Wildcards - Down and Dirty Part 31

"Doug's bakery is a block from the clinic. I buy doughnuts there in the morning.

When the call came, Troll and I were convenient."

"Right," she drawled.

... Tachyon, the .357 Magnum like a cannon in his small hand, entering from the alley. Troll roaring in from the front of the bakery. Troll doubled up a ham-size fist and beat heads like a man playing bongos. One of the Mafia thugs drew a .22 pistol. Fired point-blank into Troll's ma.s.sive chest. The bullet ricocheted off the joker's thick greenish skin with a whine. The man went white.

Troll lifted him by his s.h.i.+rt front.

"You shouldn't have done that, mister, because now I'm really mad."

Troll coolly broke both the man's arms, then his legs, and then propped him in a corner like a discarded sack. A sack that screamed.

Tachyon switching his gaze from man to man. Each one dropping in a snoring heap as soon as those strange lilac eyes were leveled upon him. One of the Fists succeeded in unlimbering a .45 automatic. Tachyon shot the gun from his hand.

Raised the gun to his lips, and blew lightly across the barrel...

"Show off," said Chrysalis.

The alien shrugged. "I'm a good shot."

"I don't believe for a moment that you didn't know Video was there. That has got to have been a performance for the benefit of the applauding ma.s.ses."

"Chrysalis, you wound me."

"Tachyon, you're an arrogant son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h, and don't try to tell me otherwise."

"I didn't know you were taking part in all this," said Finn. " I organized it ... helped organize it. I should share in the risks." The alien drained his drink and bowed to Video and Chrysalis. "Ladies, I thank you." He paused at the door. "By the way, Chrysalis. How do you think we're doing?"

"I think we've got them on the run. I just hope they don't decide to take a crack at us."

"Scared?"

"You bet your sweet little alien a.s.s I am. I know more about this situation-who's behind it-than you do."

"And you're not going to tell me."

"You've got that right."

June 1987

All the King's Horses

V.

ADMISSION ONLY $2.50 said the sign over the darkened ticket booth in front of the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum.

The booth was empty, the museum doors locked. Tom rang the bell by the ticket window. After a minute he rang it again. There were shuffling noises from within, and a door in the back of the booth opened. An eye appeared, a rheumy pale-blue eye on a long fleshy stalk that curled around the doorframe. It fixed on Tom, blinked twice.

A joker stepped into the booth. He had a dozen eyes on long prehensile stalks that sprouted from his forehead and moved constantly, like snakes. Otherwise he was unremarkable. "Cancha read?" he said in a thin, nasal voice. "We're closed."

In one hand he had a small sign, which he slid in front of the ticket window. It said CLOSED.

The way the joker's eyes kept moving gave Tom a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Are you Dutton?"

One by one the eyes turned, stilled, until every last one of them was fixed on him, studying him. "Dutton expecting you?" the joker asked. Tom nodded. "All right, c'mon round the side." He turned and left the booth, but two or three of his eyes stared back at Tom, curious and unblinking, until the door shut.

The side entrance was a heavy metal fire door opening on an alley. Tom waited nervously while locks were unlocked and bolts lifted inside. You heard stories about Jokertown alleys, and this one seemed to him especially dark and gloomy.

"This way," eye-stalks said when the door finally opened.

The museum was windowless, its interior hallways even gloomier than the alley.

Tom looked around curiously as they pa.s.sed down several long corridors, with dusty bra.s.s railings and waxwork dioramas to either side of them. He had floated over the Dime Museum thousands of time as the Turtle, but he'd never set foot inside.

With the lights out, the figures in the shadows seemed remarkably lifelike. Dr.

Tachyon stood on a mound of white sand, his s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p painted on the backdrop behind him, while nervous soldiers climbed from a jeep. Jetboy clutched his chest as steel-faced Dr. Tod pumped bullets into him. A blond in a torn teddy struggled in the grasp of the Great Ape as he scaled a model of the Empire State Building. A dozen jokers, each more twisted than the last, writhed suggestively in some dank bas.e.m.e.nt, clothing strewn all around them.

His guide vanished around a corner. Tom followed, and found himself face-to-face with a roomful of monsters. Drenched in shadow, the creatures looked so real that they brought him up short. Spiders the size of minivans, flying things that dripped acid, gigantic worms with rings of serrated teeth, humanoid monstrosities whose skin quivered like gelatin; they filled the room behind the curving gla.s.s, surrounding him on three sides, crowding each other, slavering to break out.

"Our newest diorama," a quiet voice said behind him. "Earth versus the Swarm.

Try the b.u.t.tons."

