“Tried to kill him?” I said slowly. “Pity they didn’t finish the job.”
Tammy’s eyes widened. “Hush your mouth! I don’t like the man any more than you do, but we don’t get the Pelican without Victor. And besides, he’s got some weird juju, Pea. I don’t buy what he’s selling about the hands, but I swear he can tell when you take his name in vain.”
I rolled my eyes. “Victor sure ain’t the Lord.”
“Course not. But he might be the devil.”
“You dance for him.”
“And you kill for him.”
I put my head down on the cool Formica of my table and felt each laugh as it bubbled up and burst and hurt.
She knelt down next to me. “Pea, sugar, I’m sorry. Don’t listen to me, I haven’t gotten any sleep.”
“Did Victor mention me?”
“He just asked me where you were. I said you just got out of the hospital, where did he think you’d be? And Pea … you were here, right? You’re in no condition to go climbing fire escapes, right?”
“Of course not, Tammy,” I said, and we left it at that.
She pulled out her playing deck and started shuffling, a soft flapping of moth’s wings while I waited for what the numbers might tell me. She laid the cards down fast, one after another, five rows of ten, plus two at the top and two at the bottom.
“Pick two,” she said. It was her other voice, resonant as a wide bell: she was the oracle now, a role I was never quite sure if she put on like her grass skirt or if it was visited upon her, like my hands.
I raised my head. My fingers tingled as they passed above the faceless deck. I let them fall and then again.
“Angel joker and seven of spades,” she said, turning them over. Whatever that meant, I didn’t know. She just nodded and gestured at me: pick two more.
“Three of hearts and eight of spades, reversed,” she intoned. My skin prickled and my hand in the sling spasmed with a force I felt clear to my shoulder. A small sound escaped me, but the oracle didn’t seem to notice.
I picked again. King of hearts. The second card I never saw because my left hand spasmed as it lifted it from the others and crushed it between fingers that no longer belonged to me. It was like a dream again, but come down during the day as a waking nightmare. I gasped and Tammy broke from whatever trance had been holding her. She pried the crumpled card from my grip and let me hold her until the force went away.
“It’s the hands,” I gasped. “They want something from me. They’re angry with me. They’re going to keep at me until they kill me, Tammy, I know it. That’s why I’ve got to—”
“Why you’ve got to what, Phyllis?”
But I stopped there and she let me. Tammy had a knack for knowing what she didn’t want to know.
Dev came back, at last, when it was nearly morning. I had notched the passing of the moon with memories of my kills, until its light fell on me in ribbons.
Little Ray Barry, my first, who had put a bullet through my baby brother’s left lung and left him to die; Sally Moore, a Hell’s Kitchen madam who had beat one of her youngest girls to death for not wanting to go with a client; William—had I ever known his last name?—an Irish Catholic priest who I now suspected had owed Victor some money but at the time I’d believed that he blackmailed his parishioners for sexual favors. And for all I knew, he had.
And more, rotten dozens more, who greeted me like old high-school friends: half-forgotten, faces bloated and disfigured with time, some names forgotten and some names painful to the touch. I had killed them all. My hands throbbed with each memory and I wondered if I could trust them any longer. What I had always distantly feared turned out to be true: the power behind my hands had only ever been lent to me, and the lender had come to call in his bill. Maybe they could just wander off on their own, I thought, and do Victor for me, while I lay here in a bed of my regrets.
I had reached number thirty-nine—a Bowery hooker who killed her johns, and once again I wondered—when I heard the lock turn and Dev’s tired footsteps in the foyer.
“You don’t have a key,” I said when he paused and watched me from the doorway.
He smiled and shrugged. “Did I wake you?”
“Been keeping the man in the moon company. You know in Mexico they say it’s a rabbit?”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and ran his thumb across my forehead. “So do we, in India. Imagine that, some ten thousand miles apart, and we both still see the same humble rabbit wrapped in smoke.”
I leaned my head into his hand. He smelled of cigarettes, stale coffee, cold stress; the lines around his mouth seemed to have deepened overnight. He was so tired he could barely sit upright, and yet still he looked at me.
“Vic is calling in everyone for a chat. His phrasing. He lights a candle and calls on Lucifer and then puts his hands on your head and chants. Says he’ll catch the traitor that way, and at the very least, he’s got all the soldiers and lieutenants shitting themselves. Everyone has their little secrets.”
I smiled up at him, warm as a July afternoon, and he bent down to kiss me between my eyes.
“How long have I got?”
“He doesn’t
