Better Read Than Dead Read online

  “Sure,” he said, and moved his seat closer.

  I asked his full name and birth date, shuffled the deck and began. The first card I turned over was a picture of a man scribing on a parchment in deep concentration. There was an abacus on a shelf near him, and several pentacles lined the bottom of the card. “You’re an accountant,” I said matter-of-factly.

  “Whoa! You’re good,” he said, sitting up in surprise.

  I gave him a big toothy grin and continued: “I get the feeling that you’re new to your company. Like this is a pretty big firm, and they don’t take just anyone, so the fact that you even got hired is a big accomplishment.”

  “That’s all true,” Jimmy confirmed.

  I drew another card and laid it down across the first. This one held a kingly-looking man holding a sword. He looked quite menacing to me. “I get the feeling that your boss is a taskmaster, and you’re having to burn the midnight oil at this new job, where nothing is ever quite good enough.”

  “You’re right on the money,” Jimmy confirmed.

  I drew again. This one was upside down and depicted a pregnant woman sewing on a tapestry. “There’s also an issue of debt here. You owe a lot in student loans?”

  “A bundle,” Jimmy said, squirming at the mention of debt, but still giving me his full attention.

  We kept on like that for another ten minutes or so. I talked about how the money he and his new bride would receive from the wedding would be a considerable help, but the thing that would help him the most was a promotion he was about to receive.

  “A promotion?”

  “Yup, and it’s a big one. Luck is on your side this year, Jimmy. Very soon you’re going to come into a position of power and influence. Trust me: You’re doing good work at your firm, and even though you think you’re not appreciated, you are. You’re going to get a raise that will allow you a lot of freedom in the future.”

  “Cool. Does it say anything about our honeymoon?”

  I laid down another card that depicted eight cups on a fountain catching water from the top of the fountain. In the background there was a large mountain covered in snow. My eye went to the mountain and focused on the snow. “You guys going to Aspen?”

  Jimmy barked out a laugh and said, “Vail. Ophelia’s father gave us the use of the family condo in Vail for two weeks.”

  “You’re going to have a ball,” I said. “Although I’m not sure how much of the outside world you guys will see. This says you could be spending most of your time indoors in the hot tub.”

  Jimmy laughed again. “Yeah, the condo’s got a huge hot tub, and we’d already planned on putting it to good use. Say, what can you tell me about kids?” he asked.

  I laid down a card, the two of wands. “I see two. Both boys, but not for a couple of years yet. You and Ophelia should enjoy some time together before you jump into parenthood.”

  “That’s what we’d planned on. Listen, this was awesome, thank you so much!”

  “Anytime,” I said as he got up, taking several business cards with him as he left. I reached down for my bottled water then, which I’d tucked under my chair, and as I sat up another figure dressed in a black tuxedo, a rose cummerbund and a black mask walked in. I held up a finger as I took a swig from the water, then tucked the bottle back underneath my chair. I smiled gamely at my newest guest and said, “Good evening.”

  The man simply nodded and sat down. I shuffled the cards several times, then swished them briefly around on the tabletop. I didn’t want to get the same sequence, so I made sure to shuffle them fully. Finally I looked at the man sitting in the chair and asked, “Okay, so that I can focus on your energy, may I have your full name and date of birth?”

  “Bob Smith. June sixth, nineteen sixty.” Liar, liar, pants on fire . . .

  I had already closed my eyes when “Bob” gave me his name and birth date. Surprisingly, it’s not all that uncommon for people to want to hide their personal information. They don’t trust psychics, and want to give us as little to go on as possible. I repeated his information in my head anyway; mentally tripping when I realized the birth date he’d given me was 6/6/60. Usually this would make me chuckle and roll my eyes, but tonight I shuddered involuntarily.

  I opened my eyes and turned over the first from the deck. The death card stared up at me. Kendal had once told me that the death card didn’t usually mean death. It was really about old endings and new beginnings. Still, the hooded skeleton smiling up at me from the face of the card wasn’t very reassuring, and mentally I reached out for the comfort of my guides. In an instant I realized they were gone.

