Hitting the wrong mark was amateur hour stuff that made work dry up like pee in the desert. The only job this disaster would generate would be a retribution contract on herself.
Varushka got in the car and fired it up. She drove a block before using the lights. She turned right to get the hell out of Atlantic City.
She rationalized that it could be worse. Who was going to miss a dishwasher anyway?
Chapter Twenty-Five
Pete’s early bus out of Philly did not arrive early in Atlantic City. A mechanical calamity sidelined it in the Jersey hinterlands. The passengers sat by the side of the road for two hours breathing in the sweet aroma of steaming antifreeze. By the time the replacement bus delivered them to the station, night had long since fallen, and the DiStephano’s world had forever changed.
As soon as Pete saw the circus outside of the restaurant, his heart leapt into his throat. Two police cars parked outside. Banks of flashing lights cast a surreal pulsing glow over the street. Yellow crime tape blocked the front of the building. An ambulance idled out front, its open doors waiting to accept an injured victim. A small crowd clotted around the scene’s edges.
Before Pete could dash across the street, two paramedics rushed a loaded gurney from behind the restaurant to the ambulance. The victim’s chest was soaked in blood. They rammed the gurney into the ambulance and scrambled in behind it.
As the doors closed, Mama D burst out of the restaurant. A police officer was in her wake. Two black streaks of eyeliner ran down her cheeks. She screamed hysterically.
“Tommy! Where are you taking my Tommy?”
Pete froze. That was Tommy on the way to the hospital. Healthy, happy Tommy had paramedics fighting to save his life. He must have been attacked out behind the restaurant. Why? He wasn’t even supposed to be there tonight…
Pete bit his lip.
No, I was supposed to be out there, he thought. Prosperidad’s warning about his safety replayed in his head.
A killer stalking Pete had found Tommy instead. Cauquemere hunted him on the streets of Philly. St. Croix hunted him here.
The police officer restrained Mama D and shepherded her back into the restaurant. She sobbed inconsolably. The sound tore at Pete’s heart.
He brought this disaster to their door with his VPD-induced arrival. He wanted to rush over and apologize. But he couldn’t do it. He could never face them. They took a chance on him and now their son was dead. What could he ever say to make that all right?
A more selfish thought crept in. The killer would know by now that he missed the mark. He’d be waiting for Pete to return so he could get it done right. He was probably watching the crowd right now, none too worried if some more collateral damage took place, as long as Pete stopped breathing. Pete slipped back and away from DiStephano’s.
He had nowhere to go. At this point, he was worse off than when he got off the bus in Atlantic City. He had no clothes, less money, and people trying to kill him. He had left behind a comfortable college life and jumped into the deep end of a very large pool. He needed a life jacket.
“Whassup, dude?”
Tyrone walked toward him down the sidewalk.
“Tyrone! What are you doing out here?” Pete asked.
“Checkin’ out the commotion,” Tyrone said. “Blue lights in this neighborhood means something big went down. The small stuff don’t attract nobody. What happened?”
“Someone attacked Tommy DiStephano,” Pete said, hoping he masked the guilt in his voice. “The ambulance just took him away.”
“Then watchoo doin’ here?” Tyrone sounded incredulous.
“It’s a mess over there,” Pete said. “They don’t need me getting in the way. Besides, they look so upset, I wouldn’t know what to say to them. I don’t want to go back there tonight.”
“So where you goin’?” Tyrone asked.
“I don’t know,” Pete sighed.
Tyrone’s face shifted from thoughtful to pensive, then to resolute.
“You stayin’ with me then,” Tyrone announced.
“Thanks, but I couldn’t.” Pete wasn’t putting anyone else in the crossfire, especially two kids who already had the deck stacked against them.
“You help my sister and me out, so it’s payback time,” Tyrone said. “I pays all my debts.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“No, man,” Tyrone said. “In that basement, was the first time I was gonna steal. I justified that it was for a good cause and all, but it was still gonna be wrong. You showed me that someone, even a stranger, could be out there to help. I might have been startin’ down a path like my mother took. Now that ain’t gonna happen. You stayin’ with me tonight.”
