George RR Martin - WC 3 - Jokers High

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Wildcards III: Jokers WildJokers Wild
Book 3 of Wildcards
Edited by George R.R. Martin
ISBN: 0-553-26699-3
Prologue
There is Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnival in Rio, Fiestas and Festivals and
Founders' Days by the hundreds. The Irish have St. Patrick's Day, the Italians
Columbus Day, the nation its Fourth of July. History is full of mummers' parades
and masques and orgies and religious pageants and patriotic extravaganzas.
Wild Card Day is a little of all of that, and more.
On September 15, 1946, in the cold afternoon sky over Manhattan, Jetboy died and
the Takisian xenovirus-known colloquially as the wild card-was loosed upon the
world.
It is unclear just when the observances began, but by the late sixties, those
who had felt the touch of the wild card and had lived to talk of it, the jokers
and aces of New York City, had taken the day as their own.
September 15 became Wild Card Day. A time for celebrations and lamentations, for
grief and joy, for remembering the dead and cherishing the living. A day for
fireworks and street fairs and parades, for masked balls and political rallies
and memorial banquets, for drinking and making love and fighting in the alleys.
With each passing year, the festivities became larger and more fevered. Taverns
and restaurants and hospitals did record-setting business, the media began to
notice, and finally, of course, the tourists arrived.
Once a year, without sanction or statute, Wild Card Day engulfed Jokertown and
New York City, and the carnival of chaos ruled the streets.
September 15, 1986, was the fortieth anniversary.
Chapter One
6:00 a.m.
It was as dark as it ever gets on Fifth Avenue, and as quiet.
Jennifer Maloy glanced at the streetlights and the steady stream of traffic, and
pursed her lips in annoyance. She didn't like all the light and activity, but
there wasn't much she could do about it. This was, after all, Fifth Avenue and
73rd Street in the city that never sleeps. It had been equally as busy the past
few mornings she'd spent checking out the area and she had no reason to expect
that conditions would ever get any better.
Hands thrust deep into the pockets of her trench coat, she strode past the
five-story graystone apartment building and slipped into the alley behind it.
Here was darkness and si lence. She stepped into an area of the alley that was
screened by a garbage dumpster and smiled.
No matter how many times she'd done this, she thought, it was still exciting.
Her pulse speeded up and she breathed faster in anticipation as she put on a
hoodlike mask that obscured her finely sculpted features and hid the mass of
blond hair tied in a knot at the back of her head. She took off her trench coat,
folded it neatly, and set it down next to the dumpster. Under the coat she wore
only a brief black string bikini and running shoes. Her body was lean and
gracefully muscular, with small breasts, slim hips, and long legs. She bent
down, unlaced and removed her sneakers and put them next to the trench coat.
She ran a hand almost caressingly over the rear wall of the graystone apartment
building, smiled, and then walked right through the wall.
It was the sound of a power saw biting into sodden hardwood. The whine of steel
teeth made Jack's own teeth ache as the all-too-familiar boy struggled to hide
deeper within the cypress tangle.
"He in dere somewhere!" It was his uncle Jacques. The folks around Atelier
Parish called him Snake Jake. Behind his back.
The boy bit his lip to keep from crying out. He bit deeper, tasting blood, to
keep from changing. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes.
Again the steel saw shrieked into wet cypress. The boy ducked down low; brown,
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brackish water slopped against his mouth, into his nose. He choked as the bayou
washed over his face.
"Tol' you! Dat little gator-bait right dere. Get 'im." Other voices joined in.
The power saw blade whined one more time.
Jack Robicheaux flailed out in the darkness, one arm trapped in the sweaty
sheet, the other reaching for the phone. He slammed the Tiffany lamp back
against the wall, cursed as he somehow caught its petals-and-stems base and
steadied it on the bed table, then felt the cool smoothness of the telephone. He
picked up the receiver in the middle of the fourth ring.
Jack started to curse again. Who the hell had this number? There was Bagabond,
but she was in another room here in his home. Before he could get his lips to
the mouthpiece, he knew.
"Jack?" said the voice on the other end of the line. Longdistance static washed
out the sound for a second. "Jack, this is Elouette. I'm callin' you from
Louisiana."
He smiled in the darkness. "Figured you were." He snapped the lamp switch, but
nothing happened. The filament must have broken when the lamp toppled.
"Never actually called this far before," said Elouette. "Robert always dialed."
Robert was her husband.
"What time is it?" Jack said. He felt for his watch. "'Bout five in the
morning," said his sister.
