Deadly Gamble Read Free

“Like I saw my dead ex-husband last night,” I stumbled. There was no graceful way to say it.
    Bert paused, rake in hand and gave a low whistle. “Dude,” he said.
    Since some people would have tested my forehead for a fever, I was mildly encouraged. “Maybe I’m going crazy.” That was the thought that had kept me awake, too agitated to engage in my usual insomnia cure, which was to sit at my computer and work my way through one of the piles of medical billings that paid my bills. That and the fear that Nick would get a recharge and show up again if I lay down on the bed.
    Bert began to rake noxious things into a pile between two massive pool tables. Anybody might think they were losing their mind if they’d seen what I had, but I had more reason than most. My parents were shot to death in our rented double-wide, down in Cactus Bend, when I was five years old. I knew I must have witnessed the murders, since I was found hiding in the clothes dryer off the kitchen, covered with their blood, but I had no memory of the incident, or of the next few months, for that matter. The first thing I could recall was waking up in a cheap motel, and Lillian dabbing at my face with a cold washcloth.
    â€œI seen you do some strange things,” Bert said. “Like the way you can make a slot machine pay off pretty much whenever you want. You come by your name honestly, but you ain’t crazy, Mojo. Not you.”
    My heart warmed. Actually, I didn’t come by my name honestly—or much of anything else, either. Like Lillian, I’d been using an alias for years—one I’d chosen myself, out of a library book—and some dead child’s social security number. As close as Bert and I were, though, I’d never told him the whole story. Even Nick hadn’t known, though maybe he did now. He’d seen his battered body after the accident, and he knew I’d cried at his funeral, so maybe being dead gave him a broader perspective.
    Now there was a disturbing thought.
    â€œHe looked—real,” I went on. “Except that he glowed in the dark.”
    Bert raked a little faster, and I hoped he wasn’t revising his opinion about my sanity. “Was there a reason for this visit?” he asked, without looking at me.
    â€œWe never got that far,” I said.
    Bert glanced in my direction.
    â€œNothing happened,” I told him firmly, and without delay.
    He grinned. “I never said it did,” he replied. “Give Russell one of them frankfurters, will you? He missed his breakfast.”
    I slid off the stool and went around behind the bar, glad to have something physical to do, however mundane. “You shouldn’t let him eat stuff like that,” I said. “One of these days, he’s going to blow an artery.”
    Bert got out the dustpan and leaned down to rake the pile into it. “Poor dog gets nothin’but diet kibble at home,” he said. Bert’s girlfriend, Sheila, ran a tight ship. “One sausage ain’t gonna hurt him.”
    I opened the door, speared a frank and plopped it onto a paper plate.
    Russell watched, salivating, as I cut it into bite-sized pieces with a plastic knife. “Like you don’t give him one every morning of his life,” I chided, but I set the plate down in front of Russell and smiled as he snarfed up the grub.
    â€œMy aunt Nellie saw a ghost once,” Bert ruminated, raking again. “It was her dog, Fleagel the beagle. He lived for seventeen years, and Nell swore she found crap on the same old place on the stairs for ten days after he croaked. She said that was how she knew she was going to die. When the beagle came back, I mean. Sure enough, a few weeks after the sighting, she bit the dirt, right in the middle of a game of blackout bingo.”
    I gazed across the bar at him, hands resting on my hips. With anybody else, I would have felt self-conscious in my jeans, rumpled