Katie nodded nonchalantly–she seemed to have cheered up since the Devil had stepped out–and picked up a glass.
Tam dropped a couple of small brass horns on the bar top next to Davy. Davy stared at them for a moment then glanced up admiringly. “Neat,” he admitted. “Get anythin’ else aff him?”
“Nah, the cunt wis crap. He didnae even have a moby. Just these.” Tam looked disgusted for a moment. “Ah pulled ma chib an’ waved it aroon’ an’ he totally legged it. Think anybody’ll come lookin’ for us?”
“Nae chance.” Davy raised his glass, then tapped the pocket with the Devil’s mobile phone in it smugly. “Nae a snowball’s chance in hell…”
Fiction: An excerpt from One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King by Elizabeth Bear
Part I
[In Las Vegas in 2002, Jackie, one of the city’s two Genii, loses his partner in a fight with the Genii of Los Angeles. In San Diego, simultaneously, the vampire Tribute destroys his creator. And in New York City in 1964, two spies discover that they are targets for assassination, and follow their would-be killer to Las Vegas.]
Tribute and the Scholar. Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.
My plane taxied up to the gate at McCarran International Airport a little after one A.M. I’m limited to short flights for practical reasons; the good news is, the redeye is usually uncrowded.
I love Las Vegas.
Nobody ever notices me in Vegas. Now that I was on my own, I was thinking of staying on permanently.
Don’t get me wrong. I never expected to survive. I thought I’d go down into oblivion with Sycorax, red stain of my borrowed blood on her lips and a fistful of my hair knotted in her hand. I never expected to see another sunrise. Not that I’ve seen one in 25 years, mind, but you know what I mean. But one minute my gut was clenching, twisting around my poisoned dinner, and the next Sycorax was staring at me in glazed shock, her pale hands fastened on her own wax-white throat as she sank to her knees.
If I’d known it would be that easy I would have handled this years ago.
If I’d known Jesse would leave me alone for half an hour if I did it….
Eighteen hours later, I was on a plane, and less than two hours after that I was stepping across the band of desert heat between the cool of the airplane and the air-conditioned jetway and following the cattle through McCarran’s D gates to the tram.
There’s a funny thing about Las Vegas. You keep seeing people you think you might halfway recognize. Some of them are minor celebrities, lounge acts, washed-up actors and pop stars who were the Next Big Thing twenty years back. And some aren’t.
So people turned to look at me, one or two, as I made my way from the tram over the gaudy carpet and down the escalators. But they weren’t surprised, not at all.
I had no luggage to claim; we learn to travel light. But McCarran makes you exit through Baggage Claim whether you need to or not, and I had “Go Down Moses” stuck in my head, somehow—you know, Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt’s Land. Tell ol’ Pharoah, Let my people go—and was concentrated on not singing it too loudly where anybody could hear me. Which is how I almost tripped over the spy.
You have to understand, I wasn’t supposed to know he was a spy. I was supposed to see an athletic, black-haired man in a polo shirt and khakis, turning to hand a cased tennis racket to his companion. The other man was black, broad-shouldered, wearing his hair parted on the side and greased in ringlets in a style I hadn’t seen since I was a mortal man. They both reeked of Brylcreem.
It smelled like 1965.
I wasn’t supposed to see the way their eyes met for a moment before they glanced over each other’s shoulders, either, or to notice that their three-dialed waterproof wristwatches matched. But I’ve shot up a TV set or two in my time, and I noticed, and stepped wide to go around the pair of them rather than bumping shoulders with the athlete. A little faster, a little smoother than a mortal man should have managed, and the black man’s gaze locked on me like a gunman’s sights.
And he blinked, and tilted his head to one side, and then offered a wry, contemplative smile. “King,” he said. “I didn’t know you were in the game.”
“I’m not,” I answered without bothering to fix my voice. “I’m the real thing. More or less.” And I showed him the fangs.
He stepped back: one, two—the racket case raised defensively in his hand—and I beat it for the exit while his partner was still turning to see what had caused his dismay. There was a taxi waiting.
