For Mike Fitzsimmons,
a good friend and a true fan
New York City Police Department
5th Precinct
Officers and Support Staff
A Partial Listing
Deputy Inspector Thomas Jan Maseryk, commanding
Captain Chavvah Mendelberg, second
lieutenants (7)
Lieutenant Harvey Kant ( joker)
sergeants (19)
Sergeant Jessica Penniman (SERGEANT SQUINCH), lockup, ace
Sergeant Homer Taylor (WINGMAN), desk, joker
Sergeant Vivian Choy (TIENYU), patrol, ace
detectives (6)
Leo Storgman (RAMSHEAD), Detective-Investigator, 1st Grade, joker Michael Stevens, Detective-Investigator, 3rd Grade, nat
James McTate (SLIM JIM), Detective-Investigator, 3rd Grade, ace Tenry Fong, Detective-Investigator, 2nd Grade, nat
Joan Lonnegan (RAZOR JOAN), Detective-Investigator, 1st Grade, nat Mitch Moore (SHADES), Detective-Investigator, 2nd Grade, deuce
uniformed patrol officers (123)
William Chen (TINKERBILL), deuce
Francis Xavier Black (FRANNY or ROOK), nat
Lawrence Bronkowski (BUGEYE), nat
Miranda Michaelson (RIKKI), joker
Anna Maria Rodriguez, nat
Van Tranh (DR. DILDO), ace
Benjamin Bester (BEASTIE), joker
Chey Moleka, nat
Sam Napperson (SNAP), nat
Anya Lee Tang, deuce
Lu Long (PUFF), joker
Angel Grady, nat
special details
Thomas Driscoll (TABBY), undercover, ace
Dina Quattore (K-10), K-9 detail, ace
Dr. Otto Gordon (GORDON THE GHOUL), forensic pathologist, joker
support personnel
Apsara Nai Chiangmai, file clerk, deuce
Joe Stevens, janitor, nat
Eddie Carmichael, consultant, sketch artist
Joe Mortiz (JOE TWITCH), sometime snitch
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
New York City Police Department
August
The Rat Race
The Rook
The Rat Race
September
Faith
The Rat Race
Snake Up Above
The Rat Race
… And All the Sinners Saints
Sanctuary
The Rat Race
Hope We Die Before We Get Old
The Rat Race
October
The Rat Race
More!
The Rat Race
… And All the Sinners Saints
Snake in the Hole
The Rat Race
Faith
The Rat Race
The Straight Man
November
The Rat Race
… And All the Sinners Saints
The Rat Race
Hope We Die Before We Get Old
The Rat Race
Faith
The Rat Race
Sanctuary
December
The Rat Race
… And All the Sinners Saints
The Rat Race
Faith
Hope We Die Before We Get Old
The Rat Race
Snake on Fire
Faith
The Rat Race
The Wild Cards Series
Copyright Acknowledgments
Copyright
The Rat Race
by Cherie Priest
Part 1.
LEO BRACED THE PHONE against his ear with his shoulder while he rubbed at his eyes and groaned. He muttered, “Jesus Christ, not another one.”
“Another what?” asked the woman on the other end of the line. When he didn’t reply fast enough, she demanded again, “Another what, Dad?”
“Another streaker. Tinkerbill’s bringing her in.”
The unclothed party in question was pretty, blond, and in her twenties. She was also glowing with a fizzy pink aura, but the aura couldn’t be construed as clothing, and anyway, the sparkles had been Bill Chen’s contribution. They’d wear off by morning. Probably.
Leo dropped the receiver away from his mouth and hollered past it, “Somebody get that kid a shirt or something!”
Bill blindly grabbed a squad jacket off a coatrack as he ushered the protesting prisoner toward booking. He threw it over her shoulders but she almost shook it off when she turned around to tell him, “You’re making a mistake! I … I didn’t just grab my keys and leave the house like this, you have to believe me!”
“I believe you.” Bill said it deadpan, with his peculiarly childish voice. Speech like that shouldn’t issue from a man of his size and shape—six and a half feet from toes to cap, and wide as a firehouse door. He shuffled his beefy shoulders and shook his head, prodding the still mostly naked woman barefoot along the dirty floor of Manhattan’s 5th precinct.
They don’t call it “Fort Freak” for nothing.
“Dad?”
Leo returned his attention to the phone and said, “Melanie, I’m sorry, honey. You’ve caught me at work, here. You know how it is.”
“Oh, I understand. How can my pitch possibly compete with a room full of naked people?”
“Just one. One naked person.”
“Look, Dad. Quit putting this off.”
“But what if I don’t want to move to…” He fished around on his desk, looking for the brochure she’d sent him a week before. He found it buried beneath three or four unofficial “in” stacks of reports, court documents, file notes, and case reminders. The paperwork drifts smothered everything, including the nameplate: DETECTIVE-INVESTIGATOR, 1ST GRADE: LEONARD STORGMAN.
His daughter impatiently supplied, “West Palm Beach.”
“Yeah. Florida.” With the vibrant sales brochure finally in hand, he skimmed the tagline: First planned adult community exclusively for jokers! And he sighed. “I know you’ve worked real hard, pulling this together, but I don’t think I’m ready for an old folks’ subdivision.”
Leo stuck a finger in his shirt collar. He pulled the sweat-dampened cloth loose and let it fall back against his neck. August’s dank mugginess pressed inside the old building, and the precinct’s vintage air conditioners valiantly wheezed and rattled, but did little else to address it. He nearly shuddered at the thought of such excessive warmth all year-round.
“You don’t think you’re ready to retire either.” Melanie’s voice shifted, slipping from hard-nosed community planner to wheedling daughter in a snap. “Dad, I wish you’d just think about it. Come down south! It’s nice here, and I live here—and it would make me feel better to know you’re nearby, in case something were to happen.”
“I’m turning sixty-two, not ninety-two. I’m not going to slip in the tub and break a hip.”
“I’m not trying to imply—”
He cut her off. “Sweetheart, I know you’re trying to help. But I don’t need help yet. I need some time to think, and—” His end of the conversation derailed abruptly, distracted by a pair of swinging hips in a pencil skirt, spotted across the precinct floor. He mumbled, “Hang on a second.”
The hips disappeared behind a column. It wasn’t just the shape of the hips that had his attention; it was something about the gait of the walk, and the curve of the body. He knew that walk. He knew that body.
The woman emerged from the far side of the column, her backside facing him for a moment while she paused to speak to someone. Then she said, “So long, David,” and turned around, and paused. She scanned the room.
Leo watched. He cataloged her like a piece of evidence.
Her hair was shorter now, and smoother, and a little darker—almost a true brunette. The full curve of her cleavage and the dip of her waist were a little more pronounced. One hand on her hip. One hand hanging at her side. Posture off-kilter, just enough to look casual.
Her big black sunglasses were identical to the ones he’d seen her wearing last, but that was twenty-five years ago. Funny, how styles come back around. Funny, how he would’ve known her anywhere, even after all this time.
The lens-covered eyes settled on him. The corner of her mouth crept up, pulled by a string of nostalgia until it’d drawn her lips into half a smile.
From the phone Leo heard: “Dad?”
He said, “Honey, I have to go.” He hung up. Slowly he stood, matching his rise to her approach—so by the time she was in front of his desk, he was on his feet. He said, “Wanda?”
And she said, “Leo.” Wanda Moretti pushed the sunglasses up onto her head, then changed her mind and folded them into her purse. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah. You, uh … you look great.”
“Thanks. You don’t look so bad yourself.”
Leo Storgman did not often feel self-conscious. He’d had plenty of time to get used to his appearance—two decades since his card had turned. But he fidgeted now, scratching at the back of his sticky, wet neck, jostling the houndstooth newsboy cap he often wore. It sat comfortably between the thick horns that curled out from either side of his head.
“Aw, now. You don’t … you don’t have to say that. You haven’t changed a bit—not a goddamn day. We both know I can’t say the same.”
“I didn’t say you hadn’t changed. I just said you didn’t look bad.” She didn’t bother to hide her appraising gaze. “I’d heard, and I’d wondered. But you still look like you.”
“Eh. Wasn’t born looking like this.” He made a little gesture with his hands, displaying the way they’d become bone-white, almost translucent except for the scum-green liver spots that speckled his knuckles. Similar patches blotched across his mostly bald head, right down into the ring of graying hair that held his hat like a nest. “But it could be worse.”
He was careful to pin his eyes to hers, if only to keep from looking over her shoulder, or over his own shoulder at the crowded, chaotic room. Many of his fellow civil servants had drawn much stranger and worse transformations.
By the soda machine stood beat cop Rikki Michaelson, a small, greyhound-shaped woman using her slender, pawlike hand to press for a Dr Pepper. Leaning against the wall beside her was Lu Long, with the bulky, elaborate head and upper torso of a Chinese dragon. He was wrestling with the tab of a Pepsi can, his heavily clawed fingers ill-suited to the delicate task. And beside the captain’s office door Leo spied public defender Charles Herriman, his prosthetic hands wrestling with his latest case files. It almost looked like he had the situation under control, until his cell phone rang and the juggling act fell apart.
Wanda reached for the back of the chair that faced Leo’s desk and asked, “You mind if I sit down?” Without waiting for him to respond, she took the chair and settled into it, putting her purse and an expensive-looking leather satchel on the floor by her feet.
“For old times’ sake?” he asked.
“For old times’ sake, sure. And official business too—something weird, that’s for damn sure. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t know if I’d find you here. Couldn’t remember exactly how old you are.”
“Still have five months on the clock.”
“I hope they’re an easy five months. I’d hate to see you go out with a bang.”
“Easy. Sure.” He glowered mournfully at the drifts of paperwork and loose filing, and told her, “This week alone we’ve got streakers, inconveniently coincidental burglaries, and an uptick in the usual gang bullshit. The Werewolves and the Demon Princes never did get along, but it’s getting nasty out there.”
Wanda shook her head and sighed. “You remember that case back in, oh, I don’t know. Must’ve been ’89 or ’90. That gangbanging joker who got real high and then ate somebody’s poodle?”
Leo let out a short bark of a laugh. “Yeah, I remember it. Haven’t thought of it in years. Did you do the court-reporting on that case?”
She said, “No, wasn’t me. I was gone by then.”
“I heard you got married again.” He’d heard she’d married up.
“Yeah, back in ’88, but it didn’t stick. And I left court-reporting, too. Went into real estate instead.”
“Like you always said you would. I remember you talking about it, but I didn’t know you’d gone off and done it.”
She grinned. “Got my license and started moving houses, condos, what have you. It worked out better than sitting around a courtroom, tapping till my fingers were raw. Kept the kids fed better, too.”
“How’re they doing, anyway?”
“Grown, mostly. Moved out, thank God, all four of them. What about your daughter?”
“Melanie.” He cocked his head at the phone. “That was her, just now. She’s gotten into community development planning.” He picked up the flyer again and handed it to her.
Wanda said, “Hmm. Jokers only. That might have its perks. Or drawbacks.”
“I don’t know what to make of it yet. Mellie wants me to move down there, closer to her. Once my time’s up here, you know.”
Wanda hadn’t lowered the flyer yet. She looked at him over the top of it and asked in a very pointed fashion, “Just you?”
Leo cleared his throat and reclaimed the flyer. “Just me. Vicki…” It was strange, saying his wife’s name. “Vicki died of breast cancer back in ’98.”
Wanda said, “Oh, God, Leo. I’m sorry to hear that,” like she meant it.
Wanda had never been the jealous type, as far as Leo knew. And that one ill-advised night they’d shared back in the old days … it’d never gone anywhere. Vicki had never found out about it either, a fact that Leo considered one of the sole earthly evidences that there might be a God.
Leo said, “Sometimes it feels like she died a million years ago, and sometimes I forget, and start pouring her a cup of coffee in the morning.” His wife had been good to him—better than he’d deserved. Even when his card turned, all she had to say was, “I didn’t marry you for your looks. I won’t leave you for them either.” He changed the subject. “What really brings you out here, Wanda? It’s been a long time.”
“Like I said—partly for old times’ sake. And partly”—she reached down to that leather satchel and pulled it into her lap—“this.” She lifted the flap and drew out an envelope. From it, she extracted thirty or forty singed sheets and spread them out on the desk in a loose, brittle stack. “Pardon the smell.”
“What am I looking at? Besides burned paper?”
“Transcripts, or pieces of them. From an old case, somewhere between ’75 and ’79. Most of these are waterlogged or burned beyond usefulness, but the clerk at the courthouse saw this and they called me.” She pointed at a corner, where a blue pencil had scrawled “WM.”
“Your initials.”
“My initials. Other than that, you can only read a little bit, here and there. They asked me if I could tell what case they’re from.”
Leo looked up from her initials to ask, “They don’t know?” But before she could answer, he had another one lined up. “Were these damaged last week, in that courthouse fire?”
“You got it. The fire didn’t do much damage, but it made a real mess. And look.” She pulled another sheet forward, and pointed at a string of letters that stood out among the other lines of smudged, smeared, water-destroyed print. “Right here. I’m pretty sure that says ‘Detective Storgman.’ So I was hoping you could help me answer their question—maybe recognize something I’m missing.”
“Huh,” he said, peering down at the document. “I think you’re right. Then this is probably a case from ’79. I didn’t make detective until December of ’78.”
“Okay, that’s helpful. Narrows the window quite a bit.”
Leo touched the fragile pages gently, scooting them around with the tip of his finger and hunting for places where the words were not burned or washed away. “It’s hard to tell. Except.” He used his pinky to point at a spot that wasn’t very clear. “You see this part?”
Wanda came forward and craned her neck around, leaning in a way that set her breasts right at Leo’s eye level. He struggled not to notice.
“Right here. It says ‘Augustus.’” Then he wondered aloud, “What the hell was that kid’s first name? I remember it was fucking ridiculous.” He snapped his fingers. “Bernard. Bernard Augustus.”
“It’s not ringing a bell,” Wanda said dubiously.
“Because nobody ever called him that. Everyone called him Deedle.” Leo leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. Wanda sat back in her seat too, which was a goddamn shame.
She said, “Deedle. Now that I remember.”
He bounced slowly, thoughtfully, in the chair. “These must be the trial transcripts from the Rathole murders.”
Wanda shook her head. “No, they wouldn’t be trial docs. It’s coming back to me now. That kid never made it to trial. These are more likely from an arraignment hearing.”
“Yeah, you’re right, come to think of it. He escaped.”
“Not for long.” She put her hand up to her face as if to lean on it, but nibbled gently at her thumbnail.
“No, not for long.” He paused, still thinking. “That was one hell of a case. My first murder, and I was wrong—it wasn’t ’79. It was the tail end of ’78.”
Wanda considered this for a moment, and said thoughtfully, “You know, those files were all about to be moved out of hard copy storage and scanned onto CDs. They were going to be dredged up for the first time in decades, before they burned.”
Leo said, “So?”
“So, they were going to be read. Dr. Pretorius has a whole new class of happy young lawyer wannabes who were set to scan this old stuff for class credit. And some of the more interesting cases would come to the classroom for teaching materials. History of joker law, such as it’s been.”
“This is all that’s left?” he asked, indicating the soot-flaking papers.
“Might as well be. But I couldn’t help thinking, when the clerk was going on about the fire, how amazingly convenient it was—just these years, right where a group of eager young proto-lawyers were supposed to go digging.”
Leo stopped bouncing and gathered up the brittle papers. He handed the small stack back to her. “What are you getting at?” he asked, as if he couldn’t tell.
She began the task of stuffing them carefully back into the envelope. “All I’m saying is, maybe the Rathole’s worth another look. Another quick look,” she specified. “Don’t you have a cold case unit around here, or something?”
“The Rathole’s not a cold case. It’s closed. A credible suspect was arrested—”
She interrupted, “A convenient suspect. Who then conveniently died.”
“He was good for it.”
“Maybe he only looked good for it. And you still have five months left on the clock.” She looked so eager, there in her fitted suit with her legs crossed at the knees.
But Leo said, “Wanda, it’s been thirty years. Everybody who isn’t dead has forgotten everything important. I’m glad I could help, but don’t get worked up about the Rathole now. It’s a waste of time.”
♣ ♦ ♠ ♥
The Rook
by Melinda M. Snodgrass
I FIND THE FIRST day of anything tough—first day of school, first day of camp, first day of the year. My tendency is to view the unknown future more with trepidation than joy. And now I could add to that list the first day of work.
As I walked toward New York’s 5th precinct, a hot, muggy wind off the East River sent trash scurrying down the gutters and wafted to me the scent of garbage rotting in black plastic sacks awaiting pickup. Abandoning me, the wind raced on to seize the American flag on the front of the station house, gripped it, and set it twisting and snapping like a maddened whip.
The four-story building that housed law enforcement for the part of New York City known as Jokertown was pale stone and it came right up to the edge of the sidewalk. There were a handful of parking spaces out front, but they were filled, and it made me glad I hadn’t bothered to bring down my car from Saratoga. To either side of the precinct rose two redbrick buildings that were both taller and wider; it left the cop shop looking like a short guy squeezed between burly longshoremen.
I held my hat against a particularly strong gust of wind and picked up the pace. Not just because I wanted out of the heat, but because I wanted to be early. I opened the door, then paused for one brief moment to savor the moment. My dad had worked here. Been captain of this precinct. Died at his desk on a particularly chaotic Wild Card Day that is now in the history books. I had never known John Francis Xavier Black. He died four months before I was born, but his picture is everywhere in my mother’s house upstate, and I’d heard the stories from one of his detectives, Sam Altobelli. And now I was about to walk in his footsteps.
Are you proud of me, Dad? I hope you’re wa—
I lost the rest of the thought and my hat when I was shoved violently from behind.
“Jesus fucking Christ, get out of the way.”
My hands and knees, rather than my face, met the stained linoleum floor, and I flinched as a pair of size thirteen, thick-soled, metal-toed shoes stepped over me. I tried to regain my feet, but was knocked down again by the long scaled tail that dragged behind my assailant.
Regaining my feet, I tapped the broad shoulder. The back of his head was weirdly misshapen and scaled like the tail. “Excuse me,” I said.
“This time,” a deep baritone grunted back.
This time I closed my hand on one beefy bicep. “No, you owe me the apology.”
The man turned. I braced myself for what I would see, but I didn’t brace enough. I ended up taking a step back. What faced me was a dragon.
He was also a cop. The tail and the head had sort of distracted me from noticing the blue uniform. Great, I was about to start my first day on the job in a fight (hopefully verbal) with a fellow officer.
It was shift change, so the room was bustling. The desk sergeant stood up, and was patting the air in a soothing gesture. Moving his arms caused his drooping and faded brown batwings to jerk too, but he wasn’t exactly leaping or flying to my aid. The night-shift cops, now in civvies, paused in their rush for the door. It might be the end to their “day,” but a fight was always worth a delay.
Day-shift cops were pushing in behind me. One of them—a man with a shock of orange-red hair, the red-veined nose of a drinker, and a missing ear—slapped the dragon man on the shoulder and said, “Kick the rook’s ass, Puff.”
So much for the verbal thing. Maybe I could take him if I fought dirty. I glanced from the grinning razorlike teeth to the clawed hands that were clenching and flexing in preparation, and I had the feeling that he knew more about dirty fighting than I could ever hope to learn.
“Guys, guys, what’s going on?” came a basso rumble from behind me.
I risked a glance and found myself staring at a horror. He had to be pushing seven feet tall, with a wolf’s snout, bear claws at the end of arms so long they dragged the ground, and bull horns thrusting out of the forehead. And fur.
I was starting to feel like a minnow in a shark pool.
“Dumb-ass was standing in the door blockin’ the way,” my nemesis growled. “I thought he needed a lesson in manners, and now he thinks I oughta apologize.”
I found myself gripped in a one-armed man-hug by the furry, horned, giant muppet-thing. “Hey, give the kid a break. He was probably just gettin’ his bearings.” He gave me a little shake. “Right?”
I looked up and realized the brown eyes on either side of the snout and fangs were warm and very kind. I nodded; it was as good an explanation as any, and it might keep a bad situation from turning into complete shit.