"What is it? Is it Ma?" He was waking up finally, pulling free from the
fragments of the dream.
"No, Jack, Ma's fine. Nothin'll ever happen to her. She'll outlive us both."
"Then what?" He recognized the sharpness in his voice and tried to tone it down.
It was just that Elouette's words were so slow, her thoughts so drawn-out.
The silence, punctuated by bursts of static, dilated on the line. Finally
Elouette said, "Its my daughter."
"Cordelia? What about her? What's wrong?" Another silence. "She's run off."
Jack felt an odd reaction. After all, he'd run away too, all those years before.
Run away when he was a hell of a lot younger than Cordelia. What would she be
now, fifteen? Sixteen? "Tell me what happened," he said reassuringly.
Elouette did. Cordelia (she said) had given little warning. The girl had not
come down for breakfast the morning before. Makeup, clothing, money, and an
overnight bag were also gone. Her father had checked with Cordelia's friends.
There weren't many. He called the parish sheriff. The patrols got the word. No
one had seen her. The law's best guess was that Cordelia had hitched a ride out
on the blacktop.
The sheriff had shaken his head sadly. "Gal looks like that," he'd said, "well,
we got cause to worry." He'd done what he could, but it had all taken precious
time. It had finally been Cordelia's father who'd come up with something. A girl
with the same face ("Purtiest little thing I seen in a month," the ticket clerk
had said) and long, luxuriant, black hair ("Black as a new-moon bayou sky," said
a porter) had boarded a bus in Baton Rouge.
"It was Greyhound," Elouette said. "One-way fare to New York City. By the time
we found out, the police said it wasn't none too practical to try and stop it in
New Jersey." Her voice shook slightly, as though she wanted to cry.
"It'll be okay," said Jack. "When's she supposed to get here?"'
"About seven," Elouette said. "Seven vour time." "Merde." Jack swung his legs
off the bed and sat up in the darkness.
"Can you get there, Jack? Can you find her?"
"Sure," he said. "But I gotta leave now for Port Authority, or I won't make it
in time."
"Thanks be," Elouette said. "Call me after you've met her?"
"I will. Then well figure out what to do next. Now I go, okay?"
"Okay. I'll be right here. Maybe Robert will be back too." Trust filled her
voice. "Thanks, Jack."
He put down the phone and stumbled across the room. He found the wall switch and
finally was able to see in the windowless room. Yesterday's work clothes were
strewn over the rough slab bench to one side. Jack pulled on the well-worn jeans
and green cotton shirt. He grimaced at the fragrant work socks, but they were
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all he had. Today being his day off, he'd planned to spend it at a laundromat.
He laced the steel-toed leather boots quickly, catching every other pair of
eyelets.
When he opened the door leading into the rest of his home, Bagabond, the two
huge cats, a passel of kittens, and a goggle-faced raccoon were all there in the
doorway, silently staring at him. In the dimness of the lamp-lit living room
beyond, Jack made out the gleam of Bagabond's dark brown hair and even darker
eyes, her high, shadowed cheekbones, the lightness of her skin.
"Jesus, Mother Mary!" he said, stepping back. "Don' scare me like that." He took
a deep breath and felt the tough, grainy hide on the back of his hands become
soft again.
"Didn't mean to," said Bagabond. The black cat rubbed up against Jack's leg. His
back nestled along the man's kneecap. His purr sounded like a contented coffee
grinder. "Heard the phone. You okay?"
"I'll tell you on the way to the door." He gave Bagabond a precis as he stopped
in the kitchen to decant the last of Yesterdays coffee sludge into a foam cup he
could carry with him.
Bagabond touched his wrist. "Want us to come along? Day like this, a few more
eyes might be valuable at the bus station."
Jack shook his head. "Shouldn't be any problem. She's sixteen and never been in
any big city before. Just watched a lot of TV, her mama says. I'll be right
there at the bus door to meet her."
"She know that?" said Bagabond.
Jack stooped to give the black a quick rub behind the ears. The calico meowed
and moved over to take her turn. "Nope. Probably she was going to phone me once
she got here. This'll just save time."
"Offer's still open."
"I'll have her back here for breakfast before you know it." Jack paused. "Maybe
not. She'll want to talk, so maybe I'll take her to the Automat. She won't have
seen anything like that back in Atelier." He straightened up and the cats yowled
disappointedly. "Besides, you've got an appointment with Rosemary, right?"
Bagabond nodded dubiously. "Nine."
