George Martin - Dead Mans Hand

Squisher squinted, then reached out a long sinuous arm that ended in a collection of twitching tentacles and took the card from Brennan. He brought the pasteboard close to his face, looked from it to Brennan, then silently slid under the water of his aquarium.

Brennan turned to face the room where everyone was suddenly very interested in their drinks, and spotted Bludgeon sitting alone at a table in a far, dark corner.

He recognized the joker instantly. He'd only seen him once before during a crazy, confused brawl in Times Square almost two years ago, but Bludgeon didn't have the kind of face you could easily forget.

He was seven feet of ugly, with a puckered, scarred face and a right hand that was a twisted club of muscle and bone. He was thinner than the first time Brennan had seen him, so thin that his filthy clothes hung loosely on his frame. His skin was blotchy, his hair long and greasy. He sat alone, staring at nothing and mumbling to himself as Brennan approached. The whites of his eyes were a clouded yellow shot through with scarlet veins. Brennan stared at him, unsure whether to feel pity or disgust.

"Whadda fuck you want?" Bludgeon asked after a long moment.

"Talk on the street is that you killed Chrysalis," Brennan said lowly.

A spark of animation kindled in Bludgeon's sick eyes. "Yeah," he rumbled. "It was me. I offed the cocksucking bitch. Buy me a drink and I'll tell you all about it."

"First tell me how you killed her."

Bludgeon held up his clubbed right fist. "I beat the fucking whore's brains out with my hand. It's all I ever needed. Never needed a fucking gun, never needed no goddamn knife. Just my hand."

The twitch of disgust in Brennan's face, the loathing in his eyes, went unnoticed by the drunken joker. "Where?" Brennan said softly.

"Where what?"

"Where'd you kill her?"

"In that shithole saloon of hers, man," Bludgeon mumbled. "I threw her on the bar and stuck my dick in her and fucked the living shit out of her." He laughed and a mad light shone in his sick eyes. "Then just to make sure she was dead I beat her fucking head in. Just to make sure."

"You scum," Brennan said through clenched teeth. "You shit-eating scum. I'd kill you where you sit if I didn't know that you're lying."

Bludgeon blinked, his porcine eyes staring at Brennan without comprehension. He stood up when Brennan's words finally soaked into his clouded brain, and screamed a stream of obscenities. He pushed the table at Brennan, but it only scraped slowly across the floor and Brennan sidestepped it easily.

Bludgeon howled and swung his clubbed arm. Brennan avoided the slow-motion punch and grabbed Bludgeon by his wrist and shoulder and threw him against the bar, scattering jokers right and left.

Squisher rose agitatedly from the depths of his aquarium as Brennan picked up a chair.

"My tank!" the joker screamed. "Don't break the glass!" Bludgeon, pinned against the bar and breathing hard, looked at Brennan with fear and pain in his eyes. Brennan swung the chair, smashing him across the gut, and Bludgeon gasped like a fish out of water. Brennan swung again, catching Bludgeon on the side and slamming him down across three bar stools. Bludgeon made a feeble attempt to stand, but his slack muscles wouldn't work. He sighed, bubbling the bloody froth on his lips, and made weak swimming motions with his arms.

Brennan checked his third blow when he saw that Bludgeon had nothing left in him. He dropped the chair, the tubular metal of its back and legs twisted into an ornate abstract sculpture.

"You didn't kill her," Brennan said in a low voice. "Why say you did?"

"I need a fucking job," Bludgeon panted. "No one will touch me. No one will give me a fucking chance. I figured… I just figured Fadeout or somebody in the Fists would give me a chance, you know just give me a fucking chance…"

"You pathetic lying shit," Brennan said in a low voice. He had known it wouldn't be this easy. Partly out of frustration, partly because he wanted Chrysalis's killer to know that he was on his trail, he turned to face the room and said, "I was Chrysalis's friend and I'm going to find her killer. Bet on it."

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.

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 gonna have."

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 inner security door. "Like I told you, he ain't here." They stepped through the door, and he pointed up the staircase. "You want to see the bloodstains, they're up on four and five. I been humping up and down all day, I'm sick of all them fucking steps."

"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 gonna have to hang some new wallpaper. Bet it takes him six months, though."