Dead of Winter Page 2

  “I don’t know,” said Orville. He was certain he’d queued up something to follow that, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember what. He reached for the watch, or at least he’d meant to, but his hand didn’t move.

  He wanted to give it back to her. He’d had his fun, but this was getting weird. Century-old instincts were screaming at him to disappear from this, whatever this was. You walk away when it doesn’t feel right. She was even thinner now than she’d been a moment ago.

  On second thought, why shouldn’t he keep it? He’d earned it. It sang to him. One long, steady note humming directly into his soul. It was like blood flowing back into an arm that he’d slept on funny, warm and soothing.

  “What do you want?” asked Orville, suddenly very aware of his heartbeat.

  “Truth.”

  “About what?”

  “About you,” she said. “Not the truth, I doubt you’d know it if you saw it. But you know your truth, and I’d like to hear it. Do we have a deal?”

  Do we have a deal? There was a vile phrase. He’d heard it a million times, the siren song of cops and criminals alike. It sounded a lot like “let’s work together,” but it really meant “give me your word, so if you break it I get to break your legs.” Orville avoided deals like the plague. He’d have to put on his old charm, dazzle her with the old sidestep.

  He smiled and winked to buy himself a moment, then leaned toward her conspiratorially and said, “Deal.”

  What? How had she done that? Witchcraft, probably. Orville was the bamboozler, not the mark! Especially not to a Millennial—or whatever she called herself—on her tiptoes and barely out of diapers.

  No, wait. Her face was young, but there was something else. Something older. Reincarnation? Hogwash. Everybody knew there was no such thing. But did she?

  She smiled, her gaunt cheeks going so tight Orville worried they might crack.

  “Look, I’m sorry about the misunderstanding,” he wheedled. He dangled the watch in front of her. “I was just having a laugh. Here, please take it. I don’t want to keep you.”

  “We had a deal,” she sang. He’d heard that tune before, from detectives who were surprised to see him among suspects for a bootleg run. Sure, they were.

  “Deals were meant to be …” What? Broken? Renegotiated? Picked apart by oily lawyers? Any of those would have worked, but the only thing he could think to say was, “Honored.”

  So he talked. He told her at length about growing up in the heartland. About losing his father to the Great War and his mother to Spanish Flu in the same year. About hitching out to the west coast, working as a fruit picker, and learning the art of the grift.

  “There was the fella, Jed,” said Orville. “We met in the orange groves in the picking season, must’ve been 1919. I came off the back of a pickup truck without a penny to my name, starving to death in true bumpkin fashion. He was the only one who was nice to me. We joined up with the circus after picking season. Decent paying jobs were slim pickings in those days. It was fun for a while, but damn those carnies for thieves and bastards. We had to light out of there one night with nothing but the clothes on our backs.”

  She watched him with the unblinking intensity of a statue. It unnerved Orville. Young people didn’t pay attention to the elderly. Orville hadn’t maintained eye contact with anyone for more than ten seconds since Clinton was in the White House.

  He looked up into the reddening sky to avoid her gaze. “Anyway, we ended up on the streets of Chicago, doing what we called odd jobs. There were plenty of those available if you knew who was hiring, and ‘odd’ didn’t begin to cover some of them.”

  “Something’s wrong.” Her voice was dry and cracked like her skin. Her eyes were turning dark, fading back into the shadows of her brow.

  “What is it? Do you need to go?” Orville thrust the watch toward her, casting the ghost of his aloofness to the frigid wind. He stared at her in desperation, willing her to take the damned thing and leave him be.

  “No,” she replied in a cough. “Something went wrong. With one of your odd jobs.”

  Orville sagged. He drew his hand back to his lap, the watch seeming very heavy in it. He forced half a smile.

  “Lucky guess,” he groaned. He opened his mouth, hesitated, closed it again.

  “You want to ask me something.” It wasn’t a question. It seemed the darkness coming over her provided a window into Orville’s soul. That flustered him. He was no good at directness. The truth, in his experience, was best approached at angles.