"Just don't worry. Maybe we can all have lunch. Depends on how much of a zoo
downtown turns into. Maybe we can pick up take-out at a Korean deli and have a
picnic on the Staten Island ferry." He leaned toward the woman and gave her a
quick kiss on the forehead. Before she could even halfway raise her hands to
grasp his arms and reciprocate, he was gone. Out the door. Out of her
perception.
"Damn it," she said. The cats looked up at her, confused but sympathetic. The
raccoon hugged her ankle.
Jennifer Maloy slipped through the lower two floors of the apartment building
like a ghost, disturbing nothing and no one, neither seen nor heard. She knew
that the building had gone condo some time ago and what she wanted was on the
uppermost of the three floors that were owned by a rich businessman with the
unfortunate name of Kien Phuc. He was Vietnamese. He owned a string of
restaurants and dry-cleaning establishments. At least that's what they'd said on
the segment of New York Style she'd seen on PBS two weeks ago. Jennifer really
enjoyed that show, which took its viewers on tours of the artsy and stylish
homes of the city's upper class. It presented her with endless possibilities and
tons of usefiil information.
She floated through the third floor, where Kien's servants lived. She had no
idea what was on the fourth floor, since it had been ignored by the television
cameras, so she bypassed it and head for Kien's living quarters on the top
floor. He lived there alone in eight rooms of unrelieved luxury and
opulence-decadence, almost. Jennifer had never realized there was that much
money in laundrommas and Chinese restaurants.
It was dark on the fifth floor, and quiet. She avoided the bedroom with the
circular, mirror-ceilinged bed (a little tacky, she'd thought when she'd seen it
on TV), and the fabulous hand-painted silk screens. She bypassed the
Western-style sitting room with its two-thousand-year-old bronze Buddha gazing
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benignly from a place of honor next to a fabulous electronic entertainment
center complete with a wide-screen television,
VCR, and compact disc player with accompaning racks of video and audio tapes and
discs. She wanted the' study.
It was as dark there as it was on the rest of the floor, and she started when
she saw a vague, shadowy figure looming beside the huge teakwood desk that
dominated the room's back wall. Although impervious to physical attack while
ghosting, she wasn't immune to surprise, and this figure hadn't been filmed by
the New York Style cameras.
She quickly faded into a nearby wall, but the figure didn't move or even show
any sign that it had noticed her. She cautiously slipped into the study again,
and was relieved and as tonished to see that the thing was a large,
nearly-six-foot-tall terra-cotta figure of an Oriental warrior. The workmanship
of the piece was breathtaking. Facial features, clothing, weaponry, all were
molded with exquisite delicacy of detail. It was as if a living man had been
turned to clay, baked to a flawless finish in a kiln, and preserved down through
the millennia, ending up in Kien's study. Her respect for Kien's wealth-and
influence-went up another notch. The figure was undoubtedly authentic-Kiev had
made it clear during the television interview that he had no truck with
imitations-and from what she knew, the 2200-year-old terra-cotta grave figures
of the emperor Ying Zheng, first emperor of the Qin dynasty and unifier of
China, were absolutely positively unavailable to private art collectors. Kien
must have gone through considerable feats of legerdemain and bribery to obtain
it.
It was a fantastically valuable piece, but, Jennifer knew, too large for her to
remove and probably too unique for her to fence.
She felt a sudden wave of dizziness ripple through her insubstantial form, and
quickly willed herself to solidity. She didn't like that feeling. It happened
whenever she overextended herself, as a warning that she had stayed
insubstantial for too long. She didn't know what would happen if she remained a
wraith for too long. She never wanted to find out.
Now substantial, she looked around the room. It was lined with display cases
containing Kien's collection of jades, the most beautiful, extensive, and
valuable collection in the Western world. Kien had been profiled on New York
Style because of them and they were what she had come for. Some of them, at
least. She realized that she couldn't get them all even if she made a dozen
trips back to the alley, because her ability to turn extraneous mass
insubstantial was limited. She could only ghost a few jades at a time. But a
few, really, were all she needed.
First, though, before starting on the jades, there was something else she had to
do. The thick pile of the luxurious carpet feeling quite sensuous on the soles
of her bare feet, she glided around the teakwood desk almost as quietly as if
she were insubstantial, and stood before the Hokusai print hanging on the wall
behind it.
