"I am tempted to find you in contempt."
"You can't make it stick," he said affably. "Jokers may not be enjoined from public display of their traits, unless these conflict with indecent-exposure laws. That's state and federal law; would you like citations?"
Her cheeks pinched her nose. "No. I know the law" He turned to Kimberly, who sat in the box as if she'd just been carved from a block of ice.
"Mrs. Gooding, you've been to court before to get custody of Sprout. What happened the first time?" Anger flared in her eyes. He let himself show a slight smile. Good Elizabeth Taylor. Before her John Belushi days, of course.
"You know perfectly well what happened," she said crisply.
"Please tell the court anyway." He let her see him glance toward the press-packed courtroom. He and Mark had awakened to headlines screaming TRIPS CUSTODY CASE LAWYER EQUATES ACES, DRUG LORDS and ACE POWERS KILL, ATTORNEY SAYS. He wanted her and Latham to know he intended to share the joy.
There was also an article that said President Bush, after specifically pledging not to do so during his campaign, was considering calling for a revival of the old Ace Registration Acts. Didn't have anything to do with this, of course. Just another sign of the times.
She folded her hands before her. "I was under an enormous amount of stress at the time. There was our daughter's condition, and marriage to Mark was not precisely easy on me."
Touche, he thought, not that it'll do you any good. "So what happened?"
"I broke down on the stand."
"Went to pieces is more like it, wouldn't you say?" Her mouth tightened to a razor cut. "I was ill at the time. I'm not ashamed of that, why should I be? I've had treatment."
"Indeed. And how else have circumstances changed from that time?"
"Well-" She glanced at Mark, who as usual was gazing at her like a blond basset pup. "My life has become much more stable. I've found a career, and a marvelous husband."
"So you would say that you can offer a far more stable home environment to Sprout than you could before?" She looked at him, surprised and wary. "Why, yes." He expected Latham to object right then, on GPs, just to break the rhythm of questioning even or maybe especially if he didn't know where it was headed. You aren't infallible after all, are you, motherfucker?
"So you are saying that now you are a suitable parent because you're richer? What you're saying, then, is that rich people make better parents than poor ones?"
That pulled Latham's string. He actually jumped to his feet and raised his voice when he objected. Conower was pounding her gavel to restore order. She was going to sustain, no doubt about it. But he'd seen the flicker in her eyes. He'd gotten the point home. Punched her liberal-guilt button with his customary sledgehammer subtlety.
Christ, I hate myself sometimes.
After lunch break Pretorius asked, "Have you ever used illegal drugs, Ms. Gooding."
"Yes." She was forthright, meeting his eyes, not trying to evade an allegation she knew he could prove. "A long, long time ago. It was in the wind." A half smile. "We weren't as wise back then."
Nicely done. "And did you ever try LSD-25?" A pause, then, "Yes."
"Did you use it frequently?"
"That depends on your definition."
"I'll trust your judgment, Ms. Gooding."
She dropped her eyes. "It was the sixties. It was the thing to do. We were experimenting, trying to liberate our consciousness as well as our bodies."
"And did you ever stop to consider the genetic damage such experimentation might be doing?" He let it ring: "Did you not consider the welfare of your future children, Ms. Gooding?"
The courtroom blew up again.
After Conower called recess Mark was waiting for Pretorius, kind of hopping up and down without leaving his horrible chair, ergonomically designed to conform perfectly to the mass man but to fit no individual. He looked as if his ears were made of iron and had been stuck in a microwave.
"What was all that bullshit about?" he hissed at Pretorius. "Acid isn't a proven teratogen. Not like, like alcohol."
"Alcohol isn't the issue. They haven't gotten around to reprohibiting it yet, at least not in time for the morning editions. Latham wants to make an issue of drugs. So we'll give him drugs good and hard."
For a moment Mark could only sputter in outrage. "Wuh-what about the truth?" he finally managed to get out.
"Truth." Pretorius laughed, a low, sour sound. "You're in a court of law, son. Truth is not the issue here."