  “What’s happening right now?” Orville’s voice quavered. It was small, nearly lost in the wind that whipped between them.

  “You owe me the truth,” she replied. She leaned in toward him with a squint. “Tell me about the bartender.”

  A chill ran down Orville’s spine. To be fair, that had been a regular occurrence of late. For men of his venerability, “sweater weather” started when the mercury dipped below 80 degrees.

  “How did you know about that?”

  “You told me. No, you’re going to tell me. Sorry, the sun’s almost set. Time’s all starting to run together. Wait, is it a bartender or a banker?”

  “One of each.” Orville reckoned there was no sense being coy. There was no way she could have known all of this. It was 1930! Everyone involved but Orville was dead.

  “Everyone but you,” she said, her eyes trailing across the horizon, focused on nothing.

  “You already know,” said Orville, “don’t you?”

  “Most of it,” she replied. “But you still need to tell me.”

  “You want me to tell you what you already know?” Women, he thought, rolling his mind’s eye.

  “Names, dates,” she said. “Those are just facts. What you owe me is truth.”

  Maybe she was a cop. He knew better than to ask. Despite what passes for common knowledge on TV, they don’t have to tell you.

  “The truth,” Orville sighed. What was the truth? He kept his best lies next to the truth, pressed up against them. Cleanly separating one from the other would have been quite a feat. The moment had lived and died nearly a century ago.

  “Say it,” she said. Her voice was hollower, like she was talking up to him from the bottom of a well. Her hair hung limp, the bitter wind steering clear of it. “The thing you can’t put into words. Just say it. We’re dying to know.”

  Orville looked at Popcorn. The color had drained out of her. Her perpetual joyful expression remained, mocking him with carefree delight. She was the idiot void staring back at him.

  “I died on my birthday.” The words fell out of Orville single-file. “Or I should have. But death … missed.”

  “Death doesn’t miss,” said the husk of the woman. In the purpling gloom, her skin had gone the color of milk. Her gaze offered no malice, just the promise of inevitability. Orville wouldn’t have found comfort in the distinction had he tried, which he didn’t.

  “Not usually.” Orville sighed. “Just me. I stepped aside and it took Jed instead.”

  There was more Orville wanted to say about that, but when he opened his mouth, nothing came out. Perhaps it was guilt. Perhaps it was instinct. Never tell the cops more than they need to hear. He sat there with his mouth open in the evening chill until his teeth ached before resigning himself to silence.

  “That’s not the way this works.” The well of her voice reverberated in the gloom.

  “Oh, no?” He hadn’t had the upper hand for a while, and the little spark of indignation warmed him. It felt good. Who was she, this girl, this child whose visage was death? He was an old man when she cut her first teeth!

  “You asked me for the truth,” Orville shot back at her. “Why bother, if you already know it?”

  “Truths collide, Orville.” Was she breathing? Orville couldn’t tell. “Few truths hold as much weight as death. It comes for
us all, and all appointments are kept.”

  “Well, you asked for the truth and you got it,” Orville barked.

  Popcorn growled. Orville flinched.

  “You’d better keep a hold of your dog.” Or else what?

  “She’s not my dog.”

  Orville clenched his teeth in fury. Getting caught in a lie was one thing, but truths are sacred when you’ve only got a handful of them to your name. His fists shook. How dare she ask for truth and dismiss it?

  “What are you, anyway?”

  “Irish,” she said. “On my dad’s side.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  “You mean it’s not the truth you wanted to hear.”

  “There’s a fair bit of that going around.”

  She turned to Popcorn. “I may as well tell him.”

  Orville missed whether Popcorn reacted. He was distracted by a long, gleeful cawing from Mister Gleam. The crow hopped back and forth on the arm of the bench, dancing a little jig on his perch.

  “You talking to your dog now?” asked Orville, scrambling for a little control over the conversation that was getting weirder by the second.

