The White Magic Five & Dime (A Tarot Mystery) (24 page)

A new day has dawned, and today the whole world looks different. Just take a peek out your window. You never noticed all those sunflowers in your yard, did you? And check it out: a naked kid on a horse! Wow! You sure didn’t see that when you peeped out through the blinds at midnight. In fact, you didn’t see anything at all but the blackness of your own despair. Well, it’s always darkest before the dawn, they say. And they’re right. The trick is surviving the night.

Miss Chance,
Infinite Roads to Knowing

“I’m sorry,”
Clarice said, her voice warbly, her face wet with tears. “I should’ve said something. I shouldn’t have let you come up the stairs.”

She was sitting on the couch, handcuffs around her wrists.

Anthony Grandi tucked his gun away, then stepped up and cuffed me, too.

The woman kept her gun trained on Clarice. She was a short, stout, fortyish woman with bright red hair and a face that was both cherubic and churlish. Her eyes were cold, her hand steady.

“It’s okay,” I said to Clarice. “You did the right thing.”

“Move.”

Grandi turned me around and shoved me toward the stairs. He wasn’t as big as I’d pictured him—that rumbly-growly voice of his made him sound like Chewbacca—but he shoved hard.

“Now, just hold on a second, Grandi. Why don’t we—?”

He shoved me again.

This was my we-meet-at-last moment with the man, but all I could get out was, “All right! Stop it! I’m going!”

I was scared he’d push me down the stairs, though that wouldn’t have made any sense. Why risk breaking a leg when there was a cornfield somewhere I had to walk to?

We were
marched out the back door once Grandi was sure no one was around to see us. He’d confiscated the keys to my mom’s black Cadillac, and soon he was driving us out of town in it. I hadn’t even been in it before then. It looked too much like a hearse.

They made Clarice and me get in the back.

The woman watched us from the front passenger seat. She’d given us a little speech I remembered well, though it had been twenty-something years since I’d first heard it. You know—the one about being dead before we hit the asphalt if we tried to get out.

There weren’t really any cornfields around Berdache, of course, but there was plenty of desert.

It would do.

Grandi was
good at making snatches, I had to give him that. All that skip tracing had paid off, apparently. He’d whisked us out of town before even I could get my mouth working. By the time I had a thought in my head other than
shit
,
we were cruising past the turn-off for Devil’s Ridge.

I put a hand on Clarice’s knee and gave it a squeeze. She looked back at me with wide, frightened eyes.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’re not dumb enough to hurt us.”

Clarice nodded, but her eyes didn’t look any less wide or any less frightened.

I turned toward the front seat.

“I was talking to Detective Logan not fifteen minutes ago, you know. Over dinner. If anything happens to us, the first door he’s gonna kick in is yours.”

Grandi didn’t even glance at me in the rear-view mirror.

The woman smirked.

Obviously, the words “Detective Logan” didn’t exactly strike fear into the hearts of Arizona’s evildoers. I resolved not to mention it if I ever saw Logan again. Every cop secretly believes he’s Batman.

I jerked my chin at Grandi.

“Tony I know,” I said to the woman. “Who are you?”

“Someone who doesn’t answer questions from dumbasses who don’t know when to shut up.”

“Wow. That’s a mouthful. How do you get all that on a driver’s license?”

The woman’s smirk turned into a sneer. I got the feeling she was good at scowls, glowers, and glares, too.

“You’re not scared, huh? Well, good for you.” She brought her gun up to show me what it was pointed at: my heart. “Now show me you’re not stupid.”

As it turned out, I
did
know when to shut up.

Right then, that was when.

“Watch out for potholes,” I said to Grandi.

That was the last thing out of my mouth until the car stopped.

Grandi slowed
and turned onto a gravel road. We were miles from Berdache, miles from Sedona, miles from anywhere. All I could see in the headlights were rocks and dirt and, here and gone in an instant, the glowing eyes of something watching us from the scrub by the side of the road.

Clarice whimpered. I couldn’t blame her. Maybe I even joined in, I don’t know.

Any second now we’d pull behind a convenient bluff and there would be the shallow pit dug earlier in the day. Or maybe just a pair of shovels. Or an abandoned well or mine shaft.

We reached the end of the road.

There was
the bluff, just as I’d expected. And on the other side of it, not a hole. A house.

It was one story, ranch style. Not much bigger than a mobile home. There was no mailbox, no yard, no car in the driveway. No driveway, for that matter, unless you counted the road that simply stopped thirty yards away.

“Inside,” Grandi said.

He didn’t bother pulling out his gun again. Where were we going to run to?

We followed him into the house, the woman a few steps behind us.
She
wasn’t taking any chances. Her gun was pointed at my back.

The house was a mess. It looked like a run-down spring break rental after two dozen college kids were through with it. There were crumpled soda cans and junk food wrappers everywhere, and the air smelled of cigarettes and garbage someone should have taken out weeks ago.

“Don’t tell me you kidnapped us because you’re too cheap to hire Merry Maids,” I said.

Grandi finally came alive.

He smiled.

“Hey, that’s not a bad idea.”

He went into the kitchen and came back with some plastic bags. He handed one to me, one to Clarice. One he kept for himself.

“Start cleaning,” he said.

When we
were done picking up trash, Grandi brought me a broom and told me to sweep.

I held up my hands. Handcuffs still dangled from the wrists.

“That’d be a lot easier without these.”

“Yeah, probably,” Grandi said. And he shoved the broom into my hands and walked off.

Clarice was sent into the bathroom with a roll of paper towels.

“Ew,” I heard her say.

“Shut up and scrub,” the woman snapped.

“Geez, Grandi—we’re in Arizona and you need
us
for slave labor?” I said. “I thought that’s what illegal immigrants were for.”