“Aw, Beastie, ever the peacemaker,” said a redheaded woman. Her shoes were polished mirror bright, and her pants crease could have provided a shave. She patted the dragon on the shoulder. “Lu, it’s not the kid’s fault you’re hungover. Come on, we’re going to be late.”
Everyone started to move again. Dragon guy fell into step with the one-eared guy and the redhead and threw back over his shoulder, “Next time you see me, Rook, step aside.”
“Come on, kid, let’s get you to the briefing. Don’t wanna be late on your first day.”
“Thank you, Officer…” I let my voice trail away suggestively.
“Bester. Benjamin Bester, but everyone calls me Beastie. You can too. It’s great not to be the rookie anymore.”
“Glad I could oblige.” I followed after him, past the winged desk sergeant and up the stairs. “Who’s my other rescuer?” I asked, with a nod toward the redhead.
“Angel Grady, Puff’s … sorry, Lu Long’s partner. She’ll be captain before she’s forty. She’s awesome. The other guy is Thomas Driscoll … Tabby. He works undercover.”
“That can’t last long. He’s pretty distinctive-looking.”
“No, no, he doesn’t go undercover like that. He turns into a cat.”
“Oh,” I said, faintly, as we topped the stairs and entered the squad room.
More chaos there. Phones were ringing, people were talking. Depressed-looking suspects in handcuffs were seated at a few desks while uniformed cops and plainclothes detectives pecked at the dirty keyboards of ancient computers. One old guy had ram’s horns growing out of his skull. At the back of the room were two glassed-in offices for the precinct brass. I wondered if things had been remodeled since 1986. They must have been. Somebody would have noticed if my dad had died at his desk in a glass office.
Clashing odors swirled through the room. In addition to gun oil, sweat, and vomit there was the distinctive burnt-nuts smell of very old coffee and very fresh donuts in the air. My stomach gave a growl. I had been too nervous to eat breakfast. Maybe this is how cops become a cliché, I thought. I longed to go in search of the donuts, but instead followed Beastie into the briefing room.
Beat cops were settling into chairs. Behind the podium was a middle-aged Asian woman with an oval face and worried dark eyes. Her name tag said CHOY. Behind her was a large and detailed map of Jokertown and a bit of Chinatown where the two intersected. There were wanted posters and updates from the FBI, SCARE, and other law enforcement agencies.
I took a chair in the back. I’d drawn enough attention for one day. The sergeant began the briefing. I took out my iPhone and began taking notes.
“Mr. Lee reports that somebody’s been entering his fish market and eating just the mussels and the clams. He comes in every morning to find empty shells. Tabby, maybe you could offer some insight?” The Asian woman looked over at him.
“Love to,” Driscoll drawled.
“Just don’t get distracted banging the alley cats, Tabby,” a short, skinny Asian man called. Laughter sputtered through the crowd.
A middle finger flipped up, and Tabby shot back, “Unlike you, Dildo, I can do more than two things at once.”
More laughter, quickly extinguished when Choy said, “Okay, okay, moving on. The turf war between the Werewolves and the Demon Princes is heating up. Some of those guys are better armed than us, so be careful. And we’ve got a purse snatcher operating between Elizabeth and Orchard. Keep an eye out, and for God’s sake kick your lazy asses into gear and run him down. The store owners are complaining that it’s hurting the tourist trade.”
“Are we ever gonna get those Segways?” asked a cop who was busy brushing powdered sugar off the shelf of his belly. I could see why he wanted one of the two-wheeled personal transports.
“In a word … no,” said the sergeant.
“Ah, damn. Then can I get a car?”
“No.”
The new mayor had taken many of New York’s Finest out of patrol cars and put them back on foot or on bicycles. He thought it improved community outreach when the police had to walk among the citizens they were supposed to be protecting. I thought he had a point, which is why I had decided to take an apartment in Jokertown. My mother hadn’t liked it, and I admit some of my neighbors left me queasy, but all the research indicated that when cops lived where they worked conditions in a neighborhood improved. And when I had been in law school there’d been a lot of discussion about breaking the cycle of gang membership leading to jail, returning to the gang—
“… Black? Is Black here?”
I have this tendency to become fascinated with some thought, and miss what was going on around me. Hence I missed my name being called. I scrambled awkwardly to my feet while thrusting my hand into the air. “Here. Here. I’m here.”
“Okay, Bill, he’s all yours,” said Choy, addressing an absolutely enormous Asian man in the front row.
He stood and peered back at me. I gaped. He looked like an Easter Island statue. He shook his head with its thick mop of jet-black hair and said, “How did I get so lucky?”
I choked on a laugh. The voice that emerged from that massive body was a ridiculous high-pitched squeak.
“You think his voice is funny, wait till you get a load of his power,” the woman next to me whispered. Her name tag read QUATTORE. Curling black hair brushed her shoulders, and I couldn’t help but notice her impressive rack.
At the same time Tabby grunted, “’Cause you’re such a fucking sterling example to us all.” My new partner glared at Tabby.
There appeared to be a story there. I just didn’t want to become part of it.
“Okay,” Choy broke in again. “Go out there and catch bad guys.”
There was much scraping of chairs, coughs, and conversations as the cops headed for the door. Bill walked to me. I craned my neck to look up at him, and I’m five feet ten.
“Bill Chen,” he said, and thrust out his hand.
I watched mine disappear into his paw. “Francis Black.”
“Okay, Franny, stick by me. Keep your mouth shut. Learn something.”
“I go by Frank,” I said. “And I thought that’s what I did at the Academy?”
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That was bullshit. This is Jokertown.”
♣
It was indeed Jokertown. Bill’s beat encompassed most of the famous tourist attractions—the Famous Jokertown Dime Museum, the strip club Freakers, the line of mask and cloak shops on Hester. Interspersed among them were Starbucks stores and—most incongruous of all—a new Hyatt Hotel.
The sidewalks were crowded, worse than even normal Manhattan. Joker body shapes aren’t exactly human normal, and many jokers require additional help to get around. So the sidewalks were also clogged with wheelchairs, four-wheeled carts, and other unique forms of conveyance. At one point Bill stepped casually through the scrabbling eight legs of a giant spider topped with the head and torso of an old woman scrabbling down the sidewalk. Bill acknowledged her with his baton. “Morning, Arachne.”
“Hi, Bill,” the spider-woman responded.
I didn’t trust myself not to tread on one of Arachne’s legs so I stepped off into the gutter to walk past her.
“First day on the job?” the old woman asked.
I stopped. “Uh, does it show that bad?” I tried to look at the human face, look the woman in the eyes, but my eyes kept flicking back to the spiky hairs protruding from the spider body, the eight legs culminating in pincers.
She chuckled. “Yes, you look poleaxed.”
“Franny, come on,” Bill bellowed. I ducked my head at Arachne and hurried to catch up.
Bill strode along, nightstick swinging in the rhythm of his walk.
“Isn’t it a little threatening to be carrying your stick? All you’d have to do is slap your palm with it, and you’d be a perfect cliché,” I said.
“It’s how I access my power, kid. When I want a critique of my policing style I won’t be asking you.”
“Sorry.”
A big hand closed on my shoulder. “That’s okay. At least you have the sense when to climb down. So many of us are macho assholes. Even the girls.”
“So, what is your power?”
“The day is young. I’m sure you’ll see before it’s over.”
“I noticed that every pairing seems to be a joker and a nat, or an ace and a nat,” I said.
“Precinct policy. Pair a nat and a wild card whenever possible.”
We made a stop at a newsstand at the corner of Hester and the Bowery. An incredibly wide man with blue-black skin and tusks protruding from his mouth was selling a Times, a Newsweek, and an Economist to a multiarmed, multieyed joker. After the joker skittered away on what seemed to be a million centipedelike legs, the proprietor leaned on the weather-worn counter. He and Bill slapped palms and bumped fists. Then Bill asked, “What’s the word, Jube?”
“Pretty quiet.”
“Well that won’t last,” Bill said.
“Hey,” said Jube, “I got a new one. A joker, a priest, and a rabbi are in a lifeboat…”
But I was thinking about Bill’s last comment and didn’t hear the joke. It was August. In a month, on the fifteenth of September, Jokertown was going to bust out in a celebration that was half Mardi Gras, half St. Patrick’s Day, and half riot: Wild Card Day. For me it was the anniversary of my dad’s death.
Bill groaned. “That was terrible. You need a new writer.” Then added in his absurd voice, “Let me introduce my new partner. Franny, meet Jubal. He’s been watching the world go by from this newsstand, for what? Forty years?”
“Close enough. I don’t want to actually count them up.” A broad hand thrust toward me. We shook, and Jube looked closely at my nameplate that read F. X. BLACK. “There was an F. X. Black at the 5th twenty-five years ago. Any relation?”
The words emerged from between my teeth like pulled taffy. “Yeah, my dad.”
Bill was staring at me and I felt heat rising up the back of my neck. Mercifully we were interrupted by yelling.
“You ugly son of a bitch! I gave you a goddamn fifty, and you gave me back change for a twenty. I don’t fucking think so.”
Across the street and on the corner, people swirled like water circling a drain, attracted by the altercation at the pretzel cart. Bill and I plunged between parked cars and into the street. Bill held up his stick like Moses exhorting the waves, and lo and behold, all the traffic stopped.
A red-faced nat dressed in shorts, tennis shoes with calf-high socks, and a green polo shirt that strained across his belly screamed into the masked face of a joker. “You’re a goddamn crook, you fuckin’ freak.”
The small joker seemed to be shriveling beneath the barrage of words and profanity. His face might be hidden, but folds of skin sagged down his neck like wattles on a turkey, and the same dangling folds festooned his arms, visible because of his short-sleeved shirt.
“Okay, let’s all just calm down. Now what seems to be the problem?” Bill said. It’s the standard cop line, and usually presented in an all-knowing tone. Bill’s high-pitched voice rather undercut the effect. His bulk made up for it.
“I gave this guy a fifty, and he only gave me change for a twenty,” the tourist repeated, at a much lower volume.
“I didn’t,” the joker whined.
“Open your cash box,” Bill said.
I gulped. If the joker refused we’d be forced to get a warrant. But he didn’t. And I checked off lesson number one. It never hurts to ask. Cops are intimidating, people usually agree and you avoid the warrant. I could just imagine how Dr. Pretorius, my constitutional law professor at Columbia, would react to my conclusion.
There was no fifty in the cash box. I decided I needed to start acting like a cop and investigate. “How much for a pretzel?” I asked.
“Buck twenty-nine with tax. Buck sixty-seven if you want cheese. He wanted cheese.”
I looked up at Bill who was glaring at me. I took a breath to help quiet the quivering that had hit my gut and said, “Nobody pays for a dollar sixty-seven pretzel with a fifty-dollar bill.” I peered into the cash box. “And he…” I indicated the joker. “Would have cleaned out his cash if he’d tried.”
“Which is why he just pocketed my money,” the tourist blustered.
Bill looked from one to the other. Suddenly he unlimbered the cuffs and spun the joker around.
♠
Back at the station Mr. Kuzlovsky had recovered his fifty-dollar bill, the pushcart vendor was in a cell, and I was feeling really, really stupid. After the arrest Bill had patted down the joker, and found the fifty tucked away in the drooping folds of skin around his belly. Bill was laboriously typing up a report using a one-fingered hunt and peck method, and he sensed my embarrassment. He looked up, and his expression was kind.
“Don’t worry about it, Rook. Just don’t let pity cloud your judgment. And don’t overcompensate by assuming innocence just because they’ve been afflicted and you find them disgusting.”
My new partner was turning out to be frighteningly astute. I decided not to insult us both by denying it. “I’d quibble with the word choice, but I am finding this harder than I expected,” I said. “I took an apartment down here so I could try to see the neighborhood as just a neighborhood.”
“That’s good. And now you gotta see jokers as people. Which means like most people they’re shits.”
I dropped into a chair, and shifted my nightstick and handcuffs so they weren’t digging me in the kidneys. “That’s a damn depressing attitude.”
Bill shrugged. “Just being realistic. We’re cops, which means we see the bad, not the good.” He flashed me a grin. “Cheer up. In a week you’ll assume everybody’s lying.”
“Great.” I sighed and looked away.
“What else is bothering you?” I was beginning to wonder if Bill’s power was telepathy.
“I’m worried that searching a physical deformity qualifies as a strip search. If it does we should have gotten a warrant.”
Bill stopped typing and leaned back in his chair. It creaked ominously. “You one of those annoying armchair shysters?”
I stared into that broad face and for one cowardly moment considered lying. “No, I’m an actual shyster.”
“Oh, fuck. That’s just great.” He shoved back from the desk, the wheels on his chair chattering across the floor. “Well, that probably means you can type. Be my guest.” And he stomped away toward the break room. It looked like the bonding moment was definitely over. As I settled down behind the computer I figured the word would be all over the precinct by shift change.
We were back on the street by 10:30 A.M. We broke up a fight outside Squishers Basement at 11:15. The combatants were about sixteen sheets to the wind. As I stepped back, panting and rubbing my upper arm where one of the drunks had landed an ill-aimed punch, I found myself yelling at the bartender who had come outside to observe the fight.
“What the hell time do you open? Or did you ever close? Unless you’ve got a special license you better have closed at 4:00 A.M.”
Bill slapped me on the back. “They serve ‘food.’” He put air quotes around the word. “Which means they can open at ten, and he makes a great hangover remedy.”
After the drunks were sent back to lockup I realized I was famished. Bill was hungry too, so we hit a local diner for burgers. I made the mistake of ordering mine with guacamole and blue cheese. For the next hour I got to listen to Bill talk about my “yuppie burger,” and I was revising my opinion of his empathy. I checked my watch. It was 1:20 and I had a headache blossoming behind my eyes.
A stir on the sidewalk again drew my attention. I was starting to distrust anything that disrupted the smooth flow of bodies through the canyons of Manhattan. There were youthful male hoots and catcalls.
An old man’s voice with a decidedly Yiddish accent quavered out, “You’re a bunch of pigs. Just pigs.”
This time I led the way toward the altercation, pushed through the crowd, and found a naked woman. She was young, and trying to cover herself with a forearm across her breasts and a hand in front of her crotch. Her arms sported some interesting Oriental ideograph tattoos along with the usual punk girl hearts and skulls. The only other thing on her body, aside from a mop of untidy jet-black hair, was a nose stud flashing in the autumn sunlight. Her cheeks were bright red with embarrassment.
A wolf whistle cut the air followed by, “Hey, baby, great ass!”
“Oh, bugger off!” she shouted back. The accent was British.
I held up a hand and said authoritatively (I hoped), “Okay, nothing to see here, move along.” The minute the words emerged I winced because right on cue some wags in the crowd delivered a one-two punch.
“What? Are you gay?”
“Like hell there isn’t.”
There was a clerk from a mask and cloak shop gawking. I shouted at him, “Bring her a cloak.” He hustled off. I turned to the girl. “Okay. What are you protesting? Fur? World hunger? The mayor?”
“Listen, Mr. Policeman—if you are a policeman, and not a park-keeper or something—I didn’t do a thing. I was just walking along, minding my own business when suddenly—” She gestured down the length of her body. “I’d like to report a robbery.”
The clerk returned with a cloak that the young woman flung around her shoulders and pulled tightly closed to a chorus of disappointed “Oooh’s” from the onlookers.
“Well, that’s a new one,” I said. I unlimbered my handcuffs.
“You’re arresting me!?” Hazel eyes flashed fury.
“Indecent exposure.”
Bill arrived, his bulk scattering the crowd like a polar bear through a seal colony. “Hold on there, Rook.”
“My clothes just—”
“Vanished. Yeah, I know,” Bill interrupted. He said to me, “Women have been losing their clothes almost daily. We figure it’s some ace perv, but we haven’t got a line on him yet. So question some of these pervs.” He raked the crowd with a jaundiced eye. Men started drifting away.
“Hey, hold it,” I yelled, but a lot of them vanished into the bustling crowds. I questioned the few I’d corralled while listening to Bill and the girl’s conversation. Now that I realized she wasn’t a criminal it had begun to penetrate that she was really cute.
“What’s your name, miss?” Bill asked.
“Abigail Baker.”
“What do you do?”
“I am an actress.”
“Look, we need you to come down to the precinct and make a statement.”
“I have no clothes.”
“We’ll give you a jumpsuit.”
“Wonderful. I’ll look like a criminal. And what do I do in the meantime?”
Bill called out to the shop owner. “Hey, Jeannie, we’re gonna borrow the cloak for a few hours, okay?”
“Clean it before you bring it back,” Jeannie called.
Abigail’s mouth formed an “O” of outrage, and she emitted a sound like a furious kitten. “I would prefer to return home.”
“And I would prefer you come to the precinct.”
♦
“… it was involuntary public nudity.”
We were in an interrogation room. Abigail was making an orange prison jumpsuit look almost attractive. She wore a pair of flip-flops that Sergeant Penniman had pulled out of her locker, and was sipping a Diet Coke. Bill was asking questions and I was taking notes.
She peered down her nose at me and said, “Involuntary. That’s I … N … V…”
Bill choked on a laugh. I felt the top of my ears getting warm. “I know how to spell ‘involuntary.’ I went to law school.”
“Oh, how interesting? As what?”
“As a student!”
Bill restored the peace by asking, “Okay, where do you live?” She gave an address on the southern edge of Jokertown. Bill leaned back and studied her. “They pretty much cater to students. I thought you said you were an actress?”
Abigail blushed, and took a quick sip of soda. “Well, I am … almost. I’m just finishing up a few classes at the New York School of Performing Arts. But I’m understudying a major role at the Bowery Repertory.”
“Oh, so you’re a wannabe actress,” I said.
“And you’re a failed barrister.”
“I chose to be a police officer,” I began.
“Franny, go get me a soda.” He handed me a dollar bill. “An orange. And while you’re at it ask Apsara for the victim report form.”
I left, grumbling. That girl had really gotten under my skin. I had to ask the old ram’s horn detective how to find the file room. He gave me a very tedious set of exact directions, and I headed there.
Watching too many cop dramas had given me a sense of what a file clerk should look like. An old, male, potbellied, maybe retired cop. What met me was a vision out of an Asian film. The girl looked very young, and she was flat-out gorgeous. Jet-black hair that hung past her ass, skin like honey, an amazing figure. I tried to moisten my lips, but my mouth had gone Sahara dry. “I need … I need…”
“Yes, officer?” Her voice was like bells. “What do you need?” Long lashes briefly veiled the laughter in her eyes.
“Victim’s report form.”
“All right.” I watched her go swaying away to a filing cabinet.
Her path led her past a strange little ornately carved wooden house with a gold leaf roof. I realized I’d seen similar styles in Thai restaurants.
She returned with a couple of sheets of paper. “I’m Apsara Nai Chiangmai. You’re new. What’s your name?”
“Fran—” My voice squeaked. I coughed and tried again. “Francis Black.”
“Francis,” she said slowly, making my name into a song. “That’s a nice name. I like the feel of that on my tongue.” She did that thing with her lashes again, and I thought about cold showers.
“Thank you,” I muttered, and grabbed the papers and headed for the door.
“Come by anytime,” she called.
“Okay,” I gasped.
As I left I thought I heard a cranky old man’s voice saying her name in that parent tone that tells you you’ve really fucked up.
I found the soda machine, bought Bill’s orange beverage, and got myself a Coke. I didn’t open it right away. Instead I rolled the cold can across my forehead. Having regained control over my anatomy I went back into the interrogation room.
♥
It wasn’t deliberate, I hadn’t planned it, but I happened to be at the front door when Abigail headed out. She was still in the jumpsuit.
“Do you need a taxi?” I had to clear my throat to get out the last word.
“You might notice that I no longer have a purse, which means I have no money, so no.”
“Uh … right … I could loan you…”
She walked past me, heading for the door. I hurried to open it for her.
“Uh … look … I’m new in town, and you’re … foreign, maybe we could have dinner … tonight…” At her expression I modified the statement. “Sometime?”
“Are you on crack? No!”
The door closed behind her and I heard Sergeant Taylor (whose nickname was Wingman, I had learned) give a snort of laughter. “You gotta work on your timing, Franny,” he said.
