The wretched film came alive only through the medium of Shelley. She disarmed the worst lines with genuine laughter; the best were said with glowing sincerity. Life bubbled out of her as from an artesian spring. Shad found himself enchanted.

Now he could only find bits of her wrapped in the tired joker skin. Memory kept digging sharp nails into him. Her familiar words and gestures sent waves of sickness through his belly.

Twenty grand, he thought-maybe she'd be Shelley again.

She was supposed to establish contact by putting an ad in the Times. He got her a new wardrobe and a room in an uptown hotel that was so classy, they wouldn't turn down even a dog-faced joker. He rented the adjoining room for himself. Then he placed the ad for her.

He said he had someplace to go and split.

He called all of Croyd's numbers from his hotel room. There was no answer, and he left messages on the tapes, specifying date and time so that if Croyd woke up in a month's time, he'd know not to bother answering.

When he got to the safe house, his answering machine was blinking with a message from Croyd. Croyd had apparently awakened as a joker this time, because his voice had turned into a high-pitched honk. He sounded like a goose with a cleft palate. Shad had to play the message twice to understand it. He returned the call at the number Croyd had given.

"This is Black Shadow," Shad said. "Are you looking for work?"

"I don't know if I can help you this time around," Croyd said. "I'm just planning to go back to sleep as soon as I can and forget I ever woke up looking like this."

Shad understood maybe half the words, but the meaning was clear. "Can you do anything at all?" he asked.

"I'm sort of like a giant bat, except without hair. I've got a membrane between elongated fingers and thumbs, and I have sonar, and I-" He hesitated for a moment. "I have this craving for bugs."

"You can fly, though?"

"That's the only good part, yeah."

"I think you're just what I need. Can we meet?"

"I don't feel like going out."

"Can I bring you anything?"

"A box of bugs, maybe. Assorted sizes."

Shad thought about it for a moment. If you could buy a box of bugs anywhere, you could buy them in Jokertown. "I'll see what I can do," he said.

He found a box of fried locusts in an exotic food store on Baxter and took it to his meeting. Croyd was repulsive, even for a joker, a three-foot-high pink-skinned homunculus with fleshy wings. Money changed hands, and locusts got eaten. Things were arranged.

After a visit to his Gramercy Park flat for some gear, Shad slipped back into his adjoining room at the hotel a little before ten o'clock, knocked on the door to make sure Shelley was okay, and found her in bed watching a movie on TV He carefully bugged Shelley's room, including a video camera that he aimed through a fish-eye lens he installed in their adjoining door.

"Here's what happens from this point on," Shad said. "We don't see each other till the meeting's over. They may be watching your room. You take the money now, you make the meet, you do what they tell you. Afterwards you come back here, and if things are clear, we'll talk."

"What if they ask me where I got the money?"

"Tell them you stole somebody's jewelry, then sold it." Shelley pulled her wrinkles up out of her soft brown eyes and looked at him. "Who are you? Why are you doing this?"

"I don't know"

She gave a nervous little laugh. "Which question did you answer?"

Shad looked at her. "Both."

The jumpers called Shelley at four-thirty in the morning. Evidently they'd got an early edition of the paper. They ordered her to meet them at eight, standing right out in the traffic circle at Chatham Square, with the twenty grand in her handbag. Shad watched her leave on the TV screen, called Croyd, turned on the VCR, and headed downstairs. He got on his motorcycle-a Vincent Black Shadow, natch, restored for No Dice by the Harlem Hammer-and headed for Chatham Square.

He wished the jumpers hadn't set the meet for broad daylight.

Before eight, he was on the rooftop of an apartment building on Baxter Street with Croyd. He could see Shelley standing nervously in the traffic circle a half block away. The morning rush-hour traffic was almost gridlocked around her. "Can you fly with one of these around your neck?" Shad asked.

Croyd eyed the walkie-talkie carefully. Shad looked at the pink hairless body and wondered where Croyd's excess body mass had gone.

"I don't think so."

"I'll leave one here, then. After you're done, you can report."

"walkie-talkies don't work so good around here. Too many tall buildings with metal inside."

"These are police walkie-talkies. There are repeaters set up everywhere."

"Where'd you get police walkie-talkies?"

Shad shrugged. "I dressed up as a cop, walked into Fort Freak, and took a couple from the charging rack."

Croyd gave a nasal honking laugh and shook his head. "Gotta admire your style, homes."

"Shucks. Ain't nothin."

He went down the stairs, then walked past where his motorcycle was parked. He put on a navy-blue beret, settled in a doorway where he could keep an eye on Shelley, and chewed a toothpick for a while.

Black men hanging out in doorways are not unusual in America's teeming metropoloi. He concentrated on not being unusual. He concentrated on being Juve, and Juve was checking out the scene, with long Yardbird Parker riffs, all staccato, in his head.

Juve tried real hard not to notice the little pink guy flapping through the air about five hundred feet up.

It was almost eight-fifteen when he saw the powder-blue Lincoln Town Car easing through the gridlock a second time. His nerves started humming. Nouveau-riche criminals, he had often observed, often gave themselves away when it came to personal transportation. But the Lincoln went out of sight, and then Shad's attention snapped to Shelley. She was moving, walking with the light in the direction of the East River.

Damn. She wasn't supposed to leave yet.

Juve ambled out of the doorway, straddled the Black Shadow, and kick-started it. Shelley was disobeying instructions, and this couldn't be good. It wasn't until he eased the bike out into traffic that he realized what had just happened. His nerves began to sizzle. He cast a wild look down Worth Street, then Park Row, just in time to see the blue Lincoln turn right on Duane.

Shelley was in the Lincoln. She'd just been jumped. Croyd was following the wrong body, damn it.

Shad clutched and shifted, and the Vincent's engine boomed in synch with his thrashing heart. He raced down St. James Place, elbows and knees tucked in as the bike dived between stationary gridlocked vehicles. Leaving a trail of booming decibels, he performed a power slide behind One Police Plaza, then crossed Park Row without waiting for a break in the traffic, and felt as if he were saved only by some abstruse corollary of particle physics: He wasn't in the same state, particle or wave, long enough for anyone to hit him.

Once onto Center, he saw the Town Car in the distance and throttled back. Center joined Lafayette, and the powderblue Lincoln turned right on Houston, then made another right on First, heading back into Jokertown. The streets were choked, and Shad had no trouble following.

The Lincoln made a few more turns once it entered Jokertown, then turned off into a nineteenth-century brownstone warehouse with its tall windows closed off by more recent red brick. The electronic garage door closed behind the Lincoln, and Shad passed slowly on the motorcycle, turning neither left nor right, an odd prickling on the back of his neck. He wouldn't show up on this block again, certainly not on the bike. He'd be someone else entirely by the time he came back.

He turned, positioning himself to see the Lincoln if it headed back east, then pulled over to the curb and tried to contact Croyd-nothing. He searched the sky for a flapping pink figure, saw no one.