Lowball: A Wild Cards Novel by George R. R. Martin
The crowd never got completely quiet as they murmured wondering observations and pointed at the newcomer. Ana leaned forward, trying to get a better look at her friend, who seemed small and alone as she crossed the diamond and reached the mound, tugging on her cap. She didn’t face home plate like the others, but turned outward, to the one-ton pile of concrete blocks that had been trucked to the outfield.
Kate looked nervous, stepping on one foot, then another, digging the toes of her shoes into the dirt, pressing the baseball into her glove. Her ponytail twitched when she moved. Some traditionalists hadn’t wanted her here—were appalled at the very idea of a woman on the pitcher’s mound at venerable Yankee Stadium. But this was raising money for charity so they couldn’t very well argue. Ana wondered how much harassment Kate had put up with behind the scenes. If she had, she’d channel her anger into her arm.
Ana’s stomach clenched in shared anxiety, and she gripped the railing in front of her until her fingers hurt. Why did this feel like a battle, that Ana should be out on the field with her, backing her up? Like they’d fought together so many times before. Here, all Ana could do was watch. This wasn’t a battle, this was supposed to be for fun. Gah. She touched the St. Barbara medallion she wore around her neck, tucked under her shirt. The action usually calmed her.
Finally, the ace pitcher settled, raised the ball and her glove to her chest, wound up, left leg drawn up, and let fly, her whole body stretching into the throw.
Sparks flared along her arm, and the ball vanished from her hand, followed by a crack of thunder, the whump of an explosion—and the pile of concrete was gone, just gone. Debris rained down over the field in a cloud of dust and gravel. The sound was like hail falling. The crowd sitting along the backfield screamed and ducked. Kate turned away, raising her arm to shelter her face.
Something weird had happened. Ana had seen Kate throw a thousand times, everything from a grain of rice to a bowling ball. She’d blown up cars and killed people with her projectiles. But she’d never erased a target like this.
Then the speed of the pitch flashed on the big board: 772 mph.
The announcer went crazy, his voice cracking as he screamed, “… that sound … the sonic boom of a baseball! Oh my God, I’ve never seen anything like it! Unbelievable!”
Kate had also put a sedan-sized crater in the outfield, but no one seemed to mind. The crowd’s collective roar matched the noise of a tidal wave, and the major league players rushed out on the field to swarm Curveball. A pair of them lifted her to their shoulders, so she sailed above them. Her face held an expression of stark wonder. The screen at the backfield focused on her, her vast smile and bright eyes.
Ana clapped and screamed along with the rest of the crowd.
It took two hours for the stadium to clear out. Ana lingered, making her way toward home plate, where Kate was entertaining fans leaning over the boards to talk to her. Signing baseballs, posing for pictures. Ana arrived in time to catch one exchange with a girl, maybe twelve, a redhead in braids and a baseball cap of her own.
“I play softball,” she said, handing Kate a ball to sign.
“You pitch?” Kate asked.
“Yeah, but not like you.”
“Chapman doesn’t pitch like me. I bet you’re good enough.”
The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. We didn’t win the season.”
“Keep practicing. That’s what it takes. Work hard. Okay?”
The girl left smiling.
Kate saw Ana hanging back as the last of her admirers left. Squealing, she pulled herself over the barrier and caught her up in a rib-squishing hug. Ana hugged back, laughing. They separated to get a better look at each other. Kate was still grinning, as well she should be, but Ana noticed the shadows under her eyes.
“I’m so glad you could make it,” Kate said.
“Are you kidding? I wasn’t going to miss it. You ready for the party?”
Kate sighed. “I need a couple more hours. They want a press conference and a photo op for the charity. We raised seventy-five grand.” Her gaze brightened.
“That’s so great. How about this—come over as soon as you can, and I’ll have a chance to pick up a few more things and get the place cleaned up.”
“You promised me a gallon of margaritas. Is that still on?”
“Oh, you know it. A gallon of margaritas, a pile of DVDs—and all the gossip on that new boy of yours.”
