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...and just in case you haven't read all three, check them out here. 

Get caught up in the dance

If you've already enjoyed all three, you have my deepest thanks. Take a moment to leave a review wherever you made the purchase and I'll name our next cat after you. 

And if you are looking for that promised epilogue, email me and I'll hook you up.

I've gotten such positive feedback from the series that I'm working on Jack and Anna's next adventure. Here's a taste. 

a series to binge

That's how I wrote Prophets Tango. With seasons and episodes.

Since it's a serial, if you want the whole story, you'll need all three. 

What happens when a drug-dealing psychic with a side gig as an angel of Death takes a mysterious woman for a whirl around the dance floor? 

Fate holds its breath and lets romance take a chance.

If you like your romance with a deep twist of paranormal and a hot splash of thriller, Prophets Tango is garnering five-star ratings. 

A serial in three seasons:

Season One: Out of Step

Season Two: Dancing in the Dark

Season Three: The Light Fantastic

                                                                    ~O~

Jack Bell can make a woman believe dancing with him was the best decision she ever made. That psychic thing? He knows what you're thinking, and if you need killing, he puts you on his list.

Cursed with her own flavor of psychic ability, Anna Catalano reads Tarot and jurors for a living. She feels what you're feeling—your heartaches, passions, and perversions—unless she's stoned. Anna stays just high enough to avoid thinking about her own life until her gangster-wannabe husband blackmails her into a corner and she starts looking for a way out.

With the help of a pair of hapless Spirits, Anna and Jack meet, and with one dance, their lives are upended. 

Cosmic lust comes before trust, but they have to work together if they hope to thwart her husband's plans to sell her secret to settle a deadly debt and find a future neither of them ever dreamed of.

Sex, drugs, rock'n roll with a side of ghosts and magic!

A drug-dealing ladies' man and part-time assassin with psychic skills meets the woman he’ll mend most of his ways for. A new-age con artist herself, she’s got her own brand of psychic ability and a troubling history of being on hand for untimely deaths. 

When they meet, Jack's on the lam from the Life, and Anna’s married to a gangster wannabe who’s blackmailing her to keep her in line. Cosmic lust comes before trust, but they must learn to work together if they hope to thwart her husband’s plans to sell her and her secrets to settle a deadly debt. 

Enter the Will of the Stars personified by two spirits from the next realm, Hope and Sam. Their mission is to see Jack paired up with the woman who will either save his soul, steal it, or maybe both. No one knows for sure which, and why is up for grabs. Hope is out of her league, spirit-wise, and Sam's a rookie.

Jackson Jude Bell, 19, has been kicked out of a short stint in the Navy for being, well, Jack. 

If you have something on your mind and Jack is nearby, he knows about it. He knows what you're planning, and he also knows when you are going to die. And if you are the kind of miscreant who deserves it, he’ll wait on you in a dark alley and take care of you. Judge, jury, executioner, weed peddler, and all-round ladies' man, he mostly uses his trick to get by, get over, and get laid – food, air, and water for a guy his age. He’s happy-go-lucky until he runs afoul of the cocaine epidemic in Manhattan and starts to have problems with his supplier and his lifestyle in general and takes an opportunity to relocate to the suburbs. 

Annabea Catalano has had a few more spins around the planet than Jack and a lot less joy. She was empty, aching,, and ready to run off the rails the night she met him at a bar ninety miles north of Manhattan. Even if she never saw him again, something in that night that gave her hope and the will to free herself from a loveless marriage. 

Hostage to her husband’s blackmail, she doesn't wear Ray’s ring or sleep in his bed and is working her way around to the idea that there’s only one way out of the marriage when Jack pulls her out onto the dance floor and back from the edge of self-destruction.

Anna has her own special knack of the mind, but it’s never caused her anything but unhappiness and isolation. Up close and personal, she knows what you’re thinking and can feel back down your history to the how and why of who you are. She has a modest Tarot reading business and, for a price, she’ll tell you the bitter truth. She’s also a freelance courtroom artist, which is really a cover for using her telepathic skills to vet juries for the highest bidder while keeping her methods secret. 

Years ago, she made the mistake of telling Ray about her secret and he’s used her to further his own petty political ambitions and has blackmailed her into a loveless marriage over some deadly indiscretions in her past. Anna finds the world a hostile place for an attractive woman who knows what all the men around her are thinking. She walls herself off with drugs and alcohol but realizes that her life is in jeopardy and has come to the conclusion that Ray has to go. 

