Dead Man's Hand

by George R. R. Martin

  10:00 P.M.

  Digger Downs had been right about one thing: the hotel where Kahina had spent her final weeks was a real pit.

  A half-dozen elderly jokers sat in the lobby, watching an ancient black-and-white Philco while they waited to die. When Jay entered, they all looked at him with dim incurious eyes. No one spoke. The jokers, like the lobby, smelled of decay.

  The night clerk was a stout woman in her sixties with her hair worn in a bun. Her breath smelled of gin and she didn’t know nothing about no Ay-rab girl, but she was perfectly willing to let Jay have a look at the files, once he’d slipped her a ten.

  The records were in just as shitty a shape as the rest of the building, but after thirty minutes with the registration cards and receipt books from May and June of 1987, Jay found what he was looking for. She’d paid two months in advance, in cash, for a room on the third floor. Less than three weeks later, the same room had been rerented, to someone listed only as Stig.

  Jay showed the cards and the receipt book to the night clerk. “Her,” he said, pointing out the name.

  The corner of a ten-dollar bill was just visible under the registration card; it did wonders for the old woman’s memory. “Oh, yeah, she was the pretty one. I only saw her once or twice, thought she looked kind of Jewish. You mean she was an Ay-rab?”

  “A Syrian,” Jay said. “What happened to her?”

  The woman shrugged. “They come, they go.”

  “Who’s this Stig?” Jay asked.

  “Stigmata,” the old woman said. She made a face. “Disgusting. Makes me sick just to look at him, but Joe, he says even jokers need a place to stay. If it was up to me … honestly, these people are like animals. Anyway, Stig didn’t pay his rent and Joe evicted him, good riddance to bad rubbish, and we rented his room to the Ay-rab girl. But then a few weeks later Stig had the money he owed us and he says he wants his room back. We hadn’t seen that girl for a week or so, so we let him back in.”

  “Did the woman leave any personal effects?”

  “Personal what?”

  “Any stuff,” Jay said impatiently. “Letters, papers, a passport. Luggage. Clothing. She just up and vanished one day, right? What did you find when you cleared out her room?”

  The night clerk licked her lower lip. “Yeah, now that I think about it, she had some stuff.” She studied him greedily. “You family? I don’t think I can give you her stuff unless you’re family. Wouldn’t be right.”

  “Of course not,” Jay said. “But it so happens that Mr. Jackson is a very close relative of hers.”

  “Huh?” she said, eyes blank with confusion.

  Jay sighed a deep, put-upon sigh. “How about I give you twenty bucks for her stuff?” he said wearily.

  That she understood at once. She took a key off the pegboard behind her and led Jay down to a damp, chilly basement. A dozen cardboard boxes were stacked unevenly behind the water heater, each marked with a room number. The boxes on the bottom were green with fungus and half-collapsed, their numbers all but illegible, but Kahina’s legacy was on top.

  He went through the carton in a deserted corner of the lobby. There wasn’t much: an English-language edition of the Koran, a street map of Manhattan, a paperback copy of The Making of the President 1976 with the chapters on Gregg Hartmann dog-eared and underlined, some odd bits of clothing, a box of Tampax. Jay sorted through it twice, then carried the carton back to the desk. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “That’s it. Ain’t no more.”

  Jay slammed the carton down on the desk, hard. The woman jumped and Jay winced as his broken rib made him pay the price for the gesture. “You’ve got forty bucks of my money and all I’ve got is a box of trash. You telling me this woman flew in from Syria with nothing but a few tampons in a U-Haul box? Gimme a fucking break! Where’s her luggage? Where’s her clothing? Did she have any cash, any jewelry, a wallet, a passport … anything?”

  “Nothing,” the old woman said. “Just what’s in the box, that’s all we found. These jokers, they don’t take care of their things like you and me. The way they live, it’s disgusting.”

  “Show me her room.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What’s in it for me?”

  That did it. Jay shaped his fingers into a gun and pointed. “Ta-ta,” he said, popping her away to the runway at Freakers. Thursday night was all-nude female-joker mud wrestling. He hoped she was in better shape than she looked.

