’d just answered a ringing phone yelled out for them to stop.

“Hey, Mr. Ray,” he called, “it’s headquarters.”

Ray stopped with a sigh and a put-upon expression on his face. He had something, the Angel decided, of a martyr’s complex.

“They need your help.”

He looked slightly mollified. “Sure,” he said, glancing at the Angel. She looked away, rolling her eyes. “What about?”

“It’s Butcher Dagon.” The Angel had a sudden bad feeling that was quickly confirmed. “He’s escaped.”

Ray shrugged. “That’s your—”

The Angel laid a hand on his arm. “We can’t let him run lose. Think of the innocents!”

“In Vegas?” Ray asked.

“You know what I mean,” she replied.

Ray sighed again. His expression was clouded, but the Angel knew that she had him half-convinced.

“I’ll go on ahead. I can handle things at the New York end. You take care of Butcher Dagon.” She added what she realized would be the clincher. “Only you can handle him.”

Ray paused to consider. “Well. Yeah. All right.”

The Angel paused as well. She really hated to do this, but she had no choice.

“One other thing.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t have any money. I’ll need the credit card.”

Ray’s expression turned pained, but he nodded, somewhat regretfully, the Angel thought, and handed it over.

“Take good care of it,” Ray thought and added, with only the slightest hesitation, “and yourself.”

It was, the Angel thought, rather sweet of him to be concerned.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New York City: St Dympna’s Parking Lot

“Let’s go,” Cameo said flatly. She took off her old, battered hat and climbed into the driver’s seat of the Cadillac Seville she’d hot-wired moments before.

Nighthawk gave a final wave to whoever the fellow was who looked like Butcher Dagon as he and the boy peeled out of Dympna’s parking lot. He looked at Cameo. She looked back. She seemed different, somehow.

“I’m driving,” Cameo said.

Nighthawk shrugged. It was all the same to him. He went around the car and got into the passenger’s side and had just settled down when Cameo gunned it. They hit a pothole, bounced, and roared out of the lot, jouncing about like Mexican jumping beans. Nighthawk grabbed the dashboard and watched Cameo. She had a tight smile on her face. Her eyes, her whole expression, were harder, somehow tougher. As if she were a different person.

Maybe, Nighthawk thought, she was.

“You all right, missy?” he asked.

“No thanks to you,” she replied shortly. The inflection of her voice was different. Her words were as hard as her expression. Nighthawk wondered who he was dealing with now.

“You’re not Cameo, are you?”

She snorted. “We’re all Cameo, honey.”

Nighthawk nodded. “If you say so.”

“Where are we headed?”

“I’ve got some places around town,” Nighthawk said. He thought for a moment. “How about Staten Island?”

“Staten Island?” Cameo asked. “It stinks. It’s the sticks.”

“It’s quiet. It’s out of sight. We’ll be able to rest and talk some.”

“Talk?” Cameo asked. “About what?”

“About a job I want you to do for me.”

Cameo glanced at him as she skidded around a corner practically on two wheels.

“You’ve got your nerve,” she said.

Nighthawk nodded. “That I do, missy. That I do.”

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New York City: Jokertown

From far away, from under a league of water or perhaps a thousand yards of cotton batting, Fortunato heard someone call his name. But he couldn’t answer. He was wrapped in a cloak of weakness, a cocoon that isolated him almost completely from the world.

And all of his senses told him one thing: pain. Horrific, mind-numbing, soul-eating pain that should have killed him but ironically was helping him cling to the edge of life. Pain, and from somewhere far away, insignificant insect-like vibrations that touched the edge of his consciousness.

“Father! Father Squid! Jesus Christ, come here, quick!”

There was a momentary cessation of vibration, then the whole floor quivered as if something very heavy was approaching very quickly. Then there was peace again.

“Is he still alive, Father?”

Pressure on his face, gentle, as if tendrils of a willow tree blown across his features by a soft wind that smelled faintly of the sea.

“He is.”

Fortunato was still hiding too deep in his consciousness to understand the surprise in the voice.

“It’s a miracle, Father.”

“I don’t know about that. That mental cry for help must have penetrated nearly every corner of Jokertown. Only a powerful ace could have done it. Only a powerful ace could survive a beating like this.”

“Then the old Fortunato’s back?”

“I don’t know about that, either, but if we don’t get him some help fast, we’ll never find out.”

“It took a long time to find a single man hidden in a falling down building, even if he was just across the street from Our Lady.”

“We did the best we could for him, now it’s out of our hands. Call 911. Tell them to get here quick. I’m afraid to move him ourselves.”

There were shuffling vibrations along the floor of comings and goings.

“But, good God, Father, what happened to these others? It looks like they’ve been torn to pieces by wild beasts. There’s Carlos... that has to be part of that big guy... they’re all from that gang.”

The smell of the sea receded. The floor creaked as massive weight shifted upon it.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe the old Fortunato is back. And the Bruddas bit off a little more than they could chew...”

There was an eternity of silence. Then the pain that he thought was ultimate agony exploded into agony multiplied exponentially as gentle angel wings lifted him up and brought to mercifully peaceful, painless Heaven.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New Hampton: Camp Xavier Desmond

Jerry was still tired when he woke up mid-afternoon. He was still tired, but he knew that he had to get going. He and John Fortune were safe for now, but they weren’t out of the woods yet. Literally, he thought, as he surveyed the forest outside the cabin window. John Fortune was still sleeping in the next bunk. The poor kid had been through Hell, Jerry thought, and he didn’t have the heart to wake him up. On the other hand, he didn’t want the boy to awaken, find him gone, and start wandering about the grounds looking for him. Even at Camp Xavier Desmond—or, as the kids called it, C-X-Dez—a new kid who glowed would attract an unwelcome amount of attention and cause unwanted speculation.

He left a note, telling him that he was not to leave the bunk under any circumstances—unless it caught fire or was hit by a meteor—and went off to the administrative office to find a phone. He dialed the office and was pleased when a sultry voice said “Ackroyd and Creighton. How may I help you?” in a sexy, French-accented contralto.

“Hello, Ezili—”

“Jerry!” the receptionist interrupted before he could say another word. “Are you still at the camp? Are you really all right?”

Jerry was touched by the authentic concern in her voice. He’d known Ezili for years, during most of which they’d had an on-again, off-again love affair, which unfortunately had recently been mostly off again. Jerry didn’t know if Ezili—who was named after the least forgiving aspect of her native Haiti’s love goddess—had been touched by the wild card and given a minor ace, or was merely very, very good at her favorite activity, which was sex. He didn’t love her, really, but he had feelings for her which he weren’t at all sure were reciprocated. As hot as she was in bed, she was cool out of it. It was nice to hear the concern in her voice.

“We’re okay. Got the message on I left on the tape?”

“Oui—”

It was his turn to interrupt. “All right. We’re still at the camp. We’re still all right. We still don’t have a clue as to what the Hell is going on. We could probably use some reinforcements, in case the bad guys show up again. I can’t imagine how they could trace us here... but...”

“Oui. I understand.”

“Is Jay there?”

Jay was Jay Ackroyd, senior partner of Ackroyd and Creighton. Though he looked more like a low-level bookie than an ace detective, Jay Ackroyd, both an ace and a detective, was one of the finest P.I.’s in the city. In fact, as Jay liked to say since his return from Takis, he was one of the finest P.I.’s on two planets. No one else could put that on their Yellow Pages ad.

“Non,” Ezili said, “he is still in Jersey on that Giant Rat of Passaic case. He hopes to be done with it today.”

“Who’s on call?”

Ackroyd and Creighton employed investigators of all types—nat, joker, deuce, and ace. What Jerry wanted was a boatload of aces streaming up Route 17 as soon as possible.

“Elmo Schaeffer,” Ezili said, as if reading his mind, “Sascha Starfin, and Peter Pann are the only aces.”

Jerry thought it over. It was a mixed bag. Elmo was a dwarf, stronger than any nat. Sascha was a blind telepath. Pann had his tinks. Not the strongest line-up in the world, but they all had their uses and Jerry was in no position to be picky.

“All right,” he said decisively. “Send them up.”

“I will,” Ezili said. “They will be there was soon as possible.”

“Great,” Jerry said. His stomach suddenly rumbled, and he realized that he was hungry again. “Listen, Ezili, I’ve got to go. Tell them to get here ASAP.”

“Oui,” she said. “And Jerry.”

“Yeah?”

“Be careful, mon cherie. I have a feeling that much bad may still come out of this.”

“Yeah,” Jerry said. “Me too. But at least now we’re prepared.”

I hope, anyway, Jerry said as he hung up the phone. I hope.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Staten Island: Nighthawk’s Nest

Nighthawk’s hideaway was on a quiet little Staten Island street that could have been in just about any American small town. Cameo parked the car in the detached garage. Nighthawk unlocked the front door and then opened windows to clear out the stale air. He was the only one who had access to the house and it had been some time since he’d been there. Now that someone else knew about it, he’d sell it at his first opportunity. It was too bad, because he liked the place. It was nice and small, private and quiet, yet close to Manhattan. But that was all right. Plenty of houses fit the same bill.

He came back to the living room. Cameo was stretched out on the comfortable old sofa, eyes closed as if asleep. But as soon as he entered the room her eyes flew open, and there was something in them that told him that the old Cameo, the first Cameo he’d met, was looking out at him.

“Back are we?” he asked pleasantly.

Cameo just nodded.

“Would you like some tea, missy?”

“That would be nice.”

“Have to use lemon and sugar.”

“That’s all right.”

He got a couple of mugs out of the kitchen cabinet as he brewed the tea. It was organic Earl Gray, one of his favorites. His real favorite was Gunpowder, but that was best served with cream, and Nighthawk couldn’t keep perishables in his boltholes. They could have stopped for supplies, but somehow that wasn’t the first consideration on his mind when they were running for cover. Too bad. Donuts would have been nice, too.

He brought a tray with mugs, teapot, sugar, and lemon juice into his small living room. The furniture was cheap, but comfy. There were few personal touches about the room, or the whole house for that matter, but Nighthawk didn’t really accumulate material possessions. He knew too well what happened to them over time. For one reason or another, few seemed to last for very long.

