Authors: Subterranean Press
Ghosts don’t heal, and when Bugsy was shot, the hitman
put enough lead into the back of his skull that much of his face came off the
front side when it exited. One eye was missing, the cheekbone shattered, the
empty socket oozing clotted blood and matter. The back of his head was a pulpy
mess; it contrasted vividly with his dapper gray double-breasted suit.
Even by the assassin’s standards, what was left of him
wasn’t easy to look at. But the slow trickle of gray matter down his skull
hadn’t slowed him any. “You didn’t get him,” he said, and walked through the
desk and the Mage whose laptop he had been frowning at a laptop screen to
glower at the assassin from closer in.
“No,” the assassin said. There was no point in denying
it. “Hello, Felix,” he said.
Felix Luray didn’t look up from the computer. “It’s the
stories,” he said, and flexed his hands together to crack his knuckles. “You’re
going to have to find some way to work around it, so they
can
be killed.
The bad news is their fans are still out there, keeping them alive. So they’re
real as…real as Robin Hood. Or the Easter Bunny. The good news is, capturing
them should be no problem. That’s in genre.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed,” the assassin said dryly, and
went to pour himself a drink. “And I can tell by the looks on your faces that
Angel and Goddess didn’t manage any better.”
“Goddess is dead,” Felix said. “The revenant John Henry
Kinkead bashed her skull in with a sledge hammer.”
Fumes stung the assassin’s nose. The crystal was heavy
in his hand, warming quickly from his skin. He sipped. “Well, saves me having
to kill her, then. Who’s ‘the revenant John Henry Kinkead?’”
“The One-eyed Jack,” Felix said. “John Kinkead was the
third governor of Nevada. He died circa 1904 in Carson City. Fits the name and
general description, and the timing’s right.”
“Huh.” Felix was eyeing the assassin’s glass
speculatively. The assassin poured a second drink and passed it over; Felix
poured half the measure on the rug, where it vanished, wicked up without a
trace. Bugsy looked pleased. “What does his name win us, Mr. Luray?”
“Perhaps a little symbolic leverage,” he said with a
shrug, and tasted his drink. “We’ve got the dam, of course, but a little more
never hurts. Jackie gave Benjamin a run for his money a few years back, I
hear—”
Bugsy turned his head and spat. It didn’t leave a mark
on the carpet. “That faggot’s no match for a real Mage, Felix. Sure, he knows a
little hedge-craft. But it ain’t real magic, not the sort of thing you boys
used to do.”
“Still do,” Felix said easily, and tipped out a little
more vodka onto the floor.
“Well, yeah,” Bugsy said. “But what I mean to say is,
there ain’t no more like you, Felix. No more like the Prometheans that built
the dam, right? Or the railroad.”
“No,” Felix said, very quietly. “I’m the last.”
Bugsy grinned, sending a thick clot of blood skating
down his ruined cheek. “See? You won’t have no problem with Jackie.”
The assassin smiled tightly. He didn’t mention his own
research and experience, or what they had taught him about Felix Luray, and why
he hadn’t been invited to the war that had put an end to the rest of the
Prometheans. A pity, the assassin thought; he’d found them useful allies in the
past, despite their desire to feel that they were pulling all the strings.
Still, half a Mage—a failed Mage, if you
preferred, a defrocked one—was better than none.
“So I take it our next objective is neutralizing the
other genius, the Stewart boy.”
“Not at all,” Felix said, swirling his drink and
savoring a slow, pleased smile. “Angel took care of that while you were busy in
London and New York. Everything’s under control.”
#
The One-Eyed Jack and the Steel-Driving Men. Las Vegas,
Summer, 2002.
The John Henrys waited for me on the corner of Third and
Bonneville, across the street from the chain-link around the construction site
and in the shade of some old elms and a ragged toilet brush of a Mexican fan
palm. The right-hand John Henry rested a twenty-pound sledge against his corded
sweat-shining dark neck, his other hammer leaned up against the gray
cinderblock wall behind him. He wore canvas pants and not much else, and if the
girls giggling on the sidewalk in the sweltering heat could have seen him, they
would have turned to admire the ridged expanse of his chest.