  The soft pop of her disappearance made a few of the jokers across the lobby look up. If they wondered what Jay was doing behind the desk, rummaging among the keys, they didn’t wonder enough to do anything about it.

  Of course, there was no elevator in the building. Jay trudged up three flights of stairs, grateful that it wasn’t five, and then up and down the poorly lit hallway until he found the right door. His head was pounding and his side hurt like a sonofabitch. There was light flooding through the transom, he saw, and the noise of a television from within. Jay was in a rotten mood by then. He didn’t bother knocking.

  When he pushed the door open, the room’s lone resident jumped off the bed in alarm. “What do you want?” It was suffocatingly hot in the room, with no hint of a breeze coming through the open window. The gaunt, wasted-looking joker was dressed in a pair of gray jockey shorts that might once have been white. A black rag was knotted around his temple like a crude bandage. The palms of his hands were wrapped in black, too. So were the soles of his feet. Wider strips of black cloth wound round and round his abdomen. The bandages were crusty with dried blood. There were more clots in his thinning hair, and a red-brown stain on the front of his jockey shorts.

  Jay felt his anger drain away from him. “I need to ask you a few questions, Stig,” he said.

  Stigmata looked at him warily. “Questions? That’s all?” When Jay nodded, the joker seemed to relax. He edged over toward his television. It was a big new color Sony. Stigmata turned down the sound, but kept the picture on. On the screen a man was falling, arms and legs wheeling as he plummeted down, past floor after floor, in the vast interior atrium of some building. A golden light played around him as he fell.

  Jay stared. “That’s Jack Braun,” he said. Uninvited, he sat down on the edge on the edge of the bed.

  “There was an assassin,” Stig volunteered, almost eagerly. “Didn’t you hear? It was on all the channels. Some ace. Pitched the weenie right off the balcony.”

  Jay went cold. Golden Boy was the nearest thing there was to an invincible ace, but a fall from that height … “Is he dead?”

  “Dan Rather said the fat guy saved him. Made him light.”

  “Hiram.” Jay breathed a sigh of relief. Hiram and his gravity power. Jay had been there the night the Astronomer had flung Water Lily from the top of the Empire State Building. Hiram had saved her life by making her lighter than air. Now it looked like he’d done it again. “The assassin…” Jay began.

  “He was like a buzz saw. I bet he was after Hartmann.” The joker’s voice was bitter. “They won’t let him win. Just you wait and see. It’ll be Barnett, or one of them other fuckers. I wish they would all just eat shit and die. They don’t care about us.” Just talking about it got him angry. “What do you want anyway?” he demanded. “You got no call just walking in here. You nats think you can just walk in anyplace. This is my room.”

  “I know it is,” Jay said, placatingly. “Look, I need to know a few things about the woman who had the room before you—”

  Stig didn’t give him the chance to finish. “It was my room first!” he interrupted. “They kicked me out, just ’cause I got a few months behind. Nine years I was here, and they just kick me out and give my room away. Welfare was the ones screwed up, it wasn’t my fault I didn’t have the money. They kicked me out of my own room and locked up my stuff, where was I going to go?”

  “The woman,” Jay said, trying to get him off the world’s injustice and back on Kahina. “Do you know who she was?”

  Stigmata sat down on the
bed and examined one of his hands, picking at the black, bloodstained fabric. “She was one of us. She didn’t look like a joker, but she was, she had fits. I saw one.” He looked at Jay. “What happened to her?” he asked.

  “She was murdered,” Jay said.

  Stig averted his eyes. “Another dead joker,” he said. Scrawny fingers toyed with the bandage across his palm, scratching away the dried blood. “Who cares about another dead joker?”

  “What happened to her things?” Jay asked.

  The joker’s eyes flicked up nervously, met Jay’s, looked away again. “Ask downstairs. They took it, I bet. They locked up my stuff. Nine years and they lock me out and take my stuff, it’s not right.” All the while his fingers played at his scabs.

  “You’re kind of nervous, aren’t you?” Jay asked.

  Stigmata jumped up. “I am not!” he said. “I don’t have to answer these questions. Who do you think you are? This is Jokertown, you stinkin’ nats don’t have no business here.”

