Kaleidoscope (21 page)

She saw him coming.

“HOLD ON!”

The steering wheel jumped in Luna’s hand with every warp and rut in the rocky straightaway. Everybody in the truck bed hanging on for dear life. Was pitch black and now she had Becker’s lights in her face, the beam from those carbon lamps shattered on the guts of insects. But she couldn’t let him go. Could
not
let this son of a bitch get away!

The truck swerved sideways; Luna hauled it back.

“He ain’t backin’ off!”

Tommy Speck cursing as he tried to reload. The lamps from the Packard blinding the road.

“HE AIN’T PLAYIN’ CHICKEN, LUNA.”

“GODAMMIT!”

Luna yanked the wheel, the truck swerved.

Becker slid by grinning like a gargoyle.

Moments later Luna was sprinting through the palmetto heedless of the briars tearing her skirt and skin.

“JACK—JACK—?!! Oh, God.”

The thing before her slumped in a roped collar, arms roped to a cruel tray, legs paddocked. Blood dripped fresh from a face blistered and burned and split cheek to cheek. Flesh hanging loose with snot from the shattered nose. A foot at first glance looked amputated.

“Oh, God, Jack!”

He had to work his mouth like a baby to make sounds that Luna at first could not clearly discern—

“Izzy…Izzy gone?”

Jack awoke in daylight beneath the uncanopied tester of a four-poster bed. It didn’t seem like a carney’s bed. Too comfortable. Jack looked down toward his feet and saw a foot propped on a crate and dressed professionally.

His face was stiff.

“Jack?”

Luna pressed his uninjured hand into her own.

“Where…? Ouch!”

The stitches on his face limiting his speech.

“Where am I?”

“My apartment. Above the café.”

He tried to remember where that was.

“Water?” he articulated carefully and she poured him a glass from a pitcher at the window.

The water was ice cold.

“Use the straw,” she advised and when he did skin peeled from inside his mouth in ribbons.

“It’s all right, Jack.” Doc Snyder floated into view like an extra entering a camera’s frame. “You have some burns, but they will heal. They will.”

There was something Jack meant to ask. But he could not remember what it was.

Doc inspected his face.

“Not too bad, considering,” the doc offered that assessment cheerfully. “Be some scarring, of course. Complicated the stitching, but we managed.”

The doc straightened up to finish his report.

“No fluid in the lungs, which is a miracle. As for the rest—I don’t think you’ll be stealing bases, but then, you never planned a career in baseball, did you, Jack?”

Jack swallowed his water carefully. “How did you find me?”

“Got Tommy to thank for that,” Luna answered. “He saw the bastard hauling you off.”

She took his glass and pulled a chair to the side of his bed.

“Who did this to you, Jack?”

“Name’s Becker,” Jack swallowed painfully. “Sapped me from behind.”

“But why, Jack? Why would he want to do something like this to you?”

“Not now,” Doc was fitting a syringe into a vial of what Jack knew was morphine.

“This should take the edge off,” Snyder assured his patient.

“Who gess the bill?” Jack tried to form a smile.

“My treat,” Luna said.

Her breasts settled on the bare skin of his chest, firm behind a flimsy corset of cotton. She kissed him. It was a real kiss, right on the mouth. Not off to the side. Not some peck around the barn. Right there on what was left of his smackers.

“Here we go,” Doc palpitating a vein.

A swab of alcohol cool on the skin. A little sting.

Luna rising blue as a midnight moon.

“’Night, Jack.”

He woke late that night, disoriented and confused in Luna’s wide, soft bed. The foot reminded him.

“Damnation—!”

Jack took a minute to orient himself. Luna had left a light on at the stand beside his bed, which helped. A welcome Gulf breeze whistled through the window half-raised alongside. Must be some weather coming. Jack’s lips were cracked like peapods. He saw the pitcher iced and sweating at the window. A glass ready to hand.

“Room service?” Jack joked weakly but there was no one to hear.

He saw a bell near to hand on the bed stand. Grunted to reach it.

“Doc?”

He felt ridiculous ringing the bell, but there was no answer to that summons. He tried again.

“All right, then.”

He tried to follow his good foot off the bed with the wounded one and damn near fainted.

“JESUS!”

Blood rushing to his severed toes

“Could use another shot,” Jack croaked to no reply.

