The Hanged Man

by T. J. MacGregor

  But she slammed a door on the memory and buried it under so much debris he didn’t have a prayer of finding it. Her glance was quick, sharp. “How did you—”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He withdrew and changed the subject. “Want to watch Pulp Fiction after we catch lunch?”

  “Sure.” Her smile was sly, secretive.

  He wanted to smile along with her, but sensed he might be the brunt of her joke. “What’s so funny?”

  “I just realized I never knew you were so into movies.”

  “They never had any movies worth a damn when I was in the joint.” Showing Pulp Fiction or The Shawshank Redemption at Manatee would be the same as showing The Langoliers on a 747, he thought.

  “That’s because Andy used to select them.”

  Hal laughed. “That figures.”

  She started to say something, but a hard tug on her line cut her short. Rae jerked the rod up, her legs braced wide apart, and struggled to reel in whatever it was.

  Hal leaped up to give her a hand, but the rod wrenched and she lurched forward, reeling frantically, and fell right off the end of the platform. She splashed wildly, her screams echoing across the lagoon. For moments, Hal froze in abject terror, reliving the incident with the college coed.

  Then he saw Big Guy whipping through the water, aimed straight for her. His feet tore loose from the platform, he flew to the edge of it, leaped into the water, and lunged for her. But Rae, a nonswimmer terrified of water, had moved beyond panic. Her arms flailed, she shrieked, he kept losing his hold on her, and she went under.

  Hal dived for her, his powerful arms propelling him deeper and deeper. When he grabbed her by the hair, she already had lost consciousness. He wrapped an arm around her neck and swam hard and fast toward the ladder at the front of the chickee. But the gator swam faster, a silent missile headed straight for them, now less than ten yards away.

  Floodgates inside of Hal slammed open, adrenaline pumped through him. He swam as if water were his element, reached the ladder with seconds to spare. He grabbed onto the lowest rung with one hand, gripped Rae at the waist with other arm, and slung her over his shoulder. He clambered up the ladder, heaved her onto the platform, then dropped to his knees beside her.

  Jesus God, she wasn’t breathing. Training kicked in, a CPR course he had taken in prison. He opened her mouth and breathed into her, paused, pressed down on her chest, breathed into her again. And again. C’mon, please, breathe.

  When she started coughing, relief flooded through him. Even though he got her into a sitting position, she kept coughing and gasping for air. Then she toppled forward like a wet rag doll, shuddered, and vomited.

  Hal stumbled into the chickee for a blanket and a bottle of water and made it back onto the platform before she had even raised her head. He draped the blanket around her shoulders, smoothed her wet hair away from her face, and coaxed her to sip from a bottle. She straightened up, coughed again, wiped her mouth and face with a corner of the blanket, and whispered hoarsely, “I’m okay. I’m okay now.”

  He hesitated, not wanting to leave her. Then he shot to his feet and ran over to the platform. Big Guy lurked four or five feet away, eyes and snout poking up out of the water. Gloating fucker. A tidal wave of rage swept through Hal’s mind, emptying it of everything except a pure, reptilian fury. He reached under the platform, pulled out the wooden paddle he’d hidden, and hurled it, shouting, “Get the fuck out of here!”

  The paddle struck the water and Big Guy’s massive jaws clamped over it. He sank from sight and only the noisy silence of the lagoon remained.

  At eleven-thirty Tuesday morning, Pete Ames strolled into the office with his hand inside a bag of Doritos. He mumbled something around a mouthful of chips that Sheppard didn’t understand.

  “What?” Sheppard asked.

  Munch, munch. Ames finally swallowed his mouthful of chips and said, “I ran into Pikolo downstairs. He wants you to stop by the lab as soon as you can.”

  Good, Sheppard thought. The perfect excuse to leave while Ames finished his bag of chips. He took the stairs so he wouldn’t get stuck in the elevator with someone who had heard his job would be history on November 1.

