Lowball: A Wild Cards Novel (14 page)

“How’d you hurt your arm, anyway?” Gordon asked.

“Hit by a vehicle when I was trying to make an arrest,” Gallo said. The uniformed trooper snickered.

“Shut up,” Gallo told him.

“It was a skateboard,” the trooper said. “The detective got hit by a kid on a skateboard, and now I have to drive him everywhere.”

“Fuck you,” Gallo said.

“Kid got away, too.”

“Fuck you twice.”

They went to the loading dock, and loaded John Doe onto the vehicle from the Jersey morgue. “I’ll be glad to get out of here,” the trooper said. “These jokers give me the creeps.”

“Moriarity,” Gallo said, in an exasperated tone. The trooper looked at him.

“What?”

Gallo rolled his eyes toward Gordon. The trooper looked skeptical, then turned to Gordon. “You’re not a joker,” he asked. “Are you, Doc?”

Gordon considered the question, and then gave a deliberate laugh,
heh heh heh
. “If only you knew,” he said. He went back into the clinic, and as the door sighed closed behind him, he heard Gallo’s growling voice. “Jesus Christ, Moriarity, the guy looks like a praying mantis on stilts, and you don’t think he’s a fucking joker!”

Gordon returned to the morgue and looked at himself in the mirror. Tall, thin, hunched, thick glasses beneath short sandy-brown hair. Praying mantis on stilts. That was a new one.

He returned to the morgue and found Detective Black waiting for him. Franny Black was dark-haired and ordinary-looking and young—too young for his job, or so Gordon had heard it said. He was the son of one of Fort Freak’s legendary officers, and he had so much pull in the department that the
NYPD
had violated about a dozen of its own rules to jump him to detective way early.

This hadn’t made him popular with his peers.

“Okay,” Franny said. “Now you’re done entertaining the folks from out of state, maybe you can do what you’re actually being paid to do, which is work on stiffs from this side of the Hudson.” He gave a snarl. “What about my Demon Prince body?”

Franny wasn’t naturally this belligerent, or so Gordon thought—he was just talking tough in hopes of acquiring a respect that most of the cops around here weren’t willing to give him. “The Jersey body might be yours, too,” Gordon said. “Have you checked Father Squid’s list of the missing?”

Franny’s eyes flickered. “You have a copy of the list here?”

“No. Father Squid keeps dropping off handbills, Gaida keeps throwing them away. She likes a tidy lab.” He cocked his head. “But,” he said, and flapped a hand, “when a mysterious joker appears in Jersey, he had to have come from somewhere.”

Franny seemed impatient. “Maybe,” he said. “But how about the Demon Prince?”

Gordon indicated a body laid out on a gurney and covered with a sheet. He’d looked at it earlier and seen that its wild card deformities had made the banger uglier, but not necessarily tougher. “I only had a chance to give your victim a preliminary inspection,” he said. “But it looks like the murder weapon was oval in cross-section, tapering to a point from a maximum width of about point seven five centimeters.”

“Like a letter opener?” Franny asked.

“I’d suggest a rat-tail comb.”

Franny frowned to himself. “Okay,” he said.

“Your perpetrator is between five-four and five-six and left-handed. Female. Redhead. Wears Shalimar.”

Franny for his notebook. “Shalimar,” he repeated, and wrote it down.

“Your victim,” Gordon said, “had recently eaten in a Southeast Asian restaurant—Vietnamese, Thai, something like that. Canvass the restaurants in the neighborhood, you’ll probably find someone who’s seen him with the redhead.”

Franny looked puzzled. “I thought you said you’d only done a preliminary,” he said. “You’ve already got stomach contents?”

Gordon shook his head. “No. I just smelled the nuoc mam on him—the fish sauce.”

“Fish sauce.” Scribbling in his notebook.

“High-quality stuff, too,” Gordon said. “Made from squid, not from anchovy paste. I’d check the pricier restaurants first.”

“Check.” Gordon lifted the sheet, revealing the pale corpse with its tattoos and wild card callosities. “You can give it a whiff if you like. Check it out for yourself.”

A spasm crossed Franny’s face. “I’ll trust you on that one, Doc.”

“I’ll let you know if I find anything else.”

The subsequent autopsy revealed little but the bùn ch
ả
in the stomach and some gang tattoos, not surprising since the victim was a known member of the Demon Princes. The question for Franny was going to be whether the killing was gang-related, or something else—and since rat-tail combs were not a favored weapon of the Werewolves, Gordon suspected that the homicide was more in the nature of a personal dispute.

Gordon and Gaida zipped the body up into its bag, put the bag in the cooler, and then it was time to quit.

“I’m heading uptown tonight,” Gaida said. She was a Lebanese immigrant, a joker, who wore her hair long to cover the scars where her bat wing–shaped ears had been surgically removed. “Going to take in
Don Giovanni
at Lincoln Center.”

“Have a good time,” Gordon said.

“You have plans for the weekend?”

“The usual.” Gordon shrugged. “Working on my moon rocket.”

The diener smiled. “Have a good time with that.”

“Oh,” Gordon said, “I will.”

