Wildcards - Down and Dirty Part 65

Epilogue.

The new locks that Jennifer had had installed were so efficacious that Brennan couldn't let himself into her apartment. That was good, he thought. She'd probably need them.

He sat on the fire escape landing outside her bedroom window and watched the city traffic pa.s.s below him. He had hated the city when he'd first arrived.

Still did in fact, but now he hated the thought of leaving even more.

And he had to leave. When he'd first come to the city, nothing could've stopped him from bringing down Kien. He would have sacrificed heaven and h.e.l.l to get him. But now he wasn't the same man. Now he had allowed himself to care, and he had to pay the price for his weakness. Kien had won. His vendetta was over. He watched the city move beneath his feet, realizing for the first time how lonely the mountains would be.

The warm spring afternoon had turned to dusk before a small sound in the room behind him made him turn around. Jennifer, home from the library, was looking out the window, watching him. After a moment she crossed the room and opened the window and Brennan ducked inside.

"Well," Jennifer said, "every few months you turn up just like clockwork."

She was angry, and Brennan knew why. He hadn't seen her since he'd foiled a Shadow Fists ambush at her apartment in the wintertime. There'd been something of an unspoken agreement between them that he'd come back to see her, but he hadn't until now.

"I have to warn you." There was no easy way to say it. "I'm leaving the city.

Kien said he'll leave you alone, but I don't trust him."

Jennifer frowned. "You're leaving because of me?" Brennan shrugged. "Let's just say that I've chosen the living over the dead."

Her frown deepened. "He did use me to threaten you. He said he'd send his goons after me if you kept at him."

"Something like that," Brennan admitted. "He pointed out that he'd have nothing to live for if I brought him down. That there'd be nothing I could threaten him with to keep him from killing you."

Jennifer nodded slowly. " I see. Then my life means so much to you that you'd give up your vendetta, that you'd let Kien win?"

Brennan let out a deep breath and nodded.

Jennifer smiled. "It's good to know that. It'll make things easier."

"Things?" Brennan said suspiciously. "What things?"

"Things neither you nor Kien took into account. The fact that I won't allow myself to be held hostage by anyone. The fact that I can't be held hostage if no one knows where I am." She looked at Brennan for a long, long moment, and he felt a stab of pain at the love and beauty he saw on her face. "Good-bye, Daniel, and good hunting."

She ghosted. She stepped out of her clothes and through her bedroom wall and vanished. Brennan stared at the blank wall utterly confounded. She was gone, vanished like an exorcised specter.

"wait-" he croaked, but it was too late. The room was empty, except for him and her belongings, abandoned and deserted now and forever. "Wait..."

He sat down heavily on the bed, overcome by shock and a sense of overwhelming loss that struck him with the force of a physical blow.

"You don't understand," he said aloud to the empty room, partly to himself, partly to a vanished Jennifer, struck with the force of his sudden insight.

"Kien presented me with the choice, but I'm making it freely. I want you more than, him. I want love more than hate ... life more than death. . . "

His voice trailed off and he stared at the wall where Jennifer had vanished. His eyes nearly bugged out of their sockets when she stuck her head back through the wall.

"Good." She smiled. " I hoped you'd say something like that."

He shot off the bed. "Christ Almighty! Get back in here and get solid!"

"Why? Are you going to kiss me or slug me?"

"You'll have to take your chances," Brennan started to say, but her mouth covered his before he could get half the words out.

"You know," Jennifer said when they finally got their breath back, "it may be be best to play Kien's game... at least for a little while."

Brennan nodded, his right arm tight around her waist, his left hand gently tracing the delicate curves of her jawline and chin.

"You're right." His voice, his eyes, were dreamy and strange-looking. Jennifer was startled, and then immensely pleased, to see happiness and perhaps even contentment in them. "I have a beautiful place in the Catskills I'd like you to see. And I haven't been back to New Mexico since ... since ... Christ has it really been that long?"

She smiled and kissed him again.

"And Kien?" she asked him when they broke apart. Brennan shrugged. "He'll be here. I can wait." His smile came back, but there was a chill in it that both frightened and attracted her, drawing her like a moth to a dangerously burning flame. "It's what a hunter does best."

All the King's Horses

VII.

"This is ridiculous." Bruder was in a fury. He had a pair of leather driving gloves in one hand, and he slapped them against his legs compulsively as he spoke. "Do you realize what you're doing? You're throwing away a fortune.

Millions of dollars. Moreover, you're opening yourself up for a lawsuit. Tudbury and I were partners; this land ought to belong to me."

"That's not what the will says," Joey DiAngelis said. He was sitting on the rust-eaten hood of a 1957 Edsel Citation, a can of Schaefer in his hand, as Bruder paced back and forth in front of him.