♣
2:10. Back on the street. Bill gave a warning to a panhandling joker whose gig was to offer to wash the windshields of cars waiting at stoplights. He looked like a big octopus from the waist down, and he had an interesting pitch. If the driver was polite and gave him a dollar, the joker would heave his bulk onto the roof of the car, and with a shammy in each of his nine tentacles (I don’t know why he had nine tentacles, but he did), he would proceed to wash all the windows on the car. If the driver was rude he still heaved himself onto the roof of the car, but this time he inked all the windows.
As we walked away I asked, “So, why does he just get a warning?”
“Because Arms washes the captain’s car.”
“Maseryk?” I had heard about Maseryk from Altobelli. He described him as a military flat-topped, hard-ass straight arrow. I couldn’t mesh that image with him getting free car washes from a joker.
“No, Mendelberg.”
“Ah.” The other captain of the 5th was a joker. It was beginning to look like jokers stuck together. Bill again appeared to read my mind.
“Arms is bipolar. He can’t really hold a job. Washing police cars is the only steady pay he gets.”
“Ah,” I said again. “How long does it take, acquiring this”—I gestured around—“I guess you’d call it area knowledge?”
“I’ve been in this precinct for five years, three years before that at the 13th. But I grew up in Chinatown near the 5th. I’ve got a pretty good handle on J-Town, and in Chinatown I know practically everybody.”
“That isn’t very encouraging. I’m going to be ready to retire before I get to know people.”
“Assuming you stick. You strike me as the type to end up down at One Police Plaza at headquarters.”
I watched his broad back, and resolved that wouldn’t happen. Then I realized that was probably exactly what my rabbi, Sam Altobelli, was planning. And if I really did want to follow in my dad’s footsteps and make captain I was going to have to play the political game. I followed morosely in Bill’s wake because I was back to questioning the motivations that had led to this career.
I was a Columbia law school graduate. I had passed the New York State bar. I hadn’t been law review material, I was never going to end up in a white-shoe law firm, but I had been in the top third of my class, I could have found a good job. But I wanted to make a difference. Help people.
So, become a public defender, or work for an environmental nonprofit, said that inner voice that sounded suspiciously like a cross between my mother and my college advisor.
I will, I promised them. If this doesn’t work out.
I was deep in thoughtful contemplation of my navel, watching the cracks in the sidewalk, when Bill’s radio crackled to life. “Bill, one of my pooches spotted our purse snatcher. He’s running west on Broome over near the Dumpling House.”
“Thanks, K-10, we’re on it.”
Bill took off running. I grabbed at my stick and cuffs to keep them from battering my kidney and took off after him. We came around a corner onto Broome and I heard a woman screaming. I had a fleeting glimpse of a young man clutching a large red leather handbag and running as if all the hounds of hell were on his heels.
We gave chase. Bill might be big, but I ran track in college, and the perp was motivated. We had soon pulled well ahead of Bill. The purse snatcher grabbed the corner of a brownstone and spun himself into an alley. I made the turn, and a garbage can came crashing and banging toward me, depositing its odiferous load at my feet. I slipped on a combination of rotting potato peels and plastic wrap. I managed not to face plant, but one hand and one knee dropped into the oozing garbage.
“Yuck.” I bounded up and ran on, trying to shake the garbage off my hand.
The alley ended at a chain-link fence. The purse snatcher had slung the purse over his shoulder and was swarming up the wire. I heard Bill behind me. He was roaring something, but the blood was pounding in my ears, and I couldn’t quite hear him between the slap of my feet on pavement and the shaking and chattering of the fence.
I leaped up, gripped the metal, and started to climb. The perp looked back and kicked at me. I yanked my head away just in time, and his foot just hit my shoulder. I was starting to get royally pissed. I lunged and managed to grasp the purse where it bounced on his skinny ass.
I heard Bill whistling as I yanked at the strap. The purse snatcher gave a wail of despair as he tumbled off the fence. I lost my grip and fell too … and realized we were both surrounded by a bright pink aura filled with sparks and floating stars.
♠
“I told you to get out of the way,” Bill said.
I slammed the door of my locker and batted irritably at the stars floating in front of my face. I was now, intimately, familiar with Bill’s “power.” There were snorts of laughter from Beastie Bester and Van Tranh, aka Dr. Dildo. “How long is this going to last? And you better not say forever.”
“’Bout six hours.”
“Great. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The route to the front door from the locker room took me past the file room. The incredibly sexy Asian girl giggled, and peered at me from behind the curtain of her ass-length black hair. Apsara, that was her name. I had picked up some forms from her while we were booking Abigail, and had thought I’d ask her out. Now she thought I was a dork, and that was never going to happen. Feeling incredibly sorry for myself, I proceeded to the front door and emerged onto the darkening street. Ten hours ago I had stepped through this door feeling like anything could happen.
Unfortunately that had turned out to be true.
♦
Halfway home a heavy hand descended on my shoulder, and suddenly I was kissing the soot-stained brick wall of a building. “Okay, you’re under arrest.”
“I’m a cop,” I mumbled against the rough surface.
“What’s that, scum?”
“I’m a cop!” I shouted.
“Yeah, and I’m the pope.”
“My badge is in my left breast pocket.”
Rough hands jerked me around and dove into my pocket and emerged with my badge and ID. I was facing a hideous joker. He had bulging eyes, a unibrow that made his forehead seem even more shelflike, a bullet-shaped head that looked like one side had been smacked with an iron skillet, and all of this crowned with spiky gray hair that looked more akin to a warthog’s bristles than human hair.
Standing next to him was a strange-looking girl with shaggy brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had the biggest barrel chest I’d ever seen on a human, and a tiny waist that would have made Scarlett O’Hara green with envy. She wasn’t ugly just … odd. Her name tag read MICHAELSON.
“Then why you got the glow?” the bug-eyed guy asked. His name tag identified him as BRONKOWSKI. The human whippet next to him smiled, revealing small fangs.
“Bill’s my partner. We were apprehending a purse snatcher and … well, he sort of … missed.” The ugly guy guffawed and a small dimple appeared next to the girl’s mouth. “And what the hell were you arresting me for?” I added, aggrieved.
“Walking while pink,” Michaelson said, in a tolerable female imitation of Officer Friday’s flat, unemotional tone.
“You mean you just arrest people for glowing?” I gestured at the stars and the sparks.
“Tinkerbill wouldn’t have whacked ’em unless they were guilty of something.”
“Tinkerbill?” Delight over my partner’s nickname gave way to lawyerly shock. “You’re arresting people without probable cause.”
“Kid, how long have you been on the job?” asked Michaelson. Which I thought was sort of rich. She didn’t look much older than me.
“Today was my first day.”
She and Bronkowski exchanged a glance. “You’ll learn,” she said, and they let me go.
I got arrested four more times before I got home. Each time my badge, and the explanation that I was Bill’s partner, got me released. But I sensed I had left a trail of hilarity for the swing shift.
In my effort to be P.C. I had picked an apartment smack in the middle of Jokertown. It was a relatively new building erected during a liberal mayor’s efforts to gentrify the area. It was white stone, relatively modern, which meant the living room, dining nook, and kitchen were all one big room. I had a decent-sized bedroom and a full bath with a tub in addition to a shower. I set my hat on the bookcase as I came in, and straightened the photo of my father in his dress blues. “Well, Dad, I hope you weren’t watching today,” I said to that stern, chiseled face.
I was supposed to have dinner with Altobelli that night, and I knew my mother would be waiting by the phone in the house in Saratoga, wanting to hear about my first day on the job. Not wanting to be seen in public, I canceled with Altobelli, but mothers couldn’t be postponed.
I put in an order for some Thai food to be delivered, and settled into the recliner with the phone tucked under my chin. “Hi, Mom.”
“Oh, honey, I’ve been thinking about you all day. How was it?”
The five-year-old who had run to Mommy with skinned knees and bumped elbows wanted to wail out every slight. Instead I feigned cheerfulness and said, “Great. It was great.”
“Your father would be so proud.” I heard the sigh in her voice. “So, who did you arrest?”
I told her about Abigail.
“Never get involved with perps or witnesses, dear. I’m sure Sam would tell you the same.”
“Yeah.” There was a knock at my door. “Hey, Mom, my food is here. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay, honey, take care. Be careful.”
I slammed down the footrest of the recliner with a satisfying kick, grabbed my wallet, and headed to the door. I opened it to a joker delivery boy. This one wasn’t too weird. He just had faceted eyes like a bee, and the usual fan of angry acne across his cheeks and chin that was the hallmark of every teenage boy. The hallway smelled of cabbage rolls and coffee, but they lost out to the sharp scent of green curry and garlic beef wafting up from the bag the kid carried.
“What do I owe you?”
The kid looked at the bill. “Twenty-one fifty-three.” I dug out twenty-five, and realized I couldn’t make a habit of this.
“Thanks.” I started to shut the door, but the kid held up a hand. “Yes?”
“Uh … if you want anything like for … dessert, I can set you up. I’ve got a friend.” He was staring at the pink and sparking nimbus that surrounded me.
“It’s a good thing you kept that vague, kid, because otherwise I would have to arrest you. But it’s your lucky night. I’m tired and I’m hungry so I’ll pretend I don’t actually understand what you’re saying. But just for that…” I took my cash back out of his limp hand, pulled out the five, and gave him a one instead. “No tip.”
“Hey! What about the fifty-three cents?” he howled in outrage as I started to shut the door.
“Get it from your friend.” I slammed the door.
♥
“Everyone’s a winner. Come on, mister, five’ll get you ten. Ten’ll get you twenty. Easy peasy, just pick the card.”
The singsong patter of a three-card monte hustle reached us. Bill gave a gusting sigh. “Fuckin’ Joe Twitch. Just ’cause he’s a sometime snitch he thinks he can pull this shit. Let’s go protect the rubes.”
Joe had set up between the Jokertown Dime Museum and Freakers, a spot guaranteed to get a lot of traffic. The citizens of Jokertown ignored him, but there was a crowd of tourists gathered around. None of them had ever seen a man’s hands move that fast. They were almost a blur. The man guiding those hands was short, wiry, and ugly as sin. He had faintly mottled skin, curly brown hair, and catlike green eyes that technically made him a joker. Aces and deuces were people who were outwardly unchanged, but possessed superhuman (or totally lame) powers.
The current mark had his cowboy hat pushed well back on his head, and was watching the moving cards with frowning concentration. He made his pick. It was wrong—of course—and Joe took his money. That’s when I saw the tattoos across his knuckles—FAST and FSTR.
Before another sucker could step up Bill pushed through the crowd. “Clear out, folks, you’re blocking the sidewalk.”
The crowd moved away with alacrity. Joe had the cards and money in his pocket and the table folded before I had taken two steps. Bill extended his nightstick. That plus a single word, “DON’T,” rooted Joe where he stood.
“Aww, shit, Tinkerbill, I’m just an honest businessman, making an honest buck.”
“No, Twitch, you’re a crook and hustler. I don’t want to hear you’ve moved over one block and set up again.”
“This is like fucking harassment!” His body swayed and jerked spasmodically. “I’m get a lawyer, take way to the Supreme Court!” He was talking so fast that he was dropping words, and a tiny rivulet of drool had begun to run from the corner of his mouth.
“No, Twitch, this isn’t harassment. This is harassment.” Bill pointed his nightstick at Joe Twitch and whistled.
The pink glow, stars, and sparks appeared all around Joe’s skinny body. For an instant I thought the guy was going to cry, and pity briefly twisted my gut. Now that I was close I could see dark circles under Joe’s eyes, and he looked like he’d been missing too many meals. He was also young, probably no older than me.
The moment of naked vulnerability passed, and he settled into bluster. “I’m somebody! I was on American Hero.” He was madly twitching now, popping his knuckles over and over. “You know Curveball? Babe, right? Well, her and me, we’re like this!” He crossed his fingers. “I can get her number for you.”
For one brief, wild moment I considered it, but then decided dating an ace would probably be more excitement than I needed. “No thanks.”
“And trying to bribe an officer can get you arrested,” Bill said.
“Yeah, like you’re not all on the take.”
Bill’s face tightened in anger at Twitch’s words. “Get out of here before I decide to find some reason to arrest you.”
Twitch and his table disappeared.
I spent the rest of the day occasionally thinking about the skinny joker and those desperate eyes. I was beginning to discover that sometimes certain people just get under your skin. Like the old lady whose apartment had been burgled, and she just kept crying because the perps had let her cat out. I had radioed K-10 and Tabby to be on the lookout. Quattore had been sympathetic, but Tabby had told me to shove it, he wasn’t the fuckin’ ASPCA. And now Joe Twitch.
We got back to the precinct at the end of our shift, I sat down in my chair, and the stench of cat urine rose up around me like an almost visible cloud. I felt the wet go right through the seat of my pants. Puff was laughing, his eyes glittering with malice. Tabby sauntered over. “Don’t you ever give me an order again, Franny,” he said in a low, ugly voice.
Like Joe, I didn’t know whether to fight or cry. I settled on, “It’s Frank, and I asked you for a favor.” It sounded lame even to me.
♣
Wednesday afternoon I was typing up a report about a cat fight between two strippers at Freakers that had resulted in assault and property damage charges. Beastie and his partner Chey Moleka, a Cambodian immigrant who was known for sharp elbows and voracious ambition, came through with another naked girl. I assumed she was naked. Her feet and legs were bare, and she was wrapped in Beastie’s voluminous yellow raincoat. This was the sixth naked chick in three days. They all told the same story—they were just walking along, minding their own business, when suddenly their clothes disappeared. For my own satisfaction I had stayed late one night, and tried to establish some connection between the women when there had only been four of them. I hadn’t found a single point of contact.
“Where did you find her?” I asked.
“On Bowery,” Moleka replied shortly. Ever since she’d found out that my dad had been the captain of the 5th she’d gotten pretty short with me. Competition was a terrible thing—and I was planning on burying her.
And while I was daydreaming about my future victories something suddenly clicked. Frantically I rummaged through my desk and pulled out my notes on the other flashers. I tried to bring up MapQuest on the old desktop on Bill’s desk, but it hummed, clicked, and gave me the blue screen of death.
I went over to James McTate’s desk. He was new to the 5th, a detective and a joker/ace. If you just saw his face you would think he was normal, but his body was anorexic thin, and his bones seemed to be covered with skin and nothing else. He had immediately been dubbed Slim Jim. He was from Arizona, but for some inexplicable reason had decided to move to New York. When I thought about being a joker/ace in a place like Arizona, I started to understand why he’d moved.
McTate was a detective, but friendly, so I wasn’t too shy about approaching him. His partner, Tenry Fong, one of the older guys on the force, gave me a cold glance and went back to his report. Bill kept telling me that the detectives were no better than those of us in uniform, but I couldn’t shake the feeling they got the best cases, and I craved one of those shiny gold badges. Slim Jim looked up at my approach.
“Uh … could I use your computer? Just for a second,” I hastened to add. “Ours is…” I made a helpless gesture.
“Sure.” He pushed off with a foot and went wheeling out of the way. I brought up MapQuest, printed out the page, and highlighted the bus route. It ran along Park Row, then straight up the Bowery to Cooper Union and then continued up Third Avenue. Next I marked the location of the flashers in a different colored ink. Most were along the Bowery, but there had been a number of Cooper Union college girls among them.
I jumped out of my (new) chair, and yelled, “He’s riding the 103 bus. It’s somebody on the bus!”
“What are you yapping about, Franny?” Bugeye growled.
“Frank,” I said wearily, knowing it would have no effect.
I found Bill in the bathroom, and poured out my theory. He listened while finishing up. He shook off, zipped up, washed up, and said, “Let’s go talk to the sarge.”
We found Sergeant Choy down in the basement constructing a tiny machine out of paper clips and tin foil. I had been around long enough to learn her ace power. She could control any machine she had built or heavily modified.
“The rook here has a theory about the naked chicks. I think he may be on to something.”
I went through it all again to an impassive Choy. “I don’t have a car here, ma’am. I ride the bus, a lot, ma’am, and I realized all these flashing events are happening along one particular bus line. And it’s all pretty girls in their late teens and twenties, ma’am. It’s some guy on the bus, ma’am. I’m sure of it.”
Choy ran a hand through her silver-flecked black hair. “One ma’am is sufficient. It’s a good theory. Let’s test it out. Bill, you and the rook wear civvies tomorrow. We’ll put you both on the bus. I’ll contact the other precincts where that bus runs, and tell them we’re running a sting that will cross their territory. Now we just need a tasty temptation.”
“Apsara would be perfect,” I heard myself saying.
Bill and Choy exchanged amused looks. “Yes, I expect a lot of men would like to see that.” She tapped thoughtfully on the table with a bent paper clip. “If this perv is on the bus she would be hard to resist.”
“And I hear she’s not too much in the resistance department,” Bill said, then hastened to add, “Though she is a civilian … technically.”
Choy pushed back her chair. “Let’s ask her.”
♠
So, the next morning I found myself riding the bus pretending to read the New York Times while I watched my fellow commuters. Apsara was happy to help, so she was set up to parade down the Bowery as the bus passed. All around her were various other officers ready to act, and Choy overseeing the operation.
I was seated at the back of the bus while Bill grooved on his iPod at the front. I focused on men seated in the window seats on the sidewalk side of the bus. I glanced ahead and saw Apsara prancing down the street carrying a shopping bag. Her long hair swayed with each swing of her hips. I forced myself back to watching the commuters instead of the girl. Good move. I saw a skinny teenage boy of maybe sixteen come slightly out of his seat. As I watched, his tongue licked nervously at his lips, and he raised his hand, brought his fingers to his lips, and blew a kiss. Apsara’s clothes vanished, and the kid leaned forward watching avidly as the bus went farting past.
I was out of my seat, grabbing the cuffs out of my pocket. “Got you!” A look of almost comical alarm crossed the kid’s face. “You are under arrest.”
Bill pulled the cord and the bus rolled to a stop.
The kid started yelling. “Don’t you touch me! I can fuck you up bad! I can make anything disappear. I could disappear your dick … or … or your eyeballs.”
Bill and I exchanged a glance. Clearly he was an ace. Clearly we didn’t know the limit of his powers. The heavyset African-American woman in the seat next to the kid handled the situation for us. She swung her incredibly large, and apparently incredibly heavy, purse into his belly. The air whoofed out of the kid, and he folded up like an origami figure. “You took the clothes off that girl? You’re a damn pervert,” she yelled. She slid out of her seat to make room for me. “You arrest his ass.”
I spun the still gasping kid around, pulled his arms behind his back, and slapped on the cuffs. Maybe he had to blow a kiss to use his power. I sure hoped so. In case he really could remove my dick. By now Bill had pushed through the rubbernecking commuters and was at my side.
Unfortunately, Apsara was already wrapped in a coat provided by Choy by the time we got off the bus with our prisoner. I felt a little guilty over my sexist and lascivious thoughts, so to make up for them I called to her as we headed toward a waiting squad car with the prisoner. “Thank you. I’m sure that can’t have been pleasant.”
“No problem, Franny.”
I winced. “Actually, it’s Frank.”
But she ignored me, swept the crowd with a dazzling smile, and added, “It was fun.”
♦
The kid was in an interrogation room. The handcuffs had been removed and he was nervously rubbing at his wrists. On the other side of the one-way glass a crowd had gathered—Sergeant Choy, Tabby, Puff, Slim Jim, Rikki, K-10, Angel, Moleka, and Razor Joan Lonnegan. The female cops were all demanding blood, the males tended to be amused, and there I was saying over and over in ever more plaintive tones, “He’s a minor. We’ve got to call his parents.”
The gender bickering abruptly ended. Of course I had my back to the door so I didn’t get the hint to stop talking. “… call his parents!” My voice rang out.
A hand fell on my shoulder. I choked on the final word, turned, and looked up into the square-jawed face of Captain Maseryk. With his iron-gray crew cut and perfectly pressed uniform he looked more military than cop.
“Nice work, Black. I hear from Choy this was your idea.” I mumbled something. His pale eyes scanned the rest of the crowd. “And Black is right. Call his parents.”
“Can we talk to him before they do?” Bill asked.
“But gently,” said the captain in an equally gentle tone.
Bill and I headed toward the door to the interrogation room. I had an itch between my shoulder blades as if invisible daggers were scratching at my skin.
