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 card 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.