"Great, Doc." Jerry didn't want to sound angry, but he was. "Thanks for calling."
"I'm sorry, Jeremiah. I did what I thought was best."
"I know. Good-bye. " Jerry hung up and flipped through his Rolodex for Jay Ackroyd's number. Maybe Jay could get a lead. If not, it was out of Jerry's hands.
Jerry sat on the couch in his projection room, massaging his crotch. He'd watched the first half of Jokertown, but had stopped when Nicholson got his nose slit. It was just too damn depressing. He'd popped in a porn video, but it wasn't doing much for his morale, either. He had another porn movie, jokers and Blondes, but that might be a little weird for his taste.
He turned off the TV and sighed. He'd had a couple of shots of whiskey and his brain felt as soft as his penis was hard. He thought of Kenneth and Beth upstairs, probably fucking like weasels. "Enjoy yourselves. Don't think of poor, old Jerry. Have an orgasm for me."
He'd considered sneaking up to their bedroom door and listening on several occasions, but had never actually done it. Maybe tonight would be the night. He got his feet under him, wandered into the living room and up the stairs. He stopped at the top and steadied himself on the banister. Beth was probably a great fuck. It would be consistent with her character. She was great at everything else. He took a step toward their bedroom door.
No, he thought, you're not that far gone yet. It's none of your damn business. Shame on you.
Jerry turned and headed for the upstairs bathroom. He quickly stripped and turned on the shower. The water was cold, like the air outside, but it didn't seem to help.
Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing by Victor Milan
The tall man opened his mouth and said, "Beware. There is danger here."
Mark Meadows swayed like a radio mast in a high wind, sat down on the hood of a black stretch limo parked in front of the store to wait the dizziness out. It had been a woman's voice, tinted with Asian accent like ginger flakes.
The slim, blond twelve-year-old girl with him watched him closely, concerned but not afraid. She'd seen these spells before.
He looked up and down the block. Fitz-James O'Brien Street was about the same as always. This fringe of the Village had grown rougher the last few years. But so had the world. And people left him pretty much alone.
He had friends.
You guys are getting pretty restless, he thought. He felt furtive stirrings in the back of his brain, but no more words came unbidden.
Deciding her father was all right, the girl began to swing pendulumlike on her father's arm, chanting, "We're home, Daddy, we're home." Her voice was that of a four-year-old. The rest of her was twelve.
He gazed down at her. A rush of love suffused him like a hit of windowpane. He pulled her close, hugged her, and stood.
"Yeah, Sprout. Home." He opened the door beneath the smiling hand-painted sun and the legend COSMIC PUMPKIN-FOOD FOR BODY, MIND amp;
SPIRIT.
Inside was cool and almost dark. It used to be sunny in here on spring days like this, but that was when there was still plate glass in the windows instead of plywood sheets. The sound system was on, tuned by one of his clerks to one of those New Age easy-listening stations popular with people who spend their evenings watching Koyaanisqatsi on remote-programmable VCRs. A little thin for even Mark's blood, but at the moment better than the usual fare: Bonnie Raitt, something recent with a soft ska beat.
Good business for midafternoon, he thought, with the reflex twinge of guilt he got any time he had such commercial thoughts. A small guy with a fleshy, pointy nose and a silklike jacket with a strip-club logo on the back was haunting the glass-top counter that displayed the dope paraphernalia the Pumpkin was carrying until the inevitable Crusading DA finally got around to cracking down. He seemed to be thinking of hitting on one of Mark's stumpy, brush-cut clerks, who was sweeping the floor behind the deli counter with muttering bad grace and shooting him hate looks. She gave Mark one, too, when she noticed him. He was a man; this was all his fault.
A handful of even less descript types sat at tables hunched over racing forms and steaming cups of Red Zinger tea. A tall dark-haired woman stood at the comic rack with her back to him, looking at a reprint of an early Freak Brothers classic. The DA was after those, too. Mark put a hand back around to where his long blond hair, more ash now than straw, was gathered into a blue elastic tie. It was too tight, and pulled at random patches of his scalp like doll hands. Nineteen years this spring he'd been wearing his hair long, and he still hadn't gotten the hang of tying back a ponytail.
Absently he noticed that the woman was well dressed to be grazing the undergrounds. Usually the customers in pricey threads scrupulously confined their attentions to his sprouts-and-tofu cuisine.
His daughter chirped, "Auntie Brenda," and went running back to give the clerk a hug. The tall man smiled ruefully. He could never tell his clerks apart. They both thought he was a weed, anyway.
Then the well-dressed woman turned and looked at him with violet eyes and said, quietly, "Mark."
It felt as if one of the youthful football jocks who had been the curse of his adolescence had just chop-blocked his pelvis out from under his spine.
"Sunflower," he managed to say through a throat gone as pliable as an airshaft.
He heard the squeak-scruff of his daughter's sneakers on stained linoleum behind him. A moment of silence hung in the air, stretching gradually, agonizingly, like a taffy strand. Then Sprout boiled past and threw herself at the woman, hugging her with all the strength of her thin arms.
"Mommy."
The rat-faced man slid out of the booth and walked up to Mark. He had wet-looking black eyes and a mustache that looked as if it had been carelessly dabbed on in mascara. Mark blinked at him, very carefully, as if his eyes were fragile and might break.
The smaller man thrust a packet of papers into his hand. "See you in court, buppie," he said, and sidled out the door.
Mark stared down at the papers. Freewheeling, his mind registered official-looking seals and the phrase determine custody of their daughter, Sprout.
And the other customers came boiling up from their checkered cheesecloth tables as if tied to the same string, stuck big black cameras in Mark's face, and blasted him back into the door with their strobes.
His vision full of big swarming balloons of light, Mark staggered into the little bathroom and threw up in the toilet beneath the Jimi Hendrix poster. Fortunately the poster was laminated.
Kimberly Anne slid into the limousine by feel, watching the Pumpkin's front door with bruised-looking eyes. Around the fringes of the plywood she could see the photographers' flashguns spluttering like an arc welder.
"Poor mark," she whispered. She turned with mascara beginning to melt down one cheek.
"Is it really necessary to put him through all this?" The backseat's other occupant regarded her with eyes as pale and dispassionate as a shark's. "It is," he said, "if you want your daughter back."
She stared at fingers knotted in her lap. "More than anything," she said, just audibly.
"Then you must be ready to pay the price, Mrs. Gooding."
"My advice to you, Or. Meadows," Dr. Pretorius said, leaning back and cracking the knuckles of his big, callused hands, "is to go underground."
Mark stared at the lawyer's hands. They didn't seem to fit with the rest of him, which was a pretty unorthodox picture to start with. You didn't expect hands like that on a lawyer, even a long-haired one, especially not resting above a gold watch-chain catenary on the vest of a thousanddollar charcoal-gray suit. They jarred. Just like fording the cream wallpaper and walnut-wainscoted elegance of Pretorius's office in a second-floor walk-up in what the tabloids liked to call the festering depths of Jokertown. Or like the strange tang like pus-filled bandages that seemed to stick in the back of Mark's nose.