Deadly Gamble

by Linda Lael Miller

  Bert began to rake noxious things into a pile between two massive pool tables. Anybody might think they were losing their mind if they’d seen what I had, but I had more reason than most. My parents were shot to death in our rented double-wide, down in Cactus Bend, when I was five years old. I knew I must have witnessed the murders, since I was found hiding in the clothes dryer off the kitchen, covered with their blood, but I had no memory of the incident, or of the next few months, for that matter. The first thing I could recall was waking up in a cheap motel, and Lillian dabbing at my face with a cold washcloth.

  “I seen you do some strange things,” Bert said. “Like the way you can make a slot machine pay off pretty much whenever you want. You come by your name honestly, but you ain’t crazy, Mojo. Not you.”

  My heart warmed. Actually, I didn’t come by my name honestly—or much of anything else, either. Like Lillian, I’d been using an alias for years—one I’d chosen myself, out of a library book—and some dead child’s social security number. As close as Bert and I were, though, I’d never told him the whole story. Even Nick hadn’t known, though maybe he did now. He’d seen his battered body after the accident, and he knew I’d cried at his funeral, so maybe being dead gave him a broader perspective.

  Now there was a disturbing thought.

  “He looked—real,” I went on. “Except that he glowed in the dark.”

  Bert raked a little faster, and I hoped he wasn’t revising his opinion about my sanity. “Was there a reason for this visit?” he asked, without looking at me.

  “We never got that far,” I said.

  Bert glanced in my direction.

  “Nothing happened,” I told him firmly, and without delay.

  He grinned. “I never said it did,” he replied. “Give Russell one of them frankfurters, will you? He missed his breakfast.”

  I slid off the stool and went around behind the bar, glad to have something physical to do, however mundane. “You shouldn’t let him eat stuff like that,” I said. “One of these days, he’s going to blow an artery.”

  Bert got out the dustpan and leaned down to rake the pile into it. “Poor dog gets nothin’ but diet kibble at home,” he said. Bert’s girlfriend, Sheila, ran a tight ship. “One sausage ain’t gonna hurt him.”

  I opened the door, speared a frank and plopped it onto a paper plate.

  Russell watched, salivating, as I cut it into bite-sized pieces with a plastic knife. “Like you don’t give him one every morning of his life,” I chided, but I set the plate down in front of Russell and smiled as he snarfed up the grub.

  “My aunt Nellie saw a ghost once,” Bert ruminated, raking again. “It was her dog, Fleagel the beagle. He lived for seventeen years, and Nell swore she found crap on the same old place on the stairs for ten days after he croaked. She said that was how she knew she was going to die. When the beagle came back, I mean. Sure enough, a few weeks after the sighting, she bit the dirt, right in the middle of a game of blackout bingo.”

  I gazed across the bar at him, hands resting on my hips. With anybody else, I would have felt self-conscious in my jeans, rumpled nightshirt and Sponge Bobs, but Bert was different. Like a brother. “That was a pretty insensitive remark,” I said.

  “Aunt Nellie was a pretty insensitive woman,” Bert answered, without missing a beat. “If Uncle Dutch hadn’t been too embarrassed to call the cops on her, she’d have been run in on a domestic violence charge. The only thing she ever loved, far as I could tell, was that dog of hers.”

  I returned to my stool but sat facing Bert, with my back to the bar. “We both come from dysfunctional families,” I reflected. “Maybe that’s why we get along so well.”

  Bert chuckled, shook his bald head. “You know what worries me, Mojo? I can follow your logic, back-asswards as it is. Your brother went to prison for killing your folks. I was raised by two drunks and a pack of Labrador retrievers. We’re a pair to draw to, you and me.”

  I nodded glumly. Bert’s knowledge of my background was limited to the bare facts, but I’d told him more than I’d told just about anybody else in my life, including Nick or the men I’d dated since the divorce. “By psychological standards, we ought to be in padded rooms by now.”

  “If you mention seeing a ghost to the wrong person,” Bert mused, pausing to lean on the rake handle and regard me with concern, “you might end up in one anyhow.”