Tyrone’s appeal touched him. He’d encountered the boy at a real personal crossroads.
The wind rose. The temperature was falling fast. Pete shivered in his thin fall jacket. His options were few. He also realized that if he just drifted off to sleep accidentally somewhere, without the right protection, he was ripe for another visitation by Cauquemere.
“Just one night,” Pete said.
Tyrone stuck out his hand for Pete to shake, an action that must have connoted manhood to the young boy. Pete took it.
“A man pays his debts,” Tyrone said.
They walked the few blocks to Tyrone’s. The few people they passed were on the way to the commotion at DiStephano’s. Pete kept an eye on each one. No one took notice of him, no one followed.
Tyrone’s narrow, wooden, two-story house stood wedged between similar structures. Each floor had a street-facing bay window. A set of makeshift brick steps, functioning without the assistance of mortar, replaced the long-vanished porch. Strips of white paint peeled from the corners.
Pete stepped into a house decimated by a mother’s drug abuse. A threadbare living room rug curled up away from the walls. A mismatched couch and loveseat faced a barren particleboard entertainment center, its residents no doubt sacrificed to appease addiction. The thin window drapes half-heartedly separated the room from the rest of Atlantic City. The lone shelf on the wall held cheaply framed pictures, family snapshots of varying vintages. Pete guessed that the one of the small boy standing by the boardwalk was Tyrone about eight years ago. He assumed another was of Tyrone’s mother. She was a tall, strikingly beautiful, black woman with shoulder-length hair. She wore a tight-fitting brown and tan print dress, and flashed a dazzling smile. The background looked like an upscale nightclub. The picture was too narrow to fit the frame, but was still centered, leaving blank strips of brown cardboard on either side. The shoulder of her date for the evening was barely visible, though it was clear that a chop of the scissors had excised as much of him as possible. The remaining pictures were of a little girl in a white christening dress and a few of an older couple, he guessed Tyrone’s grandparents.
“Is this your mother?”
Tyrone looked a shade embarrassed, like a boy claiming his ratty coat from the schoolroom closet.
“Yeah, that’s her,” he said, looking down at the floor. “She clean up good when she got it together.”
“You don’t think she’ll be back tonight?” Pete asked.
“Nah,” Tyrone said. “Ain’t gonna break her streak tonight.”
Small footsteps pattered down the hallway staircase. A flash of red flannel hurtled into the living room and stopped.
Tyrone’s sister stood about four feet tall and rail thin. Her red, oversized pajamas hung loose on her tiny body. Her short, kinked hair framed brown eyes wide with surprise.
She sprinted to Tyrone and tucked herself behind him, his body a bulwark against whatever the stranger might deliver. She squeezed Tyrone’s hand.
“Who’s he?” she whispered, her eyes trained on Pete.
“He’s cool,” Tyrone answered. He released his sister’s hand and, reaching back, curled his
arm around her shoulders and herded her in front of him.
“Keisha, this is Pete.”
“Hey, Keisha,” Pete said. He tried to sound genuine and harmless. He was sure he came across as neither.
Keisha gave Pete a slight, wary nod.
“Whatchoo doin’ up so late?” Tyrone said to his sister. “You should be in bed and asleep. You gotta go to school in the mornin’.”
Keisha looked up at Tyrone.
“I was waiting for you to get back,” she said. Her response didn’t sound like an excuse.
“Well, I’m back,” Tyrone said. “So get your sorry self back into bed. I don’t want to be dragging you outta there in the mornin’.” He grabbed her shoulder and rotated her toward the doorway. He gave her a push in the spine with his index finger.
“Go!”
Keisha gave Pete one last suspicious glance and launched herself out of the room and up the staircase. Tyrone followed to the base of the stairs and watched her as she disappeared at the top.