“Here you go.”

He set the tray on the coffee table and took the comfy chair set at right angles to the sofa that Cameo had collapsed on. She looked awful. Beyond tired. Beyond frightened. He watched her as she poured a cup, added lots of sugar but no lemon. Her hands shook as they conveyed the cup to her lips. She took a little sip.

“I’m sorry about St. Dympna’s. But things have a way of working out for the best. I think we’re safe here, for now. I don’t think there’s a chance in Hell that the Cardinal will be able to find us here.”

Cameo shook her head, as if trying to clear it. “We’re safe? For now?”

Nighthawk nodded, sipping at his own cup. It was time, he thought to get down to what he really wanted from her.

“How old do you think I am, missy?”

“Umm.” Cameo hesitated, as if not really caring. “Maybe... sixty?”

Nighthawk chuckled to himself, shaking his head. “Nope. Not even close.” He looked at her, his dark eyes haunted by years gone by and the deeds done in them. “Next year I’ll be a hundred and fifty one. If me and world makes it to next year.”

“A hundred...” That caught her attention. She stared at him, her voice trailing off in astonishment.

“Why not?” Nighthawk asked. “The world has changed considerably since the wild card virus came down on Manhattan in 1946. People fly without machines. They leap tall buildings in a single bound. Why, some even can channel spirits through objects they’d used in their lifetimes. Is it so impossible to believe a man could live a hundred and fifty years?”

“How do you do it?” she asked.

“I’ve never told my story to a living soul,” Nighthawk said. He sipped tea thoughtfully. “Perhaps it’s time I did. I was born in Mississippi in 1852, on a plantation. My people were slaves, and so was I. Pa was a field hand. Ma worked in the big house. I was a field hand like Pa. Then came the Civil War. Pa lived through that, but Ma wasn’t so lucky. She died in the Yankee raid when they burned the big house. After the war, Pa stayed on as a sharecropper. It was the only life he knew, but I knew I had to leave. Slave or sharecropper, it was no life for me. I went north in ‘68. Never saw my Pa again. Never knew what happened to him.” Nighthawk paused as if reliving the years and the events that were marked so deeply in his memory. “No sense in telling you about the next seventy-five years or so. I lived. Sometimes good, sometimes hard. I never had formal schooling, but I taught myself a lot of what I needed to know, or joined up with others who could teach me. Only problem was, I got old.

“I come from good stock. My Pa was a strong man, as was his before him, and his before him. So was my Ma’s family. I made it to 1946, but barely.” He looked Cameo in the eye. “You know what happened then.”

She nodded.

“I was dying in a charity hospital full of sad old cases like me. Full of old men and women worn down by age, young men and women, worn down by drink. By injury. By disease. Just by life. When the virus came it was like nothing you could imagine. Like Hell, I guess. We must have been hit by a good dose of it ‘cause most everyone on the ward caught it all at the same time. The docs just ran away. Those that could, that is. They left us all to die, and most of us did. I saw people just melt away to puddles. Saw them turn hard like rocks, screaming for breath. Saw them turn all funny like they was inside out, and flop and twist before they huddled down on their dirty sheets to die. A couple just walked away changed some, but still living. One just rose out of his bed and flew out through a window. Never saw him again.”

Nighthawk fell silent. He couldn’t help the sudden tears that traced twisting paths down his cheeks, but neither was he ashamed of them. He wiped them away with his thumbs.

“What about you?” Cameo asked quietly.

“Me?”

“Yes. What happened to you?”

Nighthawk sighed. “I was a dying old man. I was frightened. I didn’t want to die. I felt sure that I would go to Hell for some of the things I’d done over the years. I surely didn’t want to turn into a pile of goo, or grow extra legs, or turn inside out. I just kind of reached out, crying for help. I needed strength to live. I took it from the man in the bed next to me. Old Robert Nash.”

“Took it?”

“Drained it right away from him. Took it right out of his body and old Robert died looking at me, knowing what I did. I felt bad because we were friends. We talked all the time. He played music on his mouth harp. He was a blues man, nicknamed Lightning. When I knew I killed him I was even more scared. I reached out and took more from others. I felt stronger. More powerful. In the end, I didn’t even know what I was doing. How many I killed. I just know that I walked out of that hospital when I’d been days, maybe hours from death. Walked away with a spring in my step, black hair on my head, and juice in my lemon, if you know what I mean. It was like I was fifty years younger.”

“You turned over an ace,” Cameo said. “You tapped into their life force. Somehow converted it for your own use.”

“Which I’ve been doing ever since,” Nighthawk admitted. “But usually carefully, taking the energy mostly from those about to die a violent death, drawn to them by my other power—visions, unclear and uncertain, of the future.”

Cameo pursed her lips. “Awesome,” she said.

Nighthawk nodded. “Yes. So you see. I have to find the answer to my question. You can tell me.”

“Your question?”

His eyes were pleading, even tortured. “Have I been stealing their souls? Have I been using them up, condemning them to limbo, or worse?”

They looked at each other in silence for a long moment before Cameo spoke. “How can I know that?” she asked quietly.

Nighthawk reached into his jacket pocket and held up an old mouth organ. “I took it from Robert’s bedside before I left the hospital,” he said. “I’ve carried it with me for almost fifty-seven years.”

Cameo stared into space, fingering the jewelry around her neck, and her eyes changed again. As did her voice when she spoke. “What’s in it for me?” she asked.

Nighthawk smiled. “Fair enough,” he said. He got out of his comfy chair, and moved it aside as Cameo looked on curiously. There were seams in the carpet under the chair. Nighthawk removed a square of pile, and flipped up the trap door that was revealed underneath. He took a metal box from the small cavity under the flooring. From the metal box he took half a dozen bundles of hundred dollar bills and put them on the coffee table. They were thick bundles. “How about,” Nighthawk asked, “sixty thousand dollars?”

Cameo laughed out loud, uproariously. “Don’t you trust banks?” she asked.

“They keep inconvenient hours, “ Nighthawk said.

Cameo grew quiet. She looked serious. “I think I should get out of town for awhile.”

“That’d be real smart,” Nighthawk said, but he said it flatly, without emotion or hope.

“For that,” she said thoughtfully, “I’ll need money.”

Nighthawk’s face suddenly shone. “We best be careful,” he said. “If Contarini catches us we’d both be consigned to the pits of St. Dympna.”

“I’ll leave it up to you,” Cameo said, “to keep us out of there.”

Nighthawk nodded. He gave the old mouth organ a last loving glance and put it away in his jacket pocket. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in a hundred and fifty years, it’s caution.”

Cameo laughed again. “I see. That’s why you cross men like Contarini. Don’t they ever go after you?”

Nighthawk smiled. “Not more’n once,” he said.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Las Vegas

The cell in the city lock-up was totally wrecked. Its bars were broken and steel door burst asunder like a herd of buffalo had run through cardboard toilet paper rolls. The bodies had been removed from the corridor, but bloodstains still splattered the floor and half way up the walls to the ceiling. Ray had seen worse, but not often.

“How many cops were killed?” Ray asked.

“Seven,” Captain Martinez said through clenched teeth.

Ray looked up at the sharpness of the tone in her voice. “Hey, don’t blame me. I warned you.”

She sighed. Her dark, short hair was plastered to her skull with sweat which ran in runnels down her full cheeks. Her eyes were big, soft, and brown. They were not cop eyes. She herself was big, soft, and brown. She looked as if she were out of her depth. Ray actually felt somewhat sorry for her. Clearly she was not used to dealing with killer aces.

“You got any aces on the roll call?” Ray asked.

“Quite a few,” she said. “Mostly telepaths and a few precogs who work out of bunco. Assigned mostly to casino duty trying to keep scumbag wild carders from ripping the casinos blind.”

Ray just looked at her.

“Sorry,” she said after a moment, her eyes avoiding his.

“That’s all right,” Ray said flatly. “I’ve dealt with a few scumbag wild carders in my day. A few scumbag nats, too. I suggest you take your best telepaths and precogs off keeping the casinos safe from losing a couple of bucks to rogue gamblers and put them on scouring the city to keep your citizens safe from a homicidal maniac.”

“Of course.” Martinez turned to a group of horrified-looking assistants who were clustered around her. “You heard the man.”

One of them nodded, and ran off.

Ray looked into the cell. Butcher Dagon’s one-piece orange jumpsuit lay shredded among the twisted metal that was once his bunk. Fortunately, he hadn’t had a roommate, or else what was left of him would have been lying on the floor in pieces as well.

“Were all the bodies fully dressed?” he asked.

“What?” the Captain asked.

Ray looked at her coldly. “I’m beginning to think that you’re out of your depth here, Captain. Dagon loses his clothes when he transforms into his fighting form. I was wondering if he’d managed to dress after waltzing out of your cell here, or if we’re still dealing with a naked homicidal maniac. If that’s the case, he should be a little easier to spot, and we’re going to need all the help we can get with this one.”

Martinez looked at another one of her assistants, a tall, thin man with a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed nervously every time he swallowed.

“Well.” Swallow. “I don’t know.” Swallow. “Some of the bodies.” Long swallow. “Were pretty... damaged.” Swallow.

“Find out,” Martinez said between clenched teeth.

He nodded, swallowing, and ran off as well.

Ray shook his head. “Not much we can do until he’s spotted.”

Martinez nodded. “I was afraid you were going to say that. I was hoping...”

Ray shrugged as her voice trailed off.

“I’m a fighter,” he said. “Not a finder. Our best hope is the telepaths and precogs. Our second best is the ordinary citizen. If this burg has any ordinary citizens. You’ve got to put the word out, publicize his escape like Hell. Let everyone know he’s dangerous. Someone has to have seen the hairy little bastard.”

Martinez frowned. “That’ll only cause a panic. Plus, we’ll look bad.”