Gordon hadn’t mentioned to Sergeant Gallo that he owned a house in New Jersey, a two-bedroom cabin in Gallo’s own Warren County where Gordon went on weekends to conduct his rocket program. Though Gordon followed all precautions and did nothing illegal, it had to be admitted that he kept a very large store of fuel and explosives on his property, and he figured that the fewer people who knew about it, the better. Especially if the people in question were the authorities.

He took the train to Hackettstown and picked up his Volvo station wagon from the parking lot near the station. On the way to his cabin he found a nice fresh piece of roadkill, a raccoon that probably weighed twelve or fourteen pounds. It was a little lean after the long winter but would make a fine dinner, with cornbread-and-sausage stuffing and a red wine sauce. He picked up the raccoon with a pair of surgical gloves, dumped the body in a plastic bag, and put the bag in his trunk. Once he got to the cabin he put the raccoon in his refrigerator. He’d cook it the next day, when Steely Dan came by to help him make his rocket fuel.

The raccoon was boiling in salt water when Steely Dan arrived at mid-morning. Dan was, so far as Gordon knew, the only joker in Warren County, and he lived there because he had family in the area. Steely Dan was short, squat, ebon, smooth, and shiny, as if he were made of blackened, polished steel. He had no body hair, he was very strong, and his head was literally bullet-shaped. Children tended to think he was some kind of robot.

He’d been on
American Hero
in its fifth season, but had lasted only two episodes.

Dan worked at auto repair, and he brought useful skills to Gordon’s rocket program. He had built the steel cells used to synthesize sodium perchlorate, and also scavenged lead diodes from an old auto battery, which would have been messy if the job had been left to Gordon. The synthesis of NaClO4 was easy enough; but then any residual chlorides had to be chemically destroyed lest the subsequent addition of ammonium chloride turn the compound into a highly unstable chlorate. The oxidizer itself, ammonium perchlorate, was created through a process of double decomposition, then purified through recrystallization. And because
NH4ClO4
could be absorbed through the skin, Gordon and Steely Dan both had to wear protection even though the danger to the thyroid was slight.

Gordon didn’t know if Steely Dan even had a thyroid.

At the end of the long afternoon Gordon had a substantial quantity of ammonium perchlorate, a pure white powder that when mixed with aluminum powder and a few minor additives would form solid rocket fuel, the formula used by the Air Force in the boosters of their Hornet shuttle.

The operation was carried out in the old barn, amid the scent of musty old hay and rodent droppings. By the end of the afternoon, the ammonium perchlorate was safely transferred to steel drums, then pushed on a handcart to Gordon’s storage facility, a prefabricated steel shed in the middle of a meadow, and surrounded by berms of earth pushed into place by a neighbor with a bulldozer. If anything unfortunate should befall the shed, the force of the explosion would go straight up, not out into the countryside.

Which was good, because of what Gordon kept there. The aluminum powder that would turn the ammonium perchlorate into flammable mixture. Kerosene. Tanks of oxygen. Syntin, which had driven the Russians’ Sever boosters into space. Hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, which were not only explosive in combination but also highly toxic.

Gordon hadn’t quite worked out what fuel he wanted to take him to orbit, so he was keeping his options open.

The stuffed raccoon had been sizzling in the oven for two hours. Gordon sautéed new potatoes to serve with it, and he’d made a pesto of ramps, which were the only local vegetable available at this time of year; he served the pesto on linguine, with a sharp parmesan made by one of the local dairy farmers. With the meal Gordon offered a robust Australian shiraz, which Steely Dan preferred in a ten-ounce tumbler, with ice.

“Damn, man,” Dan said, after tasting the raccoon. “That’s amazing. It’s kinda like pork, isn’t it?” He had a half-comic strangled voice that contrasted with his formidable appearance.

“Tastes more like brisket to me,” Gordon said. He lowered his face over the plate and inhaled the rich aroma.

“This is a first for me,” Dan said. “If my family ever ate varmints, that was way before anyone can remember.”

“I hate to let an animal go to waste. The whole license business is ridiculous.” New Jersey required a license to prepare roadkill, which Gordon thought was simply weird.
Who thought of these things?
he wondered. And who would actually enforce such a law?

“So,” Steely Dan said, counting on his fingers, “I’ve had squirrel here, and possum, and rabbit.”

“Venison,” Gordon pointed out. “There’s a lot of roadkill venison out there.”

Steely Dan jabbed at Gordon with his fork. “Is there anything you won’t eat?”

“Rat. They can transmit Weil’s disease—and believe me, you don’t want that.”

“I never heard of Weil’s disease, but I believe you.” Steely Dan took a generous swig of his shiraz.

Gordon chewed thoughtfully, and then remembered the previous day’s autopsy. He looked at Steely Dan, and saw himself reflected in the joker’s glossy skin. “Do you know any other wild cards living in this area?” he asked.

“Besides yourself?” Steely Dan said. And, at Gordon’s blank expression, said, “You are a wild card, right?”

Gordon ignored the question and explained about the unknown joker found on the road nearby. Steely Dan was surprised.

“Just up 519 from here,” Gordon said.

“That’s weird,” Steely Dan said.

“You haven’t heard of any, say, sporting events involving wild cards?”

“In Warren County?” Steely Dan shook his bullet head. “Man, that’s nuts.”