Upgunned (31 page)

“That's quite a speech,” I said.

“Oh, baby, don't get me started,” she said. “I've had too many friends give up on their whole lives because they were obligated to be parents, and it was never a
choice
, but they spin-doctor it like crazy once they're trapped. And they always come back at you with how
wonderful
it all is, how it's the most important goddamned thing they've ever done. Yeah, for
them
, that's true, because they'll never know what they
could
have done. Then their little darling becomes a teenager, rejects you, rebels, wrecks your car, asks for money, and soon enough gets pregnant themselves, same program. Vicious cycle, never ends. None for me, thanks.”

She grabbed a little too hard for punctuation. “There is no family. We're all mutts, mating with other mutts.” Okay, so she had some mommy and daddy issues, who didn't?

She rolled, still with me in her grasp. “Let's fuck over the churches of the world and have sex for pleasure.”

“Isn't that a sin?” I grinned.

“Not in the First Book of Spooky. It's a commandment.”

The tactic worked, or would at least hold water for another day. Spooky would not mention me to Elias if she saw him first. If I saw him first, no foul. But if she wanted to sight-check connective data between me and him—not so good. She didn't know it, but she was walking a tightrope, even as we were fornicating like crazed minks. Her own snoopiness could write the end of her life. I did not particularly want to kill her—at least, not right this minute—but that codicil had never blocked me before. She was too inquisitive to leave it alone. Sooner or later she would feel compelled to poke that snake on the hot rock. I wondered if I should grant her even another 24 hours leeway. Reckless.

Spooky made it all academic, without intending to. When I reached for my cigarettes, she reached for her water bottle and one of her fine, lacquered fingernails skinned my damaged eye.

*   *   *

“You have experienced what we call corneal erosion,” said the good Dr. Blaine.

We were in the Lenox Hill emergency room; average triage wait, three hours. They had added a special treatment room for opthamology in 2003. The waiting room was full of cops and EMTs. This time of night, half the incoming patients were gunshot wounds or misdemeanor fallout, and half were heart attacks, so any nonlife-threatening distress got to wait. I dosed myself with my stolen Alcaine from my kit to neutralize the hideous hangnail sensation caused by my eyelid prying up my corneal flap. I had only just gotten around to deluding myself that my eye was at least partially healed, good enough to ignore for minutes at a time, and now it felt as bad as it had when I had rammed it on Elias's enlarger. Fortunately Spooky did not quiz me on the drops; she accepted that I had suffered some kind of setback in an ongoing condition.

After an hour I had been installed on a waiting bed in a curtained semiprivate ward, to wait while the gunshot wounds got plugged and sutured, while the cardiac patients fell to one side or the other of their internal equation. The other people in my ward, also waiting, and waiting, were less dramatic than the TV-style action that echoed dimly from down the corridor.

Spooky herself had become an action heroine. No delays and no confusion. She had bundled me into her car, delivered me, and walked me through the sign-in, which was good because I could not see a damned thing. She approached the triage nurse with just the right combination of urgency and understanding; she was, after all, well-versed in PR.

Plus, she got to go through my wallet.

I could not remember if anything incriminating was in there. My gear and my other identities were still stored at the Lucerne Hotel. But I had my key card. If she took it … if they anesthetized me … if she went there … that's all she wrote. She had been an angel and all I could think about was the need to punch her ticket, however reluctantly. You can't leave a trail, especially a trail of people who can talk about you, form memories, and therefore opinions. She had begun as a trifle, a vector on Elias, but with every moment she became more involved. Dammit. I was almost certain I could have kept her out of it. Now she was spoor.

Now she was babysitting me.

“Corneal erosion,” as described by Dr. Blaine, means that all my nice, new regenerated ocular tissue had slid off the surface of my eye like cheese off a pizza slice. Particulate irritants, stress, temperature, blinking too much, almost anything could cause such a setback. I was half-blind again, and in no condition to execute a search and destroy on Elias.

Spooky thought it had been her fault; sexing too vigorously. So I had to calm her down with more lies.

