The Wrong Goodbye

by Chris F. Holm

  I swiped his cash and cards, but left his wallet on the bench. What I took, he could replace. But those vinyl-wrapped pictures were like happy trapped in amber. Like little glinting slivers of skim, only without the nasty comedown. Last thing I wanted to do was deprive Big Dude of that.

  The only picture in Just Right's wallet was torn out of a girly magazine. That one I kept.

  The wallet, I mean. Jesus.

  I strolled out of the locker room whistling before one of them shut off the tap. Grabbed some jerky, bottled water, and a pair of flimsy flip-flops, and brought them to the counter. Told the kid behind the register to grab me one of the pre-paid cell phones hanging up behind him, and paid for fifty bucks in gas. Then I said, "Fuck it," and had him ring up some aloe vera while he was at it.

  I was in and out in less than seven minutes, and long gone before the shouting started. Of course, I didn't realize at the time I'd just taken a star turn on no fewer than two dozen security cameras, or that the cops who'd spotted us lowriding through the Rosita's parking lot would ID me from that footage right around the time I stopped in Phoenix to take a leak. I didn't know that they'd tie Bertha – and by extension, me – to the explosion at the strip club, or that a piece of shrapnel containing the Fiesta's VIN would lead the Feds to Ethan's doorstep around the time I hit the Nevada state line. The way I hear it, Ethan's breathless (if not entirely sensical) statement to the Federales tied a bow around the whole damned affair and set some junior G-man salivating at the prospect of nabbing the nefarious perpetrator of a real-live transcontinental crime spree.

  Said perpetrator being me, in case that wasn't clear.

  But like I said, I wasn't aware of any of that. I just drove blithely on toward Vegas, as one by one the pieces clicked into place.

  As I pushed open the storefront door, I was greeted by the sound of crashing surf. After two days of wandering in the desert like some latter-day Moses – you know, if Moses were undead and damned and playing for the black-hats and, OK maybe it ain't the best comparison after all – I thought maybe God was mocking me. Then a pan-flute sounded, and I spotted the boom box on the counter by the register. Propped against it was a CD case that read Reaching Elysium: Divinity Through Relaxation. That's when I knew for sure that God was mocking me.

  The place wasn't much to look at. Outside, it was a bland commercial storefront in a bland commercial district of Las Vegas, cut off from the glamor of the Strip – and the benefit of its tourist dollars – by the Las Vegas Freeway. Sandwiched as it was between a nail emporium and an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, the reek of chemicals and cooking oil seemed designed to speed what little foot-traffic might happen by on their way without a second glance. Not that a second glance would've done much good. The sign over the door was cheap, hand-lettered, and simply read: PALMISTRY TAROT DIVINATION PSYCHIC READINGS LOST ITEMS FOUND. No name, no phone number, no punctuation. But from what I could dig up online on my piece-of-shit cell phone, the place had been in business for five years, and the ratings I'd read were glowing to a one. Maybe there was more to the place than its appearance would suggest.

  There fucking oughta be, I thought, or I just spent half of my last day on Earth running down a bogus lead.

  It was Gio who brought me here. With that stupid rhyme he made Roscoe memorize. With something he said back in Las Cruces. This research shit would go a hell of a lot faster if you had an iPhone, he'd told me. A little Google access would make your life a whole lot easier.

  So I took his advice. Googled as much as I could remember of Roscoe's poem. Turned out, it really was a jingle – not for a psychic hotline, but for a real, live psychic hailing from Gio's old stomping grounds. She had an ad in the online edition of the Las Vegas Weekly, sandwiched between one touting the loosest slots in town, and one the loosest women. So if this lead didn't pan out, maybe I'd spend my last remaining hours on one of those.

  Inside, the shop was dim and close, the air-conditioned air thick with musky incense. The walls were lined with shelves stacked high with crystals and candles, charms and amulets, books of spells and jars of herbs. The ceiling was draped with fabric – an ornate batik in blue and purple. The tapestry was not quite as large as the dimensions of the ceiling itself, and was set at a forty-five degree angle to the room so that yellow-stained acoustical tiles showed in all four corners.

