Lowball: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  “Uh,” Gordon said, uncertain. “Do we run now?”

  He heard steel enter Dina’s voice. “Not … just … yet,” she said.

  The dogs’ ears pricked up, and they turned to look at the two advancing men. One of the dogs rose from its sitting position and took a few steps toward the two, and paused in a hunting posture, leaning forward, one forefoot raised.

  “Nobody move!” said the man in the cowboy hat. He raised the rifle to his shoulder as he and his comrade advanced. Neither of them seemed to have noticed their dogs’ uncharacteristic behavior. Maybe, Gordon thought, Dina isn’t filling their minds with happy thoughts any longer.

  All three dogs were on their feet now, moving low to the ground as they advanced on the two armed men. And then one of them gave a savage growl and hurled itself at the throat of the man with the rifle.

  There was a shot that went nowhere and the man went down. The other two dogs were bounding to their prey, and the man with the pistol started shooting.

  “Now we run!” Dina said, and she and Gordon both turned and began racing for the car. Dina’s legs were a lot shorter, but she was fast, and pulled ahead.

  There were more shots, followed by an agonized canine howl. Dina gasped and pitched forward onto her face.

  Gordon’s nerves gave a jolt. He splashed to a stop, turned, bent over Dina, looked for the bullet wound, asked if she was all right. Her eyes were open and staring. Her face was blank. He could hear her breathing heavily but there was no response.

  Gordon shuddered as more shots cracked out. He gave a desperate glance in the direction of the gate, and through the rain beading his spectacles saw that both men were on the ground. Two dogs lay stretched out on the driveway, and one of the men wrestled with the third.

  Gordon grabbed Dina by the jacket collar and began hauling her toward the car. He was all too aware that he was underweight and not very strong, and was thankful that she was so small. He was dragging her headfirst over the ground, and he realized he could injure her neck, so he tried to support her head with his forearms.

  He was gasping for breath by the time he got her to the Volvo. He groped behind him for the door handle, found it, and swung the door open. The dome light flashed on, silhouetting them perfectly for any shooter taking aim.…

  Actinic light flashed from the heavens. Thunder roared. Gordon took a deep breath, bent his knees, and heaved Dina’s head and shoulders up onto the passenger seat. Hot pain shot through his back. He grabbed Dina’s hips and tried to shove her center of gravity up into the car.

  Normally he had help moving limp bodies around. Normally it was from slab to gurney, or gurney to slab. Normally he didn’t have to wrestle someone into a bucket seat, or avoid slamming her into the stick shift or getting her jammed against the console.

  “Give me some help here!” he told Dina. “Just pull yourself into the car!”

  Dina’s eyes stared blankly from her lolling head. He seized her feet and tried to shove them up into the Volvo.

  A shot jolted Gordon’s nerves, and he heard the bullet hit pavement nearby. Shoving the limp body was clearly not working, and Gordon dropped Dina’s feet and ran around to the driver’s side. He threw himself into the station wagon, grabbed Dina’s collar with both hands, and tried to haul her toward him. Pain lanced through his back again as he heaved her over the central console. Her head hung in his lap in a swirl of wet, curly hair.

  Another shot cracked out. There was an urgent bang somewhere in the car as the bullet struck home.

  Gordon reached under Dina’s shoulder and shoved the gearshift lever into drive, then stomped on the accelerator as he cranked the wheel hard over. The Volvo made a screaming U-turn on the highway, and Gordon steadied the vehicle as a flash of lightning showed him the way home.

  The car’s acceleration had swung the passenger door closed onto Dina’s feet, which were still dangling out of the car. He switched the dome light off to make himself a poorer target, then put his fingers on Dina’s throat. Her pulse was strong, just a little elevated. He could hear her respiration. He hadn’t seen or felt any blood.

  But there had been shots, and she’d collapsed. That was pretty good evidence that she’d been hit somewhere. He drove to his cabin, opened the gate on the road, drove through, and locked the gate behind him. He despaired of dragging Dina into the house, so he drove behind the house, unlocked the barn door, and drove into the barn.