  By then, my thoughts had shifted to Lillian. Maybe she was having one of her good days. Even if she was, she wouldn’t be able to carry on a coherent conversation, but she could listen, and she always seemed to enjoy a surprise visit. I decided to shower, dress and motor down the 101 to see her.

  “You’re a real comfort, Bert,” I teased, already on my way to the side door, which stood propped open to the still cool mid-April air. In another month, it would be so hot the asphalt on the highways would buckle.

  “You didn’t have your coffee,” Bert called after me.

  I doubled back, filled a disposable cup, stirred in sugar and powdered creamer and raised the brew in a toast as I went by. “Put it on my tab,” I said.

  Bert grinned and nodded, and I stepped out into the sunny parking lot just as another Harley roared up, flinging gravel, and came to a noisy stop beside Bert’s bike.

  Tucker Darroch, my most recent bad romantic choice.

  He shut off the bike and gave a salutelike wave. Clad in jeans, scuffed black boots and a blue muscle shirt, which showed off his biceps to distinct advantage, Tucker was the complete opposite of Nick, at least when it came to appearance. He was six feet tall, square jawed, and his honey-colored hair was too long, falling in his eyes and curling at the nape of his neck, while Nick was of average height, compactly built and born to the boardroom.

  Tucker looked like a Hell’s Angel. In actuality, he was an undercover cop.

  We’d done a little undercover work ourselves, Tucker and I. That was the best part of our relationship. The rest of it sucked, unfortunately, and we’d agreed, three and a half weeks before, to cool it for a while. Tucker was just wrapping up a nasty divorce, and he and the little woman were still duking it out over custody of their seven-year-old twins, Danny and Daisy.

  Just watching Tucker swing a blue-jeaned leg over the seat of that bike made my nerves twitch. I wanted to nod a noncommittal greeting, climb the stairs to my apartment and go on about my business, but I might as well have been wearing cement shoes.

  Tucker approached, his hips rolling in that easy, death-to-women walk of his. He shoved his hair back from his face and looked straight down into my eyes. “Nice getup,” he said, hooking his thumbs in the back pockets of his Levi’s.

  It took me a moment to realize he was talking about my clothes. “It’s a fashion statement,” I heard myself say. “Care for a translation?”

  He grinned. “I’ll pass,” he said lightly, but his green eyes were watchful, and slightly narrowed. “You okay? You’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”

  Between Bert and Tucker, I was pretty clear that the current look wasn’t working for me. “I’m fine,” I said, a little too quickly.

  Tucker pretended to dodge a blow. “Excuse me for asking,” he said.

  I finally got my legs working again, and made for the stairs. “Things to do, people to see,” I explained airily over one shoulder, concentrating on 1—putting one foot in front of the other, then repeating the process, 2—not spilling my coffee, and 3—not running back to Tucker and jumping his bones in the parking lot. “Nice seeing you again.”

  He didn’t answer, but I felt his gaze on me as I mounted the steps.

  LILLIAN WAS NOT having one of her good days, as it turned out.

  She sat in her wheelchair, in front of the one window in her fusty little room, a shrunken and fragile figure, arthritic hands knotted in her lap. A worn but colorful afghan covered her bony knees, and a lump rose in my throat as I remembered the woman she used to be. Her stepdaughter, Jolie, had crocheted that afghan for her long ago, as a Ch
ristmas present. Lillian had been luminous with delight that day, her laughter rich and vibrant, her brain and body in working order. Those painfully curled fingers had been busy, competent, glistening with shopping-channel rings.

  Lillian was my babysitter, before my parents were murdered.

  Shortly after the killings, she’d been my kidnapper.

  I swallowed the lump, blinked back tears and crossed the room to stand next to her, bending to kiss her lightly on top of the head.

  “Hello,” I said gently.

  She looked up at me, and for a moment recognition sparked in her sunken eyes. She grasped my hand, squeezed it with a strange urgency and made a soft sound that I chose to interpret as a greeting.

  I dragged up a chair to sit knee to knee with her, opened the bag of doughnuts I’d picked up on the way down from Cave Creek and offered her favorite, a double-frosted maple bar.