Behind the print, so Kien had said, was a wall safe. He had mentioned it
because, he had said, it was absolutely, one hundred percent, totally, and
irrevocably, burglarproof. No thief knew enough about microcircuitry to
circumvent its electronic lock and it was strong enough to withstand a physical
assault short of a bomb big enough to bring down the whole building. No one, no
how, at no time, could possibly break into it. Kien, who had looked very smug as
he'd said all this, evidently was a man who liked to brag.
A mischievous smile on her face as she wondered what riches Kien had hidden in
his high-tech sale, Jennifer ghosted her right arm and put her hand through the
print and the steel door behind it.
He juggled her in his arms while he fished for his key, and finally unlocked the
door.
"You idiot, put me down. Then you can open the door."
"Nope, going to carry you over."
"We haven't gotten married."
"Yet," he said, and grinned down into her face.
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Her angle, from where she reclined in his arms, intensified the deformity of his
neck, and made his head look like a baseball perched on a pedestal. Aside from
that neck-a legacy of the wild card virus-he was a rather handsome man.
Short-cropped brown hair, beginning to gray at the temples, merry brown eyes,
strong chin-a nice face.
He negotiated the door, and set her on her feet. "My castle. Hope you like it."
It proclaimed the blue-collar origins of this man. Serviceable couch, recliner
placed before the television, a stack of Reader's Digests on the coffee table, a
large and poorly executed oil painting of a sailing ship clawing through
improbably high seas. The sort of painting one found at starving-artist sales in
Hilton hotels.
But it was scrupulously clean, and in a touch that seemed out of character in so
large and powerful a man, a row of multicolored African violets lined the
windowsills.
"Roulette, I haven't stayed out all night since my high school prom."
"I'll just bet you stayed out all night."
He blushed. "Hey, I was good Catholic boy."
"My momma always warned me about good Catholic boys."
He moved in, wrapped brawny arms about her waist. "I'm not quite so 'good'
anymore."
"I hope that refers to your morals, and not to your performance, Stan."
"Roulette!"
"Prude," she teased.
He nuzzled her neck, and nibbled on her earlobe, and Roulette pondered yet again
the random nature of wild card that it should have struck this very ordinary
"sandhog," and made him more than human.
She reached up, and stroked her hands down the sides of his swollen throat.
"Does it ever bother you?"
"Being the Howler? Hell, no.. Makes me special, and I always wanted to be
special. Used to drive my old man crazy. He always said water was good enough
for our kind of people, meaning not to get above myself. He'd sure be surprised
now. Hey." He reached out, caught a tear on the tip of one thick finger. "What
are you crying about?"
"Nothing. I just... I found that sad."
"Well, come on. I'll show you how good my performance can be."
"Before breakfast?" she asked, trying to delay the inevitable.
"Sure, give us a better appetite."
She followed him resignedly into the bedroom.
Jennifer felt around inside of the safe and touched something that felt like a
stack of coins nestled in a small pouch. She tried to ghost one of the coins and
frowned when it remained solid.
Probably gold, she thought, Krugerrands or Canadian Maple Leafs.
It was difficult to ghost dense materials like metal, particularly gold,
requiring a deeper level of concentration and a greater input of energy. She
decided to leave the coins where they were for now, and continued to explore the
safe.
Her hand caressed a flat rectangular object that ghosted a lot easier than the
coin. She drew three small notebooks through the wall, and, unable to see
details in the darkness, switched on the small tensor lamp that sat on the top
of the teakwood desk. Two of the books, she could now see, had plain black
covers. The third had a blue cloth cover with a bamboo pattern. She flipped open
the top book in the stack.
Squares of brightly colored bits of paper were stuck in rows of pockets on the
notebook's thick pages. Postage stamps. The ones in the top row seemed to be
British, but they had words in another language and the date 1922 overprinted on
them. She bent down closer to examine them, and froze as a tiny sound came from
somewhere outside the cone of light illuminating part of the desktop.
She glanced up and saw nothing. Her eyes now accustomed to the light, she tilted
the shade of the lamp outward, throwing illumination over the far reaches of the
desk. And she froze, her heart suddenly in her throat.
On the far corner of the desk was a.five-gallon jar, about the size of a water
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file:///F|/rah/George%20R.%20R.%20Martin/Martin,%20George%20R.%20R%20-%2\0Wildcards%203%20-%20Jokers%20Wild.txtWildcardsIII:JokersWildJokersWildBook3ofWildcardsEditedbyGeorgeR.R.MartinISBN:0-553-26699-3PrologueThereisMardiGrasinNewOrleans,CarnivalinRio,FiestasandFestiva\lsandFounders'Daysbythehundre...

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