One-Eyed Jack (30 page)

Hoover Dam. Summer, 2002.

I knew when the sun went down. I felt it hiss through my body, the night searing my veins, a surge of energy that should have snapped my eyes open and brought me upright, eager to hunt. Unfortunately, tonight, all it did was make me hungry. Hungrier.

If I were still alive, I would have been shivering in a cold sweat. Cold turkey, fingernails digging into my palms and my heart like a hammered steel drum surging to a calypso rhythm. I would have been curled in the corner, biting my fingers. Instead, I paced, dragging the rattling chain behind me. We don’t get blurry when we’re hungry. We get sharp-set, like hawks. The eye gets quicker. The hand gets faster. You strike before you know it—

My resources were low. I hadn’t been taking very good care of myself. And Angel was leaning over the railing, her arms folded under her tits, cleavage augmented by a push-up bra, the smell of just-clotted blood still hanging around her. Whenever I caught her eye, she held out her arm gracefully, extending it over the water, until her fingertips just brushed the edge of my reach. She’d had to re-wound it to make the blood flow. It’s good to heal like Hollywood.

I tried not to look at her too much.

Thank God for Doc. Inside my head, riding me the way John Henry rode Stewart, but a little farther back and a little farther out. I was still in control, but this way he could talk to me without Angel overhearing.

Not that he was doing much talking right then. A little muttering and a little swearing, that was all. It made up for the muttering and swearing I wasn’t doing, either at Angel or at the assassin, who was standing a little further away, watchful, arms folded, shoulders against the wall as if he could stand there all day.

Angel must have seen something change, though, because just as I felt that spark of energy, need intense as sexual desire, she glanced from me to her watch, and then at the assassin.

“I’m going to get something to eat, baby,” she said. “Do you want anything?” That last was a purr, as she straightened away from the railing and turned her back on me, dark hair draped in shining coils over her shoulders.

“No, thank you, love.” His eyes flicked up to regard her for a moment, and his mouth curved on an artificial smile. I wondered if she couldn’t see the coldness in it, or if she was just so used to playacting she’d forgotten what the real thing was supposed to look like. He let his eyes slide off her, and met mine. “I’m set.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, with a pretty flip of her pretty hair, and swung her pretty ass around the corner and away.

The assassin and I looked at each other for a moment, and he smiled. “Benjamin made it stick, did he? Capital.”

“Keeping me quiet around Angel?” I nodded.

Doc was right behind me—well, right inside me—watching with interest. “See what you can pry out of him,” he said.

As if I hadn’t been planning that already. I crossed to the edge of the water barrier, the inside railing, and folded my arms over it, mirroring Angel’s pose. If I kicked my ankle back, I had just enough chain.

I could still smell her blood, just a drop or two on the far railing, and it turned my stomach with need. I looked at the assassin and said, “I don’t suppose you feel like explaining your plot to me?”

He laughed, outright, and then ironically. Down the corridor, I heard the lift ding and slide open; when they closed, the doors cut Angel’s scent.

“You can’t be serious. You’re hoping I’ll gloat?”

“Not really, but a little conversation would help pass the time.” I smiled, and made sure he saw my teeth. “Besides. You may have noticed that my so-called friends left me here. And I know about Bugsy and Felix, and I know you’re running a double game with Angel.”

“So why should I explain it to you?”

“Because I don’t want to be a genius, and you do. So if you can promise me freedom and convince me it’s not a wrong thing—”

“I’m injured,” he interrupted, “that you would believe I’d choose the wrong side.”

We all do, sooner or later
. Doc laughed and lit a cigarette in my head. “Convince me,” I said. “What do you want?”

“Freedom for my people,” the assassin said. He tapped a cigarette from a pack, tucked the gold-banded tip into his mouth and lit it, cupping the flame in his hand to protect it from the draft. “What the slaves always want. If I’m in a position of power in Hollywood—a position of
reality
—I can do something about educating and releasing the other media ghosts.”

“The way you plan on releasing the spies?”

He shrugged and dragged on the cigarette. Coal whitened to ash. “They’re expendable.”

“So what does that have to do with the Kennedys?”