  Jay was looking at his hands. At the bandages. Plain cotton, dyed black, torn in ragged strips to bind his wounds. “I’m not a nat,” he said, putting a little ice in his voice. “I’m an ace, Stiggy.” He made a gun with his fingers.

  Pink droplets of moisture ran down Stigmata’s forehead, blood mingling with his sweat. “I didn’t do nothing,” the joker said, but his voice cracked in midsentence.

  “That’s a nice TV,” Jay said. On the screen was a police composite of the suspected assassin, a scrawny teenage hunchback dressed in leather. “How’d you pay for that TV, Stig? Looks kind of expensive. Where’d you get the money to pay your back rent, Stig?”

  Stigmata opened and closed his mouth.

  “The cheapskates who own this dump never change the locks, do they?” Jay said quietly.

  The look in Stig’s eyes was all the confirmation he needed. The joker backed away from him. Some aces could shoot fire from their hands, toss bolts of lightning, spray acid. Stigmata had no way of knowing what Jay’s finger could do. “She was gone,” he pleaded. “I never hurt her. Please, mister, it’s the truth.”

  “No,” Jay said. “You didn’t hurt her. You just robbed her. You still had your key. So after she was dead, you just came in here and helped yourself. She must have had a nice chunk of cash. Enough to pay off your back rent and buy you a new television set, at least. What else did she have? Luggage, jewelry, what?”

  Stigmata didn’t answer.

  Jay smiled, aimed, and pulled back his thumb like a hammer.

  “No jewels,” Stigmata said as beads of blood left pink trails down his forehead. “Just her luggage, and a bunch of clothes, that’s all. Honest, it’s the truth. Please.”

  “Where is it?” Jay asked.

  “I sold it,” Stigmata said. “It was all girl’s clothes, it wasn’t no good to me, I sold it. The suitcases, too.”

  It was the answer Jay had expected. “Yeah,” he said, disgusted. “Figures. You sold it. Except for the chadors. Not much market for used chadors in Jokertown, right? So you kept those.” He pointed at the joker’s hands. “She must have had quite a few, if you’re still ripping them up for bandages a year later.”

  Stigmata gave a tiny, guilty nod.

  Jay sighed and put his hands in his pocket.

  “You’re not going to hurt me?” Stig said.

  “Nothing I could do would hurt you any more than the wild card has done already,” Jay told him. “You poor sad sorry son of a bitch.” He turned to leave.

  He actually had his hand on the doorknob when the joker, out of some strange sense of relief and gratitude, said, “There’s one other thing. You can have it if you want. They wouldn’t give me nothing for it at the Goodwill.”

  Jay turned back. “What?” he said impatiently.

  “A sport jacket,” Stig said, “but I don’t think it’s your size. Anyhow it’s no good. It’s got a tear in the shoulder, and someone got blood on it.”

  “Blood?” Jay said.

  Stigmata must have thought he was angry. “It wasn’t me!” he added quickly.

  Jay could have kissed him.

  11:00 P.M.

  Maseryk paused halfway into his apartment with his hand still on the light switch, glancing around his dark living room with the tightly wired instincts of the hunter.

  “Hope you don’t mind me just dropping in like this,” Brennan said from the sofa, “but it’s time to trade info again.”

  Maseryk flicked on the light and snorted. “I don’t see you for almost fifteen years, now I can’t get rid of you.”

  “I’ve got something you want to hear. I guarantee it.”

  Maseryk sighed, shook his head. He closed the door behind him and stood with his back to it. “All right,” he said. “I’ll bite.”

  Brennan looked at him closely. His mood seemed dark and somber even for Maseryk. His eyes were sunken and there were dark circles under them. The investigation into Chrysalis’s murder, Brennan guessed, probably wasn’t going very well. “Ever hear of a woman named Ezili Rouge?”

  “Ezili Rouge? What’s she got to do with anything?”

  “So you’ve heard of her. Got an address?”

  “What am I, the telephone book?”

  “Well, do you know anything about her? Is she clean?”

  “Clean? Christ, I guess so. Other than the fact that every man who sees her wants to hump her—and most do, from what I hear—she’s clean as the goddamn driven snow.”

