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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 Devilwas 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?”