Tom looked down. A half dozen large red b.u.t.tons were set into a panel by the railing. He pressed one. Inside the diorama a spotlight picked out a wax simulacrum of Modular Man suspended from the ceiling, as twin beams of scarlet light flashed down from his shoulder-mounted guns. The lasers struck one of the swarmlings; thin tendrils of smoke rose, and a long hiss of pain issued from unseen speakers.

Tom pushed a second b.u.t.ton. Modular Man vanished back into the shadows, and the lights found the Howler in his yellow fighting togs, outlined against a plume of smoke from a burning tank. The simulacrum opened its mouth; the speakers shrieked. A swarmling quivered in agony.

"The children love it," the voice said. "This is a generation raised on special effects. I'm afraid they demand more than simple waxworks. One must adapt to one's times."

A tall man in a dark suit of old-fas.h.i.+oned cut stood in a doorway to one side of the diorama, the joker with the eyestalks hunched over beside him. "I'm Charles Dutton," he said, offering a gloved hand. A heavy black cape was thrown over his shoulders. He looked as though he'd just stepped from a hansom cab in Victorian London, except for the cowl drawn up over his head that kept his face in shadow.

"We'll be more comfortable in the office," Dutton said. "If you'll step this way."

Tom was suddenly very uneasy. He found himself wondering, once again, what the h.e.l.l he was doing here. It was one thing to float over Jokertown as the Turtle, secure in a steel sh.e.l.l, and quite another to venture into its streets in his own all-too-vulnerable flesh. But he'd come this far. There was no backing out now. He followed his host through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and down a narrow flight of steps. They pa.s.sed through a second door, through a cavernous bas.e.m.e.nt workshop, into a small but comfortably furnished office.

"Can I get you a drink?" the cowled man asked. He went to a wet bar in the corner of the office and poured himself a brandy.

"No," Tom said. He was -a cheap drunk, too easily affected by booze, and he needed all his wits about him today. Besides, drinking through the d.a.m.ned frog mask would be a b.i.t.c.h.

"Let me know if you change your mind." Cradling the snifter, Dutton crossed the room and seated himself behind an antique clawfoot desk. "Please, sit down. You look terribly uncomfortable standing there like that."

Tom wasn't listening. Something else had caught his eye. There was a head on the desk.

Dutton noticed his interest and turned the head around. The face was remarkably handsome, but the oh-so-perfect features were frozen in a rictus of surprise.

Instead of hair, the top of the skull was a plastic dome with a radar dish beneath. The plastic was cracked. Severed cables, blackened and half-melted, dangled from the jagged stump of its neck.

"That's Modular Man," Tom said, shocked. Numbly he eased himself down onto the edge of a ladderback chair. "Only his head," Dutton said.

It had to be a wax replica, Tom told himself. He reached out and touched it.

"It's not wax."

"Of course not," Dutton said. "This is authentic. We bought it from one of the busboys at Aces High. I don't mind telling you, it cost us quite a tidy sum. Our new diorama will dramatize the Astronomer's attack on Aces High. You'll recall that Modular Man was destroyed during that fracas. His head will give a certain verisimilitude to the display, don't you think?"

The whole notion made Tom ill. "You planning to put Kid Dinosaur's body on display too?" he said testily.

"The boy was cremated," Dutton replied in a matter-offact tone. "We have it on good authority that the mortuary subst.i.tuted a John Doe, cleaned his bones with carpet beetles, and sold the skeleton to Michael Jackson."

Tom found himself at a loss for words.

"You're shocked," Dutton said. "You wouldn't be, if you were a joker beneath that mask. This is Jokertown." He reached up, pulled back the cowl that covered his face. A death's head grinned at Tom across the desk; dark eyes sunk deep beneath a heavy brow ridge, leathery yellow skin stretched taut across a noseless, lipless, hairless face, teeth bared in a rictus of a smile. "When you've lived here long enough, nothing shocks you," Dutton said. Mercifully he yanked up the cowl again to conceal the living skullface, but Tom could feel the weight of his eyes. "Now," he said. "Xavier Desmond gave me to understand that you have a proposition for me. A major new exhibit."

Tom had seen thousands of jokers in his long years as the Turtle, but always at a distance, on his TV screens, with layers of armor plate between them. Sitting alone in a gloomy bas.e.m.e.nt with a cowled man whose face was a yellowed skull was a little different. "Yeah," he said uncertainly.

"We are always in the market for new exhibits, the more spectacular the better.

Des is not normally given to hyperbole, so when he tells me you're offering us something truly unique, I'm interested. Exactly what- is the nature of this exhibit?"

