The Empress File

began riffling the cards. When she was done, she placed it squarely in front of me.
    “Do you want to cut it?” I asked.
    “Should I?”
    “That’s purely up to you. Look inside yourself, and make a decision.”
    Dessusdelit closed her eyes, and after a moment her hand came out, groped for the deck, and cut it.
    “Good,” I said, picking up the deck.
    “What’d you do to this ball?” LuEllen blurted suddenly. She’d been juicing it with the laser. When Dessusdelit turned her head to look, the crystal was fluorescing like a piece of cold fire.
    “My God,” Dessusdelit said.
    “It just never stopped,” LuEllen said.
    As Dessusdelit turned, I switched the decks. The new deck was identical to the first but thoroughly stacked.
    “You know what it is?” Dessusdelit volunteered. She turned back to me, her voice droppingto a whisper. “It’s the tarot, focusing the energy in the room.”
    We all looked at the deck in my hand. “This is getting scary,” LuEllen said. I agreed. Dessusdelit’s voice had such a deadly intensity that the hair stood up on my arm.
    I shook it off and did a spread. The Empress came up immediately, overlying the significator, the card that represented Dessusdelit. She grunted, and I realized that she knew more about the tarot than she’d let on. I rolled out the rest of the spread, and she grunted several more times, little underbreath ummph noises. For the possible future, she got the Wheel of Fortune, upright, which generally means good luck; for the environment card, the Queen of Pentacles, which stands for success in business and the accumulation of property; and as the final outcome, the Ten of Pentacles, upright. The wealth card.
    “Something’s going on here,” I said. “I’ve never seen a reading so consistent across the board.”
    I began the interpretation, and she nodded and then reached out to the spread. “But this…” she said, tapping the future card. Death riding a white horse.
    “I told you about the Death card,” I said. “It doesn’t mean Death; it means change. Usually welcome change.”
    “Yes, but it’s a frightening image.”
    “Does the image strike you as particularlystrong this morning? Did the image catch your eye, rather than the philosophical position behind the card?”
    “Well…”
    “There are times when you must look at the image. You know, the tarot speaks on a lot of different levels. Sometimes it’s on a mystical level that seems far beyond anything I can interpret,” I babbled. She was listening intently. “On other occasions it’s as simple as the picture printed on the card.”
    “It did seem sort of special.…”
    Of course it did, with my implicit prompting.
    “I don’t know what it might mean, though,” I said, putting new doubt into my voice. “A dark knight, a black knight, arriving on a white horse. That hardly seems to fit modern times—especially coupled with the wealth cards we see everywhere else. I don’t know.”
    Jesus, I thought, am I overdoing it? Behind Dessusdelit, LuEllen was biting her lip.
    I picked up the Death card and placed it in front of Dessusdelit. The room had grown tense, and Dessusdelit sat frozen for a moment, studying Death. Then, with a sudden release of breath, she pushed her chair back and stood up. Her eyes were wide and distant, as though she were stoned.
    “Let’s get some light in here,” LuEllen said suddenly. She pulled a shade, and daylight cutthrough the gloom. “Boy, I’ve never seen anything like this.” She looked down at her hand. “The crystal has stopped.”
    Dessusdelit leaned over and peered at it, nodded.
    “I need a drink,” I said. “Miz Dessusdelit?”
    “No, no, thank you. I think I need to go home and lie down.…”
    She looked one last time at the dark knight on the white horse. When she was gone, LuEllen looked at me and grinned.
    “That was strong,” she said.
    “Yeah. I hope I don’t get in trouble with the tarot gods for fuckin’ with the cards.” She frowned, and I grinned at her. “No sweat. Let’s get out on the river.”
    T HE ANIMAL CONTROL compound was three-quarters of a mile south of the marina, at the far end of the town’s small industrial district. Going downriver, we passed the tall white cylinders of a grain elevator with a barge dock, a series of warehouses surrounded by chain-link fences, a lumberyard, and then a stretch of empty riverbank, overgrown with brush. The animal control complex was the last sign of life