The Further Adventures of The Joker (61 page)

Dude gave me a wink as I slipped by. “Man, you lookin’?”

“I’m
cookin’,”
I said with a giggle, a little too loud. Couple of cops started over in slow motion, but by then I was out of there, on the street, safe.

Even cooking with J took some long seconds to plug in. Saturday night on Love Me Avenue, Jangletown, U.S.A. The poxy brain of Gotham in its perpetual grand mal seizure, neurons blazing like Chinatown fireworks to the tune of Live Girls and the strobing blues and reds of police cars and ambulances, sirens wailing, people wailing louder, stench of hot dogs and stale sweat and automobile exhaust trapped and festering at the bottom of these dead canyons sunk beneath a smog so foul and thick it’s like living underwater. No, they will not find me here.

Day and night the smoke goes up from this island pyre to sting the eyes of angels. Do they weep? I sometimes wonder. Once, sick and feverish, I dreamed of angels gazing down, lovely faces lost in light, wings spread wide as clouds. Oh how I longed to join them, but then the fever broke. I never saw them again until the Doctor took me by the hand and showed me how to look. Now it’s angels everywhere, man. But they’re above this city like nowhere else. Here I’ll find the one I seek, the prince of angels I glimpsed so long ago in a fever dream. I saw him again in Dear Old Dead Old’s eyes, and it made me smile like the promise of a punchline as I pulled the trigger, jingle, jangle, jongle.

Rictus could not keep up with the Doctor. As I changed tapes, a voice at my shoulder grated, “Man, you got a crash?”

The dude from the Port Authority, Blue jogging suit: leather medallion of Mother Africa in purple, green, red. and white. I frowned, stepped away, ready to merge with and into the chaos of the street, janglewise.

“Hell, no one want to mess with you, boy. Yeah, you cookin all right. But you be hurtin’ soon, I see that. You call this number Ask for Panic; that’s me.”

A slip of paper in my hand, and the dude was gone. Panic—like where do they get these names? Cranked some Ozone and let the flow sweep me where it would.

Panic: he knew that name. Part-time dealer in flesh, full-time in drugs. His kind were common as cockroaches and more difficult to exterminate.

Jangle: he knew that name, too. AKA Doctor and/or J. Streets had been flooded with the drug over the last few months; it had appeared out of nowhere in tiny patches no bigger than a thumbprint, patches emblazoned with crazy patterns, drunken mandalas of violet and green and crimson that just so happened to blend in perfectly with the current rage for face tattoos.

Gotham seemed to be a test area; other cities had not yet reported substantial quantities of the drug. It was a personal challenge, of course, these punks poisoning his city, out to make their reps over his dead body like gunfighters in the Old West. Sometimes he could hear their laughter echoing even in this dark and peaceful refuge.

But jangle was no joke. A cocaine derivative, like crack, cut with the usual strychnine but also spliced with a designer drug he hadn’t been able to isolate, a subtle psychedelic that induced hallucinations of a paranoid nature as the dosage increased . . . which it always did. Withdrawal saw to that. Euphoria, fantasies of power and control, mystical delusions capable of reaching an intensity that in extreme cases (and they were all extreme cases, sooner or later) erupted into full-blown psychosis. And to judge by what he’d read so far, the author of this anonymous diary was reaching the breaking point.

. . . but then it only took a second. Me, dazed and hungry by the dawn’s early gloom, the Doctor O-U-T and a dirty drizzle falling from a dirty sky as I searched for a cozy corner where I could slap on some J in peace and quiet, just enough to bring me down light as a feather. Had the news buzzing in my ears, President declares war on drugs ha-ha, no reports of suburban murders but then Mom worked nights and wouldn’t be home for another hour or so.

Next thing I knew I was on my butt watching a couple kids dive down the subway with my backpack, my headphones bouncing along behind. I was too wasted to do anything but lay there while the street Samaritans howled helpfully. Fortunately there were no cops around, so I got to my feet and split though the cramps had started and I knew I wouldn’t get far.