  Now, believe it or not, I have a physical sensation when my crew is around. Think of it like feeling static electricity on one side of your body. I’m so used to this feeling that it doesn’t faze me when they show up, but having them exit stage left in the middle of a reading gave me a moment of panic. Why would they leave?

  About then it dawned on me that this man was waiting for me to say something, and the first tinges of panic tickled my neck. I had no idea what this death card was trying to say, nor why my guides would suddenly leave. To distract him I laid down another card. This one was labeled, THE TOWER, and showed a huge medieval tower being struck by a bolt of lightning, sending its roof off to smash on the ground. Even more disturbing was a depiction of people being tossed out of the tower by the force of the lightning bolt, captured midfall as they plummeted to their deaths on the rocky ground below.

  As I looked at the graphic images there was the tickle of a thought on the edge of my intuition, but it was faint and distant. As the seconds ticked by, I could feel the mounting pressure of this man’s expectations as I continued to stare at the two cards on the tabletop and got no clear message to deliver to him. In a panic now, I mentally called out loudly to my crew and demanded their presence immediately, furious that they would abandon me at the beginning of a reading. Not knowing what to do, and to stall for a little more time, I laid down yet another card labeled, JUDGMENT, which depicted three luminescent human figures rising from the earth with outstretched arms toward an angel blowing a trumpet. In one electrifying second I felt my crew smash back into place as a message tumbled into my mind with the force of a physical blow. I snapped my head up to look at the man in the chair as I gasped, “Oh my God . . . ! You’ve killed someone!”

  For a moment the man only sat there, neither moving nor speaking. I could see his mouth form a grim, set line, and then slowly he nodded exactly once. I sat there petrified of what I had said out loud. My heart was racing, and my palms were sweating, and I didn’t know what else to do, so I pulled my head back down to the cards. I looked at the judgment card, and my eyes focused on the many figures rising up to meet the angel; then I looked back at the tower card and saw the people falling to their deaths, and another thought bulleted through my head: “No, not just one person . . .” I said breathlessly. “You’ve killed many people.”

  The man’s reaction was even more chilling as he actually chuckled and replied, “Hey, you’re pretty good.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, my mouth working open and closed and my eyes wide. It suddenly occurred to me that if I showed him how much fear I felt, he might worry that I knew a little too much, and take care of me as well. I needed to continue with the reading if I had any hope of saving my own skin. With a gulp and a shaking hand I drew another card, forcing myself to get a grip already. “Uh, this says that you do this for a living,” I said before I could stop myself. Where the hell was my filtering mechanism today?

  “You could say that,” he shrugged.

  I turned over another card, “This indicates that your family is very supportive of you; in fact you may even work for your family.”

  “In a way,” he replied.

  I tentatively turned over another card, and with a quaking voice I said, “Uh, well, there’s plenty of work out there for you. I mean, you’re in demand. I mean—”

  “I get your meaning,” he said qu
ietly.

  With unsteady fingers I turned over another card, thinking that if he hadn’t killed me yet maybe I could talk my way out of this. “This says that there’s some sort of rift, like there are members of your family that have gone down a separate path, and that you no longer speak to one another, and there’s some really bad blood forming here, like people are turning on each other. . . .” I paused, not really understanding what I had just said.

  The man leaned in, suddenly interested. “Go on,” he insisted.

  “Uh, well, I get this feeling that there’s a member of your family who has betrayed you somehow, and that you’re right to keep him at a distance, but . . .” Something kept playing in the background of my head, and I paused to pay attention to it.

  “What is it?” the man demanded.

  “Well . . .” I hesitated.

  “Tell me,” he said in a voice that wasn’t kidding.

  “I keep hearing, ‘He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.”’

  The man sat back and regarded me for a long moment before standing up abruptly and reaching into his jacket pocket, I assumed for a gun. Reflexively I pulled back in my seat and squeezed my eyes shut. He was going to kill me! I’d said too much!