  It had happened several times already—the sympathetic looks, the inevitable questions about what he would do, where he would go. He felt sure that Charlie Pikolo wouldn’t mention it, that he probably didn’t even know. The boys in the crime lab, Pikolo in particular, tended to live in their own little world, their jobs as secure as the pope’s.

  “Hey, Pick,” he called, walking into the empty lab.

  Pikolo’s youthful face popped up from behind a counter. Although he’d just turned twenty-five, he looked about eighteen, a computer nerd with dark, disheveled hair and wrinkled, mismatched clothes. His eyes blinked constantly because he had just gotten contacts.

  “Hey, Shep.” He stood, brushing at his clothes. “Question. Didn’t you tell me that the little black box you dropped by here on Friday was on that Steele fellow?”

  Sheppard had forgotten all about it. “Yeah, in the pocket of his pajamas. Why? What is it?”

  Pikolo blinked. “The real question is what the hell Steele was using it for.” He opened a drawer and brought out the device. Today it more closely resembled a pager than a TV clicker. “This thing emits extremely low frequency radio waves. ELF, for short.”

  “So?”

  “Well, I had to ask myself why someone would carry one of these gizmos around, okay? I know that some years back, the government was experimenting with ELF on submarines and as a possible means for riot control. Given Steele’s line of work, I figured he might wear one whenever he was in a maximum security prison. But to bed?” Pikolo wrinkled his nose. “Not reasonable. So I started looking for unreasonable explanations.”

  He turned the contraption on. “Right now, it’s emitting signals that oscillate between one and three cycles per second, the lowest frequency there is. It’s the same frequency as the delta waves the brain produces during deep sleep and in early infancy. It can also be indicative of a brain tumor.”

  Another twist of the knob. “Now it’s emitting signals that oscillate between four and seven cycles per second, the equivalent of the brain’s theta waves. Thetas are dominant in kids between the ages of two and five and in psychopaths. They can be evoked by frustration.”

  “Steele worked with psychopaths,” Sheppard said. “And his wife had been getting weird shit in the mail.”

  “Exactly.” Pikolo’s thumb stroked the device as though it were the hand of a woman he loved. “I got to wondering if the ELF’s signals could jam the emissions from a psychopath’s brain. This led me straight into Steele’s early research in psychic phenomena.”

  The books from Steele’s den, Sheppard thought. He had paged through them, read the material with great interest, but he still didn’t see the connection. “Explain.”

  “Well, I’m no expert on this stuff, okay? But from what I understand, Steele learned that during certain types of psychic episodes, the brain emits theta or delta waves. Suppose those were the signals he was trying to jam?”

  Interesting, Sheppard thought. Nadine had told Mira that the man with the green shoelaces had some sort of unusual psychic talent. If Steele had known that, then perhaps Pikolo’s musings weren’t so outrageous.

  “Tell me more.”

  “This device creates a shield of white noise,” Pikolo said. “Of static. In a sense, it jams signals of the same frequency that are emitted from another source.”

  “You mind if I borrow this for a while, Pick?”

  “No problem.”

  Sheppard didn’t have any idea what the hell any of this meant. But before this was over and done with, he would.

  The peal of a phone woke her. Rae sat up, confused, groggy, sweating beneath the blanket, her son’s face bright in her mind. She had been dreaming of Carl, Carl when he was an infant, Carl as a toddler—dear God, Carl, what was happ
ening to Carl?

  She wanted to fall back into the dream, seek refuge within it, romp with her dream son on a dream beach. Maybe when she woke again she would be in a hospital, recovering from a car accident she didn’t recall. Yeah, fat chance.

  Rae threw off the blanket, heard the phone again, and got up to see where the ringing was coming from. She stopped just outside Hal’s den, where the door was cracked open enough for her to catch snippets of the conversation. Ed. Fletcher. Mira. The pub.

