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  He screamed again and again, but his cries were muffled and dampened behind the gag. Esteban couldn’t understand a word of the Asiatico’s wailing lament past the duct-tape.

  The Asiatico swung his head from side to side in a frenzy, hard enough his ponytail whipped round and spanked Oso’s face, knocking his cowboy hat awry. Oso flinched away and growled in outrage at the affront.

  The Asiatico shimmied inside his chain prison, the links clinking and slithering together as he thrashed and gyrated like a panicked escape artist in a stunt gone horribly wrong. Esteban and Oso struggled to keep hold of the Asiatico, but Esteban lost his grip on the slippery chains and the hombre slammed to his side on the pavement. The Asiatico’s muffled screaming stopped as he lay stunned by the impact.

  Beau sneered. “Damn, ese. You’re blowing it.”

  Esteban couldn’t look at him or Oso. “It’s different, man,” he said. “This one’s all awake and shit. It’s not like with the other hombre, the blanco.”

  Beau scowled, cocked his head at an incredulous angle. “Awake, out cold, what’s it to you? Don’t wuss out on me, hermanito.”

  Esteban squatted next to the Asiatico once more and glanced at his face warily, hoping that hitting the road like that had maybe knocked him out.

  No such luck. The Asiatico’s almond eyes were open and filled with tears as he stared back at Esteban with that same silent plea. Angry at himself for looking again and getting contaminated, Esteban fervently aimed his gaze away.

  Oso took his own position and they hoisted the Asiatico up to the rail once more. The Asiatico didn’t fight this time.

  Instead he shook in fear like a wet dog, a bone-deep trembling that Esteban could feel through his hands where he held the Asiatico on the edge of this final, fatal drop off. It was as if all the life inside this hombre, soon to be snuffed out and grow cold in the dark waters below, was shivering off of him like leaking electricity.

  And Esteban was right in the middle of it all, in the here and now with no way to stop it, no way to escape these doings. He stooped next to Oso trapped, as much a prisoner as this poor payaso meeting his end here.

  Esteban was a prisoner, too, he realized for the first time in his short life. The insight took his breath away, and he froze for a moment stooping next to the second man he was about to help murder tonight.

  “Goddammit, lift, Esteban,” Beau ordered.

  Obeying without thinking, as he had obeyed since forever, puppet Esteban stood at the same time as Oso, heaved up on the Asiatico’s feet and let go, regretting his action the instant he made it.

  No! Esteban cried out in horrified silence, wishing he could take the deed back, aching to undo it.

  Despite his fear of heights he watched clenched-jawed as the chain-bound figure toppled end-over-end through the air in seeming slow motion. The moonlight beamed onto the figure’s face for an instant.

  To Esteban’s horror he saw, not the Asiatico’s round ivory features, but his own face peering back at him, as if they had switched places and he were the one spinning off into outer darkness.

  Then the Asiatico hit the river and was gone.

  Esteban thrust himself away from the rail, feeling light-headed.

  He wondered now, when he went to his next Confession and told Padre Trejo of this night’s work, how many Hail Marys would he be given, how many Acts of Contrition?

  What Act of Atonement could remove the mortal stain Esteban had just voluntarily put on his own soul? He was afraid there was none.

  “Get your ass in gear, ‘Steban,” Beau commanded from behind him.

  Esteban spun to face Beau, the marionette acknowledging his puppeteer for the first time.

  Oso was already folded up in the backseat of the Coupe de Ville like an idling praying mantis. Beau stood by the open passenger door, appearing bored and dangerously sulky now the night’s fun was over.

  Esteban studied his big brother as if seeing him for the first time, and it was like Beau was a stranger staring back at him. It hurt to look at Beau that way, Esteban knew it wrong to do so but he just couldn’t help it.

  Esteban didn’t even have to ask himself whether, if he stepped far enough out of line, would Beau wrap him in chains and drive him to the river?

  Esteban knew the answer to that one clear as day. He was just another vulnerable meat-bag, born to die like the two hombres they’d just offed. He walked around the Coupe de Ville to the driver’s side, his mind spinning like the wheels of an overturned car right after the wreck.

