Ring Game (21 page)

Crow said, “Mind if I come in?”

“I don’t think so,” Carmen said. She tried to close the door, but Crow blocked it with his arm. “I really need to see Hy,” Crow said.

“He’s not here.”

“I know that.”

Carmen glared at him for a moment, then released the door. Crow followed her into the living room. She flopped onto the sofa, lit a cigarette. The apartment smelled like vomit. A cheerful man on the television was demonstrating a mop. Carmen regarded Crow through a haze of smoke.

“What’s your name again?” she asked.

“Howard Holiday,” Crow said. “I’m Hy’s brother.”

Carmen snorted smoke. “Yeah, right.”

“When do you expect him back?”

“About an hour ago. He went out for coffee.”

Crow sniffed. “What’s that smell?”

Carmen shrugged and turned her attention to the television. Crow watched her watching the infomercial. She was attractive enough, he supposed. Regular features; full lips; big, heavy-lidded, brown eyes. Auburn hair worn long and loose. A pair of jeans, faded almost to white, all holes and frayed edges, and a black T-shirt that had been chopped off between her navel and her ample breasts. Crow did not think of himself as a “breast man,” but Carmen’s set drew his eyes mercilessly. The rest of her body was nicely proportionate. Not an athletic body, but she had the curves.

What turned Crow off was the slack, sleepy quality that imbued her posture, her movements, her facial expression. It was similar to the narcotic contentment of a drug addict, but deeper, more a part of her core personality. Even her skin looked sleepy. Crow had the sense that she was in a transition phase, waiting out the metamorphosis from adolescent to adult, from baby fat to cellulite, from careless innocence to jaded cynicism. Or maybe she was more like overripe fruit: sweet, soft, and loose on its stem, beginning to ferment. Some men would find that attractive. Necrophiliacs, for instance.

He tried to see her as the reincarnation of the Brownsville chicana who, thirty years ago, had cold-cocked Axel Speeter. He couldn’t see it. Where would she get the energy?

Crow was rescued from his thoughts by the sound of a slamming car door. He looked out the window. Hyatt was locking the door of his BMW, holding the silver gun in one hand. Crow took up position near the front door and waited.

Hyatt entered the apartment with the bright-eyed look of a man who had just survived a traffic accident. Crow snatched the gun from his limp grasp, felt his fingers sink into loosely wrapped foil. A visible tremor ran up Hyatt’s body. He backed down the short hall into the living room, holding his hands in front of him. “Joe! Jesus! Watch where you’re pointing that thing!”

“I am. Whatever it is.” There appeared to be a shotgun beneath all the decoration. “How come you shot my car, Hy?”

“Shot …
what
? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Wait a second—Jesus!—that was you?”

“You telling me you shoot a car, you don’t even know who’s in it?”

“I thought you were with them!”

“With who?”

“The guys in the vette!”

“What made you think that?”

“Jesus, Joe, I don’t know. You were both on my ass. Both cars yellow?”

Crow let the gun barrel drop. “Remind me never to buy another yellow car.”

Hyatt laughed.

“It’s not funny yet, Hy.”

“I’m sorry, man. Really. Those guys were gonna hurt me. I was scared.”

“Scared of who?”

“The church.”

“What church?”

“The Amaranthines. My former partners. Polly and Rupe and their crew. You remember them, don’t you? From Ambrosia Foods? They’re out to get me, Joe. I swear to God, I thought you were with them. I didn’t know it was you.”

“You’re lucky nobody got killed.”

“It was me or them. They would’ve killed me. You saw. You’re my witness, Joe.”

“Witness? I saw you shoot at a couple of guys in a Corvette who weren’t doing anything.”

“They were following me.”

“I was following you, too.”

“I’m not afraid of
you
, Joe.”

Crow wasn’t sure how to take that. “Then you shouldn’t be shooting at me.”

Hyatt asked, “How come you were following me, anyway?”

Carmen said, “I remember you now. You’re a friend of Axel’s.”

“Let’s take a walk, Hy,” Crow said.

Polly floated deep in the zone, feeling Obo’s probing fingers as globes of warmth moving in and out of her body. Obo was the best. He was the one person she could count on to bring pleasure into her life on a daily basis. Obo had magic hands, zero sexuality, and absolutely nothing to say. He was the perfect masseur. She felt a little sad when he gave her spine that final flat-palmed stroke.