  She shook her wobbly head, like one of those bobble-figures they give away at baseball games, but her watery eyes were full of longing. Lillian had been an off-the-rack size 16 ever since I could remember, but now she looked almost skeletal, with big dents at her temples and under her cheekbones. It was as though her skull were eating its way to the surface.

  I broke off a piece of the maple bar and held it to her lips. She took a nibble, like a baby bird being fed in the nest. My heart twisted.

  Laboriously, Lillian gummed the morsel and swallowed.

  “You look good,” I lied.

  “Cods,” Lillian said.

  I frowned. “Cods?” She wanted fish?

  “Cods,” Lillian insisted.

  “She’s talking about these,” a female voice put in, nearly scaring me out of my skin.

  I turned to see a pudgy nurse’s aide standing by Lillian’s neatly made bed, holding up a familiar deck of cards. Of course, I thought. The Tarot cards.

  I didn’t recognize the aide. The turnover was huge at Sunset Villa.

  Lillian began to squirm in her chair, reaching with what seemed a desperate eagerness. “Cods!” she croaked.

  “They’re the devil’s work,” the nurse’s aide said, with a self-righteous little sniff. She was overweight and looked like she might attend one of those churches where they drink antifreeze and juggle snakes. “Only thing worse is them Ouija boards, if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t ask you,” I pointed out, crisply polite as I dropped the maple bar back into the bakery bag and went to claim Lillian’s deck. They were her most treasured possession, those creased and battered cards. When we were on the run, after my folks were killed, she’d sometimes given readings to pay for a tank of gas or a meal in some diner. They’d warned us, those cards, Lillian claimed, when somebody recognized my picture from the back of a milk carton, and the Tarot had predicted disaster if I married Nick.

  I should have listened.

  I took the cards and stared at the nurse’s aide, bristling in her flowered scrubs, until, in a minor snit, she turned around and left the room.

  “Give,” Lillian demanded.

  I handed her the cards, bracing myself to watch the inevitable struggle. Once, Lillian had plied that deck with the skill of a riverboat poker sharp, but that was when her fingers were straight and strong, with a hotline to her brain.

  She gripped the cards in both hands, and I saw a tremor pass through her as she closed her eyes to concentrate. I wondered, not for the first time, if large portions of her mind were dark and boarded up, as the doctors said, or if the old Lillian crouched in there someplace, smart as ever.

  I didn’t know what to hope for. For a woman as bright and full of life as Lillian had been, it would be hell if the wires were down between her mind and her body. On the other hand, being a vegetable was no fun, either.

  It tortured me, wondering how it was for her.

  I watched bleakly as the woman who’d saved me from so many things fumbled with a pack of tattered playing cards.

  She turned the deck over, thumbed them until she settled on one. The Queen of Pentacles, a colorful card, showing a medieval woman seated on a throne. That one dropped into her lap, followed, after more excruciating selection, by the Page of Cups. A young man in tights, holding up a chalice with a fish, presumably dead, flopping over the rim.

  I waited tensely, resisting the urge to help her.

  Lillian still had her pride. I had to believe that.

  When it came to interpretation, I was useless. The deck was a familiar fixture, since Lillian had carried it in her pocket or purse for as long as I could remember, but I knew next to nothing about the images, even though I’d seen them many times.

  It was almost an anticlimax when she settled on the third and apparently final card—Death. It showed a skeleton, wearing black armor and mounted on a fierce-looking horse, bodies littering the ground beneath. I drew in my breath.

  Lillian’s hands relaxed suddenly, and she looked up at me, her contorted face imploring me to understand.

  “Take,” she ground out.

  I plucked the three cards from where they’d fallen onto the pilled afghan covering her thin legs. My palms sweated as I examined the pictures, one by one. I knew there was a message, but the circuits were blocked.

  I tried to hand them back.

  “Take,” Lillian repeated, and shrank back in her wheelchair, the remaining cards bending in her grasp.

