He buttoned his shirt, looked up at her. "Don't tell them about me."
Her look was scornful. "What, kind of person do you think I am?"
"I'm here to tell you I'm not going to hurt you, okay? I know you're not the enemy."
"Violet wasn't the enemy. She went off the roof anyway."
"I didn't push her."
"That doesn't mean it wasn't your fault."
Shad didn't have an answer for that one. "741-PINE," he said. "Leave messages. I'll get them eventually, and I want to know you're okay. But I don't live by the phone. You can't trust it in an emergency." He looked at her hopelessly. "If someone pushes you off a roof, I can't help."
Her look was slitted, hidden. Like someone gazing out from behind a hundred years of hard time. She sighed, reached out, touched him. Became Shelley for a little while. "I won't shop you," she said. "You helped. I'd still be a joker if it wasn't for you."
He put his arms around her and held her close. Her life had turned nightmare, and she wanted it all back, the youth and beauty and trust fund. Maybe she'd get it.
What she would never get back was that miraculous innocence, the racing exuberant joy.
And they both knew it.
Two days later, Shad was ready. He had the jumpers scoped out, knew their movements, knew that things were as ready as they'd ever be. Shelley hadn't called him, but every day that went by was another day in which she could decide to rejoin the jumpers, and he wanted to make his move in the interim.
The only delay had been caused by the building's alarm systems. The warehouse had new state-of-the-art alarms, but the building had first got electricity a century ago, and the junction box in the alley out back was a spaghetti maze of hundreds of different-colored dusty old wires. It had taken Shad nineteen hours of work, crouched twelve feet off the ground as he worked with his meter and alligator clips, before he had the proper wires isolated. He was lucky it hadn't taken weeks. All he had to do, come the proper moment, was bypass the alarms with current from a six-volt battery, and then it would be time to rock and roll.
He decided to move early the next morning, when any guards would be tired and maybe asleep. He went to his apartment off Gramercy Park and watched the news and played Cannonball Adderley's Savoy Sessions and tried to sleep.
At four in the morning, he got up, went to the wardrobe, and unlocked it. He got out a heavy belt and a bunch of gear and laid them out on the carpet. Then looked at the clothing, all the identities lined up on the rack awaiting his habitation. His eyes drifted to the Black Shadow costume: the navy-blue jumpsuit, the black cloak, the domino mask.
The costume sang to him of readiness, and he felt his soul answer.
There was a chalk drawing on the wall next to the junction box. It showed only the junction box blown up to enormous size, its mass of wires rendered in bright, almost surrealistic detail, with a giant pair of hands working with alligator clips and a voltage meter.
Shad found his nerves keening again, his head gymballing madly as he looked for the street artist, but he knew she was long gone.
The cloak floated about him as he crouched on the wall next to the junction box and attached his homemade bypass box to the alarm system. He took a cellular phone from his belt, dialed 911, and told the police that there were jumpers holed up with their loot in the warehouse and that they had captives in there. He finished by saying that he'd heard shots fired and that they'd better cordon off the neighborhood and get a team ready to send in.
"Give me your name, sir," the operator insisted. "Black Shadow."
Why the hell not?
Shad hung the phone on his belt and walked up the wall of the warehouse. Night spilled from his cloak, raced through the sky. He sucked photons until the darkness billowed out ten yards in all directions, until his nerves sang with pleasure. He picked the lock on the roof access and went down a fluted nineteenth-century cast-iron staircase. Torn, graffitiscarred wallboard revealed crumbling red brick and slabs of unreclaimed asbestos.
Below, on the upper floor of the warehouse, were the tiger cages.
It looked like a brainwashing academy out of The Manchurian Candidate. Solid prefabricated metal-walled cells had been built and riveted together, each with a single steel door and a slot though which food could be passed. The cells were open on top and screened with metal mesh. Catwalks lay atop the mesh so that sentries could march along them and peer down at the inmates. Each cell was equipped with a cot, a mattress, a washbasin, a pitcher of water, and a slop pail. February cold filled the place; the prisoners were wrapped in blankets and secondhand winter clothing. Spotlights juryrigged to the graceful brick arches of the roof kept the prisoners in perpetual daylight. Cameras peered down from above. There was a stairway and a pair of empty freightelevator shafts that led to the floor below.
The smell was not good.
Shad saw two guards, both jokers. One, a slouched figure in a hooded cloak, paced atop the cages and carried an AK complete with bayonet, while another, a slab-sided gray skinned elephant man, drowsed naked in a chair to one side of the cages, sitting in front of a collection of electronic equipment that looked as if it had been kludged together by Victor von Frankenstein: video monitors, rheostats, switches, red and green Christmas-tree lights, Lord knew what. Both sentries were wearing shades against the glaring light.
The thing Shad found most pleasing about this setup was that there were a lot of photons to rip off.
He covered himself in darkness, inverted himself, and walked along the ceiling until he was over the cages. Most of the people in them were lying down, trying to sleep, arms thrown across their eyes to cut off the incessant light. Most were jokers, many badly deformed. One of them wore a straitjacket and was chained to the door of her cell. Little rhythmic moans came from her slitlike mouth.
The ones they couldn't afford to let go. People like Shelley they could release after a few days, but not Nelson Dixon or the city comptroller. Not the ones with access to accounts they could loot forever.
Shad looked down at the joker guard and felt certainty filling him like a swarm of buzzing photons. He'd hidden himself away, turned himself into other people. No Dice,
Wall Walker, Simon, other phantoms of his imagination or of the street. All dealing with penny-ante shit. Now he was himself again, working on something worthy of his time. Readiness filled him like a welcome draft of springwater.
Photons dopplered along his nerves at the speed of light. The joker guard was right below him. Shad dropped from the ceiling, turned himself upright in air, and landed just behind the guard. The wire mesh boomed. One hand twitched the hood off the joker's head and jerked him backward, the other drove a palm heel into the joker's mastoid. There was a nasty sound of bone caving in. The joker fell onto the mesh with a crash like a falling tree. Shad didn't figure he was dead, but of course skull fractures were unpredictable. And Shad was already on his way to the other guard.
The elephant man had come awake and was staring at Shad, blinking hard, shading his eyes against the glaring light and trying to make out what had just happened in the boiling cloud of darkness that had dropped atop his cages. It was far too late to do anything by the time he realized that the cloud of darkness was heading for him.
The cape crackled in Shad's ears as he sprang off the tiger cages and landed on the joker's chest with both booted feet. The chair went over backwards, and both Shad and the joker spilled to the floor. Shad rose to his feet and considered his handiwork. The elephant man was flat out of the picture, half his ribs broken, blood oozing from a scalp wound where the back of his head had hit the floor.
"Hey! Hey! Let me out!" The voice boomed in the huge room. Apparently one of the captives had noticed that his guard had been flattened right over his head.