“You’ll look worse,” Ray pointed out, “as the body count mounts. Now you’ve got a cop killer running around. The citizens are sympathetic. But when—not if, but when—Dagon adds a couple of ordinary citizens to his score, all Hell will break out. You’ve got to let the public know what’s going on.”

Martinez nodded reluctantly.

“Put me in a room with him,” Ray promised, “and I’ll take care of him. Until then, I’ve got to be patient and wait. Just like you.”

Martinez nodded again.

Ray had the feeling that this was going to be a long, difficult wait.

Staten Island: Nighthawk’s Nest

Cameo spread the comforter that Nighthawk had given her upon the living room sofa. It was new, right out of its plastic wrapping. She settled down on it and closed her eyes for a moment, then looked at Nighthawk.

“Ready?” she asked.

He nodded from the adjacent loveseat. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out the harmonica, turning it over in his hands for a moment. Then he tossed it to her.

Cameo caught it deftly and studied it herself. She put it to her lips and blew a tentative note that came out like a blaaaattt! from a whoopie cushion. She paused, then ran a simple scale, smiled, and a song came spilling out of it that Nighthawk hadn’t heard in a long time. It was Robert Johnson’s “Drunken-Hearted Man,” and before it ended Nighthawk was laughing and crying and clapping his hands in time all at once. He recognized the style in which it was played, and there was no doubt at all in his mind that it was Lightning Robert Nash blowing like he did back in ‘46 when they were both dying together in that charity hospital.

Cameo took the harmonica from her lips and smiled. “You looking good for such an old fart, Nighthawk. Too damn good.”

Choked up with emotion, Nighthawk couldn’t answer for a moment. “I… I got a disease that day. You remember.”

“Hard to forget the day I died, old boy.”

Nighthawk nodded. “I’ve never forgotten, either. This disease went way deep into me, deeper than my flesh, deeper than my bone. It changed me. It gave me powers, Lightning. I can take other peoples’ essence. I can take it from them and use it myself.”

Lightning Robert whistled through Cameo’s lips. “That sounds mighty powerful, John.”

Nighthawk nodded solemnly. “It is. I’ve tried to use it righteously over the years... but that first day... when it first came over me... I didn’t know how to control it.” He looked down, unable to look his old friend in Cameo’s eyes. “I took too much from you, Lightning. And I killed you. I’ve been living all these years afraid that I stole your soul—or part of it—to keep me alive. You, and others, that day.”

Lightning looked at him. “You may have took something from me, John, but it wasn’t my soul.” He laughed. “I seem to still have that. I sure do.”

“I’m glad of that, Lightning.”

“Maybe you killed me.” Cameo’s head shook. “I don’t know. I do know I was old and dying, anyway. The cancer was eating me alive. I hurt. Man, how I hurt. If you were able to take the pain away and by the way send me home, well, John, we was friends. I wouldn’t begrudge you that.”

“Thank you, Lightning.”

“My pleasure, John.” He looked around. “Where am I, anyway?”

“You’re in the body of a young lady named Cameo. She was able to call you back by holding your harmonica.”

Lightning looked down at it, held in her small white hands. “You live in a strange world, John Nighthawk.”

Nighthawk laughed. “You don’t know the half of it, Lightning. I’m a hundred and fifty years old now. In my time men have walked on the moon and visited the planets of another star. Men can fly. They can read your mind. They can turn invisible and disappear. They can do most anything except bring peace to the world.”

Lightning shook his head. “Then I’m glad I’m where I am and you’re here. You was always one for stirring things up, John. I was the quiet one.”

They sat in silence for a moment like old friends who hadn’t seen each other in decades enjoying an unexpected meeting.

Then Nighthawk asked, “What’s it like, Lightning, where you’re at now?”

Lightning looked at him and smiled. “I can’t rightly say, John. It’s like I don’t know anything past the time my heart stopped beating, but there’s dreams, like, I can almost remember. Dreams of a place that feels like home.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“That’s all I can say.”

Nighthawk nodded. It was enough. He knew now that he hadn’t destroyed his friend’s soul all those years ago. If he had, Cameo would never have been able to call it back from wherever it was now.

“You got to get back right away?” Nighthawk asked.

Lightning Robert Nash considered. “I can sit awhile. Play some tunes.”

“That’d be nice,” Nighthawk said.

“You know this one,” Lightning said, and put the mouth organ to his lips and started to blow “Sweet Home Chicago.”

John Nighthawk clapped his hands and sung in a sweet baritone that age had not dulled.

Those who heard them faintly through the walls of Nighthawk’s small house were mesmerized by the music. It sounded like nothing they’d ever heard before, as if it were being played by spirits, or perhaps angels.

Las Vegas

Ray spent the afternoon with a special flying SWAT squad investigating Butcher Dagon’s progress through Las Vegas, which was marked by a tidal wave of unsubstantiated rumor and a smaller trail of very substantiated bodies spread across the city in no discernible pattern.

The SWAT team guys were all right, but Ray would have felt better if they’d had at least some other wild carders in the field who had some useful powers. It turned out, however, that the Las Vegas PD was not exactly on the cutting edge when it came to hiring non-nats. Not that the telepaths pulled off casino patrol by Captain Martinez didn’t have their uses.

The command center that Martinez set up to deal with the Dagon situation got over five hundred tips in the first four hours, thanks mainly to Ray’s suggestion to publicize the killer ace’s escape as widely as possible. It was hard to separate the few clearly authentic sightings from cases of mistaken identity from the ravings of the lunatic fringe, but the telepaths helped. They were able to immediately discredit the obvious loonies and attention-seekers, but plenty of dead ends were left that had to be investigated.

The widespread publicity also led to a series of unfortunate gaffes. Six portly tourists were mistaken for Dagon and arrested before they could be vetted and cleared by the telepaths. Two other innocents were assaulted by irate vigilante bands, one in a cheap dive off the strip, the other in a gay bar that was having teddy bear day. Fortunately neither were seriously injured.

Ray and the SWAT guys, backed up by experienced homicide detectives, investigated four bodies that were found with Dagon’s M.O.—excessively brutal violence—literally stamped all over them, but by the time the bodies had been discovered the crime scenes were cold. There were no witnesses, no clues as to Dagon’s current whereabouts.

Around sunset a fifth body was found behind an abandoned 7-11 in a poorer section of the city. It had been stuffed between the back seat and the floor of a vehicle that had been left in the alley behind the deserted building, the keys still in the ignition.

“What’s bothering me,” Ray said to the SWAT team commander,

“is, what is Dagon thinking? There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to his activities. Yeah, he’s out of jail, he’s on the run, but what’s he trying to accomplish here? What’s his ultimate goal in all this wandering around?”

“Maybe he’s changing his hiding spots,” the SWAT guy said. “But he can’t stay hidden forever, especially if he keeps littering the city with bodies. He must have some kind of goal in mind—maybe he’s trying to reach a safe house. Maybe someplace where he can connect with his gang again.”

Ray nodded. He looked thoughtfully at the back of the 7-11. It was boarded up and graffiti-ed to Hell and back. “You may be right,” he said, strolling toward the structure.

He tried the rear door. It was unlocked. He looked at the SWAT lieutenant, who stared back, and then silently waved his arms to his men to gain their attention. Ray opened the door slowly, and from inside the structure came the sound of some animal howling a long, drawn-out, lingering greeting. It sounded almost human.

“Jesus Christ,” Ray said. He threw open the door, and looked inside the abandoned store.

It was a dusty and dirty confusion of toppled shelves, of empty refrigerated drink banks, of merchandise racks tossed in untidy piles. And on the far wall was a door. It wasn’t a normal door. It was just a black-semi circle imposed upon the wall which once held shelves laden with motor oil and pet food and pork rinds. A couple of men were walking right through the blackness, disappearing as if they’d been cut in half, but seemingly unconcerned by what should be a discomfiting experience.

They looked back at Ray as he came through the door, and one of them shouted, “Jesus Christ! It’s that Ray fucker!” before he plunged further onward and disappeared.

A disconcertingly human-looking dog, or maybe a disconcerting canine-looking human, was standing next to the gateway. He was held by another man on a leash, and he was fawning over Butcher Dagon, who was in his human form. Dagon looked less jolly than usual. His clothes were tattered and bloodstained, and he was pushing disgustedly at what Ray now realized was a particularly unfortunate-looking joker, saying, “Down, Blood, down.”

He, too, turned to look at Ray. He didn’t look happy at Ray’s sudden appearance.

“Your ass is mine, Dagon,” Ray said happily. “Again.”

“Move it,” the man holding Blood’s leash said as Ray charged across the room, dodging empty merchandise racks, “you’ve got to go through first before Blood can close the gate.”

“Shit,” Dagon said, and plunged through the blackness, Blood and his handler on his heels.

If Ray had a clear shot across the room, he would have had him. He would have pounced on Dagon before he could disappear. As it was, he had to zigzag around and jump over half a dozen obstacles, and as he reached the far wall Blood’s handler had already dragged the joker through the blackness. Blood’s hindquarters were disappearing. The blackness was starting to dilate shut like the closing of a pupil in a bright flash of light.

Ray heard the SWAT team charging after him. He heard their cries of amazement. He didn’t hesitate. He hurled himself, diving arms outstretched at the shrinking pool of blackness. He went into it head first. The shouts from the SWAT team were cut off as if by a knife. He heard nothing. For a disconcerting moment that might have lasted hours for all he could tell, he saw nothing, neither darkness nor light. He felt nothing, neither coolness nor warmth. He wondered if this was what death was like. If this was the Big Nothing. The sensation, or lack of sensation, of a spirit plunging endlessly through limbo. He was suddenly afraid. This was something that could drive a man mad in little order. To be stuck inside his mind, feeling nothing, forever. He concentrated as hard as he could, questing outward with all his senses. Suddenly he felt a low thrumming throb, and he realized that it was a single beat of his heart, stretching out impossibly long, its reverberations filling up the universe.

Abruptly, it ended.

He fell on his face on grass and dirt. It was dark, nighttime, wherever he was. Air felt cool and soothing on his skin. His knee hurt a little from where he’d landed right on a sharp-edged pebble. He breathed a sigh of relief. He was back again, somehow, in the real universe.

