Kaleidoscope (24 page)

“Oh, God!” she wailed. “If I could only believe that!”

“You
can
,” he told her. “I can fix your pop, Peewee. I can fix Becker, too, but first I’ve got to help Luna and for that—I need the money.”

A moment hung like rain on a tent.

“Get The Giant,” she said finally. “I’ll show you.”

It took some time to repair the track that allowed Peewee to direct Jack and The Giant to the smoking remains of her bed. They brought shovels and axes and buckets to a tangle of twisted metal. The bed’s brass tester sagging like spaghetti. Smoke rising to a sky now open above. There was still an ankle’s worth of water in the tank, collected below the seam to support a scum of ash and pine needles.

“You’ll have to dig it up,” Peewee said and pointed to the charred remains of a poster.

“…Under the bed?” Jack guessed it first. “You hid the cash under your bed!”

“Just like mother,” Peewee said.

Jack shoveled away ashes and dirt to find a metal trapdoor. Reaching down to grab the iron handle—“Dammit! It’s still hot.”

Giant dipped a bucket into the tank, and steam rose hissing from the door. Jack wrapped his shirt around an iron handle. The trap opened, pulling up a cloud of ash from the cavity beneath. Jack’s eyes teared; he beat away airborne cinders to peer inside a tin-sided keep.

“There’s a safe,” he announced.

“’Member my birthday?” Peewee dimpled. “’Cause if you do you can open it.”

Jack laid his axe aside and favoring his injured foot, lowered himself to the safe below.

“Let’s see what we got,” he grunted with a spin of the dial and immediately heard the clutch-type driver’s
click, click, click
.

“One…Eight…Nine…”

The heavy tumbles fell with a discernible
snick
—

“
Happy birthday.”

Jack pulled a leather bag from the safe. It was a medical bag, he realized. Doc Snyder’s bag.

He tested its weight.

“So how much is left, Peewee?”

“Something over two hundred thousand dollars,” The Fat Lady replied.

“Two hundred—?! GRAND? LEFT?”

“We invested,” Peewee shrugged. “Terry wanted us to trade on the margins but Luna said, no, be conservative. And then just recently we converted all the stocks to cash—that was why Luna was at the Mirasol, to sell everything.”

“You telling me you took two hundred thousand Washingtons out of the stock market and put it in a medicine bag?! Why? Way the market’s going, year or two, you’d be a goddamn millionaire.”

Peewee rolled massive shoulders. “I read the papers, Jack. Lots of people trading paper. Way too much speculation. You see what’s happened in Tampa? Ever occur to you it could happen on Wall Street?”

“No,” Jack replied bluntly.

“I don’t think anybody knows how much debt is stacked up in banks all over the country and when it all comes due—stocks aren’t going to be worth a hill of beans.”

Jack shook his head. “If I had two hundred thousand in that game? I’d let it ride.”

“Ah, but then you never knew when to fold, did you, Jack?

He gathered a wad of hundred-dollar bills in his hand.

“Think it’ll be enough?” Peewee asked.

“Becker’s not gonna sell Luna cheap,” Jack replied and placed the bills in his hand back into the bag. “But a hundred grand should do. I’ll just tell him it’s all that’s left.”

Platform Show—
a small, single-O attraction presented on an elevated platform
.

T
he
Betty Sue
rode a gentle swell on the boundary of the Little Alafia. Shrimp nets stowed with buoys and ropes on a dilapidated hull. A prisoner was wracked on a pair of barrels astern, hemp ropes pinning Luna Chevreaux to those staves like a butterfly tacked to cardboard.

The sun breaking in beams through a flimsy screen of cypress and willow. Luna could not wipe the sting of perspiration from her eyes, nor those of insects. Arno Becker hummed some desultory tune beside a kerosene stove mounted on the shrimper’s deck. A blue flame licking a metal pot.

Becker dipped a spoon into his pot, sampled it.

“Mmm, no. No, it needs a bite more.”

He cut off the head of a .45 caliber cartridge, dropping that bullet into the boiling cauldron of lead.

Luna biting her tongue in her rude saddle.

