Free When The Spirit Moves You (The Jeff Resnick Mysteries) by LL Bartlett Page B

it, her blue eyes going wide, her whole act looking kind of hokey to me. The ball’s short gold-tone base was peeling on the side closest to me, not unlike the paint and wallpaper around us.
    “ I see you’ve fallen on hard times,” she said, still gazing into the ball. She was one to talk. And did she have the gift of clairvoyance or had she deduced that by the wreck I’d parked outside her window, and the fact my shoes needed a shine?
    “ Go on,” I urged her.
    “ You have not been well.”
    Another brilliant deduction. After the mugging that had almost killed me five months before, I’d lost weight and had never gained it back. I wasn’t exactly gaunt, but I could have used another five or ten pounds to help me stand upright on a blustery day.
    “ What else do you see?” I asked.
    She seemed to be puzzling over the crystal for an awfully long time and I was getting antsy. This wasn’t much of a show for ten bucks.
    It was then I noticed movement over her shoulder and in the darkest corner of the room. I squinted. I hadn’t imagined it. A forty-something white man stood there. He had brown hair and a really bad haircut, dressed in dark slacks and a plaid flannel shirt. Funny thing was, I hadn’t seen or heard him enter the room.
    The feeling of disquiet grew within me.
    I was about to ask the woman who the guy was, but he held up his right hand and pressed his index finger to his lips as though to shush me.
    I sat back in my chair and frowned. I hadn’t expected an expanded audience at this little performance.
    “ I’m curious about this house. Have you lived here long?” I asked the woman.
    She waved a hand in the air as though batting away a pesky insect. “That has no bearing on your future—or your past,” she said with the slightest bit of an edge to her tone. “I see trouble ahead for you.”
    “ What kind of trouble?”
    “ With the police.”
    Oh yeah? “A traffic ticket?”
    She shook her head. “Something much more serious.”
    As I’d already helped track down two killers in the short time I’d been back in Buffalo, I found her observation oddly disturbing. I’d figured she was a blatant fraud. Now I wasn’t so sure.
    I looked back to the corner of the room but the guy in the plaid shirt was gone.
    How? He hadn’t made a sound and I swear he never walked past the fortuneteller’s table to escape the room.
    Where the hell had he gone?
    #
    Thanks to my stop for psychic entertainment, I was late getting home for dinner that night. I live in the apartment over the garage on my brother’s property, and I often join him and his wife for meals at their house, although house was a bit of a misnomer. Mansion wasn’t quite right, either, but came pretty close. At any rate, it was a comfortable arrangement.
    That night my sister-in-law, Brenda, had roasted a chicken, and had included all the fixings. Whipped potatoes, homemade sage-and-onion stuffing, peas, salad, and a bowl of jellied cranberry sauce, along with a plate mounded with grocery store dinner rolls.
    “ Are we doing a trial run for Thanksgiving?” I asked, taking in the table laden with food—a heavy meal for such a warm weekday evening.
    “ I thought it would be nice to have a hearty dinner for once. Help yourself to a beer and sit down,” she said.
    I grabbed a bottle of Labatt Blue from the fridge and took my usual seat at the table.
    “ So, what’s new with you?” my older, half-brother Richard Alpert asked as he helped himself to a dinner roll.
    I passed the butter. “I stopped off on the way home to visit the psychic on Route 5.”
    “ What did you do that for?” he asked, annoyed, and hacked off a gob of butter, spreading it across his roll.
    “ Entertainment value only—although she didn’t put on much of an act for ten bucks.”
    “ What did she tell you? I assume it was a woman psychic,” Brenda said, sounding much more interested.
    I nodded and helped myself to one of the chicken thighs, a scoop of