  At least he’d have a dry place to make an examination.

  Gordon took some of the plastic sheeting he’d draped over his rocketry gear and laid it on the ground next to the passenger door. Then he pulled Dina out of the car and laid her on the sheet. He performed a careful examination and could find no wound.

  He had a medical bag in the cabin in case there was an accident with rocketry material. He unlocked the cabin’s rear door, fetched the bag, and returned.

  Pulse stable. Blood pressure normal. Respiration normal. Pupils responded normally to light. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Dina other than catatonia. Which, it had to be said, was really, really wrong.

  She’d been in mental contact with the dogs, he thought. She’d been getting them to attack their trainers. And then the shooting had started. The dogs, he thought. The dogs had been shot, presumably killed. And Dina had been in their heads when that happened.

  Maybe the shock had been too much.

  He put the blood pressure cuff back in his bag, then touched her throat. The skin was chill and clammy. He should get some blankets and insulate Dina against hypothermia.

  Then call an ambulance. Then call Franny and the state police and get a warrant and go crashing into IDS to free the captives. Officer down. It was one of those calls which would result in immediate action by the authorities. And Dina certainly was down.

  He unlocked the rear door of the cabin and went into the hall closet for the scratchy wool trade blankets he kept there. Returning with the blankets under his arm, he saw headlights flash across the front windows.

  Gordon walked across the darkened room to the living room window and peered past the drawn curtain. He saw a large panel van parked by his gate, and a man silhouetted against the headlights peering at the house.

  Gordon’s heart lurched. He remembered that one of the IDS people had seen his car when he’d surveilled the compound the previous day, that they probably had his license number and ID by now.

  They might have recognized his car, even in the rain. They might have just come straight here. Gordon backed away from the curtain and went to the back door. He locked the door behind him and sprinted to the barn.

  Dina was as he’d left her. He put a pair of blankets over her, and her head rolled as, for a moment, her eyes fluttered open and seemed to focus. “Doc…?” she said in a hoarse whisper, and then her head fell back and her eyes closed again.

  Gordon knelt and opened one eyelid. The pupil narrowed in the light, but it didn’t focus. She’d lapsed into coma again.

  Gordon’s nerves leaped as he heard a roaring engine, followed by the crash of his gate going down in front of the panel van. He stood, looked down at Dina, looked at his car. It seemed futile to try to drag her into his car again, especially as all that he could hope for would be a car chase that he could well lose. He bent again, felt under the blanket, and took Dina’s gun and holster from her belt. He looked at it for a moment as the faint scent of gun oil floated to him, and then he put the holster on his own belt, feeling foolish as he did it.

  What was he going to do, start a Western gunfight? These were professional bad guys, kidnappers. They’d shoot him down.

  He looked again at his car. He had to draw the pursuit away from the barn.

  And he knew exactly where to take them.

  He went to the steel cabinet where he kept rocketry supplies and opened it. He took a battery, a set of a half-dozen igniters, a wireless receiver, and his controller. Then he turned off the lights in the barn and got in his car. He put the rocketr
y gear on the passenger seat.

  He waited till he heard a crash as the front door of the house went down, and then he started the Volvo, gunned the engine, and backed out of the barn in a storm of power. Gravel rattled against the car as he swung around, snapped on the lights, and put the transmission in drive. Gordon stomped the accelerator again, wove through a line of evergreen, and took off down the two-rut trail that led across the meadows.

  He figured there was no way the bad guys could avoid seeing his departure.

  He’d gone a quarter mile before he saw the lights of the van coming after him. Lightning illuminated the rolling terrain, helped him chart his course. The Volvo bucketed up and down as it leaped along the trail, brush beating on the grille, rocks cracking against the floorboards.

  The station wagon slithered down a slope and hit what seemed to be a shallow pond between it and the next slope. The tail kicked out, and the wheels spun as Gordon tried to correct. Forward motion died in mere seconds. Gravel hammered against the rear panels as the wheels spun uselessly.

