Page 4 of Soothsayer

“You’re lying,” he snarled. “It’s not too late. I can change it?justtell me what to do!” His demand was accentuated by the sudden appearance of his handgun, which I’d been expecting. Marisol hadn’t; she went pale and pulled her Glock, training it on the man, but I waved her away.

“Charles.” I leaned forward. “Look into my eyes. Come on,” I encouraged when he balked, “don’t get shy now, look into my eyes. Come here.” He bent forward, stiffly, his finger still on the trigger of his—whatever that was?something small and sleek. I looked into his red-rimmed baby blues and said, “You stupid, poor fuck. You thought it was enough to burn your hardcopies, to destroy your computers, to…Jesus, set fire to your office building? Fraud on the scale that you perpetrated can’t be burned away. You made money your god, Charles, and you worshipped it and sacrificed to it and gave it everything, and that leaves marks that can’t be branded over.

“Your house, your beautiful house…that’s still standing. Your car, your wife’s car, the very fact that you brought two bodyguards when you came to see me this morning—all signs that you’re in too deep. You can’t trick and you can’t lie and you can’t repent fast enough, not anymore. It’s too late for you, Charles Donovan Klinger.” I looked deeper, past the surface of his future and into his past as well. I cupped his face in my hands, warm silver on clammy skin, and he didn’t even blink.

“It was too late for you the moment you had your business partner killed. It was too late when the pair of you went into business together, both of you determined to find the best ways to fuck your desperate clients out of their cash. Too late at Tulane when you decided you wanted to be a lawyer so you could have the satisfaction of screwing people over without them realizing it, too late when you thought it would be easier to beat your hooker into silence instead of paying her, too late when you convinced your mentally ill grandmother to give you her car, too late from the moment you shattered your little sister’s piggy bank and stole two dollars and eighty-one cents, all of it in pennies.

“You dream of that sound sometimes, don’t you, Charles?” His pupils were huge now, windows straight into his soul, andI followed the gleam of copper as he chased those pennies over the sidewalk, chubby fingers grasping and holding on tight even then.

“You liked that sound, that breaking sound, that crash. It gets you off, just like cash in hand gets you off, just like watching yourself peddling bullshit on television gets you off. You were always going to go down in flames, Charles, but those commercials were the start of that nasty attention from the DA. They’ve got everything on you, and you’ve got nothing at all. You’ll end just like you began, a nothing, grasping for pennies in the gutter. You’redone, Charles. You’re done, and there’s nothing you can do to fight it.” I let go of his face and sat back, letting the real world filter back into my vision.

Charles was still holding the gun, but just barely, his hand gone limp. His skin was sallow and sagging, his shoulders bent and his head lolling. He looked like he’d had a stroke. I knew better. It was just in shock, but this shock was one he would never completely recover from. All his plans, all his little tricks and schemes?gone. This was what hopelessness looked like. This was ruin, on a base and personal level, and I felt a little sick even though I knew he deserved it.

“Shouldn’t have come back,” I said with a sigh. “Nobody ever really wants the details, Charles.” Marisol was still holding her gun on him, but now she looked uncertain. I waved her vigilance away. “Help me get him up. He’s going to need his guys to take him back to his car.” I used my pocket square to keep my fingerprints off his gun as I put it back in his pocket—stupid way to carry a gun, but it was a tiny thing, and I couldn’t find a holster—and then stood and got a hand under his arm. Marisol grabbed on the other side, and together we hoisted Mr. Klinger to his feet, where he wavered for a moment before his legs decided to get their act together.

We maneuvered him to the front door, which Marisol opened and waved from. The goons were there in seconds, looking dumbstruck.

“What did you do?” one of them asked angrily, appearing ready to go for his weapon. The other one shook his head.

“Nah, don’t bother,” he said, taking over for Marisol. “The boss did this to himself.” He nodded to us and then headed toward the idling car. His buddy gave us a final glower before going to help, and Marisol shut the door behind them.

“Fuck,” I said emphatically, wiping a hand over my face. “I need a smoke after that.”

“In the alley, not out front,” she said automatically. She followed it with, “Cillian? Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine.” I could still hear the ceramic cracking into a thousand pink shards and see the bright pennies scattering across the pavement. I could feel the way the sight of them sunk into his soul, like little copper claws. “I just need a minute to myself.” I walked into the back hall, grabbed my cigarettes off their resting place by the alley door, and headed outside.

Chapter Three

The alley behind the store was just wide enough for a decent-sized truck to drive down its cracked concrete. It was tufted here and there with surprisingly green weeds—it had been a wet summer so far. I leaned against the brick wall, tapped a cigarette out of the pack, and pulled my lighter out of my pocket. The burn of the smoke in my lungs soothed me a little, distracting my mind with nicotine and giving my hands something to do that wasn’t crawling after fistfuls of imaginary coins.

