Skull with flames, pistols and banner

Back when the trams still ran past the Exchange, there was a card room above a pawnbroker's on Dale Street, and at its green baize sat a woman everybody called Diablo. Nobody used her Christian name. She wore a grey coat with the collar up, she never once raised her voice, and she dealt the cards like she was reading them out of a book she'd already finished. Men lost their wages to her. Some lost their boots.

One wet Thursday a young ex-soldier came in with two pistols wrapped in oilcloth and laid them on the table as his stake. Brass-capped, nothing special, but he swore they had never misfired. Diablo looked at them a long while. Then she said, 'Deal me in,' and the room went cold as a cellar. Three hands in, the gas flames seemed to lean toward her, and the spade in the corner of the deck kept turning up, ace after ace, until the soldier was counting his fingers.

On the last hand he reached for his pistol. She was faster. She didn't shoot. She turned over the king of spades, slid the pistols back across the baize, and said, 'Go home, and tell the devil he owes me a hand.'

They say the sign over the pawnbroker's still carries her name, and if you walk past at two in the morning you can hear her shuffling behind the shutter. I wouldn't go looking. The city keeps its own counts.