  Rae stepped quickly and silently away from the door, her heart pounding, and weaved back through the light to the futon cushion in the main room. Kathleen Turner, she thought. Body Heat.

  She knew it would be her only way out.

  Chapter 19

  Around twilight that evening, a cold front swept into South Florida. It brought a sudden, hard rain that Mira knew would kill business until One World closed at nine. She figured she might as well close early and join Nadine and Annie upstairs.

  Just as she began to tally the day’s receipts, the bells on the door jingled and a man came in, stomping his feet and shaking the water from his rain slicker. He filled the doorway of the front office, a bald man with a muscular body and a rather handsome face. He asked for Mira.

  “I’m Mira,” she said.

  “I’m on the Navy ship that pulled into Port Everglades. And a buddy of mine gave me your name. I was wondering if I could get a reading tonight.”

  “I was just about to close. I’d be glad to schedule you for tomorrow.”

  He looked disappointed. “My ship pulls out tomorrow and it’s really important. I’ll pay you double whatever you charge. My daughter is sick and I—”

  “Okay.” She had a soft spot for troubled strangers in need of answers about their kids. “Sure, I guess I can squeeze in a reading. Pull up a chair, Mr… ?”

  “Ed, just call me Ed.”

  Mr. Ed, like the talking horse. “Have a seat, Ed.”

  “I sure do appreciate this, Mira.”

  She brought out a deck she loved, The Universal Tarot, an idiosyncratic deck that seemed appropriate for Mr. Ed. “Cut them into three piles, then shuffle and think of your question. The more specific, the better.”

  “Do I tell you the question?”

  “No, you don’t have to.”

  As he cut and shuffled, she grounded herself with slow, deep breathing, then took the deck and dealt six cards off the top. Mira laid them out side by side, two for the past, two for the present, two for the future. Her left brain instructed her to look for something about his sick daughter, but she didn’t see a single card in the six that indicated children.

  Right brain, she thought. Let the cards speak to you. But the longer she stared at them, the more silent the cards became. She drew a complete blank about the simplest definitions, couldn’t even remember the key words for these particular cards. A slow panic built inside of her.

  “Are they bad?” he asked.

  “No, it’s just been a long day. Draw one more card.”

  He drew the Devil, which in this deck depicted a bestial figure standing in the center of a pentagram, surrounded by a pair of flies and a bound man and woman. Lust, bondage to the past, focus on materialism, yes, okay, it got her started. “The root of your question, Ed, has to do with some unpleasant event or experience in the past that you haven’t been able to put behind you.”

  Now she moved to the original six he’d drawn and read them as a continuation of the story. “The event involved or resulted in legal problems for you. In the present, there’s an older woman, an authority figure connected to the judicial system. Considerable animosity exists between you and it goes back a long way. Does this make sense to you?”

  “Yes.” He looked—what? Surprised? Shocked? “Go on.”

  “In the near future, the ten of swords marks the end of a cycle you’ve been in. It may happen through a stab in the back by someone you thought you could trust.” She tapped the king of cups. “This man is in his forties and may be psychic himself. He’s the one who betrays you somehow.”

  His eyes bored into her, small strange eyes that made her squirm inside. An image flashed through her head of a woman sprawled in mud near a fence. A pair of panty hose was tied around her throat and from the waist down, she was nude. Mira didn’t have any idea what it meant, where it fit in a time sequence. But it definitely concerned Ed.

  “What’s the final outcome?” he asked.

  “Draw one more card.”

  The Death card.

  “The outcome will be an unexpected and sudden reversal in affairs for yourself or whoever your question was about.”

  He studied the cards. Her unease swelled. She heard Nadine or Annie walking around upstairs, a roll of thunder outside. A biting chill licked the back of her neck.

  What did that image mean? she asked silently. But her inner voice remained mute. She scooped up the cards, shuffled them, fanned them out again. “Let’s do one more spread for clarification. Choose five cards.”