“That girl needs to listen better,” he muttered under his breath. “The couch is all yours.” Tyrone pointed at the sagging furniture in the living room. “You want a blanket?”
“Hey dude, I’ll be fine,” Pete said. “You shouldn’t even be doing this.”
“No problem,” Tyrone said. He pointed his thumb upstairs. “I gotta go. See you in the AM.”
Pete looked over his temporary lodgings. A trickle of worry began to flow. His presence here was a secret, for now. Nevertheless, St. Croix would soon learn that his murderers had missed their mark, and the tentacles of his organization would search for Pete again. He swore to be gone well before that happened.
Pete felt spent. He wanted about ten hours of sleep, but on his terms.
He went into the kitchen and found the silverware drawer. He rummaged through the collection of mismatched tableware and pulled out a steak knife. On the way back to the living room, he slid the half-spool of copper wire from his pocket. On his hands and knees, he threaded the increasingly familiar wire and blade protection around the legs of the couch. He tightened the final knot and then turned out the lights. The streetlight’s soft glow backlit the gauzy curtains. Twin Moon City appeared in a quick flashback. He sat on the couch. “Lumpy” was a descriptive understatement.
He kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the cushions. His eyelids weighed a thousand pounds as they closed. He wondered again if he would tell Rayna of her coma. But he couldn’t hold the thought. Fatigue spread across him like a warm, thick blanket. He slipped away from the substantive world and into the realm where lately, nightmares outnumbered dreams.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Prosperidad awoke to the blare of a siren as an ambulance screamed by her home.
A sensation of evil permeated the air around her, like she’d awakened shrouded in the smoke from an arsonist’s fire. Guilt coursed through her veins as her prophetic gift announced she’d set some awful chain of events into motion.
She whipped back her covers and jumped out of bed. She cleared the kitchen table for her magic by just the moon’s glow, afraid that a light at this hour might alert two of the thousand eyes St. Croix had on the streets. There was already had too much to explain to the drug lord.
She pulled a starched white tablecloth and a leather pouch from the pantry. With a smap, she opened the tablecloth upon the kitchen table., She dumped the contents of the pouch on the countertop. From the pile she sorted four crystals; one white, one red, one blue, one black. She placed them at the table corners, boundaries to corral the energy.
She selected a black mahogany stick from the countertop pile. A green parrot feather protruded from one end. With broad, fluid motions, she swept the sharpened, singed point of the mahogany stylus across the expanse. The green feather danced swift steps in response to each flick of her wrist. In five quick tacks, she etched a perfect five-pointed star.
She gathered five votive candles and placed one at each tip of the star. She struck a match and in one transit all five were alight.
On the counter behind her, she filled a crystal chalice from an earthenware bottle. The clear liquid had the sharp, strident smell of unrefined alcohol. She added a pinch of herbs from a saucer and placed the chalice at the star’s center.
The flames of the candles sparkled in the goblet’s many facets. The alcohol flickered like starlight in the glass. The floating herbs bobbed in the refracted candlelight.
Prosperidad concentrated on the surface of the liquid, the way she watched the lake outside her grandmother’s house so long ago. Everything around her faded out of phase, save the chalice. The liquid’s surface shimmered. The visions began.
In the alcohol, Varushka Zenig appeared in a, black seaman’s coat, studying a drawing of Pete. Dissolve to the woman putting two bullets through Tommy DiStephano behind a dumpster. Dissolve to Mama D, lit by flashing blue lights, wailing at the doors of an ambulance.
A lifetime of reading the future had erased the word “coincidence” from her vocabulary. It was all cause and effect, action and reaction. St. Croix’s assassin couldn’t find the boy in that alley without help. They must have been followed her last night, and her warning to Pete lit this explosion’s fuse.
The price must be paid, she heard her grandmother’s voice say. All you see must come to be. You intervened and now…
She shook her grandmother’s voice from her head. In the chalice vision’s background, she caught sight of something else. Someone watched the paramedics outside the restaurant from the shadows. She waved her hand over the chalice. The view zoomed in and lightened.