I smiled to myself and shut my eyes, tilted my head back and blew the smoke toward the sky. It could have been worse. Once I’d read a murderer who liked to decapitate his victims with a butcher knife. I hadn’t trusted myself in the kitchen for a fucking week after that?cutlery kept finding its way into my hands without me realizing it.

Sometimes I had to remind myself that it wasn’tmewho was ruining these people’s lives. They had managed that all on their own. I was just the one bringing it home, and even that wasn’treally on me. I didn’t seek people out. They came to me, and I told them what I saw, and what they decided to do with it was their own business. How they reacted was out of my control.

Charles Donovan Klinger would be dead before the month was out. I saw how he did it—I saw his wife’s pill bottle and his last fifth of Crown Royal, something he couldn’t drink without thinking about his business partner. I hadn’t seen this stuff the first time around, but looking deeper meant more knowledge for the both of us, all details that neither of us wanted to know.

“Fucking prick.” I opened my eyes and looked up at the clear blue sky. Colorado had ridiculously blue skies, even through the smog of downtown Denver. They were the sort of blue that made you wish you could fall up and keep going, because it looked so much nicer up there than down here. I had drowned in a woman’s mind once, and in the end, everything had been blue, a dark, malevolent blue that eventually faded to black. Nothing like the sky.

Goddamnit. I banged my head hard against the brick and then immediately thought better of it—I was still wearing my hat. I took it off and checked it for damage, resolutely not thinking about drowning. Drowning always made me think abouthim, and I wasn’t going to do that today; I fucking wasn’t. I propped the fedora up on my fist and turned it in a circle, making sure it was still hat-shaped and didn’t appear like a moron had been smacking it into a brick wall. It had held up to my inadvertent punishment, thankfully.

I needed to get out of here for a while. Marisol wouldn’t wonder if I didn’t come back for a couple of hours, or even the rest of the day. As far as the Ace of Cups and its promise for a new beginning went, well, it could hunt me down. I wasn’t going to wait around for it. I took a final drag of my cigarette, ground it down in the empty flower pot Marisol had set out here for me—she didn’t approve of littering—and headed toward the end ofthe alley. It emptied out onto Josephine, a busy one-way street that was all businesses where it buttressed Colfax but became formerly elegant houses and apartments farther back. If I went left, I’d hit a park eventually. Right and I’d be headed toward the shabby-chic conundrum that was this part of town.

My phone buzzed, interrupting my musing. I frowned as I pulled it out of my jacket pocket. Only a dozen people had this number, and I wasn’t expecting to talk to any of them any time soon. I unlocked it and looked at my new message.

Move ten paces to the right.

My feet were moving even before my brain caught up, obedience was so instinctual. Two seconds later, I was out of the mouth of the alley, and three seconds after that, a beat-up silver sedan coming down the road was clipped by a delivery van and veered straight into the corner of the building. It wasn’t moving fast, thankfully, but the crash was plenty loud, especially since I was just a few feet away from the point of impact.

A memory flashed through my mind, one of my personal rare and painful gems. I was in the backseat of an old Lincoln, and I was very small. My feet wouldn’t have touched the floor even if I hadn’t had my knees squished to my chest, and my face was pressed to the knobby joints so hard they were leaving red blotches on my cheeks. The man driving was on a phone—an old-school dumb phone, clunky in his hand, distracting. He wasn’t paying attention, but I knew the moment before the car was hit and covered my head with my hands, so when I went flying into the door, it didn’t hurt as much. Metal crunched, and bright spots flashed across the darkness behind my eyelids as the car spun and spun…

I shook my head and took a deep breath, focusing on the present. The van hadn’t stopped, but I didn’t bother trying to catch its license plate number?there were plenty of people exclaiming and getting on their phones. I headed over to thedriver’s side and opened the door, but didn’t reach in to touch the woman who had been driving. She was moving under her own power, picking her head up off the remains of her airbag and whimpering softly. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…”

“It’s all right,” I said gently. I might not be a martyr, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel compassion for another person, especially one who’d just been thrown into a wall. “You’re okay. Just a little accident. There’s an ambulance coming to help you.” I could already hear it in the distance. We were only a few blocks from a major hospital. “Can you look at me for a moment?” She blearily turned, and as soon as our eyes met, I sighed and backed out of the way. One of the employees at the auto-painting store took my place, and a second later—bam. The fucking Ace of Cups moment. Who found true love as a result of a car accident? This wasn’t exactly the heartwarming scene I’d envisioned getting me through the day earlier.

“Are you all right?” the newcomer asked frantically. “What’s your name? I’m Felix. I’m gonna stay with you until the ambulance gets here, okay? Oh Jesus, are you all right?”

“I’m…I think so?” the woman said, her voice gaining a little bit of strength. “I’m Paula.”

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