Blaine had that paterfamilias look of the very best, most trustworthy TV doctors: Brisk white hair with lingering refugees of gray, big durable build, slight hunch from overwork, expensive spectacles, spotless smock, silk tie yanked to half-mast. He smelled like fresh laundry.

He checked my eye under ultraviolet light, then let Spooky take a peek. “It's sticking up like a slice of pie,” she said. “It's
glowing
.”

I thought she said “growing,” like meteor-jelly from a blob movie.

It was back to the torture chair, back to the ice packs and the meds, back to waiting for my eyeball to catch up with my schedule. Plus now I had Spooky to hold in abeyance. Back to one.

Bad news is always good news for somebody else.

 

PART TEN

JULIAN

In the right light, she iridesced. Not from some misty-brained romanticist notion outmoded by a century or two, but literally, eye-catchingly. She was patined in rainbow colors. Her surface was cool and smooth to the touch, not polished like the carapace of an insect, but alive with the tactile reality of human flesh. She was the kind of sight your brain insists must be an illusion, then marvels at how the trick might have been achieved, then staggers at the knowledge that there
is
no trick.

Her flesh was translucent and hyperreceptive. Trace a design on it and it manifested in deep organic red or venous blue, an instant dermagraphic that lasted for about a day. Any touch must be accepted, though; invited and permitted. Punch her and you'd never leave a bruise or scar. Hell, you'd never land the blow. She was quicker.

Her hands and feet were webbed. Bat wings of radiant membrane connected her wrists to her ankles. Not delicate or ephemeral but durable, resilient, practical. She stood about five foot eleven barefoot, a technical albino with silver-violet eyes and no pigment to protect her from the sun. Because of the sensitive nature of her retinae, she had to wear special UV glasses for anything daytime-oriented. I held them up to a light and they were as dense as welder's shades. You could watch a solar eclipse through them with no harm.

Her name was Davanna.

When Mason Stone had said there was an alligator man with Salon, I expected the usual—some guy who resembled a terminal case of eczema or had some facial defects. Jesus god, was I a dope. Erik—that's his name—was the closest I've ever seen to a hybrid, more akin to a monstrosity dreamed up by the guys in the makeup lab on
Vengeance Is
. His skin wasn't superficially scaly, but the same thickness, texture, and corrugation of crocodile hide, though the colors and patterns were a bit more flamboyant. Square-cut overlapping armor plates that could probably deflect a bullet. The front of his skull was pushed into a shape that was a compromise between an elongated snout and a human face. His teeth were blocky and pointed; he told me he had half of them extracted to make room for the others, and they grew like crazy, necessitating periodic filing. He cut himself to prove to me his skin was real; sank a utility knife a quarter-inch into his forearm, cleanly dividing a scale. No blood. He must have weighed three hundred pounds and there wasn't an ounce of fat on him. Watching him eat wasn't pretty. He looked, more than anything, like a really good alien from an expensive movie. Audiences responded with instinctive recoil from insects and reptiles, even amphibians. He was a man-phibian, and if his appearance didn't steal your breath, then his voice would help your nightmares along.

“Isn't this the
shit
?” said Mason Stone.

I was hardly on set anymore, having received special dispensation from Tripp, who was already nervous enough about stray photos in the wake of the Internet exposure of Andrew Collier's bad day. When I was monopolizing Cap Weatherwax's time on our remote gun range, Cap's Fire When Ready crew ably handled the on-set armory chores. The moment I checked back in, Mason Stone grabbed me for his field trip to the Salon.

“Don't sweat it,” said Tripp from beneath today's hat,
Plunging Tarantula
. “Today is basically a repeat of yesterday, but without Mason. Second unit, cutaways, reaction shots from extras, green screen, pickups. Rain cover usually drives us toward effects shots.” Out in Jersey the hangar was besieged by sporadic sprinkles, and the problem with using an airplane hangar versus a soundstage is that rainfall messes with your sound. “Besides, you'll be seen less … yes?”

“Nobody will miss the set snapshot hound for a day,” I said, as though reciting primary school gospel or the pledge.