The kid looked up at our entrance. He had a prominent Adam’s apple that was bouncing up and down. His black T-shirt had Ge N I U S with a word beneath each letter—Germanium, Nitrogen, Iodine, Uranium, Sulfur, and some numbers above them. His backpack, which we’d searched, had a number of science texts in them. It seemed he was a nerd with power—never a good thing.
“Stripping women. I think a competent D.A. can make the argument that’s almost rape.”
The kid went white at the R word. “I didn’t … it’s not … you’re full of it.”
“Maybe my partner is exaggerating, but only a little,” I said. “You’re in a lot of trouble.”
“I know my rights. I don’t have to say anything.”
“Oh, goody, now I can make up any story I want, and sell it to the D.A.,” Bill said.
“You can’t do that!” The kid’s eyes shifted nervously to me. “Can he?”
“Sure he can, and you won’t have said anything to counter his version of things,” I said, though it pained me to do so. “Look, talk to us. Tell us why you did it. The D.A.’s reasonable. If you just discovered your power maybe you were having trouble controlling it.”
It was the wrong thing to say. It struck at the core of his fragile teenage ego. His face went red, then white, the pimples livid against his skin. “I’ve had my power for three years. I tried out for American Hero. I’m not just some dumb kid. They said I was too young, but they took that stupid girl and her stuffed dragon! I’m an ACE!” And then he blew a kiss at me, and I was sitting there buck naked.
Bill gave a thoughtful nod. “And a one-trick pony. I can see why they didn’t take you. Tough power to put on television.” He said all this while I was holding my file in front of my package, and Bill’s behind my ass, shuffling for the door.
I exited to gales of laughter from my coworkers.
♥
The following week Bill and I got moved to the swing shift. Night in Jokertown was a whole new experience. On the Bowery neon ruled, garish as the Las Vegas Strip. Off the main streets darkness ruled.
Even though I had moved into the neighborhood a few days before I started work, I hadn’t gone out much. Too busy getting settled. After I started work I hadn’t gone out much because I’d been too damn tired. And when I did feel like going out I was probably going to head to the Village or Little Italy. A singles bar in Jokertown didn’t look like a real good prospect for a nat like me. And in the privacy of my own head I could at least be honest with myself—I wasn’t going to date a joker.
At night the crimes were darker too. The bar fights more vicious. Armed robberies often became assaults. We found some bodies too, victims of the increasingly vicious turf war between the Demon Princes and the Werewolves, and I was proud of myself because I didn’t lose my dinner over any of them.
This night the heat lay on the city like a suffocating blanket. A hulking figure wrapped in a voluminous cloak shuffled out of an alley. My hand closed reflexively on the butt of my pistol.
Bill laid a hand over mine. “Relax. It’s the Oddity. They’re on our side—sort of.”
I had been on the job for a week and was starting to feel like a bit of a pro. “I know, I’ve heard about him. Bugeye, Puff, and Tabby seem to think he’s … she’s … it’s … a good guy.”
“I take it you don’t agree,” Bill said in a neutral tone.
“The rule of law is essential to an advanced society. You abandon that, and no one is safe because there’s no certainty. The government can seize your person or your property, gangs threaten you and your only recourse is to form or hire your own gang—”
“Aren’t we just another gang, bigger, better armed … maybe, but still a gang?”
“No. We try to adhere to a set of standards that protect people from the overwhelming power of the state. They have recourse when we act like thugs. They have none from a person like him … her.” I gestured at the figure now vanishing into another alley.
“Yep, you’re going to end up at One Police Plaza, Franny,” Bill said.
“Frank. It’s Fra—” I started to say when I was interrupted by squealing tires. A beautiful vintage Ferrari convertible came roaring around the corner. Bill and I dove off to each side as the car careened wildly, the driver trying to get control. I had a brief glimpse of long brown hair and a horror mask face before the car was past us.
We took off in pursuit while Bill radioed in our location and the description of the car. It wasn’t too hard to follow; there was the sound of scraped metal and squealing tires, and car horns from the other drivers on the street. Our pounding feet echoed off the walls of surrounding buildings. I felt like a one-man band with my handcuffs clinking against my heavy flashlight, billy club banging against my belt buckle, holster thwapping against my thigh.
Brakes screeched followed by a bang and the wail of crumpling metal. A girl, her voice at a supersonic level, screamed out, “Come on, boys! It’s all yours!”
We heard approaching sirens. I pushed harder, but didn’t seem to be running any faster. Bill and I finally spun around the last corner to see dark forms heaving all around the car, which had plowed nose first into a building. Not just any building; McGurk’s Suicide Hall, the headquarters of the Demon Princes. It was like watching African army ants swarming on the body of a fallen water buffalo. I pulled out my flashlight, thumbed it on, and eyes glittered in the sudden light. Jokers. Lots of them. All holding a piece of the Ferrari.
“Hey!” Bill shouted. We sprinted forward. We passed the mouth of an alley, and were ambushed by four rolling garbage cans. One hit me hard on the shin, and I went down. By the time Bill and I fought free, the car was a metal carcass and all we saw were a few backs vanishing into various alleys. Not one of them went into Suicide Hall, which meant we couldn’t either.
The girl who had driven the car into the wall was in the top ten of ugly jokers. A pair of tiny arms emerged just below her breasts, ending in hands with only three fingers tipped with claws. Right now they were folded over her stomach. She kicked off her high-heeled shoes and took off running.
I sucked in a deep breath and set off after her. She craned her neck around to look at me. A red fluid dripped from the corners of her eyes and ran down her cheeks like scarlet tears. Her nose was a flattened snout, but beneath them was a perfect cupid bow mouth with full, sensual lips. The incongruity was almost more horrifying than the deformities.
She was fast, but lacked stamina. Bill and I managed to get on either side of her. Her shoulders slumped, she came to a stop, and she folded the extra arms across her stomach. The claws were dripping the same viscous fluid that ran out of her eyes.
“Is that your car?” Bill panted.
“A friend loaned it to me,” she said.
“And told you to run it into a brick wall, and then have it stripped?” Bill’s voice dripped sarcasm. She gave the universal teenage response—a bored shrug. “Let me see some ID,” Bill said.
“I don’t have it with me.”
“Do you have a driver’s license?”
“Not yet. I’m in driver’s ed.”
“What’s you name?”
“Joan McDermott.”
“Okay, Joan, we’re going over to the 5th and calling your parents,” he added with a glance to me. “Get the registration out of the car.”
I trotted off obediently, rummaged through the glove compartment, and came out with a folder containing proof of insurance and the registration. The car was owned by one Peter Fairbanks. Memory kicked in and provided the title that went with that name. It was Assemblyman. He represented a particularly rich and Republican part of Long Island. A slow throbbing headache began at the base of my neck, crawled up over my head, and settled behind my eyes. It was going to be a long night.
♣
“Take her a Coke. See what she has to say,” Bill tossed over his shoulder at me as he pulled the phone closer and got ready to dial.
“Bill, she’s a minor. We’re not supposed to interview her without her parent or guardian present. We did that once with that stripper kid, and it made me really uncomfortable.”
“That’s ’cause he stripped you.” I just kept staring at him. “Are you a cop, or her fucking lawyer?”
I stood my ground. “I’m trying to be an honest cop.”
Bill came out of the chair and this time I did step back. “Franny, you are really pissing me off. Take her a goddamn Coke.”
“All right, but I’m going to formally register my protest.”
The vending machine ate my dollar and burped out a can of Coke. I continued on to the interrogation rooms. The walls were a particular shade of puke green, and they seemed to hold the scent of flop sweat, alcohol, vomit, and blood. The girl was seated at the table, hands cuffed behind her back. I sat down the cold can of Coke and unlocked the handcuffs.
“Oh, you must be the good cop,” she said sarcastically, but her voice quavered on the final word.
I didn’t answer. Just pulled out the chair, swung it around, and straddled it, resting my arms on the back. “Officer Chen is calling your folks.”
“Just my mom. Dad took off four years ago.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, it was because of me,” she said, in answer to a question I hadn’t asked. Her tone was casual, but I watched the bottom lip of that vulnerable mouth quiver slightly.
Cop Frank saw the opening. “Want to tell me what happened?”
“Shouldn’t I have a lawyer?”
Cop Frank knew what he was supposed to say. It’s not necessary. We’re just having a friendly talk until your mom arrives. It’ll go better for you if you cooperate. But Lawyer Francis answered, “Yes, you should have a lawyer. Are you requesting one?”
She shook her head. “No, we can’t afford it.”
“There are public defenders,” I said. I figured Captain Mendelberg and a D.A. were behind the one-way glass cussing me out.
The joker girl said, “Yeah, and they suck.”
I couldn’t argue with that. There were always exceptions, but most P.D.s were young, overworked, and underpaid. Or angry attorneys from white-shoe law firms forced to do pro bono work. Then I remembered I knew one of the exceptions. He’d been a year ahead of me at Columbia and he was a joker; Charles Santiago Herriman. He was smart and had been inculcated by our Con Law professor Dr. Pretorius with a strong sense of outrage.
I wrote out Herriman’s name on my notepad and ripped off the page. “Here, this guy is good. Have your mom ask for him when she calls the P.D.’s office.”
“Okay, thanks.” The girl took a sip of Coke and glanced at the wall. Her upper teeth sketched her lower lip. “I was at a party. At Barrington Prep.”
I knew the school. It was a place where wealthy families sent their sons to prepare them for their future positions as legacies at Ivy League universities. “Sort of a long way from home, weren’t you?” Barrington was up the Upper West Side near Central Park.
She nodded. “I’m on the debate team at school. We debated Barrington last month. I met this boy…” She cleared her throat and tried again. “We’d been tweeting a lot, and we liked a lot of the same things—books, music—and I beat him in the debate so he knew I was smart. He invited me to a party.… Todd picked me up.” Her eyes filled with tears and her snout nose was a vivid red. She rubbed a hand across her nostrils, and snot gleamed on her skin. “I’ve never been in a Ferrari before. I felt so special…” Her voice trailed away, and her eyes filled with real tears that alternated with the red gunk. “But it was a Pig Party.”
My spine stiffened. It had begun at colleges where frat boys invited the ugliest girls they could find, and gave prizes to the boy who brought the worst. It was a nasty game and apparently it had filtered down to the high school level.
“I wanted to leave, but they said I was the Pig Queen, and I had to stay.” False imprisonment, my mind supplied. “They let the other girls leave, then they got in a circle around me and started pushing me back and forth between them. They made the freshmen kiss me.” I made a comforting noise, and she continued. “It was getting rougher and rougher. I think the punch was spiked. They sure seemed drunk. Then they got this long pin and a fake tail, and they started playing pin the tail on the piggy. They jabbed me a bunch of times.” Assault and battery, my mind supplied. She stood up and started to pull up her skirt. “I can show you.”
“Uh, I’d need a female officer,” I rushed to say, really not wanting to see her bootie. “We should get a medical examiner and a camera to document your claim.”
“It’s the truth!” she said, stung by the word “claim.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t, but we need evidence. But go on.”
She found the thread of the story again. “Todd and some of the older boys started yelling about how I had to give them blow jobs. They grabbed me and forced me onto my knees. Some of the boys already had their pants unzipped, and they were … hanging out.” She held up her second set of hands with those long claws and studied the tips. “I got scared. Real scared. So I dug my claws into a couple of their … things.” I winced. “They were all shouting and screaming. I ripped Todd’s pocket and got the car key. Then I ran.”
“Why bring the car to the Demon Princes?” I asked.
“As I was driving away I heard Todd shouting. I guess his dad didn’t know he’d taken the car. I wanted to make him pay.” She hung her head.
“Okay. So, I assume there’ll be a mark on their … penises.”
She nodded. “This gunk is like ink. I’ve done tattoos for some of my friends.” She reacted to my expression. “Flowers and things. They’re pretty.”
“I’m sure they are. Look, uh—”
The door opened and a plump woman who looked like she’d thrown on her clothes rushed into the room. “Joanie, honey. What’s happened? Are you okay?”
“Oh, Mommy!” Sobs and hugs ensued.
The young D.A. who was on duty came in and indicated for me to leave. “You’re daughter’s in some trouble, ma’am,” I heard him say as I left.
♠
Work consumed my waking hours and even invaded my dreams. For some reason I couldn’t get the ugly joker girl out of my head. Maybe it was that beautiful mouth. Maybe because the entire neighborhood was discussing the case.
I was discovering that Jokertown was a tight-knit community. People knew of Joan, her accomplishments and goals. I went in to buy tomatoes only to hear Mr. Flannigan the greengrocer talking with Mrs. Synderman about how this might cost Joan her scholarship to Princeton. They both clammed up at my entrance, and I didn’t think it was just because I was a nat. I was the man who’d arrested Joan. The old joker men playing endless games of speed chess discussed Joan. Even in the precinct the joker officers occasionally murmured about the case.
I decided to call over to the D.A.’s office and inquire about the case, and I was shocked to discover they were throwing the book, the kitchen sink, and everything else at her. I raised the fact that she had been held against her will and assaulted. It’s strange how sometimes you can “hear” a shrug across phone lines. “It’s her word against theirs.”
“And her daddy isn’t a state legislator.”
“That isn’t why—”
I cut him off. “Yeah, right.”
“You’re not going to be trouble, are you?”
“Let’s just say you better be ready to treat me like a hostile witness.” I slammed down the phone. Bill looked up from where he was shoveling Shanghai spicy noodles into his mouth.
“You gotta learn to let things go, Franny. We arrest ’em. You don’t look back, and you don’t second-guess the learned counselors.”
“Even if I’m one of them?”
“You do that and then everyone will hate you,” he said.
And I had no answer to that depressing pronouncement.
♦
That night I had the opportunity to get out of Jokertown. Sam Altobelli had invited me to a fund-raiser for the police benevolent fund at the Four Seasons. Extra tickets had been purchased by some of Manhattan’s richer citizens, and were to be handed out to “deserving officers.” I didn’t know how deserving I was, but I had a powerful rabbi. I also knew there was no way I could have afforded the two grand.
As I struggled with the cummerbund that went with my rented tux, I wondered if I ought to have refused harder, and not let Sam overrule me. The free tickets should have gone to some long-time veteran, or a person who had done something heroic in the line of duty. But Sam had argued that attractive and educated also counted for a lot, and many of those hoary old veterans sported noses with broken veins from too much booze, or trailed a long tail of citizen complaints. I found that depressing, and wondered if that would be my ultimate fate.
There was the strobe of camera flashes as I walked up the wide staircase toward the Pool Room. I hoped my picture wouldn’t make it into any of the papers. That would make my life pure hell.
The tables had been removed except for a few at the edges of the room to force people to “mingle” around the white marble pool in the center. The glitterati of New York society moved beneath a canopy of seasonally changing trees. They were still the bright green of summer. Conversation bounced off the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and reduced the small chamber orchestra to a strange hiccup of music that occasionally penetrated the roar. There was the faint odor of too many bodies. I could feel sweat forming under my arms, and I hadn’t even entered the press of people.
I snagged a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter, and grabbed a shrimp puff thingee off another tray. It was good champagne and a good shrimp thingee. Then I scanned the crowd for a familiar face. Instead I found myself faced with a man wearing an elaborate gazelle mask. “Francis Xavier Black,” the man said.
“Um, yes … do I know—”
He laughed, a rollicking, deep belly sound. “No, no, but Sam told me about you. Lucas Tate, editor of the Jokertown Cry, and I think you might be worth an article. Son of Famous Captain Returns Home.” I could hear the capital letters in the headline, and shuddered.
“No, please don’t,” I said faintly.
Tate rolled right over me. “And we’re coming up on the twenty-fourth anniversary of your father’s death. I’ll send someone around. Or, hell, maybe I’ll do it myself.”
“Oh, no, really, please … don’t.”
I heard the mayor’s familiar nasal tones calling out a greeting.
“Lucas, how the hell are you?” They walked away with the mayor’s arm across Tate’s shoulders. “Who do I have to fuck to get your paper to endorse me?”
Eventually Sam found me, and I got introduced to the chief of detectives, the chief of police, and the D.A. for the City of New York. “I hear we lost you to the thin blue line,” she said. “If you ever change your mind, come and see me. I could use somebody who’s actually interacted with the scum.”
I wondered if she’d still feel that way if she talked to the young A.D.A. I’d basically threatened earlier in the day. Then I realized I had an opportunity to do something for Joanie McDermott. “Ma’am,” I began. “There’s this case.”
But her attention was wandering, drawn by a passing congressman. “Excuse me. Don’t worry about the case. We’ll put them away,” she threw over her shoulder as she hurried after power.
“That’s the problem,” I muttered to myself.
♥
Unfortunately Lucas Tate remembered meeting me, and remembered his desire for a story. I demurred. Tate called Sam who called my mother who browbeat me into submission. The story appeared in the Sunday issue of the Cry. My hope was that everyone at the precinct would miss it because it was the weekend.
They didn’t.
I walked into work, and suddenly I was naked. There was the click of digital cameras and phones snapping photos, and gales of laughter swept through the squad room. Apsara had her hand over her face, but her fingers separated so she could peek through. Bruce Cordova, aka the Stripper, was leaning on a broom handle in the doorway laughing at me while Puff pounded him on the shoulder. I snatched a file off a desk and covered my junk, but not before Captain Mendelberg walked through and gave me the once-over. “Not bad, patrolman,” she drawled and headed into her office.
The desk sergeant walked up and said, “Better get some clothes before I have to arrest you for indecent exposure.” Wingman brayed at his own wit.
Once again I had files at my crotch and crack and I was shuffling into the men’s room. Bill came in after me. “It’s not smart to stick your head up, Franny. You’ll just get it cut off.”
I was in that state between anger and depression. I couldn’t figure out which way to fall. I decided anger was healthier. “Are you part of this?”
“No. If by ‘part of this’ you mean planned it.”
The door to the john flew open and Tabby and Puff strolled in. “You asked for it, Rook. You got a law degree. Your daddy was the captain of this precinct,” Tabby said.
“The kid didn’t pick his father,” Bill said.
“Yeah, but he picked to be a cop.”
“And come here,” Puff added.
“And he gets invited to receptions at the Four Seasons.” Tabby again.
“And has articles written about him,” Puff said.
“I didn’t ask for any of this,” I said.
Bill took a step forward. He was bigger than either of the other two officers. “Back off. Now. I won’t ask again.” Puff and Tabby left. Bill turned back to me. “Do you have an extra uniform?”
“Yeah, at my apartment.”
“Gimme the key. I’ll go get it.” His face fell comically as I dropped the files and spread my hands.
“What key?”
♣
Days passed. I took to just keeping an extra uniform in my locker. The game was getting really old, but obviously not for my tormentors or for Bruce, whose parents had quickly cut a deal so the kid was doing his community service at the 5th. The cruder members of our force—read most of them—had adopted him as a mascot and my personal tormentor. I knew if I whined to the captains I’d pay, and they didn’t seem inclined to ride to my rescue. I considered confronting Cordova and giving him a little “come to Jesus” talk, but I was feeling so low I figured he’d just laugh and blow me off.
Which meant I was in a really bad mood so when I came across Abigail Baker again, I wasn’t inclined to be sympathetic despite our shared nude experience.
It started with a skinny joker that looked like a big ant. He had been racing into coffee, ice cream, and sandwich shops—anywhere there was a tip jar—grabbing the jars and racing off down the street. Bill was in taking a report from the latest victim. I loitered in the door where I could keep an eye on the street.
“How hard can it be to find a giant ant?” the owner, who looked like a giant caterpillar, asked.
I spent a moment picturing a Japanese monster movie version of the ant guy and the caterpillar guy battling over an empty pickle jar filled with dollar bills. It didn’t have quite the panache of Godzilla Versus the Swarm. But then my attention was drawn to the jewelry store across the street.
Mr. Zamaani, owner of Fine and Rare Things, came barreling out of the door and gripped a young woman by the upper arm. The girl was staring down at her hands, and the sapphire and diamond necklace that lay across them. Mr. Zamaani started screaming, “Thief! Thief!”
