Jokers Wild Page 0,65

shoulders, resting like nervous birds, as though frightened to remain.

"Roulette, you make me feel... well, something that I haven't felt for many, many years. I'm very glad you came walking down Henry Street today. Perhaps there was even a reason for it."

She watched with rather distant interest as her fingers tightened about each other, knuckles whitening with strain. "You're looking for significance again."

" I thought you only warned me against looking for comfort. "

"Well, add significance to it." She lifted a corner of the numbing blanket with which she had covered her emotions, and found panic throbbing in time to her rushing heartbeats.

She probed at her soul, and found a bleeding wound. Fear, hate, guilt, regret, hopelessness.

She blamed him.

"Let's go to bed." And she was startled by the flatness of the words when they masked so much anguish.

It would have been quicker to travel crosstown underground. Jack had clattered down the steps at the West 4th Street station. One level, two levels, three. Few people other than maintenance workers went down to the fourth level. He went through an anonymous steel door and entered an eastwest maintenance tunnel. In their little cages, the dim safety bulbs shed a brittle yellow glow, casting islands of illumination along the passageway. Jack's shoes scuffed in dirt.

It was exhilarating to be able to stride along without having to account for endless numbers of slower pedestrians getting in his way. Jack checked his watch, and then looked at it again, unbelieving. It was only a little after two. It seemed as if he'd been searching the city for Cordelia for davs. More to the point, he'd completely lost track of time. He wondered if maybe he was squandering his time now. Maybe he should be calling Rosemary, checking with Bagabond, phoning the police, anything... He should have been watching instead of thinking.

When he swung around a dogleg in the passage and slammed into someone coming the other way at a dead run, he had, at first, only the briefest impression of a dark figure. He glimpsed one huge eye centered in the other's face, a monocle glittering in the dim light--

"Son of a bitch!" said the other person, raising one hand toward Jack. Red flame erupted from the fist, a rolling wave of painful sound crashed against Jack's ears, and he heard something buzz past his head, sprnging against the concrete wall of the corridor. Cement chips sprayed the side of his face. There was no pain yet.

"Hey!" Jack yelled. He dropped to the floor of the tunnel and the epinephrines took over. Now it was all instinctual. All the pent tension of the long day, the frustration of his search, his intermittent desire to kill something, flashed into critical mass. Also he was hungry. Very hungry.

"Bastard. Get away from me! You die!" The dark figure drew down with the pistol. Another shot. Jack saw the sparks where the bullet hit a steel stanchion.

"What the hell you doin'?" Jack cried. "Aaaaaahhh!" said the reptile brain, flooded with welcomed hormones. Jack felt his body elongate, the vestigial tail extending and swelling, clothing ripping, his snout springing forth before his eyes. The rows of teeth sprang up faster than anything sowed by Cadmus.

His claws scrabbled for purchase on the hardpacked earthen floor. He bissed with anticipation.

Hungry; he thought. There was anger, too. But mostly hunger.

The man with the pistol backed into the corner of the dogleg. He held something shiny in his other hand. He stared unbelievingly at the alligator. "Get the fuck away!"

Jaws scissoring open wide, the alligator lunged forward. Brief thunder rolled as the pistol flashed and a bullet nicked the creature's armored hide above one front leg. The jaws slammed closed with incredible force as the man screamed and thrust his hands out in a hopeless attempt to fend off the beast. The pistol skittered away, lost in the darkness. The plasticwrapped package went into the alligator's mouth. Along with the hand that held it. Along with part of an arm, the man's shoulder, and his face. His bubbling screams stopped in a matter of seconds.

Glass shattered as the monocle spun away and smashed against the tunnel wall.

The alligator wrenched his jaws away from the remains of the corpse. There was no chewing. The food went down his gullet where the powerful enzymes would take care of assuaging his hunger. He opened his jaws again to roar a challenge. No one and nothing answered him. The alligator swung his head heavily from one side