  As he opened the door Esteban realized with a panicked thrill that Beau could die too; just like himself, just like the two hombres that had died here. But from that train of thought his mind scampered rapidly away to less dangerous ideas.

  “You getting in or what?” his gran hermano asked from the darkness inside the car, and Esteban realized he’d just been standing there staring into space.

  Esteban willed his mind toward submissive blankness as he had so often before. It took some hellatious effort, but by the time Esteban slid into the driver’s seat he was successfully thinking about nothing at all.

  Still, he knew there was going to be hell to pay for tonight’s work.

  Chapter 3

  It was three AM and Carmel was down on one knee in front on her portable TV, trying to tune the boob tube to something watchable; trying to lose herself into the hypnotic alpha-wave sound-byte meaninglessness that comprised the Bay Area TV spectrum.

  She fiddled with the rabbit-ear TV antennas left handed; with her right hand, she turned the channel changer dial through all three networks. Right now they all either had their test patterns up, or else were only broadcasting snow.

  She commenced tweaking the outer channel dial through the UHF stations, patiently tuning in channel after channel. It was station break on most of them. In the course of surfing the early morning airwaves of the East Bay digital wasteland, she learned that Matthews – Top of the Hill, Daly City – was giving away a bike with every purchase of a TV or car stereo. In a jingly furniture commercial, an unseen female vocalist assured Carmel that she’d ‘love it at Levitz.’ And of course, as she already well knew, smarmy Paul at the Diamond Center was her Credit Man.

  She finally lit and stayed at KICU-36 out of San Jose. The MMM Carpet guys were hosting Movies til Dawn, and their film of choice was paralyzingly dull enough to be comforting.

  She knelt there for a while, a foot away from the flickering screen, the picture tube’s cathode rays bleaching her white-make-upped face into an even more morbid pallor. Carmel finally clicked the power knob off, realizing she was only wasting time, delaying the inevitable.

  She strode over and sat at her kitchen table. She fussed with her gear, lining it all up exactly so, organizing her space: her Mister Coffee, full of fresh perked java strong enough to dissolve a spoon; her telephone headset which she put on and tugged carefully into position over her carefully ratted black hair; a fresh pack of squares, newly opened, with a box of matches and a clean ashtray right by; and (star of the show) her tattered, beloved old Tarot deck on a spread red silk cloth awaiting her expert touch.

  Carmel sucked on her first cuppa of the shift as she dialed the master number and got the automated menu recording she could have recited by heart in her sleep by now: “You have reached the Psychic Dragon,” the breathy and obscenely chipper woman’s voice intoned. “If you are a reader logging in please press 'one,' and then use your touch-tone phone to enter your login number.”

  After Carmel logged in there were several sporadic disembodied clicks and then the voice on the other end of the line said, “Thank you. Depending on your priority ranking, callers to our advertised number will be routed to your home phone.”

  Carmel hung up, lit a smoke and shuffled her deck tenderly, warming up her fingers and giving the cards a chance to start talking. She dealt the cards onto the silk cloth in a Celtic Cross pattern and studied the layout. Right now the cards weren’t saying much; all she got wa
s the same kind of white noise the dead channels on her TV had subjected her to. But she supposed even Tarot decks needed time to wake up, just like her.

  She’d figured out quick that she got the most calls, made the most cash, on the graveyard shift – right at the time people were at their weakest and most vulnerable, when their personal demons were clamoring as loudly as her own. That was when the customers called – a mob of insomniacs reaching out to one of their own over the telephone line.

  The phone rang and she picked up on the first ring, eager as ever. “Psychic Dragon,” she said, her voice all-knowing. “Who’s this?”

  Carmel riffled her deck and took a peek. The card was the Five of Cups, showing a man looking down at three spilled cups in front of him, distracted by his pain from seeing the two cups still full and standing behind him.

  “Uh, Joe.” If this particular customer’s body matched his voice, he was one big beefy boy. His words had the dry twang of corn-fed Middle America.

  “What can I do for you tonight, Joe?”

  “It’s like this, see? Lately I been putting in way too much overtime at the bottling plant. 60 hours plus, every week.”