Becker glanced in his prisoner’s direction and smiled. She looked nice, there, pinned back in pants and nightshift. All that blue skin.

He turned back to his pot.

“Most interesting thing I ever saw was in a carnival,” he remarked conversationally. “Some hick show. A man poured molten lead into his nose and leaks it out of his eyes! Of course, he used mercury, didn’t he? Boiled the lead for the rubes to see, but poured mercury up his schnoz. Some dry ice and sleight of hand would do the trick, wouldn’t it? But I always wanted to try the real thing.”

Luna strangling a curse as the pot boiled silver.

“Jack’ll bring the money,” she tried to keep her voice from trembling.

“For your sake, he’d better,” Becker smiled pale and blue. “Or by the time I’m through with you people will turn their heads and puke.”

“HALOOOO ABOARD,” a voice floated in from starboard along with the
pocketa-pocketa
of a two-cylinder engine.

Becker checked his watch.

“Right on time. Pity.”

Becker trained a revolver on Jack as he scrambled awkwardly from Luna’s runabout onto the deck of Becker’s larger vessel. Jack had the medicine bag thrown over his shoulder. He gained the deck, taking in Luna and the red-glowing pot at a glance. Arno pulled the hammer of his weapon to single action.

“Easy, Jack. You ain’t as quick on your feet as you used to be.”

“Hurt a hair on her head, Becker, and you won’t be able to run far enough.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Where’s the cash?”

Jack tossed the bag at Arno’s feet. Becker waved him portside before kneeling to open the satchel.

He frowned.

“This can’t be half what these freaks stole from Bladehorn.”

“Not even close,” Jack admitted. “It’s fifty grand.”

“I don’t play games, Romaine,” Becker’s lips were thin and tight below his albino face.

“I told you I could get the money; here’s proof. You want the rest? Give me Chevreaux.”

“I don’t bargain.”

“What—? You really expect me to come here unarmed and turn over the entire stash without getting Luna first? Would
you
be that fucking stupid?”

Arno mulled it over a moment.

“Well, put it that way. So what do you propose?”

“A swap,” Jack answered shortly. “You get the balance of the property—”

“Which is?”

“Another fifty thousand dollars.”

“That’s all?”

“All that’s left. Which means you get a hundred grand and I get the lady.”

“Don’t play me for a sucker, you son of a bitch. A hundred grand is all that’s left? Who are you kidding?”

“There’s some stocks left, sure, if you wanta fuck around for a couple of weeks to get ’em sold, but if you want cash, yeah, this is it.”

Becker released the hammer of his revolver.

“I doubt that’s entirely true, Jack. Lucky for you I’m feeling magnanimous. But I name the place for the exchange. And I name the time.”

“Name ’em,” Jack agreed.

Arno turned to stir his awful pot.

“The Cat’s Cradle, then. You know the place?”

Jack fought an urge to shit.

“Yeah, I know it.”

“Of course you do. Meet me at the cage. Six o’clock this evening. Bring everything that’s left and, Jack, if I see anybody’s mug but yours,
anybody’s
, I will turn this whore’s muddy hide silver.”

“You’re gonna be a rich man, Arno,” Jack tried to sound calm. “Don’t screw it up.”

“
Bring me
!” Becker snarled.

Jack turned to Luna.

“I’ll be back at six. Hang tough.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Jack,” Becker leered. “She will.”

Luna’s café’ offered only a single window to view the descending sun. The sun sure fell faster in autumn, Jack noted silently. Not so quickly as in Cincinnati, maybe, but too quickly, still. Doc Snyder huddled with the last of Kaleidoscope’s ragtag population over the medicine bag as Jack snapped a rubber band around a bundle of hundred dollar bills.

“I don’t know whether Becker’s got a getaway planned by car or boat. Won’t know ’till I get there.” He snapped the bag shut.

“I still don’t like the idea of you going in alone, Jack,” Tommy Speck spoke up. “You walk in there alone, he’ll take the money and then he’ll kill you
and
Luna.”

“Maybe not,” Jack replied shortly. “Once he’s got his loot, the last thing Becker’s going to want is to have the cops on his ass.”