Kate blushed, but her smile glowed. “You got it.”
Ana had brought home the tequila, limes, salt, and a bag of ice already. Now, she went for approximately a metric ton of burritos from the excellent taquería around the corner from her apartment. They had to eat if they were going to keep up their strength for more margaritas.
The Lower East Side walk-up used to be her and Kate’s apartment, back when Kate was still on the Committee, until she quit and went back to school in Oregon. That had been a couple of years ago now, and they didn’t get to see each other very often these days.
Her apartment was on East Fifth Street, a few blocks off Jokertown, in a neighborhood that wasn’t great but wasn’t awful. Ana liked the place. It wasn’t pretentious, and she could maintain some level of normality. Like go to the taquería without anyone giving her a hard time or snapping pictures. With her straight dark hair and stoutish frame, she wasn’t as photogenic as Kate, but she’d had her own share of publicity as the Latin American Coordinator for the UN Committee on Extraordinary Interventions. She didn’t much feel like a public figure most of the time. So she stayed in her unassuming neighborhood. The street food was better.
At her building’s front door, she paused to find her key one-handed, when a voice hissed at her from the stairwell to the lower-level apartment.
“Ana! Ana, down here!” She looked over the railing.
The joker wore dark sunglasses and had his top two arms shoved into an oversized jacket. His middle two arms held it tight around his torso in some futile attempt at a disguise. He made his best effort to huddle in the shadows, away from the view of street level, but the guy was over seven feet tall and bulky: the world-famous drummer for the band Joker Plague.
“DB? What are you doing here?” she said.
He made a waving motion, hushing her. “Quiet! Get down here, will you?”
She swung around the railing, and Drummer Boy pulled her into the shelter of the stairwell, making her drop the bag of food. “Michael!”
“Shhh! Sorry. Here.” With a fifth arm emerging from the bottom of the jacket, he picked up the bag and shoved it at her. The contents were probably mushed. Maybe they could have burrito casserole. “Ana, I need to talk to you, can I come in?”
“Couldn’t you call?”
“In person. Come on, at least can we get off the street?”
She hadn’t seen him in almost a year. Normally, she’d be happy to see him, and they tried to get together the rare times they happened to be in the same zip code at the same time. He’d gotten her tickets to a Joker Plague show awhile back, and she’d love to do something like that again. But she really wished he’d called. What she didn’t want was him still hanging around when Kate arrived.
She spent too long thinking, and DB continued cajoling. “I’m passing through town, and I really need to talk to you but I’m trying to keep a low profile—”
She raised an eyebrow and gave him a skeptical look. With six arms and tympanic membranes covering his torso, Michael Vogali, aka Drummer Boy, could never keep a low profile. Ever.
“Michael, what do you want, really?” she said.
“Can I crash at your place? Just for a couple of days. Please?”
Three hundred sixty-five days in a year, and he picked this one to show up asking for a favor. He was a friend, she didn’t want to say no, but this couldn’t be happening. This … this was not going to end well.
She winced. “You don’t have anyone else you can stay with? Don’t you own an apartment on Central Park or something excessive like th
“Never did get around to it,” he said. “Our recording studio’s in LA.”
“You can’t stay at my place, it’s tiny.”
“It’s just for a couple of days—”
Exasperated, she blurted, “You can’t because Kate’s staying with me tonight.”
He brightened. “She is? I haven’t seen her in ages. Is she … I mean, is she okay and everything?”
She hadn’t meant to say anything about Kate. “Are you sure you can’t stay someplace else?”
“This isn’t just about someplace to stay, we really do need to talk. And Kate … oh fuck, I didn’t want to be the one to tell Kate, I was hoping you could do it after I’d talked to you—”
“What are you talking about?”
“Please, can we go inside?” He gave her a hangdog look that should have been ridiculous on a seven-foot-tall joker behemoth, but he managed to make himself endearing.
She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Fine. But Kate and I are still having our margarita night.”
