Wild Cards V (2 page)

Chrysalis wasn't in the corridors of the third floor, nor on the stairway leading down to the taproom, but he heard murmuring voices as he crept down the stairs.

He drew an arrow, placed it on the string of his bow, and peered around the edge of the stairwell where it opened up into the back of the taproom. He gritted his teeth. He had been right to be cautious.

Chrysalis was standing before the long, polished-wood bar that ran almost the entire length of the taproom. The whiskey decanter, still empty, was forgotten on the bar next to her. Her arms were crossed and her jaw was clenched. Her lips were compressed in a thin, angry line.

Two men bracketed her and a third sat facing her at a table in front of the bar. Brennan could discern few details in the dimness of the night-light that burned above the bar, but the men all had hard, tough faces. The one facing her drummed his fingers on the tabletop next to a chrome-plated pistol.

“Come on,” he said in a soft but dangerous-sounding voice. “We just want some information. That's all. We won't even say where we got it.” He leaned back in his chair. “Soon there's going to be war, but we don't know who to hit.”

“And you think I do?” Brennan recognized the edge anger put in Chrysalis's drawl, but he also recognized the fear under the anger.

The seated man smiled. “We know you do, babe. You know everything about this Jokertown shithole. All
we
know is that someone has put together these nickel-and-dime gangs into something called the Shadow Fists. They're moving into
our
territory, taking
our
customers, and cutting into
our
profits. It's got to stop.”

“If I knew a name,” Chrysalis said, coming down hard on the if, “it would cost you more than you can pay to learn it.”

The man sitting at his table shook his head. “You don't understand,” he said. “This is war, babe. And it's going to cost you more than
you
can pay to keep your mouth shut.” He let his words sink in while he drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Sal,” he said after a moment, nodding at the man who stood to Chrysalis's right. “I wonder if her famous invisible skin would scar?”

Sal considered the question. “Let's see,” he finally said.

There was a loud snick and Brennan saw light glint off a shiny blade. Sal waved it in Chrysalis's face, and she shrank back against the bar. She opened her mouth to scream, but the man standing on her left clamped his gloved hand over it.

Sal laughed and Brennan stood and loosed the arrow he'd been holding. It struck Sal in the back and catapulted him over the bar. No one had any idea what had happened, except possibly Chrysalis. The man seated at the table snatched his pistol and leaped to his feet. Brennan calmly shot him through the throat. The thug holding Chrysalis let out a startled stream of obscenities and fumbled under his jacket for a pistol that he carried in a shoulder rig. Brennan shot him through the right forearm. He dropped his gun and spun away from Chrysalis, staring at the aluminum-shafted hunting arrow skewering his arm and mumbling, “Jesus, oh, Jesus.” He stooped to pick up his pistol.

“Touch it,” Brennan called from the darkness, “and I'll put the next arrow through your right eye.”

The thug wisely stood up and backed against the bar. He clutched his bleeding arm and moaned.

Brennan stepped forward into the diffuse light cast by the nightlamp burning over the bar. The man stared at the razor-tipped arrow nocked to his bowstring.

“Who are they?” Brennan asked Chrysalis in a harsh, clipped voice.

“Mafia,” she replied, her voice cracking with tension and fear.

Brennan nodded, never taking his eyes off the thug who stared at the arrow that was pointed at his throat.

“Do you know who I am?”

The mafioso nodded violently. “Ya. You're that Yeoman guy—the bow 'n' arrow killer. I read about you alla time in the
Post
.” The words tripped out of his mouth in a fear-filled torrent.

“That's right,” Brennan said. He spared the man who'd been sitting at the table a quick glance and saw that he was curled on the floor in a widening pool of blood, a foot of arrow sticking out from the nape of his neck. He didn't bother checking Sal. He'd had a clean heart shot on him.

“You're a lucky man,” Brennan continued in his same dead voice. “Know why?”

The mafioso bobbed his head vigorously side to side, sighing in relief when Brennan relaxed the tension on the taut bowstring and set the bow aside.