“Becker’s not concerned about the police,” Doc objected. “Don’t tell us that.”

“What I can tell you is if the bastard sees anybody around that cage but me, he’ll kill Luna on the spot. Money or no money.”

“There must be somethink vee can do!” Jo Jo growled.

Jack shook his head. “Don’t. It’s too risky.”

“We’re carnies,” Cassandra joined with heat. “We’re used to risky.”

Jack was about to object again when Tommy Speck’s wife intervened smoothly.

“Let’s just everyone settle down. Jack—it’s your job to deliver the money and look after Luna. That’s your job. Don’t worry about the rest.”

Jack scanned the misfit faces around him. Only a few weeks earlier he had been repulsed to see such creatures. Not enough hair or too much. Not enough parts or too many.

But they all had eyes. That’s all Jack could see now, were their eyes. He’d stared down a thousand players over a thousand hands of poker in dozens of places but he could not read a single face staring into his own in this café. Not a one.

“Do your job, brodie,” Half Track said quietly. “Let us worry about the rest.”

He hesitated to gather the bag.

“I feel…I feel like I’ve let you down. All of you.”

“Just get Luna,” Tommy pressed the satchel into Jack’s hands. “Bring her home safe and everything’s jake.”

Jack prepared himself to meet Arno Becker fighting a pall of apprehension. There were any number of factors feeding his fear. Arno could not be trusted, obviously, and Jack did not have his familiar tools. The knife and knuckles which made him cock of damn near any walk could not be hidden from Arno Becker. The Hun was not about to let Jack come ashore with anything resembling a weapon. Not even a doughboy’s shovel.

Even the cane was risky.

Jack had accepted Cassandra’s offer of a heavy, ironwood walking stick. He needed that prop for his crippled foot, of course. And in the hands of a man with two good pins a cane was as good as a club. But Jack knew he couldn’t plant himself solidly enough for a game of stickball, let alone combat. He couldn’t swing a club. He couldn’t throw a punch, couldn’t run. He didn’t need a walking stick. What he needed was a gun.

It was Tommy got him one.

“God made some men bigger than others,” the spunky little fart said, handing Jack a snub-nose. “That’s why He made Smith & Wesson put out an equalizer.”

“Can’t have it on me, Tommy. He’ll frisk me, first thing.”

“So leave it in the truck. Stow it under the seat. Just in case.”

Jack did not reply that he already knew he would need a gun. Whether he got to use it or not was the question.

“Got yer roads straight?”

“Yes.”

Jack had decided to avoid an approach from the river, choosing instead to drive to the cage. Doc and Tommy had already shown him the cut off. Straight down a sandy rut off the blacktop.

Jack wasn’t sure what to expect from Becker, but whatever it was he’d rather face it on solid ground.

“Money’s square?”

“In the bag,” Jack tried to joke.

“Break a leg, then,” Tommy declared and the gathered carnies murmured in benediction.

Jack could feel the familiar churn in his gut. He dreaded facing the man who had butchered him, dreaded the encounter to come. But these people were counting on him. He thought of Luna, alone with Becker. He could not let her down.

Jack turned off the hardtop onto weed-covered ruts snaking through a prairie of pine and palmetto. The sun was just kissing the tops of the trees as Jack eased Tommy’s truck to a clattering stop on the bank above the Cat’s Cradle’s rusted hemisphere. He couldn’t see the cage, at first. Arno Becker’s Packard blocked the view.

But when he left the truck, Jack saw the cage. He saw Luna, too.

She swung naked from the roof of the cage, her arms tied at the wrists and stretched overhead. Arno was dressed for the occasion like a carney’s talker, spiffy in tails and top hat. He smiled at Jack’s ragged approach and turned Luna around on her tether. Round and round. Like a piece of meat.

“One thiiiin diiiime, ladeees and gentulmen! To see the AMAZING MOON MAIDEN! She WALKS, she TALKS, she CRAWWWLS on her belly like a REPTILE!”

“You son of a bitch,” Jack stumbled over the rough ground on his cane.

Luna heard him.

