Chris Holm - The Wrong Goodbye

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 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.