I ran across the street dodging cars and tourists in pedicabs. The girl was bucking like a foal newly broke to halter trying to break Zamaani’s grip. Zamaani’s round, fat face looked like an overinflated red balloon, and he was still bellowing in Farsi and English. “Thief! Evil thief!”
“I didn’t … I never … I was just admiring it.” I recognized the accent even before I saw her face. Abigail Baker.
I dodged past an elderly woman in a swan mask, pushing a shopping cart full of bric-a-brac with a cat riding proudly on top, and laid a hand on Mr. Zamaani’s arm. “I’ll take it from here.”
“Well, thank God, someone sensible,” Abigail said in aggrieved tones. I spun her around and slapped on the cuffs. “What the hell? I didn’t do anything. I was just standing here admiring the jewelry and suddenly it was in my hand.”
“You’re just a victim of circumstances, aren’t you?” I said sarcastically.
“Absolutely!”
“Guess we’ll sort it out down at the precinct.”
“Not again,” she wailed. “I have an audition.”
At the same time Zamaani said, “You’ll lock her up?” I nodded. “For a long time?”
“That’ll be up to a judge.” I started walking away, towing Abigail behind me.
Back at the precinct I very quickly learned that these kinds of robberies had been occurring for decades. Long before Abigail was born, much less arrived in New York. Apparently Abigail was the world’s unluckiest person—unless you counted me. As she was walking out I apologized, and then, to my horror, I heard myself saying, “Uh, Abigail, there’s a jazz festival at a really great—”
“Oh, sod off!”
♠
Three days later I was due in court to testify in the purse snatcher case. It didn’t take long, and as I was walking out I saw Mrs. McDermott and Joanie, accompanied by Charlie Herriman, the prosthetics attached to his flippers clutching at the handle of his briefcase. The inevitable happened. He dropped the case, spilling papers. I ran over to help him gather them up.
“Oh, it’s you,” Joanie said.
At the same time Charlie said, “I know you. You were at Columbia.”
“Yeah,” I said, helping him shove the papers back into his case. I stood and looked at Joanie. “How are you doing?” I asked.
Her response to even that tepid remark took me aback. Joanie’s eyes filled with tears.
“Not so good.”
“You shouldn’t be talking to my client,” Charlie said in a faintly whining and almost apologetic tone. That’s when I remembered that despite being brilliant, Charlie had always undercut the brains with his nervousness and klutziness.
“What’s going on?” I jerked my head toward the courtroom.
At that moment the familiar burly figure of Assemblyman Fairbanks hove into sight. He was accompanied by several young men dressed in the Barrington Prep uniforms, and a distinguished silver-haired man whose entire demeanor screamed counselor. Joanie buried her face against her mother’s shoulder to avoid looking at them. The boys smirked and whispered to each other. They entered the courtroom. Moments later a harried young D.A. came rushing past and hurtled through the doors into the courtroom.
“We’ve got to go,” Charlie muttered to the mother and daughter.
I stood dithering in the hall for a few more minutes, then slipped into the courtroom and took a seat in the back. Charlie was at the podium dropping papers while he made a motion to compel the young men to submit to a strip search to verify his client’s defense.
“How does this go to the charge of grand theft auto?” asked the elderly judge whose wrinkled skin and dark tan created the impression of a lizard squatting behind the bench.
“It’s an affirmative defense, Your Honor, going to my … um … client’s state of mind when she ran from the Barrington dorm. She was escaping a threatening situation where she was being held against her will.”
“She could have called a taxi,” the judge said.
“She was afraid she was going to be raped—”
The D.A. bounced to his feet. “Objection.”
Charlie plowed on doggedly. “She wasn’t thinking all that clearly.”
The D.A. was fulminating. “That’s incredibly prejudicial. Where’s the proof?”
The judge stared over the top of his glasses at the five perfectly groomed young men. The smirking jerk expressions had been replaced with those of respectful attention. He looked back at Charlie. “The D.A. raises a valid question, Mr. Herriman. Where is the proof?”
“The proof is on their bodies, Your Honor.”
I winced and watched the D.A. pounce.
“So she’s admitting to assault and battery?” His tone was silky.
Charlie opened and closed his mouth several times. “She had a right to defend herself, and they assaulted her first.” He yanked photos out of his briefcase and tried to wave them dramatically. They slipped out of his prothesis and went flying like frightened birds all over the front two rows. As he rushed about trying to pick them up he said, between sharp pants, “They stuck pins in her.”
The D.A. didn’t like where this was going. “Your Honor, granting this motion would be like giving the police a warrant without probable cause. There is no evidence that this pinprick occurred at Barrington, or that the defendant didn’t injure herself after the fact to support these claims.”
“And I suppose the wounds on the boys’ penises will be attributed to some quaint initiation rite at Barrington?” Charlie pulled out an asthma inhaler and took a hit.
The silver-haired lawyer seated next to Assemblyman Fairbanks stood up. He was very smooth, it was like watching water flow. “Gerald Pitken for the boys, Your Honor. I will resist any effort to traumatize and humiliate these young men. The public defender appears to be on a fishing expedition.” He sat back down.
The judge glanced at the assemblyman who wore a ferocious frown. He studied the boys again. He looked over at Joanie with her flattened snout and those grotesque arms thrusting out from her waist. He banged down the gavel. “Motion denied.”
I slipped away.
♦
“Why, Officer Black, what a pleasant surprise. Do come in.”
“Pardon me for imposing, sir,”
Tate chuckled behind his lion mask. “Sir, please, you’ll have me looking over my shoulder for my father. Lucas, please.”
I ducked my head. “Lucas.”
The apartment would have been elegant and tasteful if the living-room walls hadn’t been lined with masks. There were so many that you stopped seeing individual designs and were just overwhelmed by colors, feathers, and flashing sequins. Tate mistook my expression for one of admiration and launched into an exhaustive and boring monologue about the masks. “This one is from the court of Louis the Fourteenth.…”
My eyes began to glaze over and soon all I was hearing was “Blah, blah, blah blah, Mardi Gras, blah blah blah blah, Hutu tribal, blah blah blah, Venetian Carnival, blah blah. I began to squirm because I’d come here with my own agenda, I had limited time, and he’d turned into a pedant.
Tate finally seemed to realize that he was boring me insensible. “But enough of my particular hobby horse.” He led me over to a couch and gestured for me to sit down. “Now, what can I do for you?”
“I need a photographer.” And I outlined the situation.
When I finished I could tell Tate was smiling, though I couldn’t actually see his mouth behind the mask. “I’ll do it myself.”
♥
When the kid opened the door his mouth dropped open and his eyes began to flick nervously from side to side. “Hi, Bruce,” I said. “First, the little morning game is gonna stop.”
“Yeah, how you gonna make me?” The nerd bluster was back.
“I’m going to sue you and your parents. Since I’m a lawyer it won’t cost me a dime, but it sure will cost your folks.”
The kid went white again, and he grabbed at my arm as I started to walk away. “No, please. Don’t.”
“Okay, then you’re going to do something for me.”
♣
They really were a pack. Bruce and I sat on a bench at the edge of Central Park and watched as Todd Fairbanks and his posse emerged from the front doors of the Barrington Prep. The gold embroidered patch with the school’s insignia flashed in the autumn sun and glowed on their navy-blue blazers. Little budding Masters of the Universe.
I realized I found them more loathsome than the most deformed joker in Jokertown. “Them,” I said.
“I’ve never done that many,” Bruce whined.
“Don’t fuck this up.”
He concentrated to the point that the tip of his tongue emerged. Then he brought both hands to his lips and blew kisses at them. All their clothes vanished, except for one boy who still had his shoes and socks.
Tate, muffled in a long cloak with a hood, stepped forward. Over the roar of passing traffic I couldn’t hear the rapid-fire whine of the digital camera shooting multiple photos, but it was clear from the boys’ expressions they realized what was happening.
I turned to Bruce. “Okay, you can go.” He jumped up, but I caught him by the wrist. “But first, play back the deal.”
“I don’t say a word to anybody about this ever.”
“And.”
“And I stop taking your clothes.”
I released him and decided to walk through the park. It was a nice afternoon. I could hear the music from the carousel, smell hot dogs and pretzels on the various carts. There were a lot of girls taking advantage of the last warm days before winter, and skating and running past in shorts and tank tops. And Tate would need time to download and print the photos.
♠
The McDermotts lived in a run-down building on the south end of Jokertown. I stepped over a modified tricycle in the lobby and tried to visualize the child’s body that could ride it. I couldn’t twist my brain that much. Somewhere above me I heard the elevator making its slow descent. I gave up, and instead sprinted up the five flights to their floor.
Sheila had just gotten home from her job at an electronics store, and I knew her daughter had chess club and wouldn’t be at home. The mother answered at my knock and frowned, trying to place me, while she pushed a stray lock of hair off her forehead. When she did recognize me the weary irritation turned quickly to alarm. “Joanie…?”
“Fine. She’s fine. I wanted to give you this.” I handed her a business card for Dr. Pretorius. I had considered using Charlie for what I had planned, but Pretorius was the most feared plaintiff’s attorney in Manhattan. He was a much better choice, and once I’d outlined the McDermotts’ situation he was excited to help. “Dr. Pretorius is expecting your call.”
“Why am I … I can’t afford to pay a lawyer, that’s why we have the public—”
“He’ll take his fee out of your settlement.”
“What settlement?”
“Joanie’s going to be able to attend any college she wants.”
“How? Why?”
“Call him,” I said, flicking my nail on the edge of the card. I left.
♦
You don’t approach a public figure in their office. Surrounded by the trappings of their power and position they tend to bluster. Nor do you brace them in their homes. That sets off all the old defending-the-castle responses. No, you catch them in public where they can’t easily make a scene.
Being a cop also means you can locate a person pretty damn easily. Especially someone who doesn’t know he’s being watched or followed. I waited until Fairbanks was playing eighteen holes with three buddies, and I bought myself a tee time. I played golf in high school and college, and I was pretty sure I could outplay four fat old guys. I was right. By the fourth hole I was on their heels. Then I got lucky. Fairbanks sliced one into the trees. I heard him thrashing around searching for his ball. I hoisted my bag higher on my shoulder and called to his companions.
“I’ll help him find it. I’m just waiting.” It’s always fun to rub it in to bad golfers that you’re better. And I was pretty sure that any friends of Fairbanks would be assholes.
He grunted at me as I joined him among the oak and beech trees. “Sorry. We’re holding you up.”
“No problem. I wanted a chance to talk to you.”
His face closed down tight. “Call my office and make an appointment.”
I shrugged. “Okay, but you probably don’t want these floating around your office.” I took out the photos of Todd Fairbanks and his friends. Todd and two others had the distinctive marks and stains from Joanie’s claws.
“You asshole. Is this some kind of blackmail attempt because—”
“No, just reminding you of your civic duty. Your son’s a first-class thug. He and his little pals humiliated, imprisoned, and terrified a girl, threatened her with rape, and now you’re trying to get her thrown in jail. You’re going to use your influence and get the D.A. to drop these charges.”
His face was turning an alarming shade of red. “Like hell—”
I waved the photos. “Or else these go wide on the Internet, along with Joanie’s story. The best-case scenario for your kid is that people will believe he got a hand job from a joker and she tattooed his dick. Which will make him a laughingstock. Or they’ll suspect her story is true, and most Ivy League colleges aren’t going to risk admitting a potential sexual predator.”
“I’m asking you again. How much do you want?” The words squeezed between his clenched teeth.
“Not a damn thing. But Mrs. McDermott is going to be suing you and your son. I suggest you settle. She’s also suing Barrington Prep, and since you’re on the Board of Governors you should urge them to settle too.”
“Whoever the fuck you are, you’ve made yourself an enemy.”
“Good. I think the kind of enemies a man acquires tells you a lot about his character. I’m very comfortable having you dislike me.” I started to walk away. “Oh, your ball’s over there. Behind the tree.”
I returned to the fairway, smiled and nodded at Fairbanks’s companions. “If you don’t mind I’d like to play through,” I said.
The solid feel of the head of the driver connecting with the ball was very satisfying, and watching the ball arc straight down the fairway felt equally great. And then it rolled onto the green and stopped only a few inches from the hole. Heaven appeared to be pleased, too.
♥
The next morning I walked through the precinct unmolested. Bruce looked up from where he was emptying the grounds out of the coffeemaker, then quickly ducked his head and looked away. Tabby and Bugeye, who had been loitering in anticipation of seeing me humiliated again, gaped, exchanged glances, then glared at me. I gave them a sweet smile. A knot of people were reading the Cry. The front-page story was all about the huge academic grant made by Barrington Prep to Joan McDermott, enough to fund her undergraduate degree at any Ivy League university. There were also rumors of a lawsuit against Assemblyman Fairbanks, and more rumors that he would settle.
I was a little sorry that Barrington hadn’t had their nuts hammered to a wall, but figured Pretorius had wrested more money out of them by letting them avoid admitting culpability. And I had a feeling Fairbanks senior was none to happy with his son and heir right now.
Bill was studying me with a look that was half frown, half calculation. “You’re not naked.”
“Nope.”
“The charges against Joan McDermott have been dropped.”
“Looks like it.” I moved on toward the locker room. He followed me.
I had opened my locker and he peered in. “You don’t have an extra uniform.”
“Nope.”
“What did you do?”
“Solved a few problems.”
“How?”
“Creatively.”
“Do I want to know how?”
“Nope.” I slammed the door shut and headed for the door and our briefing.
“Answer me this.” I paused and looked back. “Did you have something to do with that McDermott girl?”
“Maybe.”
We measured glances. A slow smile split his face, and he nodded.
♣
At the end of my shift I was packing up to leave when Bugeye came over. I eyed him warily. “Hey, a few of us are going over to Shift Change for drinks. Want to come?”
Shift Change was the local bar where most of the off-duty officers of the 5th went to drink. I’d never been invited before. “Sure,” I said. I wondered what new and horrible thing they were going to do to me.
As we walked down the street I realized that Rikki, Beastie, Shades, Wingman, and Lieutenant Kant had fallen into step with me. My nervousness increased, but they were just exchanging gibes and talking about cases.
Wingman held the door for me. I gave him a funny look, but went in. Bill was seated at the bar. Puff was lighting a cigarette with one of his flaming goobers. Tabby had a shot and a beer lined up in front of him. The usual cop groupies, generally older women with lush bodies, had hung themselves on the male officers.
“What are you drinkin’?” Puff said. “It’s on me.”
“Uh.” I wondered who had stolen the real Puff and left this version behind. “Scotch, rocks,” I finally managed.
A steady line of cops came by to give me a slap on the back and tell me that I’d been doing a hellva job. I looked up at Bill who had an expression like the Cheshire Cat’s. He had definitely been talking.
And from somewhere in the crowd someone said, “Nice work, Frank.”
I cranked around on the bar stool and addressed the room. “Franny will be fine.”
There were guffaws and Bill pounded me on the shoulder. I turned back to the bartender and ordered another drink. It seemed I had made the right career choice.
♣ ♦ ♠ ♥
The Rat Race
Part 2.
CHARLES DUTTON’S MANSION WAS a sprawling affair that was normal on the outside and strange as hell on the inside. Stuffed with oddities, antiques, and wild card paraphernalia, the house was almost a museum. In fact, Dutton occasionally referred to it as “the annex,” by which he implied that some of the Famous Jokertown Dime Museum’s displays might hypothetically rotate in and out of his private quarters.
Leo didn’t like doing poker night at Dutton’s place. He was often consumed by the irrational conviction that the house was bigger on the inside than the outside, but he wasn’t about to skip a Society game over such a minor quibble.
He was just deciding between lifting the big, ludicrous door knocker (some kind of animal head, maybe) and pushing the ornately offset doorbell that protruded like an ivory blister when another cab pulled up. This one deposited Father Squid, who paid the cabbie and gave Leo a nod that wiggled his tentacles.
Leo nodded back. He liked the priest—a joker a few years his senior with the cephalopod face and body like a boulder. As the cassock-clad minister climbed the front steps, Leo called out, “Don’t tell me I’m late.”
“Surely not. It’s barely even dark.” He reached past Leo and seized the door knocker. He lifted it and dropped it a couple of times—casting forth a low, clattering rumble.
And then the two men stood there, side by side, until the door was answered by Dutton himself.
Charles Dutton was a tall man, thin and perennially well dressed. His death mask was its usual shade of liver-disease yellow, and if he was showing more skin he would’ve been smiling broadly. He opened the door and spread his arms like a showman with a baton. “Gentlemen! Or, you two, as the case may be.”
Father Squid said, “I resemble that remark.”
“I know you do. Come on in. You’re not late, but you’re last. Everyone else is already upstairs in the sanctum sanctorum, making drinks and starting cigars.” He held the door ajar and kept his arms aloft, gesturing into the corridor with its long red carpet runner. “Come in, come in. And let the game begin.”
Leo and Father Squid followed Dutton up the stairs to the third floor, where the “sanctum sanctorum” was set up for entertaining. The detective suspected that the intimate, windowless room had once been a secondary dining area or maybe an inconvenient parlor. Regardless, it was now a place where Dutton brought his friends, shelved his liquor, and kept a felted table with seven seats and as many ashtrays.
Some years previously, someone (and no one seemed to remember who) had made a joke about the Tiffany-style lamps, the wood paneling, the smoke, and the hunkered shoulders … to the effect that their gathering looked like a black velvet painting of dogs playing poker. At the next gathering, Lucas Tate—that aficionado of all things masklike and mask-related—arrived wearing a bulldog mask and toting half a dozen more dog masks to be shared with the group.
Thus, the Black Velvet Society.
And thus the four seated men who raised amber-colored drinks or saluted with freshly lit cigars.
The greetings went around in a circle.
“Doctor” Hendrik Pretorius was not a real doctor, but he sat closest to the bar and doled out the medicine with a generous hand. Lean and permanently tan, the man’s silver beard shot to a tidy point, a shorter analog to his ponytail. Many cops couldn’t stand the sight of the old civil liberties lawyer. There were reasons. There were also reasons that Leo didn’t mind him. “Detective.” Dr. Pretorius waved with a decanter before leaning back in his chair and sliding the crystal bottle back into its slot on a shelf.
“Lawyer,” Leo replied. Another old joke. “Journalist,” he carried it a step farther, acknowledging Lucas Tate, editor of the Jokertown Cry with a halfhearted shot from a finger-gun.
Tate was seated, masked, and languid, as usual. The elongated skin tags that passed for his hair were drawn back away from his face. “Cop.” Tate nodded from within his St. Bernard mask, which he indicated with aplomb as he then said to Father Squid, “Picked this one for you, tonight. I was feeling … holy.”
The priest said, “Yes, I bet you were. Toss me a stogie, would you?”
“But of course.” Tate fished around in the box and made a selection.
Lieutenant Harvey Kant threw back a slug of whatever very expensive beverage he’d been handed, swallowed hard, and said, “Leo,” with a friendly address of his long, brown index finger. The rest of him was brown too, and decidedly reptilian. He looked rather uncannily like a burly lizard.
Lucas Tate said, “Catch,” and tossed the priest something that smelled Cuban.
Father Squid caught it with the snap of a tentacle and motioned for a light, which Dutton swooped in to provide. The priest said, “You boys sure know how to take care of a guy,” and he settled himself into one of the remaining seats, beside Chaos—who adjusted three of his six arms in order to be more accommodating.
“Oh, and uh … Sibyl,” Leo added quickly, spying the motionless blue woman standing unobtrusively naked in a corner. “Good to see you too,” he murmured.
Sibyl didn’t have a vocational descriptor like the rest of the players, but then again, she wasn’t playing—she only accompanied the lawyer, whose side she rarely left. “Ice Blue Sibyl,” everyone called her. She never called herself anything. She never spoke at all, and no one knew how much she understood except, perhaps, Dr. Pretorius. Leo wouldn’t have admitted she made him uncomfortable with her smooth, seamless skin and her perpetual silence. But he didn’t have to.
Leo shook the nearest hand Chaos offered him. “How’s it hanging?” he asked.
“Let me unfold it and I’ll check,” Chaos offered.
“I’ve heard that one. And for God’s sake, restrain yourself.” Leo used a cigar to distort one corner of his grin.
Chaos wiggled in order to better wedge himself into place, so that he could play without elbowing anyone on either side. “You’re the one who set me up, tossing off a line like that. Nobody’s fault but your own.”