“Someone has to deliver a message for me. Someone has to tell your boss that Chrysalis is off bounds. Someone has to tell him that I have an arrow with his name on it, an arrow I would not be slow in delivering if I heard that something had happened to Chrysalis. Do you think you could tell him that?”

“Sure. Sure I could.”

“Good.” Brennan reached into his back pocket and showed the thug a playing card, a black ace of spades. “This is so he knows you're telling the truth.”

He grabbed the man's wounded arm by the elbow and yanked it straight. The thug groaned as Brennan stuck the card on the arrowtip.

“And this,” Brennan said through gritted teeth, “is to make sure you don't lose it.”

With a sudden, forceful jerk he impaled the man's other arm on the arrowpoint. The mafioso screamed at the sharp, unexpected pain. He sagged to his knees as Brennan bent the aluminum shaft of the arrow under and around both of his arms, pinning them together as tightly as handcuffs would.

Brennan yanked him to his feet. The man was sobbing in fear and pain and couldn't look Brennan in the eye.

“If I ever see you again,” Brennan said, “you'll die.”

The thug staggered away, sobbing and gibbering incomprehensible protestations. Brennan watched him until he tottered through the front door, then turned to Chrysalis.

She was looking at him with fear in her eyes, more than some of which, he was sure, was directed toward him.

“Are you all right?” he asked softly.

“Yes … yes, I think so.…”

“You'll have to answer a lot of questions,” Brennan said, “unless we get rid of the bodies.”

“Yes.” She nodded sharply, suddenly decisive, suddenly in control again. “I'll call Elmo. He'll handle it.” She looked him straight in the eye. “I owe you.”

Brennan sighed. “Does your entire life have to consist of rigidly tabulated credits and debits?”

She looked at little startled, but nodded. “Yes,” she said firmly. “Yes, it does. It's the only way to keep track, to make sure…” Her voice trailed away, and she turned and went around the bar. She looked down at Sal's body, and when she spoke again, she voiced a totally different thought. “You know, Tachyon invited me to go on that world tour of his. I think I'll take him up on it. No telling what information I'll pick up rubbing elbows with all those politicians. And if there's going to be street warfare between the Mafia and Kien's Shadow Fists”—she looked into Brennan's eyes for the first time—“I would be safer elsewhere.”

They looked at each other for a long moment, and then Brennan nodded.

“I'd better be going, then.”

“Your whiskey?”

Brennan let out a long sigh. “No.” He looked at the body at his feet. “Drink brings memories, and I don't need any tonight.” He looked back at her. “I'm going to be … indisposed … for the next few weeks. I probably won't see you before you leave. Good-bye, Chrysalis.”

She watched him go, a crystalline tear glistening on her invisible cheek, but he never looked back, he never saw.

II

The Twisted Dragon was located somewhere within the nebulous boundary of an interlocking Jokertown and Chinatown. One of Brennan's street sources had told him that the bar was the hangout of Danny Mao, a man who had a moderately high position in the Shadow Fist Society and was said to be in charge of recruitment.

Brennan watched the entrance for a while. The swirling snowflakes that missed the brim of his black cowboy hat caught on his thick, drooping mustache and in his long sideburns. A fair number of Werewolves—they were wearing Richard Nixon masks this month—were going into and out of the place. He'd also seen a few Egrets, though for the most part the Chinatown gang was too picky to hang out in a joint frequented by jokers.

He smiled, smoothing the tips of his mustache in a gesture that had already become habitual. Time to see if his plan was a stroke of genius, as he sometimes thought, or a quick way to a hard death, as he more frequently thought.

It was warm inside the Dragon, more, Brennan guessed, from the press of bodies than the bar's heating system, and it took a moment for him to spot Mao, who was, as Brennan's source had told him he'd be, sitting in a booth in the back of the room. Brennan threaded his way between crowded tables and the shuffling barmaids, staggering drunks, and swaggering punks who crossed his path as he headed toward the booth.

A girl, young and blond and looking vaguely stoned, sat next to Mao. Three men crowded the bench across the table from him. One was a Werewolf in a Nixon mask, one was a young Oriental, and the one in the middle was a thin, pale, nervous-looking man. Before Brennan could say anything a street punk stepped in Brennan's path, blocking his way.