  Ed’s hand glided through the air, an inch or two above the fan, a way to sense energy or heat from a particular card. It indicated he wasn’t the neophyte he pretended to be. His hands looked like those of a laborer, the nails blunt, cut straight across, dirt beneath several of them. But he didn’t speak like a laborer, didn’t dress or act like one. He didn’t impress her as the military type, either.

  He handed her the cards and she put them face down, four in a row, one beneath them. The Path Spread packed a lot of information into five cards and was versatile enough for either a general reading or one that answered a specific question. Ed’s cards, five majors, indicated violent change, upheaval, deception and disillusionment, anguish, ruin, devastation.

  Mira always tried to put a positive spin on a reading, but no matter how she interpreted these, Ed’s life charged toward disaster. “My best advice to you is to take careful stock of your life. Decide what your priorities are.”

  “That’s not what those cards say.”

  She didn’t like the sharpness in his voice. “That’s what they say to me.”

  “What’s this position?” He tapped the first card.

  “The path you’re on.”

  “The Tower. That’s about violent reversals in fortune. And this second position?”

  “The lesson you need to learn.”

  “The Moon.” He laughed. “I need to learn how to see deception.”

  “That isn’t the only meaning.”

  “And this third position?”

  “What you’re moving toward if you take no action.”

  “The Death card again.”

  “It doesn’t mean physical death.”

  “Bullshit.”

  The sharp nastiness of his tone set off major alarms inside her; Mira just wanted him out of here. She started to gather up the cards, but Ed slapped his massive hand over them. “Leave them.” A pulse throbbed at his temple; his weird eyes pierced hers again.

  “The reading is over,” she said.

  “It’s not over until I say it’s over.” His eyes fastened on hers, a slow smile crept across his face.

  Mira stood, heart drumming in her chest, fear pounding in her throat, and stepped away from him. She reached for the phone and punched out 911. Ed swept his arm across the desk, knocking most of the cards to the floor, and shot to his feet. Rage burned in his eyes, blood rushed into his face. “You haven’t seen the last of me,” he spat, then spun and charged for the door.

  “What’s the nature of the emergency?” asked a male voice on the other end of the phone.

  Her voice sounded choked. “Uh, no emergency. I dialed the wrong number. Sorry.” She hung up, ran into the hall, flipped the dead bolt on the front door, and sank against it, her knees like Jell-O.

  Outside, she heard his car speeding away.

  A lunatic, the first lunatic in the history of the store. Yet, she sensed that Ed hadn’t just wan
dered in off the street—or off a Navy ship. The attack on Sheppard Sunday, the attack on her early this morning, and now this: she felt sure the events were connected.

  What did that image mean?

  Her inner voice didn’t reply, but the image she had glimpsed earlier filled her head, as if in response. The woman sprawled in the mud, nude from the waist down. She suddenly knew the woman had been strangled and raped.

  Is the woman me? Is this what might happen to me?

  The voice came through loud and clear this time, as if to reassure her. Another woman. It’s already happened.

  And Ed had done it. The impression had been a warning not to continue the reading. She felt there was more to it than that, more about who Ed was and why he had come here, but the answers hovered just out of her reach.

  Nadine’s cane tapped through the hall. “Mira?”

  She stepped unsteadily away from the door, as if she had spent the day on a ship at rough seas and hadn’t found her land legs yet. “Right here.”

  Her voice sounded okay, but Nadine apparently read something in Mira’s face because she looked at her hard, frowning. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just had a difficult client.”

  Nadine regarded her silently for a moment, her dark eyes piercing the half-truth, riddling it with holes. “One of the three,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  Her grandmother’s eyes had glazed over, her breathing had changed. In the hallway light, she looked almost mythical, as though she had risen full-blown from some invisible sea. Mira realized she’d gone into trance, that Ben now spoke through her. “He’s one of the three I mentioned the other night. It would be best if you left town for a while, Mira. You, Annie, Nadine. Certain events have been set in motion and will now follow their own line of probability.”