Wildcards - One Eyed Jacks Part 36

Cunningham kept his expression impa.s.sive, but added another to his list as the Egrets piled out of the van, laughing. Two dragged a stupefied Deadhead by his arms. His payback list, Cunningham thought, was going to be very long before this day ended.

"Let's go," Chang said. "Little Mother is waiting." Like her late brother, Sui Ma was something of a sinophile. In her case, she made the Egrets who guarded her headquarters wear costumes out of what looked to Cunningham like the road show of Anna and the King of Siam. Though, Cunningham noted, discreetly holstered opposite the guards' stubby-bladed Chinese swords were very modern-looking machine pistols.

Sui Ma's headquarters always made Cunningham feel uncomfortable, and it was not just because of the feeling that he was entering the den of the Dragon Lady.

Behind the staid brick facade that was the outer wall was a fantasy land of silken tapestries and screens, electric torches glittering in wall sconces, and the heavy scent of incense billowing on the air.

Sui Ma herself was waiting for them in her reception room, sitting on her intricately carved wooden throne that was decorated with hundreds of peac.o.c.k feathers. She wore robes of dark blue silk embroidered with the dazzlingly white birds that were the sigil of the Egrets. She was a short woman, rather plain and chubby, just coming into middle age. But her mild appearance masked a powerful mind as ruthless as her brother's. And right now she didn't look exactly pleased to see Cunningham.

"Your ambition," she said coldly to Cunningham, "has finally driven you too far.

Not only have you slain my brother and his faithful bodyguard, but you then mutilated my brother's corpse. You'll pay for both acts."

Cunningham couldn't tell if she sincerely believed that he had killed Kien or if she was just using the circ.u.mstances as a convenient excuse for taking him out.

He shook his head. "I'll take the blame for Wyrm, but it was self-defense.

Christian sicced him on me. I'll give you even money that he was the one who told you that I'd killed Kien."

An expression flitted across Sui Ma's face that told Cunningham he'd given her something to think about. He spoke rapidly to press his advantage. "If I killed the General, what did I do with his head?"

She smiled. "You took it to feed to that disgusting creature of yours to learn all the secrets of the Shadow Fist Society."

"That's a fine theory," Cunningham admitted, "if I had the head in my possession. I don't."

"Then why," Sui Ma asked triumphantly, "did you go immediately from my brother's murder to pick up Deadhead at the automat?"

"Because I had something else for him," Cunningham explained. "The body of the watchdog joker that Kien had kept in a jar on his desk. The murderer killed the joker to keep it from blabbing about Kien's death. Someone seems to be running around behind the scenes trying to pin the blame on me."

"Christian," Sui Ma said thoughtfully. She gazed off into the distance for a long moment as Cunningham felt something like hope sweep over him for the first time since he'd been brought into her presence. "Where's the body of this joker?" she asked him.

"In a box in the glove compartment of my car," Cunningham said. Sui Ma glanced at Chang and nodded. He gestured at one of his goons, who immediately left to fetch it.

"And Deadhead?" Sui Ma asked.

"We have him in the antechamber," Chang said. "Bring him."

Chang nodded and also left, leaving Cunningham alone with Sui Ma and the half-dozen impa.s.sive guards who stood behind and around her peac.o.c.k throne. She continued to stare silently at him, as -if weighing the value of his life. He decided that now wasn't the time to annoy her with idle chitchat.

The goon returned with the joker in the box. He presented it to Sui Ma. She looked in the box, nodded, and gave it back to the Egret who placed it at her feet on the upper tier of the throne's dais. A moment later there was another short, respectful knock on the door, and Chang led in two Egrets dragging Deadhead between them.

The disheveled ace stared around the room with his dark, confused eyes, mumbling something to himself that no one else could understand. He looked at Cunningham, nervously licking his lips. "You have a job for me?" he finally asked.

Sui Ma nodded and pointed at the box. "In there." Deadhead stepped forward and removed the box's lid with shaking hands. "It's so little," he said. Cunningham nodded. "Consider it an appetizer." Deadhead's smile turned broad and fixed. A line of spittle ran down his chin as he reached into his pocket and took out a small leather case. Inside were a number of small, s.h.i.+ny, sharp implements. He chose one and began to saw, humming to himself. Cunningham looked away as Deadhead cut through the tiny skull. Sui Ma watched fixedly.