  There was a pause, and then I felt something flutter lightly in front of my face. Squinting one eye open I looked down to see a twenty-dollar bill on the table in front of me.

  “Thanks,” he said, reaching down to pick up one of my business cards. “You’re good.” And with that he walked out of my area.

  No sooner had he gone than I bolted up and scurried around the curtain, where Kendal was just finishing up with one of the bridesmaids. As she squeezed past me Kendal looked alarmed and asked, “Abby? What’s the matter? You look white as a ghost.”

  “Shhhh!” I hissed at him, and jumped forward, grabbing his arm and yanking him out of his chair. “Come with me immediately!”

  Kendal didn’t argue, and we made our way out of the curtained area and quick-stepped across the large ballroom through the double doors and down the hallway to a small cubby, where I was sure we had minimal privacy. Still, I kept my voice at a hiss level. “How could you book us for a mob wedding?” I said, accusation in my eyes.

  “What?” he asked me, taken aback by my statement.

  “Mob, Kendal! As in M-O-B, mob! This is a mob wedding!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I just read a hit man for the freaking mob!”

  “You what? !”

  “Am I going to have to keep repeating myself, or will you eventually listen to what I’m saying!” I said, hissing vehemently in my state of panic.

  “I heard what you said; I just don’t understand how you know you were reading a hit man for the Mafia,” Kendal said calmly.

  “This is how it went,” I said, taking a breath to gather my thoughts. “I laid down a couple of cards—”

  “Which ones?” Kendal asked, interrupting me.

  I sighed impatiently. “The death card, the tower, and judgment.”

  Kendal’s eyes got large. “All together?”

  “Yep. Bam, bam, bam,” I said, slapping my palm with the back of my other hand. “In a row, one, two, three. So I get that he’s killed someone, and before I can stop myself I’m saying this out loud—”

  “You told him what you saw?” Kendal asked, his eyes growing even bigger.

  “I told you, I couldn’t stop myself, and he says, ‘Yeah, I’ve killed someone,’ like it’s no big deal.”

  “He admitted it?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Kendal! Will you catch up?” I squealed, not bothering to whisper.

  “Sorry, sorry, please continue,” he said.

  “So then I looked back at the cards, and it dawns on me that he’s killed more than one person; in fact, he’s killed a lot of people, and again before I can stop myself I tell him what I’m getting.” Kendal’s hand abruptly moved to his brow, where lines of sweat were forming, as I continued, “And he admits that too! So next I start telling him that this is a family business, and there’s some kind of feud, and he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. . . .”

  “Wait, wait, wait!” he said, holding up his palm in a stopping motion. “How do you know that this guy isn’t just some guest? I mean, maybe he’s just here as a wedding guest, like a friend of the family . . . a distant friend of the family?”

  “Well,” I said, shaking my head, “I mean I don’t know . . . but I know . . . you know? He’s related, and this is a mob wedding!”

  Kendal’s brow furrowed in thought as I waited for him to do something. Exactly what I expected him to do, I wasn’t sure, but I wanted him to do something—anything. “Let me ask you this,” he said after some thought. “Would you recognize this man if you saw him across the room?”

  “No,” I said, exasperated. “He was wearing a mask.”

  “I know, I know, but maybe you’d recall his tuxedo or something.”

  “He was wearing a tux with a rose cummerbund.”

  Kendal’s face fell. “He was wearing a tux with a rose cummerbund?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Well, the first person I read tonight was one of the guests, who owns a tailor shop, and he said that he supplied all the tuxes for the bride’s family. Her side are all wearing tuxes with the rose-colored cummerbunds. This guy must be a relation.”

  “Mob wedding, Kendal.”

  There was a beat as we both looked at each other, then said simultaneously, “We’re outta here!”

  Together we ran back down the hallway, and stopped abruptly in front of the double doors. I looked at Kendal and asked in a panic, “Wait! What’s our story? What’s the reason we give for leaving early?”

