Dagger Key and Other Stories

I shut my eyes and squeezed the arms of my chair, exerting myself in an attempt to suppress a shout. Eventually I relaxed and my mind snapped back into on-duty mode. “What kind of shadows?” I asked Pellerin.

He gazed at me blankly. “Huh?”

“You said you were seeing shadows. What kind?”

“You’re starting to sound like Jocundra, man.”

“What, is it a big secret?”

He licked salt off the rim of his glass. “I don’t guess they’re shadows, really. They’re these black shapes, like a man, but they don’t have any faces. Sometimes they have lights inside them. Shifting lights. They kind of flow together.”

I laughed. “Sounds like a lava lamp?”

“Everybody’s got one,” he said. “But it’s not an aura. It’s more substantial. I see patterns, too. Like…” He poked around in the pile of money and trash on the table and plucked out a napkin bearing the McSorely’s logo. “Like this here. The whole thing creeps me out.”

On the napkin were several sketches of what appeared to be ironwork designs: veves. I asked why it creeped him out.

“When we were on the island,” Pellerin went on, “I found these books on voodoo. And while I was leafing through them, I saw that same design. It’s used in the practice of voodoo. Called a veve. That there’s the veve of Ogoun Badagris, the voodoo god of war. And this…” He pointed to a second sketch. “This one’s Ogoun in his aspect as the god of fire. I get that one a lot.” He paused and then said, “You know anything about it?”

I had no doubt that he could read me if I lied and, although it was my instinct to lie, I didn’t see any reason to hide things from him anymore; yet I didn’t want to freak him out, either.

“Jo told me she had another patient who saw this same sort of pattern,” I said.

“What else she tell you?”

“She said he did some great things before…”

“Before he died, right?”

“Yeah.”

There ensued a silence, during which I noticed that the song playing over the speakers was now “Margaritaville”.

“She told me he got to where he could cure the sick,” I said.

He stared at me. “Fuck.”

“Let’s get through the weekend, then you can worry about it,” I said.

“Easy for you to say.”

“It’s a lot to process, I give you that. But you can’t…”

“I knew she was holding back, but…man!” He picked up his drink, put it back down. “You know, I don’t much fucking care if we get through the weekend.”

“I care,” I said, but he appeared not to hear me, gazing out across the pool toward the hedge of palms and shrubbery that hid the concrete block wall that separated Seminole Paradise from a Circuit City store.

“You ever have the feeling you’re on the verge of understanding everything?” he said. “That if you could see things a tad clearer, you’d have the big picture in view? I mean the Big Picture. How it all fits together. That’s where I’m at. But I’m also getting this feeling I don’t fucking want to see the big picture, that it’s about ten shades darker than the picture I already got.” He chewed on that a second, then heaved up to his feet. “I’m going to the casino.”

“Wait a second!” I said as he walked away.

I busied myself plucking the hundreds out of the mess we’d made on the table, and I pressed the clutter of bills into his hands. He seemed startled by the money, as if it were an unexpected bonus, but then he stepped to the edge of the glittering pool and said in a loud voice, “Hey! Here you go, you lucky people!” and tossed the money into the air.

There couldn’t have been more than four or five thousand dollars, but for the furore it caused, it might have been a million. As the bills fluttered down, people surged through the water after them; others sprawled on the tiles in their mad scramble to dive into the pool. Children were elbowed aside, the elderly were at risk. A buff young lad surfaced with a joyous expression, clutching a fistful of bills, and was immediately hauled under by a bikini girl and her boyfriend, their faces aglow with greed. The water was lashed into a froth as by sharks in a feeding frenzy. Terrified screams replaced the prettier shrieks that had attended roughhousing and dunkings. One man dragged a woman from the melee and sought to give her mouth-to-mouth, whereupon she kicked him in the groin. The lifeguard’s umbrella toppled into the water. He shouted incoherent orders over his mike. This served to increase the chaos. He began blowing his whistle over and over, an irate clown with his cheeks puffed and a nose covered in sun block.