Wild Cards V Read Online Free PDF Page A

and pulled away from the curb. Lazy Dragon climbed from Brennan’s pocket, balanced precariously on the shoulder of the car seat, then leaped onto the lap of his human body, which, after a moment, awoke, yawned, and stretched. The mouse, undergoing a transformation somewhat analagous to that of Lot’s overcurious wife, turned back into a block of soap.
    â€œHow’d it go?” Whiskers mumbled again, glancing up into the rearview mirror as he dove.
    â€œLazy Dragon dropped his mouse-sculpture in his jacket pocket and nodded. “As planned. We found the body and Deadhead … dined. Cowboy did fine.”
    â€œGreat. We’d better get Deadhead to the boss while he’s still digesting.”
    â€œNow that we’re all buddies,” Brennan drawled, “maybe you can tell me what’s going on.”
    Whiskers flipped off a driver who’d cut in front of them. “Well … I suppose it’d be all right. Deadhead there,” he snickered, “is an ace, sort of. He can get people’s memories by eating their brains.”
    Brennan made a face. “Jesus. So Gruber knew something that Mao wants to know.”
    Whiskers nodded and gunned the Buick, running a red light. “We think so. We hope so, anyway. You see, Danny Mao’s boss is this guy named Fadeout who wants to find some ace who calls herself Wraith. Gruber was her fence before she bumped him off. Mao figures Gruber probably knew enough about her so we can use his memories to track her down.”
    Brennan pursed his lips, suppressing a smile. He knew more about this than these guys did. Fadeout was one of Kien’s aces who had tried, and failed, to capture him and Wraith on Wild Card Day, and Wraith had told him that someone—not her—had killed her fence that very day.
    â€œWhy’d you wait so long to get to Gruber’s corpse?” Brennan asked.
    Whiskers shrugged. “Deadhead was in some kinda hospital. Cops caught him doing his thing with a body he’d found on the street back on Wild Card Day, and it took the lawyers a couple of months to spring him.”
    Brennan nodded, and to stay in his role as bewildered newcomer, he asked a question he already knew the answer to. “So why does Fadeout want to find this Wraith?”
    Because she’d lifted Kien’s private diary in the early morning hours of the wildest Wild Car Day ever, Brennan thought, but the Werewolf evidently didn’t know that. He shrugged. “Hey, you think I’m Fadeout’s confidant or something?”
    Brennan nodded. He wasn’t, at least he tried not to be, introspective. His memories of the past were frequently painful, but Wraith—Jennifer Maloy—had often been on his mind since their meeting in September. It was more than the adventure they’d shared on Wild Card Day, more than the easy comradeship and grudging confidence between them, more than her tall, athletic-looking body. Brennan couldn’t, wouldn’t, admit why, but he knew that he’d try to get himself on the Shadow Fist task force that’d been given the job of hunting her. In that way he’d be in position to help her if the Fists got too close.
    Not, he thought, that they’d be able to use Gruber’s memories to track her down. Although Wraith had never told Brennan his name, she’d mentioned that she hadn’t trusted her fence and had, in fact, never even told him her real name.
    They drove on in silence. Whiskers finally pulled over and killed the engine in front of a three-story brownstone in the heart of Jokertown.
    â€œCowboy, you and Lazy Dragon help Deadhead. He can’t do much on his own while he’s digesting.”
    Brennan took his left arm, Lazy Dragon took his right, and they dragged him across the sidewalk and up the flight of stairs to the brownstone’s entrance, where Whiskers was already talking with one of the Egrets who’d been standing in