Jokers Wild

Chapter Eleven

4:00 p.m.

Electrochemical neutral responses diminished, body slowed to a dreamlike slow motion, the alligator moved among the tunnels deep below the Bowery. The reptile brain wasn't aware of it, but he was moving vaguely in the direction of Stuyvesant Square. The creature that only sometimes was Jack Robicheaux sought food, wide-nostriled snout casting from side to side as he sought to sense the location of a particularly delectable morsel. The morsel had dark brown eyes and glossy black hair. The alligator's mind fixed on that image.

The creature padded through pools of cold radiance shed by the low-wattage trouble lights fixed to the tunnel walls. The sort of maintenance crew Jack Robicheaux sometimes bossed had presumably left the system on, despite not planning to return to work until after the holiday weekend. The city would foot the electricity bill. No one cared.

The alligator turned a corner and entered a much older section of passage. The floor was slab stone rather than concrete. The ceiling lowered. The creature felt the welcome in crease of humidity as his feet plopped down now in brackish pools.

His unblinking eyes passed incuriously across years of graffiti vandals had scrawled and spray-painted on the stone walls. Near a narrow branching tunnel, someone with considerable time had incised letters in the rock: CROATOAN.

The alligator didn't care. He responded only to his basic drives and forged ahead against the awful inertia that tugged him back at every step. Hunger. Still so hungry… So needful.

The dark shallow water now covered the entire passageway. The alligator welcomed it, hoping on a primal level that the level would deepen until the reptile could start to swim. The powerful tail switched slowly with anticipation. His ears detected unfamiliar sounds and he halted jerkily. Prey? He wasn't sure. Anything could be prey ordinarily, but there was something about the noises… He heard the scrabbling of a multitude of claws on stone, a hissing sibilance of almost-voices.

They came upon him from around the next bend. There were at least two dozen of them, most tiny, as small as the webspan of his foot. Others were larger, and a few, the leaders, perhaps a quarter the size of his twelve-foot bulk.

The larger alligator slowly opened his jaws and bellowed a challenge.

The smaller reptiles stopped in a semicircle around him, their eyes glittering in the trouble-light glare. Their damp hides shone moistly, the mossy green most pronounced in the smaller ones. The skins of the larger, older alligators held an overlay of hoary whiteness, a dark-bred pallor.

The pack started to hiss and grumble as one, and started forward. Hundreds of sharp teeth shone bright as polished bone.

The larger alligator looked at them and roared again. These could be food, but he didn't want them to be. They were something else. They were as he, even if their forms were much smaller. He closed his jaws and waited for them.

The smaller ones reached him first, scuttling up, rearing on their tails and hind legs, and rubbing against his own muscled feet. The hisses, some low and rumbling, most high and sharp, filled the tunnel.

They surrounded him only a short time, the smaller, more agile alligators gamboling about, while the larger reptiles nuzzled against their bigger brother. The larger alligator felt something alien, something puzzling, disturbing on all levels. It was not hunger. It was something like the opposite.

Then the pack left him, the smaller members again merrily circling a few times before rejoining their comrades down the tunnel and around the next bend. The sound of claws tick ing on wet stone receded, as did the scent of other reptiles.

The larger alligator hesitated then in his single-minded course. Something tugged at him, urging the creature to turn in the passage and follow after the smaller reptiles, to be part of something bigger, something different from what he already was.

Then the sounds and scents faded, and all the alligator heard was dripping water. He turned back to the darkness of the tunnel ahead and again lifted one foot heavily after the other. The hunger he sought to assuage was somehow more than mere appetite, and right now, he knew there was nothing more important than pursuing the image in his head.

Jennifer, spending two hours on the street, alone, with no money, no shoes, and very little in the way of clothes, was learning what it meant to be hunted. She was afraid to stay for very long in any one place, afraid that the reptilian joker would track her down again, yet she was afraid to go to anyone for help. She was afraid to return to her apartment in case they'd track her there and discover her real identity, but, with late afternoon coming and night not too far behind, she was afraid to remain out on the street. She had already ignored half a dozen indecent proposals and that could only get worse with the coming of night. She wanted to take some positive action, but she was feeling too harried, too much the hare in the game of hound and hare, to come up with a decent plan.

She needed a haven, a place of peace and safety where she could take a breather, rest her sore feet, and, above all, think. The sign in front of a small brick-and-stone building on Or chard Street made her pause. This, she thought, was exactly what she needed.

It was a church. The sign in front said Our Lady of Perpetual Misery. It looked Catholic. Jennifer had been brought up as a Protestant, but her family hadn't been very religious and she herself harbored no deep religious feelings. None, at any rate, that would prevent her from seeking refuge in a Catholic church.

She hurried up the worn stone steps and through the large wooden double doors that opened up into a small vestibule. She stepped inside the vestibule, looked at the doors leading into the nave, and stared.

The vestibule itself was a small windowless room with flagstone paving. Wooden benches stood along its side walls with coat hooks, now all empty, above them. The closed dou ble doors leading into the church nave were also wooden. A scene had been painted on them in a naive style that would have been beautiful if the subject matter hadn't been so grotesque.

The central figure was a crucified Christ, but a Christ like Jennifer had never seen. He-Jennifer thought of Him as He, though she wasn't exactly sure if the pronoun applied in this case-was naked but for a scrap of linen draped around his loins. He had an extra set of shriveled arms sprouting from his rib cage and an extra head on his shoulders. Both heads had aesthetically lean features. One was bearded and masculine, the other was smooth-cheeked and feminine. Blood trickled down both faces because of the crowns of thorns that each head wore. Four pairs of breasts ran down the front of the Christ's body, each pair smaller than the one above. There was a gaping red wound running blood onto the lowest breast on the figure's right side. The Christ was not crucified upon a cross, but rather upon a twisting helix, a convoluted ladder, or, Jennifer realized, a representation of