Bad luck, bad luck is killin' me:
I just can't stand no more of this third degree.—Traditional blues lyric
Oh my love, forgive me! I have failed you utterly; I cannot even cry out at your murder—lest all the world be lost and your death unavenged . . .
Cold black despair saturated my heart. My luck was gone now, gone with my heart. Now The Miner would check my pulse to make sure I was dead, and when he saw I was not he would put one into my mouth to make sure . . .
There was a brief fumbling sound, and then I heard the safety catch of my gun snap closed. The gun landed on the floor with a sound so loud and unexpected I barely suppressed the flinch.
He had no stomach for firing a make-sure shot into the mouth of someone he knew damn well was dead. He had aimed three shots at my chest, and was too ignorant to know how astonishing it was that he had actually hit a target that size with a handgun from ten feet.
A ladder groaned softly under weight. I hoped it was the one to the manhole exit. If it was the one to the inspection plate, if he were going to try and repair his radio trigger now, then he would probably decide to take my flashlight with him when he left, and that would be bad.
I heard him grunt hugely with effort, and the manhole cover came free. Faint light spilled down into the chamber. Excellent. Either he had done whatever he could with the bomb before waking me for a chat, or he had written it off in his haste to quit the scene of his debut murders. He scrambled from the chamber, and wrestled the manhole cover into place behind him.
I sat up at once and looked around.
With an immense effort, I suppressed all emotion. I considered the tactical situation with icy dispassion, from the kind of Olympian perspective from which the slaughter of my beloved was a trivial sidebar. How badly was our cause damaged?
The Miner was now very likely to advance his plans, go public with his mines in advance of his target date. That was bad. I knew nothing useful about him that I had not known in Lady Sally's office. That was bad. In order to have any hope at all of salvaging the situation, it was imperative that I get free at once and tail him.
Assets within reach: a flashlight. If I didn't mind working in darkness, I could have three D-size batteries. No, wait, here was something really useful, almost within reach: a drop cloth.
That fucking toolbox was probably bulging with things far more precious than rubies. It was more than a body length out of reach.
I inspected the angled bracing bar I was double-cuffed to. At either end it was set into a retaining collar a good inch deep. I strained at it experimentally until spots swam before my eyes, but I knew there was no way I was going to snap off something meant to help support that mammoth pipe.
A bell rang in the back of my mind. John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee had faced a situation like this once. Cuffed to an angled bracing bar in the bow of his houseboat, as I recalled. I had tools analogous to the ones he had used. Maybe even better . . .
I studied the situation. The concrete truss was shaped like what an antique naval cannon sits on. On either side there was a transverse rectangular hole about two inches by four all the way through the concrete. I would guess they were there to accommodate some kind of girder that hadn't been used in that chamber. They were just where I needed them.
Hurry!
I only had to strain my cuffed arms half out of their sockets to get hold of the drop cloth. Working awkwardly behind myself, I got it folded once cattycorner and twisted into a crude rope. With even more difficult contortions I worked an end of it through the hole in the truss, tied a secure knot, led the bigger end over the bracing bar. There was just enough to reach back down to the knot at the truss again. I tied it off as tight and as securely as I could manage. Now for a lever. The only thing within reach was the flashlight. I plucked apart the two strands of taut drop cloth in the middle of their span from truss to bar, tucked the flashlight in between them, and began winding the drop cloth like a rubber band.
In theory, what had worked for Travis McGee should work for an agent of Lady Sally McGee. Something about the screw of Archimedes. Same principle as an automobile jack, I think. Wind the drop cloth/screw tight enough, and the bar, designed to take longitudinal stress, should deform, bend sideways enough to pop out of its collar at one end or the other. At that time it would probably try to break one of my major bones, but I was armored against that.
In practice, it was unbelievably difficult to keep hold of that fucking flashlight, and keep on winding it against increasing tension, with cuffed hands, behind my back, with the desperate awareness that the clock was ticking, that The Miner was getting further and further into the vast anonymity of Penn Station, while moisture that had collected on the drop cloth transferred itself to the flashlight and made it slippery . . .
Finally it got away from me. The drop cloth went into high revs, and the flashlight, unbalanced, worked free and went flying. It broke when it landed, but not before I had time to see for sure that it was hopelessly out of reach.
I wasted no time on curses or tears. I tried to kick off a shoe in such a way that I could reach it, succeeded on the second try. I got it into the drop cloth and tried winding again.
A shoe doesn't work. Not stiff enough.
In all the world I had one tiny morsel of hope left, one I hated to even consider because it hurt too much to think about. But I no longer had such luxuries.