  At the center of the shop was a table and two chairs. The table was small and round and covered in raw silk of vibrant orange. Atop it sat a deck of Tarot cards and a wooden incense burner filled with ash. The chair nearest me looked to be one scavenged from a dining set. The one opposite the table was a threadbare lime-green wing-backed armchair.

  In the armchair was a woman. Damn near seven feet of woman.

  Honestly, I don't know how I'd missed her. Her stillness, perhaps, or the fact that her garish outfit blended into the chromatic assault of the room at large. Though she was seated, she and I were nearly eye-to-eye. Her naked shoulders were even with the top of the chair back, and the yellow head wrap that hid her hair dimpled the tapestry above. She wore a scant halter of the same yellow as the head wrap and a pair of low-slung Daisy Dukes. The outfit would've been revealing on a woman half her height. Dark brown and well-muscled, she sat cockeyed on the armchair, nestled in the crook of wing and backrest, one arm slung across the chair back. Her broad shoulders and strong jaw bordered on masculine. A good six inches of cleavage tipped the scale the other way. Her legs were crossed at the knee such that one of her platform heels touched the floor, while the other dangled a ways off the ground, her shin a long diagonal. A pair of oversized Jackie O sunglasses hid her eyes from sight. As she tilted her head toward me, I caught a glimpse of my own matched-pair reflections staring back at me – twin strangers who stirred in me neither memory nor sentiment.

  "Can I help you, sugar?" she asked. Her voice was husky and well modulated. She spoke without looking at me, her head angled slightly as though listening carefully to my every move.

  "You're Lady Theresa?"

  "That's right."

  "Then I believe you can. I'm looking for someone," I said, and before I could continue, she raised a hand to hush me.

  "Darlin', ain't we all." She gestured toward the seat opposite her, cut the deck on the table. "Please, sit down."

  I sat down. She drew herself upright, and swung her legs around to face me. Seated across from her, I felt like a child. She shuffled the cards with a showman's flourish, and laid one down – a man and woman intertwined. The Lovers. "The first card dealt represents the question you've come to ask," she said. "It would seem yours centers on a matter of the heart."

  "How can you tell?"

  She smiled. "The cards know all," she said, misunderstanding my question.

  "No," I said. "What I meant was, your ad claims you're blind. How can you tell what card you just laid down?"

  "Ah – I see. You're a skeptic. Of course, when I say, 'I see,'" she said, sliding down her sunglasses to reveal a tangle of mottled scar tissue surrounding eyes clouded white by cataracts, "you understand I'm speaking figuratively." She slid her glasses back up on her nose. "The cards speak to me," she said. "In fact, I'm pretty sure they speak to everyone. Most just don't listen well enough to hear them."

  She laid down another card, this one above the first. A woman among the clouds with a staff in each hand, surrounded by a wreath of some sort – or perhaps an ouroboros, a serpent eating itself. "The World," she said. "It represents an ending, completion – or perhaps the culmination of a quest."

  To the left of the first card she placed The Devil, in which a winged, horned demon held captive a man and woman, chains biting their naked flesh. She claimed it represented ignorance, obsession, lust, and hedonism. I thought it was a tad more literal than that.

  To the right she placed Judgment, which depicted an angel sounding a trumpet, while below, gray figures rose up from stone tombs. What she said of it I didn't hear – I was too entranced by the background image of the car
d itself. For far behind the rising dead was a massive wave, cresting high above them all.

  Below The Lovers, rounding out the cardinal points, she laid the card of Death.

  I'd seen enough. I pushed back from the table, my chair toppling as I rose suddenly to my feet.

  "Is something wrong?" asked Lady Theresa. Her voice and manner were calm, as though I hadn't just freaked out and knocked over my chair. In fact, her only physical response was to slouch against the wing of the chair – legs once more out to one side, right arm draped casually over the chair back so that her hand hung out of sight.