  “The world is dying,” she replied. “Descending into darkness by inches. Can’t you see it all around you? We no longer live in a time of plenty. We have to work the gig economy, squeeze a few bucks out of everything we do if we hope to see another sunrise. That’s why I take these little jobs.”

  “What job? What are you talking about?”

  Mister Gleam cawed and cackled. She looked at him with a sunken stare.

  “He doesn’t believe in reincarnation,” she said to the bird. “Too bad. If he did, he’d have figured it out by now.”

  Orville kept quiet. He hadn’t figured out what her game was, but maybe if he waited long enough, she’d waste away to nothing and he wouldn’t have to find out. He’d rather lay awake wondering tonight, if it meant living to see another day.

  “It’s a curious case,” she said, “now that I can see the whole shape of it. The banker emptied his pistol into you. Just you. He was a good shot.”

  Orville winced. A discreet doctor had pulled six slugs out of him and stitched him up. He hadn’t thought about his scars in years, but now they itched. He’d been sitting in the speakeasy next to Jed, toasting his birthday and their good fortune.

  “I did all the talking with the banker,” said Orville, digging into a long-buried memory for the details. “Jed was just muscle. He didn’t have to say anything. He had this look that could just about break your legs on its own.”

  “You ruined him,” she said. “The banker.”

  Orville shook his head. “He dug his grave himself. Fella with access to all that cash gets carried away betting on the ponies? Our employer collected marks like him. Rough him up a couple of times—nothing serious, just to get the desperation flowing—then we come in and throw him a life preserver. He opens up the vault for me and Jed, looks the other way for a minute, and poof! His debt gets wiped out. Magic. We even gave him a little taste of the proceeds, invited him to the speakeasy for my birthday. How’d that ruin him?”

  “The police went to his house,” she told him without inflection, like she was reading the news on TV. “They questioned his wife.”

  “I never knew that.”

  “Had he gotten home a minute earlier, they’d have arrested him. Instead, he panicked. His mind turned to revenge.”

  One long caw came from Mister Gleam, then a staccato cackle.

  “He went to the speakeasy,” she continued.

  “Yeah,” said Orville. He scratched the small of his back. “I know the tune, you can quit humming.”

  They watched in silence as the last crescent of the sun disappeared behind the horizon. Purple began fading to indigo behind blackening clouds.

  “How did you do it?” asked the altogether skeletal figure of the woman. Her own personal darkness swirled around her like it was a living thing, although “living” was probably the wrong word, given the context.

  “That’s my last card,” said Orville. “Not sure I want to play it yet.”

  “You don’t have long,” she said, sending a chill up Orville’s spine. “I’m only curious. You can keep it to the end, but you can’t take it with you.”

  “I imagine that goes for the watch, too. Why should I give you the last of my truth for nothing?”

  “Fair enough,” she said. “Your last truth for the rest of the story.”

  “I know the rest of the story. A creepy hipster murders an old man in the park. Sound about right?”

  She shook her head. “You died a long time ago, you just weren’t collected. Think of this as correcting the ledger. But you don’t have the whole story. You don’t know about Jed.”

  The pang in his heart was only guilt, but he thought it might kill him anyway. For years after that fateful night, he felt constant remorse for what he’d done to Jed. As the years went by, Jed occurred to him less and less. Each time, his guilt was all the heavier for his forgetfulness.

  “I think we were with the circus for three years,” said Orville. “We were in Tennessee early one spring when the bottom dropped out. We hunkered down in the tents for nearly a week waiting out that godawful rain. I played a lot of cards. Jed had his nose stuck in a book.”

  “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

  An hour ago, Orville would have been surprised she knew that. Now that she was nothing more than a conversational pile of bones, he doubted he’d live long enough to be surprised again.