“Hey, that sounds like fun—”
“Michael!”
He raised his hands in a defensive pose and backed up a step. “No problem.”
“Hold this.” She handed him the burritos and found the key for the door. “Why didn’t you just call me instead of camping out like a homeless person?”
“Because you’d be more likely to say yes if I just showed up on your doorstep?”
She growled and hit him on the side, generating a hollow echo through his torso.
“My walls are thin—you’re going to have to cut down on the drumming.”
“Sure, of course,” he said, smacking a hollow beat as punctuation.
Oh yeah, was this going to end badly.
Kate and DB had quit the Committee at the same time, over the politicization of the group in the Middle East. Ana hadn’t been there, but she’d gotten an earful when Kate called to tell her about it. She’d cried a bunch during that phone call—Ana might be the only person in the world who knew how torn up Kate had been over the whole thing. Ana had been stuck halfway around the world, on another mission for the Committee, and couldn’t do a thing about it. DB had just been angry—he hadn’t called Ana to vent. A bunch of the tabloids insisted that DB and Kate had run off together in some torrid romance, but that wasn’t at all true. It was all getting to be old history, now. They’d moved on. Ana hoped they didn’t revive the soap opera here tonight.
Kate’s call from the downstairs intercom came an hour later, and Ana buzzed her in.
“I never thought they’d let me leave,” Kate said, pushing into the apartment and dropping her bag by the door. “One more picture, they kept saying. Not like they didn’t already have twenty million.”
Ana stepped aside, closed the door behind her, and waited. Didn’t take long.
DB stood from the sofa and sheepishly waved a couple of arms, while a third skittered a nervous beat that sounded like balloons popping. He’d taken off the oversized jacket and stood in all his shirtless, tattooed glory. “Hey, Kate.”
Kate turned to Ana. “What’s he doing here?”
DB stepped forward. “It’s just for the night, I promise, I’m trying to keep a low profile—”
“I’m a pushover,” Ana said, shrugging.
Kate glared, and Ana wasn’t sure whom the glare was directed toward. “I hope you have those margaritas ready.”
“Two pitchers, ready to go.”
They headed into the kitchen, or rather the corner of the apartment that served as the kitchen. DB followed them, sidling along, as delicately as his body allowed. “So, hey, Kate. How you doing?” DB had been nursing a crush on Kate for years now. He wasn’t any more subtle about it than he had been back on the set of the first season of American Hero. He’d gotten a little more polite, at least.
“I pitched past the sound barrier at Yankee Stadium today, how are you?”
“Um … hey, that’s great. I think. I just happened to be in town, and, well, we really need to talk—”
Kate said, “Michael, Ana and I planned a night to chill out, with too much alcohol and a lot of TV and not thinking about anything. That’s not going to change just because you’re here, okay? I can’t be mad about Ana letting you stay here. But can you just … leave us alone?”
DB sat back on the sofa, his arms folded together contritely.
Feeding everyone margaritas kept them quiet for a little while. Half an hour, maybe. The first DVD of the latest season of Grey’s Anatomy was good for another hour or so, especially watching the episode where Meredith and Derek spent the whole time fighting over Derek’s ethically questionable experiments using a new version of the trump virus on a collection of hideous joker patients. It was pretty awful.
DB chortled through the whole thing. “I wouldn’t mind it so much if they actually used joker actors rather than nat actors with fucking rubber tentacles.”
Ana agreed with him, but they had to have the rubber tentacles so they could take them off and declare them cured for five minutes before they melted in a hideous ooze of sudden-onset Black Queen.
But the episode finally ended, and in the quiet while Ana changed out DVDs, DB had to ruin it. “Okay, I know you’re having your party and all, and I know I’m interrupting—”
Kate, nested on pillows on the floor in front of the TV, took a long drink of margarita and ignored him. Ana almost felt sorry for the guy. He was nice, usually; he’d take a bullet for his friends, and with their history that wasn’t just a saying. But he was way too used to being the center of attention, and definitely wasn’t used to being ignored by a couple of women.
