genetics had gone into Chance’s making: long and lean, a chiseled face with a vaguely Asian look, capped by uncanny tiger eyes and a mouth that could tempt a holy sister to sin. I wondered if he’d felt the last kiss I brushed against that mouth, eighteen months ago. I wondered whether he’d missed me or just the revenue.
To make matters worse, he knew how to dress, and today he wore Kenneth Cole extremely well: crinkle- washed shirt in Italian cotton, jet with a muted silver stripe, dusty black button-fly jeans, polished shoes, and a black velvet blazer. I didn’t need his sartorial elegance to remind me I’d gone native, a sheer gauze blouse with crimson embroidery around the neck and a parti-colored skirt. I was even wearing flip-flops. They had a big red silk hibiscus on each toe, but were flip-flops nonetheless. It was amazing he could look at me with a straight face.
But then, he’d been raised well. His mom, Yi Min-chin, was a nice lady who made great kimchi, but he’d never say who his daddy was, claiming such knowledge granted too much power over him. And his mother went along with it. I figured it was just more of his bullshit, but with Chance, you never could be sure. He had the devil’s own luck, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Lucifer himself someday came to claim him.
“It’s never just one job with you,” I said with a trace of bitterness. “I’m a show pony to you, and you never get tired of putting me through my paces. I am
I’d built this life. I didn’t want to have to parlay to keep it.
Without a word, he flattened his palm on the top of the glass case that housed my rare treasures. When he lifted his hand, I expected to see his coin because the item glinted silver. But as I leaned in, I saw something that sent snakes disco dancing in my belly.
Because it meant I had to help him.
The Pewter Buddha
Hard to believe such a small item could cause me so much trouble.
I stared at it for a long moment, willing it to disappear, but like Chance, it wouldn’t. Not until I handled it and followed the trail to its source. The last time I saw this little pewter pocket Buddha, it had been cupped in Yi Min- chin’s hand.
It wasn’t valuable—such things sold for around two bucks—but his mother rubbed it for luck or when she was nervous, and it had never been out of her possession before to the best of my knowledge. The fact that it lay on my counter...
Well, I understood Chance’s expression a whole lot better now.
“Tell me what you know.” I still didn’t touch it, but he knew my acquiescence was a foregone conclusion. Over the course of our benighted relationship, I came to love his mom more than I ever loved him.
Sometimes I missed him; sometimes I hated him. I hadn’t thought I’d see him again. My life tends to run by chapters, and when I close one, there are no recurring characters, mainly because they lie beneath six feet of cold dirt. So I suppose Chance did well enough with me; he was still breathing when I left him.
While he seemed to gather his thoughts, I knelt and fished from the minifridge a couple of old-fashioned Cokes, the kind that come in bottles that remind you of a sexy woman’s figure. Because I was shaken, the Cokes managed to feed me glimpses of the manufacturing plant and the truck that carried them to the store, the sweaty man with a comb-over who stocked them on the cooler shelf before I bought them.
Focusing my will, I shut it down, a TV show nobody’s watching. I have to choose to read something, or I’d be bombarded with images all day long; it takes pure focus born of necessity and habit to keep my gift in check. The more traumatic of a charge an item holds, the worse it is. I had a feeling that whatever his mother’s Buddha held would be bad.
As if even my soda pop felt nervous about my situation, the glass bottle immediately began to sweat. I set the drinks down and found a bottle opener.
“I was tracking you.” His voice carried a bare-bones quality, like it was all he could do to keep from showing me how deep he was cut.
“How’d you find me?” I thought I’d been so careful, honest to God.
His smile flickered in time to the tumble of his silver coin along the knuckles of his right hand. Fully ambidextrous, he could do it with his left as well, but I wasn’t interested in his parlor tricks. At one time or another I’d seen them all, and I missed only the wicked thing he did with his tongue.
“Luck,” he said, as if it could’ve been anything else. “I showed your picture, and a car rental agent in Shreveport remembered you. She looked up where you dropped the car off for me.”
Well, naturally she did. She’d probably have volunteered a kidney and her firstborn if he’d only thought to ask. I hadn’t used my real name or any of the aliases Chance knew, but that clearly hadn’t slowed him down much.
“So you knew I returned the car in Laredo.”
He nodded, eyes fixed on the pewter icon still lying untouched on my counter. “Didn’t take too much to figure you must’ve made the border crossing. Then I just had to figure out where you went from Monterrey.”
And that would’ve been child’s play, based on how well he knew me. I fought down the dead man’s hand creeping up my back, trying to consider the question with a cool head. If he found me, could someone else? Someone who meant more harm than Chance?
Right now I couldn’t let myself think about that.
“How does your mom figure into this?” Wow, I sounded remote.
“She went missing in Laredo,” he answered, his tone dull like the pewter of her pocket Buddha. “The police have no leads and I... I swear to God, Corine, before this happened, I had no intention of looking you up. I just... I wanted closure. I wanted to know where you were, wanted to be sure you were okay.”
Oddly, I believed him. He hated uncertainty, hated not being in control, so my taking off must have ruffled him some. So he needed to find me. If he chose not to see me thereafter, that was his call. To Chance’s mind, having power and not exercising it was far different than being left in the dark. Frankly, it surprised me that it took him this long to give in to the urge to search.
Maybe, just maybe, once upon a time, I had been disappointed not to find him hot on my heels. Sometimes a woman runs because she wants to be chased. But I was over all that. And him. Right now, I just wanted to find the fastest way to make him disappear.
One thing puzzled me. “What was she doing in Texas?”
“She came out to meet me. Closed up the store in Tampa and called it a vacation.” I heard the guilt lacing his voice like strychnine tea, smooth on top but razors going down, and I felt mildly disgusted with myself for wanting to comfort him.
To distract myself from disastrous impulses, I cracked open the two drinks. The Coke bottles sat in water rings that I smeared idly with a fingertip. He took his and drained half the soda in one go. My hormones clamored; why couldn’t I stop watching his brown throat work as he swallowed?
“Is this going to be bad?” I looked at the pewter Buddha like it was a coiled rattler.
He exhaled, the sound of someone letting the air out of a tire real slow. “Maybe. I’m as afraid of what you’ll find as you are.”
That made sense. Nobody wants to receive bad news any more than I want to deliver it. Goddammit, I thought I was done with this for good. Bracing myself, I reached for the token before I could think better of it. It burned a little before it kicked in and I felt the pain on my palm where the metal blistered my skin.
You see, my gift springs from my mother’s sacrifice, dying for me in the fire, and every use of it carries me back to that night. But I didn’t let go. I accepted the price and let the vision come.
Fear subsumed me, bolstered by the resolve of a woman who made the better of two bad choices, a woman walking with a lesser devil. She definitely went of her own free will, though. No force, no physical coercion. But there’s no sound track; I can’t hear what’s been said; I just feel what they feel, see what they see.
Details were fuzzy, like I was looking through a dirty lens, but beyond the door, I saw a white truck parked. On the side it read Something Sanitation or maybe Salvation. My head throbbed, almost overwhelming the pain in my palm. Holding on, I watched while the pewter Buddha slipped from her fingers, bounced twice, where it lay until Chance found it.