He was a lean six four or five, so he towered over Brennan despite the cowboy boots that added an inch or two to Brennan's height. He wore stained leather pants and an oversize leather jacket that was draped with lengths of chain. His spiked hair added several inches to his apparent height, and the scarlet and black scars crawling on his face added apparent fierceness to his appearance, as did the bone—a human finger-bone, Brennan realized—that pierced his nose.

The scars that patterned his cheeks, forehead, and chin were the insignia of the Cannibal Headhunters, a once-feared street gang that had disintegrated when Brennan had killed its leader, an ace named Scar. Gang members not slain in the bloody power struggle after Scar's demise had for the most part gravitated to other criminal associations, such as the Shadow Fist Society.

“What do you want?” The Headhunter's voice was too reedy to sound menacing, but he tried.

“To see Danny Mao.” Brennan spoke softly, his voice pitched in the slow drawl that he remembered so well from his childhood. The Headhunter bent lower to hear Brennan over the cacophony of music, manic laughter, and half a hundred conversations that washed over them.

“'Bout what?”

“'Bout what's not your business, boy.”

Brennan saw out of the corner of his eye that conversation in the booth had stopped and that everyone was watching them.

“I say it is.” The Headhunter smiled a grin he fondly thought savage, showing filed front teeth. Brennan laughed aloud. The Headhunter frowned. “What's so funny, asshole?”

Brennan, still laughing, grabbed the bone in the Headhunter's nose and yanked. The Headhunter screamed and reached for his torn nose and Brennan kicked him in the crotch. He fell with a choking moan, and Brennan dropped the bloody bone he'd ripped from his nose onto his curled-up body.

“You,” Brennan told him, then slid into the booth next to the blond girl, who was staring at him in stoned astonishment. Two of the three men sitting across the table started to rise, but Danny Mao waved a negligent hand and they sat back down, muttering at each other and staring at Brennan.

Brennan took his hat off, set it on the table in front of him, and looked at Danny Mao, who returned his gaze with apparent interest.

“What's your name?” Mao asked.

“Cowboy,” Brennan said softly.

Mao picked up the glass in front of him and took a short sip. He looked at Brennan as if he were some kind of odd bug and frowned. “You for real? I ain't never seen a Chinese cowboy before.”

Brennan smiled. The epicanthic folds given his eyes by Dr. Tachyon's deft surgical skills had combined, as he had known they would, with his coarse, dark hair and tanned complexion to give him an Oriental appearance. This slight alteration of his features, his newly grown facial hair, and his western manner of speaking and dressing all added up to a simple but effective disguise. It wouldn't fool anyone who knew him, but he wasn't likely to run into anyone who did.

And the irony of his disguise, Brennan thought, was that every aspect of his new identity, except for the eyes given him by Tachyon, was true. His father had been fond of saying that the Brennans were Irish, Chinese, Spanish, several kinds of Indian, and all-American.

“My Asian ancestors helped build the railroads. I was born in New Mexico, but found it too limiting.” That, too, was true.

“So you came to the big city looking for excitement?”

Brennan nodded. “Some time ago.”

“And found enough so that you have to use an alias?”

He shrugged, said nothing.

Mao took another sip of his drink. “What do you want?”

“Word on the street,” Brennan said, his intense excitement buried under his southwestern drawl, “is that your people are going to war with the Mafia. You've already hit them once—Don Picchietti was assassinated two weeks ago by an invisible ace who shoved an ice pick in his ear while he was eating dinner at his own restaurant. That was certainly a Shadow Fist job. The Mafia will undoubtedly retaliate, and the Shadow Fists will need more soldiers.”

Mao nodded. “Why should we hire you?”

“Why not? I can handle myself.”

Mao glanced at his erstwhile bodybuard, who had managed to drag himself to a hunched position on his knees, his forehead resting on the floor. “Fair enough,” he said thoughtfully. “But do you have the stomach for it, I wonder?” He looked at the three men crowded together on the bench across the table, and Brennan, too, looked at them closely.

The Werewolf sat on the outside and the Oriental, probably an Immaculate Egret, was on the inside. The man they sandwiched, though, didn't look like a street tough.