George Martin - Dead Mans Hand

"What do you want?" Dragon asked as Brennan approached. He was a young man, Asian, small and trim looking. He was also a potent ace who could animate then possess animal figurines he carved or folded out of paper. Right now he didn't appear to be in a good humor.

"No rest for the wicked, is there?"

Dragon stiffened at the sound of Brennan's voice, half rose, then sank down in his chair. "What the hell are you doing here, Cowboy?" he said, using the name Brennan had taken when he'd gone undercover and joined the Fists.

Brennan shrugged. "Looks like a fun party. I'd hate to see anything break it up." He looked steadily at Dragon. "What's going on, anyway?"

Dragon looked at him for a long time before answering. "The guy over there," he said, indicating a tall, thin, wastedlooking man in white linen trousers, jacket, and shirt, "is Quinn the Eskimo. You've heard of him."

Brennan nodded. Quinn the Eskimo-his real name was Thomas Quincey-was head of the scientific arm of the Shadow Fists. He specialized in the development of synthetic drugs with extraordinary special effects.

"Trying out a new product?" Brennan asked.

As Brennan watched, Lori approached Quinn and spoke to him. He smiled and handed her a vial of blue powder, some of which she snorted, some of which she rubbed on her nipples and breasts, turning them the same bright blue color of the powder. Quinn and the men standing around him laughed. At Quinn's urging one of the men started to lick her breasts. She closed her eyes and leaned up against a nearby wall, and, as the man sucked her nipples, came to an obvious, powerful orgasm.

"What the hell was that?" Brennan asked.

Dragon shrugged. "The new product. Demonstrating for the distributors. What do you want, anyway?"

Brennan looked back down at Dragon. "A friend of mine was killed, Dragon. You heard."

"Chrysalis?"

Brennan nodded. "And I heard that someone is bragging around town that he did it to get in good with the Fists." Dragon shook his head. "I didn't know the Fists wanted her dead."

"You don't make policy. I want to talk to someone who does. Fadeout."

"He's not happy with you, Cowboy. You really fucked us over."

Brennan shrugged. "That's life," he said. "Fadeout will talk to me, or the Fists will bleed."

Dragon stood up slowly, carefully. "You don't want to start anything here, Cowboy. I'm head of security for this party-"

Brennan nodded, smiled under his Mae West mask, and backed away. "And I wouldn't want you to have a black mark on your record. Just tell Fadeout I want to talk."

They stared at each other until Brennan backed out of the room.

"So?" one of the Werewolf guards in the corridor asked Brennan.

"So what?"

"Who's going off duty?"

"Oh." Brennan stripped off the Mae West mask and tossed it at the astonished Werewolf, who caught it against his chest. " I am."

"What the hell?" the other one growled angrily. "That's not fair."

"Life's a bitch," Brennan told him. "Then you die." The Werewolves recognized the danger in his voice. They watched him as he went down the corridor, wondering who he was, deciding that it would probably be better if they never found out.

Tuesday July 19, 1988

The stale air trapped inside the unused sewer line that Chrysalis had converted to a secret Palace entrance stank of mold and rot. It was dark but for the beam from Brennan's flashlight, quiet but for the infrequent noises he made as he crept toward the Palace. Once he passed a side tunnel that Chrysalis hadn't told him about. He thought he heard something moving in it, but decided that now was not the time to indulge idle curiosity.

The sewer line led to a tunnel of more recent construction, that led in turn to a dark basement storeroom. The room was packed with stacks of liquor cases, piles of aluminum beer kegs, and cardboard boxes filled with potato chips, pretzels, pork rinds, and other junk food.

Brennan moved through the storeroom silently and went up the flight of stairs to the first floor. He waited for a moment, but neither saw, nor heard, nor smelled anything to indicate that anyone else was in the Palace. He hadn't figured there would be. He went down the corridor to Chrysalis's office and paused at the door, strangely reluctant to enter the room.

He realized that once he saw her blood splattered on the walls, he would know without a doubt that Chrysalis was dead. She'd kept too much of herself to herself for him to have loved her, but he had shared her bed and some of her secrets. He'd known the lonely woman under the cool exterior. He hadn't loved her, but he could have. He couldn't forget that. It kept gnawing at him like the pain from an open wound, unbound and bleeding.

He remembered Chrysalis's office as a dark, quiet, charming room. It had a fabulous Oriental carpet on the floor, floor-to-ceiling bookcases full of leather-bound volumes that Chrysalis had actually read, solid oak-and-leather furniture, and dark, purple-patterned Victorian wallpaper. The room had even smelled of Chrysalis, of the exotic frangipani perfume she wore and the amaretto she drank. It had been a peaceful room, and he didn't want to see it transformed into a scene of death and destruction. But he had to. He took a deep breath, pulled away the tape that sealed the door, and entered the office.

It was worse than he had suspected. The room had been utterly devastated. Her huge oak desk was on its side halfway across the room from its usual place. Her black leather chair had been shattered. Her bookcases had been torn from the walls and the volumes scattered on the floor. The visitors' chairs had been smashed to kindling. Her wooden file cabinets had been upended and their contents strewn all over the floor and the broken furniture. Worst of all was a light spray of blood, barely visible on the patterned wallpaper, splattered low on the wall behind where her desk and chair normally stood.

Brennan had seen a lot of destruction, but this devastation filled him with anger. He took the anger and forced it down, pushing it deep inside himself until it was a glowing pinpoint in the pit of his stomach. This was no time to give in to emotion. Perhaps later he could afford to vent it, but now he needed a cool, dispassionate intellect. Not knowing yet what might constitute an important clue, he memorized the horrible scene in as much detail as he could so that he'd be able to reconstruct it in his mind later.

Brennan left the office with the room locked in his memory. He couldn't face the stuffiness of the tunnels running under the streets. He wanted to breathe fresh, clean air, as fresh and clean, anyway, as could be found in the city. He went to the stairs that led to the exits of the upper floor, and he heard a voice, the last voice he ever expected to hear again, whispering from the dark stairwell ahead of him.

"Yeoman," it said, sending shivers up his spine, "I'm waiting for you. Come to my room. I'll be waiting, my archer."

It was her voice. Chrysalis, speaking in her almostEnglish accent. He stood still for a moment, but heard no one or nothing move in the darkness.

Brennan didn't believe in ghosts, but the wild card made nearly anything possible. Maybe Chrysalis hadn't even been killed, maybe it was all an elaborate hoax, perhaps perpetrated by Chrysalis herself for whatever unfathomable reason. Whatever it was, he couldn't just walk away from it. He drew his Browning Hi-Power from his hip holster and crept up the stairs as quietly as a stalking cat.

The door to Chrysalis's bedroom was open, and as he peered around the jamb he could see that someone had been here before him. The intruder had been searching for something and hadn't bothered to be neat about it. Chrysalis's canopied bed had been pulled apart and its mattress shredded. All her Victorian portraits and elegantly framed antique mirrors had been stripped from the walls and lay in silver slivers scattered about the floor. The crystal decanter that usually stood on the nightstand lay shattered on the floor. A fencing mask sat in its place.