Wild Cards XVI: Deuces Down

by Michael Cassutt

  He walked backward slowly, a deep satisfaction flowing through him. He was back. For the first time since the fucking arrow, he was really back. It was like riding a bicycle. Just get a couple civilians shitting themselves scared, and it was like his body knew what to do. He had the money, it looked like he could maybe get the drugs. That’d show Mazzucchelli. Shit, that’d show all of them.

  Close enough to start celebrating, he figured. He took the bottle out from his pocket and opened it one-handed. The priest raised his eyebrows.

  “Good trick, opening them child-proof things like that,” the priest said. “Takes some practice.”

  “You shut the fuck up,” Joey said.

  “No offense. No offense.”

  Joey glared as he sidestepped to the sink and tapped out two bright pink pills onto the counter. The priest was watching with an odd expression as he poured a glass of water with his left hand. Joey scowled, radiating menace as he popped the fag-pink pills into his mouth. He had to take his eyes off the pair for a second when he drank.

  As the water washed the pills down, a strange warmth spread in his throat. Panic hit him and he was across to the priest, the barrel of the gun pressed between the fat man’s eyes, before he knew he’d moved.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with the fucking water?” he demanded.

  The priest managed a wan smile and shook his head.

  “It’s got something in it. I can feel it. Like taking a drink.”

  “Oh,” the priest said. “That’s not the water, son. That’ll happen sometimes with narcotics. Pain killers especially. The capsule cracks a little on the way down. That is darvon, isn’t it? I always though it was a lovely color.”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Joey said. The pills were warm in his gut, and the pleasant, loose sensation spreading to his arms and legs. He took another cautious sip of the water. It didn’t taste weird at all, didn’t make his throat feel hot.

  “Try it, if you’d like,” the priest said. “You can just crack one open and wash down a touch of the powder. It does the same.”

  “If you’re fucking with me . . .” Joey said, but he took out another pill, cracking it between his fingertips, and popped it into his mouth. It was viciously bitter, but when he drank the water, the warm feeling came again. It had an aftertaste like grapes. He licked his lips. The priest smiled and seemed to relax.

  “Shit,” Joey said. “How’d you know about that?”

  “My friends and I were known to sample some narcotics in our younger days. Before I took the cloth. Since then I’ve spent a certain amount of my time ministering to folks who shared my peculiar form of weakness. I’m Father Henry Obst, by the way. I’m filling in for Father Squid for a couple weeks while he’s away. This here’s Gina. She’s accepted the protection of the Church.”

  “Yeah,” Joey said, sarcastically. “And how’s that going for her?”

  “I recall the first time I took codeine,” Father Henry said. He was leaning back now, the air of fear almost entirely gone. “I was just a young thing back then. Grade school. Before I drew . . . well, anyway. My mama gave it to me in cough syrup. That was legal back when I was a pup.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “It was a lovely feeling. Now I do have to say that you don’t seem the sort of fella to indulge, though. Not when you’re on the job as it were. I assume it’s for medical needs?”

  Joey nodded. His tongue felt a little thick, but the warmth in his gut was relaxing and calm. He was in a perfectly calm place. He was in control. He was good. Hell, he was perfect. “Fucker shot me with an arrow,” he said. “Months ago. Scar tissue’s all messed up with the nerves.”

  “Ah,” Father Henry said, nodding sympathetically. “Must be a trial for you.”

  “Yeah.”

  They were silent for a few minutes—Joey wasn’t sure exactly how many. Time seemed to be doing something weird.

  “I recall when I myself was in terrible pain,” the priest said, reflectively. “It wasn’t physical, mostly, but terrible all the same. I could turn . . . that is . . . well, wine was a staple of my diet as a young man. Anyway, it took me some time before I understood I was an addict. I’d lost a great deal that was very dear to me.”

  Joey laughed, and waved his gun languidly at the two of them. His hand seemed oddly far away.

  “You were an addict?”