The left-hand John Henry, skeletal and paperwhite behind
a luxuriant growth of moustache and blazing tubercular eyes, treated his
terrible cough out of the silver flask in his breast pocket. That hack around a
chest full of bloody slime was so much a part of his legend he couldn’t get rid
of it even dead.
Like the silk cravat with the diamond stickpin, like the
nickel-plated six shooter concealed by the fall of his stylish gray coat.
Stylish in 1881, that is. A little out of place as I crossed Bonneville against
the light, walking through the wall of thermonuclear Las Vegas sunshine, and
drew up in front of the dead men. They looked startled to be seen; as I
hesitated in the gutter, a brunette in fuchsia short-shorts and not much else
walked through the right-hand John Henry, head rocking in time to the beat of
her portable CD player. The left-hand John Henry coughed into a silk
handkerchief, leaving a spot like the jeweled heart of a snowy plain of Queen
Anne’s lace, and turned to watch the girl walk away. I was scared enough of him
that my guts turned to water in my belly, but I thought of Stewart and I made
myself walk forward.
Ghosts. I called up ghosts.
The right-hand John Henry puffed up his enormous chest
and looked away, free thumb hooked through the loops of his pants. His thighs
strained threadbare dun cloth, much mended, as he shifted his hammer on his
shoulder. The left-hand John Henry folded the cloth to hide the thumbprint of
blood and tucked it into his pocket. Not the one with the flask. He sighed.
“She’s a lady of ill repute, Doc,” drawled the
right-hand one. I stopped in front of them.
“She’s a woman who knows her own mind,” the left-hand
John Henry—Doc—replied in a rich slow voice like seasoned honey,
and drew himself up to face me. “And as for ill repute, I have a little of my
own. Some easy virtue, too. Do I know you, sir?”
“No,” I said, holding out my hand. I felt them taking in
my cargo pants, Doc Martens and earrings, my tattooed biceps and the ring
through my nose. The eyepatch didn’t look so out of place in all that. A
Cadillac crept behind me, wary of the construction dust. Pale eyes and dark
tracked its purring glide. “But my name’s Jack. One-eyed Jack, they call me.”
Neither moved to shake, and I let my hand fall to my side.
It got the smile from the left-hand John Henry I’d
half-hoped for. A gambler. And a quick wit, too. “My given name’s John, as
well.”
“It’s why I called you back. You, Dr. Holliday. And Mr.
Henry, here. You know—”
“I know I’m dead,” John Henry said. He looked at the
sledgehammer in his hand and set it down, leaned it back against the
dust-colored wall. “Where are we?”
“Las Vegas.”
“New Mexico? It’s changed some.” Doc Holliday leaned
back on the heels of his shoes and looked up at the pale sky overhead,
squinting after a jet contrail.
“Nevada.”
“Huh.” He turned his head and coughed into his
handkerchief again. “Then that’s changed some too, I imagine. What did you
bring us back from the grave for, son?”
He died at thirty-five, and I’m over a hundred. But I
wasn’t about to argue age and life experience with Doc Holliday. Even if I was
something more than mortal, myself. “I need help,” I said. I had a pretty
speech prepared, but looking up—way up—into the frowning brown eyes
of John Henry left no room for anything but honesty. Might be because the man
was a
symbol
for honesty. I swallowed and looked over at Holliday, but
it wasn’t any easier to meet his eyes. “I’m the One-eyed Jack. The spirit of
Las Vegas, its anima. Somebody shot my buddy, and I want to get them back. So I
called you up. Namesake rite, tequila and promises. But since there were two
John Henrys who fit the bill, I got the both of you.”
A pedestrian edged around me, seeing a ratty one-eyed
homeless boy with a lightless dyed-black snarl of hair, standing on a downtown
street corner talking to himself. We get that a lot around here: the straights
are used to madmen out of doors in Vegas.
“What makes you think we can help with that?”