Where was a fucking corpsman when you needed one?

A pair of crutches propped handily at a bed stand. Jack grabbed those props, hauling himself toward the window and the waiting pitcher of water and caught himself in the mirror of Luna’s vanity. Some man or piece of man stared back from that mercury pane. An unfamiliar face, split like a gourd. The nose was swollen and broken, and the face—! A gash running from cheek to cheek was sewn like the seams on a baseball. His gumline was exposed from the pull of the stitches, pink and naked to the roots of his teeth.

Jack raised his hand trembling to test lips unnaturally parted. He tried to smile. Doc had done his best, but this was no marquee effort. No face for the movies, for sure, unless it was next to Lon Chaney’s.

A murmur of conversation drifted through the window from the sandy street below. Someone talking. Jack turned from the mirror to switch off the lamp by his bed. Every beat of his heart sending a fresh throb of pain into his foot as he hobbled to the window’s sill.

You could see the roof of the Western Union office across the way, the creosote pole outside silhouetted like a crucifix. The wire swaying in a mounting breeze that corrupted the conversation coming in snatches from the street.

Voices outside. Directly below the window. Jack placed his head warily on the board of the sill. Risked a peek—

Luna Chevreaux stood just outside her door in hushed conversation with some other person out of Jack’s sight. Luna had donned a jacket and trousers against the breeze now gusting strongly enough to lift her hair. Then Jack saw a leather bag extended in a gloved hand.

Luna took the bag and her contact stepped from the cover of shadows into the moon’s unclouded light. A man by his movement. Average height and build. Baggy, lightweight slacks that looked familiar and a jacket that could have belonged to a gypsy. No vest. Shirt open at the collar. Jack could not see a face; his perch had him looking almost straight down at the fella’s hat. It was a boater, flat-brimmed and made of straw, with what looked like an orchid stuck inside the band.

The meeting was clearly over. Luna took the bag and the boater’s wearer melted into the dark like a fucking magician. Jack pulled back from the windowsill but waited until he heard Luna’s feet treading up the stairs before hobbling back to his sickbed and a feigned slumber.

He heard Luna pad into the room. Heard her pause at the foot of his bed before moving to the window. She poured a glass of water from the pitcher. He could hear the ice swirling.

Was there just a hesitation as she sipped?

A little hitch?

She took the pitcher with her when she left. The door closed finally and Jack stared into his pillow. How many midnight meetings had taken place in Luna’s apartment since he had come to Kaleidoscope? How many trysts in hotels? Jack would love to be a fly on the satchel delivered to Luna’s hands, but for some reason it was the man’s hat that nagged him.

Something about that headpiece—the hell was it?

It was an ordinary lid, a narrow-brimmed cylinder with a wide band. Perfect for the dog days of summer; the straw let the breeze through nicely. They were called boaters, as if you had to own a yacht to wear one. And then Jack remembered Cincinnati and the Milner Hotel—the man who delivered Sally Price’s cash and train ticket had been wearing a boater. The bellhop hadn’t called it a boater, of course, but the description fit, along with the loud jacket, the cheap shirt and rooster-sock slacks. But the clincher was the ostentatious boutonniere; not many jakes stuck orchids in their hats.

Especially not a man hiding from sight.

The more Jack thought about it, the more convinced he became that Luna’s bagman was Alex Goodman’s proxy, the emissary between Kaleidoscope and Sally Price. But whatever the proxy’s role, Jack was willing to bet that Luna called the shots. Jack was now convinced that Luna Chevreaux was holding Bladehorn’s stolen property, even if she had not been involved in its theft. Would take a lot of mattresses to hide that much moolah; Jack could see how Terrence Dobbs’ legal expertise would be useful. Maybe the bagman had taken over his role. Maybe in more ways than one he was Luna’s latest greaser.

A light rap of knuckles and Jack turned to see a white-coated gent at the door.

“You should be asleep.”

Doc Snyder frowning disapproval.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Jack prevaricated.

“May as well see to your dressing, then.”

The physician settled down to slowly and methodically remove the bloodstained rags binding Jack’s foot.

“Got a touch there, Doc.”

“That’s the morphine talking.”

“Where’d you get your training? The war?”

“No, no. Tulane.”

“I was a corpsman, did I tell ya?”

