“Oh, I don’t need to pray,” came the retort. “You’re wading through my last wishes right now. I wish for Raymond Sturges to fetch what all his double-dealing has got coming to him. I wish for that ugly condom-minimum he’s building to tumble into the riverbed like a house of cards. And I wish most fervently, with all the hearts I stole as a fine young thing and all of the soul I sold for scrap, that the spirit standing over there that he asked me to summon and bind, trapped in the body of a mortal man, remembers what he is and drowns the shit out of his ‘boss.’ Any of those come to pass, I’ll join the unseen world happy.” The cigar gave a vicious little jerk.
Nothing she was saying made any kind of sense. Joe tried to shake the mud out of his head.
“Jesus, lady, what the hell do you think I am?” He stepped closer. Tarot cards slipped and cracked beneath his bootheels. The whites of the old woman’s eyes flashed up at him.
“I think you know what you are.” Her voice was a low hiss. “He needed you out of the way, same as he needs me out of the way. But you can’t just put a bullet between a river god’s eyes. For that, you need specialists. You need someone who knows what they’re doing to teach you. You ne—”
“My head hurts,” Dave said. He dragged his pistol to bear. “Let’s just get this done with already.”
“No, Dave, wait, hang the hell on, I wanna know what she’s—”
“You’ll remember soon,” Maria said calmly. “He wanted you on a leash, and—”
The silencer on Dave’s gun choked the pistol’s roar into a muffled cough. Maria slumped. Her top hat and cigar tumbled to the floor at Joe’s feet.
“God DAMMIT, I was trying to talk to her! Jesus, what part of ‘wait’ don’t you understand?!”
Dave threw his hands up in the universal chill the hell out position. “I’m sorry, did the boss send us here to chat with the old bag or kill her? What the hell are you so upset for all of a sudden?”
It was a great question. Like most questions, Joe didn’t have an answer. He felt . . . weird. Now that Maria was dead, Dave seemed fine. Joe was a hundred miles west of fine in a bus headed east. It had just pulled past the city limits of Gut-Churning Anxiety in a cloud of exhaust and the next stop was someplace he desperately did not want to think about. He could see the happy life he had managed to scrape together receding in the rear-view mirror.
“No,” he muttered, clutching his head. “No no no no. She was nuts. I don’t know what she meant.”
But lies didn’t hurt like this. He could feel all the little shards of his past coming back together, intrusive and cold as men with guns, men with concrete, men with summoning spells, and there was only so long he could hold them off before—
The slightest, softest of gasps from behind. Joe and Dave both went rigid.
Standing in the doorway, haloed by the late-afternoon sun, was Rita.
Done with Raymond, he swept on to the Riverview. It hurt to pull himself back into human form—hurt like hell, in fact, like wearing a shoe three sizes too small—but he kept it together long enough to limp into his dingy little apartment one last time.
He wrote her a letter.
Rita,
I have to go. I’m so sorry. Nobody else will come after you, I promise. That’s all been taken care of.
There’s a lot of money stashed under my mattress, and a lot more at the address below. Please take it. Spending time with you and Luce has made me happier than I can say.
Thank you for everything.
He slipped it beneath her door, where she’d find it when she returned. Then he walked into the night, down to where the riverbed was visible through the chain-link fence.
She was holding a stack of towels that rose almost to her chin. Joe couldn’t see her eyes with the light of the open hotel room door at her back, but from the way she had frozen, he could imagine the look in them and it broke his heart.
Dave sighed “God dammit” in the way someone would looking at a huge mess that had just gotten a little bigger, and raised his piece. He was good at cleaning up messes, smooth as a well-tended engine. Joe had never been what you’d call “smooth,” but what he lacked in slickness he made up for by being very, very big. The desperate blow he landed on Dave’s elbow knocked the shot wide. It also shattered the bone with a crack and sent the pistol cartwheeling as Dave shrieked, smoothness temporarily splintered.
That would’ve been the moment to put him down, to crack his neck or put a bullet through his head, to lie to Raymond and pin the blame on Maria. Instead, Joe spun, pushed by his howling, cursing ex-partner, grabbed Rita as he sprinted through the door, and made for the Lincoln. Sirens were already howling in the distance. Rita didn’t make a sound as he threw her into the passenger seat and lurched for the driver’s side, still wide-eyed and wordless with shock.
The big old car’s tires chirped as it fish-tailed out of the parking lot and into early evening traffic. Joe was doing math in his head. It wouldn’t take long for Dave to report back to Raymond, even with no ride and a busted arm. Raymond already knew about Rita. He knew where she lived. Once Dave got him on the phone and he put two and two together—
“Shit. Shit shit shit shit.” He punched the console into plastic splinters and pulled his fist away bloody. It was all too much. Maria’s talk, Rita sitting beside him flinching at his rage—all of it was just too damn much. He wanted to fly apart and sweep the entire city away, Atlantis style. “Rita, I’m so sorry. I didn’t—I couldn’t—”
“Are you going to kill me?” Her voice was so small he could barely hear the words over the noise of traffic outside. Jesus, how many times could his heart crack in a single day?
“No,” he said. “I would never hurt you. Never.” He licked his dry lips and swallowed what felt like an ostrich egg–sized lump in his throat. Her posture relaxed a little, but there was still a justifiable guardedness there that it hurt to look at. Private security, he had told her. That was his job. Sure. “Is there somewhere safe you can go for a few days? Somewhere outta town?”
“I—my sister lives in Tucson, I could—”
“Take Luce and go there. Stay for a couple of weeks. Don’t come back for a while, all right?”
“My job, I can’t—”
“Your job’s the last thing to be worrying about. Please, Rita. A very bad man is probably hearing you just saw some shit you shouldn’t’ve. Give me time to fix this.” The spirit standing over there that he asked me to summon and bind, trapped in the body of a mortal man. What had that meant?
Flashes. A much younger Rita standing before him, looking about as scared as she did right now but still reaching up and out, gently, slowly—concrete trucks on the banks of home—a feeling of being pulled away from where he belonged and tethered to something small and clumsy and slow—and Raymond’s voice, clear as if he was sitting beside Joe right now: Holy hell, it worked. You did it. You crazy old witch, you did it. Nico, Bobby, get him some clothes!
“Rita,” he said, slowly, carefully. “What exactly did you see on my palm that time you read it?”