I went inside my head, where it was even darker and colder and lonelier than the chamber, and where another kind of nuclear device waited. I went way back deep inside, as close as I dared to the hot pulsing place where emotions surged and boiled like captive neutrons behind the lead walls. And I opened up a porthole into Hell.
Arethusa, I screamed into that vortex, help me! Help us all! Brooklyn is that way! Find your other body, my love, and wake it up!
I tried desperately to remember every lingering microsecond of those golden moments when Arethusa and I had experienced something like telepathic union. Those memories tore like claws now, but I needed to do anything I could to tune my telepathic transmitter to what I remembered of her receiver frequency, to send her a pattern she would recognize and recall and respond to.
Here I am, love. Remember? This is me, Ken/Joe/Humphrey, your husband, someone back in the land of the living, who still needs you. Hitchhike on my carrier wave if you need to, if you can, but find Brooklyn and wake up!
Not all of my telepathic scream was directed at her. I think some of it went into what I believe is called "praying." Don't ask me Who to; you wouldn't believe me if I told you. Telepathic screams need not pause for breath; mine went on for a long, measureless time.
Light bloomed on the far side of the pipe.
"Here I come, Joe," Arethusa said, and for the second time that night, I bawled like a baby.
HOW long does the soul linger after the brain is destroyed? Or had her soul, whatever that is, flown to Brooklyn at the instant of the shot, and waited there too weak or confused or traumatized to wake until I yelled? I was too busy to ask her.
Mike Callahan was on her heels. As Arethusa and I blubbered, he dealt with the bracing bar, then the handcuff chains. I didn't see how and didn't care. My arms went around Arethusa and clung for dear life. After a timeless time I became vaguely aware that the Professor was picking the locks on the cuffs themselves and removing them.
Figuring that detail out jumpstarted my brain. "We may still catch him," I cried, and leaped to my feet. I didn't fall down again. Those ankle cuffs had been tight, and I'd stressed them fussing with the drop cloth, but my magic skin had protected the circulation within.
Mike had already heaved the manhole cover clear with one hand. "Come on, Ken," he boomed, and held out his big mitt. I took it and was hauled upward as easily as Priscilla—oh God, Priscilla!—had hoisted Arethusa, a hundred years ago. He pressed a Smith & Wesson into my hand. I set off at a dead run.
As I rounded the corner, I skidded to a halt. There was that fucking raised floor. I tried to spot the gas jets, and failed. Except for the floor, the corridor was utterly featureless except for bare light bulbs. People began to pile up behind me. Nobody said anything.
Damn it, The Miner had walked that floor. If he used some handheld device to do so, I was screwed; we'd have to fall back to Lady Sally's, and have her reset her magic gate to deliver us to some point past the boobytrapped corridor. I hated to take the time to go backwards. Suppose my luck was back: suppose he didn't have a handheld trap-suppressor. Then there had to be a short-term cutoff located at each end of the hall. If so, there was only one place for it to be.
I reached under the floor, felt the little switch, and threw it. When I stepped onto the floor, nothing happened.
I sprinted again.
It was very good that that corridor was completely empty. It did not contain the corpse of Ralph Von Wau Wau. That suggested The Miner (the hell with the name "Doc," with his conception of himself as a planetary surgeon) had been either sentimental enough, or cautious enough, to take time to dispose of his body. The bastard hadn't bothered to do that with my body, or Arethusa's or Pris's, but he'd taken the trouble for a dog. I didn't care why he'd done it; the point was that it had to have slowed him down some.
As I ran I was trying to recall details of the map. At the end of the fatal corridor I took a right and was relieved to see a door where my memory said it ought to be. I tucked my gun away in my pants and kept on running.
A while later I emerged from a door marked "No Admittance" into an obscure part of Penn Station, with Mike, the Professor, Arethusa, Father Newman, and Tim right behind me. Mistress Cynthia too had managed to keep up somehow on her shorter legs. There were citizens in sight, but no one seemed to notice us despite the obvious bullet holes in my clothes. I looked around wildly, trying to catch my breath.
Lady Sally materialized in mid-air in front of me, squeaked, and dropped two feet to the floor with cat-like grace, dressed in a stunning Kelly-green jumpsuit and sneakers. This event was noticed. But we were after all in New York; those who witnessed it ignored it except to note the nearest exit.
"I don't see him," I called.
She spun in a slow circle. "Look!" she cried.
One of the prettiest sights I had ever seen. Over by the base of a stairway leading up to the world: a little pile of dogshit.