It took Deadhead only a few moments to cut away the top of the joker's skull. He glanced furtively at Cunningham and Sui Ma as he finished, then hunkered over the body. Half hiding his actions, he scooped out the joker's brain and popped it in his mouth. He chewed hastily, noisily, then swallowed. He knelt on the middle step of the dais before Sui Ma with a dreamy smile on his face, the tics and spasms that usually contorted his features subsiding into satiated serenity.

His eyes closed.

"How long will this take?" Sui Ma asked with more than detached interest.

"It depends," Cunningham said. "The corpse was rather ... fresh ... so that should cut down on the time it takes him to a.s.similate the memories."

It took a few moments, but then Deadhead finally began to groan and squirm.

"Noooo!" he cried, twisting as if to avoid a fatal blow.

Cunningham leaned forward eagerly. "Who killed you?" he asked.

"Red hair," Deadhead panted in his trance. "Smiling face. The boy likes it, he does." He squirmed again and let out a long, keening cry.

"Is he alone? Is there another in the room?" Deadhead whipped his head back and forth. "Another. Too far back. Blurry. Can't see who-"

Cunningham cursed to himself. The joker who'd guarded Kien's desk had been terribly myopic. "What about Kien? Is he in the room?"

"At his desk."

"What's he doing?"

"He is afraid. He opens the box, though he doesn't want to. He is saying, 'Why are you doing this to me? I don't want to. Don't make me do this.' He puts his face down in the box-"

Cunningham and Sui Ma looked at each other. "Mind control," Cunningham said, and Sui Ma nodded. "Someone-the redhead-made him inhale enough rapture to kill a whole platoon of r-heads."

"Redhead," Sui Ma said. "Mind control."

"Dr. Tachyon," they said together.

Sui Ma frowned, shaking her head. "I don't get it," she said. She looked critically at Deadhead, who was panting like a dog and tossing and jerking spasmodically on the floor, caught up in the aftereffects of brain-eating. "Why would Tachyon make Kien kill himself?"

"Maybe it wasn't him. Maybe it was some other redheaded mind-control artist."

Cunningham shrugged. "Deadhead can draw a picture of our man when he comes out of it." He looked at Sui Ma. "You can see, anyway, that I was telling the truth.

I didn't have anything to do with your brother's death."

Sui Ma again looked into the distance. "That may be true," she admitted, "but since when did truth have anything to do with deciding upon the proper course of action?" She looked at Cunningham. "My brother is dead and I shall be the new supreme power in the Shadow Fist Society. I do not think that you'd care to work for me, Fadeout, and frankly I don't think that I would trust you."

"So I'm still dead," he said with as much flippancy as he could muster.

"Let us say that the firm is eliminating your position," Sui Ma said with a smile.

"Okay," he said. "In that case, f.u.c.k it."

He faded to total invisibility. He didn't know the layout of Sui Ma's room as well as he did Kien's, but he'd done his best to memorize it in the last few minutes. He hit the ground, rolled, and came up dodging as he heard Sui Ma shout and her guards blunder around the room. There was a short burst of gunfire, an anguished scream, and then Sui Ma shouted, "Use your swords, idiots, and guard the door!"

He moved 'toward the sound of her voice, and stumbled over what sounded like a moaning Deadhead. He landed silently, rolled, stood, and b.u.mped into someone else. His hand slashed out and sunk into firm, muscular flesh, and he felt sudden, searing pain as a sharp blade chopped down into his upper thigh. He stifled a scream, and struck up at where he judged the sword wielder's wrist would be.

He struck flesh again, and pulled away. The blade came with him, still lodged in his thigh. He set his teeth together and yanked the sword from his leg, fading it out. Clasping both hands around the hilt, he swung in a great figure eight, feeling it slice through meat like a hot knife through b.u.t.ter.

Sui Ma shouted again at her guards, and that was a mistake because now he knew where she was. He started to circle toward her, holding the invisible sword out before him like a blind man might hold out his cane, and to the confusion and panic running through the room something new was suddenly added.

