Vigorish Part 2

Perhaps it was his nearly bald scalp, perhaps the thick, bookish gla.s.ses in heavy brown frames. "What's that?" he asked mildly, poking a finger at the dealer kneeling in the sawdust on the floor. My Blackout victim was reaching out, trying to find something he could use to raise himself to his feet. His face was frozen in a fierce, unseeing stare as he mentally screamed at his eyes to see, see, see!

"Blackout!" one of the bouncers told the second stick-man in a m.u.f.fled voice.

Sharp eyes fired a quick, surprised look at me. "Well," said the bald dealer. "Good evening, Brother." I had a surge of relief. The strong-arm stuff was over. This was the casino's TK.

"What kept you, Brother?" I said, sounding a little sore. "These characters were going to kick my teeth out."

His grin had a taste of viciousness. "I did give them a little time," he agreed. "How was I to know?" He looked calmly at them over the tops of his gla.s.ses. "You can go now," he said, like a schoolmarm dismissing cla.s.s.

The gorillas helped the blindly staring dealer to his feet, brushing at the sawdust that clung to his clothing, and had him presentable by the time they led him through the door. They seemed glad to get away.

"The Blackout," the TK said musingly to me. "You hear about it, and the Psiless cringe when they think it might happen to them. But you don't see it every day. You're in the Lodge, of course?" he added.

"Of course," I said coldly.

"Please," he said, waving a hand at me. "Don't take it so big. So am I."

From five feet apart we exchanged the grip, the tactile pa.s.sword impossible for the Psiless to duplicate--just a light tug at each other's ear lobes, but perfect identification as TK's. "I'm Fowler Smythe," he said. "Twenty-fifth degree," he added, flexing his TK muscles. "What is it, buster? You on c.r.a.p Patrol?"

I paused before I answered. Twenty-fifth degree? Since when could a gambling casino afford a full-time Twenty-fifth? TK's in the upper degrees come high. I had already figured my fee at a hundred thousand a day, if I straightened out the casino's losses to the cross-roader.

"Wally Bupp," I said at last, deciding there was no point to trying some cover ident.i.ty. My gimpy right wing was a dead giveaway. "Thirty-_third_ degree," I added.

He had a crooked grin, out of place beneath his scholarly gla.s.ses. "I've heard of Wally Bupp," he admitted. Well, he should have. There aren't so many Thirty-thirds hanging around. "And you are young, smug and snotty enough to play the part," he concluded without heat. "Still, that's all it might be, just play-acting, with Barney going through the motions of being blind. You could be outside the Lodge, sonny. Any cross-roader who can tip dice the way you were working them can twitch an ear. Let's see some credentials."

He scuffed through the sawdust to the bar and took a stack of silver dollars from his ap.r.o.n. He held them, dealerwise, in the palm of his hand, with his fingertips down, so that they were a column surrounded by a fence of fingers.

"How many?" he asked.

I shrugged. "The whole stack, Smythe," I told him. His eyebrows went halfway up his tall, tall forehead. But he put them all down on the bar top, about twenty-five silver dollars. "Show me," I said.

He ran his fingertips down the side of the stack of silver. Another tactile. Well, he certainly wasn't much of a perceptive, or he would have been able to handle the Blackout himself. He closed his eyes for the hard lift. Some do that. The coins came up off the mahogany an inch or so, and made a solid smack when the lift broke and he dropped them back. Not very impressive work for a Twenty-fifth degree. The coins spilled over.

I used the excuse of straightening up the stack to get a touch, myself.

I could have done it visually, of course, or I could have straightened them up with TK, but touch helps my grip. I took a good look at the door to the main casino, a heavy job of varnished native cedar. Just to show him, I turned my back on the bar, leaning against it with one foot on the bra.s.s rail. The lift was as clean as I've ever managed. Anger, fear, any strong emotion, is a big help. They came up all together, staying in a stack, and I could perceive that they hung in the air behind me, a good foot clear of the bar, and about twenty feet from the door to the casino. In a smug show of control, I dealt the cartwheels off the top of the stack, one at a time, and fired them hard. Each one snapped away from the hovering stack, like a thrown discus. My perception was of the best. Each coin knifed into the soft cedar of the door, burying itself about halfway. My best sustained lift, I suppose is about two hundred times the weight of a silver dollar. But with the lift split by the need to keep the stack together, about twenty gees was all the shove I gave the cartwheels. Still, you might figure out how fast those cartwheels were traveling after moving twenty feet across the bar at an acceleration of twenty gees.