When Jack and Anna first meet, it’s lust at first sight, but the connection gets derailed by bad timing. Once they are back in each other's orbit, they are shocked to find that they cannot read each other and have to learn the dance of love the hard way, like the rest of the human race, keeping truths from each other until it’s a matter of life or death.

 Jack struggles with the idea of the straight life and one woman, and Anna struggles against the idea of Jack, so wrong, but so right. At first, she’s willing to enlist him in her plan to rid her of Ray, but once love steps in and things go sideways, Jack and Anna are caught up in a domino run of desire and danger along their way to not one altar, but three, and a happy ever after that nobody could have anticipated.  

Now you're ready.

and furthermore..

This is an epilogue. Fair warning.

The River of Time flows, no matter. Some grab on to each other and hold on tight, swirled in a gentle eddy, shielded from the heavier currents. Others flounder, go under and are swept into the future.

    The chief of police came out of McInerney’s pub and walked to the back of the sandy lot where he’d tucked his wife’s brand new pearl white Pontiac away from assholes, idiots, and drivers from Rhode Island. Whether he was fit to drive was debatable. He fumbled the key around the lock for a few seconds and, anxious about scratching the finish, leaned on the car with his head down on his forearm a moment to steady himself. When he opened his eyes, he was astonished to see what appeared to be a large puddle of piss right in the middle of the roof. Yellow rivulets had run down the windshield and there were spatters on the glistening hood. Furious, he went back inside the bar, dragged half the patrons outside, and waited, fists on hips, for someone to say something. Even though it was only a little piss, no one dared giggle, and no one fessed up in drunken hilarity.

    “What are you gonna do, Chief? Call forensics down in Hartford?” came a voice from the back row.

    The bartender shouldered through the crowd with two sweating pitchers of water and ceremoniously poured them over the urine. “Problem solved,” he said. “Now everybody come back inside and settle your damn tabs.”

    Before anyone could move, there was the sound of a branch cracking from overhead and a rifle fell, stock first, neatly punching a hole in the windshield. A handful of red and gold leaves fluttered down, but before they could land, a large man landed face down on the hood, buckling it, his boots taking out the rest of the windshield. Those not crowding in to gawk at the body- the man was clearly dead- stepped back to look up into the tree for whatever might be next. The chief bent down and peered into the man’s face. “Motherfucker better be as dead as he looks. Somebody call this shit in and take note, Margie’s going to kill me.”

    A few blocks away on the southern edge of town, an explosion shook the ground under their feet, and a fireball reached a finger into the night. An onshore breeze brought them a pall of acrid smoke that stank of burning rubber and oil.

        “Arma-fuckin-geddon?” the bartender offered cautiously.

~O~

       Brad stood beside the car hauler trying to count the cash while the driver scrambled around the car, attempting to conceal it with a floral, king-sized, fitted sheet and failing badly. No matter how he tugged the cloth, the gleaming paint and chrome shivered and twitched with reflected light—the moon, the streetlight on the corner, the neon “closed” sign in the window of the gas station across the street— the reflections and its pent-up energy giving the illusion of life.

    Parked directly behind the truck, Jen fumed behind the wheel of her mother’s Vistacruiser. She was pissed because Brad had made a point of losing her, goosing the Chevelle’s engine, laying forty feet of rubber in her face. She got out and slammed the door hard enough to get everyone’s attention. “What the fuck is taking so long?”

    The driver hopped down from the truck bed, landing in the dirt right beside her. “Hey, honey, you must be the brains of this outfit. Dude, why don’t you let her count it?”

    Brad had a fistful of tens and twenties in each hand. “Six fifty, six sixty, six seventy...”

    She poked the driver on a tattooed bicep. “Jeez, what did you do? Take up a collection in church?”

    “Two thousand, seven hundred. Jen, shut the fuck up before I lose count.”

    Behind them, a crackling shower of sparks trickled from under the Chevelle. A hollow popping noise stopped Brad’s count, and an explosion blew the car's hood skyward as fire filled the cabin and blew out the windows. They were knocked sprawling to the dirt by the concussion before any of them had the chance to jump. One of the chrome cable rings landed on the truck driver's ass, scorching his jeans, branding him as he lay face down in the dirt, howling. They were peppered with chicklets of safety glass.