  “Still am, son,” the priest said gravely. “Will be until the day I die. It’s just a disease, and no shame in it. You just need to get right with yourself and the Lord. You know, God takes care of his own. If you just let Him.”

  “It’s not like I’m hooked or anything,” Joey said. “I just need them, you know? I mean it’s not like I take ’em for fun. It’s just . . . if I don’t . . . I just gotta get through the day. I just gotta show the guys I’m not . . . shit, I’m not making sense.”

  “Yes, you are, son. You most certainly are.”

  Joey nodded. The priest seemed like he was the center of the world. Everything else was narrowing around the thick, pasty face with its calm, accepting expression. Tears filled Joey’s eyes. The little kitchen was swimming.

  All the weeks of being laughed at, the shame of his cravings, the nightmares of watching arrows piercing his guys, of being the only one left while his friends died around him—it all bubbled up at once. He lost track of where he was, where the floor was, whether he was standing up.

  “Father,” he choked out as the darkness and sorrow enfolded him, “I think I’ve got a problem.”

  Father Henry stood over the collapsed thug who lay snoring gently on the floor. The relief mixed pleasantly with what he imagined was a somewhat prideful smugness at Gina’s open-mouthed wonder.

  “Now you let that be a lesson to you,” he said. “Always read the warning labels when you get a prescription. Lot of times you mix alcohol with ’em, it’s a very bad idea.”

  “Damn,” Gina said. “I mean that’s . . . pathetic.”

  “Well now, give him a little benefit. He didn’t know no better. Gina, if . . . well now, if you’re going to be going, I think you might best be at it. This fine young man is only going to be asleep for so long.”

  The girl looked at him, nodded, and picked the duffel from the table. She hesitated for a moment, then leaned over and kissed him briefly on the lips.

  “Thank you,” she said, and was gone up the stairs.

  Father Henry sighed and slowly dragged the unconscious thug to the cot, rolled him onto it and covered him with the blanket Gina had been using. It was odd the way God put things together and took them apart. But then he supposed that was what they meant by ineffable. The question of what to do with his new ward, now, was an interesting problem. He didn’t imagine there was a Hired Thugs Anonymous, but given his last few days, he wasn’t going to rule it out either.

  When he lumbered up the stairs, he was surprised to find Gina sitting in the front pew, her head in her hands.

  “He’s here,” she said. “Out on the street.”

  “Who’s here?”

  “Demise,” she said, and it came out like she was already dead. “And the other one’s out back. I’m fucked.”

  She dropped the duffel bag and sat on the front pew, her head in her hands. She was weeping.

  “Now you just tough back up there, miss,” Father Henry said. “It’s like I told you. You accepted the protection of the church, and that means me. I took care of things with that last gentleman, and I’ll take care of his one too.”

  “Don’t be a shithead. That guy was some pill-popping dumbfuck. Demise is an ace.”

  “Watch your language,” he said, picking up the bag and stowing it back behind the pulpit. “You go downstairs and wash yourself up. I’ll find us a way to settle this thing out.”

  She looked up at him with a mixture of hope and disbelief on her face. He only raised his eyebrows—one of the expressions he’d practiced, so he had a pretty clear idea how it looked on him—and pointed to the stairs. She didn’t have
much faith in him; that was clear enough from the way she moved. She went, though.

  Once she was gone, Father Henry rolled up his sleeves and rubbed his hands together. “Quasi! Come over here, boy. I need to talk with you. Who exactly is this Demise fella?”

  Demise stood in a doorway across the street from the Church of Jesus Christ, Joker, where he could watch the front doors and the side. Phan was somewhere on the other side, keeping an eye on the other side and the back. The whore hadn’t come out, though he’d seen her poke her head out the door once. It didn’t seem likely that she’d actually stashed the shit in the church, but the longer she stayed in there, the more he was willing to consider it.

  The snow was changing to sleet, freezing where it struck. He checked his watch. Fifteen more minutes, he figured, and they’d have to go in after her. He wondered how Danny Mao and the other bosses of Shadow Fist would feel about killing people in a church.