  “I’ll tell the wedding planner that you have some sort of food poisoning or something, and that I have to get you to a doctor right away. You look pale enough to fit that bill anyway. We’ll both go in, and you just do your best to lean on me and look sick, okay?”

  “Got it,” I said, taking his arm and leaning on him.

  We pushed through the doors together and spotted the wedding planner immediately. Kendal waved his hands frantically to get her attention, and, spotting us she came quickly over. The look on her face was not friendly. “Where have you two been? We’ve got a whole line of people waiting for you!”

  “Constance, I’m so sorry; however, my partner here has fallen very ill,” Kendal explained. I groaned convincingly, and let my head bob onto Kendal’s shoulder, playing it up for all I was worth. “I’ve got to get her to a doctor right away!”

  The wedding planner backed up a few paces, probably afraid I would spew at any moment. “But what about the guests?” she demanded.

  “I know, I know,” Kendal said soothingly. “They’ll be disappointed, but I really must get her to a doctor. Tell the bride that I will mail her a full refund tomorrow, first thing. . . .” At that moment I groaned again, this time more loudly, and grabbed my stomach. The wedding planner backed away a little farther and said, “Fine, Mr. Adams, go then. I’ll explain it to the guests, but be sure to mail that check in.”

  “Of course, of course,” Kendal said with a wave of his hand. Sitting me in a nearby chair close to the door, where I continued to bob my head and moan for effect, he dashed behind the curtain, grabbed our belongings and rushed back to me. I got up as quickly as a “sick” person would and leaned on him as we exited.

  Once we were safely out of the hallway and back into the foyer we bolted out of the casino and ran to Kendal’s car. Ten yards away he popped the locks, and we jumped in, breathing hard. He started the engine and peeled out of the parking lot, adjusting his rearview mirror to see if anyone was following.

  Within moments we were back on the highway and blazing a path toward home, both of us continually checking over our shoulders.

  “I cannot believe you conned me into doing a mob wedding!” I said moodily.

  “Oh, please. Like I knew the family was
family!” Kendal snapped defensively.

  “Well, what the hell are we supposed to do now?” I asked, fear gripping my insides like a vise.

  “We could go to the police,” Kendal said, looking confident that he’d found the solution.

  “And tell them what? ‘Hi, Mr. Policeman?”’ I said in my Little Bo Peep voice. “Yeah, I’m a psychic and I just read a hit man for the mob. Oh, what’s that you say? What’s he look like? Well, I have no idea; he was masked, you know. . . .’ Great idea, there, Sherlock.”

  “Don’t take this out on me!” Kendal snapped. “Just because you had a tough day is no reason to get snippy.”

  I crossed my arms and sank low in my seat. Kendal was right—it wasn’t his fault. After a moment I asked again, “Okay, so what do we do?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t we go back to my house and talk to Rick? He’s pretty levelheaded. Maybe he’ll have a good idea.”

  I nodded and said nothing more until we reached Kendal’s house. We pulled up in the driveway and noticed that all the lights were out and a strange car was parked out front. “He’s not home?” I asked about his partner.

  “Hmm. No, his car’s here. Maybe he’s taking a nap. Come on; we’ll wake him up.” We got out of the car and walked up to the house. He fumbled with his keys for a moment in the dark, then unlocked the door, and we stepped inside. The scent of musk oil hit my nostrils something fierce. I also noticed muffled music coming from the bedroom. “Rick?” Kendal called. “Rick, honey?”

  Kendal stepped past me as I waited in the living room, switching on a light as he went to find his partner. I heard him call to Rick one more time as he opened the bedroom door; then the muffled sounds of something a little more primal caught my ears, followed quickly by Kendal’s scream.

  I rushed forward to Kendal’s aid, certain he was being attacked, when he bolted past me, his hands over his eyes and shrieks coming out of his mouth. Following quickly behind him was a naked and very greasy Rick, slipping on the wood floors chasing after Kendal, trying to talk above the noise. “Kendal! I’m sorry! It was just an experiment, I swear!”

  As I stood back and watched the scene unfold I wondered if tonight could get any worse.