He looked up at the circle of men who stared down at him with varying degrees of disbelief on their faces. Butcher Dagon. The man and his leashed joker. Three guys with guns.

All right! Ray thought joyously. And he got to work.

A quick-as-a-cat leg-sweep brought down two of the men. He swarmed over them, punching and kicking as Dagon ran off into the night. As the third jerked his rifle into line, Ray yanked it away from him and tossed it away over the small, rustic building that was at their back. The man tried to run, but Ray snagged his ankle before he could take a step, and pulled him down, kicking and screaming and clawing at the dirt. Ray bounced his head once off the ground and he shut up.

Ray got to his feet. The deformed joker cringed before him, huddled against the man holding his leash. “Don’t hurt Blood none, mister,” the handler said. “It ain’t none of his fault what went on.”

“What the Hell is he?” Ray asked.

“He’s an ace, Blood is,” the man said, nodding vigorously. “He can open gates, like, to connect places what are far away from each other. Bring them next door, like. Only,” the man shrugged helplessly, “he ain’t too smart. It ain’t his fault we fell in with bad men.”

“It’s your fault, then?” Ray asked. He stepped closer to the two and Blood whimpered piteously.

“It is,” the man said. “It is my fault.” He put his hand out in a gesture as piteous as Blood’s whimpering. “You don’t know these people, mister. Yeah, I got ourselves mixed up with them. I’m trying to look out for the boy. I’m his brother.” He put his hand down on his Blood’s head, protectively. “I got us working for them, which was a sure enough mistake. These people are mean, mister, I mean mean.”

“Yeah, well, so am I.”

The man nodded. “I know, mister. They’re afraid of you. They truly are.”

That made Ray feel at least a little better. “Well, where the Hell are we, anyway?” he asked.

“Some place called New Hampton,” the man said, and Ray almost did a double take at his revelation.

“The camp?” Ray asked. “The camp where John Fortune is hiding out?”

The man nodded vigorously.

“How they Hell did they discover that the kid was here?”

The man shook his head. Blood, sensing that the mood of the conversation was shifting, tried to smile. “I don’t know. They don’t tell me shit. Just, have Blood take us here, have Blood take us there. You’d think it was easy on the fellow for all they put us through—”

“We all got problems,” Ray said flatly. “Focus on mine.”

“Yessir.”

“The boy’s here?”

“Yessir.”

“They’ve come to get him again?”

“Yessir.”

“Why, for Christ’s sakes?”

“Well, that’s just it. The Allumbrados think he’s the Anti-Christ whom they have to bind in chains if the real Jesus Christ is to come to restore his Kingdom on Earth.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Yessir.”

Ray didn’t bother to explain that he was just exclaiming, not questioning. Though, in a way he was. This was no time, though, to sort through dubious theology. There’d be time for that later. Maybe.

“How many men have they got?” Ray asked.

“About twenty, counting me’n—”

“Aces?”

“Well, there’s Blood—”

“I know that,” Ray said impatiently.

“—And now Dagon, of course. The Younger Witness—”

“Younger Witness?” Ray repeated.

“Yeah, there’s two Witnessess to Revelations. They’re brothers—”

Ray nodded. “One’s big and blonde—”

“The other’s dark and skinny.”

“Right,” Ray said grimly. “I’ve seen the blonde one in action. He the younger one?”

The man nodded.

“Any more aces?”

The man shrugged. “Nighthawk and his team are supposed to be here, but the Cardinal couldn’t find Nighthawk. He was real peeved about that—”

A cascade of gunfire echoed through the still night, waking it up. Ray turned toward the rolling thunder of sound like a dog on point, practically quivering with eagerness. He turned back to Blood and his brother.

“All right,” he said. “Stay out of this. Get out if you can. But stay out of my way. You’re only getting one warning.”

Blood’s brother nodded. “Yessir. Thank you sir.”

“Don’t thank me,” Ray said, before he vanished into the night. “Just obey me.”

And then he was gone.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New Hampton, New York

Jerry was in the administration office drinking coffee with the boys from the agency when Sascha Starfin, the blind telepath, suddenly put his mug down. There was just an unbroken expanse of skin where his eyes should have been.

“What is it?” Jerry asked.

“Men approaching,” he said. “Ten or so. They want the boy.”

Damn it, Jerry swore to himself. “How the Hell did they track us down so fast?”

Peter Pann, the immaculate Englishman, shook his head. “Damned if I know. But we can worry about that later. Get the boy. Vanish.”

“We’ll hold them,” Elmo Schaeffer said. He was about four feet tall and almost as wide. He was strong, even for a wild carder, but Jerry was not sanguine. A blind telepath, a strong dwarf, and a man who could call upon tiny little fairies that he called “tinks” to do his bidding.

Somehow it just didn’t seem like enough.

But Jerry didn’t waste time arguing. He slipped through the back door, keeping low to the ground and moving fast into a copse of trees. From there it was a short shot to the guest cabin where John Fortune was still resting after his ordeal of the past couple of days. He made the trees and looked out back toward the admin building. A squad of armed men had converged on it. Gunfire rattled the night and Jerry worried about the men inside, all of whom he’d worked with for years, all of whom were friends.

It was a tough business, Jerry thought, but the customer always had to come first.

And then he ran into a brick wall.

Fingers like steel cables grabbed him from behind, whirled him around. His eyes went wide with astonishment. His lips formed the word “Ray!” but before he could say anything a punch exploded like a sledgehammer in his gut and the only thing holding him up were the fingers from Ray’s left hand digging like claws into his shoulder.

His lips worked frantically but no sounds, other than a wheezing grunt, came from his mouth. Ray was winding up for another blow and all Jerry could do was shake his head feebly, his eyes wide and horrified as it descended like a thunderbolt.

Somehow, at the last instant, Ray pulled it. Most of it, anyway. It still rocked Jerry’s mid-section and he felt like puking. He held on grimly, because he knew that the last thing he wanted to do was throw up all over Billy Ray. It might, in fact, be the last thing he would ever do.

“What’s the matter, Dagon,” Ray sneered. “Can’t take it all of a sudden?”

Somehow Jerry sucked air into his laboring lungs. “Nuh-nuh Dag’n,” he wheezed.

Ray looked at him skeptically.

“Jer-jer-ry.”

Ray frowned.

Shit, Jerry thought. All those identities, all those names were really catching up to him. For a moment he couldn’t remember the name that Ray knew him by. It had blown out of his brain like the air from his lungs. He forced another shuddering breath down his trachea. It hurt like Hell. “Cray-ton,” he managed to gasp.

Ray’s eyebrows went up. “Creighton? The kid’s bodyguard?”

Jerry nodded weakly.

“Jesus, man,” Ray said, “it is you. That’s how you managed to get away with the kid. By mimicking Dagon.”

Jerry nodded again, relief in his eyes.

“Hey, man, I’m sorry.”

“All right,” Jerry wheezed. “Breath coming back. Can stand now.”

Ray let him go and he stood bent over, his hands on his knees. Sounds of commotion came to them from the cabin.

“What’s going on?”

“Cabin attacked by Dagon’s men,” Jerry said. “Our men trying to hold them off.”

“Where’s the boy?” Ray asked.

“I was going to him.”

“All right,” Ray said. “I’ll go help them hold off Dagon’s goons. Dagon himself is back, too, by the way. I saw him run off a few minutes ago. You vanish into the woods with the boy. We’ll find you, eventually.”

Jerry nodded.

“Can you walk?”

Jerry nodded again, and took a step, gingerly.

“All right,” Ray said. “Good luck.”

Jerry waved back as Ray ran toward the sounds of conflict. All right, Jerry thought. All right. All I have to do is walk. And breathe.

The first few steps were agony, but his breath soon came back and all he had to deal with was the rolling waves of nausea that threatened to overwhelm him with every step. Somehow he fought it down and made his way to the guest cabin where it was still and dark.

He entered quietly and went to John Fortune’s bunk. There was no need to turn on a light, because the kid’s face, arms, and hands were glowing softly like a beacon in the night as he slept fitfully.

John Fortune had had a quiet day, only getting up once to eat. Jerry didn’t want him to leave the cabin, and he was glad when the kid didn’t argue. It wasn’t surprising that he was feeling a little down after his long ordeal. He was also running a temperature. Maybe he’d picked something up in the Hellhole they’d imprisoned him in, but all in all he was in pretty good shape. He just needed a little rest. Which he wasn’t going to get tonight.

Jerry checked around the cabin before waking him, finding a hooded sweatshirt for him to wear. It would be a little warm on a night like this, but he didn’t want the kid shining like a lighthouse, revealing their presence to the world.

He shook John Fortune gently by the shoulder. The kid woke up immediately and only grumbled a little when Jerry told him that they had to get going.

“I don’t know how they found us so fast,” Jerry said, “but they did. Maybe they have some precogs or telepaths or whatever working for them. At any rate, we gotta move.”

“Where are we going?” the kid asked sleepily, putting on his jeans and his shoes and pulling the sweatshirt on over his head as Jerry directed.

“For now, the woods.”

“The woods?” He put the hood up over his head and drew the drawstrings tight, leaving only a bit of his face showing. It still glowed a little, but it was the best they could do. Jerry wished that he had a mask handy.

“It’s our best bet. If we’re lucky, Dagon’s men will never find us.”

“I hope someone will,” John Fortune muttered as they exited the cabin and plunged into the trees behind it.

“Don’t worry,” Jerry said with a confidence he didn’t entirely feel. “It’s not like we’re headed off into the Amazon, or anything. I mean, we’re only about an hour, hour and a half north of the city.”

He glanced back as the trees closed among them, hoping to God that they were doing the right thing.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Memphis

The Angel sat in an uncomfortable chair in the Memphis airport. Soon it would close down around her and she would have to leave, find a hotel for the night, and come back in the morning.

It had not been a good day. Her flight had been diverted to Memphis due to engine trouble. By the time they’d realized that they weren’t going to be able to fix it and get the plane back in the air, it was night.

