Ace In The Hole

"Somebody's following us. No, don't look!"

"Give me some credit, Rosie. I'm a journalist, remember? I didn't sleep through your seminar."

He glanced to the side, then faced forward. "Just some kid in a leather jacket." A frown spoiled the smooth perfection of his forehead. "Looked like he had a hunchback. Poor son of a bitch. "

She looked back again. "Now, quit that, or you're going to turn into a pillar of salt. You were the one who wanted subtlety."

"I don't like the way he looks," she said. "He-feelswrong, somehow."

"The instincts of a seasoned ace reporter. Well-seasoned."

"is that a crack about my age?"

"The wine you drank." He patted her hand. "That's the spirit. Whistling past a graveyard, like. Walk on. Keep your head up. Never let them see you're afraid. It unleashes all those primitive Nordic predatory instincts."

She fought her neck muscles, which were trying to rotate her head toward the leather boy. "You think he could be one of Barnett's little helpers?"

"Been known to happen during this convention, Rosie. Wouldn't that be an irony, to get jumped on suspicion of being Hartma

This time she did look back. He was sauntering along, hands in pockets, first the white shoe, then the black. Ricky was right, one shoulder definitely rode higher than the other.

There was something a little too elaborate about the way he wasn't paying attention to them.

At least he's small. But then, Ricky wasn't exactly Arnold Schwarzenegger…

Once around a curve, Ricky grabbed her hand and they took off ru

They slowed, Sara puffing for breath, Ricky gracious enough to pretend to be winded. "One more turn and we're back in the Hyatt," Ricky said. "Another potentially ugly confrontation avoided. That's how we eighties types handle things."

They turned the bend and there he was. Leaning with his back and his cheek against cool tile, sizing them up. He started to whistle: "Mack the Knife."

Sara grabbed Ricky's wrist and hauled him back around out of sight. "I'm not sure that's a good idea, Rosie," he said. "We should just bluff our way past. "

"Don't you see?" The terror was upon her. It glowed in her eyes like white-hot wires. "How did he get in front of us?"

"Some kind of service passage. We're right near the hotel. If he causes trouble we can make a lot of noise and someone will come rescue us."

And then he came out of the wall at them, lunging like a shark.

Like a dancer Ricky swung Sara behind him. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"Party party," the boy said with a Hans and Franz accent, laughing, spraying spittle from loose lips. "Everybody get down tonight."

There was a buzzing in the air, oppressive as the humid night outside Peachtree Center's artificial chill. The boy swung a hand karate-fashion for the side of Ricky's neck.

Ricky wasn't a racquetball ace for nothing. Nothing wrong with his reflexes; he blocked with a spidery forearm.

The hand went through it. There was a savage shrilling moment like a buzz saw hitting a knot in a plank, and then Ricky's forearm and splayed hand just sort of toppled.

Ricky stood staring at the red hoop of blood springing out the suit-coated stump. Sara screamed.

Ricky pointed his arm, hosing his own blood into his assailant's eyes. The boy fell back, sputtering and swiping at his face. Ricky hurled himself at him, windmill arms whirling. "Rosie, run!"

Her legs would not move. Ricky was pummeling the boy with stump and inexpert fist. It looked like the worst of playground bullying; Ricky was- a head taller, with a good six inches' reach-

That sound came again. She knew she would hear it every time she closed her eyes for the rest of her life. She smelled something like burned hair.

Ricky's arm fell off at the shoulder. His blood vomited over the wall, white with a mosaic sprinkling of blue and green and yellow.

He turned a martvr's face to her. "Rosie," he said, and his gums were shocks of blood, "Please run, for god's sake run-" The hand passed playfully. His lower jaw was sheared away with the rest of his words. His tongue flopped at her unmoored, a ghastly parody of lust.

She turned and fled, the charnel-house sound pursuing. As she rounded the corner the heel of her left shoe snapped. She went to her knee with an impact like a gunshot. She skidded twenty feet, bounced off a wall. She tried to struggle up. Her leg would not carry her; she fell heavily against the tile.

"Oh, Ricky," she sobbed. "I'm sorry." Sorry for blowing the escape he had bought her with his life; sorry for the strange guilty surge of relief down underneath the terror that she would not have to face the question that another night in his room would bring between them.

She began to push herself along with her hands, knees up, scooting sideways on her rump. He came around the corner, looking twelve-feet tall. Blood splashed his leather and his skin, u

"Der Ma

Single-mindedly she sculled away from him. There was nothing in the world but the motions of a losing race.

– And voices, down the corridor, welling up from where the passage from the Hyatt dipped under Center Avenue. A party of delegates in Jackson buttons appeared, black, middle-aged, well dressed, talking happily amongst themselves about their candidate's last-minute upsurge at day's end.

The killer in leather raised his head. A brief pigeon of a woman in a salmon dress with a bow beneath capacious breasts looked up, saw him with the blood upon him and his victim strewn into the corridor bend behind. She jammed fists beneath her eyes and screamed like hell.

The boy's eyes blazed at Sara. "Remember Je

11:00 P.M.

Mine!

Puppetman felt the searing, twisted menace approaching. Gregg turned as Mackie ghosted through the wall of his bedroom, a crooked smile set above his crooked shoulders.

There was a splotchy brown red stain on his right hand up to the elbow that could only be one thing.

Mine!

"All the fucking hotel rooms look the same," Mackie said. "Get the hell out of here," Gregg snapped.

Mackie's grin slid from his punched face. "I wanted to tell you," he said, the German accent broader than usual. "I offed the nigger. but the woman-"

Mine! He's mine!

Gregg was surprised that he was able to hear Mackie's voice over Puppetman at all. The power slammed relentlessly against Gregg's hold, again and again and again. Mackie's raw, violent insanity radiated wildly, leaking from the boy's pores with an odor of decomposing meat, and spreading out in front of Puppetman like a rotting banquet.

Gregg had to get Mackie away quickly or the tenuous hold he had on himself would be entirely gone.

"Out," Gregg repeated desperately. "Ellen's here." Mackie's mouth twisted, a sneer. He fidgeted, restlessly shifting his weight from foot to foot. "Yeah. I know. In the other room watching goddamn TV. They were showing Chrysalis's funeral. I saw her but she didn't see me. I could've buzzed her easy." He licked his lips. His nervous stare flicked across Gregg's body like a whip as Puppetman hammered again at the bars. "I don't know where Morgenstern is," he said at last.

"Then go find her."

"I wanted to see you." Mackie whispered it like a lover, a voice of velvet sandpaper. The lust was honeyed syrup, golden and rich and sweet.

Puppetman screeched in need. The bars in Gregg's mind started to crumble. "Get out of here," he hissed between clenched teeth. "You didn't get Downs, now you tell me you can't find Sara. What the hell good are you to me? You're just a useless punk, with or without your ace."