Polly heard the soft click of the door closing behind him. In precisely six minutes, he would return for his massage table, folding it with his efficient, short-fingered hands, never meeting her eyes, in and out in seconds. Polly gave herself four of those minutes to lay still, letting her body remember the massage, then she rolled off the table and dressed. She sat behind her desk, turned on her computer, and began reviewing the weekly cash-flow statement. It had been a negative period—a lot of money going out to Stonecrop. One shipment of limestone had cost them over forty thousand dollars.

Stonecrop, the future world headquarters of the Amaranthine Church of the One, had been under construction for more than a year. It had been part of Rupert Chandra’s vision since his awakening—a permanent haven for the first immortals, a retreat where church members could insulate themselves from the madness of the Death Program and the coming collapse of the twentieth-century military-industrial construct.

Three years ago Rupe had signed a purchase agreement for a 236-acre tract of land in western Wisconsin, sixty miles southeast of Minneapolis. It was a beautiful site located on the bluffs high above the Mississippi River, and a bargain at nine hundred dollars an acre. He had named it Stonecrop, and had declared it to be the future sanctuary of the Amaranthines as foretold by Zhang Daoling.

Polly thought her Eternal Companion had lost his ever-loving mind. Back then, the Amaranthine Church had been little more than a small-time New Age workshop, a proto-religion with fewer than three dozen adherents who met once a week in the back room of Ambrosia Foods. They could hardly make the monthly rent on their store, let alone take on a two hundred thousand-dollar debt. Polly had been furious. When she found out her husband had taken out a second mortgage on their condo for a down payment, their marriage had nearly imploded.

Hyatt Hilton, she remembered, had thought it all quite amusing. When they incorporated the Amaranthine Church of the One, Rupe insisted on transferring the Stonecrop mortgage to the corporation. Hyatt had refused to sign the papers, saying that he wouldn’t accept any ownership of an entity with negative value. That, at least, had worked out for the best. It had made it a lot easier to get rid of him.

Somehow, they had survived those difficult years. Driven by Rupe’s faith, optimism, and refusal to entertain the possibility of failure, ACO membership grew exponentially. When they needed money, it seemed, new members would appear, or old members would add to their Life Accounts, or the bank would prove to be uncharacteristically receptive to Rupe’s promises. For several months, Rupe and Benjy Hiss, a young architect and one of their charter members, spent their evenings building a scale model of Stonecrop, a Utopian community designed to last for millennia. Benjy quit his job and came to work full time for the ACO, and a year ago last May, ground was broken.

The chapel and the main cottage were nearly complete, but at least another year and another six million dollars would be required to complete the parsonage, the cottages, the auditorium and the three-mile long, twelve-foot-tall limestone wall that was to surround the entire compound. The expense weighed heavily upon Polly, who was responsible for church finances, but so far they had been able to attract enough new members, and extract enough donations from existing members, to keep the work moving forward. When Stonecrop was completed, it would be a fortress. As Rupe liked to point out, “It must stand for ten thousand years.”

One small problem was that the plans called for only nine cottages, but Rupe had promised private quarters to twenty-three of the Faithful. Numbers never seemed to bother Rupe.

“Eternity will provide,” he would say.

It had been a particularly expensive week with the limestone shipment, plus more graft to the local township officials to have some code violations overlooked, and an astonishing nineteen-thousand-dollar bill from the electricians. Perhaps eternity would provide, but Polly was counting more on Friday’s Anti-Aging Clinic.

Some time later Polly heard a knock on her office door. She looked up from the computer monitor and found that the massage table had disappeared—Obo had come and gone without her noticing.

“Come in,” she said.

It was Chip, followed by Chuckles. Polly sat back in her chair and smiled, anticipating good news. The two men arranged themselves in front of her desk.

“Well?” she finally asked, “How did it go?”

Chip said, “Not bad.” His eyes were somewhere behind her.

Chuckles made a sound with his lips.

Polly said, “Chuckles?”

“Yeah,” Chuckles said. “It went
real
good. He’s taking us serious now, and that’s no lie. And we still alive.”

“We’ve got him scared,” Chip added quickly.

“Yeah, he scared all right.”

