Lowball: A Wild Cards Novel (32 page)

“I think you need another drink,” John said. He’d produced a second glass from somewhere, and she was happy to take it.

They couldn’t argue when they were eating. Ana was starting to be pleased with herself and her diplomatic skills. But, inevitably, conversation started again and circled back around. Wasn’t anything Ana could do to stop it.

“So much for the hero part of the show,”
DB
grumbled around a bite of burrito. “Not like it’s been about anything but politics and sex scandals since the first season. Nobody’s trying to save the world.”

“I’m trying,” Ana said softly. The margaritas were a warm flush through her system, making her talk more than she usually did. “Maybe it doesn’t look like much from the outside, when I spend most of my time in an office, but I’m trying.”

Kate frowned. “Seventy-five K for children’s cancer research has to count for something.”

“It does,” John said, maybe too eagerly. “At least I think it does.” She gave him a tight-lipped smile.

DB
said, “You guys hear what happened to Joe Twitch?”

Joe Twitch, another first season veteran. Being on the show hadn’t helped him out at all, and he hadn’t saved anything in the end. After falling in with a very bad crowd, the ace had been gunned down in some messed-up police shoot-out.

“Yeah,” Ana said, and the others nodded in grim agreement.

Kate shook her head. “Let’s hear it for first season alumni. God, we’re a mess.”

They weren’t, not really. Ana had her work, Kate had her charity fund-raising. After leaving the Committee, John had done volunteer work overseas, and
DB
donated a chunk of his concert earnings to the International Red Cross and other refugee aid organizations. He didn’t even publicize it. They were all trying, though it felt like spitting into the wind sometimes.

“You know who probably knows something about those videos?”
DB
said. “Bugsy. He’s working for
Aces!
now, he knows everything. Right?” Bugsy, Jonathan Hive, another first season alumnus who now wrote for a tabloid. So maybe they weren’t all on the side of angels.

“Not a bad idea,” John said. “So who wants to actually call him?”

“We had a little talk awhile back,” Kate said, not looking particularly pleased. “He wouldn’t tell us even if he knew. But he’s got his own problems going on, we don’t need to bug him. Um. Sorry. No pun intended.”

John smirked. “I’m sure you did talk to him, after that story he did on you and your new boyfriend.”

“John!” Ana and Kate both declared, cutting off that track before it went further.

More eating. Ana wished for continued silence. The episode on the
TV
had wound down, and she wondered if she should turn the
DVD
back on, for a distraction.
DB
said to his plate, carefully, “I don’t suppose you have that copy of the magazine with the story Bugsy did—”

Kate raised her fork to throw it.

“You really want to know where those bootleg
DVD
s are coming from?” Ana burst, interrupting. “Why not ask the guys selling them.”

“And I suppose you know who that is?”
DB
said.

“Sure—there’s one of those stalls on the Bowery, just a couple blocks from here. You know those creeps who sell bootlegs
CD
s and everything. I’m sure he’s got some of these. Ask
him
where they’re coming from.”

DB
shrugged. “Sounds good to me.”

Ana suddenly wished she hadn’t said anything, but everyone else embraced the plan. Plates and glasses went into the kitchen sink, leftovers went into the fridge, and
DB
shrugged on his overcoat.

“Aren’t you hot in that?” Kate asked wonderingly.

“I’m incognito,” he said, and Kate squeaked out a stifled, tipsy laugh.

In a very brief moment they were all on the stairs heading down and outside.

Ana shouldn’t have had that second margarita. Or was that third? Not that it mattered. This was a bad idea, drunk or sober. John caught her arm when she stumbled on the stairs, asked if she was okay. She was sure she was fine, really. Right?

After leaving Fifth, they walked a couple of blocks onto the Bowery. The street was busy—not late enough to have cleared out yet. The sky was dark, but headlights and streetlights and storefronts glared brightly. Some people marched, clearly on missions, to or from work or home or miscellaneous errands. Clumps of people moved together, laughing at each other, out for a night of fun. Like Ana and the others should have been, if they knew what was good for them. The Guatemalan woman who ran the mobile taquería that Ana liked leaned out the window of her truck and shouted in Spanish, and Ana answered,
bueno,
everything was just fine.

This close to Jokertown, no one looked twice at someone who had an extra limb or three or was covered with a layer of fur or scales. But people were looking at
DB
.

“That coat isn’t doing
anything
to disguise you,” Kate observed.

DB
scowled.

Really, people were staring at all of them. And when people were staring at you in
Jokertown,
you knew you were in trouble.

She almost walked right past the row of storefronts and streetside booths, selling everything from knockoff handbags to cheap souvenirs. It was almost a carnival along this stretch. A guy playing guitar and singing on the corner of Bond had his hat out. Another block or two along the Bowery and you’d be in Jokertown’s red light district. But this was where she’d seen the guy with the
DVD
s. Stopping to take stock, she glanced up the row, then pointed. “There it is.”

The guy had wooden racks set up on folding tables, filled with
CD
and
DVD
cases that weren’t fooling anyone. The covers showed the right images for all the latest hit movies, but they were obviously fourth-generation photocopies. The plastic was cheap, warped, already coming apart. The
DVD
s inside wouldn’t be any more slick or reliable. Buyer beware.

The guy didn’t do much business that Ana had ever seen. Downloading had replaced much of the pirate
CD
and
DVD
market, she imagined. But guys like this selling crap like this would probably never go away. Not everyone had a fancy computer.

The four of them lined up in front of the stall. The stall owner, or proprietor, or clerk, or whatever, blinked back at them with round, dark eyes. A joker, he had a bony fan of flesh sprouting from his shoulder blades, through a modified slit cut into his T-shirt. Leathery and wrinkled, they didn’t look functional as wings, but who could tell.

