"Wildcards - 07 - Dead Mans Hand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

delicate pink with the passion of their lovemaking, he'd remember her cries and
moves in the dark. He'd remember and wonder what it would've been like if she'd
accepted his offer of protection and love. He would look at Jennifer asleep at
his side and know that he was happy and content, but he would still wonder. The
memory of her was a throbbing ache that wouldn't leave him alone:
He buried the van in the Tomlin International parking lot and caught a taxi to
Manhattan, where he took a room in a cheap but dirty hotel on the fringe of
Jokertown. The first thing to do, he decided, was visit the Crystal Palace. He
slipped on his mask for the first time in over a year and left the hotel
carrying his bow case.

3:00 P.M.
ACE-OF-SPADES KILLER SLAYS JOKERTOWN BARKEEP, the Post screamed.
The Jokertown Cry was less generic. CHRYSALIS MURDERED, it said beside a
two-column picture. The Cry was the only paper in the city that regularly ran
photographs of jokers.
JOKERS DESCEND ON ATLANTA AS DEMOCRATS CONVENE, said the front page of the
Times. Thousands of them had headed south in support of Senator Gregg Hartmann,
the presidential frontrunner. But in this year's crowded Democratic field,
nobody was even close to a majority, and a brokered convention was being
predicted. There were widespread fears of violence should Hartmann be denied the
nomination. Already there were reports of ugly clashes between Hartmann's jokers
and the fundamentalist supporters of Reverend Leo Barnett.
Jay usually ranked politicians right alongside used-car salesmen, pimps, and the
guy who invented pay toilets, but Hartmann did seem to be a breed apart. He'd
met the candidate a few times at the fundraisers Hiram had hosted at Aces High.
Hiram was a big Hartmann supporter, and Jay never could resist the lure of free
food and drink. Senator Gregg seemed intelligent, effective, and compassionate.
If somebody had to be president, it might as well be him. He probably didn't
stand a joker's chance of getting anywhere near the nomination.
The political bullshit took up the whole front page; he couldn't find any
mention of Chrysalis anywhere. Knowing the Times, Jay figured tomorrow's edition
would have a brief obit and that'd be it. Brutal joker murders weren't the kind
of news that's fit to print. That made Jay angriest of all. "How do you know
when a joker's been dead about three days?" the news vendor asked him. His voice
was flat and lifeless, the voice of a man grimly going through a ritual that had
lost its meaning. Jay looked up from the headlines. Jube Benson had been a
fixture on the corners of Hester Street and the Bowery for as long as there had
been a Jokertown. Walrus, they called him. He was a joker himself, three hundred
pounds of greasy blue-black flesh, big curved tusks at the corners of his mouth,
a broad domed skull covered with tufts of stiff red hair. Jube's wardrobe seemed
to consist exclusively of Hawaiian shirts. This afternoon he was wearing a
magenta item in a tasteful pineapple-and-banana print. Jay wondered what Hiram
would say.
Jube knew more joker jokes than anyone else in Jokertown, but this time Jay had
the punch line. "He smells a lot better," he said wearily. "That one's older
than your hat, Walrus." Jube took the battered porkpie hat off his head and
turned it over self-consciously in his thick, three-fingered hands. "I never
made her laugh," he said. "All those years, I came by the Palace every night,
always with a new joke. I never got a single laugh out of her."