    A second explosion, much larger than the first, launched the Chevelle up and over the end of the trailer to land upside down, crushing the station wagon, drowning it in flames. Everything was ablaze. Jen’s sweater caught fire and Brad fell on her, smothering the flames. Jen decided it was love after all until pieces of burnt money started drifting down over them. Scorched tens and twenties littered the lot. Come daylight, kids would prowl the scrub for burnt money and, rumor had it, blackened bones.

    Fire department volunteers sober enough to function responded to the call. All the radio chatter had was “car fire. minor injuries”. Then a call came for the beleaguered sheriff. Foul play suspected. They hosed a full tanker of water over the three burning carcasses, the flatbed’s diesel oil stubbornly refusing to be squelched. A young volunteer firefighter picked up a blackened piece of metal from the scrub—the SS badge from the grill of the Chevelle. He rubbed it on his sweaty shirt, looked around, and tucked it in the pocket of his yellow rubber coat. The rear tires of the flatbed blew out and the burnt frame settled onto the sandy dirt.

    The other two vehicles were tangled in a charred embrace. The large, two-door sedan lay upside down on what had been a station wagon. A big-block engine smoldered in the weeds at the back of the sandy lot. Someone stumbled across a rear windshield with ‘GOTCHA’ written in big white letters on the cracked glass. A charred license plate was recovered, and the slightly scorched survivors were taken into custody.

~O~

             

    The newlyweds tied the boat up at the town pier across from the Mill rather than venture the backchannel approach. Jack wasn’t sure whether the tide was coming or going. A car with New York plates was parked by the ramp, the only light coming from a single streetlight. Delgado leaned against the trunk, his arms folded across his chest.

    Jack held up the jacket so Anna could put her arms through the sleeves, the blood-stained shirt under it not quite concealing the black boxers. All Jack was wearing were his pants. They looked as if they’d been playing some kinky game that had turned rough. He whispered in her ear, “Guess we’re about to find out what the fuck. You ready?” He rubbed a smudge of soot from her face and kissed the spot.

    She nodded. “I’ll be gentle with him. Engine trouble, right?” Jack patted her ass as he helped her up the ladder. 

    Daniel reached for her good hand as she climbed from the boat to the pier. “It’s about time. We were just about to call the Coast Guard. What did you do to yourself?” Daniel’s tone went from angry to genuine concern in the space of a breath as he lifted her bandaged hand close to his face. For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss it.

    “You should see the other guy,” Jack called up from below her.

    “A broken glass. I don’t suppose you have a first aid kit with you?” She looked toward the Mill and the spot where they’d left the car. “Hey. Where’s my car?”

    Jack scrambled up the ladder. “Hell, I forgot to tell you. Just before we left, I asked Go to run it back up to O&M. Danny Boy. Why are you still here? Where’s your partner? I wasn’t kidding about that threesome. She and Wendy gonna start the party without you, man.”

    But Daniel was only half listening to Jack, and that half dwindled to nothing quickly. He was focused on the warmth of Anna’s hand in his and the tone of her voice reverberating in his head. The scents of gardenia, champagne, and sex wrapped around him and drove off the night’s seaside chill. He closed his eyes.

    Anna lifted their clasped hands to his heart.

    Daniel answered her unspoken question. “No one was hurt. A couple of kids stole the car not long after you left. They were closing the deal in that lot across from the Shell station when something happened.“

    Jack shrugged and said, “So you caught ‘em? Assholes. Christ, I left the keys over the visor, I...”

    Let him finish. There might be more we need to know.

    Daniel put his hand up, eyes closed. “It might have been a bomb.” He paused, seemed to grope for the next words, then gave up trying.

    Will they be able to connect it to the Grolovs?

    What's the difference?

    Daniel still held Anna’s wounded hand to his heart. Jack slipped his arm around her waist and insinuated his hand under the waistband of the satin shorts to rest on her bare hip, fingers wide. He slung his other arm over Daniel’s shoulder, suspending the man in a loop of wonder. 

    The streetlight fluttered gold to white, white to gold, and went out with an arcing snap. The black bowl of the sky reeled over their heads, the ragged gash of the Milky Way curving to and away from view at the same time. The claw moon was too high and pale to matter.

        Are we going to light him up, or what? Just kidding.

        I need him to forget something.

        Hmm? What’s that? He gave her a squeeze. Jeez, your ass is warm.

        That I would have slept with him if he’d helped me get rid of Ray.

