"An old-fashioned, please," the flirtatious girl in the beige cocktail dress ordered with a smile. Otto didn't know her real name, everyone just called her Butterfly Bree, but he knew her youthful face and the scent of men's perfume clinging to her skin. A regular customer who always had money to spare on tips for the bartender, and therefore especially appealed to him.
For her cocktail, he always saved the freshest orange slice, the shiniest glass and the neatest piece of ice - and three dollars more than the required amount slid along the bar to him. If all the customers left such generous tips, then Otto would no longer have a studio in the attic, but his own house in the suburbs of Little Rock.
The night was moving at a snail's pace, and apart from the couple in the far corner, slowly savouring their Martinis and Rusty Nails, Butterfly Bree, and the bouncer, Taylor, there was no one else. No wonder, it was Tuesday evening, and the customer base - residents of larger cities from the neighbouring dry county, where it was impossible to buy alcohol - appeared closer to the weekend.
God, he shouldn't have stayed up late last night reading Conan Doyle by the dim light of a desk lamp. Fatigue was pushing against his eyelids, and he had to force himself to drive away the obsessive thought of making himself a glass of Black Russian.
Ninety-five percent of Otto Martin Greenwich's mind was occupied with mundane matters: budgeting, birthday presents for his numerous paternal relatives, filling out tax forms, arguing with the insurance company over whether they'll cover the cost of a dental filling... The remaining five percent were devoted to a matter equally pressing, but less mundane. A tingling sensation spread through his fingertips, as if he had returned from a cold walk to a warm room. The sensations were still irritating, not yet painful, but bitter experience had taught him that if he continued to ignore the demands of the forces beyond the reality's veil, the stabbing agony that would pierce his body would be unavoidable and unfathomable.
With no one to take over for him at the counter, and him might not making it to the end of his shift, Otto slammed the door of the toilet stall in a hurry and with trembling fingers, pulling a bundle of master arcana from his pocket.
"Whose fortune do I need to read?" Otto whispered under his breath, knowing that the addressees of his question will hear it anyway.
"Myself?"
The vibration that spread through his body meant "no." He didn't have time to guess, and he began listing people with whom he often communicated in a machine gun burst: "Mom? Uncle Mitchell? Uncle Perry? Uncle Juan - the one who is Dad's half-brother? Uncle Juan, who was in Colombian prison for distribution? Aunt Mary? Aunt Sophia? Grandma Chasity? Great-grandmother Mary-Anna?.. Taylor?.."
Damn it, he hasn't even started the layout and has already wasted so much time. A meek glance at his wristwatch confirms five minutes of life lost forever. If the boss found out that he was slacking off, Otto would not see a bonus this month. Who else could the cards have in mind?! Usually, they demanded a layout either for himself or for one of his relatives. So, it was time for some yes-no questions.
"Is it one of my relatives? One of my neighbors? Former classmates? A colleague?" It was as if his organs were being squeezed by someone's bony hand, blocking his airways, and panic began to gnaw at his mind. He sank down on the tiled floor, smeared with God knows what, watching the world lose its clarity. His patrons - if you could call them that - valued ingenuity and quick thinking, and testing their patience was life-threatening.
"A client?" The pain subsided in an instant, retreating and disappearing without a trace. There were no echoes of discomfort, no unpleasant aftertaste of metal in his throat. Even the dizziness that should have remained after a sharp affixation was suspiciously absent. When the cards wanted, they could make him feel like the healthiest person on the entire planet. Only they wanted it very rarely. They didn't even spare their prophet's perfect teeth.
"One of the regulars not present today? One of that couple? Butterfly Bree?" The third option responded with an impulse that could not be described in any other way than a pure release of dopamine shot straight in the brain. Guessed, then.
"The past." The Empress's card fell first. Well, there is no need to lay out the tarot here; he kind of guessed that she used her feminine principles to get what she wanted.
