I thought of the Four of Pentacles, how happy I would be to turn my back on this city, to look back and see the skyline in the distance. I pulled the tab on my soda and wondered what I was supposed to do about the money. I was watching the pinwheels again when someone crashed into me and the soda fizzed all over my fingers, sloshed onto my shirt. It took me a minute to place him: Luis, the one who worked with Lily. Of course. Every time I saw him, something seemed to go wrong.
He held out his hands, the way people do to say sorry or take it easy.
But then I was somewhere else, outside of myself, beyond the boardwalk. Somewhere wild and untamed. Mud, and grass, a wide open field of it. A sparkle of something bright. Jewelry glinting in the light. The jewelry was attached to women. To their bodies. Their clothes looked too bright and their hair and skin was dull. There were bruises on their legs and arms. And flies. So many flies. Rings of bruises around their necks. Their faces were turned away from me, but I saw the locket, the blonde hair. Someone with Julie Zale’s long runner’s limbs. I could feel the flies everywhere, on every inch of my skin.
I came to, panting for breath. I had dropped the can of soda at my feet. It took all the effort I had to remain standing up. Luis stared at me, and as soon as I could catch my breath I started screaming. He held his hands out again, more insistently this time. As though he were saying no, stop, please. But I kept screaming, even as people gathered around us. I heard a woman mumble that they should call the cops. No, another voice said. An ambulance. No, another person said. Look at her eyes. I think she’s just strung out. Luis edged away from me, and I fumbled for my keys, collapsed against the doorframe. I managed to stab my key into the lock of the shop door and pounded up the stairs.
I hadn’t taken my own advice, hadn’t listened to my own intuition. He had always given me a weird feeling—the sense that he had something to hide. But what did it matter? It didn’t take back what he’d done to them, to all of them. Peaches, Victoria, Julie, and the two others who had been with them, touching hands. Was this the fearsome fate that my future held? Knowing the truth, and that I could do nothing about it? That maybe if I had paid better attention, those women could have been saved?
I curled myself into a ball on the floor of my bedroom, stayed like that until the light in the sky began to fade and the casinos turned on their signs, and everything was covered in their eerie red glow. The most I could manage was watching the colors of the light change. If this was what the Ten of Swords had been pointing to, it also meant that freedom was close. I knew one fact, consistent as a heartbeat: I have to get out of here. All of the others had probably thought the same.
LUIS
THE DAY AFTER HE FINDS the women, he paces the boardwalk, up and down and up and down and up and down. All the stores sell the same things—T-shirts printed with pictures of neon sunsets, wire cages filled with sad, slow hermit crabs whose shells are covered with glitter and painted designs: baseballs, moons. But at one of the shops, above the crabs, a row of cameras hangs from plastic hooks, the disposable kind in a bright yellow wrapper—his grandfather used to bring them along on their crabbing trips, or take pictures of Luis and his grandmother on the porch, his grandmother giving him a silly poke in the cheek so that he would smile, and in a few days Luis could hold the glossy images, feeling like a piece of himself was now kept safely inside. He chooses a camera from the display and brings it to the counter. He tries to control the shaking in his hands when he passes his money to the clerk. He know he’s taking a risk, knows what will happen if this goes wrong. Men in black boots kicking down his door. The cops who laughed at him, coming to pick him up, cuff him, haul him away. He thinks of more words.