  "I don't have time for this," I said, my voice shakier than I would've liked. "I'm looking for Francis Giordano. Do you know where I can find him?"

  I'll tell you, for a blind chick, she could move. One second, she's stretched out like a housecat in a patch of sunlight, and the next, I'm flat on my back. The table that had until recently separated us was now upturned, and cards lay scattered across the floor. One platform heel ground against my Adam's apple. And that arm she'd draped so casually over the chair back had returned holding a sawed-off shotgun that, unless I was much mistaken, had until recently been Velcroed to her chair back.

  "Listen to me, you son of a bitch – you ain't taking my Gio from me again, you hear? You tell your people he's my man, and hell can't have him."

  Oh. Good. He told her, then.

  I tried to argue. To explain I wasn't here to collect him. But that was kind of hard, seeing as how she'd stuffed the barrel of the shotgun in my mouth. So instead, I settled for thrashing around like an idiot and making frantic mmmmfthftfhing noises.

  "Damn right you should be scared. Now, I understand your kind can't die, but you feel pain the same as anybody else. So I want you to remember something before you come sniffing around here for my man again, OK?"

  I mmmmed some more. I guess she took it as a good enough response.

  "I want you to remember what buckshot tastes like."

  I watched her finger tighten on the trigger. Felt a sudden rush of warm dry air, cutting through the chilly air-conditioned shop like a knife. Something hit the ground behind me, and then the gun went off, my world disintegrating in a sudden roar of thunder.

  It took me a couple minutes to realize I wasn't dead. A couple more before I could bring myself to open my eyes. My face stung like hell, but a quick check indicated everything was more or less where it was supposed to be. The left side of my face was pretty scraped up, and my ears were bleeding, too, but all in all, a shotgun blast to the face wasn't as bad as I'd anticipated.

  Then I saw the crater in the floor beside me – ruined tile and pitted subfloor – and realized she'd missed.

  I tried to piece together what had happened. Saw the shop door still swinging open, two paper bags of groceries lying just inside. One was upright, and stuffed to overflowing. The other was on its side, its contents scattered across the floor. A pool of milk spread slowly out around it like a photo-negative of someone bleeding out in an old black-and-white horror movie.

  Lady Theresa was lying on her back beside me, her shotgun out of reach. She seemed content to let it stay there. Of course, it's not like she had a choice, what with Gio sitting on her chest.

  The boy looked good, I'd give him that. Maybe being on the lam suited him. He'd ditched his funeral duds, swapping out his suit for a pair of navy blue Bermuda shorts and a silk bowling shirt. Looked like he'd had himself a shower and a shave as well. Lady Theresa, however, looked a little worse for being tackled. Her hair wrap had come undone, setting loose a good two feet of unruly Afro. Her sunglasses sat crooked on her head, leaving one pale white eye exposed. And she looked pissed. From all the gesticulating the two of them were doing, it was clear they were having a discussion, and a heated one at that. But my ears were ringing like Notre Dame at Christmas, so it took me some serious concentrating before I could piece together what they were saying.

  "– I mean Jesus fuck, Ter, what the shit were you thinking?"

  "I was thinking I was saving your fat ass, darlin'. How was I supposed to know this guy was friendly?"

  "I told you keep an eye out for him!"

  "No, you told me to keep an eye out for some dude in a suit all beat to shit. This guy strolled in all healthy-like in jeans."

  "Yeah, well, thanks to you, he looks halfway back to beat to shit."

  "I'M FINE," I said, from like a thousand miles away.

  "Fine, huh?" asked Gio, smirking. "Then why the hell're you yelling?"

  "I'M YELLING?"

  "Yeah."

  "AM I STILL?"

  "A bit, dude."

  "OH. DID YOU MISS ME?"

  "For the sake of politeness, let's say yeah. Hey," he said, nodding toward the still-upright bag of gro eries, "you wanna beer?"

  "GOOD LORD YES."

  29.