  “Mr. Spector?” a distant voice shouted over the noise of traffic.

  He looked up. A short, pear-shaped man with a clerical collar stood before the doors of the cathedral, waving over at him with a goofy grin. Demise tilted his head. “Now what the fuck is this?” he muttered.

  “No call to be shy now, sir,” the pear-shaped priest shouted, a thick southern accent drawing out his words. “Come on over and let’s talk this here thing out.”

  He hesitated for a minute, but then stepped out across the street, dodging cars, until he reached the opposite sidewalk. “Who the fuck are you?” he called.

  “Father Henry Obst,” the priest said, beaming. “Lately of Selma. I’m taking over for Father Squid for a mite while he’s traveling the world. Come along inside now, sir. We’ve got a little matter of business to discuss, I think.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Rumor has you’re a hired killer for some sort of Asian mob,” the priest said pleasantly.

  “Well. Yeah,” Demise said. “Where’s the whore?”

  “Oh, she’s in here,” the priest said. “I think we can get this whole thing taken care of to everybody’s satisfaction. Come on along, now sir. No reason to do this out in the weather.”

  The priest turned and trundled back into the cathedral. Demise stood looking at the open door, then, shaking his head walked up and entered the church. The space was bigger than he’d remembered, and almost empty. The twisted, two-headed Christ impaled upon a double-helix cross seemed to writhe as Demise walked down the aisle, his footsteps echoing. The scent of car exhaust and snow mixed with ghost-faint incense.

  The whore was there, sitting in the first pew with her head bowed. The little priest was still smiling and leaning against the altar rail.

  “Now then, sir,” the priest said. “I understand there was something you were looking for.”

  “The bitch stole something,” Demise said. “I’ve come to collect it.”

  “Well now, you see that’s the issue that we need to look at, you and me. The drugs and the money—I presume that’s what you had in mind? Yes, well, they are no longer in this fine young woman’s care. I’ve taken them myself in the name of the church.”

  “Okay,” Demise said. “So I should kill you instead?”

  “It’s one of life’s little ironies that you and I should be the ones having this conversation,” the priest said, sticking his hands in his pockets and looking out over the pews. His round, puffy face had taken on a philosophical cast that looked like he’d rehearsed it in the mirror. “The virus has given me the ability to recreate Our Lord’s first miracle from the marriage at Cana, and you his final one in rising from his tomb. We represent the alpha and the omega, you and I. Not that it’s done either of us much good. I have a sermon I’ll be delivering on the subject come Sunday. You should come hear it.”

  “Whatever,” Demise said. “How about we get back to business. Give me the shit and I’ll walk out of here. Nobody gets killed.”

  “You forget sir that you are in the house of the Lord. You have no power here.”

  Demise laughed, a little disbelieving cough, and locked his eyes into the watery blue of the priest’s. Father Henry met his gaze placidly. Demise pressed the pain along where the channel should have been, but nothing happened. He could see the priest considering him, could look into the black of the little man’s eyes, but there was no connection, no lock.

  “God is stronger than a virus, sir,” Father Henry intoned, and for almost half a second, Demise got nervous. Then he noticed the red marks on the bridge of Father Henry’s nose.

  “You’re fucking nearsighted,” Demise said.

  Father Henry’s expression froze and the whore gave out a little moan. “I knew this wouldn’t work,” she said.

  “You thought you could fuck with my head by taking off your glasses?” Demise said, almost laughing. “Christ, what a fucking hick.”

  “The power . . . the power of God protects me. You just stand your ground there.” The priest’s voice was wobbling like his neck fat.

  Demise stepped forward, took the little man’s chin in his hand, and lifted. Father Henry, eyes pressed closed, took his hands out of his pockets. Demise didn’t see the little black cylinder until it hissed, a stream of pepper mace already scalding his eyes and nose. The pain was nothing compared to the constant pain of death he carried with him, but the stuff did make his eyes water. The little priest pulled away, falling loudly over the rail, while Demise wiped at the tears and roared.

  He never saw the whore coming up behind him.

