Jim nodded. “I heard already. I’m going up there right now.”
“If you need any help, just whistle. Doc’s an old pal o’ mine.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, but how did you know my name?”
The rat shook his head. “Jayzus, you think I’m an eejit or something? Don’t I know Jim Morrison when I see him?”
***
After the third floor, Semple was the only passenger in the elevator, and when the doors opened on the eighth, Jim was standing waiting. Semple beckoned him in. “Come on. We might as well go straight up to ten.”
As he stepped into the elevator, she noticed a strange expression on his face. When the doors closed, Jim suddenly pulled her to him. His hands traveled over her intimately. “Most of the last week just came back to me. I guess it was the elevator that triggered it.”
The suddenness of it all took her breath away. Her arms went around him, and she kissed him, wide-mouthed and deep. Her legs felt weak with a sudden flow of desire. With his left hand he raised her skirt, stroking the backs of her thighs, whispering in her ear. “Now that I can remember, I want to experience you in the present. I want to live those Polaroids all over again.”
“Two floors hardly gives us time.”
Jim sighed ruefully. “I know that.”
“You’re just going to have to wait.”
The elevator doors opened. Semple took Jim by the hand. “Let’s go and see about Doc.”
They stepped out into the tenth-floor corridor, and were immediately confronted by two men walking toward them. One was an elderly transvestite in a bottle-green, satin cocktail dress that was a harmonic disaster with his sallow, heavy-jowled complexion and pet pug face. It also didn’t help that he hadn’t shaved in two days and one of his false eyelashes was missing. He was walking clumsily bowlegged in high-heeled pumps, while counting a large number of plastic gold coins into a patent leather purse. The other man was tall with the tentatively obsequious look of a longtime companion and flunky. When all of the coins were safely stowed in the bag, the transvestite glanced at his companion with a grin of unpleasant self-congratulation. “I think we got out of there just in time.”
“You know they were letting you win, Edgar.”
The transvestite looked around testily. “Of course they were letting me win. You think I’m a fool? They always let me win. Even here, they’re still afraid of me.”
As Jim and Semple passed the pair, Jim quickly leaned close and whispered, “Do you know who they are?”
Semple shook her head. “No, should I?”
“It’s J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson.”
“Here in Hell?”
“Can you think of a better place for them?”
Jim stopped walking and half turned. His face was angry and set. “I really ought to do something about that bastard.”
Semple frowned. “Like what?”
“Like punch him clear out to the pods, like payback for all the good people he fucked and fucked over.”
“We ought to be focusing on getting Doc out of the poker game.”
Hoover and Tolson were waiting for the elevator. Hoover glanced at Jim with an expression of routine contempt. Jim clenched his fists. “It’d give me a fuck of a lot of satisfaction to know I’d put J. Edgar Hoover’s lights out.”
“There’s got to be worse than him running around the Afterlife.”
“Not many.”
“We really don’t have the time. We have to concentrate on Doc. That’s what Danbhala La Flambeau said.”
***
The five-card stud was cutthroat and Doc Holliday was running on pills and fear. His lungs felt raw from too many cigars; he suspected they might be bleeding again. The various kinds of dope he’d taken were clashing with the alcohol; he was developing an epic headache from staring at the cards. His frock coat was hanging over the back of his chair, long since shucked off, sweat soaked the armpits of his evening shirt, and the lace ruffles were wilting. The game had been going on for longer than he could remember, and he knew he was in well over his head. This in itself was no big thing. He’d been in a hundred previous games-more if you counted lifeside-in which the waters had threatened to close over him. What made this one different was that Lucifer seemed to be playing for keeps. In the old days, the Prince of Darkness would have been looking for souls to come into the pot: these days, since souls no longer signified, he was into pieces of minds and memory when the chips were really down. Already one player, a bizarro in a silver suit who called himself the Saber-Toothed Kid, was lying in the back room alternately catatonic and whimpering, having anted up the connections to a selection of synapses on a marker to Lucifer when he’d been cleaned out of ready cash chasing a busted flush. No one seriously expected the Saber-Toothed Kid to recover, although the question of what to do with him when the game was over had yet to be resolved. Doc had toyed with the idea of maybe selling the Kid as a warm body to Hoover and Tolson, but had kept it to himself. It was likely others might join the bizarro before the conclusion finally came to pass.
Not that Doc was, as yet, reduced to such dire straits as parting with segments of his brain as collateral. He still had a reasonable poke of coin remaining, but he knew the vise was tightening. The amateurs and thrill-seekers had long since been whittled away; the ones who only wanted to tell the story of how they’d been there, lost their rolls, and departed. Hoover had left with Tolson, his nonplaying boyfriend, in tow-and a considerable winning poke, as was always his wont. That left just five of them at the table, and the game appeared destined to go to the death. What Doc had to do was ensure that the annihilation in question was someone’s other than his own, and this was where the fear came in. For the past few hours, he had been doing little more than holding his own. Each time his turn to deal came around, Lucifer would clamp a mechanic’s grip on the deck and spin out cards from the top, bottom, or middle, only able to cheat so overtly to the professional eye because he knew no one would have the stones to call him on it, in his own game, right there in Hell.
Lucifer was formidable in any form, but his current Ike Turner persona-processed Beatle wig and pencil mustache, ruffled disco shirt, diamond sleeve garters, open to the navel and revealing a weight of neck gold sufficient to carry him for at least three rounds of betting-gave him an ass-tightening edge. Anyone going up against him would be left in no doubt that they were finally down with the baddest in town. If anyone could match Lucifer, menace for menace, it was the inscrutable Kali, who sat directly to Lucifer’s left. Topless, as the Hindu goddess of death always appeared in statues and religious prints, with fully exposed blue-black breasts and ruby nipples, but with her extra arms retracted at the request of the other players, Kali had so far been playing an incredibly tight, nolose/no-win game, never going after any of the big rich pots. When Hoover had left, however, Kali had removed her crown of skulls, and Doc wondered if this was a sign that she was about to get serious.
Richard Nixon always played seriously, not to say deviously, but he only ever seemed to go in big-time when he was sure of his cards. So far, as revealed by the call, Nixon had yet to bluff in a major way, but with his shifting eyes, sweat beading his upper lip, and the five o’clock shadow moving toward eight or nine, it was almost impossible to guess what he was thinking. Like Kali, he had been tailgating the game most of the time, sweeping up the smaller pots to keep himself solvent but avoiding any protracted showdown with Doc or Lucifer. Doc had few worries about the final player. He was a stone-faced North Korean, a former secret policeman who had been reassigned from torturer to victim in Kim II Sung’s second-to-last purge. By all accounts, he had held out through over three weeks of physical and psychological horror before being slowly garroted by some of his former subordinates. Although a master of the implacable bluff, the secret policeman was essentially out of his league in present company, and Doc suspected he would be the next to go. His stack was already running grievously low, but Doc didn’t expect him to depart easily. Dour communist tenacity might well force him to risk his entire nervous system before he was closed out and forced to join the Saber-Toothed Kid babbling mindlessly in the adjoining room.