"I'll contest the G.o.dd.a.m.ned will," Bruder threatened. "d.a.m.n it, we took out loans together."

"The loans will be paid," Joey said. "Tuds was insured for a hundred grand.

There's a lot left even after the funeral expenses. You'll be covered, Bruder.

But you ain't getting the junkyard, that's mine."

Bruder pointed 'at him, gloves dangling from his hand. "If you think I won't take you to court, you better think again. I'm going to take everything you own, you a.s.shole, including this s.h.i.t-eating junkyard."

"f.u.c.k you," Joey DiAngelis said. "So sue me, I don't give a s.h.i.t. I can afford lawyers, too, Bruder. Tuds left me all the rest of his stuff, the house, the comic collection, his share of the business. I'll sell it all if I have to, but I'm keeping this junkyard."

Bruder scowled. "DiAngelis," he said, trying to sound a little more conciliatory, "listen to reason. Tudbury wanted to sell this place. What good is an abandoned junkyard? Think of all the people who need housing. This development will be an enormous boon to the whole city."

DiAngelis took a swig of beer. "You think I'm a moron or what? You're not building no shelter for the homeless. Tom showed me the plans. We're talking quarter-million-dollar townhouses, right?" He looked around at the acres of trash and rusted cars. "Well, f.u.c.k that s.h.i.t. I grew up in this junkyard, Stevie boy. I like it just the way it is."

"Then you're an idiot," Bruder snapped.

"And you're on my property," Joey said. "You better get the f.u.c.k off, or I might get the urge to jam a tailpipe up that tight a.s.s of yours." He crushed the beer can in his hand, tossed it aside, and slid off the hood of the Edsel. The two men stood toe to toe.

"You can't intimidate me, DiAngelis," Bruder said. "We're not kids in a schoolyard anymore. I'm bigger than you, and I work out three times a week. I've studied martial arts."

"Yeah," Joey said, "but I fight dirty." He grinned. Bruder hesitated, then turned angrily on his heels and stalked back to his car. "You haven't heard the last of this!" he shouted, backing out.

Joey smiled as he watched him drive off.

After Bruder had gone, he went to his own car and pulled another Schaefer off the six-pack on the pa.s.senger seat. He drank the first swallow by the sh.o.r.e as the tide came in off the bay. It was a wet, windy, overcast day, and in an hour or so it was going to turn into a wet, windy, overcast night. Joey sat on a rock and watched the fading light paint rainbows in the oil slicks on the water, thinking of Tuds.

The wake and the funeral had both been closed casket, but Joey had gone into the back room after everyone else had left and told a junior mortician that he wanted to see the body. The wild card hadn't left much that looked like Tom. The corpse had skin like an armadillo, scaly and hard, and a faint greenish glow, like it was radioactive or some f.u.c.king thing. Its eyes were huge sacs of glistening pink gelatin, but it was wearing Tom's aviator frames, and he'd recognized the high school ring on the pinky of one webbed hand.

Not that there was any room for doubt. The body had been found in a Jokertown alley, wearing Tom's clothes and carrying all of Tom's ID, and Dr. Tachyon himself had done the autopsy and signed the death certificate, after comparing dental records.

Joey DiAngelis sighed, crushed another beer can in his hand, and tossed it to the side. He remembered when he and Tom had built the first sh.e.l.l together. Back then they made beer cans out of steel, and you had to be strong to crush the motherf.u.c.kers. Now any old wimp could do it.

He grabbed the rest of his six-pack by an empty ring in the plastic holder and walked on back to the bunker.

The big door was open, and down inside the hole Joey saw the flare of an acetylene torch. He sat down with his legs over the edge and dangled the six-pack out in front of him. "Hey, Tuds," he shouted down, "you ready for a break?"

The blowtorch went out. Tom walked out from behind the framework of the huge new half-built sh.e.l.l. What a f.u.c.king monster, Joey thought again as he looked down at its skeleton; it was going to be almost twice as big as any previous sh.e.l.l, airtight, watertight, self-contained, computerized, armored to h.e.l.l and gone, a hundred and fifty f.u.c.king thousand dollars' worth of sh.e.l.l, all the suitcase loot and most of the insurance settlement, too. Tuds was even making noises about cannibalizing that f.u.c.king head he'd brought back to see if he could figure out some way to fix the radar set and hook it into his hardware.

Tom pulled off his goggles. They left big pale circles around his eyes.

"a.s.shole," he shouted up, "how many times I got to tell you, Tudbury is dead.

There's no one home but us turtles."

"f.u.c.k it then," Joey said. "Turtles don't drink beer."

"This one does. Give it here-that G.o.dd.a.m.n torch is hot." Joey dropped what was left of the six-pack.

Tom caught it, tore off a can, and opened it. Beer sprayed all over his face and hair. Joey laughed.