Pete Holm’s face came into focus.
She laid her palms against the chalice and twirled it on the axis of its stem. The alcohol swirled, and when it stilled, Pete materialized, in fitful sleep on a ragged couch. The room could be in any poverty-racked home in Atlantic City.
She wondered what could keep him here in the face of such a threat.
Copper wire hung between the legs of the couch. A fleeting, victorious smile passed across her face. But for dreamwalkers, sleep was not rest. He was on the other side now. On Cauquemere’s side. With no knowledge of the rules. If she could help him…
Look what your “help” has done already, her grandmother’s voice said.
She set her jaw in grim determination and ignored the scolding. She couldn’t abandon the life she’d put in danger. But she’d need help.
From the shelf, she took a mortar and pestle, grilled maize and a few pinches of dried herbs and fruit. She ground the ingredients together into a fine, gray powder. Dipping her finger in the chalice, she added several drops of the alcohol to the mix. She blew on it three times and chanted a rumbling invocation to the loa gods.
She coated the tip of the mahogany stick in the mixture and traced a smudged spiral on the edge of the tablecloth. With the negative energy surrounding her dispelled, the path to communicate with the loa was clear.
She pulled a small, homemade doll from a shelf. Straw filler poked through the thinning, hand sewn cloth. The colors of the voodoo talisman her grandmother made her may have faded, but its power was undiminished. She placed the doll in the spiral’s center.
She invoked the names of the loa and begged their forgiveness. Then she offered the doll to them, as an exchange, her life for one that was threatened. Take her. Save Tommy.
Now she had to contact Pete. Searching him out again in person would get them both killed. However, unknown to St. Croix, she had her own method of clandestine communication.
She grabbed a piece of paper from the countertop, scribbled a hasty note, and folded it in nine sections, the number of completeness. She pressed the note into her palm and picked up one of the votive candles off the table. The circle of light broke and the chalice images vanished.
Guided by the dim candlelight, she made her way downstairs
to her reading room. She put the candle on the table where she’d delivered the prophesy to St. Croix. A preserved antelope head sat on a shelf, glass eyes staring out at nothing. She placed it on the table. The polished horns glowed in the candlelight. An ancient taxidermist had stuffed the head and given it a leather bridle adorned with a form of hieroglyphics. She slid the note into a cavity in its underside.
“Brother Antelope,” she said, “speedy messenger between here and beyond, please deliver this message to its intended.”
She stroked the nose of the antelope and blew out the candle. She made her way back up the stairs in the dark.
Another loan against the future, her grandmother’s voice said. The debt grows. What is foretold must unfold…
Prosperidad covered her ears.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
When Pete dove into the world of dreams from Tyrone’s couch, he surfaced in the mansion, his only safe haven outside the tactile world. He sighed in relief. His sanity needed a breather.
He wanted to rest, to sit in the sunroom and smell the orchids, to forget about comas and Cauquemere, to forget all about Atlantic City.
But there wasn’t the time. The mansion couldn’t be an escape. It was just a safe portal to Twin Moon City and Rayna. And he needed to see Rayna. He needed to feel the vitality he missed in Legacy Hospice. He also needed to know more about Twin Moon City.
They’d need time to talk. The farther from the city center they met, the farther from the all-seeing eyes above the palace, the longer it would take hunter Jeeps to find them. As he subconsciously sent the tunnel to Cauquemere’s palace before, he’d send it in the opposite direction tonight.
Pete started for the trap door in the hall. Then he caught himself and stopped.
Why was he going to go through empty handed? Rayna could use some things. What should he bring to the girl who has nothing?
Weapons were the first thing that came to mind. But outnumbered a hundred-to-one, in the long run, they would just bring more trouble. At the other end of the spectrum, he considered the traditional girlfriend gift route, but jewelry and the like were even more ridiculous. And a bit presumptuous. Then it came to him.
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