Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (70 page)

“Doc’s in room 1009, in a poker game that’s now well into its seventh day.”

“Doc wouldn’t welcome us dragging him out of a game.”

“He’s in there with some deeply dangerous people. They’ve started playing for really weird stuff, bits of each other’s being, hearts, minds, and souls. He’s got to get out of there. He needs some kind of intervention so he can walk away while he’s still intact.”

Jim sounded a great deal less vague, like he was rising to the challenge. “And the game is right here in the Mephisto?”

“Like I said, room 1009.”

“So I’ll throw some clothes on and get up there.”

“I want to come with you.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“Good idea or not, I don’t want us getting separated right now.”

“Suit yourself.”

By now the junkie was pressing his face to the dirty glass of the phone booth and tapping on the door. “Listen, Jim, I’ve got to go. I’ll give you ten minutes to get yourself together and then I’ll meet you by the elevator.”

As Semple stepped out of the booth, the junkie all but knocked her aside, barging past her, sweating and snarling. “You holding a fucking telethon in there?” The hookers also gave her dirty looks, but she ignored them. For the ten minutes she was allowing Jim to get himself dressed and in motion, she went into the coffee shop and bought a donut and a cup of greasy metallic coffee. The Mephisto was not noted for its cuisine, which Semple suspected had a lot to do with the quality of the clientele. In the steam and grease atmosphere, enclosed by sweating plastic panels and under merciless overbright, overhead neon, unshaven and conspiratorial men in long overcoats, anarchists perhaps, or Bolsheviks, huddled in groups of three or four at dirty tables, drinking soup and black tea while apparently plotting strange insurrections among the dead. Young women in shapeless clothing, pale as the corpses they had left behind on Earth, sat by themselves, shutting out the world with paperback
anthologies of Emily Dickinson and the works of Virginia Woolf. Junkies and other addicts twitched furtively and tried not to contemplate the possible horrors of the immediate future. Cold-looking street women and lipstick boys sipped coffee while they rested their psyches and their feet. Semple took her coffee to a table occupied by a solitary woman in a simple cape and leotard, and the most elaborate pair of boots Semple had ever seen. Between foot and thigh, each boot must had over two dozen tiny buckles holding it fastened.

“Do you mind if I sit here?”

The woman shook her head. “Of course not.”

Semple seated herself and picked up the donut. It was forty-eight hours stale. “That’s really an amazing pair of boots.”

The woman’s expression was entirely neutral. Her skin was coffee-colored and she had a small red caste mark in the exact center of her forehead. “Many people tell me that.”

At the end of the allotted ten minutes, Semple got up and, leaving a third of the aging donut and half of the cup of deadly coffee, walked out of the coffee shop and headed for the elevators. The woman in the buckle boots watched her as she made her exit and then continued to stare after her through the steamed-up glass of the window.

Semple was right, Jim noted as he closed the door behind him. It
was
room 807. In the time since Semple had phoned, a great deal had come back to him—most of the events on the Island of the Gods, up to the point where the light had come down and whisked them away. To his deep chagrin, however, the recent days of what Semple had described as “bourbon, depravity, and room service” were still a total and frustrating blank. Still worrying about his lessthan-complete memory, Jim started down the corridor just in time to cross paths with a large brown rat with a pink naked tail that slipped out of a door marked
STAFF ONLY
. The rat looked up at Jim as though he had a full and equal right to be in the corridor. “Hey, Morrison, you know Doc’s on the tenth floor and he’s not doing too well.” The rat had a thick Irish brogue.

Jim nodded. “I heard already. I’m going up there right now.”

“If you need any help, just whistle. Doc’s an old pal o’ mine.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, but how did you know my name?”

The rat shook his head. “Jayzus, you think I’m an eejit or something? Don’t I know Jim Morrison when I see him?”

After the third floor, Semple was the only passenger in the elevator, and when the doors opened on the eighth, Jim was standing waiting. Semple beckoned him in. “Come on. We might as well go straight up to ten.”

As he stepped into the elevator, she noticed a strange expression on his face. When the doors closed, Jim suddenly pulled her to him. His hands traveled over her intimately. “Most of the last week just came back to me. I guess it was the elevator that triggered it.”

The suddenness of it all took her breath away. Her arms went around him, and she kissed him, wide-mouthed and deep. Her legs felt weak with a sudden flow of desire. With his left hand he raised her skirt, stroking the backs of her thighs, whispering in her ear. “Now that I can remember, I want to experience you in the present. I want to live those Polaroids all over again.”

“Two floors hardly gives us time.”

Jim sighed ruefully. “I know that.”

“You’re just going to have to wait.”

The elevator doors opened. Semple took Jim by the hand. “Let’s go and see about Doc.”