He sighed and sat. "Never believe that the days of trial by combat are over. Trials are still duels. It's just that the champions wised up and rewrote the rules. Now we fight with writs and precedents instead of maces, and instead of risking our own lives, all we risk is our clients' money. Or lives or freedom."
He rested both hands on the gargoyle-head knob of his cane. You don't like what I'm doing. Son, I don't either. But I take my role as your champion seriously. If I have to wallow in shit to win your case for you, that's what I do.
"These are witch-hunt times. You want to challenge that essential fact; hell, so do I. But if that's all I do, you lose your daughter. That's why they call it the system, Mark. Because like it or not, it's the way things work. Defy it too openly, it grinds you up and spits you out."
Mark and Kimberly had a date for that night, Friday. She didn't keep it. He wasn't surprised. He didn't even blame her. He felt dirtied by the way Pretorius had treated her, ashamed.
What was worst in his own mind was that he hadn't stopped him.
Saturday the guilty depression got to be too much. Mark closed the Wellness Center early. There was something he had to do. A matter of voices in his head.
The small man stood with one red Adida on the roof parapet, looking at the stop-and-go Third World traffic of jokertown a dozen stories below. He wore a red jogging suit over an orange T-shirt. His face was narrow, foxlike, with a sharp prominent nose and a sardonic bend to the eyebrows. Russet hair blew like flames in the stinking breeze.
He held a hand out before him. A jet of flame spurted from the forefinger tip. It became a ball, jumped from one finger to the next. He rolled the hand palm up. The flame swelled to baseball size, settled in the palm. For a moment it burned there, pallid in the sunlight, while he stared at it, as if fascinated. Then with a roar it shot into the high haze on a gusher of fire that seemed to spring from his palm.
He watched the flame dissipate. Then he drew a deep breath, let it sigh out through a lopsided grin.
"About fucking time," he said, and stepped into space. He let himself fall about fifteen feet, far enough to see a startled face flash by in a window. Then he straightened his body and put his arms out before him like a swimmer in a racing dive and took off flying. No point freaking the citizenry too much. The poor schmucks in J-town had enough on their plates already.
He flew north, toward the park, thinking Mark's really. put his foot in it this time. At least the poor fool hadn't quite had the nuts to make a clean break with the past. Didn't have a cold enough core to pour out his remaining vials of powder and see his other selves swirl away down the drain.
Thank God. It was chafing enough, the half-life he and the others led, like spectators at the back of an old and cavernous movie house where the film kept breaking.
He hated that he only existed on sufferance, only knew his own body, his own flesh, the feel of flight and the wind in his hair, in sixty-minute increments. For a man as full of life as he, that was hell.
Hell was a cold place, for him. The life that roared inside him, he expressed as flame.
A helicopter vaulted off a building top to his left. He angled toward it. When he was a thousand yards away, he kicked in some flame, went streaking for it like a SAM.
He threw himself into a corkscrew, drawing a spiral of orange fire into which the chopper flew.
It was a traffic chopper. The crew knew him; the announcer grinned and waved while his assistant pointed a live-action minicam at him.
JJ Flash, superstar. He grinned and waved. The pilot's face was as white as a brother's ever gets. He obviously hadn't run into Jumpin' Jack before.
That was fine, too. Flash had a certain amount of mean in him, that needed some harmless outlet. .. About then he realized where he was heading. He smiled again, wolfishly. His subconscious knew what it was doing.
Kimberly Ann Cordayne Meadows Gooding looked up from her magazine. A man was floating outside the glass corner of her penthouse, tapping with one finger.
She gasped. Her hand reached up to twitch her indigo robe a little more closed over the sheer lilac negligee. He made urgent gestures for her to open the window. She bit her lip, shook her head.
"It doesn't open," she said.
"Fuck," his mouth said soundlessly. He pushed away about six feet, rolled out his hand palm up, as if introducing his next guest on late-night TV Orange fire jetted out and splashed against the window.
Kimberly recoiled. Almost she screamed. Almost. The window wavered, melted in a rough oval. A breath of warm diesel-perfumed wind washed in. The man in red stepped through.