“I was hoping for new material,” Leo told him.
Charles Dutton said, “You young lads—always daring to dream. Chaos hasn’t learned any new jokes since Nixon was in office.”
“In my defense,” said the six-armed man, “that man was a veritable oasis of humor.”
“If you say so.” Leo turned his attention to Dutton. “And who’re you calling ‘young’?”
“For a relative value of young,” their host clarified. “Look around you. What’s the median age here, you think? We ought to start calling ourselves the Social Security Society.”
More softly than he meant to, Leo said, “You know, they’re throwing me off the force in January, for being old. I guess it’s better this than the alternative.”
Chaos patted his shoulder and said, “All the same, it ain’t hardly fair.”
“Not remotely. Look at him—still a spring chick, I tell you,” insisted Dutton, doing his part to keep the mood light enough for cards. He approached the table and drew out his own seat, which was everyone’s signal to start. “So. Shall we?”
Chaos fidgeted, still trying to keep all his shoulders within his personal space. He asked, “Who’s dealing? Host?”
“Always,” declared Dutton, reaching for the pack of cards and tapping them out into his palm as neatly as a cigarette. “If you’d come around more often, you’d know that.”
“If you didn’t have Cosmos so often—”
Father Squid made a sound that cut him off. “None of that. This is a friendly game. You’re both welcome here. It’s not our fault you two can’t play nice.”
Chaos grumbled something under his breath, but he didn’t push his luck. Instead he asked, “What’re we playing? Hold ’em?”
Charles Dutton leaned forward and began to thumb a single card, facedown, around the circle. He said, “Christ, no. This is man-poker. Seven card, or nothing.”
“Got it.”
Another card made the rounds, this one faceup.
Leo picked up his offerings and shuffled them between his fingers until he liked the way they looked. Seven of clubs. Ace of diamonds. No matter which way he held them, he wasn’t thrilled, but he kept it to himself.
Dutton said, “All right,” and everyone threw in, starting small.
When Leo’s turn came up, he pulled out a George and tossed it on the pile. The next set of cards came around, and he added those to his hand, and added a few more bills to the pot. He still wasn’t liking the hand, and was paying too much attention to it when Dutton nudged him by saying, “Ante up, old man.”
“Sure. Sorry.”
But he escaped that round having lost less than ten bucks, and fared better on the third, wherein he picked up mint with a good old-fashioned dead man’s hand. He cackled at the money, and scooped his winnings closer to his chest.
“Time for a drink break. Or a refresher break,” Lucas Tate suggested, and they broke off briefly to address half-forgotten cigars and mostly empty glasses while Dutton shuffled, fiddled, and did a decent trick or two with the fresh, starchy cards.
Harvey Kant said, “You keep playing like that, and you won’t need that pension.”
And Leo replied, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Dr. Pretorius left his seat to go stand near the inscrutable Sibyl, and fixed himself a new beverage. No one offered Sibyl anything, not out of rudeness—but so far as anyone knew, she neither ate nor drank. Anything. She had a mouth, but Leo had never seen it open.
During the course of this break, the talk turned to work in general—and Fort Freak’s line of work in particular. “I’ve heard,” Father Squid said with a nod that jiggled his tentacles, “that the gangs are really up in arms.”
Harvey Kant agreed, but added, “Same old thing. Big, stupid game of ‘Who took my drugs?’ You’d think they’d try something else once in a while.”
Leo said, “At least we got all the goddamned naked people sorted out, if you’ll pardon my French, Father. But the thefts—scads of ’em, none of it related as far as we can tell. Except they must be.”
Head-shaking went around the table, along with new puffs of smoke from Lucas Tate’s cigar. But as they buckled down for another hand, Leo cleared his throat and said in the direction of Dr. Pretorius, “And then there’s that thing about the courthouse.”
Chaos said, “What, the fire? I heard that wasn’t a big deal.”
“It was an inconvenient deal for me,” Dr. Pretorius griped.
Leo said, “Yeah—it messed up the doctor’s plans for his students. And it dredged up some strange old things in the process.”
“Like what?” Dutton asked, but he didn’t pause from his down-card dealing to wait for a response.
“Like…” Leo reached forward when the faceup card came around. “You remember the Rathole, don’t you?” He didn’t get an immediate response, so he said, “All of us were old enough. It was a big deal.”
Dutton paused mid card delivery. “The restaurant? The murders? That was … twenty or thirty years ago.”
“Nineteen seventy-eight,” Leo said. “Right before Christmas. Some of the paperwork that survived the fire—it was from that case.” He did a little wave that meant yada yada yada and continued. “Anyway, it was something I hadn’t thought about. Not in years.”
“But you’re thinking about it now,” Father Squid delivered in his best, most detached-but-warm counseling voice.
Leo said, “It was my first bad one. Right after I made detective.” He gathered up Dutton’s next offerings.
Dutton delivered the rest of the cards, and the players delivered the rest of their bets in silence, until Father Squid said softly, “I remember the Rathole. My first church—the storefront—was right nearby. A girl named Lizzie worked there. She was one of the kindest people I ever knew.”
“The counter girl?” Leo asked.
“Yes. She died that night.”
“Her and a bunch of other people,” Lucas Tate said, and Leo could hear his frown through the St. Bernard mask. “The counter girl glowed, didn’t she?” he asked, but no one answered, so he kept talking. “Yeah, I remember the Rathole. It happened right after I came up from that assignment.”
“What assignment?” Leo asked.
Charles Dutton rolled his eyes; everyone could see it, even through the yellow death mask. “God, here we go.”
Lucas perked up significantly and said, “So you know I wrote this book, right?”
And everyone around the table groaned good-naturedly except for Leo, who knew about it same as everybody else. But he’d forgotten. “Paper Demon. You wrote that right after the Rathole?”
“Yes and no. I was out from undercover, but I’d just begun working on the book when the diner got shot up. My life with the gangs of Jokertown,” he mused, supplying the second part of Paper Demon’s title. “I was just getting used to hearing my own name again, instead of ‘Nimrod.’ Yeah, that’s what they called me. Man. It feels like a hundred years ago.”
The detective said, “Tell me about it.”
Though it’d only been a rhetorical response, Dr. Pretorius took him up on it. “I’ll tell you about it. I’ll tell you about a teenaged street joker who got railroaded for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit.”
“Did you represent him?” Leo asked. “I don’t remember.”
“He escaped before the trial. I never got a chance to defend him, only to file his paperwork.” The lawyer seemed to be restraining himself when he said quietly, “I was going to use his case in my class next semester. The kid couldn’t have done it.”
Lucas Tate spoke up, saying, “That’s a little hard to argue. I mean, he was holding a king’s ransom in drugs when they picked him up—and that was after he’d spent a week helping himself to the stash he took from the diner. Everybody knew that cook was dealing.”
“We never argued that point. But—”
It was Kant’s turn to object. “Christ, Storgman. I hope you’re not thinking of looking into that case again. No point wasting time and energy on a thirty-year-old crime. We got the guy, and now he’s dead. They’re all dead.”
Father Squid muttered, “We’re not.”
“Hey, Nimrod,” Leo said, wanting to steer away from the potential disagreement. “Come Monday, I’ll be swinging by the Cry. Will you be in?”
“I’ll be in,” he confirmed. “But I won’t answer to that anymore, Ramshead. Go ahead and come by my office, while you’re at it. We’ll talk about the bad old days, and I’ll slip you a copy of Paper Demon … in case you’ve somehow misplaced your own.”
Leo said, “Good idea. I think I might’ve … uh … lost my copy.”
Almost everyone laughed.
♣ ♦ ♠ ♥
Faith
by John Jos. Miller
Part 1.
SEPTEMBER, 2010
THE CATACOMBS UNDERNEATH OUR Lady of Perpetual Misery, the Church of Jesus Christ, Joker, were not as old as those beneath Rome nor as extensive as those under Jerusalem, but they sufficed. Their only entrance was through a trapdoor in the crypt’s floor. The trapdoor and permanent steel ladder had been installed during the tunnel’s earlier life as a conduit for since superseded electrical and telephone lines and the bundles of wires and pipes. Father Squid was thankful for the ladder. He was getting too old and, let’s face it, heavy, for unsecured stepladders.
When was the last time I’ve played handball with Rabbi Feldman down at the Y? he asked himself. Or done laps in the pool? I like doing laps in the pool.
Father Squid was a shade under six feet, but he was big. When he was what he fondly thought of as being in shape he weighed about two-seventy, but he’d passed the three-hundred-pound mark sometime past and he wasn’t looking back. He liked swimming because there was more than a little of the amphibian in him. His skin was thick, gray, and totally hairless. His round eyes were slightly protruding and covered by flickering, nictitating membranes. In place of a nose he had a cluster of dangling tentacles that covered his mouth like a constantly twitching mustache. His large hands had long, attenuated fingers and their palms had circular depressions—vestigial suckers—impressed all over them. He walked slowly, ponderously, making soft squishing sounds as he moved. He smelled faintly of the sea.
He sighed as he stood on the ladder’s bottom rung, catching his breath. The tunnel was cool and quiet, and dark. The priest stepped down onto the slightly uneven brick floor and reached up to find the cord that turned on the recently installed fluorescent light dangling from the ceiling. He flicked it on to reveal an ossuary with wooden racks placed against the tunnel walls containing piles of old, clean, neatly stacked bones. Father Squid looked at them and sighed again. So many gone over the years. So many lost and gone.
The racks held all that remained of the forgotten and unknown who’d been removed from the first Our Lady’s graveyard after they’d been forced to move when the church had been sold out from under Father Squid’s mortgage. The bones were sorted by type. Femurs, tibiae, humeri, skulls, and vertebrae stacked in neat piles. The strangely twisted and deformed abnormalities frequently found in joker skeletons were jumbled together in a separate bin. All the bones were naked of flesh but to Father Squid’s sensitive nasal tentacles they still smelled of loss, sadness, and death. He went to the bank of votive candles adjacent to the racks and lit half a dozen. He bowed his head in silent prayer for those who had no one to remember them and no one to mourn them but the priest and the old ladies of the Living Rosary Society who met in the catacombs once a month to tell their beads in prayer.
The additional candlelight faintly illuminated a little more of the silent catacomb. Farther down the tunnel were tombs and mausoleums, family and individual. Father Squid passed the mass crypt that held the remains of the victims of the arsonist’s fire that had destroyed the original Our Lady and killed a hundred worshippers. Beside the massive mausoleum was the stone coffin that contained Chrysalis’s remains. Once a year an offering of Amaretto and a dozen English roses was placed on it by a still-grieving devotee. Beyond that a dark niche held a single urn of ashes with the name Spector chiseled on its base that only Quasiman, the church’s sexton, ever dusted clean. Farther back was an unmarked but not unvisited wall crypt that held the twisted and deformed skeleton of a boy caught between two states of being. The skeleton had appeared mysteriously in Father Squid’s rectory one day, wrapped in a cloak with an unsigned note reading: “Came across this while privately previewing an estate sale. Since the prior owner has no more use for him, I thought you could finally put him to a proper rest.” Father Squid had removed the single sequined glove from the one human-shaped skeletal hand, and interred the bones quietly.
The priest waddled farther down the tunnel, taking a powerful flashlight from his cassock. This area hadn’t been electrified yet. He preferred it that way. This is where he came to perform his private acts of contrition. He visited the single tomb set in a wall niche several times a year, whenever overwhelming need drove him, whenever memories became too burdensome to bear alone.
Storgman’s revelations at the poker game had disturbed him greatly, recalling events from the past that he had thought well buried. He’d had a sleepless night. Morning had brought no surcease to his sorrow or his worry. He realized that it probably wouldn’t help much, but he had to talk things over with someone. Someone he had once loved greatly, and still did.
He stopped before the tomb and reached out his finely fingered hand and rested it gently on the small name plaque set into the wall. “Hello,” he said quietly. He bowed his head in prayer, but prayer could not dim his recollections of that terrible night.
DECEMBER, 1978
Father Squid sat at his desk in St. Andrew’s office, tired but satisfied at the tag end of a long night after a long and busy day. Finally, after a few months of uncertainty, things were starting to go well with his new assignment. The congregation, if not the other members of the parish hierarchy, were starting to accept him, starting to believe in him. He had, he thought, his idea of the pageant to thank for that.
He’d first come to St. Andrew’s in the summer, fresh out of seminary. In fact, he hadn’t even officially ended his study when he’d been shipped off to the Jokertown parish as part of a special program, an experimental outreach to this most peculiar community that wasn’t on any map, nor named in government documents, nor ever given official borders. What it had, in spades, was jokers. And what they had were problems, many of which the local parish could hardly comprehend, let alone resolve. When Father Coughlan, the head of the parish, whom Father Squid found to be a sincere but boozy old relict utterly unequipped to deal with the task of shepherding his malformed flock, had pled for help, someone had the bright idea to pluck Squid out of the seminary, slap a collar on him, and send him out among his fellow jokers. But, being jokers and naturally suspicious of all authority, the young priest had been unsure how to reach the parishioners. Until he had the idea for a Jokertown Christmas Pageant.
Father Squid wanted this to be a total community effort. He alternately cajoled and browbeat Dorian Wilde, Jokertown’s poet laureate, into writing and directing it. He tirelessly canvassed the neighborhood for volunteers to play the various roles in the pageant; the three Wise Men, Joseph, Mary, the shepherds, the angels, and, of course, the coveted position of baby Jesus himself. He quickly discovered that there is no mother alive, joker or not, who doesn’t believe that her child is suitably adorable to play an angel and that there is no businessman or community leader who doesn’t believe he’s a Wise Man.
The entire community got involved designing and constructing sets, making costumes, publicizing the pageant wide and far. St. Andrew’s was getting publicity outside Jokertown, which was all to the good. Wild card chic was all the rage, and Father Squid hoped to grab a bit of it, not for himself, but for the people of his parish. Even Father Coughlan was happy. Church attendance was up. More donations were coming into the coffers. All this had been achieved without more effort on Coughlan’s part and he was that much closer to his retirement and the small cottage in Ireland that he coveted.
Though all the work fell on Father Squid’s shoulders, he was young and energetic and enthusiastic. He worked long hours not only on the pageant but at the community center he’d started in a boarded-up old liquor store down the street from the church. Often, like tonight, he’d work all day and well into the night and then end his day by swinging by the Rathole and lingering over a cup or two of coffee.
Maybe, he reflected as he buttoned up his coat and left his office for the chilly December night, the idea of becoming a priest wasn’t so crazy after all. There were still problems he had to deal with, of course. Complications. Things he hadn’t planned on. But given the difficulties of his past life, these were all small potatoes. Faith, he told himself. Have faith, and it will all work out.
Father Squid was an easily recognizable figure. Many he passed on the still busy street greeted him. A few stopped to chat. It was part of his job, so he humored them all, though he was tired and really wanted to get inside someplace warm, get some even warmer coffee inside of himself, sit, and rest for a while and then walk her home with the dawn.
She was another miracle in his life. He was almost ashamed at the undeserved blessings he’d received lately. He’d come far from the St. Cabrini’s orphanage in Salem where he’d been abandoned as an infant by anonymous parents, almost certainly because his card had turned. He’d been lucky to have only drawn a joker, one that allowed him a relatively normal life. He’d been lucky at the orphanage too. The nuns had been good to him. The other kids didn’t even bully him, much, because either his natural heritage or the wild card had also given him the build of a baby bull. But St. Cabrini’s had never been a real home and of course they’d cut him loose when he turned eighteen. The years of drifting after that had opened his eyes to the ways of a world much crueler than that of the gentle nuns who’d taken care of him. For a while he thought he’d found a family of sorts when he’d been drafted into the army, but that proved to be more of a lunatic asylum than a home. After ’Nam there was more footless wandering until he’d joined the Twisted Fists. That had been the biggest mistake of his life
Father Squid was a block or so away from the Rathole when he realized something was wrong.
Police cars passed him, speeding down the street, sirens flashing, lights punching through the darkness as they slowed to breast the crowd blocking the road. The sidewalks were also overflowing with curious onlookers, though their ranks parted as Father Squid approached.
“Look, it’s that priest—”
“Father Squid. Someone must have called—”
“Thank God he’s here—”
“Oh, Father, it’s awful—”
Father Squid found himself suddenly immersed in a mad scene painted as if by an artist sunk in a nightmare of twisted bodies and deformed faces flashing in the strobing bursts thrown out by the police car’s pulsing lights. He advanced on stiff legs, his expression as suddenly frozen as his heart. Let it not be the Rathole, he prayed silently. He pressed on when he reached the yellow tape cordoning off the sidewalk in front of the diner. A uniformed cop came forward to stop him as he ducked under the crime scene tape.
“Hey you, you can’t go in there!”
Another cop recognized him. “Let him through. He’s a priest.”
“A priest?” The first cop looked astonished. He was a nat. All the cops were. Sergeant Mole was the only joker cop in the Jokertown Precinct, and they kept him down in the basement filed away out of sight, much like the records that he maintained. “Well, all right.” He turned to his partner as Father Squid, who had not slowed his inexorable pace, marched past with an unreadable expression on his face. “They’re sure making them weird-looking these days.” He shrugged. “Nobody in there needs a priest, anyway.”
If Father Squid heard, he gave no sign. His first prayer denied, he prayed again, Let it not be Lizzie.
He could smell the blood and death as he came through the front door. It was like ’Nam again. Or as if he were running with the Black Dog once more. The stink of death, like the blood, was everywhere. Crime scene techs and uniformed cops were swarming the tiny little diner with their cameras and their notebooks and their normal, brisk, unaffected faces. There were bodies. There was blood. There was, draped on the floor, Lizzie, still glowing faintly. Her skin was a pale, washed-out green.
“Hey, you!” someone shouted. “You can’t come in here.”
“He’s a priest.” The young cop who’d first vouched for him was standing by his shoulder.
A man came up to him. He was a few inches shorter than Father Squid and of moderate build, dark-haired, and young. “I’m Detective Storgman,” he said. “You are?”
“Father Squid.” He didn’t look at the man. He couldn’t take his eyes off Lizzie. He’d seen many bodies in his day, and he knew a corpse when he saw one. He was hardly aware that he spoke again. “What happened?”
“Looks like a robbery gone bad,” the young nat detective said. “Did you know anyone here?”
Father Squid still couldn’t take his eyes off Lizzie’s body. He wanted to, but he was afraid that he’d collapse if he moved so much as a single muscle. When he spoke again his voice was without inflection.
“Not for long enough,” he said. “Not nearly long enough.”
SEPTEMBER, 2010
That was how, Father Squid thought, it ended.
Partly, anyway. Because it really wasn’t over, not even now, over thirty years later.
The horror he’d found at the Rathole that night still haunted his dreams, and at times would even catch him unaware during his waking hours. He’d never stop paying for his role in the events that culminated in the killings.
He leaned like a sick man against the wall behind which Lizzie was entombed, then pushed himself erect and shambled back down the corridor and up the stairs, the tears drying on his cheeks before he gained the sunlight again.
♣ ♦ ♠ ♥
The Rat Race
Part 3.
WANDA ARRIVED PROMPTLY AT Leo’s desk, just as he was swiping up his keys, adjusting his hat, and reaching for his jacket. “Your timing’s great,” he told her.
“I never miss a date.”
“Is that what this is?”
She shrugged. “It’s a lunch date, anyway. And then a trip to the morgue—very romantic.”
“The newspaper morgue. And it was your idea.” He couldn’t keep the smile off his face. It wasn’t every day a pretty woman showed up at his desk, inviting herself into his lunch hour.
“And I appreciate you humoring me. Should we walk it or ride?” he asked.
With a glance down at her very high heels, Wanda said, “Let’s ride.”
“Works for me,” he said.
Just then his partner—a tall, pleasant-looking black man about half Leo’s age—dropped a stack of folders onto his own adjoining desk. “A ride to where?” he asked curiously, lifting an eyebrow at the sight of Wanda.
Before Leo could answer, Wanda said, “Oh, we’re just getting lunch and thinking about a cab. And you are.…?”
“Michael Stevens.” He nearly tripped over himself to make the introduction. “I’m Leo’s partner.”
