../.

Back at "grandma's house," as Chad calls it, Zandra picks up where she left off the evening before. Chad and Bexley relax on the couch, splitting a stale donut from a shoebox. Zandra, damning her ankle beneath her breath, does a loop around the premises to make sure no one else is home. Given the state of the house, it's rather labor intensive.

So is trying to breathe with a chain wrapped around your neck.

As best as she can tell, no one else is present. Of course, someone could be hiding within the piles of wreckage strewn about that seem to breathe with every creak and sway of the house.

"God must be present in the most unlikeliest of events, because otherwise those events wouldn't happen. Correct?" Zandra says after rejoining Chad and Bexley. She pulls out the pack of poker cards from the pocket of her purple gown.

"Well, yeah," Chad says. He holds a crescent of donut in one hand and fidgets with a pocket torch in the other.

Zandra drags a TV tray over to the five-gallon bucket. She plants herself on the bucket and tips a stack of pizza boxes from the tray onto the floor. She pours the cards out onto the tray, squares them up, and gives them a shuffle.

"Let's see if we can conjure God right now," Zandra says.

Bexley's eyes grow a white sliver wider behind her donut.

Watch carefully.

Zandra shuffles the cards again. Her technique is sloppy, but that's not the point. After a few more rounds of shuffling, she squares the cards up and snaps her fingers over the deck.

"Done," Zandra says.

Bexley looks around. "God's here right now?"

"Oh, shit," Chad says and drops the pocket torch.

Pretty sure God knows all about your extracurricular activities, Chad. They can smell it up in heaven.

Zandra taps the top of the deck with her index finger. "Right here."

"I don't get it," Bexley says.

Zandra coughs into her sleeve. It reminds her of how little she coughed last night.

"Let me ask you this," Zandra says, shifting on the five-gallon bucket to find a comfortable angle. Such an angle doesn't exist. "How low do the odds of something happening have to be for you to assume a supernatural source? That God was responsible?"

"A billion to one," Chad says.

Bexley's more cautious. "A quadrillion to one."

A fair guess. That's as big a number as anyone can usually think of.

"How about an eight with 67 zeroes after it, to one?" Zandra says. "Those are the odds of shuffling a deck of cards at any point in time and getting the exact same order of cards as any other shuffled deck of cards at any other point in time. You just witnessed something that shouldn't be able to happen without divine intervention: the order of these cards after I shuffled them."

Unlike Zandra's other grifts, this factoid isn't massaged or embellished. The actual odds of shuffling a deck of cards and ending up with the same order of cards as another shuffled deck are 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 to one. There isn't an easy way to remember that sequence, let alone a name for that number, but Zandra doesn't need to recall more than what she read on a trivia flyer in the lobby of a fast-food restaurant 20 years ago. Despite the source, it's true.

Chad rubs his chin and squints behind his glasses. "So you think you're God?"

"No, stupid," Bexley says from the other side of the couch. "She's saying she just did something with supernatural odds. God didn't do it, though. She did."

"Oh, thank fuck for that," Chad says and picks the pocket torch up.

Zandra rubs her hands together. "Yes, the odds would say that what you just witnessed shouldn't have happened. The likelihood is practically zero. And yet, here is a deck of cards ordered in a way that shouldn't exist, according to the odds."

"Wait a minute. There are only 52 cards. There can't be that many combinations," Chad says.

Right there. Did you catch it? That's the line. On one side are the manipulable masses, walking blind through life, feeling their way through the darkness six inches at a time with their dicks in their hands. On the other side are the politicians, pundits, marketers, mathematicians, psychos, and psychics, relying on counterintuitive truths rather than mental shortcuts and conventional wisdom.

"There are more combinations in a deck of 52 than there are atoms on Earth," Zandra says, again reciting the trivia from the flyer.

That factoid's a little hard even for Zandra to believe.

I'm still on the same side of the line, though.

The living room falls silent until Bexley peels a slice of pickle from the bottom of her shoe. She drops it onto Chad's eye.

"Spa day," Bexley says and laughs.

Chad claws the pickle away from his eye. "What the fuck? Ugh, that stings."