“Hey, hey. Ana, right? Wha-what can I do for you?
Que pasa?
” His accent might have been Puerto Rican. His smile was strained.

She opened her mouth to say something, then completely forgot what it was she’d been about to say. Some accusation. Swearing, probably. This man was a criminal, she stood for truth and justice, she ought to do something about it. Shouldn’t she?

“Where are they?”
DB
said, looming. The guy cringed, stammered, and
DB
grabbed the collar of his jacket and hauled him up. “I know you’re selling them, where are they?”

“Michael, calm the hell down,” Kate muttered, hanging off one of
DB
’s arms.

Ana spotted a Joker Plague
CD
that might have been used or might have been a bootleg; she decided not to tell the drummer about it. Stepping in front of
DB
, subtly edging him away from the stall, Ana reminded herself that she was an international agent for good and found her voice again. “He’s asking about special stuff that isn’t in the racks, that you sell under the table. Right?”

The guy shrugged. A line of sweat dripped from his hairline. “Yeah, I got a lot of stuff. I mean, there’s, you know, the triple X stuff—”

She shook her head. “No. Well, sort of. Outtakes from
American Hero,
bootleg behind-the-scenes stuff. I guess some of it’s rated X.…” She winced.

His eyes widened, and Ana swore if he said something about her being too nice a girl for that sort of thing … “You
sure
you want to look at that stuff?” he asked instead. “All’a you. I mean you seem like nice kids, and I haven’t watched any of it myself—I’d never do that, you know—but I hear it gets kind of rough.”

DB
grumbled, “Don’t tell me about it—I was there for most of it, Bat Boy.”

The joker cringed.

Ana made soothing gestures toward them both. “We want to find out where the videos are coming from—who’s distributing them, who’s making them. Who might have access to the footage, you know?”

“I don’t know any of that—I just get the boxes of ’em from the wholesaler. I don’t even look, you know?”

“You have to look—you already said you had some. Can we see what you’ve got?” Maybe some of the other
DVD
cases would have identifying information on them, unlike
DB
’s copy.

The joker wore a skeptical frown, but he crouched to pull a cardboard box from under the table and started pawing through it. “I’m telling you, most of what I got’s just porn, not from the show. You interested in any of that? I got a bunch of stuff here, ace on ace, ace on joker—”

“Just the
American Hero
stuff,” Ana said. John was looking on, interested.
DB
and Kate were fidgeting, their patience stretching thin.
DB
pattered a riff on his torso that made people up and down the block look over. Why any of them had thought they could do this without drawing attention …

The stall owner pulled
DVD
cases out of the box and laid them out on his table. They were just as awful as Ana could have imagined, with all seasons of
American Hero
represented, most of the covers featuring particularly photogenic female contestants in various states of undress. And those were probably the least prurient covers of the bunch, because as promised he was selling a bunch of outright porn as well as other reality-based sensationalism.

“What’s that?”
DB
said, grabbing a pair of cases out of the guy’s hand. They all leaned in to get a better look.

Large, yellow capital letters, in a bullet-ridden font spelled
JOKER FIGHT CLUB VOL. III.
The image behind the words was murky, showing poorly lit figures moving in a blur. Two men—jokers, large ones, with abnormal muscles and bison-like bulk, one with horns growing from his shoulders, one with claws on his arms, beat on each other. The one who faced the camera had blood covering half his misshapen face. This didn’t look staged. It didn’t look like special effects.

“Where’d you get this?” Ana said.

“I don’t know, they just turn up.” He looked scared now, his hands shaking as he tried to grab the cases out of their hands.

She raised a brow at him, skeptical.

DB
picked three or four more of the
Joker Fight Club
videos out of the batch. “How can you even sell this crap?” he said, disgusted.

“I gotta pay rent, just like everybody else. Those guys in the fights—they’re paying rent, too, wanna bet? You’re a joker, you know how it is.”

“And what?” Ana said. “These just magically show up in a cardboard box so you can pay your rent? Where do you get them? Who sells them to you?”

He cringed away, but Ana didn’t have any illusions that she was the one intimidating him.
DB
was looming, fury in his gaze.

The guy’s vestigial wings flopped weakly against his back. “These ones, the fight club ones, they come from a couple of
hombres
in a white van. They drop ’em off every week or so. They just dropped these off this evening.”

“Here?” Kate said. “They were here?” The ace turned to Ana. “You think maybe it’s the same people doing the
American Hero
DVD
s?”

Ana shrugged. “Worth finding out. Where’d they go?” She glared at the joker, who pointed down the street.

“East. Turned on Houston.” Straight into Jokertown. Ana could think of a dozen scenarios where some lowlife gangsters in Jokertown had decided to go into video production and managed to snag the
American Hero
outtakes. Not to mention the other stuff. God, if there was a porn studio in Jokertown she didn’t want to know about it. Who was she kidding, there probably was. Never mind.

“How long ago?”

“Hour, maybe?”

DB
started shoving
DVD
s into his coat pockets with two hands. A third threw a couple of tens down on the table. “I’m buying the whole fucking mess,”
DB
said. “Hand ’em over to my lawyers and let them have a crack.”

“Wait, what—” The stall owner pawed at the money. “Who do you think you are?”

DB
snarled at him in answer and stalked off. Ana, Kate, and John followed.

Ana thought the guy was lucky
DB
’d given him anything at all and not called the cops. The joker at the stall must have realized that because he didn’t argue further. Not that anyone would argue with
DB
when he got into a mood like this.