He stood up and hoisted the boy easily onto his shoulders. "Enough of the song, Scott. You still got your money?" The boy rattled the worthless chips and pennies in his pocket. "Then let's go into the den."
"What for?" asked Donna, her hands hooked into the back pockets of her jeans.
"Man stuff," Leon told her. "Right, Scotto?"
Scott swayed happily on his father's shoulders. "Right!"
Leon crossed the room, pretended to be about to ram the boy's head into the door lintel, then at the last moment did a deep knee bend and stepped through. He did the same trick at the door to the den—provoking wild giggles from Scotty—and then lifted him down and plopped him into the leather chair that was Daddy's chair. The lamp flame flickered with the wind of it, throwing freakish shadows across the spines of the books that haphazardly filled the floor-to-ceiling shelves.
Scotty's blue eyes were wide, and Leon knew the boy was surprised to be allowed, for the first time, to sit in the chair with the cup and lance head and crown hanging on wires overhead.
"This is the King's chair," the boy whispered.
"That's right." Leon swallowed, and his voice was steadier when he went on: "And anybody who sits in it … becomes the King. Let's play a game of cards." He unlocked the desk and took from it a handful of gold coins and a polished wooden box the size of a Bible.
He dropped the coins onto the carpet. "Pot's not right."
Scotty dug the holed chips and flattened pennies out of his pocket and tossed them onto the floor in front of the chair. He grinned uncertainly at his father. "Pot's right."
Defaced currency against gold, Leon thought. The pot is indeed right.
Crouching in front of the boy now, Leon opened the box and spilled into his hands a deck of oversize cards. He spread them out on the carpet, covering their bets, and waved at them. "Look," he said softly. A smell like incense and hot metal filled the room.
Leon looked at the boy's face rather than at the Tarot cards. He remembered the night he had first seen a deck of this version, the suppressed Lombardy Zeroth version, in a candle-lit attic in Marseilles in 1925; and he remembered how profoundly disturbing the enigmatic pictures had been, and how his head had seemed to be full of voices, and how afterward he had forced himself not to sleep for nearly a week.
The boy's eyes narrowed, and he was breathing deeply and slowly. Awful wisdom seemed to be subtly aging the planes of his young face, and Leon tried to guess, from the changing set of his mouth, which card was under his gaze at which moment: the Fool, in this version without his characteristic dog, standing on a jigsaw-edged cliff with an expression of malevolent idiocy; Death, also standing at the wavy cliff edge, looking more like a vertically split mummy than a skeleton, and carrying a bizarrely reminiscent-of-Cupid bow; Judgment, with the King calling up naked people from a tomb; the various face cards of Cups, Wands, Swords, and Coins … and all with repugnantly innocent-seeming patterns of branches or flower vines or ivy in the foreground somewhere … and all done in the vividest golds and reds and oceanic blues …
Tears glistened in Scotty's eyes. Leon had blinked away his own before gathering in the deck and beginning to shuffle.
The boy's mind was opened now, and unconnected.
"Now," said Leon huskily, "you're going to choose eight c—"
"No," interrupted Donna from the doorway.
Leon looked up angrily, then relaxed his face into wooden impassivity when he saw the little gun she held with both fists.
Two barrels, big bore, .45 probably. A derringer.
In the instant Leon had seen the gun, there had been a faint booming overhead as Richard had scrambled across the tiles on the roof, but now there was no sound from up there.
"Not him too," Donna said. She was breathing fast, and the skin was tight over her cheekbones, and her lips were white. "This is loaded with .410 bird-shot shells. I know, I figured it out, what you did to Richard, okay? I figure that's, it's too late there for him." She took a deep breath and let it out. "But you can't have Scotty too."
Check and a big raise, Leon told himself. You were too involved in your own cinch hand to watch the eyes of all the other players.
He spread his hands as if in alarmed acknowledgment of defeat … and then in one smooth motion he sprang sideways and swept the boy out of the chair and stood up, holding Scotty as a shield in front of his face and chest. And a devastating raise back at you, he thought. "And the kid," he said confidently. "To you."
"Call," she said, and lowered the stubby barrel and fired.
CHAPTER 2: No Smell of Roses
The blue-flaring blast deafened and dazzled her, but she saw the man and the boy fall violently forward, and the boy collided with her knees and knocked her backward against the bookcase. One of her numbed hands still clutched the little gun, and with the other she snatched Scotty up by his collar.
Leon had been hunched on his hands and knees on the blood-dappled carpet, but now he reared back, the cards a fan in his fist. His face was a colorless mask of effort, but when he spoke, it was loud.
"Look."
She looked, and he flung the cards at her.
Several hissed past her face and clattered into the book-spines behind her, but through her collar-clutching hand she felt Scotty shudder.
Then she had turned and was blundering down the hall, shouting words that she hoped conveyed the fact that she still had one shot left in the gun. By the kitchen door she snatched the car keys off the hook, and she was trying to think, trying to remember whether her Chevrolet had gas in the tank, when she heard Scotty's whimpering.
She looked down—and the ringing in her ears seemed to increase when she realized that the card attached edge-on to the boy's face was actually embedded in his right eye.
In the stretched-out second in which nothing else moved, her numbed hand tucked the gun into her pocket, reached down, and, with two fingers, tugged the card free and dropped it. It slapped the floor, face down on the linoleum.
She wrestled the door open and dragged the shock-stiffened little boy out across the chilly gravel yard to the car; she unlocked the driver's side door, muscled him in and then got in herself, pushing him along the seat. She twisted the key in the ignition at the same moment that she stomped the accelerator and yanked the wheel sideways.
The car started, and she slammed it into gear. She snapped the headlights on as the back end was whipping across the gravel, and when the gate to the road came around into the glare, she spun the wheel back to straighten the car out and then they had punched through and were on the street, having only caved in the driver's side against one of the gate's uprights.
"Okay, Scotty," she was mumbling inaudibly, "we're gonna get you help, kid, hang on …"
Where? she thought. Boulder, it's got to be Boulder. There's the old Six Companies Hospital out there. Anything in town here is too close, to easy for Georges to find.
She turned right onto Fremont.
"He is rich," she said, blinking but keeping her eyes on the lights of traffic amid the casino neon that made a glittering rainbow of the wet street. "I was thinking of you, I swear—Christ, he liked you, I know he did! Richard's gone, it was too late for Richard, and I never thought he'd decide he needed more than one."
She swerved around a slow-moving station wagon, and Scotty whimpered. His head was against the far doorjamb, and he was bracing himself against the handle with one hand and covering his ruined eye with the other.