Part 5 (2/2)
”I'll make it right,” I said. ”Come on,” I told her. ”If we're going to stay up all night, we need fuel. How long since you've tackled a twenty-ounce sirloin?”
The Lodge has unmentioned influence. No, Psi powers aren't a secret government. But what high official can afford to be at odds with us?
They know where the Lodge stands. A little while on the visor as the east pinked up got me what I wanted. Because of the three-hour time difference, the Was.h.i.+ngton bra.s.s got me _carte blanche_ before banking hours at the Tahoe bank that supplied the Sky Hi Club with its cash.
Working with the cas.h.i.+er, who hadn't even taken time to shave after getting his orders from the Federal Reserve Bank, I went over their stock of thousand dollar bills, as Pheola had PC'd I would, and marked down the edges of the stacks with grease pencil. Mostly I did it to make my grip firmer. When the time came, I could make that money jump.
Pheola let me get her a c.o.c.ktail dress in one of the women's shops. The right dress helped, but more steaks would have helped even more. I'll bet I put five pounds on her that day. She was one hungry 'cropper.
Hungry and sniffly.
We idled away the afternoon and waited until nearly midnight to go back to the Sky Hi Club. Action is about at its peak then, and if the cross-roader had been tipping dice again, as they suspected, they would have had time to notice which table wasn't making its vigorish.
Plain enough where they were having trouble. Fowler Smythe was scowling through his gla.s.ses behind a table with Barney, the dealer I'd hit with the Blackout. Their faces were sweating in the dry desert air. The table was being taken.
”Now watch it, Pheola,” I said, as we squeezed into the crowd, opposite the dealers. ”Almost anything can happen. I want to know the instant you get a feeling. You understand?” She nodded and wiped at her drippy nose with a clean handkerchief. I'd gotten her a dozen.
There was the same old racket. The burnt out voice of a chanteuse, coming over the PA system from the dining room, tried to remember the sultry insouciance with which it had sung ”Eadie was a Lady” in its youth. Waiters in dude-ranch getups swivel-hipped from table to table like wraithes through the mob of gamblers, trays of free drinks in their hands. This time Pheola didn't have the same greedy grab for the _hors d'oeuvres_. She'd wrapped herself around a couple pounds of high-quality protein before we had come to the casino.
The gamblers were urging the dice with the same old calls, and the stick-men were chanting: ”Coming out!” ”Five's the point!” ”And _seven_!
The dice pa.s.s!” and all the rest. The ivories had a way to go before they reached us. I gave Pheola a stack of ten-buck chips and let her bet, without making any effort to tip the dice. She still had it. She moved the chips back and forth from ”Pa.s.s” to ”Don't Pa.s.s” and won at every roll. I could see Fowler Smythe begin to scowl as she let her winnings ride, building up a real stack.
Without warning she dragged down her winnings and leaned close to me, sniffling. ”You'll get all wet!”
I looked around, seeing a waiter near me. He had just served drinks to the rear, half of the table, to the gamblers nearest the dealers. His tray was still half-full. This was the moment. It was a generalized sort of lift, the kind of thing that qualifies a TK for the Thirty-third degree. I heaved at the thousand-dollar bills I had had marked in the morning, without the faintest idea of where they were. The tray lurched in the waiter's hand, throwing gla.s.ses to the floor. Most of them shattered when they struck the real wood planks, splas.h.i.+ng whisky and mix on our legs.
I looked across the table and grinned at Fowler Smythe. His scowl had an awful lot of forehead to work on. ”What the devil!” I could read his lips say over the racket. But Barney, the stick-man who'd felt my Blackout, caught on a lot quicker.
I was about to freeze him with a clamp on his thyroid. It's just as effective as wrapping your fingers around the throat. But Pheola upset the apple cart.
She grabbed my right arm, so newly powerful. ”No, Billy Joe!” she cried.
”I _don't_ want to die!”
”Who's dying?” I snapped.
”He's shooting me!” she gasped.
Shoot? With what? I had one terrified moment--what to lift? What was aimed at her? At the last possible moment I saw it. His c.r.a.p-stick was a hollow tube, and he was raising it toward _me_, not toward Pheola. I'd heard of things like that--a gas-powered dart gun. Silent, and shooting a tiny needle with a nerve poison in grooves cut in its tip.
I lifted, but half in panic. Fowler Smythe squeezed his trigger and the tiny dart leaped unseen across the c.r.a.p layout. My lift had been way off--it should have thrown the stick toward the ceiling, where no one would have been hurt. Instead it merely twitched the c.r.a.p-stick, and the dart struck Pheola in the left hand. She screeched a little and grabbed at the needle-p.r.i.c.k with her fingernails.
You never know how much power there is in Psi until you use it without restraint. I threw the crowd back away from us with a lift that nearly blacked me out, and had Pheola on the wet boards of the floor before she could blink. She had only seconds to live unless I blocked all circulation to and from her arm. I found the spots in her armpit and lifted the veins and arteries into a complete block.
A whiff of garlic told me that Simonetti had reached the table. He'd been watching on the TV monitor, of course. He knelt down beside us.
”A doctor, quick,” I said. ”She's been pinked with nerve poison.”
”She's gone, then,” he said huskily. ”Who done it?”
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