Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Tom Doherty Associates ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For Elizabeth Jones Johnson,
who I met before I could remember.
And
For Lillian Wayne Prillerman Fogg,
who warned me.
SAINTS
CAME IN
Seven. That’s what we’re starting with.
I woke with the dream late on a Thursday night, sometime in July.
It’s a good one, as far as sevens go. The angel joker for the zero, plus seven of spades, that’s seven, clean as the air you breathe. Well, cleaner, if you breathing in Harlem.
“Tell me,” the dentist said while he lit my cigarette. He was using the lighter Dev gave me after I’d dropped mine in the Hudson, the one I kept by my bed still. I blew a shaky plume that scattered in the crosswinds of the fan and the raunchy East River musk slinking through my open window.
“Was I in it?” he asked when I didn’t say anything. The dentist was nervous, which made me laugh a little, considering, and he eyed the holster hanging easy and louche on the post of my bed.
“Nope,” I said. “But Vic was.”
The dentist squeezed my shoulders. He was looking at me like anyone might, or at least anyone who heard that Victor’s angel had, at last, been given her second dream. Like he was working out which runner would take his numbers on the day, hour, and minute of my death.
You get the hands with a dream, a dream that runs true. In Harlem, we might throw a party or we might keep it real quiet—sometimes that extra dose of juju doesn’t go over well with the neighbors—but we always play the numbers. The dream that gives you the hands never fails, they say.
Well, what the Lord giveth he can taketh the hell away.
You get a second dream, you and your uncanny hands better play the numbers, so your widow can pay for your casket.
“Victor came up to me in the Pelican with Red Man just behind him. He said, ‘Here’s a job for you, Phyllis LeBlanc,’ and then I was standing next to him in this long white dress. I had on my holster, but there were two severed hands in it instead of my knives. And then Red Man pointed to me and said, ‘You killed that man!’ Just like the end of some Charlie Chan flick. Can you believe it? As if that would surprise anyone, let alone Red Man.”
The dentist didn’t laugh. “And then?”
“A wind blew through, a hot wind, and it was so bright and blue I could hardly see. Just Red Man’s silhouette like a halo. He lifted his arms and said, ‘Don’t fail us.’ And then I heard—someone’s voice. Calling my name. That was it.”
“Don’t fail?” Now the dentist laughed. “Have you ever failed at killing someone, darling?”
My heart puckered like an old wound. “No.”
“Are you sure it was really … that kind of dream?”
My hands still ached from the memory of it all. The last time the dream came down I’d been ten years old and my easy knack for throwing darts had become, overnight, the uncanny force that makes folks slide away from you at church but come up to you after to ask for their numbers.
They said we had saints’ hands, called us jujus and witches and confidence artists. You believed or you didn’t; no matter to the hands. They were our latter-day flood—or our plague—descended upon us after Emancipation. Ever since we moved north, the extra had run in my family: my great-uncle could tell a card just from touching it and my great-great-grandmother could pick up lightning in a storm. Mommy used to say that there were fewer of us in every generation, so she didn’t know why the dreams had struck two of her three children. I think she wanted to believe that it wasn’t her fault. Especially after my brother died.
Especially after I went downtown.
But now—I hadn’t done a job for Victor in nearly seven months. I’d told the man who gave me my past that I was thinking of a different future.
He hadn’t said no.
This little number in the first position, it’s the past sticking its fat nose into your present business. Might even be a good thing, but see these cards? They could mean some trouble just as easy. Those spades got sharp edges and no one likes a joker with a knife.
“It was,” I said, soft, “that kind of dream.”
1
“Oh, Phyllis…”
It had been Dev’s voice at the end of the dream; just his voice, warning me against nothing I could see; just his voice, pushing me awake, and away from him, again. He had only ever called me Phyllis in extremity: mortal danger, orgasm. I wondered which it would be this time.
“Christ,” said the dentist, jamming his cigarette into my silver ashtray and getting another. “Christ, where’s that lighter? I hate even thinking about Red Man, and you have to go and dream about him…”
“He’s not so bad. Not like Victor.”
The dentist flinched. “You know what they say, the things he’s done. You just like him because he likes you … you and that snake girl, what’s her name—”
“Tamara,” I said, not for the first time. The star of