Their plane had been full, and hundreds of passengers scrambled to get the few available seats on the flights headed east. If Ray had been with her, he could have conceivably used his Secret Service pull and gotten them one of the coveted seats. As it was, she just had to wait and take her turn as it came up.

She prayed it would come soon.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New Hampton: The Woods

It was dark in the forest. Damn dark. The ground was uneven. Half-buried rocks lurked everywhere. Bushes and shrubs and fallen trees all clutched at their ankles and tripped up their feet. And there were mysterious sounds. Jerry had no idea what was making them. He didn’t think there were bears or wildcats in these woods, but he wasn’t sure. But men with guns were chasing him and John Fortune, and he was unarmed. In retrospect, Jerry thought, perhaps it would have been wiser to take the gun Pann had offered him. But he wasn’t the greatest marksman in the world. Probably not good enough to stand up to Dagon and his men. Running had been the wise course, the only proper action to take. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the best he could come up with.

“You all right, John?”

“Uh-huh.”

The kid looked at him. Jerry couldn’t see much in the moonless night, but he could discern a glimmer of excitement on the boy’s features. To him, this was an adventure, exhilaration intruding upon what had been an otherwise terribly sheltered life. Jerry could understand that. But long experience had taught him that things that started out exciting sometimes ended in disaster, even for the good guys.

“Jerry, what happened in Vegas, anyway? How’s my Mom?”

They hadn’t had a chance to talk over the events of the previous days. Now was as good a time as any, but Jerry didn’t get into details. Actually, he didn’t know Peregrine’s fate anyway. He didn’t want to lie to the kid, but neither did he want to depress him unnecessarily.

“So, my Mom’s all right, then?” John Fortune asked after Jerry told him a sanitized version of the battle at the Mirage, and how he had eventually rescued him from St. Dympna’s.

“Maybe—watch out!”

He grabbed John Fortune’s arm, steadying him, before he could trip over the fallen tree that blocked their path. They weren’t following an actual trail. They were just wandering aimlessly through trees. While that tactic might throw off pursuit for the moment, Jerry knew that it wasn’t a feasible long-term strategy. He didn’t know what kind of technology Dagon might have access to. Night scopes. Heat detection devices. If Dagon had anything high tech with him, or maybe some kind of ace, they were sunk. He could only hope that the attackers hadn’t planned on a night hunt through thick forest.

“A road!” Jerry exclaimed as they stumbled out of the trees and onto a dirt path. “Thank God!”

“It’s not much of a road,” John Fortune said.

And it wasn’t. It was a simple dirt lane leading deeper into the woods.

“But it’s all we’ve got,” Jerry said, “and it’s got to lead somewhere.”

“I’m kind of hot in this sweatshirt,” the kid said.

“All the more reason to hurry. The sooner we get on down the road the sooner we find someplace we can relax. But you’ve got to leave that hood up for now, and keep your hands in your pockets. Otherwise you’ll betray our position by glowing like a king-sized firefly.”

“I understand,” John Fortune said, “but I can sure use something to drink.”

They went down the trail. It curved in lazy swathes through the forest, but it was smoothly surfaced gravel, without potholes or ruts, well-maintained, and nice and level. At least they didn’t have to worry about tripping over unseen branches anymore.

“Hey!” John Fortune said. “A light.”

Jerry nodded. He had spotted it himself. It was dim, rather diffuse. As they walked up the curved road they could see that it looked like a flashlight, or something of that relative size and power, sitting on the ground. It cast its light upon a wooden sign standing before an even smaller dirt lane, perhaps a driveway, diverging from the road. As they approached Jerry could see the figure of a small garden gnome leaning against the sign, as if he were guarding the turn-off.

Jerry looked up at the sign. The small floodlight only illuminated part of it.

“Nursery...” Jerry read aloud. He and John Fortune looked at each other.

“Some kind of garden store?” the kid asked.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe they have a telephone. We can call for help.”

“Maybe.”

“What are you folks doing out in the woods so late at night?” a tiny voice asked.

Jerry felt his heart surge up into his mouth. He grabbed John Fortune by the arm and yanked him backward, stepping in front of him. Jerry looked frantically in all directions.

“Hey!” John Fortune said, peering around him. “It’s the garden gnome. It speaks.”

“Of course I speak,” the gnome said. “Why the Hell not?”

Jerry looked down at him. What he had thought was a two-foot high statue was a little man... or something resembling such. He had a fat, jolly face and a white, pointed chin beard, and wore garden-gnome type clothing.

“Cool,” John Fortune said. “Do you live here?”

“Sure do,” the gnome said. “I keep on eye on the place at night. You folks in trouble or something? I heard some gunshots earlier, but that’s not too unusual around here. At least in hunting season, which this ain’t.”

“Uh—” Jerry began.

“You bet,” John Fortune said. “Kidnappers are after me. They have guns, but we don’t.”

“Kidnappers!” the gnome exclaimed.

“Uh—” Jerry said.

“Yep. I’m John Fortune. I just became an ace. My Mom’s Peregrine, the ace. You know, she has a TV show, Peregrine’s Perch, but she and my Dad also make movies.”

“I guess you do need help,” the gnome said. He pressed a button on the floodlight control panel, then shut off the light.

Jerry felt as if he were drowning in darkness. “What’d you do that for?”

“No sense lighting up our location if guys with guns are looking for you.”

“Good idea,” John Fortune said. “Are you going to help us?”

“Sit tight,” the gnome advised. “I rang for the boss. He’ll be here in a minute.”

“The boss—” Jerry began.

“He owns this land,” the gnome said, waving airily about. “And he don’t allow no hunting. Not even of kids.”

They stood silent for what seemed a minute. Maybe two. “Where is he?” Jerry asked, getting impatient.

“Right here,” a low, deep voice said, not six feet from Jerry’s side. A light suddenly flashed in his eyes, strong enough to almost blind him. He automatically threw up a hand and turned his head aside. The light went from Jerry’s face to John Fortune’s, who let out a plaintive, “Hey,” and blinked.

“Say,” said the garden gnome, “you’re not the boss.”

The man with the flashlight looked down, surprised. “Shut up,” he said when he saw who had spoken, “before I stomp you flat.”

No doubt about it now, Jerry thought. Dagon’s men had found them, damn it. Again. They were infuriatingly competent. There were actually two of them this time. The man with the flashlight and a silent companion.

“You won’t be talking so big in a minute or two, fella,” the gnome said.

“I said, shut up.” The man raised a hand canon with a gigantic bore, spotlighting the blinking gnome with his flashlight.

“Hey—” Jerry said. He knew the man was going to shoot. Even a glancing hit would tear the gnome to pieces.

From nowhere there was a sound in the night as if the mother of all mosquitoes buzzed past them. The tough guy with the pistol grunted, like someone punched him in the gut. He swayed on his feet, staring at the aluminum arrow shaft planted directly in the center of his chest.

“Jesus Christ,” his companion said.

The man with the flashlight looked at him. Jerry could see that the arrow had gone nearly all the way through his body. Half a foot protruded from his back and blood dripped off the razor-tipped four-bladed head.

“Son of a bitch,” Dagon’s man said, and he fell on his flashlight, bringing darkness again to the night as his companion wildly sprayed bullets into the trees all around them. Jerry felt a shock burn across his forehead like a blow from a red hot poker. He fell to the ground and with a frantic last effort dragged a bewildered John Fortune down with him. He held him tightly, covering him with his own body as best he could as his consciousness faded away.

Jerry woke with the feeling that he was being watched. Closely and relentlessly. He was in a strange but comfortable bed in an unfamiliar room. He was laying on his side, looking right at a wall so he couldn’t see much of the room, but Jerry was certain that he’d never been in it before.

He turned suddenly away from the wall, and immediately regretted it. A wave of pain rushed through his head, accompanied by a swarming nausea that was even more distressing. He swallowed hard and put his hand to his forehead, which he discovered was swathed in a soft, thick bandage. He looked into the room and saw his audience and suppressed an urge to groan aloud.

Two kids stood by his bedside staring at him. One was a boy, maybe ten. The other, a girl, was four or five years younger. Jerry wasn’t sure. He hadn’t had much experience with kids, other than John Fortune. The boy was tall and lean. He was blonde with delicate, almost elfin features. The girl was darker and stockier, but there was a certain familial resemblance between the two that marked them as brother and sister.

The girl looked at him solemnly. “Make your face do that again,” she said to Jerry.

“Do what?” Jerry was surprised that his voice sounded so weak and scratchy.

“Go all funny and wriggly,” the girl said.

“Jeez, shut up, will you?” her brother interrupted. “You’re not being very polite.”

She made a face. “I’m telling Mom you’re harassing me.”

The boy rolled his eyes. “Go ahead. Tell her our, uh, guest, is awake, too.”

The girl ran from the room, yelling, “Mommmmmm!!!” in a voice loud enough to make Jerry wince.

The boy seemed to notice his discomfort. “Sorry about that. She can be a real brat sometime.”

Jerry suppressed his notion to nod. “Where am I?”

“Our house,” the boy said, unconsciously uninformative. “Dad brought you home last night. He found you in the woods. Said you were shot in the head, but nothing important was hit.”

Shot, Jerry thought. He remembered it all, suddenly. “Did he—was anyone else with me?”

The boy shook his head.

Jerry lurched upright, doing his best to ignore the whirling as the room pirouetted around him. John Fortune, he thought, was still out in the woods. Or—maybe Butcher Dagon had gotten him! He tried to stand, but couldn’t make it to his feet.

“Give me a hand, would you—” he asked, reaching out for the boy, but a voice interrupted from the doorway.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Mr. Creighton.”

Jerry swiveled his head drunkenly towards the doorway. The woman standing there smiled at him. The little girl was pressed against her legs, watching Jerry as solemnly as before.

Jerry sat back weakly. “How’d you know my name?” he asked.