"Sorry about the window," he said. "I'll pay for it. I had to talk to you."
"My husband's a rich man," she said. Her voice caught, like a hand running over silk.
"I'm JJ Flash."
"I know who you are. I've seen you on Peregrine's Perch."
Without asking, he dropped onto a merciless white chair. "Yeah. And you've seen those pictures your fuck lawyer flashed around. Some poor teenybopper pan-fried by a psycho in a town I've never even been to."
She glanced at the window. The wind was blowing her hair. "Maybe Mr. Latham's the one you should be visiting."
"No. You're the one I want. Why are you jacking Mark Meadows around?"
She leapt up. "How dare you speak to me like thad" He laughed. "Can the indignation, babe. All your life… as long as you've known him, it's been the same. You tantalize and glide away. He's a putz in a lot of ways, but he deserves better."
He tipped his head sideways and looked more like a fox than ever. "Or are you just setting the boy up?"
For a moment her eyebrows formed fine arches of fury above eyes that had gone meltwater pale. Then she stood and spun, walked a few steps away. He watched the way her full buttocks moved the heavy cloth of the robe. "He must tell you a lot about himself," she said tartly. A grin came across Flash's face. He held up crossed fingers. "We're like this." The grin hardened, set. "Answer the question, babe."
She stood by the melt-edged hole. "Do you think it's easy for me?"
"From where I sit," he said, "it looks like the easiest thing in the world."
"I love Mark. Really," she said in a clotted voice. "He is the kindest man I've ever known."
"Or the biggest schmuck. Because you equate kind with weak, don't you?" He was on his feet now, in her face.
Weeping, she started to spin away. He caught her by the shoulder and made her face him. Small flames danced around his fist.
"Too many women," he said, "are afraid of themselves. They buy the old Judeo-Christian rap that they're innately wicked, tainted. So they look for a man to abuse them. Give them the punishment they deserve. Like that jock who busted Mark's beak and then yours. Is that your gig, Ms. Kimberly Perfect?"
She gasped. Smoke wisped up around the curve of one nostril, and suddenly her gown flashed into flame. Kimberly shrieked, tried to run. Flash held her. His free hand tangled the burning synthetic, pulling with surprising strength. Robe and gown tore away.
She slumped to the floor, sobbing in terror. Flash methodically wadded the burning garment, almost seeming to wash his hands with it. The fire diminished, went out. He tossed the half-molten mass in the corner and knelt beside her.
She clung to him. For a moment he held her, absently stroking her hair. Then he pushed her away.
"Let's see what kind of shape you're in, while I can still do you some good."
Ignoring her attempts to marshal belated modesty and indignation, he looked her over. She seemed unharmed, except for a reddening glare of burn stretching from her left shoulder to breast. He laid a hand over the angry patch, began to run it down.
She tried to jerk back. "Just what the hell do you think you're doing?"
"Drawing the energy out," he said, preoccupied. "It's like hitting a minor burn with a piece of ice. If I get to it quickly enough, there's no harm done."
She looked at him. "I thought fire was your element," she said from somewhere down in her throat.
"It is." He cupped her breast. Where his hand had passed, the skin was white, unmarked. "Just a little parlor trick."
"You're a dangerous man to be around, Mr. Flash." His thumb stroked her nipple. She gasped, stiffened. The nipple rose. Her eyes held his. Her lips were moist. "I'm not an eighties kind of guy," he said huskily, "any more than Mark is. He's a gentle flake from the sixties. `And I'm a bastard for the nineties."
She grabbed the back of his neck and pulled his head down.
In an alley behind an elegant Park Avenue high rise Mark Meadows sat with his knees up around his prominent ears.
How long has it been, that I've dreamed of that? Of holding her, feeling her, tasting her, seeing the way her eyes go dark and then pale, the way she tosses her hair and clutches and moans…
He felt two-timed. He felt like a voyeur. He felt like a fool.
He put his face in his spider hands and cried.
That night Mark sat up and killed a bottle of wine. Sprout played with her Tinkertoy set. Kimberly never came.
