Ace in the Hole

by George R. R. Martin

  He was lighter, he realized. Hiram had just made him lighter, but hadn’t been able to stop his fall entirely.

  The patch of white, he saw, was the grand piano. He was about to plunge into it.

  At least, he thought, he wouldn’t have to listen to that stupid Argentina song again.

  Spector could tell they were headed into Atlanta’s jokertown. The Jokertown was in New York, but most other major cities had a ghetto for their freaks, too. The buildings were crumbling, burned-out, or otherwise beat to pieces. Most of the cars on the street were stripped or immobile junkers. There were slogans spray-painted on walls, “KILL THE FREAKS” or “MONSTER MASH.” Obviously not put there by the neighborhood jokers. Atlanta’s jokertown wasn’t big enough to keep crazy nats from making a quick trip in to tear things up or kick some joker ass.

  Spector heard a rumble that wasn’t thunder and looked behind. There was a pink-and-white ’57 Chevy tailing them. The muffler was shot and the car was making a lot of noise. Spector couldn’t see well enough to know for sure, but figured there were some cracker punks inside.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Tony, pulling up against the curb beyond a dead Rambler.

  “Who’s worried?” Spector wasn’t just talking. He’d killed more street punks than he could count. He opened the car door and looked over at Tony.

  “Follow me.” Tony walked around the car and trotted up a set of concrete stairs to a well-lit doorway. He pressed the doorbell and waited.

  Spector walked up slowly behind him, keeping an eye on the street. The Chevy had cruised past them and turned the corner. He could still hear it over on the next street.

  The door opened. A joker woman in a plain blue dress smiled at them. She was covered with something that looked like yellow rubber hair. “Tony!” She grabbed Calderone and gave him a hug. “We didn’t expect to see you this trip, busy as you are.”

  “Never miss a chance for a visit, Shelly, you know that.” The woman took a step back and tugged Tony in by his shirtsleeve. Spector followed.

  “Shelly, this is Jim Spector, an old friend of mine from Jersey.” Shelly looked puzzled for a moment and Spector was afraid she’d placed his name. But an instant later she held out her hand. Spector took it. Her rubbery hair felt creepy, and her flesh gave too much as he squeezed it.

  “Nice to meet you, Jim,” she said, pulling away. She turned back to Tony. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? And bringing company, too. I’d have cleaned up the place.”

  Tony shook his head. “Shelly, my place never looks this good.”

  Spector looked around. The room was surprisingly clean. The furniture was inexpensive, but was dusted and polished. A black man was sitting on the couch watching a movie. This family, like almost all joker families, had nothing to do with blood relations. Their deformities were what brought them together.

  “This is Armand.” Armand turned around when Tony said his name. His jaws were hinged wrong, making his mouth a vertical pink slit. He had no lips or nostrils that Spector could see. Armand shook Tony’s hand and then reached out to Spector.

  “Nice to meet you,” Spector said, taking the man’s hand. It felt normal, at least.

  “Kids in the den?” Tony asked, taking a step toward the next room.

  “Yes. Playing cards, I think. Would either of you like some coffee?” She looked at Tony and then at Spector.

  Tony looked over at Spector, who shook his head. “No thanks, Shelly, we just had a big meal.” Tony gave her a pat on the shoulder and went into the next room. Spector smiled weakly and followed.

  They were sitting at a card table. The little girl, older by a few years, was pretty except for her arms. Up and down them were rows of what looked like rose thorns. The boy sat across from her, holding his cards in his prehensile feet. He had no arms, but his head was several times larger than normal. It was supported by a metal brace attached to the back of the wheelchair.

  “Hi, Uncle Tony,” they said together. Both seemed more interested in their cards.

  “Hey, squirts.” He sat down at the table with them. “I want you to meet a friend of mine. His name is Jim.”

  “Hi, kids,” Spector said. He felt completely out of place and would have been more comfortable with a broom handle up his ass.

  “I’m Tina,” said the little girl, turning over a card.

  “Jeffrey.” The boy didn’t turn to look at him. It looked like it wouldn’t be easy to do, anyway. He flipped over his card and laughed. His jack took her eight. He put both cards on the bottom of the deck. Jeffrey’s stack was a bit bigger than Tina’s.

