Fool Me Once: A Tarot Mystery

  Copyright Information

  Fool Me Once: A Tarot Mystery © 2015 by Steve Hockensmith with Lisa Falco.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2015

  E-book ISBN: 9780738744254

  Book design by Rebecca Zins

  Cover design by Lisa Novak

  Cover illustration by John Kachik

  Lisa Falco photo by Picture People, Topanga Mall

  Steve Hockensmith photo by Cecily Hunt

  Tarot images from Roberto de Angelis’s Universal Tarot;

  used by permission of Lo Scarabeo; further reproduction is prohibited

  Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hockensmith, Steve.

  Fool me once / Steve Hockensmith with Lisa Falco. — First edition.

  1 online resource. — (A tarot mystery ; #2)

  Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  ISBN 978-0-73874425-4 () — ISBN 978-0-7387-4223-6

  I. Falco, Lisa, 1970-II. Title.

  PS3608.O29

  813’.6—dc23

  2015012498

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  Part 1

  Readings

  Behold: the magic cucumber! Also known as the Ace of Wands, card of bold beginnings, vitality, and adventure. The hand of Fate offers you either a walking stick for a new journey or a club for beating the stuffing out of an old problem—or it could be the kindling you’ve needed to start a new fire in your life. Go ahead—light that sucker up! Just be careful not to get burned.

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  Anyone who says “I’m going to kill you,” Biddle used to tell me, isn’t going to kill you. Why would they be talking to somebody who’s practically dead already? The ones who really mean it just say it with their eyes, and then they do it. Learn to recognize that look, Biddle would say, and you’ll have the edge you need to save yourself—or at least you won’t die surprised.

  So I learned the Look. The Looks, really. One white-hot with hatred, the other ice-cold and calculated.

  It was the first Look I saw on Bill Riggs’s face. He’d followed his wife into the White Magic Five and Dime and was reaching for her, trying to clamp onto a wrist and drag her outside again.

  “You’re coming home,” he said to her.

  And what his scowl-twisted mouth and flushed face and widened eyes said to me was, “I’m going to kill her. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But eventually. And I’ll say I’m sorry but I won’t really mean it because in my heart I’ll know it was my right.”

  So I moved one quick step to the left, and that was all it took to change everything.

  I’d been walking toward the fish tank in the shop’s waiting area, where customers I didn’t have could flip through the latest People Weekly while I gave readings to other customers I didn’t have. So I was near the door when Marsha Riggs burst in, with her husband—the controlling, abusive one I’d helped her walk out on two weeks before—two steps behind her.

  I’d already come between Marsha and Bill figuratively. Now suddenly I was between them literally.

  “Keep going, Marsha,” I said as Bill came to a halt practically standing on my toes. “Don’t stop. Up the hall and up the stairs. Tell Clarice that Bill’s here.”

  Marsha didn’t say anything, but I could hear her footsteps as she hurried past the store’s counter and fled up the hallway beyond.

  “Get back here this instant!” Bill called after her. “Don’t you run away from me!”

  He took a step to the left.

  I blocked him.

  He took a step to the right.

  I blocked him again.

  “I can do this dance all day, Bill,” I said. “You’re not getting past me.”

  And that’s when he turned the Look on me.

  “You scheming [female sexual organ],” he said. “I oughta break your neck.”

  “[Female sexual organs] don’t have necks, Bill,” I said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  I did.

  Maybe I should have felt relieved. He was saying he wanted to kill me, which meant he wouldn’t—if Biddle was right.

  Then again, the last time I’d seen Biddle, he was being led off into a cornfield to get a bullet in the back of the head. Perhaps he wasn’t the expert on survival he thought he was.

  “I knew Marsha would show up here sooner or later,” Riggs said. “First your mother brainwashed her with those stupid cards, and now you’re taking over.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, though I did.

  “That’s why you’re trying to get rid of me.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said, though I was.

  “Bullshit! It was you who set me up with the cops.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said, though I had.

  Riggs crossed his arms over his chest and gave me a spiteful smile.

  “It’s not gonna work. Know that. The problems you’ve caused for me—they’re going away, this little temporary problem with Marsha included. And after they do go away…you’re going away, too. I’m gonna make sure of it.”

  “You need to go away, Bill. Now. Out of my store.”

  Riggs waved a hand at the shop’s stock in trade: pewter charms and quartz-gravel crystals and cutesy-poo mass-produced voodoo dolls. The stuff dreams are made of—most of it made in Taiwan.

  “Or what?” Riggs said. “You’ll put a hex on me?”

  I took two slow, deliberate steps backward, my gaze never wavering from Riggs.

  “I don’t need a hex.”