  “The Count of Monte Cristo,” he confirmed. “Jed thought literature made him educated. He was right, but I was the one who got an education that week. There was this fortune teller, really pretty gal, had a deck of cards. Not tarot cards, just an old set of Bicycles. She and I were playing one night, and I won big.”

  “Not money,” she said.

  “Better,” said Orville. “That fortune teller—Delilah was her name—she was older than I was, and to hear her talk you’d think she’d looped the world a hundred times. One lifetime wasn’t enough for all of that. She must’ve had a dozen. It was her idea to bet secrets. She collected them, that’s what she told me. I knew she had a good hand when she said she wanted to go all in. She never bluffed.

  “So there we were, our darkest secrets in the balance. She throws down a full house, queens and sixes. You should’ve seen her eyes when my four jacks hit the table.”

  “You cheated.”

  “I didn’t, usually, but something told me her darkest secret was worth the risk. I’d cuffed a pair of knaves, and she dealt me two more. What would you have done?”

  “Not stolen the cards.”

  “Live a little,” said Orville. He winced, but if she was offended, her perpetual grin didn’t let on. “Anyway, she was true to her word. She gave me the secret of death.”

  “And what is the secret of death?”

  “Everyone’s got an end, and if you’re quick, you can get someone else to take your place.”

  “That’s the secret of death?” She seemed amused, like she’d just asked a five-year-old how old his father was.

  Orville folded his arms in a huff. He stared off into the black sky for a moment, then his expression softened. He laughed.

  “The con man’s curse,” he said. “My lies sound so much like the truth, even I can barely tell them apart. But yeah, that’s the honest truth. And unfortunately for poor old Jed, I was quick when that coward shot me in the back.”

  “Why him? The speakeasy was full of people, why Jed?”

  Orville gave her a sidelong glance. “You really don’t know, do you?”

  She steepled her bony hands at her chin. “Death isn’t accustomed to being cheated, Orville.”

  “Referring to oneself in the third person has never been cool.”
>
  “Oh, I’m not Death. There’s no capital-D Death. Think of me as your Uber.”

  “There’s that gig economy,” Orville mumbled.

  She shrugged. “It’s a living.”

  “Ha!” It felt good to laugh, but he didn’t have many more coming. This was it, wasn’t it? And the last laugh is always on you.

  “The people in our lives,” Orville said slowly, reaching for the right words, “the paths we walk, the experiences we share. That’s where our souls overlap…or something like that. I don’t really understand it myself. By then, Jed and I had spent every day of a decade together. We were practically the same fella. When lowercase-D death bore down on me, I just sort of stepped aside.”

  She smiled at him, not that she could have done anything else. Orville tried to smile back, but he didn’t have it in him. He’d betrayed the best friend he’d ever had, and even the better part of a century couldn’t wash that stain from his conscience. But even against the imminent call of fate, Orville was human to a fault. He wanted to live. 117 years was far more than most people got, and what did he have to live for? He hadn’t gotten close to anyone, not the way he’d been with Jed.

  “Just my murder,” he mused aloud.

  “You died a long time ago,” she corrected him.

  “I meant the birds,” said Orville. “You know a flock of crows is called a murder? They’re the only ones who’ll know I’m gone. Mister Gleam, here, he gets it. He’s the closest friend I’ve had since …”

  Mister Gleam was looking at Orville. Staring at him. He knew crows could be patient, but they didn’t stare. Like most wild things, they were constantly on the lookout for predators, prey, or a statue that didn’t have any shit on it. Even Mister Gleam, who was particularly bright for a crow, kept his beak swiveling all day long. Not the sort of bird who’d be caught unawares.

  “Jed?” Orville’s voice was barely a whisper.

  “I wondered if I’d have to draw you a picture,” said Orville’s death. “You believe in reincarnation yet?”

  Orville had never seen a crow dance an Irish jig, but he’d seen Jed do it dozens of times. Give the man a pull off the moonshine, belt out a tune, and the fire in his belly shot straight to his feet. Mister Gleam hopped from one foot to the other, just like Jed.