The Hanged Man

Home > Other > The Hanged Man > Page 8
The Hanged Man Page 8

by T. J. MacGregor

“You heard the news, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Which news?”

  “It won’t be official until Monday, but they’ve narrowed the cutbacks in our department to four positions.”

  Sheppard went utterly and completely cold inside; liquid nitrogen ran through his veins. He suddenly knew what death would feel like six feet under. “Who?” he croaked.

  Ames looked as smug as a pig in skit. “Captain doesn’t know yet. But that’s why everyone’s working on a Saturday.”

  He numbered among the targeted four, he was sure of it. He was equally sure that Ames had figured it that way, too.

  “We’re all looking for the big one that will save our asses,” Ames went on. “‘Course, even overtime isn’t going to help if you don’t have the years in.”

  “And how many years is that, Pete?” You dumb shit.

  His smug little grin widened. “I hear at least six.”

  The knot of anxiety hardened in his chest again and swelled in direct proportion to the widening of Ames’s grin. Sheppard couldn’t stand looking at the man any longer, so he turned his attention back to the file.

  For the first few moments, the words kept blurring, sentences ran together like melting wax, and he saw himself in an unemployment line. The unemployment office would smell of sweat and heat and frustration. The clerks would be deadbeats counting the minutes to their next coffee break. Christ help him.

  Focus, focus, focus.

  He rubbed his eyes and went back to the beginning of the file. Hotchkiss never turned up any significant leads. The convenience store clerk who gave the description on the perp had gone into the freezer to get the man ice cream and when she’d come out, two men were dead and the perp had split with a couple hundred bucks.

  When I asked her why she’d gone into the freezer and left her register untended, Hotchkiss wrote, she had she seemed confused, said she didn’t know why she’d done it, she simply had. Despite repeated questioning about the perp’s appearance, she was able to recall only one other new detail, that the guy wore lime green shoelaces. I never mentioned this fact to Mrs. Morales. I hoped she would come up with it in one of her “visions.” She never did.

  “Sweet Christ,” Sheppard whispered. Lime green shoelaces.

  He shot to his feet, scooped up the rest of the file, and hurried out of the office, vaguely aware of Ames’s eyes glued to his back. He went into the Xerox room, shut the door, and leaned against it, the file pressed to his chest, his eyes squeezed shut. Blood pounded in his ears.

  You imagined it.

  No, he hadn’t. He patted the wall for the switch and turned on the light. He moved the file away from his chest, smoothed the wrinkled top sheet with the palm of his hand, and read the line about the green shoelaces again and again.

  The killer in Mira’s vision had also been wearing green shoelaces. His deepest instincts said it had to be the same guy. The coincidence was too great for it to be otherwise. This discovery wasn’t just a vital link in the case; it might save his ass from the unemployment line.

  Sheppard made four copies of the page—overkill, for sure, but what the hell. He decided not to say anything to the captain yet. Gerry Young, a pragmatist, wouldn’t give much credence to Mira’s version of what had happened to Steele. But if Steele’s young son confirmed that the killer had worn green shoelaces, then he would have something solid to present to Young.

  He returned to his office. Ames had left, thank Christ; he needed some privacy. He shut the door, then called pediatrics at Holy Cross Hospital, gave his badge number, and asked for an update on Carl Steele’s condition. The head nurse said that Carl Steele had improved sufficiently so that Sheppard could talk to him tomorrow sometime. She cautioned him to keep it short and to proceed as gently as possible. Sheppard assured her he would.

  “I certainly will. Thanks for your help.”

  The phone rang almost as soon as he hung up. “Detective Sheppard.”

  A man with a soft, raspy voice said: “I have some information on the Steele homicide that will interest you.”

  “And your name?”

  The man ignored the question. “I’ll be at the Elbo Room on Lauderdale Beach next Thursday evening at ten.”

  “How will I know you?”

  “I’ll know you,” he replied, and hung up.

  Sheppard sat there gripping the receiver, the man’s words ringing in his ears.

