Chris Holm - The Wrong Goodbye

“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.”

“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 shivered 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.”