George Martin - Lowball

“I didn’t know you were a musician.”

“Neither did I.” Marcus cut his eyes up at the priest’s face, and then took a sip of his iced tea. “I mean, I’m not. Slate keeps asking for a demo, but … I can’t rap. I tried. I got videos on my cell phone, but, man … I suck.”

“I can’t say that I’m disappointed to hear that.”

“He’s just after me ’cause I got a tight image, you know?”

“You have a measure of fame. With it comes responsibility. You understand that, right?”

“Yeah, you talk about it all the time.”

The father dropped one of his heavy hands on Marcus’s shoulder, the suckers on his palm squeezing. “I remind you because I care. Because I see a life of great promise ahead of you. I doubt very much that rapping would be fulfilling your potential. Marcus, if your card hadn’t turned, where would you be now?”

“In college, I guess.”

“Then you should be there now. The fact that you’re a joker need not change that.”

Marcus shifted uncomfortably. He couldn’t imagine slithering across the quad of some campus, all the nat students staring at his tail. It might have been his future once, but college didn’t seem possible anymore.

“Perhaps we can use your celebrity status for something other than making vulgar music,” Father Squid said. “And you can do something other than dispensing vigilante justice. You do much good. I won’t deny that. But where is the line? What happens when you err? When you hurt an innocent by mistake? What happens if you lose the bits of yourself that are kinder than your fists and muscles?”

The main dishes arrived.

The priest stuffed a napkin under his tentacled chin. After thanking the waitress, he continued, “Your life need not be defined only by the physical abilities the wild card has given you. That’s why I’m going to set up a college fund in your honor. I think quite a few people would be willing to contribute to that.”

Marcus hid the wave of emotion that rolled over him by digging in to his curry dish. Part of it was fear. Fear of wanting to strive for something that nats strove for. Fear of failing, of all the eyes that would watch him, critical and cold. Part of it was surprise that anyone would want to invest in his future that way. His parents didn’t. Nobody in his old life did.

Father Squid chuckled. “I should have warned you it was spicy.”

“Yeah,” Marcus said, wiping at the moisture in his eyes, “spicy. It’s almost got me crying.”

“Did that hurt?”

Jamal Norwood stared in pain and horror at the wound on his left forearm. Pain because, yes, it hurt to have the extra-large needle jabbed into his arm, to feel the blood being sucked into the giant, toy-like syringe. Even the withdrawal was slow and jagged. What, this guy couldn’t have used a new needle? Or a small one?

“Yes!” Jamal couldn’t help sounding surprised at his frank answer, and a bit ashamed of himself. The grunting, high-pitched squeal hardly matched the image of a buff former movie stuntman turned SCARE agent.

The doctor, a centaur in a lab coat, frowned. “Sorry,” he said. His name was Finn and he came highly recommended, not that Jamal had done much in the way of due diligence. He had needed a quick, quiet consult … and the Jokertown Clinic seemed to be the best place.

Now, of course, with the crude, industrial-sized instruments, Jamal was revising his opinion. “It’s not your fault, Doctor,” he said, rubbing his arm. No, it was entirely Jamal’s problem. Hence the terror: he was Stuntman! His whole ace power was bouncing back from damage that would have severely injured, or killed, another human being, nat, ace, or joker.

And quickly! Being dropped from a forty-story building and flattened? Stuntman would bounce back within hours.

In past experience, a pinprick would have closed as soon as the needle point touched his skin. In fact, Jamal couldn’t remember the last time he’d had blood taken.

Or needed to.

“Hold on to this while I get something better,” Dr. Finn said, placing a cotton ball on the wound and closing Jamal’s arm on it.

Jamal wanted to tell the man no, no need.

But there was need: it felt as though his blood was gushing … it felt as though the cotton ball had already been soaked through.

What the hell was happening?

The spring of 2012 had been one of the warmest in New York history. When Jamal and the rest of the SCARE team arrived in late March for the presidential primary, they had expected a typical spring: cold, raw days interspersed with warm ones, rain, trees beginning to bloom.

Well, they found the rain, that was certain.

But the weather had been tropical … high temperatures, equally high humidity, and rain every day. New York streets, never in great shape in good years, were transformed into a collection of terrifying potholes and cracked pavement.

Jamal’s immediate boss, Bathsheeba Fox, also known as the Midnight Angel, was a good Christian belle whose default setting was to accept “God’s will” when it came to fouled-up situations. Jamal suspected that Sheeba felt glorified by the opportunity to protect the Holy Roller, the Reverend Thaddeus Wintergreen-the first ace to run for the presidency-from the increasing numbers of people who (in Jamal’s opinion) quite understandably wanted this Mississippi shithead dead. Sheeba would gladly have called down her personal Sword of the Lord on any member of the SCARE task force who dared to offer a discouraging word.…

Yet even She Who Must Be Obeyed had stood in the rain yesterday, her signature leather outfit showing cracks from wear, her jet-black mane a sodden, tied-up mess, her minimal makeup smeared, as she looked up at the sky and said, “You know, this kind of sucks.” Which summed up the whole New York tour … bad weather leading to ill temper all around. SCARE had assigned Jamal and Sheeba to provide coverage for Wintergreen. It didn’t matter that the Roller had zero chance of winning-Senators Obama and Lieberman and Attorney General Rodham were divvying up the delegates there. Known to millions from American Hero (that goddamn show again!), the Roller was drawing huge crowds wherever he went, and a goodly percentage of his fans resided on Homeland Security, Secret Service, and SCARE watch lists.

The Holy Roller detail had been a death march of long hours spent in grim factory gates, high school gymnasia, and an amazing number of cracker churches-more in the state of New York than Jamal would have believed. Each event required the SCARE team to engage in tedious “interfaces” with local police and sheriffs, plus the endless interviews, follow-ups, crowd scans.

It could have been worse, Jamal thought: he could have been assigned to cover one of the Republican candidates, but with Romney running away with the contest, SCARE’s very own Mormon, Nephi Callendar, had come out of retirement to provide “interface” with that campaign-sparing Jamal Norwood and the others.

Even though they’d avoided involvement with the Republicans, a greater challenge loomed: the Liberty Party and its national standard-bearer, Duncan Towers, a blow-dried blowhard who made the Roller seem rational. So far Towers had been protected by the Secret Service and his own personal security force, but with the Dems moving on to California and what might yet prove to be a brokered convention, Sheeba’s team had been ordered to stay in New York to provide “advance” work for Towers and Liberty.

Jamal devoutly hoped that the assignment would be a short one. He had joined SCARE because he was bored with Hollywood and determined to rehabilitate himself after the debacle of the first season of American Hero . What better way than to fight terrorists in the Middle East?