He didn’t bother answering.

He was trying to find the 409.

I started
sweeping down the hall, moving closer to the red-headed woman.

Closer.

Closer…

Almost close enough to bring the broom handle down on her hand, then up again into her face.

“Back off or you’ll be sweeping up your own guts,” she said.

I started sweeping up the hall, moving farther away from the red-headed woman.

Farther.

Farther…

“All right.
That’s enough,” Grandi announced.

I leaned my broom against the wall. “Can we wait till tomorrow to start on the lawn? I’m exhausted.”

Grandi pulled out his gun again. “End of the hall, room on the right. Go.”

I didn’t move.

Would they have plastic sheeting ready back there? A tarp? Something to keep the splatter off the walls?

No. They had miles of darkened desert all around. Why make a mess in the house? The one you just cleaned?

None of this made any sense.

Grandi hadn’t been pointing his gun anywhere in particular, but he corrected that now by aiming at my face.

“
Go
.”

I went.

The room
was small and bare. A single light bulb overhead, nothing on the walls, no furniture other than a ratty mattress in one corner and, across from it, a bucket.

I stayed as far away from the bucket as possible.

The room’s one window was barred, and there was a padlock on the outside of the door.

Grandi took off our handcuffs—while his sister covered us from the doorway, of course—then stepped outside and locked us in.

“Oh my god, Alanis,” Clarice said the second the door was closed. “What the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know. This isn’t how I expected things to play out.”

“What
did
you expect?”

“Not spring cleaning, that’s for sure.” I waved a hand at the room around us. “Obviously this is Grandi’s private Guant
á
namo. I assume he sweats people here from time to time. Maybe when he’s looking for leads on someone who’s jumped bail. Maybe when he wants to give someone a choice: back to jail or…I don’t know. Whatever they’ve got to give.”

“But why bring
us
here?”

“To show he’s serious about me leaving town?” I said with a shrug.

“It doesn’t sound like you really think that.”

“I don’t know what to think, Clarice. Grandi suddenly starts threatening me, then he suddenly stops, then he suddenly hauls us off at gunpoint. I don’t get it.”

“Maybe he’s nuts.”

“That’s a comforting thought.”

I walked to the door and brought an ear in close. I could hear Grandi and the woman talking in the living room, but they kept their voices low and I could only catch the occasional word. One kept coming up again and again, though. From both of them.

Mom
.

If it had been
mother
, I might have assumed they were talking about mine. But not
mom
. That was too informal, too personal.

“I think that woman might be Grandi’s sister,” I said.

“Jesus. What a family.”

“Judge not. What are we, the Huxtables?”

“Who the hell are the Huxtables?”

“They’re…never mind.”

Clarice started to sit on the mattress, then changed her mind when she got a good look at it. She kicked it instead.

“Maybe this is why Athena left the Five & Dime to you,” she said. “She knew it’d suck you into all this shit.”

I barked out a bitter little laugh. “That’d be so perfect, wouldn’t it? Her last will and testament is really her last scam, and I’m the…Jesus.”

“You’re the Jesus?”

“No. I think you might be right. I’m the
mark
.”

“Oh, come on, Alanis. I was only joking.”

I wasn’t.

I’d thought maybe my mother had forgiven me.

Ha
. Now there’s a joke.

She was getting her revenge.

Mom had
known she was dying, so she had started squaring things away.

She’d made sure Clarice was legally emancipated. There’d be no social workers or foster homes for her to run away from.

Fly free, little bird…and maybe starve. That’s up to you.

So that was one daughter taken care of, as Mom would see it. What to do about the other? The one who’d freed herself?

To me she left everything—except an explanation. Which pretty much guaranteed that Clarice would hate my guts. And when I came to collect my inheritance, I’d find all Mom’s schemes brewing and the Grandis seething about it and a police detective sniffing around the whole rotten mess. If I was still up to my old ways—
her
ways—I’d slide right into her place and right into her troubles. And if I’d gone straight, maybe this was just the setup that would bend me crooked again.

She’d prove I was no better than her by helping me
become
her. And if I didn’t go along with it—well, maybe I’d just get myself killed.

You had to give it to her: The woman was good. Even dead, she could still out-con me.

Time passed.
We brooded.

“Alanis,” Clarice eventually said, “I want you to be honest with me.”

“All right.”

“Are the Grandis going to kill us?”

“I don’t know.”

“But if you had to guess—?”

“What do you think?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Because you’re hoping I’ll say something different.”

“Yeah. Probably.”

“Then don’t tell me to be honest.”

I listened
to the voices down the hall rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall. After a while, I thought I heard more than just the two I recognized. Perhaps another man. Perhaps another woman.

Maybe that’s what Grandi had been making us wait for.

The burial detail.

There were
footsteps in the hall.

“They’re coming,” I said.

Clarice cringed against the far wall.

I positioned myself in the middle of the room, between her and the door. As if that would help. But it seemed like the thing to do.

The door opened, and Grandi’s sister came in. Still with her gun, of course.

Grandi was behind her. With a folding table.

He walked up to me, set up the table, then left the room. He returned almost immediately with two folding chairs.

“Hell of a time for poker,” I said.

He unfolded the chairs. One he pushed over to me. The other he left on the opposite side of the table.

“All right,” Grandi said loudly. Not to me—to someone out in the hall.

There was a long, ominous silence. Then she came into the room. Slowly, almost shuffling.

The most adorable little grandma you ever saw.

She was short but plump, a little dumpling in a powder-blue pantsuit. She had a hunched back and wrinkly wattles that swayed with each step and hair permed up into a wavy-gray mushroom cloud erupting from her head.

She set her white handbag on the table, eased herself into the chair across from me, then looked up at Grandi.