  Gordon grabbed his rocket gear and bolted from the car. Rain drummed on his skull as he splashed through standing water and began to run up the nearest slope. Brush clawed at his legs.

  The van crowned the slope behind him and dove toward his stalled car. Gordon panted for breath. The van splashed into the same lake as the Volvo and came to a halt, wheels spinning. Two men jumped out and charged the Volvo, finding no one inside.

  A flash of lightning turned the scene into day as Gordon crowned the slope, and Gordon heard a pair of shouts as he was spotted. But the flash had illuminated something else—the berms that surrounded the shed filled with rocket fuel.

  Gordon dragged himself forward. He dragged himself up the nearest berm, then ran down the steep slope and slammed to a tooth-clattering halt against the steel door of the shed. Breath heaved in and out of his lungs. He wasn’t used to running. He wasn’t used to panic, or to fighting, or being soaked to the skin.

  Better use his brains then, he decided.

  He fumbled at his belt for the key to the padlock on the door, then opened the lock and threw it over his shoulder. He tore open the door, ran inside, and reached for the tank that held the syntin, the Soviet liquid rocket fuel. He opened the valve and the fuel began to drain, filling the shack with a rich hydrocarbon scent. Gordon dropped an igniter into the fuel, put the battery on the concrete floor nearby, twisted wires around the terminals, and ran back into the open. He left the door invitingly ajar, ran around the building, and scrambled up the far berm. At the top he tripped and fell, and as he lay sprawled in the grass at the foot of the berm he heard an accented voice say, “He’s in there!”

  Gordon got to his feet and felt pain shoot through his right ankle. He lurched toward the grove of hawthorn at the far end of the meadow.

  As he ran he looked at the remote control in his hand and pushed the rocker switch to ON. The LEDs flicked from Safety to Armed. He heard the door to the shed go booming back on its hinges as the intruders stormed inside, and he heaved in a sobbing breath and pressed the Fire button. He was faintly surprised to find that the berms worked exactly as they were supposed to.

  “The perps were blown into their constituent atoms,” Gordon told Dina two nights later. “The crime scene guys weren’t able to find a single piece of remains.”

  Dina seemed impressed. “I have to say that once you make up your mind to do something,” she said, “you’re damned thorough.”

  “You’ll have to speak up,” Gordon said. “I’m still a little deaf.”

  The shed had exploded and then kept exploding, going on for several minutes at least. Gordon had watched from the shelter of the hawthorns as one blast after another rocked the peaceful meadow and sent flame reaching toward the low clouds overhead.

  It had to be admitted that he’d put a lot of oxidizer in that shed.

  For their dinner Gordon had taken her to Au Pied de Cochon, the New York incarnation of a well-known Parisian brasserie. The linen was crisp, the waitstaff efficient, and the tulip-shaped lights cast a fine mellow glow over the dining room with its dark wood paneling. The restaurant offered proteins in substantial quantities, which given Dina’s carnivore instincts seemed appropriate.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me for not going with you to the hospital,” Gordon said. “I didn’t know how to fix you, and I wanted to be there when the captives were freed in case they needed a doctor.”

  Dina affected thought. “Maybe I’ll forgive you,” she said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “I was there when you woke up,” Gordon pointed out.

  She’d come to herself about noon on Monday, demanding her clothes, meat protein, and her gun. No permanent harm seemed to have been done to her, and she could remember nothing of the time she’d been in a coma. “You were the first person I saw,” said Dina. “You get points for that.”

  “At least the sight didn’t send you back into a coma.”

  She laughed thinly.

  “When the first cops turned up at the facility,” Gordon said, “they saw three dogs shot dead in front of the gate and the corpse of a man who’d had his throat ripped out. It was an obvious crime scene, and they no longer needed a warrant to go in, but they felt a little leery of going in by themselves and called for backup, and while they waited Franny Black showed up with about half the detectives from Fort Freak.” He grinned. “They were toting some serious firepower and a lot of attitude. Harvey Kant even had a tommy gun that must have dated from Lucky Luciano’s day—which, by the way, made me wonder just how old Kant actually is. So our guys just brushed the Jersey cops aside and stormed the place.”