Ralph was alive! He must have recovered while The Miner was dealing with me, and even though he'd heard nothing from us, he was following the original plan . . .
I went up those stairs, got off at the landing with the turd, followed my instincts and found myself in the main terminal. I skidded to a halt and spun around like a yokel. "Fan out," I cried, and my friends each picked an exit and headed for it.
I took the nearest one.
Ralph was waiting by the mouth of the exit, peering cautiously around the corner into Seventh Avenue in an obvious agony of indecision.
"Ralph," I called out when I saw him.
He whirled and spotted me. "Danke schön, lieber Gott," he barked. "Qvigley, Ken! He iss in a car, he hass started it. He iss pulling away!"
The nearest car I could see with muscle was a black-and-white, parked by the curb. It was empty; I couldn't see its owners anywhere from where I stood. I didn't like it—I couldn't shadow him in a cop car, I'd be committed to capturing him fast—but there wasn't time to hotwire something else.
"Describe the car," I rapped.
"Red Ferrari Mondiale. Diplomatic platez."
Sure. What else could park outside Penn Station with impunity? Easy to spot. Hard to catch on the highway, maybe, but in midtown, with a black-and-white under me, nothing could lose me.
"Run back inside and howl like a son of a bitch until you draw the others," I said, and sprinted for the black-and-white.
Keys present, thank the Lord for lazy cops. Engine fired right up. After five hundred movies, I was going to have my first real live car chase—in a copmobile, chasing a red Ferrari through midtown Manhattan at dawn. I began to almost enjoy myself.
There he was! I gunned it out into traffic, causing an accident and not giving a damn. There was the red Ferrari, just turning west on Thirty-first with a predator growl. I made a similar growl myself and floored it, cornering like Jim Rockford.
I squinted at him. My trick contact lenses made him zoom closer: I clearly saw him spot me in his rear-view, saw him start visibly as he recognized me behind the wheel. Now the car chase would begin!
He stopped dead, in front of Madison Square Garden.
I stood up on the brakes (which sucked). I was indignant. In the movies, the other half of the car chase never refuses to play. It was a given: you realize someone is on your tail, and you floor it.
I took out the Smith and opened the car door.
He peeled out.
I leaped back into the seat and floored it, letting inertia slam the door.
He stopped.
I stopped, and said a word that should have curdled his brains in his skull even at that distance.
Not once during all those movies had I ever considered what would happen in this situation.
The bastard was damned smart, or near as intuitive as me. I was at the wheel of a cop car, and I certainly was not a uniformed officer, and I was not running lights and siren even in a situation where that would have been appropriate. Therefore I had stolen the cop car, and had some reason for not simply telling its rightful owners to run him down for me. For some reason, I did not want official involvement any more than he did. I was not going to start blasting away at him in front of Madison Square Garden. He was not getting away. . . . but sooner or later, someone was going to come peel me out of this squad car and give him the chance to take off.
I saw him staring at me in the rear-view mirror, waiting for my next move.
I sighed, and opened the door again. As he started to shriek away, I took very careful aim and shot out both back tires.
(Fellow movie fans, I'm very sorry, but there is nothing you can do to a car with a gun that will make it blow up. At most, you might start a fire under the trunk. Falling off a cliff won't make a car blow up. Only a dissatisfied business rival or a stunt coordinator can do that. Pity the hundreds of spinal cases pulled every year from wrecks by movie fans afraid of the inevitable explosion.)
He tried to keep going on the rims, but I ran him down easily, and put the gun to the driver's side window. He stopped, and blinked at me through the window. He shut the engine off. I assumed shooter's stance.
"Freeze!" a stentorian voice bellowed from my right.
I took a snap glance. A uniform with a dead bead on me.
"I'm on the job," I snapped. "Gold Shield out of the One-Three, Taggart. Hold down on this skell for me while I call for backup."
It should have worked. Five bits of cop lingo in one breath. "There's no dick named Taggart in the One-Three," he hollered back. "Drop the piece or I swear to God I'll put you away."
I kept one eye on The Miner and put the other on the cop. He was serious, and he was not going to believe the truth. At best he would run us both in, and the shit would hit the media. Being shot was a nuisance I could tolerate, but to get rid of him without giving The Miner time to sprint for it, I would have to shoot. I took another look; no, I'd have to kill. I hate to shoot a good cop; there aren't any spares. But I didn't see any choice.
I shot a wild glance over my shoulder, back toward Seventh Avenue. I saw something, squinted.