“Oh, you caught that, did you?” He knew how to smoke a cigarette elegantly. It’s nearly a lost art. Jackie more sucked on them. “You shouldn’t listen to everything the Russian says.”

“Professional jealousy?”

He glared at me through his lashes. “Pumping me for information is useless, King. You must know that.”

“Don’t think of it as information. Think of it as persuasion.” I folded my hands in front of me, elbows on the railing. The fingers were wax-white, bony and fragile. We all look so elegant when we’re starving. “You know what I think, you limey son of a bitch?”

That got a little bit of a smile. “Do I care what you think, Yank?”

“You tell me. I think you’re running out of time. I think some or all of the spies got away. I think Angel might be about to catch on to your schemes and I think you’re worried and in a hurry, and you don’t want to be beholden to Felix and Bugsy either. I think you were honest just now—you want your freedom more than you want to run anything. And I think I can give you what you want, and you can give me what I want. But I need to know what I’m getting into, first.”

He stared at me, openly, and rubbed his knuckle across the scar on his cheek. He looked down at his hands, and turned them over, as if inspecting the palms. His lip curled. I knew the look. “And if I tell you, I let you go and you help me?”

“No.”

Oh, that had his attention. He seemed to glow when he met my eyes; just the corona of extreme hunger, identifying a meal. Ye of little faith—

“Then what, King?”

“Then I kill Angel for you, and give you what you want from me, and then you let me go.”

“That’s a big risk on your part, with no sureties.”

I shrugged. “What do I have to lose? As I said, I can tell you’re on a schedule. And I’d rather you didn’t shoot me again.”

He frowned and studied me carefully, and then nodded, slowly. “You want to know about Jack and Bobby.”

It was hard to keep the relief out of my shoulders, but if my hands were shaking, maybe he would think it was hunger.

Doc, you ready to run this back to Jackie?

Soon as we know what I’ve got to run
, he answered.
You know they may have to take you down if you do this thing?

I knew. I’d cross that bridge when it caught fire on me. I looked the assassin in the eye and said, “It’ll do for a start.”

The Russian and the Naming of Parts.

Somewhere in North Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

A little after sunset, when the light had faded, the Russian walked away from the rest of the group and found Stewart crouched behind a cluster of creosote bushes, his hands folded between his knees, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. His eyes were closed, and his lips moved silently. The Russian couldn’t make the words out, so he waited a little, to be polite, and then cleared his throat.

Stewart cocked his head back and looked up. “Yessir?”

“They’ve decided to wait for Doc or John Henry to show up with intelligence,” he said. “So we’re here for the night, I guess. We should check the perimeter before it gets dark.” He gestured to Stewart’s loosely cupped hands. “Salt?”

Stewart turned both hands over, let the fingers uncurl, showed him the flat gritty winter-white crystals of Kosher salt. “How’d you guess?”

“It’s what I do.” The Russian stepped back and Stewart stood up. Carefully, almost reverentially, he spread salt over the ground in the form of a cross about two meters long and a meter wide, then stepped to the side and repeated the gesture. The Russian nodded to himself, understanding, and asked, very quietly, “
Did
you kill them?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Stewart said, dusting his hands on his jeans. “The legends say I did.” He swallowed visibly and took a breath, and then squared his shoulders and looked up. “Make yourself useful; come help me sprinkle this water around.”

The Russian took one of the jugs. Between them, they’d drunk what Stewart had brought, and been grateful for it, even though they were only sitting in the shade. Stewart had refilled the bottles from in the cattail-clogged rill under the cottonwood trees. Now the Russian flipped off the plastic lid and followed Stewart as he walked a circle around the shattered adobe hut and the spring, the other spies and Jackie. Stewart reached into a plastic bag in his pocket and cast thin handfuls of salt like Gretel sprinkling breadcrumbs, and the Russian splashed water into his cupped hand and scattered it after. The drops made little dark circles on the earth and vanished quickly. Any stain was invisible in the twilight.

“Do you have another name?” he asked, when they had come nearly all the way around.

Stewart stopped and turned around. The genius smiled at him shrewdly and pushed sodden hair off his forehead with his thumb. “A first name, you mean?”

