Wild Cards Part 30

She started to walk away and then she looked in the can. "Hey, thanks, man. You're okay. Listen, here's a flyer. If you want to do some more, call us."

"Sure," Fortunato said. "What's your name?"

"They call me C.C.," she said. "C.C. Ryder."

"Is it the same C.C. as up there?" He pointed to the S.N.C.C. banner.

C.C. shook her head. "You're funny, man," she said, and smiled once and faded into the crowd.

He folded up the flyer and stuck it in his pocket and turned off the Bowery. All the talk about jokers had left him feeling disconnected. Just down the street was a mirror-walled club called the Funhouse, owned by a guy named Desmond who had a trunk instead of a nose. He was one of Fortunato's customers, always wanting a geisha with finer skin or darker hair or a sweeter face than Fortunato could find for him. Fortunato could not stand the thought of seeing him just then.

On the side streets hardly anyone wore masks anymore, and eyes stared back defiantly at him from upside-down faces or heads the size of cantaloupes. Your new brothers and sisters, he told himself. For every ace there were ten of these, lurking in alleys while the lucky ones put on capes and talked their lame jargon and jetted around fighting each other. The aces had the headlines and the talk shows, and the freaks and cripples had Jokertown. Jokertown and the jungles of Vietnam, if C.C.'s story was right.

But the only place Fortunato wanted to be was back in Lenore's apartment, making love to her. And this time he would let go, and if it made him weak it wouldn't matter, and things would go back to the way they always had been.

Except that sooner or later the killer was going to move again. Vietnam was halfway around the world, but the killer was right here, maybe in this very block.

He stopped walking, looked up, and saw that his subconscious had brought him right to the alley where they told him they'd found Erika.

He thought about what C.C. had said. Using power to take care of your own.

When Lenore had jolted him out of his body he'd seen things he'd never seen before, swirls and patterns of energy that he had no name for. If he could get out again he might see something the cops had missed.

A wino in a long, filthy overcoat started at him. It took Fortunato a second to realize the man had long, floppy, ba.s.set ears and a moist, black nose. Fortunato ignored him, shutting his eyes and trying to remember the feeling.

He might as well have been trying to think himself to the moon. He needed Lenore but he was afraid to bring her here. Could he do it at her place, then fly back here? Would he be able to keep it going that long? What would happen to his physical body if he did?

Too many questions. He called her from a pay phone and told her where to meet him.

"Do you have a gun?" he asked.

"Yes. Ever since . . . you know."

"Bring it."

"Fortunato? Are you in trouble?"

"Not yet," he said.

By the time he got back to the alley with Lenore he'd drawn a crowd. They all wore Salvation Army leftovers: baggy pants, ripped and stained flannel s.h.i.+rts, jackets the color of dried grease. One short old woman looked like a wax museum statue that had started to melt. Off to her right was a teenaged boy, standing next to a rack of garbage cans, vibrating. When the vibrations got to a certain pitch the cans would bang together like a spastic cymbal section and the woman would turn on them in a fury and kick at them. The others were less obviously deformed: a man with suckers on the ends of his fingers, a girl whose features had been squared off with ridges of hardened skin.

Lenore held onto Fortunato's arm. "What now?" she whispered.

Fortunato kissed her. She tried to pull away when the audience of freaks started to snicker, but Fortunato was insistent, opening her lips with his tongue, moving his hands over the small of her back, and finally she began to breathe heavily and he felt the power stirring at the base of his spine. He moved his lips down Lenore's shoulder, her long fingernails digging into his neck, and then he raised his eyes until he was looking at the dog-man. He felt the power flow into his eyes and voice and said, quietly, "Go away."

The dog-man turned and walked out of the alley. One at a time he ordered the others away and then he said, "Now," and guided her hand into his trousers. "Do it to me, what you did before." He slid his hands up under her sweater and moved them slowly over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her right hand closed over him and her left went around his waist, comforting him with the weight of her S&W .32. He closed his eyes as the heat began to build, letting the brick wall behind him take his weight. In seconds he was ready to come, his astral body bobbling like a loosely held balloon.

And then, like stepping sideways out of a moving car, he slipped free.

Every brick and candy wrapper glistened with clarity. As he concentrated, the rumble of traffic slowed and deepened until it was barely audible.

They'd found Erika in a doorway deep in the alley, severed arms and legs stacked like firewood in her lap, head attached by less than half the thickness of her neck. Fortunato could see the stains of her blood deep within the molecules of the concrete, still glowing faintly with her life essence. The wood of the doorframe still held a trace of her perfume and a single thread of ash-blond hair.

