His appetite gone, Franny set aside his food. He didn’t want to remember. Didn’t want to answer. He realized he was going to have to give something to get something. He said, “Rage. Against … so many people. If any of them had been in front of me I would have—” He broke off, stood, and walked away. He looked back over his shoulder at Baba Yaga. “I’m not that person. At least I don’t think I am. I pray I’m not.”
“Are you religious, boy?”
“I’m a Catholic.”
“Not what I asked.”
“Okay, yeah, I suppose I am.”
“Then I will tell you this much. Hell is about to come to Earth.”
She stood and walked to the car. It was clear the conversation was over.
The Angel awoke, unmoving. Only her eyelids fluttered open as she lay on the narrow hotel bed and stared at the man lying next to her. She knew from past experience that if she even twitched he’d awake instantly and she sometimes liked to watch him sleep for a bit. It was the only time his face was in repose, the only time his tense body was relaxed.
The sun had risen and enough light leaked through the partially drawn curtains in the Holiday Inn Express that a soft light illuminated Ray’s harsh features and hard-ridged musculature. He lay flat on his back, his head nestled in his pillow, his mouth slightly open, a thin line of drool running down to his jawline. She smiled at his adorable appearance.
Sometime in the night he’d thrown off most of the rumpled sheet so that it only partially covered the hip and leg nestling against her, but still enfolded her curves. He was always hot, his skin and flesh palpably warm to her touch. It was part of his ace metabolism. Her eyes drank in his nakedness, still marveling at the fierce beauty of it. She’d never felt ashamed at the feelings it aroused in her, not even when they were new, unwed lovers, despite the lessons her mother had tried to beat into her.
His scars somehow added to the attraction she felt. They spoke to her of the price he’d paid over the years. Of course over the years most had vanished, faded away because of his extraordinary healing powers. Some recently acquired ones still lingered, longer than they used to. That worried her. Ray hadn’t slowed down over the years she’d known him, but his ability to heal had.
But the long scar, the one that ran from his sternum to his groin, was still an angry red line stitched into his pale skin, straight and sharp as a razor cut. When they were new lovers it had taken her months to gather the courage to ask him about it, but he’d only laughed when she’d brought it up one night while they were in bed.
“That? I got that one on stage at the Democratic National Convention, back in 1990. That twisted little Nazi fuck Mackie Messer took off most of the fingers of my right hand and gutted me like a fish live on national TV. He could vibrate his hands like buzz saws,” Ray had explained. He’d fallen silent for a moment, remembering. “Not my best moment, but no one knew who the hell he was and what he could do, least of all me. But, see?” He’d held his hand out for her inspection. “They all grew back and work just fine.” He’d illustrated by caressing her breasts, teasing her nipples so that she’d shivered.
“Did you kill him?”
“Nah. I was too busy holding my guts inside me.” His eyes had turned dark for a moment, but his hand never missed a stroke. “I was in the hospital for like eight goddamned months and that goddamned Senator Hartmann whose life I’d just saved never even sent me a get-well card. But he got his, eventually.”
“Don’t blaspheme,” the Angel had moaned, and suddenly concerned with other matters, Ray never told her exactly what it was the senator had gotten. Later she’d looked him up in the SCARE archives and what he had gotten had been pretty bad indeed.
Back in the present, she smiled down at him. She had her own scars, some visible, some not, but the worst of her visible ones was the one that crawled over her flat stomach like a snake. Ray had never asked her about it.
The Angel suddenly realized that Ray’s left eye was open and squinting up at her.
“How’d you know that I was awake?” she asked him.
“You’re breathing harder,” Ray told her.
Her smile broadened. “We have a busy day ahead of us.”
“Just another day of saving the world.”
“Do we have time, do you think…”
He grabbed her, pulled her on top of him.
“I’ll always have time for you, baby.”
This was, the Angel thought, her most favorite part of the day.