Lady Sally's blessed face zoomed at me. She was squinting too. Our eyes met.
I looked back to the cop, ostentatiously raised my piece and made it safe. When it hit the pavement a satisfactory distance away from me, he lifted his own gun a scant few inches and began to approach. I turned to face him, hands high.
Lady Sally McGee appeared on the sidewalk behind him. In her upraised arm was a bottle of champagne I later learned she had commandeered from the liquor store in Penn Station. She pegged it accurately and vigorously at the back of the cop's head. He went down like a felled steer.
I heard the Ferrari door pop open. I had judged the distance nicely. As The Miner made his break, I pivoted, screwed my feet into the pavement, and brought my right hand down in a long looping arc that gathered up all the momentum of the pivot and all the weight of my body and delivered them to the point of that lordly Gallic nose, spreading it flat across his skinny face.
He sat down in the street and said, "Sacré bleu," which I have never in my life understood. Why would anyone under stress say, "Holy blue?"
Lady Sally trotted out to join me. "Topping shot, Ken," she said.
"I can't take you anywhere," I said, caressing my knuckles, which had not broken thanks to her roll-on protection.
She shrugged. "Lady slings the booze," she said.
I gave no reaction at all. I was unarmed.
Many people were staring, and not a few of them were nervously fingering guns of their own. New York is one of those cities where you see signs saying, "Hospital zone: please affix your silencer." I frowned.
"Let's get this clown out of here," I suggested.
"Take his hand and mine," she directed.
I did so, and three seconds later I was sinking, heavily and gratefully, into her cushy desk chair in her glorious House.
She left me there with him for a few moments and ducked into the wall again. Reggie held down on him with a big scattergun, one of those Atcheson alley-sweepers, but it was quite unnecessary. The Miner kept both hands on his smashed nose, did not move anything but his eyes. He seemed fascinated by the bullet holes in my clothes.
When Arethusa emerged from the bare wall, he began to whine very much like a dog, and backed up, using only his hams to propel himself, until he banged against the bookcase opposite.
I sprang back up from the chair, and she ran into my arms. I began to shiver as if I were freezing. We clung to each other and sobbed together.
Ralph Von Wau Wau emerged from the wall. "Vunderbar," he said when he saw The Miner. "Nice vork, Ken!"
The Miner began to sob.
Shortly Lady Sally arrived with the rest of the crew. They all looked The Miner over with intent, silent interest. For some reason it was the sight of Mistress Cynthia that caused him to finally go into genuine hysterics. The Lady touched him behind one ear, and he slept.
"Leave us now, children," she said musically. "You too, I'm afraid, Arethusa. Ken and I have some private calls to make. He'll come for you when he's done."
"Count on it," I said into her shining eyes.
"I am," she told me.
Was it a trick of light, or was there just about twice as much brightness as usual in those eyes?
Everyone filed out, and Lady Sally punched a number on her speakerphone. It had thirteen digits. I heard one ring. She hung up, pressed redial, let it ring three times, and disconnected again. This time when she redialed it was answered in the middle of the first ring. "Yes," said a robot-like voice.
"The Greeks reckon time by the kalends," she said carefully.
"One moment."
A short pause, and a different, more jocular voice came on the line. "Don't look at me," it said. "I wasn't anywhere near there nine months ago."
"It must be yours, George," Lady Sally said. "I can't get it off the tit."
"So it's not stupid. That doesn't prove it's mine. Hi, Honeybritches. Who are your two friends?"
I was impressed. That phone circuit had existed for less than fifteen seconds. "I'm Ken Taggart," I said. "The other guy's asleep, and I don't know his name."
"What can I do for you, Mr. Taggart?" he asked.
"George," Lady Sally said, "I'm going to initiate scramble."
"If you wish," he agreed. After a few squawks, his voice returned. "Go ahead."
"The sleeping gentleman, name not known to myself either, is a member of the diplomatic community—never mind what nation." (It turned out to be Switzerland, by the way. They speak French there, some of them. I don't know where he'd been when his alarms went off; maybe it had been Canada.) "Acting—to my certain knowledge—purely as a private individual, he assembled a small organization which has planted a radio-triggered nuclear device in midtown Manhattan, and in twenty-nine other cities around the world."
"Jesus fucking Christ," he scroaned, "shut up!"
"I thought this line was secure," she said irritably.
"It is—from enemies!" he said. "But do you want this to leak? Give me a moment . . . there. Go on—but for God's sake, quickly!"