"The present." The inverted Lovers were now resting on the toilet lid. Romantic problems for a night butterfly? Well, it's a real shock, he himself would not have guessed. Otto licked his chapped lips. The last card will fall, and he, having pronounced into the void the prophecy of someone else's fate, will be free from this red tape for at least three or four days.
"The Future." The Tower fell third in a row, and Otto stood there awkwardly, his mouth slightly open, his gaze burning a hole in the ill-fated card. Many people, unfamiliar with the meaning of the cards, think that the Death should be a grim harbinger of the end — death should mean death, right? But it spoke more of the end of the old and the birth of something new.
Tower. The Tower was the scariest of the cards. The last time he pulled out the tower during fortune-telling, his father died under the wheels of a truck, and the fact that after that he did not come across the card during fortune-telling only reinforced its status as a bitter omen of death.
The cards were in his pocket as quickly as they came out. What the hell do they want?! To see his reaction to the fact that the woman who sat smiling across from him ten minutes ago is going to die in a few hours? Watch him flounder helplessly, trying to change his fate, and later drown in guilt when his attempts inevitably fail?
Taylor, noticing Otto's return, nodded approvingly from the other end of the bar, where an African American man was almost dozing off on a barstool. It was one o'clock. God, his colleague probably thinks he either has bladder problems or on drugs. How embarrassing. He shouldn't be thinking about such trivial things right now, but it was better than the gnawing realization that he couldn't find the strength to look into the eyes of a woman who was five minutes away from death. She didn't seem in a hurry to leave.
"Do you believe in fate?" Otto heard himself say, as if from a distance. For the first time, Bree looked at him with more than just a fleeting expression of gratitude. More meaningful, somehow, as if in her mind he had moved from the category of impersonal background noise to one of the supporting characters.
"Wow. I've never been hit on like that before, " Bree leaned forward, resting her elbows on the bar and closing the distance between them. "What if I was? Would you say that our numerous rendezvous were orchestrated by a higher power?"
Otto Martin Greenwich heard with horrifying clarity the loud whistle from the corner, where Taylor had drawn his own conclusions from their conversation. Otto, feeling the heat rush to his cheeks, awkwardly reached for the back of his head, combing his scalp with his nails, which had only recently become covered with a crust of congealed blood — a bad habit caused by stress. Like a fish, he opened and closed his mouth, trying to find the words to clarify the situation before it became even more awkward.
"No, I didn't-I-I didn't mean anything obscene. I shouldn't have started this conversation like this, but it's like there's a dark cloud hanging over you, miss. Please be careful, it's not safe for a lady to walk alone at night. "
Any mirth that had been visible in Bree's deep blue eyes was now completely gone. Her face was contorted as if she had just eaten a lemon. The silence of the empty establishment was broken by the creaking of a chair being pushed back and the sound of hurried footsteps. Otto tried to call out to the woman, but she did not slow down for even a moment. The door continued to swing back and forth for a few seconds, powered by Bree's force of friction.
"That's a strange thing to say, Otto," Tyler said with a disapproving shake of his head. "I thought you were finally going through a phase where you're acting like a ladies' man, but instead you've scared off a chick like that."
"Oh, piss off, Tyler, you're always thinking with your ass. I really feel like something bad is going to happen to her. Remember when I told you that Natisha would leave you, and it happened?"
"Well, yes, but it had been a long time since everything went well with her, you don't need to be a shaman to figure it out. We were fighting, plates were being smashed, I was flirting with that Asian girl from college, she was flirting with fat Pete."
His colleague was a skeptic, what else was there to look for. It's amazing, considering that all of his rarely visiting relatives managed to mention evil spirits and evil eyes in at most fifteen minutes of conversation, as well as spit on the neighbors who had definitely achieved success through the use of black magic.
"I can't change your mind anyway," Otto sighed deeply, wiping the counter and stretching along the way, preparing for the long—awaited end of the shift. "But I'm afraid Butterfly Bree won't be coming here anymore either way."