I shook with her. If she’d been in costume as well as in character, half a dozen gold bangles would have clattered on her wrist. “Very nice to meet you.” And, trying on the same accent: “I am… Devin!”
She wasn’t amused. “An Irish name?”
“Right.”
“The Irish are full of sorrow, and many have the sight. I don’t know if you do, but you will meet someone who does.”
Actually, I was full of happiness… along with that surpassing desire to put a Pup-A-Licious pup, preferably loaded with chili, down my throat. This was feeling like an adventure. I told myself I’d probably feel less that way when I was swabbing out toilets at the end of a busy day, or cleaning puke from the seats of the Whirly Cups, but just then everything seemed perfect.
“Are you practicing your act?”
She drew herself up to her full height, which might have been five-two. “Is no act, my lad.” She said ect for act. “Jews are the most psychically sensitive race on earth. This is a thing everyone knows.” She dropped the accent. “Also, Joyland beats hanging out a palmistry shingle on Second Avenue. Sorrowful or not, I like you. You give off good vibrations.”
“One of my very favorite Beach Boys songs.”
“But you are on the edge of great sorrow.” She paused, doing the old emphasis thing. “And, perhaps, danger.”
“Do you see a beautiful woman with dark hair in my future?” Wendy was a beautiful woman with dark hair.
“No,” Rozzie said, and what came next stopped me dead. “She is in your past.”
Ohh-kay.
I walked around her in the direction of Pup-A-Licious, being careful not to touch her. She was a charlatan, I didn’t have a single doubt about that, but touching her just then still seemed like a lousy idea.
No good. She walked with me. “In your future is a little girl and a little boy. The boy has a dog.”
“A Happy Hound, I bet. Probably named Howie.”
She ignored this latest attempt at levity. “The girl wears a red hat and carries a doll. One of these children has the sight. I don’t know which. It is hidden from me.”
I hardly heard that part of her spiel. I was thinking of the previous pronouncement, made in a flat Brooklyn accent: She is in your past.
Madame Fortuna got a lot of stuff wrong, I found out, but she did seem to have a genuine psychic touch, and on the day I interviewed for a summer at Joyland, she was hitting on all cylinders…
Read the rest today!
Hard Case Crime brings you gripping, award-winning crime fiction by best-selling authors and the hottest new writers in the field:
“AN ENDING YOU’LL NEVER FORGET” —STEPHEN KING
The day Joan Medford buried her first husband, she met two men: the older man whose touch repelled her but whose money was an irresistible temptation, and the young schemer she’d come to crave like life itself…
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A masterful first novel written in the styles of three giants of the mystery genre. Stephen King says it’s “bold, innovative, and thrilling… crackles with suspense and will keep you up late.”
“TERRIFIC” —STEPHEN KING
An unsolved heist of priceless art from a Boston museum sends deadly repercussions echoing from 1946 to the present day. The Wall Street Journal calls this first novel “impressive, inventive, and immensely enjoyable.”
The Best of MWA Grand Master
DONALD E. WESTLAKE!
“A book by this guy is cause for happiness.”
Based on Westlake’s story for a James Bond movie that was never filmed! Millions will die to satisfy one man’s hunger for gold—and revenge…
When domestic terrorists kidnap a big-name comedian, it’ll take more than quick wits for him to survive.
With his memory damaged after a brutal assault and the police hounding him, actor Paul Cole fights to rebuild his shattered life.
“Thou Shalt Not Steal” is only the first commandment to be broken when the Crispinite monks of New York City try to save their monastery from the wrecking ball.
A gang of convicts plots to use a secret tunnel not to escape from prison but to rob two banks while they have the perfect alibi: they couldn’t have done it since they’re already behind bars…
The Best of MWA Grand Master
LAWRENCE BLOCK!
“Block grabs you… and never lets go.”
Block’s long-lost first crime novel, about an insurance man who reinvents himself as a mobster.
On the border between El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, five lives are about to collide: the gambler, the divorcee, the hitchhiker, the redhead, and the madman who’s not done killing.
A woman sets out to track down every man she’s ever slept with—and kill them all.
A con man accidentally steals a drug lord’s stash of heroin—and the man’s beautiful wife. But can love survive a collaboration in homicide?
In steamy small-town Florida, ex-cop Doak Miller falls for a femme fatale and has to figure out how to get away with murder on her behalf…
The LOST Detective Novel
From the Creator of PERRY MASON
Lost for more than 75 years, The Knife Slipped was meant to be the second book in the Cool & Lam series but got shelved when Gardner’s publisher objected to (among other things) Bertha Cool’s tendency to “talk tough, swear, smoke cigarettes, and try to gyp people.” But this tale of adultery and corruption, of double-crosses and triple identities—however shocking for 1939—shines today as a glorious present from the past, a return to the heyday of private eyes and shady dames, of powerful criminals, crooked cops, blazing dialogue and wild plot twists.