A whiff of butyric acid extinguished the last glowing remnants of Polly’s massage. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

Frowning, Hyatt examined the GTO’s hood, his nose almost touching the marred finish. He said, “It was only birdshot, Joe. It just marked up the paint is all.” He licked a finger and rubbed one of the gray spots to no effect. “That’ll buff right out.”

“Fine, if it buffs out it’ll save you some money.”

“You were way out of range. I was just trying to scare you.” He dropped his eyes to the foliated shotgun in Crow’s hands and hastily added, “I didn’t know it was you at the time, of course. And I want to make things right by you.”

“I’ll get an estimate.”

“One nice thing about a gun like that, you can carry it down the street and nobody knows what you’ve got.”

“Is that why all the foil?”

“Nah, that was my crazy buddy Jimmy. It’s his gun.”

“What are these things sticking out?”

“Antennae.”

“Very nice. I’m sure Jimmy won’t mind if I keep his magic gun.”

Hyatt shrugged, apparently bored with the topic. He drummed his long fingers on the GTO’s roof. “When I was a kid, this was the hottest thing going. What’s it got in it?”

“Four hundred cubes. Three hundred sixty-six horses.”

“Huh. A real gas hog, I bet.”

“Not too bad,” Crow lied. “Tell me something, Hy. What did you do to get those guys so pissed at you?”

“I didn’t do anything. Not really. Not yet. I mean, it’s not what I did, it’s what I know.”

Crow waited for more.

“I mean, I know everything about the ACO, Joe. I know all their secrets.”

“Like how to live forever?”

Hyatt nodded. “Physical immortality is a real possibility, Joe.”

“You just take your vitamins and avoid getting shot, right?”

“It was my idea, you know.”

“What was? Immortality?”

Hyatt answered seriously, “No. Rupe was the first. But I
founded
the Amaranthine Church. If it wasn’t for me, Polly and Rupe would still be hawking vitamins. They’d be immortal, but what would be the point?”

“I heard they kicked you out.”

“They did.”

“How could they kick you out of your own church?”

Hyatt shrugged. “Legally speaking, you can’t own a religion. We’d incorporated as a nonprofit and copyrighted our name and materials under the name. Rupe and Polly had their names on the lease and the bank account. I was a silent partner. Actually, legally speaking, I wasn’t a partner at all. But we had an understanding. Where I come from, a man’s word is his bond.”

“I thought you came from up on the Range. Biwabik, wasn’t it?”

“I told you that?” Hyatt looked surprised. “Anyway, the point is that I trusted them, and they cut me out. Let me tell you, Joe, you ever own your own business, you better
own
it. You can’t believe what anybody tells you. I talked to a lawyer. There was nothing I could do.”

“Is that why you broke up that meeting last month?”

Hyatt tipped his head. “You heard about that? Jesus Christ, I’m talking to Mr. Moto here. I was upset. I lost my head, and they threw me out.” Hyatt crossed his arms and produced a flat smile. “What else do you know about me? You’re checking me out, aren’t you? Did Sophie ask you to check me out?”

“I’m just trying to find out why my car has all these marks on it.”

“Seems to me the question is, why were you following me in the first place?”

Crow did not reply. He was still trying to work that one out himself.

“You know, pointing that gun at me, Joe, that really scared Carmen.”

“Oh? I was trying to scare
you
.”

“I knew you weren’t going to shoot me. How long have we known each other? I wasn’t worried. But Carmen, she doesn’t know you like I do.”

Crow thought back to the scene in Hyatt’s living room. “She didn’t look scared to me,” he said. “In fact, she didn’t look like she gave a damn, one way or the other.”

“You’re wrong about that.” Hyatt pushed his hands into the pockets of his red-and-gold striped pants.

“How come you’re marrying her, Hy?”

Hy raised his eyebrows and spread his pocketed hands, which caused the sides of his trousers to spread like a pair of bloomers. “What do you mean? I love her.” He frowned. “I don’t understand how my marriage is any of your damn business.”

Suddenly, Crow wasn’t sure either. “I’m your fiancée’s pseudofather’s best friend’s illegitimate son,” he said.

Hyatt smirked and gazed out over Crow’s head. “Then I guess that makes us family,” he said. “In which case,
brother
, I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I tell you to fuck off.”