Dead Mans Hand

He dropped an ace of spades on Bludgeon and stalked out of the bar. Before he got out the door one of the bar's bolder patrons was stripping the leather jacket off Bludgeon's back, slapping him in the face when he protested in a sad, tremulous whine.

11:00 A.M.

Digger's apartment was a fifth floor walk-up on Horatio in the West Village. In the playground across the street, some teenagers were shooting baskets, shirts against skins. Jay stopped to watch for a few minutes. They had a couple girls playing, but they were both on the shirts side, more's the pity.

A heavyset man with a shaved head sat on the stoop of Digger's building, drinking a can of Rheingold. When Jay stepped off the sidewalk, he got up and blocked the door. "You got business here?"

The man had three inches and fifty pounds on him, not' to mention an eagle tattooed on his right biceps and a gold hoop in one ear. "I'm looking for Digger Downs," Jay told him.

"He ain't home."

"I'll check for myself, thanks."

"The fuck you will. We had enough freaks comin' round for a free look."

Jay didn't like the sound of that. "You had trouble here?" The man crushed the beer can in his fist. "Nothin' like the trouble you're go

He mulled over the idea of popping this asshole down inside an abandoned subway station, but decided to try it the easy way first. "I want to know what happened here," he said. He took a fold of bills out of his pocket. "So does Mr. Jackson."

"I don't know no Mr. Jackson," the man said, "but you lay a tenspot on me, you can go inside and look."

Wit was a lost art, Jay decided; on the other hand, he'd just saved ten bucks, so he shouldn't complain. He unfolded a ten-dollar bill and put it in the man's thick, callused hand.

"C'mon," the man said, "I ain't got all day." They went inside. The entryway was small and dark, doorbells mounted beside the mailboxes. While the big man fumbled for a key, Jay found Downs and pressed his button. There was no answer.

"You really lookin' for Digger?" his host said, grunting again, as he opened the i

"Are you going to tell me what happened here, or should we play twenty questions?"

"Fuck, I thought the whole city knew, the way the cops were crawling all over the place yesterday. You oughta read the Post, mister. Double murder."

"Oh, shit," Jay said, a sinking feeling in the bottom of his stomach. This iced the cake, he supposed, but the frosting was a real ugly flavor. "Downs?"

"Nah. It was Mrs. Rosenstein, she's got the apartment across the hall from Digger, and Jonesy the super."

"Let me guess," Jay said. "They were beaten to death."

"Fuck no."

It had been a long time since Jay Ackroyd had been that surprised. "No?" he said.

"Nah. They was cut to pieces, both of 'em, by some nutcase with a buzz saw. I was the one that found 'em. God, you should've seen it. I took off early yesterday, had this sum bitch of a hangover, and when I come home, there's this shit lying right in front of my door. I'm up on three. Fuck, I almost stepped in it. It was all bloody, like something you'd find in the garbage behind a butcher shop, some piece of meat nobody wanted, y'know? So I nudge it with my foot, and I seen it had an eye in it. Know what it was?" He leaned forward, and Jay could smell the beer on his breath. "Jonesy's face! Not the whole thing, only half of it. It must of fallen down the stairwell. The rest of him was on the fourth-floor landing. I don't know how he made it that far, his whole fucking belly was cut open, and his guts was spilling out on that fag Cooper's welcome mat. His hands was all slimy from trying to stuff 'em back in, but one of them whatchacallits, intensines, it went all the way up the stairs to the fifth floor. That was where I found Mrs. Rosenstein. Betcha never knew them intensines was so long, right?" He shrugged. "Well, the cops took the bodies away, but there's still blood all over the goddamn walls. Now that fuckin' landlord is go

"What about Downs?" Jay demanded.

"Fuck if I know. He ain't been home. The cops checked his door, but it was still locked. He's just off doing some write-up for that fuckin' magazine. He's go

"A riot," said Jay, who didn't think Digger would be pissed at all. "Hey, you ever been in Newark city jail?"

"Fuck no," the man said, with a frown.

"Oh, good," Jay said. "I spent a night there once. It really sucks." He pointed. Air rushed into suddenly empty space with a pop that sounded almost like a hiccup, and Jay was alone in the hallway. He started up the stairs, smiling. That was pointless and petty, and if he kept doing stuff like that he was going to get himself sued one of these days. But sometimes it just felt so good.

He spotted red-brown traces on the third-floor landing, and droplets on the wooden banister between three and four, but the serious bloodstains began on the fourth floor. The faded wallpaper showed long dark streaks in two places, where the custodian must have staggered against the wall as he tried to flee, maimed and bleeding, holding himself together with his hands.

That was pretty bad, but the fifth-floor landing was a lot worse. There were dried brown smears where a body, or a piece of a body, had struck the wall. The carpet ru

Jay looked around and tried to reconcile what he was seeing with what he'd seen yesterday morning in the Crystal Palace. It didn't add up. A buzz saw, the asshole downstairs had said; it sure as hell looked like it. The West Village Chainsaw Massacre; no wonder the Post had had a field day. By comparison, Chrysalis had hardly bled at all. A few drops on her blouse, a little down low on the walls, but nothing like this.

He tried on the theory that was all coincidence, that this little exercise in atrocity had nothing to do with what had happened to Chrysalis, but every gut instinct he had told him that was bullshit. What the hell was going on here? Disgusted, Jay turned to Digger's door. It was locked, as advertised. He opened the spring lock easily enough with a credit card, but there was a dead bolt as well. For that he needed a lock pick and a good ten minutes of work. Jay had deft, practiced hands and a real nice set of lock picks, but this was a good lock. Finally he heard the tumblers click, and the door pushed open. There was a chain, he saw as he stepped through, but it hadn't been used. Neither had the police bar, which meant the apartment had been locked from the outside. Jay took one look around and said, "Oh shit."

The place had been trashed. Thoroughly and savagely trashed.

He moved through the cramped little rooms carefully. Things had been thrown, smashed, stepped on. At every turn he expected to find a body, or what remained of a body. The living-room floor was buried in a blizzard of paper. A gigantic old Zenith console television had been reduced to ground glass and kindling, and what might have been an impressive collection of old LPs crunched underfoot as Jay stepped on the pieces. In the bedroom, the bed was in pieces, sheets razored, stuffing torn out of the mattress and scattered, books sliced in half right down their spines. The kitchen was covered with decaying junk food, the riper bits already crawling with roaches. All the cupboards had been shattered, their contents strewn wildly about. A huge old refrigerator lay facedown on the linoleum. When Jay bent to examine it, he found a jagged gash in the thick metal of the door. "Jesus Christ," he said. He stood up.