"The Turtle's sh.e.l.ls," said Tom.

Dutton was silent for a moment. "Not a replica?"

"The real thing," Tom told him.

"The Turtle's sh.e.l.l was destroyed last Wild Card Day," Dutton said. "They dredged up pieces of it from the bottom of the Hudson."

"That was one sh.e.l.l. There were earlier models. I've got three of them, including the very first. Armor plate over a Volkswagen frame. It's got some burned-out tubes, but otherwise it's pretty much intact. You could clean it up, rig the TV screens for closed circuit, make a real ride out of it. Charge extra for people to crawl inside. The other two sh.e.l.ls are just empty hulls, but they'd still make quite a draw. If you have a big enough hall, you could hang 'em from the ceiling, like the airplanes in the Smithsonian." Tom leaned forward. "If you want to make this place into a real museum instead of just a tacky freak show for nat tourists, you need real exhibits."

Dutton nodded. "Intriguing. I'll admit I'm tempted. But anyone could build a sh.e.l.l. We'd need some kind of authentication. If you don't mind my asking, how did they chance to come into your possession?"

Tom hesitated. Xavier Desmond said Dutton could be trusted, but it was not easy to set aside twenty-four years of caution. "They're mine," he said. "I'm the Turtle."

This time Dutton's silence was even longer. "There are those who say the Turtle is dead."

"They're wrong."

"I see. I don't suppose you'd care to give me proof." Tom took a deep breath.

His hands curled around the armrests of his chair. He stared across the desk, concentrated. Modular Man's head rose a foot into the air and turned slowly until its eyes were fixed on Dutton.

"Telekinesis is a relatively common power," Dutton said, unimpressed. "The Turtle is distinguished not by the mere fact of his teke, but by its strength.

Lift the desk and you'll convince me."

Tom hesitated. He didn't want to queer the deal by admitting that he couldn't lift the desk, not when he was out of his sh.e.l.l. All of a sudden, without thinking, he heard himself say, "Buy the sh.e.l.ls, and I'll fly them here. All three of them." The words slipped out glib and easy; it wasn't until they were there hanging in the air that Tom realized what he'd said.

Dutton paused thoughtfully. "We could videotape the arrival, run the loop as part of the exhibit. Yes, I'd think that would be all the authentication we'd need. How much are you asking?"

Tom felt a moment of blind panic. Modular Man's head thumped back onto Dutton's desk. "One hundred thousand dollars," he blurted. It was twice what he'd intended to ask. "Too much. I'll offer you forty thousand."

"f.u.c.k that," Tom said. "This is a one-of-a-kind exhibit."

"Three-of-a-kind, actually," Dutton pointed out. "I might be able to go to fifty thousand."

"The historical value alone is more than that. This is going to give this f.u.c.king place respectability. You'll have lines going around the block."

"Sixty-five thousand," Dutton said. "I'm afraid that's my final offer."

Tom stood up, relieved but somehow disappointed as well. "Okay. Thanks for your time. You don't happen to have a number for Michael Jackson, do you?" When Dutton didn't answer, he started for the door.

"Eighty thousand," Dutton said behind him. Tom turned. Dutton coughed apologetically. "That's it. Really. I couldn't do better if I wanted to. Not without liquidating some of my other investments, which I'm not prepared to do."

Tom paused in the doorway. He'd almost escaped. Now he was stuck again. He didn't see any way out that wouldn't make him look like a fool. "I'll need cash."

Dutton chuckled. "I don't imagine a check made out to the Great and Powerful Turtle would be very easy to negotiate. It will take me a few weeks to raise that much cash, but I imagine I can work it out." The cowled man unfolded from his chair and came around the desk. "Are we agreed, then?"

"Yeah," Tom said. "If you'll throw in the head."

"The head?" Dutton sounded surprised, and a little amused. "Sentimental, aren't we?" He picked up Modular Man's head and stared into the blind, unfocused eyes.

"It's just a machine, you know. A broken machine."

"He was one of us," Tom said with a pa.s.sion that surprised even him. "It doesn't feel right, leaving him here."

"Aces," Dutton sighed. "Well, I suppose we can do up a wax replica for the Aces High diorama. It's yours, as soon as we can take delivery on the sh.e.l.ls."

"You get the sh.e.l.ls when I get my money," Tom said. "Fair enough," Dutton replied.

Jesus, Tom thought, what the f.u.c.k have I gone and done? Then he got a grip on himself. Eighty thousand dollars was one h.e.l.l of a lot of money.

Enough money to make it worth turning turtle one last time.

Concerto for Siren and Serotonin