“Yes, Jack,” Doc taped off the dressing. The smell of fresh bandages and disinfectant. “Now cut the yakking and get some rest.”

Doc switched off the bedstand’s lamp as he left the room, but Jack did not sleep. He knew he was close to finding Bladehorn’s property, very close.

But so was Arno Becker.

HighWire’s deep slumber was broken when a small tremor interrupted a recurring dream. The telegrapher had been transported in sleep to Milwaukee. A beautiful spring day. His wife and daughter smiled below, artificial smiles, for the rubes, as the young and athletic performer stretched his toes to grip the wire spanning from his platform high above the deck of a barge to a tower raised on the shore.

There were thousands of people gathered at the lake to watch, a terrific crowd. But the wind was a problem. The wind was rocking the water, the water was rocking the boat, and HighWire could feel a harmonic developing, that dangerous rhythmic undulation so feared by men on the wire. He pumped the wire gently, just a small jump to damp the growing threat, compensating for balance with his longpole, but it was not enough.

The cable was oscillating, undulating in collusion with the wind and the water and HighWire was not yet cleared of the barge. The wire swayed, swayed—! The pole lurched and HighWire felt himself—

“…Wake up, HighWire. Wake up, old timer.”

The disabled performer was roused from sleep to find a Frankenstein shaking his cot.

“What the hell?!”

HighWire scrambled for his glasses to find a face stitched northeast to southwest with catgut. Incisors bared like a mad dog. A foot swathed and seeping blood.

“Jesus Christ, Jack, is that you?”

“I got to send a wire,” Jack leaned over on his crutches. “Tulane Medical School.”

“The hell are you doing up at this hour?”

“Can you send the wire?”

“Could send it just as well in the morning.”

“I need it now. I don’t want anybody knowing I sent it. And I’ll need the reply as soon as it comes through.”

The old man nodded. “Should I have Tommy run it for you?”

“No,” Jack declined. “Just you and me.”

It took a week before Jack got his cabled reply. It was a week of dissembling, at least on Jack’s part. Luna fussed over him daily, bringing a meal or changing a dressing. He had swapped the crutches for a cane, but she would not let him negotiate the stairs by himself.

He saw Luna every day. Her smell brought an erection. Her skin, that sheath that used to repel him, was now provocative, erotic. He wanted to slide his belly and legs against hers. He wanted to run his tongue into her, over her. He wanted to feel her legs crush him with her climax.

But what woman would sleep with a Frankenstein?

Luna answered that question. She was shaving him. His first shave, a night-time shear. The bedroom’s mirror let Jack watch as Luna worked between the fences of his surgeon’s handiwork.

“I look like a monster,” he proclaimed bitterly.

Luna never interrupted the patient stroke of her razor.

“You’ve got a lot to learn, Jack.”

“Whadda you mean?” Jack’s reply sounded paranoid even to himself.

She paused. “How long ago did your wife die, Jack?”

The question took him by surprise.

“Four…five years, I guess.”

“How were things between you two?”

“Don’t see the point of that question.”

“Well, did you screw around, Jack? A little liver with the steak?”

“Go to hell.”

“Did you?”

“No, I didn’t even think about it.”

“That’s good,” Luna wiped the cream off her blade with a towel. “That kind of loyalty—you don’t see it often.”

“No. You don’t.”

“Except with carnies,” Luna amended. “That’s where you keep striking out, Jack. You keep figuring the odds. Working the angles. But you really don’t know what sets a carney’s life apart from any other. You don’t yet know what makes carnies different from bankers or doctors. Or thieves.”

“I suppose you do?”

“Sure,” she folded the straightblade. “It came clear to me in one crystal moment. I was still in my teens, had literally run away from home for the circus. Got lucky when I ran into one of the finest gentlemen on any midway. That would be Mr. Clarence Wortham. This was, what—? Nineteen fourteen. He gave me the billing, ‘Luna The Moon Maiden’. So here I am with my first gig on my first run, first time on a train for that matter, and we go and have a wreck.

“Every carney knows about the Wortham Wreck. Forty-one boxcars derailed. Everything was either ruined or destroyed. I mean clothes and costumes, props and trailers—the animals. Terrible scene, putting down the elephants and such. Not to mention the sight of mangled human bodies.