Wild Cards V (22 page)

Tom had known Steve Bruder since childhood and cordially loathed him most of that time, but for once Bruder's words were music to his ears. When Bruder offered to buy the junkyard outright, the price made Tom's head spin, but he resisted the temptation. He'd thought this all out beforehand. “No,” he said. “I'm not selling. I want to be a full partner in the development. I provide the land, you provide the money and know-how, we split the profits fifty-fifty.”

Bruder had given him a shark's slow smile. “You're not as dumb as you look, Tudbury. Someone been coaching you, or is this all your own idea?”

“Maybe I've finally gotten smart,” Tom said. “Now what is it, yes or no? Shit or get off the pot, asshole.”

“It's not nice to call your partner an asshole, wimp,” Bruder said, extending his hand. He had a very firm handshake, but Tom was careful not to wince.

Tom looked at his watch. Steve would be bringing the bankers by in about an hour. Just a formality, he said. The loan would be candy; the property screamed with potential. Once they had the line of credit, they could get the zoning changed. By spring they'd have the junk cleared out and the land subdivided into building lots.

Tom wasn't sure why he'd come so early … unless it was just to remember.

It was funny that so many of his important memories were rooted in this junkyard … but somehow appropriate, considering the way his life had gone.

But all of that was about to change. Forever. Thomas Tudbury was about to become a rich man.

Tom walked slowly around the shack, kicked at a threadbare tire in his path, then lifted it with his mind. He held it five feet off the ground, gave it a brisk telekinetic shove that set it spinning, and counted. At eight the tire began to wobble; at eleven it fell. Not bad. Back in his teens, before he'd crawled into a shell, he could have held that tire up all day … but that was when the power had been Tom's, before he'd given it away to the Turtle. Like he'd given so much else.

“Sell the junkyard?” Joey had said when Tom told him the plan. “You're serious about this, aren't you? That's one hell of a bridge to burn. What if they find the bunker?”

“They'll find a fucking hole in the ground. Maybe they'll worry about it for five, ten minutes. Then they'll push some dirt into it and it'll be over.”

“What about the shells?”

“There are no shells,” Tom said. “Just some junk that used to be shells. ‘All the king's horses and all the king's men,' remember? I'll go out there one night and turn Turtle just long enough to drop them into the bay.”

“Hell of a waste,” Joey said. “Weren't you the one telling me how much money and sweat you put into those fucking things?” He took a long swig of beer and shook his head. Joey looked more like his father Dom every year. The same skinny arms, the same rock-hard beer-belly, the same salt-and-pepper hair. Tom remembered when it had been pure black, always falling down into his eyes. In those days before pull-tabs, Joey used to wear a church key around his neck on a leather thong, even when he'd donned a cheap frog mask and gone to Jokertown with the Turtle to help roust Dr. Tachyon from an alcoholic pout.

That was twenty-three years ago. Tachyon hadn't aged, but Joey had, and so had Tom. He'd grown old without growing up, but all that was changing now. The Turtle was dead, but Tom Tudbury's life had just begun.

He strolled away from the shoreline. Broken headlights stared at him like so many blind eyes from mountains of dead cars, and once he felt live eyes and turned to see a huge gray rat peering out of the damp, rotten interior of a legless Victorian sofa. In the depths of the junkyard he passed between two long rows of vintage refrigerators, all the doors carefully removed. On the far side was a flat, bare patch of earth where a square metal plate was set into the ground. It was heavy, Tom knew from past experience. He stared at the big ring set into the metal, concentrated, and on the third try managed to shift it enough to reveal the dark tunnel mouth below.

Tom sat on the edge of the hole and dropped down carefully into darkness. At the bottom he fumbled against the wall and found the flashlight he'd hung there, then walked down the cold, damp tunnel until he emerged in the bunker.

The old shells waited for him in silence.

He'd have to get rid of them soon, he knew. But not today. The bankers wouldn't go poking around back here. They just wanted to eyeball the property, see the view, maybe sign a few papers. There was plenty of time to dump this junk in the bay; it wasn't going anywhere.

Painted daisies and peace symbols covered shell two, the once-bright paint now faded and chipped. Just looking at it was enough to bring back memories of old songs, old causes, old certainties. The March on Washington, folk-rock blaring from his speakers,
MAKE LOVE NOT WAR
scrawled across his armor. Gene McCarthy had stood on that shell and spoken with his customary wry eloquence for a solid twenty minutes. Pretty girls in halter tops and jeans would fight for the chance to ride on top. Tom remembered one in particular, with cornflower-blue eyes beneath an Indian headband and straight blond hair that fell past her ass. She loved him, she'd whispered as she lay across the shell. She wanted him to open the hatch, let her in; she wanted to see his face and look into his eyes; she didn't care if he was a joker like they said, she loved him and she wanted him to ball her, right then, right there.

She'd given him a hard-on that felt like a crowbar in his jeans, but he hadn't opened the shell. Not then, not ever. She wanted the Turtle, but inside the armor was only Tom Tudbury. He wondered where she was now, what she looked like, what she remembered. By now she might have a daughter as old as she'd been the night she'd tried to crawl inside his shell.

Tom ran his hand over the cold metal and traced another peace symbol in the dust that lay thick on the armor. He'd really felt as though he was making a difference in those days. He was a part of a movement, stopping a war, protecting the weak. The day the Turtle had made Nixon's enemy list had been one of the proudest of his life.

