Ace in the Hole - By George R. R. Martin Page 0,41

tell my parents were thinking if only it were Andi. Do you know what I mean? When I was bad or clumsy, it was, Andi wouldn't do that. I mean, they'd never say anything that horrible, not out loud. But I knew. It was as if I had a wild card of my own, a poison psychic gift that let me know what they really thought."

She was crying, then, the tears rushing out as if someone had punched a big awl through her eyes and hit a giant reservoir of grief. Ricky was beside her on the bed, cradling her against his racquetball-trim chest, stroking her hair with those splendid fingers, while the mascara eroded from her face and stained his Brooks Brothers shirt in big ugly blotches.

"Sara-Rosie-it's all right now, baby, it's all right, we'll get it straightened out. Everything will be okay. You're fine, sweetheart, everything's going to be fine . ."

She clung to him like a baby opossum, welcoming human contact for one rare moment, letting him murmur his soothing words, letting him hold her.

I just hope he doesn't press too far, she thought.

The passengers walking the LaGuardia concourse gave plenty of sea room to the thin young man in the faded black jacket. It wasn't just the stale smell of sweat emanating from his seldom-washed clothes and body. Mackie was so full of excitement at getting The Call that he wasn't able to keep it all in; parts of him kept going off into buzz. The subliminals were unnerving people.

He looked up at the TV monitors next to the Eastern gate. The gray alphanumerics confirmed once again that his flight was departing on time. He could actually see it there through the polarized glass, fat and white and glistening like snot in the July morning sun. The paper jacket that held his ticket and boarding pass was beginning to wilt in his hand; he didn't want to let go of it, even to slip it into a pocket.

Chrysalis was dead, Digger vanished, but he got to kill one who was even better. The woman. The Man had told Mackie about her. She had done it with the Man on the tour.

They broke up and she got crazy and might try to do something to the Man-his Man. He'd wanted to go out and find her as soon as he heard that, put a good buzz on and cut her, and watch the blood well up, but the Man said, no. Wait for my word.

It had come a half hour ago in the form of a coded call to the Bowery message drop.

He was glad there was no smoking on airplanes. He hated smokers: smokers jokers. He'd been on an airplane once, when he'd come across from Germany to be close to the Man.

He held his pass up to his face, opened it, shuffled through it. He could barely read the red type, and not just because it was blurred. He hadn't gotten what you called a good education in Germany. He never learned to read real well, even though he did learn to speak English. From his mother. The whore.

The ticket had been waiting for him when he asked at the Eastern counter. The clerk there was afraid of him. He could tell. She was a fat nigger bitch. She thought he was a joker.

You could see it in those calf-stupid eyes. People always thought he was a joker. Especially women.

That was probably why the Man sounded funny. That woman after him. Women did that. Women were shit. He thought of his mother. The fat, cognac-swilling whore. The bottleneck stuck in her mouth in his mind turned to a fat nigger cock. He watched it slide in and out for a while, moistened his lips.

His mother had fucked niggers. She'd fucked anybody with the ready, in Hamburg's Sankt Pauli district. ReeperbahnstraBe. Where he'd grown up. One of them had knocked her up. When she got drunk and beat Mackie up, she told him his father was a deserter, a GI Stockholm-bound from 'Nam. But his father was a general. He knew.

Mackie Messer was maximum bad. His father couldn't have been just anybody, could he?

His mother had abandoned him; naturlich. Women did that. Made you love them so they could hurt you. They wanted you to put that man-thing in them so they could take it away:

bite it off. He tried to imagine his mother biting off the huge black dick, but it dissolved into tears that