The pole cracked against his head and he saw stars, but he kept moving forward and he nailed Tate in the gut, which confused him. They toppled together, each one shoving the other’s arms out of the way—and each one kicking at the other, elbows clattering into faces and knees ramming against ribs as they clawed and crawled sideways on the ground.
Behind everything, still Leo was listening.
He heard it when the basement door smacked open and Tate heard it too, but he didn’t dare look.
By virtue of being taller than Leo and having longer arms, his fingertips were there first—pricking at the gun’s butt and clawing to drag it back.
“Stop! Police!” shouted Michael, who had arrived in the nick of time like the best of the goddamned cavalry.
Leo gasped, “Hurry!” and used a final surge of strength to grab Tate’s shoulder, using the other man’s weight to haul himself along the cement floor. Tate hammered Leo in the eye with his forearm and Leo wheezed, “My gun!”
Michael had already seen it. “Freeze!” he shouted at them both, which wasn’t going to work—but it was worth the formality. He approached the writhing duo, and being both younger and taller than the detective and the editor, he seized Tate by the back of his pants and heaved him bodily off his partner.
Tate swung around with a desperate kick, trying to sweep Michael’s gun away too … and thinking what? That Leo was slow or winded, and that he wouldn’t retrieve his own weapon in that intervening moment of distraction?
Leo didn’t know, and he didn’t stop to wonder about it.
He flung himself forward, reached his gun, and caught himself on his elbows. By the time he was up in a seated position, holding it out and forward, Tate was crouched on the ground—one hand held out to Leo, one hand held out to Michael.
Michael’s feet were parted and his hands were steady, all professional precision—and this from a man who’d been summoned by a Hail Mary message in the middle of the night. Leo didn’t think he’d ever been half so happy to see any other cop, maybe in his whole career.
Michael looked over Tate’s ragged, fight-mussed head and he gave Leo a nod that said, “I’ve got it now,” and at the same time asked, “Are you all right?”
Leo nodded back his answer to both.
He knew Michael had it now. And he was all right.
He climbed all the way to his feet and sat back onto the bench while Michael performed the details, flattening Tate against a wall and locking him into handcuffs.
Ten minutes later, outside in the parking lot, Harvey Kant was there, and Bugeye Bronkowski too; the spinning red and blue lights of their cars were kicking holes in the wee-morning blackness. And Leo Storgman was sitting on the trunk of the lieutenant’s car when a taxi pulled up to deposit Wanda.
She wasn’t frantic, but you could see it from there. “Leo! I just got your message!” She ran toward him, tripping over the small, tire-churned drifts that crisscrossed the lot and then catching herself just in time to reach him. “Is everything all right?”
He hopped down off the trunk and opened his arms.
“Everything’s going to be great,” he said. Then he gave her the biggest, deepest, most serious kiss he’d ever given anybody in public, and added, “Fuck Florida. You ever seen Paris?”
♣ ♦ ♠ ♥
The Wild Cards Series
Wild Cards
Aces High
Jokers Wild
Aces Abroad
Down and Dirty
Ace in the Hole
Dead Man’s Hand
One-Eyed Jacks
Jokertown Shuffle
Double Solitaire
Dealer’s Choice
Turn of the Cards
Card Sharks
Marked Cards
Black Trump
Deuces Down
Death Draws Five
Inside Straight
Busted Flush
Suicide Kings
Fort Freak
Copyright Acknowledgments
“The Rat Race” copyright © 2011 by Cherie Priest.
“The Rook” copyright © 2011 by Lumina Enterprises, LLC.
“Faith” copyright © 2011 by John Jos. Miller.
“Snake Up Above/Snake in the Hole/Snake on Fire” copyright © 2011 by David Anthony Durham.
“… And All the Sinners Saints” copyright © 2011 by Victor Milán and Ty Franck.
“Sanctuary” copyright © 2011 by Mary Anne Mohanraj.
“Hope We Die Before We Get Old” copyright © 2011 by Stephen Leigh.
“More!” copyright © 2011 by Paul Cornell.
“The Straight Man” copyright © 2011 by Kevin Andrew Murphy.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.
FORT FREAK: A WILD CARDS MOSAIC NOVEL
Copyright © 2011 by George R. R. Martin and the Wild Cards Trust
All rights reserved.
A Tor® eBook
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martin, George R. R.
Fort Freak / George R.R. Martin.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 978-0-7653-2570-9
I. Title.
PS3563.A7239F67 2011
813'.54—dc22
2011011551
First Edition: June 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-7185-0
First Tor eBook Edition: June 2011