Barbara shook her head, scanning the pages before her. Under her feet, the floor of the UN jet throbbed, and the faint roaring of the jets penetrated even the soundproofed meeting room where she, Klaus, and Jayewardene sat, with stacks of flimsy printouts in front of them. The rest of the Committee aces were ensconced in the main passenger cabin, or perhaps mingling with the press crew at the rear of the plane. The Secretary-General was poring over his stack; Lohengrin had barely glanced at his. Barbara thumbed through hers quickly, looking for the ones that Ink, Barbara’s assistant, had marked at the top with an asterisk.
Too many requests for intervention. It wears on all of us, and especially Klaus. Barbara knew that Klaus was feeling overwhelmed by the red tape, the bureaucracy, the rules and regulations that were slowly strangling the Committee as it become more firmly enmeshed in the UN’s structure.
The stack of reports had a bewildering array of global issues: the continuing eruptions of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which were disrupting air travel throughout Europe (no asterisk on that one); Barbara wondered what in the hell anyone thought the UN or the Committee aces could do about a volcanic eruption, or if they’d act even if they could; fighting in Dili, the capital of East Timor, between jokers and the police over promised health care reforms (an asterisk from Ink on this one, with the terse note Could become an issue); riots in Talas (that one prominently asterisked with the note Got more on this at the office); more Somalia piracy, but no asterisk; Kim Jong-un’s threats to test a wild card bomb in order to create aces for North Korea, which had never had a significant outbreak of the virus (that one asterisked, with a note underneath stating Still no reports of the DPRK having the virus, or labs capable of growing large quantities of it).
“What about this Talas report?” Barbara asked Jayewardene. Klaus started at her comment and started to glance down at his own reports. “That’s Kazakhstan, right? Not the one in Kyrgyzstan or Turkey, but the old Silk Road area? Ink seems concerned about it—do your people have more, or do you have a feeling about it?”
“Nothing more from my sources,” Jayewardene answered. “But…” He gave a shrug of thin shoulders. “I don’t like reading this…” Barbara raised an eyebrow, glancing at Klaus. Klaus just shrugged, however.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I see Ink’s marked it, but there’re so many places that seem worse off and more in need of attention. The South Korean stuff—maybe it’s time we showed the DPRK where they really belong in the global scale of things.”
“Sending aces to the DPRK would just make them think they’re more important than they really are,” Barbara responded as Jayewardene nodded. They all felt the jet banking, and Barbara’s ears popped as the cabin pressure dropped slightly. Klaus yawned, whether to clear his own ears or not, Barbara couldn’t tell.
“I suppose,” he said, pushing his chair away from the table. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll be wheels down in just a few hours, and I don’t know about you two, but everything I see here can wait until we’re back in New York at the office. I’m going to see if I can grab something to eat, then try to get some sleep before we’re back. Barbara?”
She shook her head. “I want to give Ink a call and see if any new reports have come in since she printed out these.”
“More paper…” Klaus gave another shrug, shaking his head. “Whatever you want,” he said. “We’ll talk about what’s next later, then.”
He nodded to Jayewardene, and left the room. As the door closed behind him, Barbara turned to f
ind Jayewardene’s dark brown eyes on her. “Everything is good with you? And with Klaus?”
“Sure,” Barbara told him. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Just concerned. Klaus looks … tired.”
“He is,” Barbara told the Secretary-General. “We didn’t get much sleep the last few nights, that’s all.”
Jayewardene lifted his chin. Barbara smiled at him disarmingly. She wondered whether he’d glimpsed something, or whether someone in the office—Ink, perhaps, she wondered; after all, she’d worked with him—had told him that Klaus was becoming more disengaged from the daily workings of the Committee, that he sometimes seemed overwhelmed, that he was only his old self when he was actively engaged out in the field, that Barbara herself was making more and more of the decisions for the Committee.
He lost an eye, and he lost friends that he’d had for years. She worried about depression and PTSD, but Klaus shut her out anytime she suggested that, or hinted that it wouldn’t hurt him to talk to someone if he needed to. She certainly wasn’t going to tell him that it was all putting an increasing strain on their relationship.