  "So," I said, washing down a bite of chips and salsa with a swig of Dos Equis, "when'd you realize you had the sight? Uh, the ability to divine, I mean," I added lamely.

  Theresa laughed. "You gotta loosen up, honey – ain't no need to dance around the fact I'm blind. I mean geez, you try to shoot a guy once, and he gets all worried about offending you."

  "Funny, that," I said.

  We were sitting in the back room of Theresa's shop, me and Gio on a thrift-store dinette set, Theresa lounging in an oversized beanbag chair in the corner. The room was draped all over with richly colored fabric just like the front room of the shop. An oversized lava lamp sat in one corner, next to an air mattress and a pile of blankets. A galley kitchen with a mini-fridge and a toaster oven occupied one wall. The sink was piled with dishes, and a pair of toothbrushes lay next to it. Looked to me like Gio had been crashing here, and his woman with him.

  My hearing was back to maybe fifty percent, and a few minutes' cleaning up my face in the shop's restroom revealed only minor cuts and scrapes beneath the blood. I'd emerged to discover Gio'd laid out a snackfood feast, as well as the promised beers. I hadn't realized until I saw the food how hungry I was. And after twenty minutes of shoving food into my face, I'd only just begun to slow. Guess skim really takes it out of you. No wonder Danny had looked like shit.

  "As for my ability to sense what lies behind the curtain," Theresa continued theatrically, "I guess somehow I've always known."

  Gio snorted.

  "Something funny?" I asked.

  "Just the fact she's fulla shit," he replied. "Ter can't see the goddamn future any more than she can see your hand in front of her face."

  "You're kidding me."

  "He's not," Theresa said.

  "But the cards–"

  "– are marked," she finished. "You notch the edge ever so slightly with your nail – usually suit on the right-hand side, card value on the left. Something my daddy taught me when I was a kid. Got me kicked out of Binion's more than once."

  "More than once? I was under the impression once you get kicked out of a casino, you're never let back in."

  Theresa smiled. "That's mostly true," she said. "But the first time they kicked me out, I was a lanky boy of twenty-three. One of the benefits of starting out a Terrence and becoming a Theresa is you get a do-over on the mistakes you make in youth. Or a second chance to make them all over again."

  Ah, so that explained her height, her voice – her broad, well-muscled frame. But right then, I was far more curious about the hand she'd dealt me before the shooting started, and the reading she'd doled out. "The cards you laid down today – did you pick them?"

  "Nope," she said. "Never do, and today's deal was no different; they came up how they came up. All I did was read 'em."

  "Then it's time to burn those cards – they hit a little close to home for my taste. If you didn't select those cards, something else did, and whatever that something else is, your deck – and by extension, you – are now on its radar. Even if you weren't harboring a fugitive from hell," I said, nodding toward Gio, "that kind of attention is best avoided."

  Theresa shiver
ed at the thought, crossing her arms and hugging them tight to her chest. "You got it, darlin'. If I'da thought for a second any of this shit was real, I'da stayed good and far away. Fact is, my daddy was a confidence man, and in a way, I suppose, I was taking after him when I opened this place. He always said the mark of a good grift is folks walk away feeling like they're the ones getting something out of it, and by that measure, this gig of mine is as good a grift as you'll ever find. Folks want to believe. They want the comfort of knowing there's a plan for them. But believin's hard. You can't just tell 'em what they want to hear – you gotta make a show of it. My pop, he was all about blending in, looking like the marks he set his sights on. For me, that ain't never been an option. But in this business, being peculiar's more an asset than a liability. Folks find Otherness mysterious, hard to fathom; it's that mystery that helps 'em believe. And baby," she said, extending her arms as if inviting appraisal, "if you want Other, I ain't nothing but. But that's all this gig has ever been: a grift. If I could see the future even a little, you can be damn sure I would've ducked when that shitfuck decided to break a bottle across my face."

  "Jesus," I said. "That's how you got your scars?"

  Theresa nodded, her massive, parted Afro bobbing as she did so. "Once upon a time, I was a showgirl at The Flamingo."