Zandra slides the deck of cards back into the pack. She drops the pack back into the deep pocket of her purple gown.

"Aren't you supposed to use cucumbers?" Chad says and rubs his eye on the side of the couch.

"Pickles are cucumbers," Bexley says.

"No. Pickles are pickles, stupid."

"Don't call me stupid, stupid."

OK, I guess we're finished with the intellectual portion of our day.

A crash from somewhere upstairs sends Zandra's hand scrambling for the lawnmower knife up her sleeve. This time, she's able to get a good grip on the paracord-wrapped handle.

"I'll check it out," Chad says as casually as noting that a microwaved burrito is finished heating.

Bexley accompanies him upstairs, leaving Zandra alone with the packet in her pocket, the pipe, and the torch. Zandra coughs until she's dizzy. It reminds her to pop a nifedipine for her blood pressure, which she washes down with an errant can of soda that by some miracle isn't opened. She chases the syrupy drink with a cigarette, which she lights with the pocket torch. She puffs on the cigarette while flicking the torch on and off like a toy.

What did that person in the van say about citric? What is that? An orange? Like cut it with an orange or something? Maybe that's a thing people do with this stuff.

Zandra sniffs.

Very much doubt there's any fresh fruit around here.

Zandra's attention to the temptation in her pocket distracts her from the situation upstairs. She misses eavesdropping on Chad and Bexley's conversation, courtesy of the thin ceiling above her head. When the two return to the living room downstairs five minutes later, Zandra's still playing with the torch, although she's since moved to the couch from the bucket.

"And?" Zandra says.

"Raccoon," Bexley says. "Going through the trash in the bathroom upstairs. Probably came down from the attic."

"We just left it there. It's not like we can ask it to leave. Raccoons don't speak English," Chad says and runs a hand through his long, greasy hair. "They speak—I don't know—raccoon-ese or something."

Brilliant insight, Chad.

Bexley smudges the living room with whatever is inside the pipe she lights up next. Zandra wrinkles her nose, both from the smell and the sight of Bexley passing her puff in a mouth-to-mouth embrace with Chad. A bridge of spit forms and collapses as they pull away.

"On to more important things, I found a buyer," Zandra says.

"Oh, yeah? That's great," Bexley says. "When do we get the cash?"

"There's a catch," Zandra says.

"I know. It's at the bottom of the river."

"No, there's another one," Zandra says and ashes her cigarette onto the couch cushion. "Our buyer is having some romantic issues with a woman living not far from here. Seems she's been cheating on him."

Chad shrugs. "So?"

"So he wants me to find out who the person she's cheating with. It's standard private investigator territory, but it needs to get done before he buys," Zandra says and drags the cigarette down to the butt. She tosses the stub at a broken alarm clock hanging by its power cord off the top of the bookshelf. It's a miss.

"Bummer," Chad says.

I'm going to assume you're talking about the prerequisite and not me missing that throw at the alarm clock.

"Clock's ticking," Zandra says. "Police will be investigating why the Curd Queen went down. They'll send divers to try to recover bodies. They probably won't know to look in those cases with the goods in them, but it's not impossible. Anyway, it buys us some time, because the same people who sent that sniper for Aaron won't make a move until the police are gone."

"So how much time do we have?" Bexley says.

"Impossible to know. We need to get started," Zandra says.

"OK, but you know who the buyer is, right?"

"No."

"What about this woman? What's her name?"

"He didn't tell me. I've got an address for a house a couple blocks away."

"So how is this going to work?"

"It'll work."

"But how?"

Chad answers that one. "Because she's Zandra."

That's the first intelligent thing I've heard you say, Chad.

After a brief argument about whether it'd be better to walk to the woman's house or attempt to ride the mountain bikes Chad claims are in the basement, the three leave "grandma's house" on foot. Zandra checks her pockets on the way out.

Poker cards. Heroin. Nifedipine. Exactly one cigarette. I'm a walking pharmacy. Hopefully that's enough, but this should be simple. Wait and watch for this other person to visit the woman, or vice versa. Can't imagine this will take more than a couple days.

Zandra should've imagined harder. The street address the man in the van gave her doesn't lead to a house. It leads to an empty lot.