“Jack—? JACK?”

“I’M HERE, LUNA.”

A groan turned into a cough that wracked her whole frame.

“BECKER, GET HER DOWN.”

“Ah, I see you have little stomach for the exotic, sir. But I encourage you to indulge yourself. You do want her, don’t you, Jack? You
lust
for her, yes? And why not? What man doesn’t want The Moon Maiden, eh? And all for himself.

“But first you must pay. Pay, sir, and you may have her. ‘Have’ her, get it, Jack? If you still think she’s worth having.”

Jack leaning on his hardwood stick to drop the bag and cash at the cage’s rusty gate.

“Fifty to match the fify I already gave ya. Come and get it.”

“You packing anything besides that cane, Jack? Any other toys I should see?”

Jack slipped off his jacket.

“Turn around.”

Jack limped to oblige.

“Trousers and crotch,” Becker ordered next and Jack obeyed without comment.

Becker smiled. “Nothing like getting caught with your pants down, is there, Jack?”

Jack offered not a word in reply. He had expected some kind of humiliation. That was what Arno liked. That’s how he got his kicks. And it didn’t matter—as long as Jack got Luna out of that goddamned cage.

“Well, well,” Arno completed his inspection. “How about that, Miss Chevreaux? Our boy’s decided to play fair.”

“What about it, Becker? Are you done playing?”

“Just about,” Becker gathered Luna’s long legs in his arm and yanked.

Her shoulders popped in their sockets and she screamed. A hoarse, high scream swallowed in the pines.

“GET HER DOWN, GODDAMMIT”

“I’m still having fun.”

Don’t look at Luna, Jack told himself. Don’t look!

He kept his eyes caged on Arno Becker.

“Hundred grand will buy you lots of fun, Arno. But you don’t get it ’till she comes down.”

“Oh, I believe I could take it, Jack. But since you’ve been so sporting here—”

A switchblade opened in Becker’s hand.

“Cut her down yourself.”

Becker waiting with the knife. Inviting Jack into the cage. Luna groaning agony.

Jack could feel his legs turning to water.

“All right, all right, I’m coming.”

“And drop the stick, Jack.”

“Fine,” Jack tossed the cane aside. Arno emerged from the cage, tipping his top hat.

“I leave the field to you, sir!”

The two men’s eyes locked like vipers’ as Jack eased into the cage.

“I need something to cut her down,” Jack pointed out.

“Certainly,” Arno smiled and tossed the knife onto the sand beneath Luna’s feet.

Jack had barely turned for the knife when Becker slammed the cage-door shut. A chain rattling on rusty bars.

“Tell you what, Jack,” Becker snapped a padlock tight. “I’ll just leave you two lovebirds in your cage.”

“Jack?!” Luna breathing was labored.

“Easy, baby, I’ll get you down.”

All he could do was lift Luna with the strength of his one good leg and reach high overhead—high! to cut the hemp rope stretched tight to the top of the cage.

The blade glancing off the rope to nick her wrist.

“Oh, baby!”

“’S’awright,” she gasped. “Just…gemme down!”

When the rope gave she fell like a sack and took Jack with her to the floor of the cage.

Jack hauled himself to a knee.

“Luna? Luna, baby!”

“My arms—!”

“We’re nearly there.”

Cursing silently over the knots trapping her hands. Working the knife carefully. But Luna’s attention was directed outside the cage.

“The car. Jack—his car.”

“Fuck his car. Let him have it.”

“Jack, he’s got a gun!”

Arno Becker placed his heavy revolver on the dash of his coupe as he counted his money aloud.

“…forty eight thousand…forty nine…fifty grand. Plus the fifty I already have makes one hundred thousand exactly. You stiffed me a little, Jack, but what the hell—”

He gathered his handgun.

“What’s money between friends?”

Becker stepped from the Packard pulling his revolver level on the cage. Jack and Luna trapped inside. Clinging to each other in that cruel iron ring.

“This is too easy, Jack.”

Arno strolling over.

“Like shooting ducks in a barrel.”

Jack shoving himself in front of Luna as Becker spun the revolver’s cylinder.