Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The day of the meet-up with Sweeney, I was up before dawn, but Mary Alice beat me to it. She was in the kitchen, frying up apple-stuffed French toast on the hot plate to go with the bacon she’d cooked in the microwave. She looked luminous, like the blood was humming just under her skin, and I knew what had her lit up inside—anticipation. Whichever way the meeting with Sweeney went, we were one step closer to being finished with this and getting back to our lives.

At least, that’s what I suspected she was thinking. Nobody was talking much at that point. Akiko—still giving Mary Alice the silent treatment—went to a secret vampire speakeasy on Bourbon Street with Minka while the rest of us were busy preparing for the meeting. Mary Alice fixed plates for Helen and Natalie and the four of us went over the plan again until it was time to dress. It was early—hours before we expected Sweeney—but the point was to be in place, making ourselves part of the atmosphere of Jackson Square.

We slipped out separately to take our positions. Helen had made reservations at Muriel’s, the restaurant that sat diagonally off the north corner of the square, insisting upon a balcony table in a prime location. She’d gone in person to secure the booking, slipping a fifty to the hostess with a sob story about it being her first wedding anniversary after her husband’s death. It was bullshit, of course, but it was good bullshit, just authentic enough for Helen to manage a few watery gulps as she told the story. The hostess promised to seat her there for a late lunch, which Helen intended to spin out with several slow courses and an off-the-menu soufflé for dessert.

From her perch at the small round table, she’d have a perfect view of the entire paved stretch in front of the cathedral. I’d provided her with a pistol, checking the sights myself. I hoped she wouldn’t need it, especially at that range, but there was no way to disguise a rifle. At the far end of the paved area, Mary Alice settled herself against the iron railing separating the green space of the square from the more commercial area. She had found a secondhand cello in a junk shop and had restrung and polished and tuned it until it sounded halfway decent. She’d have preferred a viola, but they were thin on the ground. She set an upturned silk top hat at her feet, displaying the shredded scarlet silk lining and dropping in a few coins to give passersby a hint.

On the same trip to the junk store, Natalie had scored several crappy canvases of depressing landscapes and even more depressing portraits. Nat had popped them out of the frames, overpainting a series of rough pictures that suggested New Orleans scenes without really committing themselves. They were exactly the sort of thing street artists hung all over the railings in Jackson Square, and Natalie finished off her disguise with a grey bobbed wig and a tie-dyed fanny pack, a hippy granny in touch with her creative side.

For my disguise, I bought a deck of tarot cards from Esoterica and spent two days shuffling to rough them up, then crayoned a posterboard sign with an evil eye to stick onto a card table. A couple of folding chairs and I was in business. I wore leggings and boots under my long, bright cotton peasant skirt—it was chilly with the wind blowing off the river—and a pair of cheap, gaudy earrings. I finished with a heavy application of kohl and a cascading wig of dark red curls tied with a scarf. Between the riot of hair and the eyeliner, I was unrecognizable.

I’d expected the crowds to be thin on a weekday so early in January, but the post-holiday tourists were still partying off their hangovers. I set up shop in front of the Presbytére, the narrow building separated from the cathedral by a tiny passageway called Père Antoine Alley. I could see Helen if I glanced up to my right and Mary Alice if I looked down to my left. Natalie was around the corner, watching pedestrians approaching from the river as she hawked her ugly paintings. We had debated using comms, but in the end decided to keep it simple, working out a series of signals we could each give that would alert the others to danger. Once an hour, just as the cathedral clock struck quarter past, we did a quick visual to check in, but everything was good.

I saw Sweeney before he saw me. Charles Ellison McSween. He looked like an old man, I thought sadly, watching him lope into the square, his shoulders hunched into his jacket against the cold. The river breeze ruffled the hair just below his baseball cap. The red was faded to the color of rust with a layer of frost on it. I let him walk past me before I called out to him, fortune-teller patter. He half turned back and I gestured theatrically to the empty seat across from me.

“Wouldn’t you like to know what the cards have to say about you?” I asked as he approached.

He gave me a narrow look. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered as he took the chair, testing it a little to see if it would take his weight.

“Shut up, I’m communicating with the other side,” I said, smiling as I shuffled.

He grinned back. “God, it’s good to see you.” The smile faded almost as soon as it came. “Billie, what the hell is going on?”

I shuffled the cards slowly. “Don’t use my name. And you should have worn a disguise.”

He touched the brim of his Yankees cap. “I am in disguise. Everybody knows I’m a Cards fan.” He narrowed his gaze at the deck in my hand. “What’s this mumbo jumbo all about?”

“This is a traditional Rider-Waite deck, recognizable to fortune-tellers and emo teenage girls the world over.” I pulled the top card off the deck and showed it to him. It was the Star, a naked woman bending over a brook with pitchers while stars hung just over her head.

“Ooh, I like her,” he said, pulling a stick of chewing gum out of his pocket. “She’s hot.”

“She represents hope, opportunity. Maybe you’ll choose her,” I said, shuffling the card back into the deck. “There are seventy-eight cards, divided into major and minor arcana.”

“Say what now?” He unwrapped the gum and stuffed it into his mouth.

“Major arcana—they represent big life lessons. Minor arcana are numbers and court cards like queens and kings. Four suits, wands, cups, coins, and pentacles.”

“Pentacles? Like Satan stuff?”

“No, not like Satan stuff. That’s pentagrams.” I spread the cards into a fan. “Pick three using your left hand. Leave them facedown.”