  “Uh huh.” Carmel took a deep drag off her smoke, tapped the ash. “Why the heavy workload?”

  “It’s the bills, see? The wife maxed out our Mastercard and now I get to clean up the mess.” Perversely, he sounded as proud of his complaint as he was bothered by it. Despite the resentment tingeing his voice, he obviously reveled in the role of the good provider doing right by his spendthrift woman.

  “So your question is about the money situation.” Carmel took another peep at her cards and was surprised not to see something from the suit of Pentacles (which was the Suit of Loot after all).

  Instead she saw the Nine of Wands, showing a beat-up war-weary guy clutching a fighting staff. The guy stood guard in the midst of a wall of staffs, planted in the ground like the palisades of a frontier fort.

  “No. No, fraid not,” Joe said. “Actually . . . it’s my wife, see? She moved this other fella into the house. He’s sleeping on the couch in the next room right now. He’s home with her all day while I’m working my 12s.”

  “Why?” A vertical crease appeared between Carmel’s eyes to mar her plucked brow.

  “She says she doesn’t love me anymore, see?” Joe’s deep voice had gone quiet and small. “She says she loves him now.”

  Carmel riffled the deck open with her thumb but didn’t even bother to look this time. She’d found that laying out the cards in a formal spread wasn’t that useful on a phone gig sometimes. Sometimes she had to cling to the customer’s voice so as to know what they wanted to hear, what they needed to hear.

  This one was a no-brainer. “Joe, the cards say for you to give this guy the old heave-ho. Toss him and his trash out your front door.”

  “Really?” Joe’s voice was absurdly grateful. He sounded ready and eager, like he’d only needed permission from some outside source to nut up and do what had to be done all along.

  “Okay,” he said in a hoarse shout.

  Carmel winced as Joe’s dropped handset clunked against some hard surface. She could hear a real hullabaloo kicking up through the phone: loud yelling, smashing sounds, and a woman’s screech.

  “Oh, and the cards think you probably need a better old lady too,” Carmel told the fight noises at Joe’s end of the line.

  The phone was still off the hook on Joe’s end and Carmel briefly considered milking it, leaving the connection open. The company encouraged keeping the customers on the line as long as possible ‘no matter what.’ What with all the excitement on Joe’s end, it would be awhile before he noticed the dangling phone handset and realized he’d been charged a dollar a minute for as long as it took him to remember to hang it up.

  Besides being paid by the minute, Carmel had another incentive to keep the connection open. If you didn’t hold the customers on the phone long enough, the company punished you by lowering your priority number. The further down you were on the list, the further back you were in line to have money-making calls routed your way – everyone with a higher priority number than you got automatic cuts in line. You could wait an hour for even a short call if the company didn’t like you.

  Her conscience won this time, but the fracas was still going strong on the other end as she hung up on Joe’s little domestic disturbance. Carmel rested her cigarette in the ashtray, took a sip of her battery-acid-strength coffee and shuffled the deck a bit to wipe Joe’s aura off the cards for the next call.

  The phone rang.

  “Psychic Dragon, how are you tonight?” No one spoke on the other end but she could hear a radio turned low in the background, Gloria Estefan singing ‘Dr. Beat.’ “Hello?”

  “Hola,” a girl whispered, and then rattled off something in machine-gun Spanish, accented differently than Carmel was used to hearing from East Bay latinas.

  “Wait, wait,” Carmel said. “No habla, okay? Who’s this?”

  Silence again for a moment except for the radio’s sunny beat on the other end of the line.

  “Maria.” The girl sounded disgruntled at having to make up a fake name.

  “Well, what can the Psychic Dragon do for you, Maria?”

  “Okey okey, engles es bueno,” ‘Maria’ conceded magnanimously. “I have this girlfriend, si? Okey, so she works for these fellows here in Miami, this cliqua from Bogota. You know what they move out of Bogota, si?”

  “Si, I know of Bogota.” A sly peek at the deck showed the Five of Swords, with a ferret-faced guy holding a bunch of ill-gotten swords, sneering at the backs of several other guys walking away from him looking all forlorn.