“You’re—”
Who you are. New World demigods in
the making, the Chuchulainns and Beowulfs and Yellow Emperors of the Americas.
Folklore creatures.
Like me.
“You’re Doc Holliday, sir. That
there is John Henry the drillman. You’re American legends, sir.”
Holliday opened his mouth, but a coughing jag took him
and he fumbled in his pocket for his flask and drank quickly, neatly, even when
I thought he’d choke. The whiskey calmed his cough and he shook his head as he
screwed the silver cap back on. “Jack, I never killed but three, four men in my
lifetime. And every one of those bastards deserved to die.”
John Henry shifted balance beside him, a mountain
changing its stance. “I heard it was fifty, Doc.”
“Stories grow in the telling, son.”
I’d done some reading since Stewart got killed. “Wyatt
Earp said you were the most dangerous man he ever knew, and the fastest gun.”
Holliday laughed and stroked his moustache, straightened
his cravat. “Wyatt never minded stretching a tale till it squeaked protest, and
you know what the papers are like.” He couldn’t hide a pleased smile. “He was
right about one thing.”
“Doc?”
I was maybe three feet from Holliday. Before I could
have moved, even shouted, his revolver was out of the hip holster and leveled
at my chest. He cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger so quickly I didn’t
have time to close my eyes before the report boxed my ears.
So I
saw
the bullet hit my chest, go through, and
pass without a whisper of sensation. Holliday laughed and spun his pistol back
into his holster. “Ghosts,” he said, and took another swig from his flask,
squinting in pain.
“Well,” I answered. “I called you up with a task in
mind, gentlemen. And you can’t go back to rest until we figure out how to do
it. So—immaterial or not—I suggest we go get a drink and talk it
over.”
“I can’t drink your liquor,” Doc Holliday said, as John
Henry fell silently into step on my other side.
“I’ll pour it on the ground.”
I led them toward the Strip. Dead men don’t mind the
heat.
#
The American and the Russian. Somewhere in the Desert
Inn Hotel & Casino, 1964.
Bram Stoker—
that
Bram
Stoker—said of Teddy Roosevelt that he was a man you couldn’t cajole,
couldn’t frighten, couldn’t awe. Some mornings, I wake up certain that the
ex-president has somehow managed to get himself reincarnated as my partner.
He won’t be cajoled. Neither will he be beguiled.
Someone must have lied to him once. Someone I would like
very much to find, someday, and talk to.
Because if he weren’t so darned frictionless, I might be
able to get him to talk to me a little more about what he said about
Oswald—
“What are you writing?” the Russian said, toweling his
hair as he walked out of the bathroom, and the American crumpled the sheet
hastily and dropped it into the wastebasket by his knee.
“A letter to my aunt, but it’s not coming out well.
Ready to go down and see if the café is still serving?”
“What’s the expression? No locks, no clocks?” The
Russian looked about for his shoes and sat on the bed to tug them on. “And then
we need to try to figure out why the assassin’s here.”
“Because if we know what he’s doing—”
“—we know where he is.” Their eyes met, and a
brief smile passed between them. “What do you plan to do with him if we
do
track him down?”
The American grinned, knowing he looked like a shark.
What
do you mean if?
“Kill him. In cold blood. Preferably from a distance and
from hiding. We’ll work out a justification later.”
“Excellent,” the Russian said, stamping his feet into
his black loafers. “Get your coat. And don’t forget your concealed carry card.
This is Vegas.”
“Yes. They don’t care if you have a pistol on your hip,
but God forbid there’s one under your coat.” The American stood and followed
his partner out, pausing for a second to hang the Do Not Disturb card and trap
a strand of his own dark hair between the lockplate and the tongue. “Breakfast
or drinks?”
“Both?” The Russian glanced over his shoulder hopefully,
and the American nodded.
Halfway down the fire stairs, the Russian reached back
and laid a hand on the American’s sleeve, and the American glanced down to meet
his partner’s sidelong glance. His hand slipped under his coat, but he didn’t
draw the weapon, though his thumb rested against the safety lever. “Did you
hear?”