“A new partner?” she asked, giving him an up-and-down appraisal usually reserved for show cats. Apparently the conclusions she drew were good, because she took Michael’s hand and shook it.
Leo answered, “Relatively new. Ralph retired back in 2000, and these days he’s laid up with lung cancer. Mike’s been with me since last year—after Ralph’s replacement transferred out to Seattle. Anyway, Mike, this is Wanda Moretti. She’s an old friend.”
“Moretti…” he repeated. “I think I’ve heard the name.”
“I used to spend a lot of time around the precinct,” she said, leaving a thousand hints and implications to flutter in the wind. “But that was a long time ago.” Then she turned to Leo and said, “I definitely like the look of him!”
“Um, thank you,” Michael said, and dark skin or no, Leo watched him redden. Wanda’d always had that effect on people. Twenty years hadn’t taken the edge off it; the decades had given her time to fine-tune it.
“Are you a family man?” she asked, her eyes flitting across his desk and spying a framed photo there.
He tracked her gaze and said, “Yes! I mean, yes. This”—he retrieved the photo and handed it to her—“is my … ah … my girlfriend and daughter. She’s a dancer. My girlfriend, I mean. Not … um … not the baby. Obviously.”
“What a lovely family,” Wanda said approvingly. Then she teased in a half whisper, “And it’s just as well. I’m old enough to be your mother.”
Michael rallied through his rising blush and said, “I don’t believe that for a moment!” with just a touch more chivalrous enthusiasm than an unembarrassed man would’ve mustered.
“Trust me, Sunshine,” she said. “I’ve got shoes older than you. But it’s nice of you to say so. Leo? Are we ready?”
“Yes, ma’am.” His coat was halfway zipped. He zipped it the rest of the way and told Michael, “Be back in a couple of hours. Got my phone if anything exciting happens.”
His partner said, “All right. Have fun. And, I … um. Nice to meet you, Ms. Moretti.”
“Likewise, I’m sure,” she told him, and falling into step beside Leo, the two of them left to flag down a cab.
Once Wanda was seated beside him and they were on their way, she said, “I do like him, you know. Your partner.”
“He’s an all right kid. Got too many brains for his own good, but I trust him. You wouldn’t know it at a glance, but he’s actually pretty tough for a goofy-looking nat. Tough and … young. Jesus. Was I ever that young?”
“Oh, yes. With a picture of your wife and kid on your desk and everything. I remember it well.” But this tiptoed too closely to uncomfortable territory, so she gracefully shifted gears. “Now this Michael—he’s another nat?”
“Yeah.”
They were both thinking about Ralph, so they discussed him for a while; and the trip to the High Hand was short enough that they didn’t need much else to talk about.
The restaurant itself was almost too high-end for lunch, but Leo wanted the hour to look good, and it did. The food was great, featuring a pair of aged steaks smothered in mushrooms and caramelized onions. The conversation was better. Photos came out of Wanda’s wallet and her three grandchildren were discussed, and real estate came up but only briefly. Leo told Wanda about some of the more peculiar cases he’d seen in the intervening years since last they’d spent any time together; he spilled about his daughter’s erratic love life and his own lack of grandkids. And when the check came Leo got it.
Down the street at the Cry offices, they were informed that Lucas Tate was in an unexpected meeting—but he’d left word at the front desk that Leo was welcome to make himself at home in the newspaper morgue and he’d be with him in an hour.
A rickety service elevator deposited Leo and Wanda in a subbasement lit with unsteady fluorescent lights covered with ill-fitting plastic shades. The main corridor was lined with doors—mostly glass ones, and mostly they were open. Signs beside the rooms announced MICROFILM MACHINES, SCANNED FILES, and READING ROOM. In these rooms were filing cabinets of the ordinary size; and a few doors back they found much larger metal cabinets, with drawers as wide as Leo’s desk.
The rooms were divided into decades, and the cabinets were divided into years. “1978–79” was penciled onto a piece of yellow paper and held in place upon one such drawer by a strip of Scotch tape gone brown with age.
Wanda reached for the drawer and braced herself, and drew it open slowly. “It happened around Christmas, right?”
“Just before it,” he confirmed.
Soon they found what they were looking for. The headline screamed loud, in font as big as the detective’s thumbs: “MASS SHOOTING AT RATHOLE DINER.”
They read in silence. And as the paragraphs brought the night back into focus, Leo’s memory filled in some of the missing gaps. It didn’t take his breath away, not this time. But it made him quiet all the same, restoring that dreadful sense of unease he’d almost forgotten.
In 1978 the Rathole was a mom-and-pop diner beyond the main drag of the Bowery, a couple of blocks down Grand Street. Open all night every night, it was one of those places that should’ve saved money and left the locks off the doors. It served the expected clientele, off the beaten path in a part of town most kindly described as “iffy.”
“Elizabeth Allison Wallace,” Leo read out loud. She’d been working the counter that night. “And she was pregnant—not very far along.” He remembered the girl lying on the cold tile floor behind the register, her phosphorescent skin still giving the shadowed nook a soft, lingering gleam like a low-watt bulb. When she was still alive, she’d hovered a couple of feet off the floor, whether she liked it or not. The neighborhood had called her “Glowworm” when it didn’t call her “Lizzie.” Nineteen years old, and taking classes to wrap up her GED. She’d had a boyfriend, somebody who was bad news. It was all coming back to him now.
Wanda asked, “Who?”
He only shook his head and pointed at the paper. “Donald Richard Reynolds. Went by The Drip. Joker with a face like a half-melted candle. Homeless, with a record. Vagrancy, petty theft, and bigger theft. He also had a daughter living with an ex-wife someplace, and we think he was driving a Mercedes that you can bet your sweet ass he didn’t own.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
He didn’t answer right away, but moved on to the next name. “Maddox Horatio Crowder. Called Hash. Looked a little like a big, beefy alien—with real tight gray skin and four extra eyes. Short-order cook with a sawed-off shotgun. He got into the fray, and got off a couple of shots.”
“What was he doing with a sawed-off?” Wanda wanted to know.
“In that neighborhood, back then? Everyone was packing. But he was packing heavy because he was dealing out the back door. Speed, pot, coke. You name it. Shotgun didn’t do him any good, though. By the time we got there, his stash was cleaned out and he was cooling off.”
She suggested, “Could’ve been a robbery gone bad.”
“Could’ve been. Even looked like it—and Deedle looked good for it. When we caught him, he was carrying what was left of Hash’s merchandise. The rest had gone up his nose or into his arm. Anyway, who else…?” His finger slid down the typeface, picking up old ink in a soft gray smudge. “Stella Michelle Nichols, yeah. Bareback, they called her, over at Freakers. She had a…” He made the universal man-sign for breasts, cupping his hands above his belly. “But on her back too. Worked second shift, showing ’em off. She’d been having problems with an overenthusiastic customer, someone who wanted to stuff more than dollar bills in her panties. But we never did pin him down. Never found her sister either. And then there was that last guy, there he is,” he said, stopping his finger again.
“Joel Eric Arnold,” Wanda read. “What was his story?”
“A nat, and I knew him, a little. Most of us knew who he was—he was a janitor at Fort Freak, working third shift. That night he was doing laundry around the corner, and he stepped in here for a cup of coffee. Talk about your shitty luck. I remember Ralph took a look at him and started swearing. He recognized him right away. It took me a minute.” After all, half the guy’s face had been blown off. Quietly he mused, “Five people, all shot to death in the middle of the night.”
“And no one saw a thing.” It wasn’t a question.
Leo said, “Actually, that’s not true. We got an anonymous tip, that’s how we found them so fast.” He hadn’t taken the call, but he’d heard the recording later—the frantic, blubbering terror of a man who refused to identify himself, saying only that they were dead at the Rathole, they were all dead. All of them, killed by a man wearing a hawk mask.
“You ever figure out who Mr. Anonymous was?”
“Nope. Never did. And unless he died between then and now, he’s out there still.” He continued tapping his gray fingertip on the old newsprint. “It looked cut-and-dried, Hash—that was the short-order cook, Maddox—had been dealing out the back door, but when we reached the scene, there wasn’t so much as a dusting of coke or weed, not anyplace. But there was a hell of a lot of food—like he’d been cooking for a small army right before he died. I mean, the kitchen was packed.” The memory of the smell was almost enough to make him woozy. A dozen fried eggs, burning down to charcoal on the stove. Stacks of pancakes heaped on a plate, with another round smoldering on the griddle, and the fryer full of chicken fingers and French fries—all of them cooking way too long, filling the room with the greasy, choking smell of kitchen smoke and ash. “And there was no money,” he concluded. “Deedle’d made off with that too. But he was scared shitless when he figured out who all that money belonged to.”
“The mob?”
“Uh-huh. He heard about it in holding, how the mafia higher-ups were wanting a word with him. You know how he escaped, right?”
“Refresh my memory,” she said.
“They were moving him to the courthouse from lockup, and the little bastard got his cuffed wrists in front of him. Bit off his own thumb.”
“Goddamn.”
“Slipped loose, kicked his way out the back door, and hit the street running.”
Wanda wrapped up the rest. “And turned up dead a week or two later.”
“You got it,” Leo said, though hearing the summary aloud jarred something else loose, another unpleasant fact that he hadn’t considered in decades. “He was beaten to a pulp, behind the old church building Squid was working on back then—turning it into Our Lady of Perpetual Misery. There wasn’t enough left of the kid to stuff a pita.”
She considered this, and scanned another paragraph on another page—from a follow-up story printed a few days after the original announcement. “Deedle had a Mercedes. Or he was driving a Mercedes, wasn’t he?”
Leo nodded. “Stolen. Restolen, actually—the one Don Reynolds had been driving. The kid must’ve taken it right off the curb. Probably thought it was his lucky day.”
“Is that what you think?” she asked, suddenly very serious.
Leo turned around so he could lean against the drawer and face the room, as if he were giving a lecture. Wanda listened. But he wasn’t looking at her while he talked.
“I think this dumbass kid wandered by the Rathole, saw an opportunity, and he took it. Things got out of hand, all those people died … but Deedle, he was thrilled silly because he’d scored enough money and enough drugs to keep him high for a year. I think he grabbed it and made a run for it—and maybe he wired the Mercedes, or maybe he saw Don’s keys lying in a pool of blood, I don’t remember how we found the car.”
He paused, and Wanda bit the edge of her lip as she held her breath. She asked, “What about the bird mask? Deedle was wearing a bird mask, wasn’t he? When they caught him?”
Leo grunted dismissively. “Back in the seventies masks were a dime a dozen and everybody wore one, more or less. The mask didn’t mean much. And if Dr. Pretorius had ever gotten a chance to take it in front of a jury, he’d have torn up that point.”
He stopped again, catching his breath or his memories.
And he continued, slower and more certain. “But someone out there, someone saw it—or saw the tail end of it. Someone who made a phone call.” He considered the newspapers and the burned transcripts.
They closed the drawers and went back up the elevator.
At the front desk, they learned that Lucas Tate had been unavoidably detained and that he would not be joining them after all; but he’d been kind enough to leave a copy of Paper Demon: My Life with the Gangs of Jokertown with a Post-it note on the cover, telling Leo, “Happy reading!”
♣ ♦ ♠ ♥
Snake Up Above
by David Anthony Durham
THE GUY FIDGETED CONSTANTLY. One second he leaned against the doorjamb smoking a cigarette, the next he paced the sidewalk, and then he sat on the steps flicking his lighter open and closed. The only time he seemed to stand still was when ushering a new customer inside the town house or when wishing a departing one a good evening. When he had to send an unwanted patron on his way, he did so with a weird barrage of quick movements, dancing around the guy, not really doing any damage, but untouchable and freaking annoying.
Looking down from a fire-escape landing four stories above, Marcus Morgan yawned and stretched his neck. He’d been up here for several hours, wasting the humid night away, watching the sporadic procession of the malformed and bizarre as they went inside the ramshackle town house. He’d come across the place during his nightly wanderings and figured out pretty quickly what sort of establishment the place was. A brothel. The kind of place the cops would be grateful to him for pointing out.
He’d settled down thinking he’d just gather some information, identify some customers, private eye like. He’d snitch the place out. He wasn’t sure what he’d get in return. Some praise. A pat on the back. Maybe make it a regular thing, doing a little bit of good in this place.
For that matter, it would just be good to have a reason to connect with some people, make some friends. He didn’t want to be sulking around alone, but since arriving in New York a couple of weeks earlier he’d been wary to interact much with others in the city. There had been that kid who started following him yesterday. The joker’s mouth was crowded with teeth, all pressed together and crooked. He was nice enough and talked a mile a minute, but Marcus ditched him. What sort of friend could he be? Better to get in with the cops.
That, at least, was what he intended when he began his surveillance. But watching the johns exit twenty or thirty minutes after they entered he wasn’t so sure. They looked just as monstrous, but they were also more relaxed. More at peace with the world, looking like they’d just had a breakthrough at a really good therapist’s …
“Hey, you!” It was the sketchy guy from the brothel, looking up from below Marcus. “You slithery fuck. What, you think I can’t see you?”
Marcus pulled his coils in closer, trying to get them into shadow.
“No use hiding now. You been spotted. Bull’s-eye. Pow! Shot dead. Come down. Let me get a look at ya.”
Marcus hesitated a moment and then slipped through the opening in the landing and descended the metal stairs. He went headfirst. His arms helped him on, the long stretch of the rest of his body flexing against the steel as it slithered audibly across the rusted structure. He took the gap from the lowest landing to the ground at speed, curving his torso up just before he would’ve touched the asphalt. The rest of his body flowed down around him.
And there he was, in full view under the harsh spotlight above the brothel’s entrance. Marcus’s torso and arms were those of a well-muscled eighteen-year-old African-American kid. Normal enough. But beneath his belly button his body was that of a snake; thick, muscular, scaled in a vibrant pattern of yellow and red and black stripes. His snake portion stretched about twenty feet. He’d only been this way about a month and still found his reptilian length more embarrassing than anything else.
The sketchy guy stroked a sparse beard and studied Marcus, green eyes wide. He had letters tattooed on his knuckles, but he moved his hands too fast for Marcus to read them. He looked kinda familiar. “Jesus,” he said, “the snake man cometh!” The guy vanished and reappeared right beside Marcus. He tweaked his bicep and then zipped away. “Strong kid, huh? Like them muscles? Work out?”
Marcus shrugged. He had never been particularly strong before, but he had to admit that his chest and shoulders had thickened. The muscles in his arms cut contours he had only dreamed of a few months ago. His back flared and his abs were chiseled into neat compartments.
The guy pressed in near him. “You looking for a taste of … tail? I could probably arrange something. I got a girl—you’re into girls, right?—that could handle your length, big guy like you.”
“You have somebody like me in there?”
The guy popped his knuckles and flicked his gaze down Marcus’s serpentine body. “Not exactly. She doesn’t need to be ‘like’ you, if you know what I mean.”
Marcus didn’t.
“You got cash?”
Marcus shook his head.
“You must have a bill or two, tucked up safe behind a scale or something.”
“I don’t,” Marcus began. “I’m not here for … I was just…”
Whatever denial he was trying to fish up proved unnecessary. A commotion inside snapped the guy’s attention away. An angry female voice shouted, “Give me a break here. Spasm! Spaasssmmmm!?”
“Cripes,” the guy said. “Not again. Stay here. Don’t let anybody in until I’m back.” He zipped inside.
Marcus stood a moment, alone on the street. People and cars passed on First Street. Somebody was looking through the garbage cans half a block away, but nobody approached him. What would he do if they did? Was he working? Unsure, he twisted around to face the street, arms folded and looking quite a bit more menacing than he knew.
A moment later a young man stomped out, a white guy, looking like a frat boy with his tousled blond hair. Behind him came a woman. She looked like a nat, pretty and dark-skinned, wearing a short nightgown she had clamped in place beneath an arm. “Spasm,” she said, “did you not hear me shouting, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah! I’m gonna, gonna, gonna…’” The temporary look of rapture with which she said these words disappeared. “What part of that didn’t you hear? When I say that, you give the john an orgasm. Quick as possible. That’s your tiny little part in this. It is your one talent.”
“Look,” Spasm said, “I’m sorry, Minal. It’s got nothing to do with you—”
“I know that!” she snapped. “Master of stating the obvious…”
As she set her hands on her hips, her gown flapped open, revealing a torso covered in small, tentaclelike things. There might have been hundreds of them, all of them wriggling as if they had minds of their own. They looked so soft, delicate, like nipples, but nimbler than tongues, each of them dancing sensuous invitations. Marcus shifted his torso back a bit, pulling coils around in front of him. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the prostitute. Man, he wanted to touch them, to feel them under his palm and caressing the side of his face. A weird pressure throbbed against a portion of his scales. Whatever was down there, it wasn’t like the type of erections he used to get.
Spasm shook his head, exhaled, glanced at the fidgety guy. “Twitch, this is freaking me out, bro. I didn’t think it would matter, but each time I go to make the guy come I can’t help thinking about … you know … boils and flippers and”—as if of their own accord, his eyes darted to Marcus—“slithery things. Half these guys don’t even have the right parts in the right places.”
“That’s the point, Spaz,” Twitch said. “You and Minal can take all comers. You can serve Jokertown’s sexually challenged population. Think of the untapped clientele!”
“That’s the problem,” Spasm protested. “I can’t help but think too much. I thought joker sex would give me a rise, but there are better ways to make a buck. Dude, I could be working Vegas or something.”
“You couldn’t handle Vegas,” Minal spat. “I should be working Vegas!” She stepped back inside and slammed the door.
Suddenly Marcus recognized both men. Spasm and … Twitch. From … “American Hero,” he said. “You guys were on American Hero! The first season. I watched the whole thing. You…” As quickly as his enthusiasm came on him, it morphed to perplexity. “What happened? You guys were famous.”
Both men looked at him, annoyed. Twitch wiped a line of drool from the corner of his mouth. Spasm said, “Shit happens, dude. A half-snake black kid should know that.” He started walking away.
Twitch pestered Spasm all the way to the end of the block, snapping in front of him again and again. Until he got tired of that and resorted to tripping him, pulling his shirt up over his head, tying his shoelaces together.
Marcus uncrossed his arms. “Hey, Twitch, you still … need me?”
Twitch appeared in front of him. “Need you? What I need is a new way to make a living. I need a break. Nothing’s been going right lately.” He paused a moment. “Hey, what’s your name, kid?”
“Marcus.”
“Marcus, my man. Marcus, you ever think of using that tail of yours for something?”
Sliding back slightly, Marcus asked, “Like what?”
“Like … doing some high-rise work. Snake burglary. Slither yourself into a penthouse. They got shit just lying around there. Stuff they don’t need—not as bad as you and I need it, at least. We could partner on it. Make a stack of bills in no time.”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m not a crook.”
Twitch pulled a face. “Nah, but you can evolve,” he said. “Give it time. Tell you what, you change your mind, come on back and find me.” He snapped away again.
♠
A couple of hours later, Marcus slithered through dockside crates, containers, and nautical debris. He stood for a while looking over the Hudson. Beyond its glistening blackness the stark geometries of apartment buildings loomed, many already twinkling awake to face the coming day. Imagining the regular families living in them made him physically sick in the stomach.
Wrapping the tip of his tail around the nearest beam, he flowed over the edge and down the wall of cluttered cement and steel and tar-plastered wooden supports beneath him. He found the handholds he already knew by heart. A few seconds later he swung his body into a cavelike slot that ran back underneath the docks. He couldn’t tell what it had ever been for, but it certainly wasn’t in use anymore.
Marcus coiled up on a rug and leaned back against a soiled beanbag. He tugged his MacBook close. He flipped it open and looked at his face on the display screen. That was all he was going to see. During his first few days in New York, when it still had power, he’d stared at the collage of photos on the computer’s screen saver: family shots, their vacation in Jamaica, photos of snakes and lizards, a few sports stars thrown in, a head shot of Mos Def looking deeply introspective, and more than a few screens of Alicia Keys. He just had to imagine them now.