  “Playing war?” Spector asked.

  “Joker war,” corrected Tina.

  Tony looked up. “It’s the same, except that jokers beat everything. And a black queen kills the other person’s card.” Tony smiled. Spector couldn’t imagine why the fuck his friend was so happy.

  Jeffrey took another trick. “I think he’s got your number, Tina,” Spector said.

  Tina wrinkled her nose and gave him her best killing look. Spector took a step backward, pretending to be scared. Jeffrey didn’t seem as miserable as he obviously should be. Spector wanted to kill him and save the kid a lifetime of hell, but that wasn’t, as they say, in the cards.

  “Mommy says we can watch a movie later,” Tina said. She turned her cards over and let Jeffrey collect them. “The Manchurian Candidate is going to be on.”

  Tony sighed. “Politics, mind-control, and assassination. Not the kind of thing kids should be watching. I’ll talk to Shelly and…”

  “Don’t do that, Uncle Tony,” Tina pleaded. She looked over at Spector. “Mister, don’t let him do it. Mommy promised.”

  Spector shrugged. “Don’t want to have to get rough with you, old friend.”

  Tony threw up his hands. “Democracy at work,” he said, walking back toward the living room.

  “Yay,” said Tina.

  “My queen kills your last ace.” Jeffrey fanned the cards with his toes. “I win.”

  “Congratulations, kids,” Spector said. “Sometimes that’s what it takes. Just remember that.”

  After the crash, after he’d landed right in the middle of the piano and then driven through the floor to the function space on the lower level, the thing that surprised Jack was that he started to float upward again through the hole he’d just made.

  Hiram had made him lighter than air. Crap.

  Before he could float out into space again, Jack grabbed some of the twisted rebar that had been supporting the atrium floor. He hung upside down. Flashbulbs dazzled him. A TV floodlight drilled between his eyes. The pianist was lurching about like a drunk. From out of the burning light he could see Hiram peering at him out of his doughy face.

  “There’s an assassin loose!” he yelled. “Little guy in a leather jacket! He’s a wild card!”

  “Where?” Hiram goggled at him.

  “The senator’s floor!”

  Hiram turned dead-white. He spun and ran, arms and legs pumping. The crowd dissolved into pandemonium.

  “Hiram!” Jack yelled. “Worchester, goddamn it!”

  He was still lighter-than-air. And he was the only one who knew what the assassin looked like, and how to stop him.

  The pianist danced before him in his white tuxedo. He pointed at Jack. “He tried to kill me! He threatened me earlier!”

  “Shut the hell up,” said Jack.

  The pianist turned white as his tux and faded away.

  Hiram’s shot of antigravity diminished in a few minutes, and Jack tried to run for an elevator. He was still very light and he bobbled like an astronaut on the moon. He kept jumping across the atrium without going near the elevators. Security people were in the process of barring all the doors, which wasn’t going to do very much to stop someone who could walk through walls. Some stranger finally led Jack to the elevator by the hand.

  As Jack shot upward, he tried not to think of the skinny hunchback sitting up on top, slicing the c
ables with buzz-saw hands. The security was concentrating on the hallway leading to Hartmann’s apartment and HQ. Billy Ray was prominent in his white suit, flexing his muscles in front of a battery of gray-suited Secret Service. Some of them were carrying their Uzis in plain sight.

  Shaking pulverized concrete dust out of his ruined clothes, Jack walked up to Ray and gave him a description of the assassin, including the fact he could make himself insubstantial. Ray took his job seriously for once and didn’t give Jack a single sneer. He passed on the information with his radio and asked Jack to step into another room for a debriefing. Jack asked if he could change first—his clothes were ribbons. Ray nodded.

  Jack headed back to his room. As he stepped through the open door, he realized that he hadn’t bothered to tell anyone that this was where the fight had taken place.

  He headed for his bedroom and his foot hit something lying on the carpet. He looked down and saw part of Sara’s shoulder bag. He bent down and shook it open. One-third of a laptop computer slid out, along with scraps of paper that fluttered to the floor.