  “You sure?” Brennan asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Maseryk grumbled. “We checked her out when she first made the scene—the boys drew straws for the privilege—and she checked out clean.”

  “Someone reliable do the checking?”

  “Of course. My partner, Kant.”

  Pure as the driven snow? Brennan thought. That’s not exactly what Tripod had told him. Something here didn’t add up. Kant either wasn’t as good a cop as Maseryk thought, or wasn’t as trustworthy.

  “All right,” Maseryk grumbled. “What’s this big thing I’m supposed to be getting all excited about?”

  Brennan reached into the pocket of his denim jacket and tossed Maseryk the vial of rapture he’d taken from Lori. “Know what that is?”

  Maseryk grunted. “From its pretty blue color I’d say it’s that new designer drug that hit the streets this week. Most of the other samples we’ve managed to score have been impure. Cut with everything from dry milk to strychnine.”

  “You know that it enhances sensation. Food, drink, sex—it’s supposed to turn near anything into an ecstatic experience.”

  “Yeah, we know all that.”

  “What you don’t know about is the side effect,” Brennan said. “After you take that stuff for a couple of weeks, you need it. You really need it. Anything without it—food, sex, whatever—is tasteless and sensationless, or worse, actually revolting.”

  Maseryk sighed and sank back into his chair. “So it quickly becomes addictive?”

  “Horribly addictive. You can confirm this with a girl at Chickadee’s named Lori. She’s easy to spot. She’s got a blue mouth from taking this shit. Apparently she’s been one of Quincey’s human guinea pigs, so she’s been at it longer than most.”

  “How long before this addiction takes root?”

  Brennan shrugged. “I don’t know. A few weeks, maybe.”

  “Well, this is valuable news. Makes what I have to do more difficult.”

  Maseryk locked eyes with Brennan, who returned the stare with a frown. “What’s that, Maseryk?”

  The cop sighed and shook his head. “You couldn’t leave things well enough alone. You couldn’t stay retired, could you? You had to come back and play vigilante again.”

  Brennan had a sudden, sharp inspiration. “Ackroyd told you that I’m Yeoman.”

  Maseryk nodded. “I should have guessed after our first conversation. I suppose I halfway did, but I didn’t want to think it through. Then that damned PI rubbed our noses in it. Now we have t
o take you in.”

  “No, you don’t,” Brennan said quietly.

  “It’s my job,” Maseryk said. “I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

  Brennan nodded. “I appreciate the fact that you have duties. I hope you realize that I do, too.”

  Maseryk stood up straight, away from the door. “Let’s not get into that,” he said.

  Jennifer ghosted out of the wall next to Maseryk, quiet as smoke, and put the barrel of a suddenly solid pistol against his head. Maseryk froze and stared at her from the corner of his eye.

  “The accomplice?” he asked, his hands held out from his sides.

  Brennan got up from the sofa. “I learned the value of backup in Nam,” he told Maseryk. “It’s something I haven’t forgotten.” He walked by the cop and opened the door.

  “We’ll be looking for you now,” Maseryk told him.

  “Your time would be better spent finding Chrysalis’s killer and stopping the rapture trade,” Brennan said as he went out the door.

  As the door slammed behind him, Maseryk whirled, grabbing the barrel of the gun. Wraith surrendered it with a laugh. He tried to grab her, too, but she was already smoke, drifting through the wall on an unseen, unfelt wind.

  Friday

  July 22, 1988

  6:00 A.M.

  BRENNAN WAS ALREADY AWAKE and sitting in the chair by the bed when Jennifer turned and, finding him gone, woke up. She yawned and mumbled something sleepily.

  “Good morning,” Brennan said, leaning over and kissing her on her forehead as she rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

  “Is it morning?”

  “Just about.”

  “Need a shower,” Jennifer said, sitting up, still half-wrapped in the twisted sheet. “Care to join me?”

  “Sure.” Brennan still felt tired, too, and already sticky with sweat despite the earliness of the hour. “Go ahead. I have to make a quick phone call.”

  “All right.” She stood and shed the sheet. “If you hurry, I’ll soap your favorite parts.”