Joey gave her an annoyed look. “Fuck no. Christ on a crutch, why would I do somethin’ like that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you wanted to unburden yourself. Feel less guilty.”
“I don’t feel guilty about nothin’ I do.”
“Then why didn’t you tell her?”
“You know why,” Joey replied. “She sat here for a year waiting for you to wake up. She kept your parents away long as she fucking could, considerin’ she don’t have no rights. And she did it expecting nothin’.” Joey shook her head. “You and me, we’re alike. We’re used to having to look out for ourselves. Juliet, she don’t know how to do that. She loves you and that means putting everything else aside to take care of you.”
“I suppose you know more about my girlfriend than I do,” Michelle snapped.
“Yeah, I do.” Joey slouched down in her chair. Juliet had gone out for coffee and beignets and it was the first time Michelle and Joey had been alone.
“Oh, my God. You’re sleeping with her!”
“Jesus, you are one crazy bitch. No, but it ain’t because I didn’t want to. You just don’t know a thing about Ink, do you? Fuck me all to hell.” Joey jumped up from her chair and grabbed her gimme cap. “I’m gonna go see if she needs some help with those doughnuts.”
Michelle fumed. She wanted to run after Joey. To tell her she was wrong. That she did so understand Juliet. But she was still too big. And then there were those damn bubbles. They went on and on and on…
Jokertown
Manhattan, New York
The famous bowery wild Card Dime Museum was a short ride on the subway. Ellen spent the time looking out the windows at the speed-blurred concrete and the darkness. She had a slight smile on her face, and a sense of peace that was almost postcoital, though Bugsy knew for a fact it wasn’t.
He knew what it was. “How’s Nick?” he asked.
Ellen took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The hat itself is a little the worse for wear. It’s strange having him back again. I still can’t quite…”
Ellen’s voice got thick for a moment. She hadn’t expected to get Nick back. He’d died before she’d met him, and with the physical locus she used to channel him gone, she’d thought he was gone again. She’d been in the middle of mourning him.
Now he was back, and she had spent most of the last day communing with him-bringing him up-to-date, sharing confidences, no doubt telling funny stories about Bugsy and Aliyah and that one time when the FedEx guy opened the apartment door when they were in flagrante in the kitchen.
There was something basically unnerving about hearing the same mouth you kissed when you were making time with your girl laughing about you in a man’s voice.
The subway reached their station, and Bugsy and Cameo ascended into the light.
Jokertown made up a section of Manhattan small enough to walk across in half a morning. It was also a different world. In the pale sun of early morning, two jokers jogged slowly down the street, one half mastodon half insect, the other with the body of a beautiful woman and the head of an oversized horse fly. But they were talking about Tara Reid’s latest fashion blunder, so maybe it wasn’t such a different world after all.
On one of the city buses that stopped to let out its cargo of freaks and misfits, a teenage girl was weeping. The cell phone pressed to her ear let out squeaks and buzzes, making words in no known language. An old man still drunk from the previous night urinated in an alley, his penis talking in a high, gargling voice of its own about imagined sexual conquests. A bat the size of a rottweiler with the face of a twelve-year-old Chinese girl flapped desperately, trying to catch up with a distant school bus. The coffee shops filled with the morning press of men, women, and who-the-hell-knew all grabbing a cup of joe and a corn muffin on their way to work while a neon-blue man in the back booth sucked down eight breakfasts, the plates stacking up beside him higher than his head.
Bugsy and Cameo crossed in front of a slow-moving delivery truck and went into the museum. The place smelled like old french fries and mildew, but it looked like the best secondhand shop ever. Display cases were filled with oddments and curios. A waxwork Peregrine stood in the corner in the same pose and outfit as the copy of Aces framed behind her. The joker at the counter could have been a man or a woman. The long face was something between a melted candle and road rash. Thick, ropey arms spilled out of a Yankees jersey. “Cameo!” it said.
“Jason,” Ellen said, smiling. “It’s been a while. How’s Annie?”
“The same,” the joker said, spreading his splayed, tumor-budding hands in a gesture that meant Women. Whatcha gonna do? “What can we do you for today?”
“My friend here is doing some research. People’s Park riot.”
“The what?”
“Apparently there was a riot in People’s Park in 1969,” Bugsy said.
“Could have been,” the joker agreed. “I was two, so chances are I wouldn’t remember.”
“Thomas Marion Douglas was there,” Ellen said.
“The Lizard King? Oh, fuck yeah. We’ve got crates of stuff on him.” The joker squinted, scratched himself, and nodded. “None of that’s on display anymore. The whole sixties rock thing we don’t put up unless there’s a revival or something going on. But… yeah. I think we’ve maybe got something back in the newsreels, too.”
“Anything you’ve got would be great,” Ellen said.
The joker held up a disjointed finger. One minute. He disappeared into the shadowy back of the museum. Bugsy walked around slowly, taking in the hundreds of small items and pictures. A poster for Golden Boy, the movie where the ace had gotten his name back before he got tangled up with McCarthy. Weird to think it was the same guy Bugsy had seen in Hollywood two years before. He looked just the same. Still pictures from the Rox War. A cheesy pot-metal action figure of The Great and Powerful Turtle, the grooves in the top making it look like a hand grenade cut along its length.
“I love this place,” Ellen said.
A dress Water Lily had worn. A copy of an arrest warrant for Fortunato. A metallic green feather off one of Dr. Tachyon’s hats. A solid two dozen pictures along one wall, each of them different, and all of them Croyd Crenson. “It’s a trip,” Bugsy said.
The joker stepped out of the shadows and motioned them in. The dim back office was stuffed to the ceiling with cardboard boxes and piles of paper. A ten-inch color monitor perched on the desk. It showed an image of a newscaster in the pale, washed-out colors that Bugsy associated with 1970s television.
“That’s the footage I was thinking about,” the joker said. “I’ve got a wash towel from his last concert in the box there. We got it off eBay a couple years ago, so it might be bullshit, but it’s the only thing I’m sure he’d have worn after the People’s Park thing.”
“You’re great, Jason,” Ellen said.
“I try,” the joker said with a sloping, awkward grin.
Bugsy squatted down, found the remote, and started the video playing. There he was. Thomas Marion Douglas. He was shouting at a crowd, exhorting them. A line of National Guardsmen stood shoulder to shoulder, facing him. This was before the advent of the mirrored face guard, so Bugsy could make out the nervous expressions on the soldiers.
Something loud happened. The reporter ducked, and the camera spun. A Volkswagen Bug was in flames. The camera pulled back to an armored personnel carrier, Thomas Marion Douglas on the upper deck, twisting the barrel as if it were nothing. The Browning came off the APC, and Douglas held it up over his head, bending it almost double.
“Watch this part,” the joker said. “This is great.”
The Lizard King bent down and hauled someone in a uniform out of the carrier. The poor nat kicked his legs in the air, and the Lizard King went down.
“Wait!” Bugsy said, poking at the buttons on the remote. “What happened?”
The joker lifted the remote from his hands and the images streamed backward. Frame by frame, they went through it. The burning car. The broken APC. The captain plucked out like the good bits of an oyster. And then the blurred arc of something moving fast. Thomas Marion Douglas’s head flew forward and to the right, and he went down like he was boneless.
The man who stood where the Lizard King had been wore work overalls and a hard hat. A long iron wrench was in his hand. The guy was huge, but seemed to be shrinking. “Go home!” the previous generation’s Hardhat