“He’s fine,” Barbara told Jayewardene. “We both are.”
The Angel and Billy Ray scooted up the front steps of the Jokertown precinct—locally known as Fort Freak—and slipped inside through one of the double wooden doors held open politely by a blue-uniformed patrolman. She’d never been inside the precinct before so she stopped for a moment to glance around and get her bearings.
Having worked for a number of years for SCARE, she was used to something less than luxurious surroundings. But this … If SCARE was the redheaded stepchild of federal law enforcement, then Fort Freak was clearly that child’s illegitimate offspring.
Though tidy, the reception area looked as if it had last been renovated during the depths of the Depression. The Angel could readily picture a kicking and screaming James Cagney being dragged through it by a couple of uniforms while shouting, “I’m gonna get you coppers!”
The floor, though clean enough, was worn linoleum tile that had clearly seen better decades. The wooden furniture—benches set against the faded walls, the handrails on the steps leading up to higher floors, the large desk that dominated the reception area’s rear wall—were all battle-scarred by cigarette burns, knife blades, and what looked like the occasional badly patched bullet hole. Ceiling lights and desk lamps were translucent glass bulbs that the Angel imagined were once lit by flickering gas flames.
The air was a dull mixture of sweat, long unwashed clothing, booze, vomit, harsh antiseptic, the not-quite-human ichor that flowed through the veins of some of the local citizens, and the desperation and fatalism that tore at their souls. It seemed to settle into her lungs like swamp fog blowing off a chemical waste dump.
She’d never imagined that someplace that could make her long for her sterile little cubical office down the hall from Fish and Game existed, but this was it.
Billy Ray stopped, turned, and looked at her, impatience on his face. His expression changed when he saw the look on hers. He grinned crookedly.
“Makes our little slice of reality look good, don’t it?”
She smiled weakly.
“Come on. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get out of this dump.”
She hurried to his side. The wide-open reception foyer buzzed with floor traffic, uniforms escorting criminals, obvious detectives and probably some not so obvious, on their important business, helpless and hopeless civilians wandering about with dazed looks in their eyes, all flavored with that special Jokertown aroma. Almost all the civilians were jokers, and more than a few of the cops, including the joker with sergeant stripes on his blue blouse. Enfolding bat wings depended from shoulders, as he sat high in judgment behind the elevated reception desk. He looked down speculatively, his eyes going back and forth between them, but straying, the Angel noted, more often to her rather than her husband.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Ray?” he asked.
Ray smiled, pleased, the Angel knew, at being recognized.
“Sergeant?”
“Taylor,” the desk man supplied, after Ray paused for a moment.
Ray nodded. “Taylor. We need to see the top officer on duty. Captain Maseryk?” The name was a question.
Taylor shook his head, his wings rustling slightly as he moved. The Angel wondered if his nickname around the shop was Bat Man.
“Captain Mendelberg, she’s—”
“Busy,” a voice supplied from behind them.
The Angel turned. It was the female detective who’d responded to the call at Norwood’s hotel room. Razor Joan barely acknowledged the Angel with a flicker of her cold eyes. Instead, she focused on Ray.
“So this is the famous Billy Ray,” she said speculatively, her eyes gliding over him, the Angel thought, as if he were a particularly tasty-looking T-bone on display in a butcher’s shop window.
“Billy,” the Angel said. “This is Detective First Class Lonnegan. She and Stevens responded yesterday to the situation at Jamal’s hotel room,” the Angel told him. She and the detective exchanged brief nods and glances.
“I see,” Ray said. He frowned, as if he didn’t. Really. “Any further developments?”
Razor Joan looked up at Sergeant Taylor, who suddenly looked down and found something very interesting in the papers that had been spread before him upon his desk. He picked up a pen and started to write furiously. She looked back at Ray and her expression changed, becoming noncommittal without softening.
“We should find someplace rather more private,” she said, “to discuss this.”
“How about the captain’s office?” Ray asked. “Who’s on day duty? Maseryk or Mendelberg?”
