Wildcards - Down and Dirty Part 21

"You look mature and distinguished with the white sideburns."

"d.a.m.n, I missed some," he said. "And you're really missing a custom- Er, a date?"

"Uh-huh. Seems like we've both thought about getting together too."

"True. You have dinner yet?"

She gave her hair a toss and smiled. "No, and I was looking forward to something special."

He took her arm. "I'll get us a table," he said, "and I've already got a great special in mind."

Croyd crumpled the note and left it in the ashtray.

The trouble with women, Croyd reflected, was that no matter how good they might be in bed, eventually they wanted to use that piece of furniture for sleeping-a condition he was generally unable and unwilling to share. Consequently, when Veronica had finally succ.u.mbed to the sleep of exhaustion, Croyd had risen and begun pacing his Morningside Heights apartment, to which they had finally repaired sometime after midnight.

He poured the contents of a can of beef and vegetable soup into a pan and set it on the stove. He prepared a pot of coffee. While he waited for them to simmer and percolate, he phoned those of his other apartments with telephone answering machines and used a remote activator to play back their message tapes. Nothing new.

Finishing his soup, he checked whether Veronica was still asleep, then removed the key from its hiding place and opened the reinforced door to the small room without windows. He turned on its single light, locked himself in, and went to sit beside the gla.s.s statue reclining upon the day bed. He held Melanie's hand and began talking to her-slowly at first; but after a time the words came tumbling out. He told her of Dr. Finn and his sleep machine and talked about the Mafia and Demise and Eye and Danny Mao-whom he hadn't been able to run down yet-and about how great things used to be. He talked until he grew hoa.r.s.e, and then he went out and locked the door and hid the key again.

Later, a pallid dawn spreading like an infection in the east, he entered the bedroom on hearing sounds from within. "Hey, lady, ready for a coffee fix?" he called. "And a little angular momentum? A steak-"

He paused on observing the drug paraphernalia Veronica had set out on the bedside table. She looked up, winked at him, and smiled.

"Coffee would be great, lover. I take it light. No sugar."

"All right," he replied. " I didn't realize you were a user." She glanced down at her bare arms, nodded. "Doesn't show. Can't mainline or you spoil the merchandise."

"Then what-"

She a.s.sembled a hype and filled it. Then she stuck out her tongue, took hold of its tip with the fingers of her left hand, raised it, and administered the injection in the underside.

"Ouch," Croyd commented. "Where'd you learn that trick?"

"House of D. Can I fix you up here?"

Croyd shook his head. "Wrong time of month."

"Makes you sound raggedy."

"With me it's a special need. When the time comes, I'll drop some purple hearts or do some benz."

"Oh, bombitas. Si," she said, nodding. "Speedb.a.l.l.s, STP, high-octane s.h.i.t. Crazy man's cooking. I've heard of your habits. Loco stuff."

Croyd shrugged. "I've tried it all."

"Not yage?"

"Yeah. It ain't that great."

"Desoxyn? Desbutol?"

"Uh-huh. They'll do." "Khat?"

"h.e.l.l, yes. I've even done hudca. You ever try pituri? Now that's some good s.h.i.t. Routine's a little messy, though. Learned it from an abo. How's about kratom? Comes out of Thailand--"

"You're kidding."

"No."

"Jeez, we'll never run out of conversation. Bet I can pick up a lot from you."

"I'll see that you do."

"Sure I can't set you up?"

"Right now coffee'll do fine."

The morning entered the room, spilling over their slow movements.

"Here's one called the Purple Monkey Proffers the Peach and Takes It Away Again," Croyd murmured. "Learned itheard of it, that is-from the lady gave me the kratom."

"Good s.h.i.t," Veronica whispered.

When Croyd entered the Twisted Dragon for the third time in as many days, he headed directly to the bar, seated himself beneath a red paper lantern, and ordered a Tsingtao.

A nasty-looking Caucasian with ornate scars all over his face occupied the stool two seats to his left, and Croyd glanced at him, looked away, and looked again.

Light shone through the septum of the man's nose. There was a good-size hole'

there, and a patch of scabbed pinkish flesh occurred on the nose's tip. It was almost as if he had recently given up on wearing a nose ring under some duress.

Croyd smiled. "Stand too near a merry-go-round?"

"Huh?"

"Or is it just the feng shui in here?" Croyd continued. "What the h.e.l.l's feng shui?" the man said.

"Ask any of these guys," Croyd said, gesturing broadly. "Especially, though, ask Danny Mao. It's the way energy circulates in the world, and sometimes it gets you in a tricky bind. Lady from Thailand told me about it once. Like, killer chi will come blasting in that door, bounce off the mirror here, get split by that ba-gua fixture there and,"-he chugged his beer, stepped down from his stool and advanced--"hit you right in the nose."

Croyd's movement was too fast for the man's eyes to follow, and he screamed when he felt that the finger had pa.s.sed through his perforated septum.

"Stop it! My G.o.d! Cut it out!" he cried. Croyd led him off his stool.

"Twice I've gotten the runaround in this joint," he said loudly. "I promised myself today that the first person I ran into here was going to talk to me."

"I'll talk to you! I'll talk! What do you want to know?"

"Where's Danny Mao?" Croyd asked.

"I don't know. I don't know any-aah!"

Croyd had crooked his finger, moved it in a figure eight, straightened it.

"Please," the man whined. "Let go. He's not here. He's--"

"I'm Danny Mao," came a well-modulated voice from a table partly masked by a dusty potted palm. Its owner rose and followed it around the tree, a middle-size Oriental man, expressionless save for a quirked eyebrow. "What's your business here, paleface?"

"Private," Croyd said, "unless you want to stand out on the street and shout."

"I don't give interviews to strangers," Danny said, moving toward him.

