stacked against them.
How many millions were going into that warehouse?
Along with guns bought with converted bearer bonds, medical supplies from the Jokertown Clinic, drugs from the Snowboys, paintings from the Metropolitan collection ...
The question was how to bust it open. His usual method was to infiltrate, then turn the bad guys against each other. But this was too damn big. And infiltration would be difficult. He wasn't a jumper, wasn't a joker, wasn't a Snowboy, and he certainly wasn't whatever the bald woman was.
The third night, he followed Tachyon to the warehouse. The Saab couldn't get in because there was a navy-surplus deuce-and-a-half sitting in the open main door. Blaise and Tachyon conferred inside for a few minutes, and then the Saab led the truck onto a pier on the Lower West Side. Shad remembered himself as Mr. Gravemold, fighting a paranoid albino Croyd and a near-invincible Snotman on this same pier. It seemed the pier wasn't keeping any better company since that time.
He slipped through the pier rail and walked inverted over the water. He stopped when he heard the truck brakes squeal, then the slam of doors and the sound of voices. The water near the pier began to bubble. Shad's nerves gave a leap. He summoned darkness to cover him.
Something broke surface, a gelatinous hemisphere streaming with cold Hudson water. Shad's mouth went dry as he saw the bulbous eyes, up top like a bullfrog's, and the leering twisted mouth. He was used to jokers but he wasn't used to this.
"Let's hurry it up," the thing said. "I got dinner waiting." Its veined skin split open, and another joker stood up inside. The joker was built along the lines of a beer truck, with a heavy armored exoskeleton to strengthen him, and he began to take heavy crates from those above and stow them carefully inside the shimmering dome.
The crates seemed evenly divided between food and munitions.
"My aching back," said the aquatic dome. "I hope you're ready for a slow ride home."
"Anything to give Granddad a kick in the teeth," Blaise said. Tachyon and the jokers looked uncomfortable. Granddad, Shad thought. Tachyon had been jumped. And he was on the Rox.
Tachyon and Blaise lay flat on a case of antitank rockets.
The big joker stepped out, the dome sealed, and in complete silence, it vanished from sight beneath the river.
The deuce-and-a-half rumbled as it started up.
Shad decided to burglarize Tachyon's apartment again. Maybe he'd find something incriminating this time.
On the pavement below Tachyon's window he found a chalk drawing of himself, dressed as he was just now, his feet planted to the wall. Shad's head swung wildly, his ears alert to the sound of laughter.
He heard nothing.
He found nothing in Tachyon's apartment.
He wondered, as he scuffed the drawing away with his shoe, if his role in this was ordained by someone not himself. If he was a pawn.
And he wondered if that someone had chalk dust on her fingertips.
"Hi. My name is Lisa Traeger these days. I'm calling from the trust officer's desk while he's off converting about half a million dollars to bearer bonds. I just thought I'd let you know I'm still among the living. I'll call back later, when I get some free time."
Lisa Traeger. He knew the victim's name now.
He heard the phone call hours after it was recorded. He'd seen the jump after having followed the Lincoln from the brownstone warehouse, but he hadn't known Shelley was a part of it. Shad was waiting by the phone when it rang again.
"Yes?" he said.
"This is, ah, Miss Traeger. I was wondering if you would care to join me for a night on the town."
"Are you free?"
"Nobody's watching. They trust me. I'm a criminal now, just like them."
He wasn't completely certain he believed that.
He met her at Tavern on the Green, in the Chestnut Room, which was one of the few rooms in the restaurant where people lurking out in Central Park couldn't watch them through the glass walls. He had taken a few circuits of the building before he'd gone in, just in case, and seen nothing, not even a detached eyeball.
Shad wore a blue blazer, gray wool slacks, and regimental tie. Lisa Traeger was in her late thirties, white, darkhaired, dark-eyed, and handsome. She carried a leather briefcase that Shad suspected was stuffed with bearer bonds. She wore a black off-the-shoulder Donna Karan evening dress and a Georges Kaplan fox wrap with the price tag still on it. Emeralds shone at her throat