  I bit my lower lip, nodded and tucked the Queen, the Page and Death gently into the side-flap of my purse. I’d stop at a bookstore on the way back to Cave Creek, I decided. Pick up a Damn Fool’s Guide to Tarot. I wasn’t ready to leave Lillian, but she was clearly overwrought, and staying too long might plunge her into an even steeper decline.

  “Want some more of the maple bar?” I asked, and practically choked on the words. If she’d been in her usual staring mode, I might have told her about last night’s visit from Nick, just to have a sounding board, but she was too agitated to listen to a ghost story. Besides, even if she understood, what could she do?

  “No,” she said clearly, and at first I thought she was answering my question about the maple bar. Instead, her gaze was fixed on the doorway.

  A tall man stood on the threshold, a finger hooked in the suit jacket hanging behind his right shoulder. He had a full head of gray hair and one of those benignly handsome faces that inspire instant confidence. I felt a spike of recognition and reached out to close my fingers over Lillian’s hands. They were clenched.

  My uncle, Clive Larimer, smiled.

  “Hello, Mary Josephine,” he greeted me. “Long time no see.”

  Lillian began a soft, gurgling murmur.

  Larimer stepped into the room, momentarily distracted when the nurse’s aide pushed past him and rushed over to Lillian.

  “What’s the matter, Mrs. Travers?” she asked anxiously.

  I peeped at her name tag. Felicia.

  A tear slipped down Lillian’s right cheek.

  “You’ll have to leave, both of you,” Felicia decreed.

  Larimer backed into the corridor, out of sight. I forgot all about him, in my concern for Lillian.

  “It’s those damn devil-cards,” Felicia declared, but she was patting Lillian’s shoulder, and Lillian seemed to be calming down a little. “Time for your medicine anyway, isn’t it, Mrs. Travers? And after that, you can take a nice nap.” Felicia paused to glare at me. “That’s what Mrs. Travers needs. Medicine and a nap. You’d better go now.”

  I didn’t protest. I’d already made the decision to split, after all. Lillian had drifted back into herself, and the cards lay forgotten between her palms. I might have been transparent, the way she stared through me.

  I nodded, certain I’d break down and cry if I tried to say anything. I picked up my purse, leaving the bakery bag on the window sill, where I’d set it earlier, and dashed for the door.

  I ran smack into Uncle Clive in the corridor, and he steadied me by placing avuncular hands on my shoulders.

  “Mary Josephine,” he said, as if he coul
dn’t believe it was really me.

  I bit my lower lip, speechless. I hadn’t seen the man since I was five, and I probably wouldn’t have recognized him at all if he hadn’t been a state senator, making regular appearances on TV and in every major newspaper in Arizona. He looked harmless, even friendly, but he was one of the people Lillian had wanted to avoid, all those years ago. She’d been scared to death, for herself and me, which was why she’d snatched me from the front yard of my foster home. At least, that was her account of what happened—I didn’t remember any of it.

  “Let’s have some coffee and talk,” Uncle Clive said quietly.

  I was twenty-eight years old, a self-supporting adult, not a kid. I’d been married and divorced. I’d read The Damn Fool’s Guide to Self-Defense for Women.

  There was nothing to be afraid of.

  And, besides, I was curious as hell.

  Uncle Clive was my mother’s older brother. He’d been around when the killings took place, and he could fill in a lot of gaps in my memory, bring me up to speed on my half brother, Geoff, who’d gone to prison at sixteen for second-degree murder.

  “Okay,” I said.

  CHAPTER

  2

  T he cafeteria at Sunset Villa wasn’t much, so we walked, my long-lost uncle and I, to a nearby Starbucks, with outside tables and misters to cool the customers. Even in April, it’s warm in Phoenix.

  I didn’t think I could choke down anything—the whole scenario was an excuse to talk, after all—but Clive bought us both a cup of classic roast. Except for a few university students bent over textbooks and one doughy guy with piercings and vampire teeth—a poet or a serial killer or both—we had the place to ourselves.

  “I can’t believe it’s you,” Clive said, as he joined me under the shade of a green-and-white striped umbrella, setting down our cups. His black metal chair, which matched the black metal table, scraped on the patio stones as he drew it back to sit.