he wants; I don't care. You read it-you'll get the most fucking pleasure out of it. And tell Amy to make arrangements to get me and Ellen out of Atlanta. I don't want to see any reporters. You got it?"
Devaughn sniffed. His gaze was scornful and superior, and Gregg ached to tear it from his face, but he didn't have the power anymore.
"Tell them yourself. I don't work for you anymore." Devaughn shook his head. "I had it all for you and you blew it. I'm going to see if Dukakis can use my talents. "
Devaughn left the room with prissy dignity. A Secret Service man stuck his head in, glanced at Gregg and the shattered glass on the rug, and shut the door again. Gregg sat there alone for a very long time.
9:00 A.M.
Somehow over the years he had managed to spend a lot of time in morgues. And no matter how beautifully appointed, how perfectly cleaned, nothing could hide the essential factthey were freezers for dead human meat.
"I appreciate your coming down here," the M.E. was saying as he led Tachyon into the operating room. His eyes slid to Tachyon's stump, and quickly away. "Especially after... but I've never seen anything like this, and you're the expert."
"No problem. It's sort of fitting somehow."
The M. E. helped him into gown and mask. They walked to the table. A wan-faced woman was clutching rib cutters to her chest, and eyeing the headless body with wary alarm.
The corpse had been slit from sternum to groin, the ribs cut and pulled- aside. But pale yellow fat was growing across the glistening intestines. The ribs were putting out bony tendrils. Skin had grown across the severed neck, and pooching up from the center of the neck, like a finger thrust into a drum, was a tiny bud. Tachyon bent in for a closer look. Fascinated and horrified and unable to stop himself.
"It's almost as if it's ... trying to ... to ... "
"To grow a new head, yes." Tach jerked back when he realized the embryonic head had eyes.
What if they suddenly opened? Would Demise's power remain? Would he make good his threat even from beyond the grave?
Stupid! He's always killed from beyond the grave. Bending Tachyon slid his dagger from its boot sheath, and jabbed it sharply into a buttock. The body arched and jerked. "Shit!" screamed the woman, and the M.E. didn't stop running until he reached the door.
Clinging to the swinging door, he stuttered, "Wha ... what the fuck is that?"
"A mistake. A major miscalculation on my part. My nemesis and a reminder not to play God. May I suggest that we dispense with the autopsy, and move straight to cremation?"
"Great. You'll get no argument from me. What about the ashes? Are there any next of kin?"
A humorless smile touched Tachyon's lips. "I suppose I stand in loco parentis. I'll take them."
"Doc, you are one weird dude," sighed the woman, and she snipped off a rib that had grown beyond the edge of the chest cavity.
10:00 A.M.
ACES BATTLE IN CONVENTION BLOODBATH
Sara winced and let the newspaper fall into mud drenched by firehoses and churned by a thousand feet of various descriptions.
You're right, damn you, she thought, in case Tachyon happened to be listening in. He wouldn't, though that Takisian honor of his. That damned expedient Takisian honor.
He'd laid it right on the line, as straightforwardly as he'd laid her Friday night, and even less gently: You cannot unmask Hartmann. It would hand the election to Barnett on a platter. How many innocent joker lives are you willing to spend on your vengeance?
"None," she said.
A couple of joker faces looked at her with shellshock blankness. None of them recognized her; she had a leopard mask on today. It had been lying in a gutter on Peachtree. The riot hadn't mashed it beyond usefulness.
Something crunched beneath her foot. She kicked at it until a sign emerged from the mud, hand-lettered at the JADL headquarters tent for last night's demonstration. The message almost made her smile.
Judas Jack, 1950
Traitor Tach, I988
Two of A Kind
With Mackie dead she'd been able to return to her own room. She was dressed today in blue jeans and a loose pale-blue blouse. She let her Reeboks carry her past a CBS remote van, where an earnest young black stringer was talking into a yellow-foam phallus.
"Piedmont Park remains virtually deserted after a night of rioting in which three hundred jokers were arrested. Several dozen jokers wander, as if dazed, among