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Zoe tried to slip in quietly, but they were already awake. Anne, in her chenille bathrobe, sat in the kitchen drinking coffee. Bjorn, always warm in his fur, wore seersucker jogging pants. He paced back and forth, blowing on a cup of chamomile tea.
"Wups. You heard me leave, didn't you?" Zoe asked.
"No," Anne said. "But we worried, a little, when we found you were gone. I have to admit I'm - concerned - about this cancer thing, Zoe. That's why I woke up, I guess."
"Mother. The clinic. You can't go there." Zoe put Dutton's folder on the kitchen table. She shrugged out of her windbreaker and sat down. "Momma, you've got to go to Jerusalem instead."
"It's that bad is it?" Anne asked.
"I fear for you."
"Bad times have come and gone," Bjorn said.
"This is different. Maybe the Sharks are real, maybe they aren't. But until this craziness is over, I want you safe."
Bjorn sat down. He looked mean and big. It was just his fur standing on end, but it did make him look scary.
"You're right, daughter. I'm afraid that this time you are right. We'll go."
"Good. I want you to call a travel agency and book tickets to Jerusalem for you and Anne. And get me the price of tickets from New York to Saigon. I'm going to be buying quite a few."
"Quite a few?" Anne asked.
"I can't leave yet, not with this grand jury nonsense. But the latents who work for me - pardon me, that's who worked for me - they can get out. I've got to talk to them. Damn. What time is it?"
"Don't swear, darling. It's six."
"I can get to Maria's place before she goes to work. I need to talk to people face to face. Can I shower first, daddy?"
"Don't stay in all day, is all I ask. I've got to walk my route, you know."
"You're not going to the clinic with momma?" Zoe asked.
"Last time I was in the clinic, I ended up getting married," Bjorn said. "Anne says for me not to come."
True. He had come to the labor room and waited through Zoe's birth. "Must be mine," he'd said to the delivery room nurses. "Look at that red hair." Father Squid had married them while the nurse on duty had stitched up Anne's episiotomy. The doc had been attending a transformation crisis and hadn't made it into the room until later. It had been, Anne said, a typical night at the Jokertown clinic.
Zoe got her shower and came back to the kitchen. Bjorn, his bifocals perched far down his nose, turned over the last page of the morning Times and looked up at her. "Daughter? I don't want you to use your money for these tickets."
"I can't desert these people! I know that most of them don't have the cash to get out! I can't just watch them get slaughtered! Daddy - "
He stared at her with his "I won't take this nonsense from you, young lady" expression. "You need your money for your lawyers. Your mother and I have been talking. I have a savings account that isn't part of the pension. It just might cover the costs on this rescue of yours."
"It will leave you with no safety margin."
"I'm old. Your mother isn't so young. These workers of yours are young, and some of them have children. Let's get them out of here."
"You've always said not to run away from problems," Zoe said.
"Running away can be the only good choice, sometimes. This looks like one of those times."
"I can't let you do this," Zoe said.
"Since when, young lady, have you begun to decide what your parents can and cannot do?"
"Since never. Thank you, daddy." Zoe bent down and hugged him, hard. She hid her face against his chest, afraid that he would see her thoughts, and what she was thinking was - Daddy's contribution gives me a little more slack. Needles, Jellyhead, Jimmy, Jimmy and Jan, you're getting out, too.
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He just wasn't what she'd expected. Maybe she wasn't what he'd expected; the short little man took a step backward, his hand still firmly on the hotel room's doorknob, and looked her up and down. This was the Great and Powerful Turtle? This graying, paunchy, blue-collar nerd? She knew he'd written Shell Games, the Turtle's story, himself, even if it had been published with an "as told to" name. She'd caught a glimpse of him on Arsenio once, but the cameras hadn't given her the leprechaun look of him. He wore chinos that were baggy in the butt, and a rust-colored shirt, some sort of brocade. But he looked like he'd be happier in a coverall, one with "Turtle" embroidered in red over the left pocket.
"Mr. Tudbury?"
"You're Zoe, right?"
"Yes."
"Come on in. Charles Dutton just called. Good thing he did, too. I was ready to call this off. Dutton made me change my mind." He waved her toward a table by the window, stacked with the remnants of a room service breakfast - for two. No bed, the room held a couch and end tables, and a desk with a laptop and modem.
"Want some coffee?" he asked. "Lemme get a clean cup, there's one on the dresser."
"Uh, I didn't mean to intrude ..."
"You're not intruding." He ducked into the bedroom of the suite and came back with the promised cup. "Danny's in the shower." He poured coffee for her, indicated the sugarbowl and the cream pitcher, and sat down with a definitive thump, as if he planned to stay in his chair all day.
"I got another hate call this morning. The hotel usually screens the calls pretty well, but this was a real nut case. Gave the right names, you know, and then it turns out to be some fanatic who insists that the shell's forcefield, whatever that might be, made his roses die. He'll probably sue. They all do."
Turtle projected a sense of restless energy. He wasn't doing real well with eye contact. "It could have been worse," he said, as if he were talking to himself. "It could have been someone who lost someone on the Rox. To save people I loved, I killed people I loved. That's a bitch. That's such a bitch." He stared out at the bricks outside the window until Zoe thought he'd forgotten she was there. The shower kept running, and CNN's electronic ta-da-da-dat! came from the bedroom. "My old friend Charles says you want to be a hero. Do you?"
"No!"
"That's good. Only fools want to be heroes." When he smiled, he was a different person. "What do you want, then?"
"Mr. Dutton thinks you can help me learn to use my ace."
"Ace, huh. What makes you think you're an ace?"
"I've got a power. I can't use it when I want to. I tried so hard to pass as a nat that I guess it just got ... repressed or something."
"I'm not a shrink," Turtle said.
"No. You're an ace. How could I trust a shrink with this?"
"Good question. What's wrong with being a nat?" Turtle asked.
"Nothing!"
He was looking away again, and she feared she had lost him; he looked as if he were thinking about showing her to the door. "I've lost my company. My VP has framed me with an embezzlement charge. My father lost his pension because he's a joker. The feds are about to put jokers in fucking concentration camps! And maybe this shit about the Card Sharks is fake, or maybe it's real, but if it's real, it must be stopped. About the only asset I have left is a little wild card power that I can only use when I'm scared to death, and it's not any help because I don't know how to use it!"
His guarded look was replaced by one of wry amusement. "Embezzlement, huh? I've only been stuck with insurance fraud myself. So far."
"But I didn't embezzle anything."
"You don't look the type."
"I'm not the type."
"You look like a total yuppie. I'm not comfortable around yuppies."
"I'm sorry."
"You're sorry. You've got money problems, is all I've heard so far. Money problems! Let me tell you about money problems. I've got the IRS on my ass, the City of New York wants me to fix the Brooklyn Bridge, the feds want the Statue of Liberty put back, on my tab, and that's only the money part! That doesn't even begin to get close to what I did to those jokers on the Rox!"