  Chapter 8

  Tom had taught Mira that without a dream, life was tragically diminished, a parody of itself. Even if the dream never materialized fully, the striving mattered.

  In the days and weeks and months after Tom’s death, she’d thought often about striving to reach her dreams without Tom cheering her on in the background. As the child of Cuban immigrants, he’d known a few things about dreams. He and Nadine had envisioned One World, believed in it, long before she had.

  Now she climbed the stairs to the apartment they had lived in during that long, hot summer when they had been making the dream a reality. In her memories, Tom usually was laughing, a rich, robust laugh that had marked him as surely as the rich black of his hair.

  He had been one of those rare individuals whose optimistic nature called a day partly sunny, not partly cloudy. He hadn’t been a complicated man, perhaps because his priorities had been utterly clear in his mind. But his depth had awed her.

  Tonight a kind of menacing gloom accompanied her up these stairs, the result of Sheppard’s visit, of his request for information and help. She felt anxious, uneasy, spooked by the smallest sounds here in the stairwell. The creak of the old wood, a scratching she couldn’t identify, the muted whisper of the wind: the internal made manifest. She knew it wouldn’t stop here.

  The tension already had begun to appear in her body. Her head throbbed, her stomach felt weird, the vague, irritating ache in the small of her back begged for the soothing heat of a long bath. Everything she felt at the moment, in fact, screamed for her to forget Sheppard’s request, to just let it be. She had seen what she had seen, she had reported it, she had answered his questions to the best of her ability. No spoken or unspoken code obligated her to do anything more than that.

  But she couldn’t dismiss it because she didn’t understand why she had tuned in on the murder of a man she had never met. After struggling all these years to understand the nature of her ability and how it worked, she knew at least one thing: it didn’t reach out randomly and scoop in psychic garbage just because it was there. So why Steele? What was it about him that had triggered the connection?

  She didn’t know. No matter how she looked at it, how she turned the equation around, she found only a looming black question mark.

  At the top of the stairs, Mira rapped on the door of the apartment, then let herself in. Nadine had moved in here about a year ago, after the fall that had broken her hip. Up until then, she had been living alone in a large house in nearby Hidden Lake that she once had shared with her second husband, a millionaire who had died eleven years ago.

  She had transformed the place, bringing her own eccentricities to these rooms. But rather than molding them to fit her requirements, it was as if Nadine had released their essence.

  The bamboo chairs, the Mexican tile floors, the wild profusion of plants, even the sparse furnishings, coalesced into some breathing, organic whole with which Nadine coexisted. Her grandmother always had lived at the border between the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the ethereal, equally at home in both.

  Mira’s parents, on the other hand, clearly belonged in the realm of the visible. They lived in an ocean condo on Vero Beach, belonged to the local yacht club, played golf four times a week, and attended their church regularly even though they didn’t believe a word of what was preached. To them, Mira and Nadine were the eccentrics of the family, the affable weirdos who cruised in for a visit every few months, then returned to their inexplicable lives.

  The cats greeted her with fussy me
ows that made it clear they didn’t appreciate being hauled from the house to the apartment. Annie and Nadine lounged on the couch, Annie reading and Nadine watching the late news, which she hadn’t done in at least a decade. “You just missed seeing Detective Sheppard,” she said, glancing away from the TV. “He was giving a statement about the murder of a man named Andrew Steele. Does that have anything to do with the tarot cards he wanted interpreted?”

  Mira nodded and dropped her purse in one of the bamboo chairs. “I don’t know if what I told him helped very much.”

  “Nana and I saved you some veggie chili, Mom,” Annie piped up.

  “Thanks, sweetie. It’s past your bedtime, don’t you think?”

  “Aw, c’mon. Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

  “Thirty more minutes.”

  Annie blew her a kiss and reached for the TV clicker. Nadine picked up her cane and pushed to her feet. “Let’s talk in the kitchen while you eat.”