Problem was that it was all too easy for him to imagine things about his life before his card turned. In his dreams he had it all back again. He’d be at home in Maryland, driving his new Versa through his old neighborhood in North Baltimore, a semisuburban community that stretched out toward the county line. Kids he knew played on their lawns. Folks waved as he passed. He slowed going by Tish Reynolds’s house, just in case she happened to be out … Or he’d be struggling to get a word in at the dinner table as his brother talked basketball, and his sister gossiped about what Kelly Gaines’s sister Michelle did when she found Monique Packer’s iPhone and figured it was payback time, and his mom dished out complete meals even though she’d just gotten home from work, and his dad took it all in, his ownership of all of them resting in the curve of his lips.
In some ways they were the Huxtables. Dad a gynecological surgeon. Mom a therapist. Theirs was a prosperous mixed neighborhood, but their family friends tended to be upwardly mobile African-Americans, doctors and professors, a politician or two. In their house it wasn’t about being equal to whites and having the same privileges. It was about having the same privileges and being a bit better, deserving them a bit more, protecting their status and carefully shaping the direction of their children’s lives.
And it was all crap, Marcus now believed. The Huxtables didn’t do well with change, with acceptance, with a joker in the family.
Okay, about the only part of what happened that he did admit was his fault was that it was his stupid idea to get Baby Girl. Since his mom was allergic to anything furry, he’d kept fish and lizards, and finally snakes as pets. Quiet and calm. Slim and beautiful and dead-eyed: he liked snakes the best. Garters got old pretty quick, though. His milk snake wasn’t much different. The golden boa he bought with an entire Christmas season’s gift money was crazy cool, but when a guy that got fired from Lamont Got Lizards! told him he could score him a coral snake, Marcus didn’t even ask how or why or concern himself with legality.
He called her Baby Girl. For weeks he kept her hidden in one of the basement tanks. He stared for hours at her rings and her eyes. Only gradually did he ease a gloved hand into the tank, so, so gently, not even touching her at first but just being there near her. When he finally got up the courage to pick her up his heart thumped wildly in his chest. The feeling of danger and trust and deadly power afterward left him sated and dreamy.
All totally awesome, until the day he held her near to his face, feeling sure she loved him as much as he did her. She kept licking the air with her tongue. So—thinking snaky thoughts himself—he stuck out his own tongue. Baby Girl didn’t hesitate. She opened her mouth and bit the tip of the proffered tongue. He fell unconscious knowing something serious had just happened.
When he awoke his mother was standing over him, her face ashen above a hospital mask. Still, relief flooded him. He was in the hospital. He’d been bitten by a coral snake and lived! If he was waking in the hospital he must be all right.
But then he realized they were in his bedroom. His father’s back was to him. He had on his smock and mask, and when he turned he held a curving sliver of surgical steel that looked positively demented. Marcus tried to shout, but his tongue felt strange.
His mother slipped some sort of mask over his face. She said something comforting, but her eyes betrayed disgust. He followed the flick of her gaze and took in the scaled horror that was his body below the waist. It spilled off the bed and trailed across the floor and over his desk, pulsing like a living creature that he was no part of. But he was a part of it. It was him! He knew, even through the haze the gas mask started to induce, what his father planned to do with that scalpel.
As the surgeon moved in, Marcus’s arm flew up from under the covers. He slapped his father across his lower jaw. The scalpel flew into the air. His mother screamed. Again, he tried to speak, but his father was scrabbling for another instrument, and his mother was climbing the wall to get away from him. Marcus rolled off the bed, his lower body all muscle, seething with power, pumped full of adrenaline. His father had another scalpel in hand now, but his intent looked more like murder than surgery.
Marcus didn’t plan what happened next. His tongue shot out of his mouth. It stretched incredibly long and punched his father right between the eyes, snapping his head back. Worse still, he’d put anger in the strike. He put poison in it. He felt a sharp joy in the taste of it and in the sight of his father going down.
The Cosby Show had never been like this.
♦
Asmodeus wore pin-striped trousers and suspenders over a sleeveless white undershirt, which was moist with sweat down the front and under the armpits. A riot of acne wrapped his jawline like a red beard. Short horns ringed his head in a jagged crown. A heavy inverted cross hung from a thick silver chain on his neck, and curving barbs—like metallic thorns—pierced through his earlobes and cartilage.
For all this there was something comforting about his face when he smiled and said, “Welcome, young truth seekers.” He considered them a moment, looking one to another as if he were measuring them up. “Young ass-kicking warriors.”
Marcus lifted his chin, squared his shoulders. He stood as his father had told him military men do, proud and disciplined. A few hours ago he hadn’t even heard of this guy. He’d been snaking through the Bowery, trying to pretend he wasn’t keeping an eye out for a Dumpster to dive. That kid had found him again, the one that had too many teeth. Marcus stayed close-lipped at first, little more than grunting answers as the guy stuck to his side.
The kid followed Marcus around as if he had nothing better to do, talking the whole time. At first he seemed to be rambling with no direction, but after a while he began mentioning Asmodeus again and again. The things he did for young jokers were fucking straight. Taking them in. Schooling them about fighting and shit. Hooking them up with whatever they wanted. Getting them laid. Getting them strapped. Whatever. He was a fucking Demon Prince! He knew Lucifer personally.
Marcus had no idea what a Demon Prince was and wasn’t convinced knowing Lucifer was something to brag about. Still, when he realized the kid was leading him toward this Asmodeus, he didn’t fight it.
That’s why he was standing at attention before the crown-headed joker. He was one of a group of ten, most of them young, all of them jokers. There were two scrawny brothers, thin and dark like urchins of some Indian slum, both of them with a third eye on their foreheads. Another guy kept pulling things that looked like jelly beans out of his nose. A muscle-bound man stood at the edge of the group. It was hard to say that he was definitely a joker. He might just have been one of those sicko bodybuilders, but Marcus couldn’t help thinking he had more muscles in more places than any nat should have. Another looked perfectly normal but had breath so foul when he grunted a hello that Marcus nearly passed out.
“Look at you,” Asmodeus said. He didn’t give any sign that he saw anything but good things in each of them. “Each of you a warrior awaiting a cause. Each of you cast adrift by the cruelties of the nat-dominated world. Am I lying? Tell me that every shit-fucked thing you’ve suffered wasn’t inflicted upon you by a nat. A friend, maybe. A sibling. Parents even. Parents! And they call us unnatural. What’s more unnatural than turning out their own children?”
The joker wasn’t looking at him when he said that, but it grabbed Marcus like it was intended for only him. His parents had turned him out after their thwarted surgery attempt. His father wasn’t hurt that bad, but they’d accused him of attempted murder. Even called the police on him. That’s when he fled.
“Yeah,” the man said, “I know where you been. Question is—where you going now? And you going alone? Or you going with brothers who got your back? Cops will shoot us in the back for loose change. That’s what we’re worth to them. Seems to me we all need brothers in a time like this, in a city like J-Town. And then the question becomes—what does it take to become a brother?”
The guy had a lot of questions. He didn’t exactly answer them, but Marcus believed he was working toward it. That why he was still with Asmodeus and the others two hours later, frying beneath the late summer sun and looking down from the rooftop of a tenement building. The space below them had that run-down look typical of abandoned lots. Litter-strewn dirt and clumps of grass, debris. An old bathtub and a stack of railroad ties. That was all normal enough. What wasn’t was that a swimming pool occupied the center of the lot. It was figure eight of glass blue, as pure-looking as an Alpine lake.
“Look closely, friends,” Asmodeus said. “Behold Werewolves at rest.”
Marcus swallowed, partially because he was parched, partially because among the dozen or so jokers lounging on the wooden decking around the pool or bobbing in that amazing water was a girl in a white bathing suit. From a distance she looked kinda like Tish Reynolds. There was something on her face, but he couldn’t quite make it out.
“That’s not a pool,” one of the twins said. “It’s a couple of Dumpsters filled with water, with a deck built around it.”
“Yes,” Asmodeus confirmed. “You see, even they—deep down—believe they are trash. Instead of being ashamed of it they thrive, flaunt it. There is no end to their arrogance.” After a moment he added, “Unless we put an end to it.”
It wasn’t the jokers who were out of touch with the workings of the world, he said. It was the nats and those who supported them. It was they who hadn’t kept up with the changes the wild card had wrought, an evolution that could never be erased or denied, no matter how much they tried. Some who were brave enough—like the Demon Princes—had fought to protect jokers, to carve out turf and keep it all joker. Why not? Was it so much to ask that they have one place in America that they could feel proudly joker in?
Marcus hadn’t thought of it that way before. Being proudly joker. But why not? The shame and confusion and self-hatred and wishing for the past: he could shake all of that off and simply be himself. It seemed perfectly reasonable when Asmodeus explained it. And intoxicatingly attractive, like the girl in the pool.
Marcus couldn’t take his eyes off her. Such grace in the way she hung with her arms stretched out on the deck behind her, kicking her legs before her. Yeah, Tish definitely had a suit like that. It was the main reason he spent so much of last summer at the municipal pool, watching her, working up the courage for the few short conversations he had with her. Tish Reynolds … She’d never know how much he’d thought and dreamed and fantasized about her. He hadn’t even said good-bye to her. She’d never seen him like he was now.
Someone pointed out that the Werewolves in the Dumpster were jokers themselves. “Yes, they are,” Asmodeus said. “They call themselves Werewolves, but they wear masks to cover their faces. Look at them! Each and every one of them so ashamed of themselves that they’d rather pretend to be nats than show the world their real faces.”
Oh, that’s what was on the girl’s face, and on all their faces: masks.
“Someone should teach them a lesson,” Asmodeus said. “Someone should have the guts to go in swinging.”
♥
They came out of the night like commandos in some video game. For a few moments Marcus felt the pure macho adrenaline testosterone buzz of intentional, surprise brutality. They were the shit. The stunned, dumb-ass-looking Werewolves who looked at them as they roared into the lot were proof of it. Marcus had never been a violent person, but if violence was what it took to make it on his own he was up for it. These Werewolves deserved it. Asmodeus was watching them from above, and Marcus and the others had psyched themselves into putting on the best show they could.
It started beautifully. He didn’t even use the ladder. He just surged up and over the railing. Bare-chested, his arms out to either side, he came in swinging. He clocked one Werewolf across the temple, laying him out on the deck. Another he missed with his first strike. He twisted his snake portion right around, bringing the same fist back to smash the masked face he’d missed only a second before. He surged toward the next guy, his tail moving him with power and speed he’d never known he had. The guy drew a knife, but Marcus tagged him with his tongue and then slapped him over the railing with his tail. That felt good.
The fight went on down below also, among the lawn chairs and folding tables set up for the evening’s festivities. The overly muscled guy had a brute of a Werewolf down and was whaling on him with everything he had. The twins knocked a chest crowded with forty ouncers over, started picking up malt liquor flavored shards of glass and hurling them at Werewolves with ferocious speed. The guy with the bad breath made good use of it, facing his opponents with his mouth gaping, blowing his stench and attacking when they cringed away from it. One of the Werewolves down on the lot pulled a gun and started firing wildly. He got the muscle-bound guy in the shoulder, and might have hit one of the twins. Marcus wasn’t sure because both of them darted around like they had springs on their feet.
Marcus realized he and the girl in the white bathing suit—wearing a robe over it now—were alone on the deck. Thing is, she wasn’t lounging invitingly on an air mattress—as he’d fantasized she would be when he arrived. She didn’t look up at him with a mixture of fear and excitement, a captive among brutes and he her scaled savior. No, instead she stood with her legs set firmly. Her silk robe flowed about her, her mask the same innocuous nat face as the other werewolves. One hand waved a knife; the other was cocked back with an elongated middle finger standing upright like a thin, angry soldier. Not the reception Marcus had hoped for at all.
“Hey,” Marcus began. “Ah…”
“Fucking Demon!” the girl said. She rushed him, slashing the knife in front of her in a furious pattern.
“Wait,” Marcus said. “We don’t have to…” That’s as far as he could get before defending himself. He snapped his tail out to intercept her, just under the knife’s arc, and clipped the girl’s legs. He lifted her as she tumbled over and swatted her out into the pool as gently as he could manage. “Sorry,” he said as she went under.
Just then a new player arrived. Marcus noticed him because he came from the alley behind the girl. He strode in without the slightest hesitation at entering the fray. Marcus tried to ignore him, intent as he was on turning around his prospects with the girl, but something about the way the guy moved pulled his eyes away from her.
The new arrival was large, cloaked in a heavy, hooded jacket, face covered by a fencing mask. He was incredibly fast, but his strides weren’t uniform. He seemed to sprint and hobble and amble, convulse and trip and recover all at the same time. Each step looked like it might send him crashing down, and yet instead each step propelled him forward in great leaps.
“No way,” Marcus said, recognizing the notorious joker. “Oddity?”
Marcus forgot all about the girl and turned to watch as Oddity collided with the brawling gang members in the lot. For a moment it wasn’t clear what the jokers within that one body were trying to do. They slammed a gloved hand down on a Werewolf’s head and pulled him back from the Demon Prince he was beating down. Then they leaped forward and smashed a closed fist into the chest of the guy with jelly beans in his nose. He flew back from the blow and skittered to halt in a heap, looking broken in the way of a rag doll.
The Werewolf with the gun began firing at them, but only got two shots off before he ran out of bullets. Both missed. Oddity caught him by the ankle as he began to run and flung him across the lot. He screamed until he smashed into the edge of the building. That silenced him. But the action seemed only to enrage Oddity.
It was an incredible, horrible, fascinating thing to watch. The body hidden in that cloak shifted and trembled. The arms and legs were mismatched, torso bulging, shapes pushing against the fabric, looking like limbs and faces trying to burst through. The masked head groaned and ranted. Sometimes it snapped back to bellow into the sky as if in agony. But despite all that, they managed to inflict incredible damage. They were fast, unpredictable in movement, changing direction and target seemingly at random. They threw their fists around like mallets. Grasped and snapped arms and legs with crushing force.
The muscle-bound Demon Prince wannabe managed to leap onto Oddity’s back. He yanked off the mask and drew back his bulging arm to smash the unprotected face. That’s as far as he got. Oddity reached back with both hands, grabbed the guy, and slammed him down with all the force they could muster. The guy hit the pavement on his back and instantly went limp. He stayed that way as Oddity lifted and smashed him down several more times.
Marcus suddenly felt sick to the stomach. He wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. That’s why he was staring right at them when Oddity looked up at him. Marcus found their eyes, set lopsided among a bubbling stew of features. Their nose and mouth shifted, twisted, changing shape and character constantly. Ripples tore through their flesh as if an unseen knife were slicing through it, with an equally unseen needle sewing the gaping tissue closed a moment later. It wasn’t just the horror of the faces that most transfixed Marcus, though. It was confusion in the eyes, the animus in one and—somehow—the piteous compassion in the other. At least, that’s how Marcus read them in the brief moment their gaze held. Then it was over.
Oddity cocked their head, listened to something, and then snatched up the mask and bounded away, leaving a battlefield of destruction behind. Bodies strewn about, low moaning, chairs and glass shattered along with heads and bones. Marcus cast around for the girl, feeling he’d like to say something to her. But she was gone too.
He heard the sirens at just about the same time he saw the flashing lights, which was fast on the moment Fort Freak’s Finest roared in. Marcus flowed over the railing. He hit the lot and zigzagged through the debris and broken bodies, heading for the nearest alley. What met him there caused him to recoil, almost knotting himself up as he did the serpentine equivalent of backpedaling.
A demon lumbered from the alley. Behind him the discordant chaos of police lights cast it in silhouette, making him a hulking shape, two massive horns curving up from a boulder of a head. When he strode into the light the sight of him was even worse. As furry as any grizzly bear, with the fanged snout of something else, he came in growling. He walked hunched over. His long arms trailed the ground, claws scraping across the asphalt as if he were sharpening them. For a moment Marcus thought he was another vigilante like Oddity, but he wore what must have been a custom-made flack vest squeezed around his torso. A beat cop’s hat—ridiculously small—nestled on his head, framed by those horns.
“Hey now, party’s over!” he said. He had a smooth voice, funked-out and honey-rich, like Isaac Hayes on Black Moses. “Let’s have some order up in here.”
Guy must weigh six hundred pounds! That was a few hundred more than Marcus wanted to tangle with. He put his slither in reverse and darted for another exit.
Two more cops awaited him there: an older guy holding something in hand, smiling like he knew a joke and was dying to tell it, and a small woman who looked mixed race, kind of Asian and kind of black. The woman spoke with a lilting accent. “We gonna go easy, Snaky-Man?”
“Sure. You get out of my way and things will be real easy.” Marcus set his course, ready to smash through and over them.
The woman fell forward abruptly.
“What the…”
She stood on her hands, and her legs twisted about in a sudden blur. She kicked Marcus in the face. Hard. Twice. He swung for her, but she wasn’t there. She was on her feet again, spinning low to slam another kick into his abdomen. He grabbed for her, but she fell backward, caught herself in a bridge, twisted away and came up with her pistol in hand.
The white cop also had a weapon fixed on him, a beam of red light targeted on his chest. It wasn’t a gun, but he held it like it was. “Give me a reason, kid,” he said. “Blink or something. Breathe heavy, how about that?”
Marcus could feel his tongue rock hard in his mouth, ready to dart out if he let it. But these were the police. He wasn’t ready to cross that line. He’d have some explaining to do, but he had to call it quits.
Speaking to the other cop, the white cop said, “That was that Brazilian shit again, wasn’t it? You’re too much show, Tang. Too much show. Watch and learn.” He turned back to Marcus. He smiled, though his voice grew suddenly alarmed in a manner that didn’t sit right with the pleasure on his features. “Wait? What’d you just say? That a threat? I can’t have you threatening…”
Before he finished the sentence, darts shot out of the weapon, punched Marcus in the chest, and sent every inch of him into a spasming world of hurt. Marcus went down hard, screaming.
♣
Marcus spent a few hours in the dank little holding room, having pushed the chair offered him aside and coiled himself into a seat of his own. He’d had an entire speech prepared pretty quickly, but as the minutes ticked by he increasingly focused on the cold seeping up from the concrete floor. When his public defender finally arrived all he said was, “I didn’t do anything.”
“Ah…” the man said, slapping a briefcase awkwardly onto the desk between them. “I believe you. What amazes me is that Jokertown’s law officers always manage to pinch the wrong guy. It’s an incredible record. Statistically out of this world.”
Marcus thought the guy meant to be funny, but his delivery was flat. It remained so when he said, “Name’s Charles Santiago Herriman. You may hear someone refer to me as Flipper. You shouldn’t but … it might happen. I’m just saying that’s me, Flipper.” He lifted his arms, but not enough for Marcus to verify whether the name referred to a deformity in them. He didn’t offer a hand to shake. He looked more like a goth kid than an attorney, tallish and rail-thin, with skin that suggested olive but somehow looked pale and brown hair that hung limp around his face. “As you may have guessed, I’m your public defender.” By the sigh that accompanied this, it didn’t exactly sound like good news.
“They Tasered me,” Marcus said.
“Yeah, I heard. You shouldn’t have fought them.”
“I didn’t fight them! I was just standing there!”
The lawyer didn’t dispute this. “You still feeling the effects?”
“I’m sore.” Marcus rubbed his chest. “Feel a little … weird. Has anyone come to bail me out?”
“Anyone like who?”
Asmodeus, Marcus almost said, but caught himself. “Just anybody.”
“No. All you got is me.”
“You gonna get me out?”
“Sure. Like you said, you didn’t do anything. The boys in blue dragged their feet a bit in getting me in here. They ran a check on you and didn’t come up with any priors. Seems you’ve lived a virtuous life. Wasn’t what they were expecting.”
Maybe his parents hadn’t really called the police. Or maybe they hadn’t checked as far as Baltimore yet. “I didn’t do anything,” Marcus repeated.
“Well, that’s the thing,” Flipper said. Marcus had forgotten his real name already. “There’s a police report here that says you were involved in gang violence, assaulted an officer.…”
“I did not!”
“Take it easy. The cops don’t want you. Not really. What they want is information. They need a full report on Oddity, when they showed up, what they said, did, et cetera. They want to know everything you know about what the Demon Princes are up to. They want the goods on Asmodeus, something they can get warrants on. They want to take him down, and then go a step higher. You help them do that and they’ll make things easy on you.”
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