The baritone murmur of the street dropped to a vibration so low that Fortunato could feel the individual wave peaks pa.s.s through him. Now he could see the indentation Erika's body had made in the concrete stoop, the infinitesimal trace her shoes had pressed into the asphalt. And beside them the footprints of her killer.

They led from the street to Erika's body and back again, and at the curb they met the imprint of a car. He had no idea what kind of a car it had been, but he could see the tracks it had left, thick and black and fibrous, as if it had been burning rubber the entire way.

He stopped for an instant and looked back at his material body frozen in Lenore's arms. Then he let the tracks of the car pull him out into the street, across to Second Avenue, then south to Delancey. He felt himself gradually weakening, his vision clouding up and the background noises of the city starting to shake the edge of his hearing. He concentrated harder, pulling the last reserves of strength out of his physical body.

The car turned north on the Bowery and paused in front of a shabby gray warehouse. Fortunato bore down on the sidewalk, saw the footprints as they crossed from the car to the building's front door.

He followed them upstairs. He felt as if he'd been tied to a giant elastic band and run to its limit. Each stair took more out of him than the last. Finally the footprints disappeared at the entrance to a loft, and he knew he was finished.

The traffic noise spun up to speed around him and he shot backward the way he'd come, drawn irresistibly home to his body. Blissful, exhausted, as if he'd drained himself in s.e.x, he fell into it like a diver into a pool. Lenore staggered under his sudden dead weight and then he slid down into unconsciousness.

"No," she said, and rolled away from him. "I can't."

She had purple circles under her eyes and her body was limp with exhaustion. Fortunato wondered how she'd been able to get him into a taxi and help him up the stairs to her apartment.

"I don't understand," he said.

"You build up a charge, and then s.e.x burns it off. You see? The power, the shakti shakti. Except with tantric magick you absorb the energy back into you. Not just yours, but whatever energy I give up to you."

"So when you come, you give up this shakti shakti."

"Right."

"And you've given me all you have."

"That's right, big guy. I'm all f.u.c.ked out."

Fortunato reached for the phone.

"What are you doing?"

"I know where the killer is," he said, dialing. "If you can't give me the strength to take him, I'll have to get it somewhere else." He didn't like the way it came out but he was too tired right then to care. Tired and something else. His brain hummed with the knowledge of his power, and he felt it changing him, taking control.

The phone rang at the other end and then he heard Miranda answer it. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and turned back to Lenore. "Will you help?"

She closed her eyes and did something with her mouth that was almost a smile. "I guess a hooker should know better than to be jealous."

"Geisha," Fortunato said.

"All right," Lenore said. "I'll show her what to do."

They had a line each of cocaine and some intense Vietnamese pot. Lenore swore it would only help tune them into each other. Miranda, tall, black-haired, lush, the most physically adept of his women, stripped slowly to garter belt, stockings, and a black bra.s.siere so thin he could see the dark ovals of her nipples.

Forty minutes later Lenore had pa.s.sed out across the foot of the bed. Miranda, her head hanging down over the edge, arms spread in a mock crucifix, shut her eyes. "That's it," she whispered. "I can't come any more. I may never come again."

Fortunato pushed himself up onto his knees. He was covered with an even sheen of sweat and he thought he could see a golden light radiating from underneath his skin. He saw himself in the mirror over Lenore's dresser and wasn't alarmed or even surprised when he saw that his forehead had begun to swell with power.

He was ready.

The cab let him off two blocks away on Delancey. He had Lenore's .32 shoved in the back of his pants for insurance, hidden by his black linen jacket. But if he could, he would do the job with his own hands. Either way, the cops were not going to get a chance to put the killer back on the streets.

His eyes wouldn't quite focus and he had to keep his hands in his pockets because he didn't trust them. For some reason he was not afraid at all. He felt fifteen again, like he'd felt when he started making it with the girls his mother trained. For months he'd been afraid to try because of what his mother might say or do; once he gave in he no longer cared.

It was the same now. He was reckless, charged with the dark scent and hot, moist pressure of s.e.x, barely functioning in the real world at all. I'm going to face a killer, he told himself, but they were only words. In his guts he knew he was going to protect his women, and that was all that mattered.

He climbed the stairs to the loft. It was after midnight, but he could hear the stereo blasting the Rolling Stones' "Street-Fighting Man" through the steel door. He pounded on it with the bottoms of his fists.

He swallowed hard and his throat turned cold.

The door opened.

On the other side was a boy of seventeen or eighteen, pale, thin, but well-muscled. He had long blond hair and a face that might have been beautiful except for an eruption of pimples around the chin, clumsily hidden with makeup. He wore a yellow s.h.i.+rt with black polka dots and faded denim bell-bottoms.