Eventually Mark got down on the new white linoleum he and Durg had laid and helped Sprout build an airplane with a propeller that really spun. It never got off the ground.
"I'll do it," she said.
He looked at her the way a cobra looks at you through the glass in the zoo. Without interest, without sign of even seeing.
"Do what, Mrs. Gooding?"
"What whatever you ask me to. To make sure I keep her."
She stood there, her whole body clenched, holding a breath inside until it threatened to burst her rib cage. Just daring him to ask what caused her change of heart.
He didn't give her the satisfaction. He just nodded. And she found herself hating his certainty as desperately as she needed it.
Sunday the front doorbell rang just as the sun was checking out. Mark came and stared through the replacement glass for a long moment before unlocking the door.
She had a flushed, bright-eyed, breathless quality, as though there was frost in the air. She wore a loose dark smock over blue jeans tonight.
"Feel like a walk?" she asked.
"You mean, after what happened the other day? You can still, like, talk to me?"
She recoiled a fraction of an inch. Then she went to the toes of her fashionable low-top boots and kissed his cheek. "Of course I can, Mark. What happens in court ought to stay there. Let's go."
Afterward he never could remember what they talked about. All he could remember was feeling that, despite it all, she might really be coming back this time.
Then they turned a corner and stopped. A pair of NYPD motorcycles were drawn across the street. Down the block a building waved flags of flame against the night.
Fire trucks were drawn up in front, arcing jets of water into the blaze. As he watched, one pulsed once spastically and died.
He drifted forward, pulling away from Kimberly's hand that clutched his sleeve. He felt the flames on his face. At the far end of the block a knot of skinheads cheered and jeered. One was just darting back into their midst, pursued by a fireman clumsy in his big boots. In horror Mark realized the skin had just slashed a hose.
"What's happening, man?" he asked a bystander. "Somebody torched an old apartment. Chink family on the third floor was trying to start some kind tailor shop." He spat on the sidewalk. "Slopes got it coming, you ask me. Tryin' to mess with our rent control, sneak the place into bein' commercial property. They in it with the landlord, that's for sure."
A line of cops crowded the skins, pushing them back. Mark ran forward. Sprout screamed, "Daddy!", broke Kimberly's grip, and lunged after him. Kimberly followed, trying to grab her arm.
Am ambulance was parked this side of the blaze. Beside it cops were trying to keep back an Asian family. A man and woman were wrestling with the officers and firemen who hemmed them in, howling and windmilling painfully thin arms. A man in an asbestos suit was hanging on the end of a ladder; a truck was trying to bring him into position to get inside a window, but huge bellows of flames kept lashing out at him, driving him back despite his protective clothing.
Several other men in inferno suits stood in a puddle on the street with helmets off. "You gotta get in there," a florid-faced man with a chiefs badge on his helmet yelled. "There's still a little girl inside."
"It's suicide. Fucking roofs going."
Mark was fumbling in his Dead patch pocket. Kimberly caught up with Sprout a few feet away.
"Mark! What's happening?"
He shook his head, unheeding. Black and silver-no. Yellow: useless. Gray, worse than. In his haste he discarded them. His lives fell in glittering arcs to shatter on the asphalt.
"Mark, what what in God's name are you doing?" The last two. One blue-and, thank God, an orange. He stuck the blue vial back in his pocket. Then he tossed the orange one's contents down his throat.
Kimberly saw him stagger back. And then he changed. The familiar gawky outlines blurred, shifted, condensed. A different man stood there, with film-star looks, a Jewish nose, a devil's grin. And a red sweatsuit, worn over an orange T-shirt.
JJ Flash tipped a one-finger salute to Kimberly. "Later, toots. Take care of the kid."
He launched himself into the sky.
The man on the ladder said a couple of Had Marys and prepared to jump through the window. He was going to his death. But that was better than hearing the little girl in there crying every time he closed his eyes for the rest of his life.
He jumped. Something grabbed the back of his protective hood, bought him up short, and hung him on the end of the ladder.
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