“—but I really need to talk to you. This is serious. Seriously.” The sofa creaked as he leaned forward, and half his hands drummed nervously.
Ana shushed him, got the DVD in and hit play, hoping that would shut him up. But Kate rolled over and glared. “Michael, what are you doing here? Isn’t Joker Plague supposed to be on tour in … in Thailand or someplace?”
He brightened. “You’ve been keeping up with us—”
She glowered. “Crazy guess.”
“The tour was last month. We’re supposed to be recording the new album, but … I gotta tell you, it’s not going well. I knew we were in trouble when all our songs started being about how tough it is being a band on tour. So I’m telling the guys, maybe we should take some time off, get back to our roots. Hang in Jokertown for a while—”
Kate turned back to the TV.
“—but never mind that. I was doing this signing in LA a week or so ago, and a fan brought me this … this thing. I think you really need to know that this is out there.” He was serious—worried, even, reaching for something in the pocket of his oversized coat, draped over the back of the sofa.
The intercom buzzer at the front door went off.
Ana needed a minute to scramble up from the bed of cushions. Her first margarita was already making her wobbly. She really needed a vacation.…
“You expecting anyone?” Kate asked.
“No,” Ana said, and hit the intercom button. “Hello?”
“Ana. It’s John. John Fortune.”
This had to be a joke. Someone had put him up to this. This was too … If it had happened to someone else, it would be funny.
“What?” Kate said. Both she and DB were staring at her. So yeah, they’d heard it.
She didn’t want to argue. “I’ll be right down,” she said, and left before Kate and DB could say anything.
He was waiting at the front door, hands shoved in the pockets of a ratty army jacket. She couldn’t say he looked particularly good at the moment. He was a slim, handsome man, with dark skin, pale hair, and a serious expression. The white lines of an asterisk-shaped scar painted his forehead. At the moment his hair was too long and uncombed, and he looked shadowed, gaunt, like he hadn’t gotten enough food, sleep, or both.
“Hi,” he said, his smile thin, halfhearted.
“John. Hi
“I need a favor.” Oh, no, this was not happening.… He said, “Can I stay with you? Just a couple of nights.”
Any other night … “This really isn’t the best time. Can’t you stay with your mom?”
He winced and rubbed his head. “I would, except she’s trying to talk me into coming back to work for her on American Hero. And that … I can’t do that. I’m avoiding her.”
“No,” she said. “You sure can’t.”
“I know I should have called ahead … but it’s just a couple of nights, I promise.”
Whatever else she was, Ana was not the kind of person who left a friend standing on the street. She held open the door. “Come on in. Um, I should probably warn you…”
Ana half expected Kate to be hiding in the bathroom, the only spot in the studio with a closable door and any modicum of privacy. But she was standing in the middle of the room, side by side with DB, waiting. Ana led John inside and softly closed the door.
John slouched, and his smile was strained. “Hi, Kate.”
“Hi,” she said, her tone flat. That was it.
“Well,” DB drawled. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
“Can it, Michael,” Ana said. She drew herself up, hands on hips. She’d stared down diplomats from a dozen countries and addressed the UN Security Council. Surely she could lay down the law here. “You’re all my friends and I’m not going to leave anybody stranded. But I would appreciate you all acting like grown-ups. You think you can do that?” Nobody said anything, so she assumed that was yes. “I’ll heat up some food, we can have dinner. Like normal people.” While she pulled food out of the fridge, she listened.
“How you doing?” John said.
“I’m okay,” Kate answered. “You?”
He might have shrugged.
Ana hadn’t been there when they broke up, but she knew it had been bad—Kate walking out while John was still in the hospital, recovering from having a joker parasite with delusions of grandeur ripped out of his forehead. John had gone from being a latent, to drawing a Black Queen, to having his father die to save his life, to having an ace power in the form of a scarab-beetle ace living inside him—to nathood. And then his girlfriend broke up with him.