Dead Mans Hand

His voice ran down into racking sobs, and despite himself Bre

"Help me…" jory sobbed.

"What do you want from me?" Bre

"Cart do that," he said in the same soft voice.

"Then buy me a bottle. They took all my money last night. All my money, and my face."

Bre

She was with a man down the bar, drinking with him and laughing a little too loudly whenever he spoke. She was standing so close to him that her bare knees were pressing against his thigh, and she was toying with his hair, making little loose ringlets of it with her middle finger. Bre

Bre

"I'd like to talk to the lady."

The man looked as if he were going to dispute things, then thought better of it. "Sure, buddy," he said. "Plenty of babes in this place."

He slid off the stool and Bre

"You look like a man who likes to party," she said hopefully. She obviously didn't recognize Bre

"I do."

"Good." Her smile grew wider, her eyes brighter. "Let's go upstairs, honey. I can show you something you've never seen before."

"You can?"

"Sure. Trust me." She urged Bre

Her room was a small cubicle with a messily made bed. She closed the door after them and smiled with insincere coyness at Bre

"Let's get the business out of the way, honey. Then we can be friends. Now," she went on, after Bre

"What's that?" Bre

She was already pulling open the drawer of her cluttered, rickety vanity. "It's called rapture, honey, and it's sheer heaven."

She held up a small vial of blue powder, much like the one Bre

"What's it do?" Bre

"Is it dangerous?"

Lori laughed and shook her head. "No way. I've been taking it for weeks now" She leaned closer and smiled confidentially. "Me and the guy who made it are like this," she said, entwining two fingers.

"I'll bet." Bre

"Why can't we do it without the rapture?" he asked. "Because it's so good with it."

"I like it plain."

"But it's better, it really is," she said with increasing frenzy.

He remembered what Quincey had said about it a couple of days before, a drug that was so good that it makes a whore like sex.

"What's it like without the rapture?" he asked, holding the vial away as she snatched for it.

"Like always," she spat. "Boring. Dead. Unfeeling."

"How about food? What's that like without a dose?" She made a face. "Cardboard and paste. Rotting compost."

"Wine? Champagne?"

"Tepid water with shit floating in it. Give me that!" Bre

"I'll scream," she said.

Bre

"Give, me two doses. One for later," she panted. "Sure."

Lori nodded frantically and turned back to her vanity. She gave Bre

"What's it like when you do it that way?" he asked curiously.

"Good thoughts," Lori said dreamily. "Only good thoughts." He nodded and led her to the bed. She sat down obediently as he tore the sheet into strips, bound and gagged her. He left her room wondering what kind of thoughts she'd have after the rapture wore off.

10:00 P.M.

Digger Downs had been right about one thing: the hotel where Kahina had spent her final weeks was a real pit.

A half-dozen elderly jokers sat in the lobby, watching an ancient black-and-white Philco while they waited to die. When Jay entered, they all looked at him with dim incurious eyes. No one spoke. The jokers, like the lobby, smelled of decay.

The night clerk was a stout woman in her sixties with her hair worn in a bun. Her breath smelled of gin and she didn't know nothing about no Ay-rab girl, but she was perfectly willing to let Jay have a look at the files, once he'd slipped her a ten.

The records were in just as shitty a shape as the rest of the building, but after thirty minutes with the registration cards and receipt books from May and June of 1987, Jay found what he was looking for. She'd paid two months in advance, in cash, for a room on the third floor. Less than three weeks later, the same room had been rerented, to someone listed only as Stig.

Jay showed the cards and the receipt book to the night clerk. "Her," he said, pointing out the name.

The corner of a ten-dollar bill was just visible under. the registration card; it did wonders for the old woman's memory. "Oh, yeah, she was the pretty one. I only saw her once or twice, thought she looked kind of Jewish. You mean she was an Ay-rab?"

"A Syrian," Jay said. "What happened to her?" The woman shrugged. "They come, they go."

"Who's this Stig?" Jay asked.

"Stigmata," the old woman said. She made a face. "Disgusting. Makes me sick just to look at him, but Joe, he says even jokers need a place to stay. If it was up to me… honestly, these people are like animals. Anyway, Stig didn't pay his rent and Joe evicted him, good riddance to bad rubbish, and we rented his room to the Ay-rab girl. But then a few weeks later Stig had the money he owed us and he says he wants his room back. We hadn't seen that girl for a week or so, so we let him back in."