I made it around the corner and halfway down the next block before my guts came boiling up in my throat. I barely had time to drop to my knees in the gutter. I wondered if I was dying and more than half hoped so. I’d always come down nice and slow before, easy does it, softened the crash with a nice fluffy pillow. What an idiot to keep all my stash in one place! I deserved to suffer, man.

And I did, lying there I don’t know how long, an hour maybe, knowing if I didn’t move it was just a matter of time before the cops found me on their next sweep of the Avenue.

Then came the miracle. Through my misery I felt a flutter of fingers deftly peeling the useless dose from my neck and replacing it with a fresh one. And oh, man, this was some pure stuff, I mean jangle with a capital J. In seconds I felt the cool and fiery rush enter my blood, saw behind my blinded eyes the intricate dance of light and shadow that forms the substance of this world and glimpsed once more in the dirty clouds, infinite hierarchies of angels, angels orchestrating our destinies with delicate strokes of their glittering wings, each bright feather keen as a razor blade.

“Don’t freak,” admonished the childish voice of my savior. “We gotta split. Come
on.”
And pulled me to my feet. “You okay?”

With an effort I blinked away the angels, saw a face scarcely less beautiful: high cheekbones, smooth skin so pale it seemed a hard look might leave a bruise, eyes wide and piercing blue, short hair colored and shaved in swirls as though tie-dyed except for a sheaf of white-blond bangs flopping over one eye. A tattooed Mandelbrot Set flared across his neck like the badge of some exotic clan, concealing from all but practiced eyes a jolt of J. Torn T-shirt, dirty jeans, purple All-Stars with bright green laces. I guessed he was no more than thirteen; two years my junior in all but the ability to survive on Love Me Avenue “Way rad tattoo,” I said.

“Name’s Toddy,” he answered. We fell into step with that weird synchronicity of thought and action that springs up between two users, as though the drug made us brothers.

“Mine’s Galen,” I replied. I had a feeling we were going to hit it off, I was warping out on the J. Without Toddy there I would’ve freaked for sure. “Galen Starling.”

He giggled as we dodged through the crowded street, straights giving us glances of disgust and annoyance as they hurried to their nine-to-fives.

“Panic’s gonna
love
that,” he promised, an hysterical edge to his voice. While Toddy was calming me, I had the opposite effect on him. He absorbed my high like a jangle vampire.

Panic.
That name sounded familiar, but it wasn’t until Toddy had led me down a dizzying maze of streets and alleys to a building of bricked-and boarded-up doors and windows in a neighborhood that looked as if a war had swept through only yesterday that I remembered the slip of paper still in my pocket.

“What’s this place, Toddy?”

“Home,” he said, flashing me a grin perfect as an angel’s wing. “It’s cool—come on.”

And with that, he scurried past the warped boards blocking the front door, leaving me alone on the empty street with no idea where I was or how’d I’d gotten there. My backpack was gone; the cops were probably after me by now. I didn’t have a friend in the city but Toddy, and Toddy had jangle. I followed him in.

“Toddy?”

It took me a second to adjust to the gloom. What light there was came from candles and single bulbs dangling from extension cords high overhead. Portions of the walls and ceiling had fallen, giving the place a bombed-out look. A few kids my own age or younger were eyeing me sullenly from the shadows, boys and girls, black, white, brown, yellow.

“Well if it ain’t Mister Independent,” a voice rasped to my left.

I turned, saw Panic approaching with one arm draped about Toddy’s shoulders, the other kids following. He was dressed in the same blue jogging suit as the night before, leather medallion jouncing upon his ample chest. Toddy was munching a candy bar, gazing up at Panic with a pure affection that made my skin crawl. I felt as if the ghost of Dear Old Dead Old had crept back to haunt me.

“Hey, boy, you’re way ahead of schedule! Knew I’d be seeing you, but not so soon.”

“I got robbed,” I said glumly, shrugging.