  Jack reached down and picked up the papers. There were several sheets stapled together and cut neatly off near the top, a press handout giving Leo Barnett’s appearances for the days leading up to the campaign.

  Another was the top of a yellow legal sheet written in scrawled blue ballpoint. “Secret Ace,” it said, underlined several times.

  Below were just doodles, a row of crosses, a tombstone.

  The next sheet was a photocopy on old-fashioned slick photocopy paper. It was obviously some official document.

  DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, it said. DOD#864-558-2048(b)

  BLOOD SERUM TEST XENOVIRUS TAKIS-A

  The rest was sliced off.

  Jack stared at it for a long moment.

  The secret ace, he thought, might not be secret much longer.

  10:00 P.M.

  Spector was relieved when it was time to leave. Everyone said their good-byes, except Armand, who didn’t look like he could say anything. Tony slipped Shelly an envelope as they stood in the doorway. Spector figured there was a check in it. Shelly waved good-bye and closed the door. Spector and Tony headed down the stairs toward the car.

  “You see what they’re like if you give them half a chance,” Tony said. “Oh, son of a bitch.” He was looking at the car. Someone had spray-painted “BARNETT FOR PRESIDENT!” in six-inch yellow letters on the Regal.

  Spector didn’t say anything, but figured that the Hartmann stickers on Tony’s car had made it too much of a temptation for the jerks with the spray paint. “What do you bet it was those shitheads in the Chevy?”

  “Good guess.” The voice came from behind them. Spector and Tony spun around. There were seven of them, clad in sweat-stained T-shirts and denim jeans. The largest had on a brown leather flight jacket. “We don’t much like being called shitheads, though. I think we need to teach you some manners.” There were grunts of approval from the others.

  Spector had seen and heard it all before, but this time it was different. He couldn’t just kill these punks, or Tony would figure out he was an ace. Seven to two was lousy odds. They were going to take a beating.

  The boy in the jacket slipped on some brass knucks and walked straight toward Tony. The others spread out and moved in. Tony was in a crouch, fists raised. Spector moved over next to him. Hopefully, he could keep the guy with the knucks busy. It’d hurt, but he’d heal in a hurry. Tony wouldn’t. At least none of them were showing knives or guns.

  The leader took a wild swing at Tony and got a hard, straight right to the jaw as a reward. The kid was knocked back a step, but the others swarmed in. Spector caught one of the punks in the throat with a flailing elbow, but this wasn’t his kind of fighting. They quickly hammered him to the sidewalk, and started kicking him in the stomach. Spector rolled into a ball and protected his head. They kept on kicking the shit out of him for a few moments, then stopped.

  “Let’s teach these joker-pokers a real lesson now.” The kid spoke with the bravado only a pea-brained street punk can manage.

  Spector rolled over and looked up. Tony was lying next to him, blood coming from his mouth and nose; eyes closed. He was out. The kid in the jacket pulled out a switchblade and clicked it open. Spector knew game time was over. He blinked a few times to clear his head before killing the kid.

  There was a gunshot from the window behind them. The kid went down with a funny look on his face, his switchblade spinning off into the darkness. The other punks scattered before Spector could get up. The kid had gotten over the initial shock of being shot and was now screaming on the sidewalk. His right arm was a bloody mess between the shoulder and elbow.

  Spector struggled up and kicked the kid in the mouth. “You shut up or I’ll rip your tongue out, shithead.” The kid stopped yelling, but still made pathetic mewling noises.

  Armand came down the stairs holding a rifle. Shelly was a step behind, a rubbery hand over her mouth. Tina had her face pressed to the window and was peering down at the sidewalk. Porch lights, those that worked anyway, were coming on up and down the street. Several neighbors were headed toward them. Spector carefully rolled his friend over. Tony had a bad cut on his forehead, and several of his front teeth were chipped or split.

  “Is he all right?” Shelly dabbed at the blood on Tony’s face with her sleeve.

  “He’ll be okay, I think,” Spector said, opening the back door and grabbing Tony by the armpits. “Help me lift him in. We need to get him to a hospital.” Armand grabbed Tony’s legs and they hoisted him into the backseat. Spector turned to Shelly. “You know where the nearest hospital is?”