They stepped out into the tenth-floor corridor, and were immediately confronted by two men walking toward them. One was an elderly transvestite in a bottle-green, satin cocktail dress that was a harmonic disaster with his sallow, heavy-jowled complexion and pet pug face. It also didn’t help that he hadn’t shaved in two days and one of his false eyelashes was missing. He was walking clumsily bowlegged in high-heeled pumps, while counting a large number of plastic gold coins into a patent leather purse. The other man was tall with the tentatively obsequious look of a longtime companion and flunky. When all of the coins were safely stowed in the bag, the transvestite glanced at his companion with a grin of unpleasant self-congratulation. “I think we got out of there just in time.”

“You know they were letting you win, Edgar.”

The transvestite looked around testily. “Of course they were letting
me win. You think I’m a fool? They always let me win. Even here, they’re still afraid of me.”

As Jim and Semple passed the pair, Jim quickly leaned close and whispered, “Do you know who they are?”

Semple shook her head. “No, should I?”

“It’s J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson.”

“Here in Hell?”

“Can you think of a better place for them?”

Jim stopped walking and half turned. His face was angry and set. “I really ought to do something about that bastard.”

Semple frowned. “Like what?”

“Like punch him clear out to the pods, like payback for all the good people he fucked and fucked over.”

“We ought to be focusing on getting Doc out of the poker game.”

Hoover and Tolson were waiting for the elevator. Hoover glanced at Jim with an expression of routine contempt. Jim clenched his fists. “It’d give me a fuck of a lot of satisfaction to know I’d put J. Edgar Hoover’s lights out.”

“There’s got to be worse than him running around the Afterlife.”

“Not many.”

“We really don’t have the time. We have to concentrate on Doc. That’s what Danbhala La Flambeau said.”

The five-card stud was cutthroat and Doc Holliday was running on pills and fear. His lungs felt raw from too many cigars; he suspected they might be bleeding again. The various kinds of dope he’d taken were clashing with the alcohol; he was developing an epic headache from staring at the cards. His frock coat was hanging over the back of his chair, long since shucked off, sweat soaked the armpits of his evening shirt, and the lace ruffles were wilting. The game had been going on for longer than he could remember, and he knew he was in well over his head. This in itself was no big thing. He’d been in a hundred previous games—more if you counted lifeside—in which the waters had threatened to close over him. What made this one different was that Lucifer seemed to be playing for keeps. In the old days, the Prince of Darkness would have been looking for souls to come into the pot: these days, since souls no longer signified, he was
into pieces of minds and memory when the chips were really down. Already one player, a bizarro in a silver suit who called himself the Saber-Toothed Kid, was lying in the back room alternately catatonic and whimpering, having anted up the connections to a selection of synapses on a marker to Lucifer when he’d been cleaned out of ready cash chasing a busted flush. No one seriously expected the Saber-Toothed Kid to recover, although the question of what to do with him when the game was over had yet to be resolved. Doc had toyed with the idea of maybe selling the Kid as a warm body to Hoover and Tolson, but had kept it to himself. It was likely others might join the bizarro before the conclusion finally came to pass.

Not that Doc was, as yet, reduced to such dire straits as parting with segments of his brain as collateral. He still had a reasonable poke of coin remaining, but he knew the vise was tightening. The amateurs and thrill-seekers had long since been whittled away; the ones who only wanted to tell the story of how they’d been there, lost their rolls, and departed. Hoover had left with Tolson, his nonplaying boyfriend, in tow—and a considerable winning poke, as was always his wont. That left just five of them at the table, and the game appeared destined to go to the death. What Doc had to do was ensure that the annihilation in question was someone’s other than his own, and this was where the fear came in. For the past few hours, he had been doing little more than holding his own. Each time his turn to deal came around, Lucifer would clamp a mechanic’s grip on the deck and spin out cards from the top, bottom, or middle, only able to cheat so overtly to the professional eye because he knew no one would have the stones to call him on it, in his own game, right there in Hell.

Lucifer was formidable in any form, but his current Ike Turner persona—processed Beatle wig and pencil mustache, ruffled disco shirt, diamond sleeve garters, open to the navel and revealing a weight of neck gold sufficient to carry him for at least three rounds of betting—gave him an ass-tightening edge. Anyone going up against him would be left in no doubt that they were finally down with the baddest in town. If anyone could match Lucifer, menace for menace, it was the inscrutable Kali, who sat directly to Lucifer’s left. Topless, as the Hindu goddess of death always appeared in statues and religious prints, with fully exposed blue-black breasts and ruby nipples, but with her extra arms retracted at the request of the other players, Kali had so far been playing an incredibly tight, nolose/no-win
game, never going after any of the big rich pots. When Hoover had left, however, Kali had removed her crown of skulls, and Doc wondered if this was a sign that she was about to get serious.