“Mendelberg,” Lonnegan said. “But—”
“But what?” Ray asked. His tone had grown colder, his expression tauter during the brief exchange. The Angel could read the slight signs, see the tension in face and eyes and even the way he held himself. It had quickly turned into a contest between him and Lonnegan.
“You may have heard that we had some excitement here yesterday,” the cop said.
“Yeah. I heard it rained jokers inside the precinct.”
“That’s one way of putting it. Since then, Mendelberg has been—” She paused slightly, as if searching for the proper word. The one she chose sounded oddly neutral to the Angel. “—occupied by the problem.”
“I’ll bet,” Ray said. “Well, we’ve come to see her about this little problem. And others.”
Lonnegan continued to stare at Ray, then she slowly nodded. “Yes,” she finally said. “The captain’s office. That might just be the place. Come right this way, Mr. Ray—”
“Billy,” Ray said brusquely. The tautness of his expression, the Angel noticed, had gone down from eleven back to ten.
Lonnegan nodded approvingly. “Billy.” She glanced at the Angel. “Bathsheeba—come this way.”
She stepped aside as she gestured toward a corridor that led apparently into the core of the ancient precinct. Not to be outdone, Ray paused, unbent ever so slightly.
“After you, ladies,” he said, and together they went down the hallway, abreast, Ray between the Angel and Lonnegan while the sergeant still studiously pushed papers around the surface of his battered old desk.
Five minutes with Ffodor’s webcam roulette software and the wireless connection from a coffee shop in Taos gave Mollie a new doorway site. She chose a garden terrace behind a hedge on the campus of an engineering college in Chandigarh, India. It was sixteen hundred miles from Talas—just barely enough from her point of view. But it was random, a place she’d never visited before, and somewhere she’d probably never revisit. She wasn’t about to scout the casino from within one of her own bolt-holes. After all, others had probably entertained similar thoughts about the place by now. And, on the off chance the chaos surrounding her last visit hadn’t culminated in a permanent change of ownership, she wasn’t giving anyone a chance to track her.
Baba Yaga was bad fucking news. So was her pal, the drooling vegetable in the wheelchair—the guy looked harmless, but something about him gave Mollie the screaming clownies.
She paused, chewing the last bite of a cloying lemon bar. Do I really want to rob that witch a second time?
All it took was a little bit of bad luck to turn something simple into something rotten. The residual Taser ache in her chest served a useful reminder. Good. It would keep her alert.
Hell yes I do. She turned my life into shit. If not for Baba Yaga, I never would have come near that sick fight club shit in a million years. And Ffodor …
Mollie cleared her thoughts with an angry shake of her head. It rattled her table; other patrons glanced at her. She glared back at them until they became uncomfortable. Then she locked the real-time image on her tablet. A text banner flashed across the screen:
Be smart. Be safe. Be quick.
She gasped.
Ffodor, taking care of her even now. He had written the webcam software for her. It was yet another thing she never would have considered on her own, a simple idea that somehow made her ace that much better. She’d forgotten that he added a reminder … Her face turned hot, warmed by the blush of embarrassment when she remembered the misadventure in São Paulo that had prompted him to add the gentle reminder. The embarrassment turned to shame.
And then she couldn’t see the screen anymore. She blew her nose on a paper napkin. It smelled like overly strong coffee and the chocolate syrup from her mocha, but for a moment she could almost smell the scent of weird Hungarian cigarettes, as though somebody had snuffed one just before she entered the room.
God damn it.
Mollie wiped her eyes, glad she hadn’t bothered with makeup before getting a start on the day. She studied the image on the laptop until she could easily picture the secluded spot on the Indian campus with eyes closed. Then she scooted her chair back, stood, and went to the ladies’ room. It was empty. She went into a stall. Somebody had used a black Magic Marker to draw an arrow pointing to the dispenser of tissue-paper toilet seat covers; above this they had scrawled in block letters, FREE! AUTHENTIC TAOS COWBOY HATS! Alongside this somebody had printed, in a different hand and ink, FUCK YOU, CHOLO.
High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel Page 10