“What’s the harm in it, Digger?”
He looked around, unsure where the voice had come from. Someone was laughing on the second floor, but that voice was distant. This one had been near his ear.
He continued down the stairs, intent on passing the bar without a glance. A Rolling Stones song was grinding across the room and spilling from the door like cigarette smoke. Glass clinked and several dozen tongues blended into one thick murmur, televisions casting kaleidoscopic light. He couldn’t help himself. Blame the bar mirror, blame the Devil, blame the goddamned weather, but he had to look.
His eyes went first to the row of amber bottles stacked at the back of the bar, then over to the bartender, a spike-haired young man with a thick neck, then back to the bottles. He told his feet to keep right on walking, because he had a date with his dead wife, but drunks knew how to screw things up at the most inconvenient times. That’s what they did best, and who was he to try to be better? When the devil made you do something, well, what could you expect besides the worst?
Besides, Cristos Rubio was sitting at the bar, perched on a stool like a frog sitting on a lakeside rock and waiting for a fly.
I can kill two birds with one stone.
Wayne was already through the door before he realized there was no second bird. He waved to a group of ghost hunters gathered in a booth. A couple nodded at him, apparently harboring no ill will over the disrupted schedule. Booze greased the squeakiest wheels, Wayne well knew, and he was feeling a bit rusty himself. The beer signs, dart board, karaoke stage, cigarette machine, and half-empty glasses were screaming “Welcome home,” and even the solemn Cristos was smiling at him.
Wayne made it to the bar before his knees went weak, and the bar stool was there to catch him.
“Deegger Weelson,” Cristos slurred in this thick accent.
“Cristos, I need some help.”
“You need a drink, compadre.”
Wayne swallowed. He’d promised Kendra. He’d even promised Beth, in the closest thing that ever passed for a prayer from his lips. Today I can do it. Today will be different. This time I can control myself.
“No, I just want to talk to you about something,” he said. On the television in the corner, two prize fighters were swapping body punches, one of them riding the ropes as if waiting out the bell.
“I know,” Cristos said. “That’s why I wait here for you.”
Cristos slid a drink coaster toward him. Wayne looked down at the design. It was the same snake illustration that had adorned Gelbaugh’s surprise Tarot card, the serpent entwined with a tree, its forked tongue flicking out from a vague reptilian smile.
“How did you do that?” Wayne asked, but Cristos was signaling the bartender. The Peruvian seer tapped his glass and held up two brown fingers.
“You wonder about fate,” Cristos said. “The will versus the randomness of chance.”
“I...had an experience.” Actually, he’d had several, but lies were easier than promises.
“Chance or will?”
“Does it matter?”
“I have read the cards for many years. The outcome is always the same.”
“I saw my dead wife.”
Cristos stared at his own reflection in the bar mirror. Wayne looked beyond the row of glistening bottles and saw Violet at a table, leaning forward and talking with a handsome, curly-haired man. He considered asking her about Janey Mays, but then the bartender was pushing a whiskey sour under his nose and his world was reduced to four ounces of golden fluid and half a dozen ice cubes.
“We see what we want to see,” Cristos said.
“Don’t give me that crap about wishful thinking,” Wayne said. “I’ve been selling it for years.”
“And it led you to the White Horse Inn, Black Rock, North Carolina. The way it should be.” Cristos tilted back his head and tasted his fresh drink.
“I’ve been here before.”
“We each live many lives.”
“No, I mean in this one. My wife and I were staying here sixteen years ago when we made a pact. If one of us died, we’d meet here.”
“And now you are surprised. Would you not have kept the promise if you had been first to die?”
“It should have been me. The world needed her more.” Wayne reached out and touched the dew that beaded the whiskey glass.
“Maybe the next world needed her even more. Angels aren’t born. They die.”
Wayne searched the man’s eyes but they were black and cold, as impassive as midnight on a distant moon. “I can’t believe beyond this one.”
Wayne nudged the drink away, but only a few inches. Through the bottom of the glass, the snake on the coaster undulated, the forked tongue slipping in and out. The music, chatter, and laughter swelled to a crescendo, as if a church choir had hit the Rapture chord.
“Perhaps a question,” Cristos said. “Did you come back because you expected to meet her? Or because you were certain she wouldn’t?”
“This conference.” Wayne swept his hand out to indicate the hotel. “It had nothing to do with the promise. It’s a haunted hotel and that’s what I do.”
“Will or fate?”
Wayne touched the glass again. “The outcome is the same.”
“Not yet.”
Wayne had the glass to his lips and the first swallow burned a sweet path to his belly. He thought of Kendra and the expression in her eyes when she found him—a look that said she knew it all along, that the Digger was determined to hollow out his own grave and bury himself. The second swallow washed that vision away, and his gut warmed as if the banked coals of hell had been stoked into a cheerful blaze.
Cristos nodded in approval. “Welcome back.”
Digger Wilson could summon the courage to face Beth and do what he had to do. He figured three drinks would be enough.
Chapter 28
“So, what do you think of this place?” Violet picked at the label of her Corona bottle, aware that it was the international bar-scene signal for horniness. She wasn’t sure she was horny, not yet, but Phillippe definitely had potential. According to Cosmo and Glamour, women knew within three seconds of meeting whether they would sleep with a man. Violet was suspicious of that formula, because the advice was geared toward the upper-class single woman with a busy career. Three seconds was not enough time to calculate someone’s net worth and, more importantly, his willingness to shower that worth on a lover.
“The decor is not even shabby chic, just plain shabby,” he said, pursing his plump lips. “I would give the whole place a makeover.”
“Janey’s going for the creep factor. She realized ghosts are good for business.”
“Janey Mays.” Phillippe fluttered his eyes toward the smoke-stained ceiling and sipped his chablis. “Pisser dessus. Piss on her.”
“Yeah,” she said, noticing the bar was fuller than it had been in weeks.
“She’s petasse, a whore for donkeys.”
Violet barely heard him over Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” the ballad of self-pitying barflies around the world. A wine-drinking chef with a flair for interior design who used phrases like “shabby chic”? God, he wasn’t gay, was he? Just her luck. She’d taken his French accent as a sign of European hunkness and had totally overlooked the signals. Cosmo never said anything about this.
“You want another?” Phillipe said.
Violet had only finished half her beer and it was getting warm and flat. “I’ve got an early shift.”
He took the bait and she took it as proof that he wasn’t gay, or he might have been more concerned for her well-being and less about the potential for a score. “Hey, the night is young and so are we.”
“Okay, but if I get wobbly, will you take care of me?”
He grinned, and some wolf glinted in his teeth. “You can trust me, mademoiselle.”
The way he said implied that she couldn’t trust him a bit, which she took as an even better sign. As he approached the bar, her eyes roamed from his taut buttocks and she surveyed the room, noting in particular the off-duty staff smoking and drinking. Dead-end slaves killing time. Violet was better than them--she was a dreamer. Why, with a break here and there, she could take Janey’s position. Assuming the old Battle Axe was really dead.