George Martin - Lowball

And if the arms were relaxed, the spur would rotate backward to protect the head from a surprise attack from the sides or rear.

There were spurs on the knees as well, but these looked like an anatomically simple extension of the tibia. There were also some scars to suggest there had also been spurs on the heels, but these had been amputated at some point to allow the subject to walk normally.

Gordon thought that the wild card was sometimes capable of great beauty, even genius, in its adaptation of human anatomy; but it was also capable of forgetting that someone apparently designed as a street fighter might also need to walk.

Gordon would have liked to dissect the shoulder just to understand the mechanism. But that wasn’t part of his job.

His job was ascertaining cause of death, here in his morgue annex in the basement of the Jokertown precinct, a room that smelled of antiseptic and plastic body bags and the bitter-cherry scent of death, where deformed bodies lay on steel tables coated in blue-gray porcelain, and where police officers paced as they drank coffee from paper cups and waited for information.

“So,” said Detective Sergeant Gallo, “it was the hit-and-run did him in?”

Gallo stood a respectful distance from the body, by the door. He wanted to be in the room during the autopsy, but he didn’t have a compulsion to stand right by and watch the pathologist at work. Maybe he didn’t like corpses, Gordon thought, or maybe he’d seen so many that he was no longer interested.

Which was not something that could ever be said of Gordon.

“No,” Gordon said. “He was dead by the time the vehicle hit him.”

“The vehicle hit a corpse,” Gallo said.

“The vehicle was pretty unusual,” Gordon said. “It had slick tires-the prints on the victim’s body and clothing were absolutely featureless, no tread marks at all.” He looked at Gallo and blinked. “What uses slick tires besides a drag racer?”

Gallo shrugged. He was a tall, broad man, dark-haired, blue-eyed. His right arm was in a fluorescent red fiberglass cast and carried in a sling, and he wore a black leather jacket on the left arm and thrown over the shoulder on the right. His pistol was tucked into the sling for ease of access.

“Coulda been a drag racer, I suppose,” he said. “Though it wasn’t going very fast when it hit the victim. But if the vic died from the beating, there’s no point in chasing down the driver.”

“It wasn’t the beating,” Gordon said. “El Monstro didn’t kill him.”

Gallo was startled. “Who?”

“El Monstro.”

Gallo was New Jersey State Police and not from New York, so he wouldn’t have had a chance to meet El Monstro. Certainly the joker was hard to miss-nearly eight feet tall, horned, with chitinous armor plates covering most of his body-and plates on his knuckles as well, plates that left a very distinct imprint.

“His real name’s José Luis Melo da Conceição Neto,” Gordon said. “Brazilian kid, raised in Jokertown. I testified on his behalf about fourteen months ago, in an assault case.” Gordon gestured with one hand at the distinctive bruising on the dead man’s upper arms and torso. “El Monstro pretty clearly left these marks. Nobody else has fists like that.”

Gallo reached for his notebook, juggled it one-handed for a moment, then put it on one of the counters that surrounded the room. “Can you give me that name again?”

Gordon did. “Neto isn’t really part of the name,” he said. “It just means ‘grandson’-grandson of the original José Luis Melo da Conceição.”

Gallo wasn’t used to writing left-handed and it took some time to get the name down.

“He was a nice kid,” Gordon said. “He’d be about nineteen now. Works a couple jobs, trying to support a disabled mother and get through NYU. I was able to show the court that he suffered at least half a dozen defensive injuries before he put his assailant in a coma with a single punch. The assailant had a history of violence and robbery, so El Monstro walked.”

“He walked all the way to Warren County,” Gallo said, “where he killed this other joker.”

Gordon shook his head. “No,” he said. “He didn’t kill this John Doe.”

Gallo’s tone turned aggressive. “If the truck didn’t kill him, and your El Monstro didn’t beat him to death, what the hell did put his lights out?”

Gordon looked up from the body. “SCD,” he said.

Gallo stared at him in disbelief. “Sudden cardiac death? You’re telling me the John Doe had a heart attack?”

“Not a heart attack. Cardiac arrest caused by aortic valve stenosis.” Gordon gestured toward the victim’s heart, which was sitting in a plastic container on the counter. “His aortic valve narrowed to the point where the heart couldn’t pump enough blood into the aorta, which caused the heart to pump faster and faster until it went into ventricular fibrillation, and then…” Gordon made a vague gesture. “Asystole, cardiogenic shock, loss of circulation, death. It happens pretty fast, sometimes within seconds.”

“What caused the, ah, stenosis?”

“At his age, it was most likely congenital. Happens to men more often than women.”

For the first time Gallo approached the body and looked at it thoughtfully. “So he got beat up by this El Monstro guy.”

“The wounds were antemortem, though not very far in advance of death.”

“And then the vic has SCD, and drops dead on the road, apparently, and was then hit by a drag racer?” The fingers of his left hand reached into his cast and scratched the fingers of his right. He looked up. “He can’t have been pushed out of a car or something?”

“No drag marks. No skid marks.” Gordon shrugged. “Lividity hadn’t developed when the vehicle hit him, so he was run over less than twenty minutes after death.”

Gallo shook his head. “This is the worst case of bad luck in all history,” he said. He made a disgusted noise. “What was he doing on Route 519? Rural New Jersey, for cripe’s sake!”

The victim wasn’t, technically speaking, Gordon’s business. New Jersey had its own forensic pathologists. But jokers weren’t very common in northwest New Jersey, and when the body turned up beaten, run over, and naked except for an athletic supporter and a pair of Adidas training pants, it had been taken to Jokertown for an examination by a specialist in joker bodies.

By Otto Gordon, M.D., known to his colleagues as Gordon the Ghoul.

Gordon adjusted his glasses. “You sure there weren’t any prizefights in the vicinity?” he asked. “Cage fights? He’d been through a beating.”

“Nothing in that area but dairy farms. We didn’t see any crowd leaving, any sign of anything unusual.”

“Footprints? Tire tracks?”

“Zilch. And certainly no sign of anyone like El Monstro.”

“Well.” Gordon shrugged. “Let me stitch up the body, and you can take it home. I’ll send you the report when it’s done.”

“And I’ll liaise with NYPD to see if we can pick up this Monstro guy.”

Gallo left to do his liaison work. Gordon closed the Y-shaped autopsy incision, made sure the plastic containers with the victim’s organs were properly sealed and labeled, and then called his diener, Gaida Hanawi, to help shift the victim back into the body bag he’d arrived in.

Gallo returned along with the uniformed trooper who had driven him into the city from Warren County. Gaida and the uniform began wheeling the body out to the loading dock, past a couple local cops who looked at him in surprise. The trooper’s sky-blue jacket with its gaudy yellow patches and the gold-striped black trousers were a considerable contrast to the more severe dark blue uniform of the NYPD.

“How’d you hurt your arm, anyway?” Gordon asked.