She smiled. It looked good on her elegantly-featured face. She was tall, lean-hipped, and long-legged. Her hair was blonde, her eyes a light blue, and her cheekbones, mouth, and nose exquisite. She could have been a model. She was a little old for that game now, but her features were of a classic delicacy that aged well. Her shorts and sleeveless pullover revealed that she took great care of her body. She was lean and lithely muscular, despite the two kids, who had to be hers. Somehow, she seemed familiar. Maybe she was a model and he’d seen her picture somewhere. Maybe she’d even been in the movies.

“My husband owns the land the camp is on, so we have an intimate interest in what goes on there.”

Jerry almost nodded again, but caught himself in time. So, he’d finally discovered the identity of the anonymous benefactor whom Father Squid always talked about. Or, he would when he actually met him.

“The boy—” Jerry said, and she nodded.

“I know. He’s still missing. My husband’s out looking for him now. Don’t worry. If anybody can find him, he will.”

“I’ve got to get to a phone,” Jerry said with some urgency. He wondered how much he should tell her. “If you know my identity, then you must know that I’m a private detective. The boy is under my care. Someone attempted to kidnap him last night.”

“We pieced together as much,” the woman said. “My husband... took care of the men who assaulted you last night. But the boy apparently slipped away while he was busy. Daniel couldn’t do much in the dark, but he went out at first light to try to track him.” She stopped and glanced over her shoulder, then looked back at Jerry. “I think I hear him coming in now. I hope he has good news.”

I hope, Jerry thought.

“Daddy!”

The little girl transferred her grip from her mother’s thighs to the waist of the man who appeared suddenly, silently in the doorway. He was no taller than the woman who leaned over the child to embrace him as well. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed like the girl and his skin was tanned from long exposure to the sun. He put one hand on the little girl’s back and hugged her close, saying, “Hello, sweetie.”

His hands were large and strong-looking and his arms muscled, not with the kind built by pumping iron but rather lean muscle won from hard physical labor. His face was weathered and harsh-featured, but its strong lines relaxed as he embraced his girl and leaned over her to briefly kiss his wife.

“The boy?” Jerry asked, still uncertain if he should use Fortune’s real name.

The man shook his head. “Vanished in the woods. I lost his trail where he stumbled on the county road. Couldn’t tell which way he went, right or left. But I’ve still got my people out looking for him. Don’t worry. He wasn’t wounded. And the men hunting you didn’t get him.”

“How do you know?” Jerry asked.

The man only looked at him. “I know.”

Jerry cleared his throat. It didn’t seem reasonable to press the point.

“I’m in your debt, mister...?”

He reached down and picked up his daughter, holding her on his hip with one arm around her waist. “Brennan,” he said. “Daniel Brennan.” He put his other arm around the woman’s waist. “This is my wife. Jennifer Maloy Brennan.”

“My mom’s an ace,” the little girl said.

“Jeez.” The boy, silent until now, rolled his eyes. “You don’t go just telling people that.”

Jennifer Maloy Brennan smiled. “We all have our little secrets. Don’t we, Mr. Creighton?”

“Uh,” Jerry said.

Brennan smiled at him. In other circumstances, Jerry could see how that smile could look disturbing. Dangerous, even. He felt that somehow, someway, he should know this man.

“Would you like some breakfast, Mr. Creighton?” Jennifer Brennan asked.

“Yes, I would, thanks,” Jerry said. “Mind if I change first?”

The Brennans looked at each other, quizzically.

“No, not at all,” Jennifer said.

“Thanks. I’ll be along in a minute.”

He had decided to get rid of the Dagon face. He’d had even worse luck than usual since acquiring it, and he definitely wanted to change it before running into Billy Ray again.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New Hampton: Camp Xavier Desmond

Ray felt pretty good when he awoke, even though he’d only had a couple of hours of sleep in the guest cabin that had been turned into a command post in the effort to find John Fortune. He lay back in the bunk, thinking over the past night’s events.

It had begun with promise that soon petered out into the drudgery of fruitless searching, though it had not been without its high points, especially the initial battle at the administration cabin.

Pann, Starfin, and Schaeffer had been doing their best to hold the line against the Allumbrado assault team, though they were not the ideal combat force. The blind telepath was somewhat limited in his capabilities. Elmo, though very tough when he could get his hands on someone, had to face armed Allumbrados, and Pann, though competent with a gun couldn’t get his tinks to do anything more useful than occasionally momentarily blind an opponent by blinking brightly in their vicinity.

Once Ray had arrived, however, the odds turned drastically in favor of the good guys. He single-handedly transformed what had been a moderately desperate situation into a cakewalk, going through half a score of numbnuts with guns as if they’d been a troop of girl scouts out for a midnight hike. Ray’s only disappointment was that he didn’t run into any aces while he was cleaning clocks. He knew Dagon was somewhere in the night, as supposedly was that blonde jerk who’d teamed with Dagon in the Vegas assault. Witness. Ray had hoped to run into him, but never did.

As soon as all of their opponents were groaning on the ground, Ray and the others lit out for the cabin where Creighton had stashed the kid, but Sascha knew that it was empty before they even got inside. They figured that Creighton had headed for the woods with the kid in tow, and went in after them, but it was a hopeless job.

They even brought Sascha along, hoping he could pick up the scent telepathically, but gave it up after a couple of hours of trying to lead a blind man through a forest at night. Ray broke away from the others after they’d heard a couple of gunshots in the near distance, but noises like that are notoriously difficult to track, especially in hilly, heavy forested terrain. Ray couldn’t do it.

He stumbled along in the dark. It was more luck than anything else that brought him back to the camp a couple hours before dawn. The whole area was quiet and secure. The Allumbrados, aces and numbnuts both, had all disappeared. Even their casualties. Camp administrators had the kids back in their bunks, fobbing them off with a story about a botched robbery. Ray and the men from the detective agency realized their best course was to get a couple hours of sleep, get up early and call for reinforcements, and then start the search in the morning when they could actually see what they were looking for.

Ray opened his eyes wide. He suddenly smelled coffee. The dwarf came into the cabin with two mugs and handed him one when he realized that Ray was awake. Ray sat up and took a sip. He grimaced. It was awful, but he didn’t care. It just felt good to be in the field again.

“Any news?” he asked.

“Creighton just showed up.”

“Alone?”

Elmo shook his head. “Didn’t have the kid, but he was with some guy. Also a joker, a little guy covered in fur.”

“Little guy?”

Elmo nodded. “About two feet shorter than me.”

Ray was about to crack a joke about that being really little, but caught himself in time. He was working on his sensitivity, and besides, he’d fought next to the dwarf the night before, and Elmo had done more than carry his own weight. Ray only nodded.

“The guy with Creighton was a local. In fact, apparently owns a lot of land around here, including the land the camp’s on. Knows it pretty good. He also has a team of these little jokers working for him, or something.”

“Doing what?” Ray asked, reminding himself again to refrain from the short jokes.

Elmo shrugged shoulders that would have been massive on a six-footer. “Got me. Maybe they gather nuts and berries for him. None of ‘em seem much bigger than squirrels, anyway.”

Maybe, Ray thought, short jokes are okay after all.

“They’ve been out scouring the forest since dawn. They’ll find the kid, if anyone can.”

“We should go, too,” Ray said.

“Creighton said to hang on for a bit. Ackroyd’s coming up from the city with reinforcements from the agency. Between us and this Brennan guy and his gang of munchkins, we should cover the area pretty good.”

Ray grunted. Ackroyd. He and the P.I. weren’t the best of friends, but what the Hell, that never stopped him from working with anyone before. “And the Allumbrados?” he asked.

Elmo shrugged again. “They may be out in the woods, but we haven’t seen ‘em or heard ‘em. Brennan has his gang keeping an eye out for them, as well.”

Ray nodded. “In the meantime, how about breakfast?”

“You read my mind. This way.”

Breakfast. It made Ray think of Angel. He wondered where she was, and if she was getting enough to eat.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New Hampton, New York: Onion Avenue

When the Angel finally arrived at New Hampton she discovered that there was no there, there.

It was on the map somewhere between Goshen and Middletown and Florida, but when she got there, she couldn’t find it. It was all just unmarked roads, many of them single lane, fields of lettuce, corn, pumpkins, and onions, and a few scattered houses. Even Florida, which she’d encountered when she’d gone too far down the quaintly-named Pulaski Highway (which was, at least, two lanes; one going each way), had a crossroads and traffic light. New Hampton, once she’d found it, proved to be devoid of such trappings of civilization.

She finally stopped at a small store on an unmarked county road where the bucolically named Onion Avenue branched off and wandered off to nowhere in particular. The sign outside the store said “Kaleita’s Groceries.” She went in to ask for directions. At least that was her intent, but she couldn’t resist first buying an ice cream sandwich from the old fashioned slide-top cooler which was humming like a berserk air-conditioner. She paid the proprietor and took a bite out of the sandwich as he searched through the register’s drawer for change. He was an old man who spoke English just like he was fresh off the boat from some old country. She wasn’t sure which one.

“Kid?” the old man repeated after she finally got his attention by asking the same question three or four times. Even then it was clear that he hadn’t really heard what she’d asked. “You’re looking for a kid? Not many kids around here. Mostly old people. Mostly old people.”

“No kids around here at all?”

“Nope,” the old man said. “No kids.”

The Angel frowned to herself. She was probably totally off the track. “Thanks.”

“There’s the kids at the camp, of course.”

She stopped. “Camp?”

“Yah. The summer camp up the road.”

“Road?” the Angel repeated.

“Yah. Lower Road. The road that runs by Snake Hill.”

The Angel told herself not to say “Snake Hill?”

“You can’t miss it,” the old man said. “Turn right out of the parking lot, go up the hill, take a right at the stop sign. You can’t miss it. It’ll be on your left after a mile or so.”

“Thanks,” the Angel said trying not to clench her teeth as she went out the door. She brushed by the guy who was waiting for her to go by so he could enter the store. The Angel looked at him suspiciously. He looked like a hippie. Like something off a 1960’s album cover, with ragged, holed bell bottoms embroidered with flowers and other designs, and bushy hair and a colorful silk scarf tied loosely around his neck. His shirt was outrageously colored and patterned and he wore tiny little glasses with purple octagonal lenses hanging on his long, narrow nose. The Angel didn’t have anything against hippies. Especially. She was just surprised to see one in this setting.