  I reached out, picked up the phone by the cash register, and punched in numbers with my thumb, all while still looking hard into Riggs’s eyes. I knew if he was going to make a move, now was when he’d do it.

  Riggs glowered back at me, the muscles in his neck so tense it looked like his head might pop off like the cork shooting from a champagne bottle. Riggs wasn’t a big man, but he was young and in decent shape. And he’d had training once upon a time. According to Marsha, he
was in the army all of five months before being thrown out for insubordination, disorderly conduct, and general belligerence.

  The guy was too violent for the army. Think about that.

  I had. A lot.

  That’s how I’d set him up. I’d upgraded his Camaro with a few new features: drugs, an unregistered gun, a busted taillight, and a new bumper sticker—bad cop. no donut—that was bound to get him noticed by the surliest of state troopers. His bad temper had done the rest.

  And apparently it hadn’t stopped there.

  The flesh around his left eye was pink and puffy, and there were scabs and scrapes on his chin and cheeks.

  He’d been in a fight.

  “Who you calling? The cops?” he sneered at me. “I was just trying to talk to my wife. There’s no law against that.”

  “Well, yes and no,” I said.

  Riggs cocked his head slightly to the side like a confused dog.

  Maybe a pit bull.

  A rabid one.

  “Hi, Deputy,” I said into the phone. “It’s Alanis McLachlan. I’m about to make your job a lot easier. He’s here, standing right in front of me in my shop. Followed his wife in. No, don’t worry; he’s not causing any trouble. But you might want to hurry over with that court order. I don’t know how much longer he’s going to be here. Great. No problem…my pleasure…see you soon. Oh, and thank you for the flowers. They’re lovely.”

  I hung up.

  “Court order?” Riggs said.

  Suddenly the confused pit bull looked scared.

  He was out on bail. “Court order” could mean a quick trip back to the pound.

  “Marsha got an order of protection,” I said. “A restraining order. It’ll take effect as soon as you’re served with it, which should be in about four minutes. If you’re still here, that is.”

  Riggs chewed on that a moment. I could see his fear and confusion fade—to be replaced by fury. He lurched forward.

  I reflexively jumped back. But it wasn’t me Riggs was moving toward. It was the hallway.

  He leaned to the side to shout past me.

  “Marsha! I love you, honey! You know that! You’re being manipulated! These people are not your friends! Come home! It’s not too late!”

  Riggs paused, listening for a response. When he realized he wasn’t going to get one, he glared at me again.

  “This is all your fault. You’ve brainwashed her with your mumbo jumbo and those stupid cards.”

  “Oh, so you’re sticking around to chat?” I said. “Lovely. You’ll get to meet Deputy Ferguson. Fascinating guy. Arizona’s number-one caber tosser.”

  “You’re gonna regret messing with me.”

  “I didn’t even know Arizona had a number-one caber tosser until he told me that,” I said. “I didn’t know Arizona had caber tossers. Or cabers.”

  “Bitch.”

  Because Riggs was finally leaving, I let him have the last word.

  As soon as the door closed behind him, I picked up the phone and dialed the same number I had a minute before.

  “Jesus, Alanis—are you all right?” said Eugene Wheeler, my lawyer. “I’ve been standing here wondering if I should call the police.”

  “Everything’s fine now. Sorry—I didn’t expect you to pick up on a Sunday. Look out your window.”

  Like the White Magic Five and Dime, Eugene’s office was on Furnier Avenue, the closest thing little Berdache, Arizona, has to a main drag. I peered out the big picture window at the front of my shop, past the zodiac signs and tarot cards and black-and-white yin-yang painted on the glass, and saw Bill Riggs stomping off to his Camaro.

  In the distance I could make out a big pear-shaped shadow—Eugene—looming behind the words wheeler & associates on another storefront window.

  Together we watched a scowling, muttering Riggs jerk open the door and throw himself in behind the wheel.

  “Five’ll get you ten he Starsky-and-Hutches it,” I said.

  Eugene didn’t take the bet, maybe because he didn’t know what I meant but probably because he knew I was right.

  Riggs peeled out fast, engine roaring, tires squealing, a cloud of gray exhaust fumes and scorched rubber swirling in his wake.

  “He’s going to be even more pissed when he figures out there’s no order of protection,” Eugene said.

  “By then I’ll have finally talked Marsha into getting one.”

  “Don’t hold your breath. Last time I spoke to her, she was even waffling on the divorce.”

  I sighed.

  Two days before, while doing a tarot reading for Marsha, I’d turned over a Three of Swords in the near-future position and a Nine of Swords in the outcome slot.

  One shows a heart pierced by three blades hovering over an agonized man, the other a weeping woman writhing in her bed. You want a side of emotional torment with your betrayal and upheaval? the cards seemed to be saying.