        My woman, the hustler. He kissed her, then patted Daniel on the cheek gently. Nah. Leave him with it. Nothing’s wrong with a little hot history. Besides, he’s the kind of ace you want to keep up your sleeve.

        “I love you.”

        “Fuckin' ay.”

     Anna pulled her hand from Daniel’s grasp and broke the spell.

     Jack snapped his fingers under Daniel’s nose. “Dude, are you high? You zoned out on us for a second.”

     Daniel scrubbed his hands over his face and stifled a yawn. “It’s been a very long day.” He offered Anna his arm, and she took it. “Let’s get you back to O&M and look at that hand.”

     Jack flanked him and whispered, “And you need to find out where Sylvie and Wendy went. Don’t tell me you never been the cream in an Oreo!”

~O~

Starts. We all have them.

 Annabea Catalano, All Hallow’s Eve, 1949

 

            Distant thunder reached into her dreams and she struggled to wake up, wondering why it was so important that she did. She’d been so comfortable, sunk deep in sleep for the first time in months. A breeze gusted over the divan on the back porch where she lay, and her apron flipped up over her face and she woke with a start even before the next and more ominous rumble.

The sky was coming on dark in the wrong direction for night, and she struggled to her feet, the puffs of wind laden with ozone. Out in the yard, the clotheslines were lifting and straining, the sheets and pillowcases belling out, starting to pop. She’d save what she could, moving out across the yard at the best pace she could muster. The real problem would be carrying the basket inside. Her belly so much in the way now that she couldn’t get her arms around anything enough to lift it. She’d carried the wet sheets from the porch two at a time, slung dripping over her shoulders. The cooling dampness had been welcome then; she was always hot. Now she was chilled and stiff with it.

The sheets shoved and slapped her as she fought to pull the wooden pins and keep the cloth from touching the ground at the same time. A second rinse in the rain was one thing, but she’d be damned if she was going to wash any of these over again. As she freed the third sheet and draped it doubled over her left shoulder, another gust of wind almost knocked her down, and a bolt of lightning struck in the field across the road. She couldn’t even hear herself shriek, the thunder was so deafening. Only three? Shit.

A fat bullet of rain struck her between her shoulder blades and another on the nape of her neck as she reached the porch. Counting on the depth of the overhang to keep her dry, she backed up to the divan and sat heavily. The starkly white sheets over both her shoulders and across her enormous stomach made her look like a Roman senator. “Did they wear white?” Hera wondered aloud as she looked out across the wild laundry being subdued by the rain. A fresh but further away peal of thunder startled her and a cramp in her leg brought her thoughts back to her body and its alien occupation.

She pointed her toes skyward to relieve the cramp and wrapped her arms around her belly for leverage before the tension and pain spread up to her thigh and butt. That’s when she realized that, for the first time in six or seven months, the plucking and churning inside her had ceased. Complete and blessed stillness. Before she had time to be concerned, she leaned back, closed her eyes, and waited for the internal assault to start back up. She slid into a sleep that fell off the edge into unconsciousness so profound that she was absent for the labor and delivery of the child. A soul vacation.

 

“Well, well. Look who’s back from the dead,” Brownie said as he held a cup with a straw to her lips. Hera struggled to swallow a mouthful of stale water. She couldn’t speak to ask the question and tried unsuccessfully to sit up. The strange bed was too soft, and she was tucked in like a tick. He made no move to help her and sat back in the chair beside the bed. “Looks like you screwed this up too, woman.” He paused long enough to take a pull from a flask he’d hidden in his greasy jacket. “It’s a girl. Eight pounds of beaver. I’ll never hear the end of it down at the bar.”

There was a stained and crumpled paper sack at her feet on the coverlet. In it, one of his old handkerchiefs over which he’d poured a healthy squirt of gas while he was filling up the bike. All during the pregnancy, she’d craved the smell of gasoline the way other women went for ice cream and pickles. The fumes from the bag reached her, and she threw up what little there was loose inside her, sending Brownie retching and scrambling for a nurse.

She didn’t see him again until they kicked her and the baby out a week later, and he was slightly drunk when he got there. The orderly wheeled her through the last doors out into the parking lot, where she saw the Indian with a borrowed sidecar parked in the NO PARKING zone, Brownie leaning against the sign casually, having a smoke like he was waiting for the bus. She looked down at the swaddled baby sleeping in her arms.

Baby Girl Brown looked like an oversized grub with a red face. Did babies know what kind of world they’d come into? What sort of people were they in the care of? She wanted to say to the orderly, “Wait. Take her back inside with you,” but what kind of people did that? What kind of mother? As things turned out, no kind.