The man whose nose Croyd wore on his finger whimpered as Croyd turned, dragging him with him.

"I'll introduce myself in private," Croyd said. "Don't bother."

The man's fist flashed forward. Croyd moved his free hand with equal rapidity and the punch struck his palm. Three more punches followed, and Croyd stopped all of them in a similar fashion. The kick he caught behind the heel, raising the foot high and fast. Danny Mao executed a backward flip, landed on his feet, caught his balance.

"s.h.i.t!" Croyd observed, moving his other hand rapidly. The stranger howled as something in his nose snapped and he was hurled forward, crashing into Danny Mao. Both men went down, and the weeping man's nose gushed red upon them. "Bad feng shui," Croyd added. "You've got to watch out for that stuff. Gets you every time."

"Danny," came a voice from behind a carved wooden screen beyond the foot of the bar, "I gotta talk to you." Croyd thought he recognized the voice, and when the small, scaly joker with the fanged, orange face looked around the screens corner, he saw it to be Linetap, who had erratic telepathic abilities and often worked as a lookout.

"Might be a good idea," Croyd told Danny Mao.

The man with the bleeding nose limped off to the rest room while Danny flowed gracefully to his feet, brushed off his trousers, and gave Croyd a quick burning glance before heading back toward Linetap.

After several minutes' conversation Danny Mao returned from behind the screen and stood before him.

"So you're the Sleeper," Danny said. "Yep."

"St. John Latham, of the law firm Latham, Strauss."

"What?"

"The name you're after. I'm giving it to you: St. John Latham."

"Without further struggle? Free, gratis and for nothing?"

"No. You will pay. For this information I believe that soon you will sleep forever. Good day, Mr. Crenson."

Danny Mao turned and walked away. Croyd was about to do the same when the man with the nose job emerged from the rest room, holding a large wad of toilet tissue to his face.

"Hope you know you've made the Cannibal Headhunters' s.h.i.t list," he snuffled.

Croyd nodded slowly. "Tell them to mind the killer chi," he said, "and keep your nose clean."

The Second Coming of Buddy Holley

by Edward Bryant

Wednesday.

The dead man slammed his fist through the pine door.

No knuckles broke, but his skin tore. Blood streaked the wooden shards of door panel. It hurt, but not enough. No, it didn't hurt much at all, other things considered. "Other things,"-what a euphemistic code for people and relationships, lovers and kin. The dirty little politics of rejections and betrayals. Jesus G.o.d, they hurt.

Real mature, my frien', Jack Robicheaux thought. Going through the grieving process at Mach 10. Right past denial and directly to self-pity. Real grown-up for a guy into his forties. f.u.c.k it.

He gingerly withdrew his hand from the shattered door. Naturally the long wooden splinters faced the wrong way. It was like trying to extract his flesh from some sort of toothy trap.

Jack turned and walked back into the shambles of his living room. It still looked like Captain Nemo's stateroom on the Nautilus--after the giant squid had wrestled with the submarine in the middle of the Atlantic's storm of a century.

He loved this room. "Love." Funny word to use anymore. Kicking aside a shattered antique s.e.xtant, Jack crossed to the outside door-the one opening on a pa.s.sage leading to the subway maintenance tunnels-and bolted it. As he did so, he caught a last whiff of Michael's sharp citrus after-shave. The image of Michael's retreating back, shoulders slightly hunched with denial, flickered in the s.p.a.ce the door occupied, vanished, slipped out of existence with not even a whimper.

Jack stepped over the old-fashioned phone crafted as the effigy of Huey Long.

Somehow it had miraculously ended on the floor upright with the earpiece still cradled in Huey's upraised right hand. 01' Huey had communicated like a son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h. Why couldn't Jack?

He couldn't call Bagabond. He wouldn't call Cordelia.

There was no one else he wanted to talk to. Besides, he thought he'd talked enough. He'd spoken to Tachyon. An apple a day hadn't worked. And he had talked to Michael. Who was left? A priest? Not a chance. Atelier Parish was too far behind. Too many years. Too much memory.

Jack stepped behind the carved mahogany bar with the bra.s.s fittings, smelled the dusty plush velvet hanging as he opened the cabinet. The brandy had cost close to sixty bucks. Expensive on a transit worker's salary, but what the h.e.l.l, he'd always read in sea novels about brandy's being administered to survivors of wrack and storm, and besides, the cut-crystal decanter fit this Victorian room beautifully.

He poured himself a triple, drank it like a double, and filled the gla.s.s again.

He didn't usually gulp like this, but-- "There is an interesting fact about Mr. Kaposi," Tachyon had said. His medical smock shone an immaculate white with almost the albedo of an arctic snowfield.

His red hair seemed aflame under the examining-room lights. "Shortly before he discovered and named his sarcoma in 1872, Kaposi had changed his name from Kohn."

Jack stared at him, unable to form the words he wanted to say. What the f.u.c.k was Tachyon talking about?

"There was, of course, a pogrom in Czechoslovakia," Tachyon said, slender fingers gesturing expressively. "He reacted to the sort of ill-informed prejudice that has cursed both jokers, not to mention aces, of course, and AIDS patients alike. Exotic viruses might as well be the evil eye."

Jack looked down at his bare chest, gingerly touching the blue-black bruiselike markings above his ribs. "I don' need no double-barreled curse. One to a customer, no?"

"I'm sorry, Jack." Tachyon hesitated. "It's difficult to say when you were infected. The tumors are well-advanced, but the biopsy and the anomalous workup results suggest there's a synergy going on between the wild card virus and the HIV organism attacking your immunosuppressant system. I suspect some sort of galloping accelerated process."

Jack shook his head as though only half-hearing. " I had a negative test a year ago."

"It's as I feared then," said the doctor. "I can't forecast the progress."