Jokers Wild Page 0,26

to the floor. He straddled the fat man and pinned his arms.

"Don't kill me. Please, no."

"You're dead already." Spector grabbed Gruber's eyelids and pulled them up. Gruber screamed, but it was too late. Their eves locked.

Spector was the only person who had drawn the Black Queen and lived to tell about it. Unfortunately, the memory of his death was always there. He turned it loose on Gruber, pro jecting his agony into the man's body, convincing him that he was dying. Gruber's pudgy flesh believed. His eyes rolled up into his head and he gasped. Spector felt him turn to dead weight and let go.

He looked at the desktop. Gruber had written one word on a notepad. Stamps. He shrugged and turned away. Spector put on the holster and slid the Ingram into it. If he ran into the Astronomer it might help, then again it might not. He closed and locked the cage door, donned his mask, and left through the back.

Stupid! How much more of an idiot could I have been? Jack thought as he fought his way downtown through the throngs. His anger with himself still burned savagely. He scanned what he could see of Eighth Avenue ahead of him. Where was the girl with the man wearing the purple suit and the dapper fedora?

He hadn't called Cordelia's mother vet. Elouette would just have to wait, impatient or not. Jack had made the one phone call he thought might do some good. If Bagabond and her animals could just sight his niece... He'd take care of the rest. His tongue felt rough, sliding across teeth that were slightly more profuse, sharper, and longer than were normal. He tried to damp the anger. Time enough for that later.

Control. Obviously he had some now. At first, upon exiting the Port Authority, he'd searched at random, fighting his way first one direction through the crowds, then another. Then the human level of his mind started to calm the urgent reptile brain. Set up a grid. Don't repeat a line of search. Try downtown. Consider Fortunato a lead. He didn't know that the guy he supposed was a pimp was one of Fortunato's freelance talent scouts; in fact, he didn't know if the man even used that kind of scavenging talent; but it was worth a try. The man with Cordelia would find it easier to fall in with the flow of the crowds down toward Jokertown. Eighth was less crowded right now than the other avenues. Eventually Jack would have to worry about a good crosstown route. But for now, he went on his hunch.

It paid off.

He came up to the intersection of 38th Street. Suddenly he saw, across the street, a familiar fedora bobbing a bit as though the wearer were looking about himself confusedly. He also saw the back of a head, a quick glimpse of a fall of shining black hair. The fedora moved toward the black hair. The young woman with the black hair moved farther away. She was running.

Fedora pursued.

Jack, staring after them, started off the curb. A hand grabbed his shoulder, roughly tugging him back. A honking yellow cab nearly took off his toes and latent snout.

"Watch it, bub,".said a husky joker standing beside him. "Cabbies don't give a shit. Not today. Not never."

By now, the intersection was full of traffic. The last cabs to make it through had done so. Now there were vehicles lined up in either direction. No one seemed worried about automatic $25 tickets for gridlocking.

"Never a cop when you need one," somebody said.

Jack made it across the intersection like a good brokenfield runner. The Jets'd be proud, he thought irrelevantly. This season, they could use him. On the other side of 38th, he realized that neither the fedora nor Cordelia was in sight.

Damn it. Sooner or later, he thought, striking downtown again. He looked around for one of Bagabond's birds, a cat, a squirrel, anything.

Never a pigeon when you need one.

Having chosen her clothing from the collection of tattered and dirty mismatched coats, pants, and shirts she kept at Jack's, Bagabond jammed a Greek fisherman's cap on her stringy hair and left the cats behind as she made her way up to ground level through the tunnels that bypassed Jack's home. Agile from years of moving through the underground, she used the eyes of the rats who lived in the tunnels to show her the path. The floor-level view she gained from their perspective was enough to avoid most