  Gordon laughed. “They were serious. For some reason they thought you were being held captive in there.”

  Dina’s eyes narrowed. “Who gave them that idea?” she asked.

  “They must have misinterpreted my phone call,” Gordon said. His face was deadpan. “Our guys were too late. The compound had been emptied. At least three computers were carried away, but they did manage to pull up a few names off envelopes and bills. But they did find Steely Dan and two kidnapped Jokertown residents held in some kind of steel-lined underground cells in the rearmost building.” He shook his head. “It was like some supervillain’s headquarters from the movies.”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t put them in dog cages,” Dina said.

  “Dog cages aren’t strong enough for Dan or any other wild card with extra strength,” Gordon said. “He would have ripped his way right out. The perps needed a custom facility.”

  “But what was it for?”

  “Even the captives didn’t know.” All Steely Dan knew was that he’d gone to answer the door, and there had been a couple of guys there with stun guns. They’d tased him into helplessness, then bound him, thrown him in a van, and driven away.

  “They were fed regularly. They weren’t mistreated beyond being held against their will.” He looked down at the gleaming tableware laid out on either side of his fine china plate. “The brass are thinking they were to be used to train dogs to kill people,” he said, “but I’ve been thinking. Maybe they were being held for … medical experiments.”

  Dina gave a canine growl that came very close to raising the hairs on Gordon’s neck. “That ain’t right,” she said.

  “Maybe if we can ID the body, or if the latent fingerprints tell us anything…”

  “That dead guy was Russian or something, right?” Dina said. “If he was a crook, maybe the Russians can tell us who he was.”

  “Maybe.” Gordon spread his hands wide. “So now the Jersey cops are involved, and the NYPD, and the FBI because there was a kidnapping. And FBI and ATF are both investigating my shed, because they’re half convinced I’m a terrorist.”

  “‘Blown to constituent atoms,’” Dina quoted. “Where’s their evidence?”

  “Well,” Gordon said dubiously, “there’s the big rocket engine in the barn. They might make something of that, I s
uppose.”

  She gave a laugh. “At least you’re not a joker. They’d put you with the Twisted Fists.” He looked at her. She looked back at him, then frowned. “You aren’t a joker, right?” she said.

  The police at Fort Freak had every reason to think he was a joker, because there it was in his file, the fact he’d tested positive for the wild card. In fact he’d been struck by the virus on the island of Okinawa, where his Air Force father had been stationed. Gordon had been in the hospital, out of his mind with fever, vast tumors growing everywhere on his skin, his heart thundering as his blood pressure crashed into the basement …

  American military hospitals come equipped for all sort of contingencies. They’d given him the trump, which in those days had only a thirty percent chance of success. And it had worked, reversing the chaotic wreckage the wild card was making of his body. He’d test positive for the rest of his life, but in fact he was a nat. A nat with his height, his weight, and his olfactory sense on the extreme edge of normal, but a nat nonetheless.

  “Am I a joker?” he repeated. “No, I’m not.”

  She screwed up her face as she looked at him, as if she wasn’t quite sure whether or not to believe him. Then she picked up the menu. “Maybe we’d better order.” Dina frowned over the menu, which did not include an English translation. “Well,” she said, “I know what porc means.”

  “Cochon also means pig,” Gordon added helpfully.

  “What’s panés?”

  “In breadcrumbs.”

  The waiter stepped forward with his smile and his pad. Gordon ordered calf’s face for an appetizer, followed by pig’s knuckle braised in spices. Dina had onion soup for a starter, followed by—her finger traced the words on the menu as she spoke them aloud—queue, oreille, museau et pied de cochon panés, the pork dish coated in breadcrumbs.

  Gordon didn’t tell her that she’d just ordered the ear, tail, snout, and foot of a pig. Foreign cookery, he thought, should come with its share of surprises.