All the king's horses and all the king's men …

Beyond the painted shell was another hulk, larger, plainer, more recent. That one had seen some hard service too. He paused by the dent where some lunatic had bounced a cannonball off him. His head was ringing for weeks afterward. Underneath, Tom knew, if you looked in the right place, you could find the imprint of a small human hand sunk four inches deep into the armor plate, a souvenir left him by a rogue ace the press called the Sculptress. She was a cute bit of business; metal and stone flowed like water under her hands. She was a media darling until she started using those hands to shape doorways into bank vaults. The Turtle delivered her to the cops, wondering how they were going to stop her from just walking out again, but she never tried it. Instead she'd accepted a pardon and gone to work for the Justice Department. Sometimes it was a very strange world.

There wasn't much left of either shells two or three except for the frame and armor plate. The interiors had long since been gutted for parts. Cameras, electronics, heaters, fans, you name it; all that stuff cost money, of which Tom had never had an overabundance. So you borrowed from the old shells to build the new, where you could. It didn't help much, it still cost a fortune. By his rough figuring, he'd had about fifty grand tied up in the shell the goddamned Takisians had so casually spit out the airlock, most of it borrowed. He was still making payments.

In the darkest corner of the bunker he found the oldest shell of all. Even the layers of badly welded armor plate couldn't quite obliterate the familiar lines of the VW Beetle they'd started with back in the winter of 1963. Inside, he knew, it was dark and stuffy, with barely enough room to turn around, and none of the amenities of the later shells. Shining the flashlight over the exterior, he sighed at his naivete. Black-and-white TV sets, a Volkswagen body, twenty-year-old electrical wire, vacuum tubes. It was more or less intact, if only because it was so hopelessly obsolete. The very idea that he'd crossed the bay in it just a few months prior made him want to shudder.

Still … it was the first shell, with the strongest memories of all. He looked at it for a long time, remembering how it had been. Building it, testing it, flying it. He remembered the first time he'd crossed over to New York. He'd been scared shitless. Then he'd found the fire, teked that woman to safety—even now, all these years later, he could see the dress she'd been wearing vividly in his mind's eye, the flames licking up the fabric as he'd floated her down to the street.

“I tried,” he said aloud. His voice echoed strangely in the dimness of the bunker. “I did some good.” He heard scrabbling noises behind him. Rats probably. It had gotten so bad that he was talking to rats. Who was he trying to convince?

He looked at the shells, three of them in a crooked row, so much scrap metal, destined for the bottom of the bay. It made him sad. He remembered what Joey had said, about what a waste it was, and that gave him the beginnings of an idea. Tom pulled a pad out of his back pocket and jotted a quick note to himself, smiling. He'd been playing shell games for twenty years, and he never did find the pea beneath any of them. Well, maybe he could turn the old shells into a whole
can
of peas.

Steve Bruder arrived forty-five minutes later, wearing leather driving gloves and a Burberry coat, with two bankers in his long brown Lincoln Town Car. Tom let him do all the talking as they walked around the property. The bankers admired the view and politely deigned not to notice the junkyard rats.

They signed the papers that afternoon and celebrated with dinner at Hendrickson's.

 

Concerto for Siren and Serotonin

III

THE WIND CAME AND
went like heavy surf, vibrating streetside windowpanes, driving icy pellets against the stone lions flanking the entranceway. These sounds were intensified as the door to the Jokertown Clinic was opened. A man entered and began stamping his feet and brushing snow from his dark blue blazer. He made no effort to close the door behind him.

Madeleine Johnson, sometimes known as the Chickenfoot Lady, doing a partial front desk deathwatch for her friend Cock Robin, with whom she had a good thing going, looked up from her crossword puzzle, stroked her wattles with her pencil, and squawked, “Close the damn door, mister!”

The man lowered the handkerchief with which he had been wiping his face and stared at her. She realized then that his eyes were faceted. His jaw muscles bunched and unbunched.

“Sorry,” he said, and he drew the door closed. Then he turned his head slowly, seeming to study everything in the room, though with those eyes it was difficult to tell for certain. Finally, “I've got to talk to Dr. Tachyon,” he said.

“The doctor is out of town,” she stated, “and he's going to be away for some time. What is it that you want?”

“I want to be put to sleep,” he said.

“This isn't a veterinary clinic,” she told him, and regretted it a moment later when he moved forward, for he developed a distinct halo and began emitting sparks like a static electricity generator. She doubted this had much to do with virtue, for his teeth were bared and he clenched and unclenched his hands as if anticipating strenuous activity.

“This—is—an—emergency,” he said. “My name is Croyd Crenson, and there is probably a file. Better find it. I get violent.”

She squawked again, leaped and departed, leaving two pinfeathers to drift in the air before him. He put out a hand and leaned upon her desk, then mopped his brow again. His gaze fell upon a half-filled coffee cup beside her newspaper. He picked it up and chugged it.

Moments later there came a clattering sound from the hallway beyond the desk. A blond, blue-eyed young man halted at the threshold and stared at him. He had on a green and white polo shirt, a stethoscope, and a beach-boy smile. From the waist down he was a palomino pony, his tail beautifully braided. Madeleine appeared behind him and fluttered.

“He's the one,” she told the centaur. “He said, ‘violent.'”

Still smiling, the quadrupedal youth entered the room and extended his hand. “I'm Dr. Finn,” he said. “I've sent for your file, Mr. Crenson. Come on back to an examination room, and you can tell me what's bothering you while we wait for it.”

Croyd took his hand and nodded.

“Any coffee back there?”

“I think so. We'll get you a cup.”