"You want something?" he finally asked.

"To talk to you," Fortunato said. His mouth was dry and his eyes were still not focusing right.

"What about?"

"Erika Naylor."

The boy had no reaction. "Never heard of her."

"I think you do."

"You a cop?" Fortunato didn't answer. "Then f.u.c.k off."

He started to close the door. Fortunato remembered the alley, ordering the jokers away. "No," he said, staring hard into the boy's colorless eyes. "Let me in."

The boy hesitated, looking stunned, but not giving in. Fortunato hit the door with his shoulder, knocking the boy all the way back into the loft and onto the floor.

The room was dark and the music deafening. Fortunato found an overhead light switch and flipped it on, then took an involuntary step back as his brain registered what he saw.

It was Lenore's apartment twisted into perversion, the hip, s.e.xy fas.h.i.+on of occultism taken all the way into torture and murder and rape. As in Lenore's apartment there was a five-pointed star on the floor, but this one was hasty, uneven, scratched into the boards with something sharp and then splattered with blood. Instead of velvet and candles and exotic wood, there was a gray-striped mattress in one corner, a pile of dirty clothes, and a dozen or more Polaroid pictures tacked to the wall with a staplegun.

He knew what he was going to find, but he walked over to the wall anyway. Of the fourteen nude, dismembered women he recognized three. The latest, in the lower righthand corner, was Erika.

He couldn't think with the music blaring at him. He looked around for the record player and saw the blond boy get up onto shaky legs and stumble toward the door. "Stop!" Fortunato shouted, but without eye contact it didn't mean anything.

Enraged and panicking, Fortunato charged. He caught the boy around the waist and drove him into the bare plasterboard wall.

And then suddenly he was trying to hold on to a raging animal, all knees and fingernails and teeth. Fortunato pulled away instinctively and watched the razor edge of an enormous switchblade flash between them, slicing through his jacket and his s.h.i.+rt and his skin, coming away outlined in red.

I'm going to die, Fortunato thought. The gun was stuck in the back of his pants, too far away to reach before the blade came around again, cutting deeper, sliding all the way in. Killing him.

He looked at the blade. Before he knew what he was doing he was staring hard at it, concentrating, the way he had when he read the books in Lenore's apartment, the way he had in the Jokertown alley.

And time slowed.

He could see not only his own blood on the knife, but the blood of the others, of Erika and all the other women in the photographs, washed away, but still held in the memory of the metal.

He backed away from the insane blond boy, moving with dream slowness through thickened air, but still moving faster than the boy or his knife. He reached behind him, felt the slick grips of the gun under his fingers. The Rolling Stones had slowed to a dirge as he brought the gun around, pointed it at the boy, saw the pale eyes go wide.

Don't kill him, he thought suddenly. Not until you know why. He s.h.i.+fted the barrel until it pointed at the boy's right shoulder, and pulled the trigger.

The noise started as a vibration in Fortunato's hand, accelerated like a rocket, became a roar, a short bang of thunder, and then time was rolling again, the boy rocking back with the impact of the bullet but his eyes not showing it, scooping the knife out of his useless right hand with his left and lurching forward again.

Possessed, Fortunato thought with horror, and shot him through the heart.

Staggering back, Fortunato pulled his s.h.i.+rt open and saw that the long, shallow cut across his chest had already stopped bleeding, would not even need st.i.tches. He slammed the door to the hallway and walked across the room to kick out the plug of the phonograph. And then, in the strangled silence, he turned to face the dead boy.

The power rippled and surged inside him. He could see the blood of the women on the dead boy's hands, see the trail of blood that led from the crude pentagram on the floor, see the tracks where the boy had stood, the shadows where the women had died, and there, faintly, as if it had been somehow erased, the marks left by something else.

Lines of power still lingered inside the pentagram, like heat waves s.h.i.+mmering off a highway in the desert. Fortunato ground his hands into fists, felt cool sweat trickle down his chest. What had really really happened here? Had the boy somehow conjured a demon? Or had the boy's madness just been a tool in something vastly larger, something infinitely worse than a few random killings? happened here? Had the boy somehow conjured a demon? Or had the boy's madness just been a tool in something vastly larger, something infinitely worse than a few random killings?

The boy could have told him, but the boy was dead.

Fortunato went to the door, put his hand on the k.n.o.b. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cold metal. Think, he told himself.

He wiped his fingerprints off the pistol and threw it next to the body. Let the cops draw their own conclusions. The Polaroids should give them plenty to think about.

He turned to go again, and again he couldn't leave the room.