Lowball: A Wild Cards Novel (30 page)

“I’m so glad you could make it,” Kate said.

“Are you kidding? I wasn’t going to miss it. You ready for the party?”

Kate sighed. “I need a couple more hours. They want a press conference and a photo op for the charity. We raised seventy-five grand.” Her gaze brightened.

“That’s so great. How about this—come over as soon as you can, and I’ll have a chance to pick up a few more things and get the place cleaned up.”

“You promised me a gallon of margaritas. Is that still on?”

“Oh, you know it. A gallon of margaritas, a pile of
DVD
s—and all the gossip on that new boy of yours.”

Kate blushed, but her smile glowed. “You got it.”

Ana had brought home the tequila, limes, salt, and a bag of ice already. Now, she went for approximately a metric ton of burritos from the excellent taquería around the corner from her apartment. They had to eat if they were going to keep up their strength for more margaritas.

The Lower East Side walk-up used to be her and Kate’s apartment, back when Kate was still on the Committee, until she quit and went back to school in Oregon. That had been a couple of years ago now, and they didn’t get to see each other very often these days.

Her apartment was on East Fifth Street, a few blocks off Jokertown, in a neighborhood that wasn’t great but wasn’t awful. Ana liked the place. It wasn’t pretentious, and she could maintain some level of normality. Like go to the taquería without anyone giving her a hard time or snapping pictures. With her straight dark hair and stoutish frame, she wasn’t as photogenic as Kate, but she’d had her own share of publicity as the Latin American Coordinator for the
UN
Committee on Extraordinary Interventions. She didn’t much
feel
like a public figure most of the time. So she stayed in her unassuming neighborhood. The street food was better.

At her building’s front door, she paused to find her key one-handed, when a voice hissed at her from the stairwell to the lower-level apartment.

“Ana! Ana, down here!” She looked over the railing.

The joker wore dark sunglasses and had his top two arms shoved into an oversized jacket. His middle two arms held it tight around his torso in some futile attempt at a disguise. He made his best effort to huddle in the shadows, away from the view of street level, but the guy was over seven feet tall and bulky: the world-famous drummer for the band Joker Plague.

“
DB
? What are you doing here?” she said.

He made a waving motion, hushing her. “Quiet! Get down here, will you?”

She swung around the railing, and Drummer Boy pulled her into the shelter of the stairwell, making her drop the bag of food. “Michael!”

“Shhh! Sorry. Here.” With a fifth arm emerging from the bottom of the jacket, he picked up the bag and shoved it at her. The contents were probably mushed. Maybe they could have burrito casserole. “Ana, I need to talk to you, can I come in?”

“Couldn’t you call?”

“
In person
. Come on, at least can we get off the street?”

She hadn’t seen him in almost a year. Normally, she’d be happy to see him, and they tried to get together the rare times they happened to be in the same zip code at the same time. He’d gotten her tickets to a Joker Plague show awhile back, and she’d love to do something like that again. But she really wished he’d called. What she
didn’t
want was him still hanging around when Kate arrived.

She spent too long thinking, and
DB
continued cajoling. “I’m passing through town, and I really need to talk to you but I’m trying to keep a low profile—”

She raised an eyebrow and gave him a skeptical look. With six arms and tympanic membranes covering his torso, Michael Vogali, aka Drummer Boy, could never keep a low profile. Ever.

“Michael, what do you want, really?” she said.

“Can I crash at your place? Just for a couple of days. Please?”

Three hundred sixty-five days in a year, and he picked this one to show up asking for a favor. He was a friend, she didn’t want to say no, but this
couldn’t
be happening. This … this was not going to end well.

She winced. “You don’t have anyone else you can stay with? Don’t you own an apartment on Central Park or something excessive like that?”

“Never did get around to it,” he said. “Our recording studio’s in
LA
.”

“You can’t stay at my place, it’s
tiny
.”

“It’s just for a couple of days—”

Exasperated, she blurted, “You can’t because Kate’s staying with me tonight.”

He brightened. “She is? I haven’t seen her in ages. Is she … I mean, is she okay and everything?”

She hadn’t meant to say anything about Kate. “Are you
sure
you can’t stay someplace else?”

“This isn’t just about someplace to stay, we really do need to talk. And Kate … oh fuck, I didn’t want to be the one to tell Kate, I was hoping you could do it after I’d talked to you—”

“What are you talking about?”

“Please, can we go inside?” He gave her a hangdog look that should have been ridiculous on a seven-foot-tall joker behemoth, but he managed to make himself endearing.

She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Fine. But Kate and I are still having our margarita night.”

“Hey, that sounds like fun—”

“Michael!”

He raised his hands in a defensive pose and backed up a step. “No problem.”

“Hold this.” She handed him the burritos and found the key for the door. “Why didn’t you just call me instead of camping out like a homeless person?”