The hippie’s eyes were heavy-lidded. The Angel could smell fumes coming off him. It was some sweet smelling incense that made her eyes water. He smiled and nodded in her direction, and then caught sight of the SUV Ray had reserved at Tomlin International.

It was a 2003 Cadillac Escalade. The Angel had been distressed when she discovered that Ray had rented it, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. When she first got it out of the parking lot, it felt like she was driving a tank, but she quickly realized that it had a smoother ride, a much more comfortable seat, great air conditioning, and a killer sound system. It had a three hundred and forty-five horsepower V8 with four wheel anti-lock brakes, independent torsion bar front suspension, an AM/FM radio, cassette player, and in-dash six disc CD changer with eight Bose speakers, a pre-programmed equalizer, and a Bose subwoofer. It also had OnStar Virtual Advisor with e-mail access which, while the Angel thought was really excessive, she kept thinking that she should use when she was lost but wouldn’t because then she’d have to admit to herself that she was lost. She realized that it sounded like something Ray would do, but still... The transmission was a four speed electronically controlled automatic, but that was all right.

“Bitchin’ wheels,” the hippie said.

“Thanks.” She glanced at the beat up old VW van that was parked next to it, guessing that it belonged to the hippie. If it didn’t, it should have. “Your wheels are, uh, nice, too.”

“Thanks, man” the hippie said. “See you around.”

I doubt it, the Angel thought, but bit her tongue. There was no need to be impolite. She nodded and smiled briefly and got in the car and backed out of the lot onto the traffic-less road.

The Escalade, whatever that meant, took the small, steep high with a smooth purr. It was nice, actually, to drive something so big, so powerful, yet so quiet and smooth. She didn’t have a car herself, as she didn’t have a house nor much else in the way of material possessions, but she’d grown up a child of the South and had learned to drive on a succession of beat up junkers with clunky manual transmissions that her mother briefly owned before they’d been repossessed or died within months of chugging out of the used car lot. This vehicle was quite different, and, she had to admit, actually enjoyable to drive.

A small white-framed wooden church stood on the right side of the road at the hill’s crest. The Angel pulled off to the side of the undivided county road to get a better look at it. The sign board in the front said “Saint Andrew Bobula,” and listed the times for Sunday services. Pity. It was Papist, though it did remind her of the white clapboard churches her mother was always dragging her to. Not dragging her to. She went with her mother willingly because she wanted to. Because it was the correct thing to do.

She thought briefly about going in anyway to offer a quick prayer. It was her habit to attend service as often as was practical, but for the past couple of days it hadn’t really been practical. She made up for it by praying more than usual. When she had the chance. She hoped that her prayers would be to good effect. No. She knew they would be, even if appearances were to the contrary. The Lord, after all, had a plan, even if she wasn’t privy to it.

She went on past the church, glancing out the driver side window to her left where there was an entrance to a working gravel pit which had been eating away at the hillside for apparently quite some time. From her vantage point on the hill’s crest, the Angel could see a steam shovel down in the depths of the pit biting big chunks of dirt and rock out of the hillside.

Even here, she thought, in the middle of apparently peaceful country, they were destroying the land. Carving it up, chewing it to pieces, and spitting it out into dump trucks to be hauled away. She wasn’t against progress, but she could mourn the price of that progress, and what it cost the peace of the natural world.

She glided down the hill’s backslope and approached the T-intersection that the old storekeeper had told her about. She paused briefly at the stop sign, and read, thanks be to God, an actual road sign that said “Lower Road.” She hung a right. A long, steep, heavily-forested ridge loomed on the left. On the right the terrain was more open, sloping gently down to what looked like a small river meandering in the middle distance. She drove slowly, studying the terrain she passed. The thickly wooded ridge on the left must be what the storekeeper had called Snake Hill. It seemed to be totally undeveloped forest, fronted by open fields or meadows bordering the road.

She went a mile or more without seeing a single building, before noticing a cluster of rustic-looking dwellings standing in a big open area bordering the forest margin. A dirt driveway meandered from Lower Road to a parking lot that obviously served the buildings. She wondered if this was the long sought-for camp. She slowed down as she approached. Her heart beat a little faster at the thought that she was perhaps only moments away from again coming face to face with her personal savior. With Jesus Christ, himself.

A car, actually another SUV of some sort, was parked by the side of the road next to the driveway leading up to the scatter of buildings. Three men were standing around it, talking. Two were unfamiliar. But the third...

She pulled the Escalade over to the side of the road and killed the engine.

The third was Billy Ray. She stared at him. The three men looked back. Ray broke off his conversation and laconically headed in her direction.

“Well,” Ray said as she rolled down the driver side window. “Well, well, well. Look who finally showed up.”

“How did you get here?” the Angel asked, astonished.

He looked irritatingly smug. “It’s a long story,” Ray said. “I’ll tell it to you some chilly night. Right now, we don’t have time for chitchat. We’ve sent a couple of search teams out looking for John Fortune, and we’re about to head into the woods ourselves.”

“Looking for him?” The Angel asked.

Ray nodded. “He was here. So were Dagon’s boys. In fact, so was Dagon himself. Now they’ve all seemed to vanish. Creighton lost the kid in the woods somewhere. We assume that Dagon’s boys are out there, too, looking for him. We’ve got to get him first.”

The Angel felt lost. “How—Creighton? The bodyguard? He’s here, too?”

“Yep,” Ray said. “That’s him over there. The kind of geeky looking skinny guy. He’s a shape-shifter. We all got here via Blood.” He held his hand up, forestalling questions. “Don’t ask. It seems that these Allumbrados have a couple tricks up their sleeves we didn’t know about, including this joker-ace named Blood who can zap people transdimensionally from, say, Las Vegas to New Hampton. I got zapped here last night, right when Dagon’s boys—actually, supposedly they were led by Witness, but I never saw him—hit the camp. Creighton got the kid out, but lost him in the woods, later.”

“Witness?” the Angel asked, trying to keep up.

“Yeah. Your blonde boyfriend from Vegas,” Ray said laconically. “Remember?”

Blushing, she did. If the Angel felt lost before, now her head was swimming. “All right. Who’s the other man?”

“A guy I know named Ackroyd. He’s a dick”

“Must you swear so much?” the Angel asked, annoyed.

“I’m not swearing. Je—I mean, Go—uh, gosh. The guy’s a dick.” Ray sighed at the look on the Angel’s face. “A detective. A private investigator. He’s Creighton’s partner. He just brought a team of ops to help find the kid.” He turned and waved to them. “Hey, Popinjay,” he shouted, “come over and meet Angel!” Ray looked back at her. “He hates that nickname. I use it every chance I get.”

She rolled her eyes, got out of the Escalade, and stretched. She was hungry again, but this was no time to think of her stomach. John Fortune, the poor boy, was wandering somewhere around the woods. He was probably tired, and much more hungry himself. She could feel her Lord’s pain as her stomach rumbled in sympathy.

Ackroyd strolled up to the Escalade, followed by his companion. Ackroyd was a small man in a rumpled suit without a tie. Creighton was also small, in less formal clothes that fit him like he’d stolen them from someone who was bigger than him. He had a bandage high on his forehead. His real face was much less handsome than the one he’d worn in Las Vegas. She wondered why he’d changed it. He was young, but there was something about him, a sadness in his eyes, that showed that much was missing in his life. She wondered if his heart was filled with Jesus. It seemed unlikely.

“Nice wheels,” Ackroyd said sardonically. “Did you steal them off some geezer on a camping trip?”

Ray grinned. “What’s your ride these days, Popinjay?” Ray asked, then his face took on a sudden look of dismay. “Oh, that’s right. You’re from ‘The City.’ You never learned how to drive.” He looked around searchingly. “Where’s the subway stop that dropped you off in this god-forsaken place?”

“Yeah,” Ackroyd responded. “It is pretty rural.” He indicated his companion. “You know my partner, Creighton, I believe.”

“Yeah,” Ray said. “She met him the first time he lost the kid.”

Ackroyd grinned, but there wasn’t much humor in his expression. “Good to see that you’re still an all-around asshole, Ray.”

The Angel made a noise in her throat that was something between a derisive snort and an exasperated prayer, probably because for some obscure reason she felt somewhat compelled to defend Ray. Just a little, anyway.

“We’re here to do a job,” she said forcefully. “Not engage in juvenile repartee and spray testosterone around like skunks marking their territory.”

Ackroyd’s eyebrows went up. “Skunks mark their territory?” he asked Creighton, who only shrugged. He turned to Ray. “Who’s your girlfriend?”

“I’m not his girlfriend,” she said, aggrieved.

“This is Angel,” Ray said. He stood next to her, smiling. “She’s new,” he added, as if that explained everything.

Ackroyd nodded. “How’d the Feds get on the case already?”

“We’re not—” the Angel started to say, and Ray stepped hard on her foot. She shut her mouth and glared at him, momentarily too outraged to speak.

“—at liberty to say how we learned about it,” Ray said. “Confidential sources, and all.”

The Angel suddenly realized that Ray wanted to let Ackroyd and Creighton still think they worked for the government and not The Hand. She could see the wisdom in that. In fact, she should have thought of it herself. She castigated herself silently for a moment, then chipped in brightly, “That’s right.”

“Uh-huh,” Ackroyd said. He looked at Creighton, who shrugged again.

The Angel could tell that Ackroyd was suspicious. Suspicion seemed to be in his nature. But there was really nothing he could do, except disbelieve them. He seemed a man of little faith.

“So,” Ray said, “got any clues as to John Fortune’s current whereabouts?”

Ackroyd smiled. “Clues? Is that what we need?” He looked at Creighton as if for confirmation. “Jeez, Ray, it’s great when you Feds turn up to tell us that we need clues and all. I don’t know if that information came in Detecting for Dummies. That’s the book Creighton and I use to solve all our cases. Right, partner?”