  I’d tried to dance around that with a little no-pain-no-gain, stay-the-course spin. But Marsha knew the cards well enough to see the obvious interpretation herself.

  It didn’t take much to discourage her. Those two cards would have been enough, and I should have known it.

  “I’ve never met a more passive person in my entire life,” Eugene went on. “The woman makes a doormat look hyperactive.”

  “Someone else has been controlling her life for nine years, Eugene. Bill moved her away from her family and friends and then barely let her out of the house. The only thing she ever got to decide for herself was what to clean first when he went to work. Give her more time. She’s coming along.”

  “Thanks to you. I still don’t understand why you’re doing so much for her. Picking up my tab. Paying for a motel room. Buying her a car.”

  “A $300 clunker, Eugene.”

  “You’ve known her less than a month.”

  “I’ve known you less than a month, and just look at how close we’ve grown.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence while Eugene tried to figure out if I was being sarcastic and, if not, what he should say in response.

  Eugene’s about as emotionally intuitive and available as you’d expect a fiftyish American male named Eugene to be. Maybe if he’d had hippie parents who had christened him Moonbeam Starchild he’d be offering hugs to strangers with flowers in his hair. But no—he was a Eugene, there were no hugs, and the only thing you’d find in his hair was perhaps, on a particularly humid day when even the most manly man of commerce could justify it, a light coating of Aquanet.

  “Right…well…anyway,” Eugene said.

  He stopped there. “Right…well…anyway” really just meant “Could we talk about something else, please?”

  I obliged him.

  “Have you heard any scuttlebutt about the charges against Riggs?” I asked.

  “Just that the county attorney thinks the drug possession is fishy, but that’s nothing new. As far as I know, the state still wants to prosecute for resisting arrest and aggravated assault on an officer. Why do you ask? Did Riggs say something about it?”

  There were footsteps behind me, and I turned to find a willowy, dark-skinned girl moving up the hallway, clutching a gun.

  “Sorry, Eugene—can’t gossip now,” I said. “Give my best to everyone at the Rotary Club.”

  “Uhhh…okay.”

  Eugene hung up.

  I don’t know if Berdache even has a Rotary Club. But if it does, Eugene’s the president emeritus.

  “Bill’s gone?” said the girl with the gun—my half sister, Clarice.

  She was leading a procession now. About ten yards behind her, halfway down the hall, was a girl with short, bright blue hair and clothes as black as her lipstick: Clarice’s gothy girlfriend, Ceecee.

  Ten yards beyond her, at the bottom of the steps leading up to the living space on the second floor, was Marsha Riggs. From so far away, you almost couldn’t see the faded yellow bruise under her left eye and the contusion high up on her forehead.

  “Yeah.
He’s gone,” I said.

  Ceecee sighed with relief. But Marsha just stared at me wide-eyed, looking like a wary rabbit about to turn fuzzy tail and jump for the nearest hole. I almost expected her nose to twitch.

  Clarice lowered the gun—a BB pistol with all the stopping power of a spitball.

  “Thanks for coming up to tell us,” she grumbled.

  “Sorry. Got distracted. But it’s definitely over now. You and Ceecee can go back to doing your homework or smoking crack or whatever it is you two do up there in the afternoon.”

  “‘Smoking crack.’ That is so ’90s, Alanis,” Clarice snorted. “We’re sniffing crank.”

  “Oh. Right. Well, carry on.”

  Clarice and Ceecee headed back upstairs while Marsha gaped at me more wide-eyed than ever.

  “We’re just kidding around,” I said. And then, because I couldn’t resist: “We’re all on meth.”

  Marsha managed to curl one corner of her mouth ever so slightly upward to indicate that she got the joke—or realized that it was supposed to be a joke, anyway.

  I reminded myself to tone it down around her. Marsha was earnest, gentle, guileless. Exactly the kind of person I’d been raised to avoid.

  An honest man is hard to find, Biddle had told me. And thank god for that!

  Because you can’t con an honest man, they used to say. And it was true enough of most of the old scams. But my mother, Barbra, had found a new one for herself—one where honesty was fine so long as there was a heaping helping of gullibility to go along with it.

  Fortunetelling.

  Marsha had been one of Barbra’s best customers. Mom had milked her for hundreds if not thousands before she died.

  I was paying Marsha back. I wanted to pay everyone back—all the people my mother had manipulated and cheated—with my help, until I’d finally run from her. And what better way to make amends than through one of Mom’s own cons?

  Of course, there was no way I could ever find all of my mother’s victims. So I’d hunkered down in the White Magic Five and Dime and made do with the ones who found their way to me.

  “You okay?” I asked Marsha.

  She came up the hall, passing the little curtained nook where I did readings, and joined me in the store’s front room.