  Tin boxes lined wall shelves in the tiny kitchen, each a different shape and color, each containing a deck of tarot cards or one of its permutations. A myriad of other psychic tools were displayed as well—runes, I Ching coins, shells, pendulums, even a collection of bleached white bones and a crystal ball. A wind chime made of different colored crystals hung in the only window, its wooden shutters open to the night.

  Despite the window, this little hobbit kitchen always made Mira feel as if she were underground, in some dry, firelit cave. Everywhere she looked, she saw tree frogs: the miniature collection that lined the top edge of the stove, the dish towels with tree frogs on them, the frog-shaped soap dish, the ceramic frogs that held a pair of unlit red candles. Nadine considered frogs to be her talismen.

  “I want to hear it from the beginning,” Nadine said, setting a bowl of chili and a glass of iced tea in front of Mira.

  She started with the vision she’d had Thursday morning. For as far back as she could remember, Nadine had been her sounding board, her mentor, teacher, and close friend. She’d helped Mira understand and deal with the clairvoyant impressions she’d had as a child, had taught her how to focus her psychic ability, and how to shut it down. Nadine had dealt with psychic matters most of her life; if an explanation existed for why Mira had tuned in on the murder of a man she’d never met, Nadine would help her find it.

  “The first question you have to ask yourself, Mira, is why you picked up on this man’s murder. You didn’t know him, had no personal connection to him whatsoever. So why him?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”

  Nadine hobbled over to the kitchen drawer where she kept her special tarot cards. They shared space with some of Annie’s toys, with pens and pencils and old grocery lists, with everything that didn’t fit elsewhere. By contrast, Mira kept her decks wrapped in silk of different colors and stored in a cool, dark place. But Nadine had never been big on ritual.

  She selected two decks, the Voyager and a Rider-Waite deck. The first, the subject of the workshop this afternoon, was a unique permutation of the original tarot, designed for the next millennium. No art graced these cards; each consisted of a photo collage that was utterly magnificent. The second deck was the same one Sheppard’s cards had come from.

  “What were the cards again?” Nadine asked, rolling the rubber band off the Rider-Waite deck.

  “The Lovers, the Tower, the eight of cups, the Wheel of Fortune, the eight and ten of swords, and the Hanged Man.”

  Nadine slipped on her reading glasses, which hung from a chain around her neck, and removed the respective cards from the deck. She fanned them out face up and slipped the four major arcana cards out of the fan. The Lovers, the Tower, the Wheel of Fortune, and the Hanged Man.

  “Since these are majors, they’re the only ones that are important right now.”

  Major Arcana cards concerned character and destiny and depicted archetypical situations: birth, death, change, growth, love, marriage—the biggies. The minor arcana, the four suits of cups, wands, swords, and coins, concerned behavior and circumstances.

  “When you interpreted the cards for Sheppard, were you just giving him the definitions or were you reading the cards?”

  In other words, had she tuned in? Nope, she hadn’t. “I was trying to listen to the cards, I didn’t want to tune in.”

  “You were afraid to, you mean.”

  It wasn’t a criticism; Nadine simply stated the truth as she saw it. Mira nodded.

  “This murder thrust itself into your awareness for a reason, Mira, even if we don’t know what that reason is yet. By fearing it, you’re denying your own power. So your first decision has to be whether or not you can continue to be involved.”

  “I’d rather not be involved. But I want to know why I picked up on the murder.”

  “Fine. Then let’s see what kind of story we can create from these cards.” She glanced down at the four majors. “Since the cards were sent to Mrs. Steele, I have to interpret this story as one of romantic obsession. Our Hanged Man’s love for Steele’s wife is a dark, twisted emotion. He’s willing to do almost anything to possess her. He takes enormous risks. Perhaps he even kills Steele and abducts her. In that case, the majors point to the destiny between Mrs. Steele and this man.”

  “If you believe in destiny,” Mira remarked.