  The first jolt of the stun gun hardly stopped him—the pain was negligible. He spun, reaching out for the bitch, but she danced back and then swung in low, catching him just under the ribs. By the fourth shock, his muscles were going weak, and it was getting hard to breathe. The fifth one—a lucky shot on the back of his neck—made his whole right side go numb.

  Demise gave out before the batteries did.

  Father Henry sat at the altar, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. With his glasses back on, the assassin turned from a muddy man-shaped blur into an actual man, hog-tied in the aisle before the altar. Gina, smart girl that she was, had gagged him with a sock and a strip of cloth and covered his head with a pastel pink pillowcase. She’d moved fast, and it was a good thing. The man had never quite lost consciousness.

  “So what do we do now?” Gina asked softly.

  “Well, we have this gentleman here, the other one back in the kitchen,” he whispered back. “Seems like hitmen are what you might call thick on the ground just now.”

  “There’s still the other one out back. The other one from the car.”

  “Well that’s all well and good,” Father Henry snapped, “but I don’t think I’m much up for doing this a third time today. A man has limits.”

  “I wasn’t saying that,” Gina said. “But we’ve got to do something.”

  “All right. Here, you keep an eye on this here miscreant and I’ll see whether I can’t work something out with our friend downstairs.”

  Demise shifted, straining against his bonds, and tried to shout something, but Father Henry was damned if could tell what.

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1987

  “The whole thing was a setup,” Joey said. “I’m telling you, boss. I was lucky I got out of there at all.”

  The restaurant was almost exactly the way he’d imagined it, except that he was empty-handed, Mazzucchelli was frowning, and Lapierre was over by the bar chatting up a waitress. Joey shook his head.

  “And this priest got you out?”

  “He woke me up after those four Fist guys jumped me and got me outta there.”

  “Four guys?”

  “Maybe five,” Joey said, trying not to wince with the lie. But it wasn’t like he could tell Mazzucchelli he’d passed out.

  “The cops were coming, and he was thinking the Fist might try to kill me. They’d went in there and forced him to help them out. I’m telling you, the guy’s a fucking hero going against them like he did.”
r />   Mazzucchelli took a bite of his pasta and shook his head. Joey scratched at the scars on his left hand.

  “Sounds like bullshit,” Mazzuchelli said.

  “There was a Fist hanging just outside the back door,” Joey said. “And the cops—they picked up Demise there, didn’t they?”

  Mazzucchelli took the starched white napkin off his knee and dabbed the corner of his mouth.

  “Yeah,” he said with a long, slow, sigh. “Yeah, they did.”

  “If I’d have jumped the gun and called in backup, they’d have ambushed us, boss. Demise was just the bait.”

  “So how’d this hero priest get the drop on Demise?” Joey grinned.

  “Yeah, he told about that too, when he was helping me get my feet. It went like this, see . . .”

  Demise walked out of the detention center in the late afternoon, pissed off. He still had on the fucking Aerosmith t-shirt. The car waited for him at the curb, Phan Lo at the wheel. Demise climbed in and slammed the door.

  “What the fuck took you people so long?” he demanded as Phan pulled out into traffic. “I was in there overnight. How hard is it to post a little bail?”

  “Gambiones,” Phan said. “They hit back yesterday.”

  “No shit?”

  “They torched five of our places. We lost twenty, maybe thirty men. Word on the street is they were trying for Danny Mao.”

  “Still doesn’t explain why I had to spend a night in the lockup.”

  “You weren’t the top priority,” Phan said.

  They drove in silence. The day was clearer, but cold. Phan turned toward Chinatown.

  “Did you, ah, mention to anyone . . .” Demise began, but the sentence trailed off.

  “They know you got your ass kicked by a deuce priest and a Jokertown whore,” Phan said. “They laughed about it a little and got back to business.”

  “Shit.”

  “The whole thing was a setup. I saw one of the Gambione guys coming out the back right before the cops showed up. So we got suckered. Let it go, man. No one’s going to remember how they did it. You want to get another shirt?”