“Knock off the horseshit, already,” Ray said. “Angel is right.”

“Yes,” the Angel chimed in. “Our job is to find the boy. Sparring with each other isn’t helping.”

Ackroyd sighed. “Wisdom from the mouth of babes.” He held up a hand to forestall another outburst from Ray or the Angel, or both. “But, you’re right. Both of you. What do you propose?”

The Angel felt Ray’s eyes on her. They were calculating. Though lust lay behind the calculation, he did seem to be focusing somewhat at least upon their job. “Well,” Ray said, “there’s two of us, and two of you. Why don’t we split our teams?”

“Good idea,” Ackroyd said. “I’ll go with Angel—”

“Uh, no,” Ray interrupted, shaking his head. “You and me, Popinjay. We’re a team. Like the old days.”

Ackroyd frowned. “Only if you knock off the ‘Popinjay’ crap.”

“All right,” Ray said.

“All right.” Ackroyd turned to Creighton. “I should talk things over with your little helper from last night.”

“Right.” Creighton spoke for the first time. His voice, the Angel thought, was the same as before, as deep and soft as his eyes. He seemed a gentle soul, unsuited for his profession. “There are some other things we should check out. Brennan told me about another settlement up the road that John Fortune might have stumbled into last the night. Or Dagon’s men, for that matter.”

“Right,” Ackroyd said crisply. “Check it out. Be careful.” He fished in his inside jacket pocket and tossed a cell phone to Creighton. Ackroyd frowned. “Too bad the kid wasn’t carrying one of these. All this tramping around the countryside wouldn’t be necessary. Anyway, be careful. Watch out for cows and other wild animals. And if you spot any of Dagon’s men—call immediately.”

“That’s right,” Ray said. “And we’ll come kick their asses.”

“Let’s hope,” Ackroyd said. “Come on. I’ll catch you up on all our ‘clues.’”

The Angel could hear the quotation marks Ackroyd’s sarcastic tones put around the word as he and Ray went off down the road together. She looked at Creighton. He returned her gaze. Lust was lurking in the depths of his sad eyes. Men, she thought.

“The commune is down the road apiece,” he said, “We can walk to it.” He gestured towards the ridge with the summer camp nestled at its base. “This area is called Snake Hill. Used to be known for all the rattlesnakes around here, sixty, seventy years ago. Don’t worry. They’re all gone now.” He frowned. “At least, supposedly most of ‘em are. Anyway, their presence attracted a, a religious community, I’d guess you’d call it.”

“Ophiolatrists!” the Angel hissed.

“Huh?”

“I hate ophiolatrists!” the Angel said.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New York City: Saint Dympna’s Home For the Mentally Deficient And Criminally Inclined

The Cardinal was furious. He slammed the cell phone down on the oubliette’s floor and it shattered into miscellaneous bits of plastic and unidentifiable electronics. He was in the basement of St. Dympna’s with Usher, Magda, and Nighthawk, and the Witness, examining the damage that the big break out had caused when the call came from upstate. The old pile of stones was pretty much intact, though the same could not be said for the credenti who had been manning it. Some of the released prisoners had chosen to take revenge and they’d come out of the oubliette mad and armed with looted weaponry. Such a copious amount of blood had not been spilled in the old asylum in over fifty years. Then came the phone call from the younger Witness relaying the news from upstate. It wasn’t good.

“The reception is terrible!” the Cardinal swore furiously. “How do they expect me to even hear, let alone condone their whining excuses?”

Nighthawk only shrugged. He knew better than to interrupt the Cardinal in mid-rant. The Witness—the Asshole, as Nighthawk thought of him—tried to catch Nighthawk’s eye, but he refused to look at him.

“How many of those morons does it take to capture one boy?” Contarini asked rhetorically. “Even if he is the Anti-Christ?” He turned his gaze directly on Nighthawk. “It took only you to capture a girl after the idiots here let her escape. Just you! How many men do they have with them?”

“Twenty-six,” the Asshole answered.

Ass-kisser, Nighthawk thought. The man would sell out his own brother to gain favor with the Cardinal.

Contarini took a deep breath, struggling to control his fury. “Can those fools do nothing right? Must I handle everything, personally?” He glanced at Nighthawk. “Cameo was not as you promised, but at least you took care of her.”

Nighthawk kept silent, and only nodded, half to himself. He had taken care of her. He had given her sixty thousand dollars in cash and personally escorted her to the station where he put her on a train headed west. He had told her to go somewhere, anywhere. To get out of the city and stay out until she saw from the news that it was safe to return. She was a sensible girl. She took his advice.

She even gave him the silk choker from around her neck without hesitation when he asked for it. After he saw her off safely, he searched a couple of pawn shops until he found a cameo that was quite similar to the one that she’d worn, mounted it on her choker, stained the silk with some blood he’d gotten off a juicy beefsteak he’d purchased at a grocery store, and presented it to the Cardinal as proof that he’d handled the Cameo problem.

Contarini, if not delighted, had at least been mollified.

That was all right with Nighthawk. The Cardinal was never going to treat him like family. It wasn’t, Nighthawk realized, so much that he was black, though that was probably part of it. More like he was an American and, worse, a wild carder. But again, that was all right. He had gotten what he wanted out of this crazy affair. He felt better than he had in years, as if a tremendous weight had been lifted off his soul. He felt truly young again, without guilt or worry. His ultimate goal now was to extricate himself from this fiasco with a whole skin. It would not be easy. Things were not going the way Cardinal Contarini wanted, and when that happened bad things tended to happen to those around him.

“It’s occurred to me,” Contarini said icily, “that we can weaken the position of the Anti-Christ by destroying those close to him. I’ve learned that both the black-skinned Satan and his doxy, the Whore of Babylon, are patients in the Jokertown Clinic. Both have been severely wounded. Both are just clinging to life. Perhaps one of you can handle them, now.” He fixed the Witness and Nighthawk with his hard stare. “Perhaps two of you. Who wants the job?”

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New Hampton: Snake Hill

Jerry looked at his new found partner dubiously. “Ophiolatrists?” he asked. “What’s that?”

“Snake worshipers,” Angel said briefly, her face set a frown that seemed habitual. She was quite good-looking, Jerry thought, despite her dourness. Her leather jumpsuit accentuated the lushness of her figure and her gloomy expression couldn’t eclipse the strong, handsome lines of her features. She wasn’t really beautiful because she lacked any hint of delicacy, but she had other qualities in sufficient quantity to more than make up for that.

They walked down the road in silence for several minutes. It was pretty obvious to Jerry that if there was going to be any conversation, he’d have to initiate it. It was in his experience pretty much always a good idea to talk to attractive women, because all good things started with talking.

“So,” Jerry said, conversationally as they sauntered together down the country road, shaded by the thickly-forested slope that came down to the verge, “how long have you worked for the government, Angel?”

“My name’s not Angel,” she said.

Jerry frowned. “Sorry. I thought Ray said—”

“I am the Midnight Angel,” she informed him. “Named after the hour of my Lord’s Passion in the Garden of Getheseme.”

“I—see,” Jerry said, thinking, Why are all the great-looking ones such nuts?

“This must be it,” she said, her full lips grimacing in distaste as they halted in front of a gated dirt road that led up into the heart of Snake Hill.

Jerry peered over her shoulder to read the hand-lettered sign nailed to the wooden gate.

PRIVATE PROPERTY

POSTED

CHURCH OF THE SERPENT REDEEMED

NO TAX COLLECTORS, POLICE OFFICERS,

OR GOVERNMENT MEN

THIS MEANS YOU!!!!!

The periods at the tips of the exclamation points were represented by slightly off-centered bullet holes punched through the wooden sign. The free-hand letters were actually well formed and on the edge of artistic. The spelling was surprisingly literate.

“Well, none of that fits us,” Jerry said. “I mean, you may work for the government, but you’re not a man—”

She turned and stared at him.

“I mean obviously. Not. So... I guess we can go in.”

Angel turned without a word and slipped the small wire loop off the gate’s upright post. Jerry didn’t take her utter dismissal personally. It seemed the usual face that she presented to the world. She swung the gate open and Jerry started to follow her onto the winding dirt path leading up Snake Hill when, with a laboring engine smelling of burning oil, an ancient Volkswagen mini-van painted in faded psychedelic designs of exploding stars and dancing mushrooms—with a big peace sign on the front panel—pulled up to the turn-off and chugged to a stop, sounding something like a lawn-mower with a bad choke.

A young man stuck his head out the driver side window. “Can I help you folks?”

Jerry glanced at Angel. She was looking at the newcomer with recognition and active suspicion, but didn’t seem prepared to comment. He stepped towards the van, smiling, ready to take charge.

“Maybe,” he said. “We’re looking—whoa!”

Pungent waves bearing the scent of marijuana wafted out from the open window and hit Jerry in the face with the force of a palpable blow. Suddenly he felt as if he’d been transported into a Cheech and Chong movie. The guy in the VW could have easily been a bit player in Up In Smoke. He was young, maybe in his late twenties—though Jerry was well aware that the wild card virus had transformed the phrase “appearances can be deceiving” from a cliché to an ultimate truth—but his hair style, dress, and general deportment seemed four decades out of phase. Though he was Caucasian, his thick, wiry black hair was fluffed up in a bushy Afro. He had a Fu Manchu mustache and large, sharply delineated sideburns that appeared more often in gay fantasies than in real life. He wore what appeared to be a paisley tie as a cravat, and had tiny, octagonal-shaped granny glasses, tinted purple, on the tip of his long, straight nose. His purple silk shirt had long, puffy sleeves and was patterned in a startling green and crimson orchid print. His ragged jeans were embroidered with, from what Jerry could see, flowers, smiley faces, and peace signs. He seemed to take no notice of the fact that Jerry, a complete stranger, could obviously detect the odor of mary jane wafting off him in waves approaching tidal in size and effect.

“—Uh,” Jerry caught himself. “Are you a member of the Church?”

The living museum-piece shook his head. “No, man. But these righteous dudes are like customers of mine.”