  Which neither of them did. With each choice you made, with each belief you discarded or adopted, life changed. This was part of the problem with doing predictive tarot, predictive anything. When Mira read for a client, she tuned into the path or paths that were most probable at that moment. The point of power resided in the present. Change what you believe and your life changes.

  So what belief of hers had drawn this experience to her? “The problem with all this, Nadine, is that the cards were sent before the murder. Everything may have changed since then. Also, I don’t know what spread to use.”

  Nadine made an impatient gesture with her hand. “You’re too obsessed about spreads. You don’t need a spread to read the cards. They are what they are. You know that.”

  The cantankerous undertone to her voice put Mira on the defensive and cranked up her body aches and discomforts another notch.

  “They’re nothing but a particular placement. The cards are what matter.” Nadine picked up the Voyager deck, snapped off the rubber band. “Think of a question and pick three cards. But keep it simple, okay? I’m too tired to get into a big deal.”

  Mira thought of her question, chose her cards, set them facedown on the table, nothing fancy, one two three, right next to each other. Nadine quickly turned the cards over. “Your past is holding you back. You need to release it before you can move forward in your life. A man that you meet through work will help you break those patterns.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed. “What bullshit, Nadine. I asked if I was going to have a guest bathroom in my next house.”

  “That’s a frivolous question.”

  “Not to me.”

  Nadine picked up the cards, shuffled them back into the deck, snapped the rubber band around them again. “That’s exactly my point. It doesn’t matter what question you ask. The cards will give you the information you need about where you are in your life.”

  “But you’re the one doing the interpreting. That doesn’t count. You know me too well.”

  She rolled her eyes and reached for her cane. “That was just an example to make my point.”

  The knot in Mira’s stomach tightened, she pushed the half-eaten bowl of chili away from her. “It was a blatant attempt on your part to get me thinking about Sheppard.”

  “You need to get out more, Mira. That’s a fact. And he seemed like a perfectly nice man.”

  “He’s a cop.”

  “Better a cop than a convict,” Nadine replied with a laugh. “Very funny. Is Ben around?”

  “No, Ben isn’t around.” Nadine sipped from a mug of hot chocolate—sipped noisil
y, an unattractive habit, but what the hell. Her age entitled her to a few quirks.

  “You’re just angry that I called your bluff.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “If you weren’t angry, Ben would be around.”

  For at least fifteen years, her grandmother had been channeling an entity who called himself Ben. She didn’t do it for clients; outside of the family, the only people who knew about Ben were Nadine’s oldest friends.

  Ben claimed that by working through Nadine, he accelerated his own spiritual growth. Mira still didn’t know what, exactly, Ben was. At times, she thought he might be part of Nadine, some disassociated piece of her personality. Other times, she felt sure he was what he claimed to be: an “energy essence” no longer focused in physical reality.

  Regardless of what he was or wasn’t, his accuracy had proven impressive. Although the specifics of some of Ben’s predictions had differed from the actual event, that was typical for any psychic reading. The bottom line, though, had remained unchanged for fifteen years: when Ben came through, Mira listened.

  “C’mon, Nadine, I’ve got a couple of questions for him.”

  Besides, Ben owed her. He hadn’t warned Tom to stay out of convenience stores (but then again, neither had she) and hadn’t given her any information whatsoever about who had killed him. He’d only discussed why it had happened, which wasn’t what she had wanted to hear five years ago. She had said all this before, but she said it again now.

  “Okay, okay, Mira.”

  Nadine sipped once more from her mug, then sat back, palms flat against her thighs, and shut her eyes. Her breathing deepened, that was all.

  When she opened her eyes again, they seemed to be all pupil, as black as wet streets. Her spine had straightened, she looked younger, more energetic. Mira knew from experience that Nadine wouldn’t need her glasses now to read, that her hearing would be sharper, that she wouldn’t use the cane if she got up from the table.

  Many channelers manifested similar changes, a phenomenon Mira likened to what happened to people with split personalities. One personality might be a diabetic, for instance, but the condition didn’t exist in another personality, even though both used the same physical body.

 

‹ Prev