George Martin - Suicide Kings

Actually… once they got it outside, in the sunlight, it looked really fragile. Long cracks spiderwebbed a couple of the windows; the fuselage had silvery gouges where the white paint had been scraped away; the wings had pits and dings and one thing that looked like a homemade patch. And the huge landing gear appeared to be more patch than tire.

“Hey, Mr. Finch? Is this safe?”

Finch’s nostrils flared again. “Tourists,” he muttered.

Jackson Square

New Orleans, Louisiana

CNN was broadcasting it live. So was every other major news outlet. Juliet told Michelle it was being streamed live on the Internet.

Michelle had been bubbling for almost twelve hours now. She was still as huge as she had been, but she could tell she was getting lighter.

The bubbles were pouring from her hands. As many bubbles as she could release. She kept them dense enough that they didn’t just pop, but light enough to float away. Just making a bunch of soap bubbles wouldn’t do, and every other variation she had thought of had risks. She’d tried to make the bubbles somewhat pop-able; it was impossible to have the kind of control over them that she wanted. Even now, even hours since she’d begun bubbling, the power was still clawing through her. It was exhausting trying to keep it in check.

On the TV there was a long shot of the temple with the stream of bubbles rising from it. Then there were overhead shots, but these were on a loop since they’d shut down the Louis B. Armstrong Airport and closed New Orleans to all air traffic. Now they were cutting away to viewer video.

In every frame they showed, pretty, iridescent bubbles floated and bobbed like a child’s playthings. They went up, up, up and then floated here and there, carried by the prevailing winds, until they slowly started to fall back to earth.

It was raining bubbles in New Orleans.

The TV showed a long shot of a young man in front of the Super Dome, preening for the camera. “Yeah, I know she saved the city, but damn, couldn’t she have done this bubble thing somewhere else?”

The camera cut to another shot. A harried-looking woman held a toddler on her hip.

“I’ve got babies to think about. You don’t know what’s in those things. Oh, they look pretty enough, but have you tried to keep a baby away from one of them? They put everything in their mouths. I saw American Hero. She can make those things blow up.”

Michelle yelled at the TV. “ These aren’t blowing up! They’re not supposed to!”

“See, that’s part of your damn problem, Bubbles.” Joey turned down the TV sound. “You worry about what fuckers think about you. Me? I don’t care.”

“Did you tell Juliet about us?” Michelle blurted. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she thought.

Joey gave her an annoyed look. “Fuck no. Christ on a crutch, why would I do somethin’ like that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you wanted to unburden yourself. Feel less guilty.”

“I don’t feel guilty about nothin’ I do.”

“Then why didn’t you tell her?”

“You know why,” Joey replied. “She sat here for a year waiting for you to wake up. She kept your parents away long as she fucking could, considerin’ she don’t have no rights. And she did it expecting nothin’.” Joey shook her head. “You and me, we’re alike. We’re used to having to look out for ourselves. Juliet, she don’t know how to do that. She loves you and that means putting everything else aside to take care of you.”

“I suppose you know more about my girlfriend than I do,” Michelle snapped.

“Yeah, I do.” Joey slouched down in her chair. Juliet had gone out for coffee and beignets and it was the first time Michelle and Joey had been alone.

“Oh, my God. You’re sleeping with her!”

“Jesus, you are one crazy bitch. No, but it ain’t because I didn’t want to. You just don’t know a thing about Ink, do you? Fuck me all to hell.” Joey jumped up from her chair and grabbed her gimme cap. “I’m gonna go see if she needs some help with those doughnuts.”

Michelle fumed. She wanted to run after Joey. To tell her she was wrong. That she did so understand Juliet. But she was still too big. And then there were those damn bubbles. They went on and on and on…

Jokertown

Manhattan, New York

The famous bowery wild Card Dime Museum was a short ride on the subway. Ellen spent the time looking out the windows at the speed-blurred concrete and the darkness. She had a slight smile on her face, and a sense of peace that was almost postcoital, though Bugsy knew for a fact it wasn’t.

He knew what it was. “How’s Nick?” he asked.

Ellen took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The hat itself is a little the worse for wear. It’s strange having him back again. I still can’t quite…”

Ellen’s voice got thick for a moment. She hadn’t expected to get Nick back. He’d died before she’d met him, and with the physical locus she used to channel him gone, she’d thought he was gone again. She’d been in the middle of mourning him.

Now he was back, and she had spent most of the last day communing with him-bringing him up-to-date, sharing confidences, no doubt telling funny stories about Bugsy and Aliyah and that one time when the FedEx guy opened the apartment door when they were in flagrante in the kitchen.

There was something basically unnerving about hearing the same mouth you kissed when you were making time with your girl laughing about you in a man’s voice.

The subway reached their station, and Bugsy and Cameo ascended into the light.

Jokertown made up a section of Manhattan small enough to walk across in half a morning. It was also a different world. In the pale sun of early morning, two jokers jogged slowly down the street, one half mastodon half insect, the other with the body of a beautiful woman and the head of an oversized horse fly. But they were talking about Tara Reid’s latest fashion blunder, so maybe it wasn’t such a different world after all.

On one of the city buses that stopped to let out its cargo of freaks and misfits, a teenage girl was weeping. The cell phone pressed to her ear let out squeaks and buzzes, making words in no known language. An old man still drunk from the previous night urinated in an alley, his penis talking in a high, gargling voice of its own about imagined sexual conquests. A bat the size of a rottweiler with the face of a twelve-year-old Chinese girl flapped desperately, trying to catch up with a distant school bus. The coffee shops filled with the morning press of men, women, and who-the-hell-knew all grabbing a cup of joe and a corn muffin on their way to work while a neon-blue man in the back booth sucked down eight breakfasts, the plates stacking up beside him higher than his head.

Bugsy and Cameo crossed in front of a slow-moving delivery truck and went into the museum. The place smelled like old french fries and mildew, but it looked like the best secondhand shop ever. Display cases were filled with oddments and curios. A waxwork Peregrine stood in the corner in the same pose and outfit as the copy of Aces framed behind her. The joker at the counter could have been a man or a woman. The long face was something between a melted candle and road rash. Thick, ropey arms spilled out of a Yankees jersey. “Cameo!” it said.

“Jason,” Ellen said, smiling. “It’s been a while. How’s Annie?”

“The same,” the joker said, spreading his splayed, tumor-budding hands in a gesture that meant Women. Whatcha gonna do? “What can we do you for today?”

“My friend here is doing some research. People’s Park riot.”

“The what?”

“Apparently there was a riot in People’s Park in 1969,” Bugsy said.

“Could have been,” the joker agreed. “I was two, so chances are I wouldn’t remember.”