There were deep, hoa.r.s.e shouts in new voices, and the sound of gunfire blasted deafeningly through the chamber. Cunningham risked fading in his eyes for a moment and had to stifle a cry of relief as he saw that the cavalry had arrived in the form of a Werewolf squadron led by Warlock himself.

There were more than a dozen Wolves wearing leathers and delicately featured Michael Jackson masks, and armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and combat shotguns. One of them had a portable boom box, and the song "I'm Bad" was blasting through the chamber louder than the reports of their weapons.

Sui Ma was standing before her throne, more anger than fear on her face, braced by two of her guards, who were dropping their swords and fumbling for the guns holstered at their sides. Cunningham gauged the distance between them and slipped back into total invisibility. He lunged forward silently, swinging his razor-sharp blade.

He felt something warm and sticky splatter on his face and faded in his eyes, knowing that the mask of blood he was now carrying would give him away anyway.

One of the guards was down, but the other was turning toward him, gun up and ready. Cunningham tensed to dodge, but before the Asian could fire, a shotgun blast from the hands of a Werewolf cut him down. He fell forward, thudding down the steps of the dais, and Sui Ma was standing unprotected and alone before her throne.

She looked at Cunningham. "You seem to have won for now," she said, almost graciously.

He nedded. "You were right," he said. " I could never work for you. And I don't think that you could ever work for me."

He thrust the blade up and into her stomach, and she gasped, collapsing backward onto her chair. She looked at him for what seemed a long time before her eyes glazed over. Cunningham sighed and turned away. He'd killed before, but it made him feel funny to kill a woman like that. He couldn't totally console himself with the thought that she'd been prepared to do the -same for him.

In the rest of the chamber the Werewolves were wrapping up the last few of their surprised, outnumbered foes. Warlock stepped over Deadhead, cowering on the floor, and came up to join Cunningham at the top of the dais.

"Got here as soon as we could," he said, "after one of the brothers spotted you being hustled out of that laundromat. Finally figured, what the h.e.l.l, bust in and-"

He stopped and stared at Cunningham. Cunningham supposed that he was quite a sight. His leg was throbbing like h.e.l.l. The sword cut he'd taken on the thigh was bleeding like a G.o.dd.a.m.n river, and the blood of the guard he'd killed was splattered all over his face. Warlock was staring at his face. From the look in his eyes, peering through his Michael Jackson mask, he looked like he'd seen a ghost. The blood, Cunningham realized, must make him look like he'd taken a bad head wound.

"Don't worry"-he laughed-"I'm all right. This isn't mine." He wiped at the blood, smearing it but managing to remove some of it from his features.

Warlock seemed to catch himself. "Right," he said. "Glad you're okay. But we'd better move it before more of these d.a.m.ned gooks show up." He gestured at Sui Ma's corpse. "They're not going to like that."

"Okay," Cunningham said. He looked away from the corpse-littered room. Most of the bodies were Egrets, but a few Werewolves had gone down at the hands of Sui Ma's men. "It's back to the Lair. We've got to figure out where that d.a.m.ned head is."

But despite the death surrounding him, despite the pain he himself felt, Cunningham couldn't keep back a wide smile. It was over. The New Day had come.

He was the new head of the Shadow Fists.

In the far-gone days when the Bowery had been noted for its fas.h.i.+onable nightspots, the decrepit building now known as the Werewolves' Lair had been a famous luxury hotel. When things started going bad for the neighborhood, the hotel had been turned into apartments. When the neighborhood really hit the skids, it had degenerated into a flophouse, then been abandoned for well over a decade, sinking even further into pathetic decrepitude before the Werewolves took it over as their headquarters.

They'd made some effort to clean it up, though Werewolf sanitary standards were not exactly those of the Ritz.

It was a smelly warren of dirty little rooms the heart of which was Warlock's Sanctorum. This was a large chamber behind double wooden doors that had a crude pentacle surrounded by the legend 666: LAIR OF THE BEAST Sloppily lettered on them in drippy red paint. It was dimly lit and cluttered with books overflowing their shelves and piled against the walls and sitting on the dusty furniture where they competed for s.p.a.ce with occult gimcracks ranging from real human skulls to bundles of dyed chicken feathers that looked like they'd come from Auntie Leveaux's Hoodoo and Love Potion Shoppe.