I took it.
There’s real, after all. And then there’s real.
And if I was going to spend any time in Las Vegas, I was going to have to find out what was going on to bring two of those to the streets of Sin City. And not its native media ghosts, either.
No, a couple of strangers in town.
#
The assassin and the man behind the curtain. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
There were two men already in the office when the assassin got there; one dead, and one alive. The dead one stood behind the live one. The living one was hunched over a laptop computer. The dead one was peering over the living one’s shoulder, trying not to drip brains down his back.
Bugsy Siegel looked up when the assassin walked through the door, and frowned. For a dead man, he had an effective stare. He hadn’t died pretty, and it still showed.
Ghosts don’t heal, and when Bugsy was shot, the hitman put enough lead into the back of his skull that much of his face came off the front side when it exited. One eye was missing, the cheekbone shattered, the empty socket oozing clotted blood and matter. The back of his head was a pulpy mess; it contrasted vividly with his dapper gray double-breasted suit.
Even by the assassin’s standards, what was left of him wasn’t easy to look at. But the slow trickle of gray matter down his skull hadn’t slowed him any. “You didn’t get him,” he said, and walked through the desk and the Mage whose laptop he had been frowning at a laptop screen to glower at the assassin from closer in.
“No,” the assassin said. There was no point in denying it. “Hello, Felix,” he said.
Felix Luray didn’t look up from the computer. “It’s the stories,” he said, and flexed his hands together to crack his knuckles. “You’re going to have to find some way to work around it, so they can be killed. The bad news is their fans are still out there, keeping them alive. So they’re real as…real as Robin Hood. Or the Easter Bunny. The good news is, capturing them should be no problem. That’s in genre.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed,” the assassin said dryly, and went to pour himself a drink. “And I can tell by the looks on your faces that Angel and Goddess didn’t manage any better.”
“Goddess is dead,” Felix said. “The revenant John Henry Kinkead bashed her skull in with a sledge hammer.”
Fumes stung the assassin’s nose. The crystal was heavy in his hand, warming quickly from his skin. He sipped. “Well, saves me having to kill her, then. Who’s ‘the revenant John Henry Kinkead?’”
“The One-eyed Jack,” Felix said. “John Kinkead was the third governor of Nevada. He died circa 1904 in Carson City. Fits the name and general description, and the timing’s right.”
“Huh.” Felix was eyeing the assassin’s glass speculatively. The assassin poured a second drink and passed it over; Felix poured half the measure on the rug, where it vanished, wicked up without a trace. Bugsy looked pleased. “What does his name win us, Mr. Luray?”
“Perhaps a little symbolic leverage,” he said with a shrug, and tasted his drink. “We’ve got the dam, of course, but a little more never hurts. Jackie gave Benjamin a run for his money a few years back, I hear—”
Bugsy turned his head and spat. It didn’t leave a mark on the carpet. “That faggot’s no match for a real Mage, Felix. Sure, he knows a little hedge-craft. But it ain’t real magic, not the sort of thing you boys used to do.”
“Still do,” Felix said easily, and tipped out a little more vodka onto the floor.
“Wel
l, yeah,” Bugsy said. “But what I mean to say is, there ain’t no more like you, Felix. No more like the Prometheans that built the dam, right? Or the railroad.”
“No,” Felix said, very quietly. “I’m the last.”
Bugsy grinned, sending a thick clot of blood skating down his ruined cheek. “See? You won’t have no problem with Jackie.”
The assassin smiled tightly. He didn’t mention his own research and experience, or what they had taught him about Felix Luray, and why he hadn’t been invited to the war that had put an end to the rest of the Prometheans. A pity, the assassin thought; he’d found them useful allies in the past, despite their desire to feel that they were pulling all the strings.
Still, half a Mage—a failed Mage, if you preferred, a defrocked one—was better than none.
“So I take it our next objective is neutralizing the other genius, the Stewart boy.”
“Not at all,” Felix said, swirling his drink and savoring a slow, pleased smile. “Angel took care of that while you were busy in London and New York. Everything’s under control.”