“Why three cards?” He chewed as he considered the cards.

“The first is your past, the second represents the present. The third card is what is yet to come.”

“And why does it have to be my left hand?” he asked.

“It’s the hand of destiny,” I said solemnly.

He laughed and tugged three cards free of the fan. I gathered up the rest. The notes of Mary Alice’s cello drifted over the square. She was playing Fleetwood Mac—“Rhiannon”—and Sweeney started tapping a finger in time with it.

I turned over the first card.

“Hey! I thought you said it wasn’t Satan stuff,” he protested. The card was the Devil, complete with horns and goat legs and a dramatic set of bat wings.

“It doesn’t mean what you think,” I told him. The Devil was sitting on a high throne, looming over a naked couple who were bound together by chains. I pointed to them. “They represent something that started out as a pleasure for you but became something that chained you up—like an addiction. But it’s in the past.”

He pointed to the wad of gum in his cheek. “Nicotine gum. I gave up smoking last month. I’m down to two sticks a day.”

“Well, there you go,” I said. I moved towards the second card. “What have you heard, Sweeney?”

“There were rumors,” he said. He shifted in his chair, clearly uncomfortable.

“What kind of rumors?”

“That you were taking contracts on the side.” I raised a brow. The cardinal rule of the Museum was that freelancing was strictly forbidden. It’s one of the things that separated us from hired guns. We killed to order only, targets that had been scrupulously vetted and chosen because their deaths would benefit humanity as a whole. Murders with a mission statement, we joked. But we were convinced it kept us on the right side of the karmic ledger.

“Moonlighting isn’t allowed, and even if it were, that’s not me. You know that.”

He shrugged and I turned over the second card. In the center was an orange disc marked with symbols. Winged creatures hovered in the corners, and atop the disc sat a sphinx.

“The Wheel of Fortune,” I told him.

“I don’t see Vanna,” he joked. “But it sounds good.”

“It means a change in circumstances. Could go either way,” I said. “What else did you hear?”

He paused, then started talking, fast—like he wanted to get it out before he changed his mind. “Nothing. Just that the four of you had gone rogue and were killing for profit.”

“And you thought it was true?”

He held up both hands like he was trying to ward me off. “I’m just telling you what I heard.”

I studied him a moment, making a careful note of the reddened tips of his ears, the quick slide of his gaze away from mine. “Bullshit. You believed it.”

I didn’t keep the anger out of my voice; I didn’t even try.

I flipped over the last card. It was an image of a man lying on his stomach, his face averted. He was wearing a red cape, and part of it—or a puddle of blood—drifted across the card. Ten swords were stuck into his back.

“What the shit is that?” he demanded.

“Ten of Swords,” I told him. “It’s as bad as it looks. Betrayal. Backstabbing. Utter ruin.”

He pulled off his baseball cap and ran his hands through his thinning hair. “Jesus, Billie. Did you put it there on purpose?”

“Me? The cards don’t lie,” I said simply.

“Maybe they don’t,” he said. His voice didn’t change; he was a pro. But there was something about the shift in how he held himself, some almost imperceptible difference in his arms. I couldn’t see his hands, but I knew. He hadn’t come to talk. He’d come to kill.

“So where are the others?” he asked, his tone casual. And then I understood. Of course. If the Museum’s official line was that we had gone rogue, there would be bonuses for taking us out. And Sweeney wouldn’t want to stop at one. Four kills would pay for a lot of baseball tickets and Hungry-Man dinners.

Somehow, above the usual crowd noise, I caught the sound of Mary Alice’s cello. The melody had changed and she’d crashed into the opening of “Hazy Shade of Winter.” She was playing it sharp and up-tempo—the Bangles, not Simon and Garfunkel. She’d spotted somebody who wasn’t supposed to be there. Either Sweeney had brought backup or he had competition. Either way, we weren’t safe.

Sweeney didn’t seem to know he’d been made. He just kept looking at me with the same wide-open, innocent gaze that helped him clean up at the poker table. I gathered the cards and tapped them twice before putting them in a stack on the left-hand side of the table. That was the signal to Helen to take him out.

I resisted the urge to look up to where Helen would be eyeing Sweeney along the barrel. I only hoped she wouldn’t go for a head shot. It would be messy as hell and not exactly subtle. A neck shot would be just as effective and a little more discreet.

But the bullet didn’t come and I realized Helen must be having trouble getting the shot off. I had to buy time.

I grabbed Sweeney’s left hand in mine and turned it over. “Let me read your palm. Then I’ll take you to where the others are. They’ll be happy to see you.”

He smiled and something behind his eyes eased. He was ready to play along if there was a chance he’d get all four of us. I traced lines, making up bullshit about his life and heart, waiting, waiting for Helen to pull the trigger. By the time I got to the Mount of Venus—which sounds dirty but just means the part below your thumb—I was getting antsy. I flicked a glance up to where Helen sat on the balcony, hands gripping the railing. She wasn’t in shooting position; she hadn’t even gotten her gun out. She was frozen, a rabbit in the headlights, and I knew then I’d have to take matters into my own hands.

I stopped bullshitting and looked him dead in the eye. “Give it to me straight. There are bounties on us, aren’t there? Bonuses for every one of us that get killed.”

He shrugged. “I’m sorry about this, Billie. I really am. But yeah.”

“How much?”

He told me. I was still holding Sweeney’s left hand in mine as I spoke. It kept him from noticing that I was reaching into my skirt pocket with my right. My finger touched the trigger and I squeezed.