"Oh, yeah," Shad said. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a pill bottle. "I found these on the floor of the car. They would seem to be yours."
"Thanks." Croyd popped the top on the bottle and swallowed a mouthful of gel caps. "Wish I had Scotch for a chaser. Nothing like a Scotch after you've killed a bunch of people."
The last few days, Shad thought, didn't make him want to do anything other than kill his own thoughts.
Shad had followed every detail of Herzenhagen's plot through listening devices and phone taps. He and Croyd had ample opportunity to evolve their plan.
Gerard and her driver would be found dead, in the cemetery, in their limo, one rented by Herzenhagen. It had been an easy enough hit, Shad filling the car with darkness so that the jumper couldn't use her power. Forensics would determine that the gun was the same one that had been found under Herzenhagen when he was arrested. And Shad made sure, when he grappled with the old man on the ground, that he'd smeared the gun oil and gunpowder residue from his own hands onto those of the Shark, providing clear forensic evidence that it was Herzenhagen who had despatched the jumper and her driver.
"We get Rudo now, right?" Croyd said.
"As soon as he gets back to this country. In the meantime, maybe we can get some other names out of the Latchkey documents."
Unfortunately, the documents would require careful work. There was a lot of raw material; but all the money moved only in numbered accounts and the people were referred to only by code names. It was enough to keep a team of investigators busy for weeks.
Casaday. The General. Brandon. Names Herzenhagen had brought up on the tapes. If Shad could attach them to code names on the documents, maybe he'd have something.
And he really wanted to spend some time off the street anyway. Keep to himself, lose his prison self, find someone else to be.
Croyd's voice rapped out like shotgun pellets landing on a roof. "Hell with that, Gravemold. Hell with that. We fly to Kirghizia and scrag the bastard. Nothing easier." Croyd put a paternal hand on Shad's shoulder. "Stick with Croyd and his moral guidance, kid. I'll steer ya right." He laughed. "I called you Gravemold, didn't I? For some reason I can't get that name out of my mind."
Sit back, Shad thought, and let nature take its course.
Not everyone in the government was a Shark, and likewise the media. Shad hoped that enough furor had been created to generate any number of investigations. With luck Peggy Durand would turn state's witness. And if the investigations seemed to be dying down, Shad could start mailing the tapes he'd made, Herzenhagen and Durand and Hughes and the others. Or copies of the documents they'd taken from Latchkey.
Maybe Shad wouldn't have to do anything more except help Croyd take out Rudo. He owed Croyd that at least - and he owed Rudo, too, as far as that went.
"Kirghizia," Croyd said. "Lovely name." He opened his mouth as if to yawn, then shut it abruptly. "And you think we should look at documents when Rudo's on the loose?"
"Okay," Shad said. "Kirghizia it is."
"Documents. A lot you know about documents." Croyd gave a grin. "I know something you don't know." He reached for the pill bottie again, popped the lid, swallowed another couple gel tabs. "Off-the-street crap," he muttered. "This shit's gotta be cut with something. The only speed you get on the street nowadays is smuggled up from Mexico or crystal meth people make in garbage cans. Not like when the pharmaceutical companies - "
"What is it, Croyd?" Shad asked.
Croyd smiled expansively, stretched, stopped another yawn. "I remember the good old days of speed. You could get anything - Black Beauties, desoxyn in all those pretty colors ..."
"What is it you know," Shad spelled out, "about the documents that I don't know?"
Croyd chuckled. "Oh. Your old buddy Hartmann."
"What about him? Did you find something that said what he was up to?"
"See, there was this log of the jumps they were doing, and I kind of paged through it. Started with putting Mistral back into her body just after the Rox, and then going on to ..."
He yawned.
"Going on to what?" Shad said. An ominous warning was sounding in his nerves.
"Going on to Hartmann. They jumped him." Croyd laughed lazily. "You got the wrong guy. It was your buddy Battle you killed."
"You bastard!" Shad pounded the steering wheel while Croyd laughed on. The horn went off again. Shad clamped his hands on the wheel and spoke through clenched teeth. "You didn't tell me?"
"I didn't want you running back up to New York when we were having such fun here in DC."
"So what happened to Hartmann? They killed him, right?"
"No. They jumped him into this puny little joker body, looked like a chrome yellow cartoon character, and he escaped." Croyd yawned and closed his eyes. "The Sharks are supposed to shoot him on sight. There's a description in the book." He tapped his jacket. "Got it right here. I'll show it to you," he yawned again, "once we get to Kirghizia."
"I don't think we're going to Kirghizia, Croyd."
"Oh yeah?" Croyd licked his lips and pillowed his head against the headrest. "Why's that?"
"Because of the drugs you've been taking."
"Heh. I'm a pro, man. Don't wony. My liver is safe."
"It isn't your liver I'm talking about. It's the fact that I emptied the crystal meth out of those capsules of yours and filled them with Dalmane."
Croyd dragged his eyes open. "That's a tranquilizer!"
"Yep."
"You ..." he yawned again, "bastard!"
"Word, man."
Croyd was asleep. Shad dragged the documents out of Croyd's jacket, read furiously as the traffic inched its way toward Washington. Then he began to laugh.
Gregg Hartmann was stuck in the body of a three-foot-tall joker with bad eyesight and the voice of a ruptured countertenor. Puppetman's powers had to have died with Hartmann's original body. Every Shark in the world had orders to kill Hartmann on sight. And since Shad had just killed the last jumper on the planet, Hartmann was going to stay in the joker body for the rest of his life.
If you could call it living.
Shad tossed the documents on Croyd's lap and laughed. The Sharks had done Shad's job for him, had engineered a vengeance on Hartmann that was better than anything Shad could ever have done.
And if Hartmann the joker ever surfaced, maybe Shad could contrive a few additional disappointments for him. Just to remind him of who he was, and what he'd done, and what he'd deserved.
Yeah, he thought. Just like he'd said all along.
Let nature take its course.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Black Trump.
The word repeated itself in Herzenhagen's mind. Something to concentrate on as he sat on his bunk and watched the shadows of the bars form patterns on his cell wall.
Black Trump.
Herzenhagen wasn't talking, even to his own lawyer, would let the man fight the accusations without his help. Because sooner or later the Shark mission would be fulfilled, and then it didn't matter what happened to Herzenhagen.
Black Trump.
Only a matter of time.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the Act
Falls the Shadow.
- T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
The Color of His Skin
Part 6
Gregg waited a week. That wasn't really his intention: it was his body's fault.
He had to molt.
Only a few hours after he'd decided to call Rudo, he had a sudden, instinctive urge to find a private, dark place. Not long after he'd pulled aside a loose grating and slithered down into the New York sewer system, pieces of skin had begun the long, slow process of peeling away. Molting felt like having the worst sunburn in the world. Every moment of it was agony: scraping against the rough stone walls to help the skin loosen, the raw new layers burning for hours until they hardened, more layers sloughing off in long streamers.