#
The One-Eyed Jack and the Steel-Driving Men. Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.
The John Henrys waited for me on the corner of Third and Bonneville, across the street from the chain-link around the construction site and in the shade of some old elms and a ragged toilet brush of a Mexican fan palm. The right-hand John Henry rested a twenty-pound sledge against his corded sweat-shining dark neck, his other hammer leaned up against the gray cinderblock wall behind him. He wore canvas pants and not much else, and if the girls giggling on the sidewalk in the sweltering heat could have seen him, they would have turned to admire the ridged expanse of his chest.
The left-hand John Henry, skeletal and paperwhite behind a luxuriant growth of moustache and blazing tubercular eyes, treated his terrible cough out of the silver flask in his breast pocket. That hack around a chest full of bloody slime was so much a part of his legend he couldn’t get rid of it even dead.
Like the silk cravat with the diamond stickpin, like the nickel-plated six shooter concealed by the fall of his stylish gray coat. Stylish in 1881, that is. A little out of place as I crossed Bonneville against the light, walking through the wall of thermonuclear Las Vegas sunshine, and drew up in front of the dead men. They looked startled to be seen; as I hesitated in the gutter, a brunette in fuchsia short-shorts and not much else walked through the right-hand John Henry, head rocking in time to the beat of her portable CD player. The left-hand John Henry coughed into a silk handkerchief, leaving a spot like the jeweled heart of a snowy plain of Queen Anne’s lace, and turned to watch the girl walk away. I was scared enough of him that my guts turned to water in my belly, but I thought of Stewart and I made myself walk forward. Ghosts. I called up ghosts.
The right-hand John Henry puffed up his enormous chest and looked away, free thumb hooked through the loops of his pants. His thighs strained threadbare dun cloth, much mended, as he shifted his hammer on his shoulder. The left-hand John Henry folded the cloth to hide the thumbprint of blood and tucked it into his pocket. Not the one with the flask. He sighed.
“She’s a lady of ill repute, Doc,” drawled the right-hand one. I stopped in front of them.
“She’s a woman who knows her own mind,” the left-hand John Henry—Doc—replied in a rich slow voice like seasoned honey, and drew himself up to face me. “And as for ill repute, I have a little of my own. Some easy virtue, too. Do I know you, sir?”
“No,” I said, holding out my hand. I felt them taking in my cargo pants, Doc Martens and earrings, my tattooed biceps and the ring through my nose. The eyepatch didn’t look so out of place in all that. A Cadillac crept behind me, wary of the construction dust. Pale eyes and dark tracked its purring glide. “But my name’s Jack. One-eyed Jack, they call me.” Neither moved to shake, and I let my hand fall to my side.
It got the smile from the left-hand John Henry I’d half-hoped for. A gambler. And a quick wit, too. “My given name’s John, as well.”
“It’s why I called you back. You, Dr. Holliday. And Mr. Henry, here. You know—”
“I know I’m dead,” John Henry said. He looked at the sledgehammer in his hand and set it down, leaned it back against the dust-colored wall. “Where are we?”
“Las Vegas.”
“New Mexico? It’s changed some.” Doc Holliday leaned back on the heels of his shoes and looked up at the pale sky overhead, squinting after a jet contrail.
“Nevada.”
“Huh.” He turned his head and coughed into his handkerchief again. “Then that’s changed some too, I imagine. What did you bring us back from the grave for, son?”
He died at thirty-five, and I’m over a hundred. But I wasn’t about to argue age and life experience with Doc Holliday. Even if I was something more than mortal, myself. “I need help,” I said. I had a pretty speech prepared, but looking up—way up—into the frowning brown eyes of John Henry left no room for anything but honesty. Might be because the man was a symbol for honesty. I swallowed and looked over at Holliday, but it wasn’t any easier to meet his eyes. “I’m the One-eyed Jack. The spirit of Las Vegas, its anima. Somebody shot my buddy, and I want to get them back. So I called you up. Namesake rite, tequila and promises. But since there were two John Henrys who fit the bill, I got the both of you.”