“Because you’d be more likely to say yes if I just showed up on your doorstep?”

She growled and hit him on the side, generating a hollow echo through his torso.

“My walls are thin—you’re going to have to cut down on the drumming.”

“Sure, of course,” he said, smacking a hollow beat as punctuation.

Oh yeah, was this going to end badly.

Kate and
DB
had quit the Committee at the same time, over the politicization of the group in the Middle East. Ana hadn’t been there, but she’d gotten an earful when Kate called to tell her about it. She’d cried a bunch during that phone call—Ana might be the only person in the world who knew how torn up Kate had been over the whole thing. Ana had been stuck halfway around the world, on another mission for the Committee, and couldn’t do a thing about it.
DB
had just been angry—he hadn’t called Ana to vent. A bunch of the tabloids insisted that
DB
and Kate had run off together in some torrid romance, but that wasn’t at all true. It was all getting to be old history, now. They’d moved on. Ana hoped they didn’t revive the soap opera here tonight.

Kate’s call from the downstairs intercom came an hour later, and Ana buzzed her in.

“I never thought they’d let me leave,” Kate said, pushing into the apartment and dropping her bag by the door. “One more picture, they kept saying. Not like they didn’t already have twenty million.”

Ana stepped aside, closed the door behind her, and waited. Didn’t take long.

DB
stood from the sofa and sheepishly waved a couple of arms, while a third skittered a nervous beat that sounded like balloons popping. He’d taken off the oversized jacket and stood in all his shirtless, tattooed glory. “Hey, Kate.”

Kate turned to Ana. “What’s he doing here?”

DB
stepped forward. “It’s just for the night, I promise, I’m trying to keep a low profile—”

“I’m a pushover,” Ana said, shrugging.

Kate glared, and Ana wasn’t sure whom the glare was directed toward. “I hope you have those margaritas ready.”

“Two pitchers, ready to go.”

They headed into the kitchen, or rather the corner of the apartment that served as the kitchen.
DB
followed them, sidling along, as delicately as his body allowed. “So, hey, Kate. How you doing?”
DB
had been nursing a crush on Kate for years now. He wasn’t any more subtle about it than he had been back on the set of the first season of
American Hero
. He’d gotten a little more polite, at least.

“I pitched past the sound barrier at Yankee Stadium today, how are you?”

“Um … hey, that’s great. I think. I just happened to be in town, and, well, we really need to talk—”

Kate said, “Michael, Ana and I planned a night to chill out, with too much alcohol and a lot of
TV
and not thinking about anything. That’s not going to change just because you’re here, okay? I can’t be mad about Ana letting you stay here. But can you just … leave us alone?”

DB
sat back on the sofa, his arms folded together contritely.

Feeding everyone margaritas kept them quiet for a little while. Half an hour, maybe. The first
DVD
of the latest season of
Grey’s Anatomy
was good for another hour or so, especially watching the episode where Meredith and Derek spent the whole time fighting over Derek’s ethically questionable experiments using a new version of the trump virus on a collection of hideous joker patients. It was pretty awful.

DB
chortled through the whole thing. “I wouldn’t mind it so much if they actually used joker actors rather than nat actors with fucking rubber tentacles.”

Ana agreed with him, but they had to have the rubber tentacles so they could take them off and declare them cured for five minutes before they melted in a hideous ooze of sudden-onset Black Queen.

But the episode finally ended, and in the quiet while Ana changed out
DVD
s,
DB
had to ruin it. “Okay, I know you’re having your party and all, and I know I’m interrupting—”

Kate, nested on pillows on the floor in front of the
TV
, took a long drink of margarita and ignored him. Ana almost felt sorry for the guy. He was nice, usually; he’d take a bullet for his friends, and with their history that wasn’t just a saying. But he was way too used to being the center of attention, and definitely wasn’t used to being ignored by a couple of women.

“—but I really need to talk to you. This is serious. Seriously.” The sofa creaked as he leaned forward, and half his hands drummed nervously.

Ana shushed him, got the
DVD
in and hit play, hoping that would shut him up. But Kate rolled over and glared. “Michael, what are you doing here? Isn’t Joker Plague supposed to be on tour in … in Thailand or someplace?”

He brightened. “You’ve been keeping up with us—”

She glowered. “Crazy guess.”

“The tour was last month. We’re supposed to be recording the new album, but … I gotta tell you, it’s not going well. I knew we were in trouble when all our songs started being about how tough it is being a band on tour. So I’m telling the guys, maybe we should take some time off, get back to our roots. Hang in Jokertown for a while—”

Kate turned back to the
TV
.

“—but never mind that. I was doing this signing in
LA
a week or so ago, and a fan brought me this … this
thing
. I think you really need to know that this is out there.” He was serious—worried, even, reaching for something in the pocket of his oversized coat, draped over the back of the sofa.