Mason Stone's limo was, of course, ridiculous. Dick Fearing, he of the great Easter Island face, played chauffeur. Garrett Torres had hooked onto a date named Jodi, who I think was one of the day players. At least, I think I recalled her from the New York Street shoot-out, bundled up in business chic with a French twist and glasses, standard library girl, diving for cover—she might have been a stuntie, too. She was decked out quite differently tonight, openly competing with Artesia Savoy in the category of total length-of-leg exposure, and I watched Mason's eyes stray appreciatively. Andrew Collier was supposed to have been with us, but begged off to wrestle the next day's schedule with Gordo and Tripp.

Then there was Kleck, our emcee, ringmaster, tour guide, advocate, and point man. Kleck was a dwarf in a tailored suit with spats. His face looked like a clenched fist. He greeted us as our limousine door was opened by his sidekick, a big powerhouse of muscle wearing a turban and a veil that concealed his entire face, like a footman from
The Arabian Nights.

“That's Uno,” Kleck said.

Kleck wobbled along with his filigreed walking stick, regaling us with the air of an oft-repeated spiel about the special nature of Salon, and the extraspecial privilege we were about to enjoy by seeing its denizens firsthand. Henceforth, he enthused, our lives would never be the same. Along the way he added that he was an hermaphroditic twin, and that he would prove it, since seeing was believing.

“You don't really want me to photograph a bisexed midget, do you?” I whispered to Mason Stone.

He had to divide himself from Artesia Savoy's overly touchy-feely sense of dominion. Affection, to Artesia, was a matter of barrage. But he spared me a glance: “Be cool, Jules; you'll see.”

We found ourselves in the middle of a sumptuously appointed, marble-floored megasuite somewhere in the heart of the city, high up. Almost a Vegas sense of overkill, fireplace, full bar, lounge space for fifty and “areas” for every task. I tried to record details since I wasn't shooting documentation, but something about the air in the room seemed different and charged, like the crackle imparted by ozone. I later realized it was pheromones, attraction molecules emitted by the members of Salon, who were somewhat more than human. The effect was thick and heady. You breathed it in and your perceptions changed. All things were suddenly possible.

When potables were distributed, I stuck to seltzer.

“You few come to risk the unusual,” Kleck intoned. “You come with open minds, open hearts. You expect disappointment. This is normal. It is the only such normal thing in these rooms. You expect trickery. There is none. You are willing to entertain the idea that perhaps you do not know everything. As you are willing, so are we.”

“
Hurry,
hurry, hurry,” muttered Garrett, and Jodi snickered. “Step right up.”

Mason Stone shot them both a look that could set fire to the ice in their cocktails.

“Unenlightened individuals quite understandably expect what used to be called a ‘freak show' back in the day,” said Kleck. “If you had come to see obese women, flipper children, geeks, the malformed, or hirsute wolfpeople … well, you would not have been invited to Salon. I daresay our beautiful ladies seated before me probably have more tattoos than any of my colleagues.”

Artesia and Jodi squirmed appropriately. I already knew about the dragon braceleting Artesia's ankle, and Jodi obligingly rolled over to display a tramp stamp on the small of her back that resembled the grille of a Chevy, appropriate since such ink was also called a California license plate.

Fifty years ago, my former helpmate Joey would have lived in a sideshow, no question. And the Amazing Fat Man … well, he was now so ordinary that airlines had to rewrite their seating rules.

When Kleck introduced Erik, the Alligator Man, Jodi's mouth snapped shut like a mousetrap. Garrett's remained unhinged.

Erik came out of the darkness behind Kleck, where lush sleeping quarters were arranged like the spokes on a half-wheel. He was bare-chested but wearing bigass 505 rapper jeans, which he offered to remove. I would never forget his voice, that clicking, froggy glottal that brought its own echo from within the caverns of his head.

“Touch it,” he said of his arm, extended toward Jodi, who flinched. “Find a seam, a zipper that says I am not real.”

“How did you come to be the way you are?” asked Mason, choosing his words cautiously, ultrapolite.

“Born this way,” rasped Erik. “All of us, born this way. Do you have a talent? An expertise? My beauty and power are on the outside for all to see.”