A pedestrian edged around me, seeing a ratty one-eyed homeless boy with a lightless dyed-black snarl of hair, standing on a downtown street corner talking to himself. We get that a lot around here: the straights are used to madmen out of doors in Vegas.
“What makes you think we can help with that?”
“You’re—” Who you are. New World demigods in the making, the Chuchulainns and Beowulfs and Yellow Emperors of the Americas. Folklore creatures.
Like me. “You’re Doc Holliday, sir. That there is John Henry the drillman. You’re American legends, sir.”
Holliday opened his mouth, but a coughing jag took him and he fumbled in his pocket for his flask and drank quickly, neatly, even when I thought he’d choke. The whiskey calmed his cough and he shook his head as he screwed the silver cap back on. “Jack, I never killed but three, four men in my lifetime. And every one of those bastards deserved to die.”
John Henry shifted balance beside him, a mountain changing its stance. “I heard it was fifty, Doc.”
“Stories grow in the telling, son.”
I’d done some reading since Stewart got killed. “Wyatt Earp said you were the most dangerous man he ever knew, and the fastest gun.”
Holliday laughed and stroked his moustache, straightened his cravat. “Wyatt never minded stretching a tale till it squeaked protest, and you know what the papers are like.” He couldn’t hide a pleased smile. “He was right about one thing.”
“Doc?”
I was maybe three feet from Holliday. Before I could have moved, even shouted, his revolver was out of the hip holster and leveled at my chest. He cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger so quickly I didn’t have time to close my eyes before the report boxed my ears.
So I saw the bullet hit my chest, go through, and pass without a whisper of sensation. Holliday laughed and spun his pistol back into his holster. “Ghosts,” he said, and took another swig from his flask, squinting in pain.
“Well,” I answered. “I called you up with a task in mind, gentlemen. And you can’t go back to rest until we figure out how to do it. So—immaterial or not—I suggest we go get a drink and talk it over.”
“I can’t drink your liquor,” Doc Holliday said, as John Henry fell silently into step on my other side.
“I’ll pour it on the ground.”
I led them toward the Strip. Dead men don’t mind the heat.
#
The American and the Russian. Somewhere in the Desert Inn Hotel & Casino, 1964.
Bram Stoker—that Bram Stoker—said of Teddy Roosevelt that he was a man you couldn’t cajole, couldn’t frighten, couldn’t awe. Some mornings, I wa
ke up certain that the ex-president has somehow managed to get himself reincarnated as my partner.
He won’t be cajoled. Neither will he be beguiled.
Someone must have lied to him once. Someone I would like very much to find, someday, and talk to.
Because if he weren’t so darned frictionless, I might be able to get him to talk to me a little more about what he said about Oswald—
“What are you writing?” the Russian said, toweling his hair as he walked out of the bathroom, and the American crumpled the sheet hastily and dropped it into the wastebasket by his knee.
“A letter to my aunt, but it’s not coming out well. Ready to go down and see if the café is still serving?”
“What’s the expression? No locks, no clocks?” The Russian looked about for his shoes and sat on the bed to tug them on. “And then we need to try to figure out why the assassin’s here.”
“Because if we know what he’s doing—”
“—we know where he is.” Their eyes met, and a brief smile passed between them. “What do you plan to do with him if we do track him down?”
The American grinned, knowing he looked like a shark. What do you mean if? “Kill him. In cold blood. Preferably from a distance and from hiding. We’ll work out a justification later.”
“Excellent,” the Russian said, stamping his feet into his black loafers. “Get your coat. And don’t forget your concealed carry card. This is Vegas.”
“Yes. They don’t care if you have a pistol on your hip, but God forbid there’s one under your coat.” The American stood and followed his partner out, pausing for a second to hang the Do Not Disturb card and trap a strand of his own dark hair between the lockplate and the tongue. “Breakfast or drinks?”
“Both?” The Russian glanced over his shoulder hopefully, and the American nodded.
Summer 2007 Page 8