  Shelly nodded.

  “Then get in the front seat and tell me where to go.” Spector fished out Tony’s car keys, closed the door, and walked around to the driver’s side.

  Armand grabbed him by the elbow and motioned to the kid with his head.

  Spector coughed. “Tony would tell you to hand him over to the cops and hope for the best. Personally, though, I’d cut his throat and feed him to the neighborhood dogs.”

  Armand’s face changed, but Spector couldn’t be sure it was a smile. He slid into the driver’s seat and cranked the Regal up.

  “Buckle up, Shelly,” Spector said, fastening his seat belt. She did as she was told. Tony groaned as Spector punched the accelerator. They screamed off into the night.

  Chapter Five

  Friday July 22, 1988

  6:00 A.M.

  THE DARKNESS SHOULD HAVE been soothing. Instead, the air conditioner droned like some slumbering evil beast and demons capered in the dim reaches of the ceiling. Gregg could feel his hands trembling. He tottered on the edge of an anxiety attack. The panic threatened to overwhelm him and set him screaming.

  “Gregg?” Ellen whispered alongside him. Her soft hand touched his chest. “It’s only six. You should be sleeping.”

  “Can’t.” He could barely even choke out the word, afraid that if he opened his mouth again he might start screaming.

  Her hand stroked his cheek, and slowly the panic receded, though the shade of it remained behind. He lay there stiffly, feeling Puppetman crawl inside at the touch, like a slug just underneath his skin. “I’ll be glad when this convention is over, no matter what,” Ellen said.

  “I’m blowing it, Ellen.” Gregg closed his eyes, taking a long, slow breath that did nothing to calm him. The apparitions continued to dance behind his eyelids. “It’s all falling apart around me, the whole thing.”

  “Gregg … Love…” Ellen’s arms came around him, her body snuggling close, and she hugged him. “Stop. You’re just letting the stress get to you, that’s all. Maybe if you saw Tachyon, he could prescribe—”

  “No,” he interrupted vehemently. “There’s nothing a doctor can do.” Ellen drew back at his sharp tone, then returned.

  “I love you,” she said, empty of any other comfort.

  “I know.” He sighed. “I know. It’s a damn good thing. God, you’ve b
een so understanding, the way I’ve been acting…” For a moment, he was on the verge of confessing, of just letting the whole madness spill out just to have an end to it. Then Puppetman wriggled inside, a reminder, and he carefully pushed the power back down.

  You can’t say it, it told him. I won’t let you.

  “You’re worrying too much. The nomination will come or it won’t. If not this year, you’ll be in a good position for ’92. We can wait. We’ll have time to let the baby grow up a little.” He could feel her smiling bravely—her own little obsession. “You’ll have enough to keep you busy with our son or daughter. A little part of us.”

  Ellen took his hand and placed it on the swell of her stomach just below her navel. “Feel it?” she asked. “It’s been kicking up a storm lately. Getting more active every day, stronger. It’s waking up now. There, feel that? Say hello to Daddy, little one,” she crooned.

  Gregg suddenly wished that she was right, that it was over. Ellen had brought up the subject after the hectic months of the tour; he’d been surprised at how easily he’d agreed. It seemed right, a symbol of normalcy after the violence and hatred. It had taken months; he’d been so pleased when they’d found Ellen was finally pregnant. Despite everything, he’d wanted the child as much as she did. He’d enjoyed playing the proud, prospective father. Even the power within had seemed to share the happiness.

  A little part of us.

  Now he could hardly remember that at all. The pride and love and hope had been driven away by Puppetman’s needs.

  There was a faint fluttering beneath his fingertips. Ellen laughed with the baby’s movements.

  Let the baby grow up a little.

  And Gregg nearly pulled his hand away as if burned. The suspicion was like a physical blow. He knew, and with the knowledge, Puppetman howled inside.

  The difficulties with Puppetman had started slowly and intermittently only a few months ago. The Gimli-presence had been faint and weak and unformed then, easily pushed away.

  Getting more active every day, stronger.