Cunningham had co-opted Warlock's normal seat behind a desk piled high with more occult stuff, under a rather badly executed portrait of a bald and jowly Aleister Crowley, Warlock's patron saint. Warlock sat in a chair across the desk that was usually reserved for visitors. He was watching Cunningham closely. The ace sat with his bandaged leg held stiffly in front of him, his voice low and thoughtful as he mused on the day's wild events.

"It's Christian," he muttered, "it's got to be Christian. But how did that limey b.a.s.t.a.r.d think he was going to get away with taking over? He's too much of an outsider in the Shadow Fists to have a real power base."

"Unless he was conspiring with Sui Ma," Warlock suggested.

Cunningham shook his head. "She seemed genuinely surprised that her brother was dead. I think she really thought that I did it."

"There's Loophole," Warlock said. "He might figure in somewhere."

"He might," Cunningham agreed. "That's why I sent a few of the brothers to his office to pick him up. Maybe he can clear up some of the mystery." He fingered a sheet of paper lying on the desk in front of him. "Like who the h.e.l.l this is."

It was a sketch done in colored pencil of the redhaired mind-control artist who'd killed Kien's watchdog. Deadhead was really a talented artist, and he'd caught an expression of cruel delight in the kid's smile that was doubly horrific on such a young, otherwise sweet face. There was a respectful knock on the Sanctorum's double doors, and Cunningham looked up from the sketch to see two Werewolves come in with Edward St. John Latham between them.

Latham was a lean, handsome man in a dark gray Brooks Brother suit with a light, almost imperceptible purple pinstripe. His face had no expression at all as he entered the room and nodded at Cunningham. He ignored Warlock as he sat down in the chair next to him, crossing his leg casually, ankle over knee. "I suppose congratulations of a sort are in order," he said.

"Thanks, Sinjin." Cunningham knew that Latham disliked being called Sinjin as much as he could be said to dislike anything. He was an emotionless, supposedly utterly loyal b.a.s.t.a.r.d. It was hard to see where he'd fit into a conspiracy against Kien. "But there's still some things I'd like to clear up."

"Such as?"

"Such as are you with me and Warlock, or the general and his sister?"

Latham smiled without humor. "I've already heard about the late general and his late sister. There's not much of a decision to make, is there?"

"I'm glad to see that you're being sensible. Tell me. What do you know about Leslie Christian?"

"Christian?" Loophole frowned. "Why?"

"He's the missing ace from the deck. I've got, the Werewolves scouring the city for him, but he seems to have disappeared. Not, however, before trying to pin Kien's murder on me."

Loophole looked faintly surprised. "Then you didn't kill Kien?"

Cunningham shook his head. "No. Would I do a thing like that? I figure Christian had to have been involved in the killing somehow. He showed up right after I'd found the body and tried to frame me, then he disappeared."

"Why would Christian kill Kien?" Latham asked.

"I don't know. But what do we really know about him?" Cunningham asked, ticking the points off one by one on his fingers. "He's an ace of some kind. He's foreign. He drinks. Somehow he wormed his way into Kien's confidence. He could have half a million reasons for wanting Kien dead, but we don't know enough about him to guess what they might be."

"Whereas," Latham said dryly, "you just had one reason for wanting the general dead."

"Okay," Cunningham conceded. "We're being honest with each other. I admit it. I wanted to be head of the Shadow Fists. I had ... plans. But I didn't kill Kien."

He reached across the desk and handed Latham the drawing of the youthful mind-control artist that had skewered Kien's batrachian watchdog. "He did."

Latham took it, glanced at it. Something flickered across his face, and for a moment Cunningham could swear that the usually unflappable lawyer was unsure of himself.

"The joker saw this kid mind-control Kien and make him shove his face into a bag of rapture. Then the kid killed the joker."

"Interesting," Latham murmured.

"You have any idea who this could be?"

Latham looked at him a long while, then said, "Perhaps. "

"Do you want to let me in on it?"

Latham considered it for another long moment, then nodded. "In the interest of truth," he said without a trace of irony in his voice, "and justice."

Cunningham suppressed a smile, but Warlock let out an audible snort.