 

                                                            ~O~

 

Jackson Jude Bell, April 20, 1954

             It was seven in the morning and already hotter than hell.  How appropriate, Bridget thought, for surely she was headed for hell.  She was exhausted from the stress of concealing her condition. The only time when she might be able to have some relief was in the dark in her own bed at night, but the baby wouldn’t permit it. Not that it kicked and tumbled all night like she heard most did. This baby hid itself. Long periods, hours on end of stillness, and she was in a panic that something was wrong, that it had died inside her. Died of her shame and fear of getting caught.

            Wishing it away hadn’t worked. She’d had no plan for months, only the driving need to keep it all a secret. She had long given up hope that the child’s father would make good on his promise to come for her on his next leave and now that she thought the baby was coming, she made the irrational decision that it would be a good idea to go to confession before going to the hospital.

              Why were those friggin’ Dago boys so damned attractive? she wondered bitterly, and this one hardly speaking English. He was Angie’s cousin, here on leave from the Italian Navy, of all damned things. Who knew they had a navy?

            “My name is Joey,” was about the longest string of English words he could put together, but what she clung to was the memory of how he had bent down from his six-foot and kissed her and touched her body so boldly. His black hair, wide brown eyes, and full lips made her weak-kneed and soft, but with that memory came a pain in her belly that expanded like the fireworks at Orchard Beach, forcing her to lean against the brick wall with her hands spread and her knees locked or she would crumple to the dirty pavement.

            They’d all gone dancing, and he’d said, “Ti amerò per sempre.”

            Angie laughed. “He says that to all the girls.”

            Still, she let him have his way and, even as another pain took hold of her body right on the heels of the last one, she didn't regret a minute of it.

            Joey was long gone. There had been one postcard in hen-scratched Italian that Angie read aloud, doing her best to interpret. “Wish you were here with me and your pink titties?” Bridget had snatched the postcard from her fingers and ran.

            A passing shower floated back off the pavement as steam, and she was soaked through as she pulled the door of Holy Spirit open wide enough to allow her and her belly inside for some shelter, rest, and confession where no one knew her. Her plan was to go to the hospital, have the baby, play the idiot, and slip away when no one was looking, leaving the baby behind. Girls did it all the time.

            Her water broke as she closed the massive wooden door of the church with her body weight, and the pain that came with the action brought her to her knees. She crawled to an inner door and pulled herself up by the wrought iron door handle, then crouched in the darkness of the coat closet. Under a row of old wooden hangers, she slumped on the floor with the corner of a worn cassock clenched in her teeth as she pushed the baby out onto the cool slate. He didn’t cry, and it was all she could do to scoop the slimy, bloody body into the hem of her dress before she passed out, blood pooling under her.

           

            Sister Ag arrived to see to preparations for early Mass. She slipped in the puddle of fluid on the floor and fell flat on her back, cracking her head on the slate floor. Father McLeod found her minutes later and helped her to her feet. Together, they followed the trail of liquid to the closet and made the discovery.

            The boy child silent, but alive, still linked to his young mother who was warm, but unresponsive. There was too much blood on the floor. The priest cut the cord with his pocket knife while he murmured the last rites. Sister Ag wrapped the baby in a worn altar cloth and took him through the sanctuary to the convent kitchen next door. The priest finished the ritual, then called the police. The girl was dead long before they arrived.

            “Father McLeod, the EMT tells me that she’d just given birth. Where’s the baby, Father?” The officer was a parishioner at St.Ignatius. He was well aware that Holy Spirit had a long-standing reputation with hookers and street people as a safe haven for unwanted infants.

            “Now Michael, you know very well that the child is safe and in good hands.”

            The officer shrugged. “Just doing my paperwork, Father. You know how it is.”

            Normally, abandoned infants were placed in foster homes and the authorities contacted. This time it was different. The church and city networks of foster homes were stretched to breaking. There was no one to take on an infant at a moment’s notice. The baby could languish for weeks in a hospital nursery even though the child had appeared healthy.

            Father McLeod and Sister Ag made an unspoken pact when they took the baby from the dead girl’s lap and the nun tied off the cord with a bit of yarn pulled from the girl’s sweater. The boy was born in sanctuary and in sanctuary, he would stay. The convent’s cook had four at home, one still nursing. What was one more here?

                                                                                 ~O~