  “Okey. So my friend, she takes this briefcase from the house of these men from Bogota. It’s full of the ye-yo, the white powder, tu se? Many many bags, much weight, primo A-1 coca. But I think they find out who took it.”

  Carmel took a long drag off her cigarette. “Maria, the cards know it’s you. There is no friend.” Stoic silence on the other end, except for the still cheerful radio. “Are these men looking for you?”

  “Si.” Maria’s voice was calm. “I am at a motel now. You do not need to know where. When I look out the blinds I see their people walking or driving, searching. They are hunting me.”

  Though it was difficult to do so, Carmel managed to stay detached from the sudden photo-crisp image that formed in her mind of this greedy foolish little Maria, trapped in her dead-end motel room surrounded by a neon-lit kill zone with paid killers trolling endlessly for her.

  “How about the cops?” Carmel asked, repressing compassion to give Maria the objectivity she so desperately needed.

  “No.” For the first time Maria’s voice quavered with the fear she had yet to display while discussing cartel hit men in all probability looking to give her a Colombian Necktie. “No policia.”

  Carmel peeked at the deck again and was chilled: it was the Ten of Swords, showing somebody pinned to the ground with swords stabbed through their body and blood flowing away to soak into the thirsty earth.

  Carmel chose her words with especial care. “Maria, listen to me close. You’re going to be fine, everything’s going to be okay – don’t torture yourself with fear anymore, all right?”

  Carmel tried to make her voice light and upbeat despite the sympathetic dread running through her and making her want to hyperventilate. “You need to look around, check the bathroom, find stuff to change your appearance as much as possible. Whip up a disguise, do your best. Are you willing to leave the coke behind, lighten your load?”

  “No,” Maria said firmly. “I take the coca with me.”

  “Okay. Keep an eye on those hunters. The first time you see a chance to make a break, go for it. Don’t hesitate, don’t look back. And Maria?” Carmel waited, but felt only impatience from the other end. “The cards still don’t think that the policia are such a bad idea.”

  A click as Maria hung up.

  Carmel ground out her smoke, took
a deep swig of her now cold coffee, lit a new cigarette. Some of her customers called her back by inputting her personal direct extension number on the Psychic Dragon phone menu. But she didn’t think she’d be hearing from this ‘Maria’ again.

  ‘Maria’s’ had stood out from most of the calls anyway – Carmel only averaged maybe one life-or-death customer per shift.

  In her time at Psychic Dragon Carmel had talked with runaway teen prostitutes male and female; degenerate drug addicts; the suicidally depressed. She’d heard enough sordid tales of adultery, embezzlement, and sheer human moral weakness and vulnerability in action that she sometimes felt like the underside of a bench where everybody had stuck their snot after picking their nose. Carmel was their dumping ground, their confidante, and their (totally unqualified) therapist. But of course, acting as an unofficial psychiatrist allowed her to focus on others instead of on herself.

  Most of her calls, however, were about simple boredom – that, or good old-fashioned loneliness. There were a lot of isolated people out there just needing someone to talk to, seeking any kind of connection. Sometimes she’d talk with a customer for hours like two dear old friends gabbing away. She’d advise and cajole, flirt, talk dirty, conversate about pretty much any random thing at all. But the meter was always running in the background.

  The next call was one of the chatty ones, from a drunk cowgirl in Nebraska wanting to brag about the new pickup truck her sugar daddy had bought her.

  A lot of Carmel’s customers wanted to share a secret with a stranger they knew they’d never meet, knowing there’d never be a comeback after they unloaded their confession’s psychic weight onto Carmel’s oh-so-willing shoulders.

  Her next call was one of the unburdening kind: some kid in Boise telling her about sawing the head off a woman’s corpse in a mausoleum and selling it to Satanists for $300.

  She flashed another psychic snapshot off that conversation: this scruffy ghoul kid all by himself in that bone-cold house of death, down on one knee next to the cobwebby coffin. In the coffin, a headless withered black mummy dressed in rotted lace, ‘her’ leathern-fingered hands crossed at the chest over bulges of material on the bodice that suggested they once enclosed ample breasts before those time-fragile hidden tatas had sagged away into whatever they looked like now under the moldy dress.