“Yes.”

He got a far-away look, as if he were thinking hard. His forehead creased between his eyebrows. “It used to be Hiram. But I don’t use it anymore.” And then he squinted through the darkness, with a fox-bright expression, and said, “That’s it. Could I be dumber? Jackie!”

The Russian flinched from the raised voice, but the truth was, it wasn’t a shout. Just a low, carrying call—and apparently it got Jackie’s attention, because he unfolded lankily from his perch among the cottonwood roots and strolled over, hands laced behind his back. “Yo.”

The Russian might as well have turned invisible. Stewart turned to Jackie and said, “What would it do to Bugsy maybe being able to find
them
if we gave them names?”

“Names?” Jackie blinked, and looked at the Russian. His mouth twisted thoughtfully, and he turned over his shoulder and glanced at the other two spies, who were still sitting in the shelter of the desperate little grove of trees. “Names. Media ghosts don’t have names.” A glance back at Stewart, his boots raising little puffs of dust as he twisted, and he said, “You want to do it?”

“Sure,” Stewart said. He turned back to the Russian and pursed his lips. “How’d you like to be Nikita?”

“Krushchev? Not in particular—”

“No, just Nikita.” Stewart grinned at him, turned around, tossed his last handful of salt in the general direction of closing the circle, and then bounced up on tiptoe to kiss the Russian on the cheek. “I dub thee Nikita,” he said, as the Russian startled back. “Loyal knight and protector of the city of Las Vegas.” And then he grinned, bright-eyed and delighted, and trotted off toward the American and the Englishman.

Jackie laughed low in his throat and watched Stewart run off, a smile on his mouth that the Russian—that
Nikita
—found almost painful to contemplate. He looked down.

“Nikita,” he mouthed without breath, and then glanced up to find Jackie looking over his shoulder. Strangely, he didn’t question Stewart’s right to name him—or his right to dub him into service, either. “It’s a ridiculous name.”

“You’ll get used to it. Hey, rock and roll—”

“What?” Nikita turned to look.

“John Henry’s here,” Jackie said. “Go let the troops know while I let him in the circle, would you?”

Looking after him, Nikita at first saw nothing but the glimmer of twilight, swiftly fading, as the purple mountains went black against the indigo sky. And then, unexpectedly, a dark outline resolved against the jagged horizon and the hunched shapes of scrub and stunted trees. A big man, a dark man burned darker in the sun, a red bandanna tied across his brow and a hammer slung over one shoulder, his deltoids and pectoral muscles straining the straps of a worn blue coverall. He was whistling to himself, a song Nikita didn’t know, sweet and sad, and as Jackie walked up to him, he lowered the hammer to the ground and leaned on it, both gargantuan hands folded over each other. Nikita looked over at the others, saw Stewart laughing, and the Englishman raise his head in surprise as John Henry and Jackie nodded to one another and leaned close.

Let the troops know . . .

“I think they’re aware,” Nikita said, and closed the circle with the water he had left before he went to join the rest.

One-Eyed Jack and the Ghosts of Christmas Present.

North Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

Around Stewart, you never know what’s going to happen next. But you always know it’s going to be interesting. So I wasn’t sure what his little knighting and naming ceremony was supposed to accomplish—beyond breaking our trail a little bit more—but when I led John Henry across the dusty earth back to the campsite—charitably termed—I could see one thing at least. The media ghosts were noticing him, which was something a normal-type person couldn’t do. Which meant Stewart’s naming ceremony was about more than confounding genre expectations, somehow.

And that gave me a little bit of pause. Because if the assassin could turn real, and take on the aspects of a genius, what was to say the spies couldn’t?

I wondered if Stewart had just hired our replacements. You know, it would almost kind of be a relief.

I could tell just by standing next to him that John Henry was surprised to be seen, but Stewart wandered into the middle of the circle and murmured a few words to the big ghost which seemed to make everything okay. At the very least, John Henry was leaning on his hammer again, and had swept the bandanna off his head to mop the sweat from his cheeks and brow.

“This is James,” he said, gesturing to the Englishman, who like the Russian didn’t seem entirely pleased with his new name.