Part 6 (1/2)

”Fowler Smythe,” I said bitterly. ”A snake within the Lodge. You might try to stop him. But your partner, Rose, is the real crook. Get the doc, then tie up Rose.”

”She's gone,” he insisted. ”Nerve poison kills right now.”

”He's right, Billy Joe,” Pheola said softly. ”I'm going numb all over.”

”What did I tell you?” Simonetti husked at me. I had enough left to hit him sharply over the temples with a lift. ”A doctor. With antidote,” I snapped. He trotted away.

”Darlin' Billy!” she said, and her heart stopped. She was dead. I picked her up in my arms and carried her to the same sawdust-strewn private dining room where I'd given Barney the Blackout.

I had to split the lift. The tourniquet was an absolute necessity, or more of the nerve poison would enter her system. But her heart _couldn't_ stop. The brain can only stand a few seconds of that. I hadn't let it miss three beats. Even as I carried her from the casino, I lifted the main coronary muscle and started a ragged pumping, maybe forty beats a minute. Once in the smaller room I began artificial respiration with my mouth.

The sawbones was there in three minutes. I guided the tip of his hypodermic into a vein in her right arm, the one that still had blood coursing through it. He depressed the piston, pumping the antidote into her bloodstream. Little by little I let up on the clamp on her wounded left arm, dribbling the poisoned blood into her system, so that the antidote could react with it gradually. She stayed unconscious.

Then I felt it. Her heart muscle tugged back at my lift. It was struggling to beat on its own. I matched my lifts to its ragged impulses, feeling it steady to a normal seventy-two as the antidote took effect.

Her eyes opened at last, and we stopped respiration. ”Billy Joe!” she smiled. She was back from the dead.

In an hour we had returned to the motel. She was as good as new, but badly shaken.

”I still don't know what happened,” she said.

I shrugged. ”Smoke screen, Pheola. Every time there's a run of luck on a c.r.a.p table, somebody yells 'TK!' And I suppose there's a number of TK's who aren't in the Lodge, and who figure to make a killing here and a killing there by tipping the dice. But any decent TK, even a Fowler Smythe, can spot them.

”There was TK in this, but not tipping dice. Smythe is a skunk. He's no Twenty-fifth, or he wouldn't have any need to go crooked. He saw a chance to make a killing. He suggested it to Rose, who fell for it and went along. Rose decided to steal Simonetti's half of the business from his partner with Smythe's help. It was no more complicated than smuggling thousand dollar bills off the table in false bottoms of trays that drinks were being served on. Smythe was using TK to lift the bills into those false bottoms, well screened by the trays from the TV monitors. Barney was in on it, of course. And after the joint had lost enough dough that way, Rose and Simonetti would have had to sell out.

Only the buyer would have been a dummy for Rose and Smythe, using money Smythe had lifted off the tables.

”The whole TK business was just a smoke screen to keep matters confused,” I concluded.

”How come they dared send for a TK like you? Why weren't they scared you'd catch them, just like you did?”