“Now ain’t that a shame!” Panic grinned like he knew all about my misfortunes. “Toddy tell me you need a place to stay.”

I nodded, wary.

“Talkative, ain’t you. What’s your name?”

“Galen Starling.”

Panic whooped. “Christ Almighty, where
do
you white folks get them names?”

I burned. “It’s Gaelic.”

“Oooo. Sound like a damn bird to me. Well, my name’s Gaelic, too. It means, ‘Watch your step, wiseass.’ Know what I think? You that kid I heard about on the TV this morning. That right?”

I shook my head, mouth so dry the words came out whispered. “No way.” I would have run, but the others were crowding me in.

He eyed me shrewdly. “Yeah, right. Well, you can crash here. I got plenty of room, plenty of everything, right? Only you gotta help out, everyone lends a hand when Uncle Panic’s got work to do. Errands, you know? Deliveries, got some important people we can’t keep waiting, need some smart kids, fast kids. You smart, Galen? You fast?”

I grinned then, J screaming through my brain like a missile. Fast? I’d show him fast.

So the mysterious author had a name at last. He fed it into the computer. Seconds later, the information flashed onto the screen.

Galen Starling, 15, wanted in connection with the murder of his stepfather. An unusual name, Starling . . . Cross-references to the child welfare files—a few minor drug offenses, petty theft, then buried in a footnote an allegation of sexual abuse leveled against the stepfather by one of Galen’s neighbors, never followed up.

Between bureaucratic ineptitude and the tender mercies of the Panics of the world, what chance did kids like Galen have? It made him sick and angry; kids always hit him the hardest. His own childhood had been stolen—he knew better than most what it was like to be young, alone and afraid, with nobody to turn to, nobody to trust. Sometimes he wondered if that was what kept him going after so many failures, so many deaths he’d been powerless to prevent, had in a sense contributed to if not caused outright, part of him dying again each time. God, the blood on his hands! He was sick to death of the whole damn mess, but it was too late now, he’d lost too much to turn back, given up his soul piece by piece and become just another of Gotham’s lurid fever dreams in the process. No, there was nothing to do but finish what he’d started. Or be finished by it. And never let them see the hurt and frightened boy he still, deep down, knew himself to be, whether kneeling on the dirt sidewalk watching his parents’ lives bleed away or cradling in his arms the broken body of the brave boy he’d loved like a son.

Toddy’s always asking how come I write so much in here. Hell, I don’t know. I thought I might show it to Mom someday, let her know what it was like for me being alone so much of the time with Dear Old Dead Old while she was busy playing Angel of Mercy at the hospital. But I’ve torn all those pages out. Burned them. I mean, what’s the point? That’s all history now that he’s dead. But the funny thing is, I can’t quit writing. It’s in my blood, I guess. Like jangle.

For sure Mom wouldn’t recognize me these days. I got my hair cut and dyed and a tattoo like Toddy’s; man, we cruise Love Me Avenue like a couple of Siamese twins! Purple All-Stars with green laces to show we’re Panic’s boys. But me and Toddy are gonna save us some money and split. Clear out where Panic’ll never find us. I mean, it’s too late for me; my father messed me up good before jangle came along to finish the job. But it breaks my heart to see the same thing happening to Toddy. He’s still a kid, man. It isn’t right, it just isn’t right.

This is my favorite place. On the roof at night with a jolt of J leaking its slow magic into my blood and all of Gotham lit up like a Christmas tree. Nothing can touch me up here. I’m free, I can feel the angels so near I can shut my eyes and feel their wings brush my face. They’re out there, man, all around me, calling me. Now and then a gunshot comes like an urgent summons and it’s all I can do to hold myself back: the ledge beckons, my spirit soars as though I could fly! Sometimes I know that if I jumped I wouldn’t fall, they would fold me in their wings and take me up to where the prince of angels lives. He gazes down on us with a secret smile and Gotham City throws back his warped reflection. I would go in search of him but the thought of Toddy keeps me here. Who’d take care of him if I was gone?