"Mr. Taggart, an artist in my employ, has wrecked the New York bomb and placed its master under citizen's arrest. He proposes to meet with you privately and deliver the said terrorist, detailed maps of the other twenty-nine bombs—one in Washington, and several annotated in Cyrillic alphabet—and most important of all, the precise radio frequency which must be jammed to neutralize them."
"My God," he said hoarsely. "I can be there in an hour and a half. Are you still at the same location?"
"George, George," she chided. "'If it's messy, eat it over the sink.' Let's meet elsewhere."
"Forgive me," he said. "And pardon my language just now. Uh . . . Honeybritches, do you remember where we . . . ?" He trailed off.
"Of course I do," she said, smiling reminiscently.
"An hour and a half?"
"Make it two," she said. "It's been a long night. Our delegation will consist of myself, Mr. Taggart, one other associate, and the alleged perpetrator. He's a pacifist-type terrorist, by the way. And George . . . do come alone."
"Something I do all too often these days," he said mournfully. "Two hours from . . . mark."
The connection was broken.
Lady Sally held up a hand to me for silence. After a short time there was a screech. Another voice said, "I think they both hung up at once. Holy sh—"
Now the line was dead.
"Poppycock," she muttered fondly. "I'd bet my House George hasn't come alone since 1939." She pressed the button that hung up her end. "But he will arrive alone. He'll be there an hour from now, of course, but he'll arrive alone and wait alone, and he'll be alone when we get there. George is an honorable man." She smiled. "I, on the contrary, am neither honorable nor a man. Fortunately."
She got another dial tone, punched another complex number, went through a similar routine, and had a substantially similar conversation—in Russian, this time. It sounded a little bawdier in spots, and once he made her laugh deep in her throat.
No sense dragging this story out any longer. We had a meet with George and Anatoly. You don't need to know anything more about them. They were considerably startled to see and recognize each other, but they got over it; they had always secretly wanted to meet each other. They took everything we were prepared to give them, and they didn't try too hard for too long to take too much more, and after about an hour they left together, with thirty maps and The Miner. I knew that they would not let him leave their sight until they had personally wrung him dry together, and I knew that they would wring him dry. Of course, some of what he would say, they'd have to discount as obvious hallucination . . .
All of us in Lady Sally's inner circle kept a close eye on the papers and TV news for the next while, hoping for blessed silence and holding our collective metaphorical breath. But the single ripple that appeared on the media pond, several months later, nearly made me bust a gut laughing. It seems a certain TV news personality I had always despised was accosted on the sidewalk near his home in the Upper East Eighties by two men with foreign accents, in trench coats, who proceeded to beat the mortal shit out of him . . . while repeating, over and over again, the cryptic words "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" He was never the same after that, and eventually the day came when people stopped commenting to me on the resemblance . . .
My original client never did get an explanation of what he had paid me to do—and he did pay me, in full—but he did get a Lifetime Comp at Lady Sally's House out of the deal. Then less than a year later the House closed, for reasons too complex to explain here, and shortly he retired a broken man. So everyone in the city made out a little, in a sense. Above and beyond simply not being killed or vanished.
On a more somber note, I must report that it was her pianist-avatar—the one with the best hand-eye coordination—that Arethusa had elected to send through that wall into combat. I never did get to hear her play the piano . . . and I never will: she will not touch the instrument any more. That is a loss neither of us will ever really stop mourning. But we're learning to live with it.
And Lady Sally, in her capacity as consulting xenogeneticist, assures us that our son will combine both of my wife's talents, and my own. I hope I can stand the little bastard. (His conception predated our marriage by hours, I'm told.) He'll probably have a life filled with lots of good luck and lots of bad luck, powerful intuition, fine music, and a whole lot of love . . . and what the hell more can you ask of life, anyway?
Nikola Tesla is doing . . . what he does. How the hell would I know what? How would I explain it to you if I did? You will hear more of him again one day, I promise you that. His historic bad luck seems to be slowly changing at last, just like mine.
I have a sneaking suspicion Lady Sally may be his Luck . . .
As for Lady Sally, she and Mike were alive and well and happy last time I heard, practicing other professions in a place far from here and now, and that is all you need to know about them at this time. At least I hope so, for if you would know more of those two, you must look elsewhere.
But all of what I've described, believe it or not, was not only not the last case I ever worked on . . . it wasn't even the weirdest case I ever had.
I haven't got room here to tell you about that last one—a thumbnail sketch of a synopsis of the treatment would take twenty pages—but as long as I live, I'll never forget the day it began, or the remarkable words that began it:
"Was it necessary," asked the judge, "to produce this entire lake in evidence?"