Smythe gasped. I doubted he had ever seen better, even in the controlled conditions of Lodge Meeting. "A little something to remember me by," I said, as I opened the silver-studded door. "Now let's see the boss."

"You're a TK bruiser," he said, impressed. "If you hit Barney's eyes like that, he's a Blind Tom for fair."

"Hardly," I sniffed. "You ought to know that no respectable TK would lay a lift on a retina. I just squeezed off a couple of small arteries. He's back in business already, I'd say."

Had I mentioned the rustic _decor_ of the Sky Hi Club? When Las Vegas had deteriorated to the point where it would turn most stomachs, the better clubs migrated up among the tall pines, along the sh.o.r.es of Lake Tahoe. And in place of the dated chromium glitter of Vegas, they had reached way back to the "Good old days" for styling. The Sky Hi Club was typical. The outside was all hand-hewn logs. The inside had a low, rough-beamed ceiling, and a sure-enough genuine wood floor. The planks were random-width, tree nailed to the joists. Even the help was dressed up like a lot of cow-pokes, whatever cow-pokes were.

This ersatz ranch-house was owned by two completely unlovelies. Peno Rose, who had used his political leverage to get me on the job, I had known since he'd been a policy number runner on the lower East Side. His partner, Simonetti, was something else, but somehow I wasn't looking forward to meeting him any more than I was to seeing Rose again.

I guess it's the filth within these croupier types that makes them surround themselves with the aseptic immaculacy of iridium and gla.s.s.

Their office was in a penthouse perched on the slanting roof shakes of the casino. It was big as a squash court, and as high and as square.

Every wall was gla.s.s. It couldn't have been in greater contrast to the contrived hominess of the casino if they'd thought about it for a year.

Then, for the last twist, the furnishings were straight out of the old Southwest--Navajo rugs, heavy, Spanish oak desks, and a pair of matching couches or divans of whole steer leather stretched over oak frames.

Peno Rose came quickly toward me the moment Fowler Smythe showed me into the office, spurs jingling. "Hey! There he is! The boy they had to rule off the track! How's a boy, Lefty? Long time no see." He had his hand stuck way out ahead of him. His sharp, dried-out features repelled me twice as much as they had ten years before. That hatchet face of his was gashed with what he thought was a smile. I've seen sharks with a pleasanter gape. Naturally, I didn't take his hand.

"Hi, Peno," I said. He jerked his hand back and straightened up. He snapped the hole in his face shut.

"My partner," he said, waving his hand at the dark-skinned gent standing over against one of the fumed oak desks. "Sime, meet Lefty Bupp, the hottest TK artist with dice in the whole d.a.m.ned country!"

Simonetti leaned against the desk. He drew a zipper open in his fancy blouse, dragged out the Bull Durham and started to roll his own. They watch too much TV. It makes terrible hams of them all. He spat on the floor.

"A living doll," I said. I took a better look at this honey. Face it, he was an oily snake, cleaned up as much as possible, but not enough. No amount of dude ranch duds, gold spurs or Indian jewelry could hide his stiletto mentality. He was just a Tenderloin hoodlum with some of the sc.u.m sc.r.a.ped off. Well, I should know. So was I.

Simonetti finished licking the seam of his roach. He came forward as he lit it and blew too much smoke in my face. "What you doing here?" he said in a husky voice. "I told Rose no dice. We need another TK like we need a hole in the head."

"You think I _want_ to be in this trap?" I snapped at him. "Say the word, Tex, and I'm gone."

"You're fired," he said huskily. "Scram!"

I started for the door, glad to be rid of the lot of them. Peno Rose beat me to it. He showed me several rows of teeth, the way sharks will.

"Half of this joint is mine," he snarled, holding a hand lightly against my chest. He knew me better than to push. "_My_ half is hiring you."

The whiff of garlic over my shoulder told me that Simonetti had followed me, too. He didn't have any reservations about grabbing me and twisting me around and giving me a real face-full.

"If you know what's good for you, you'll get out of here."

"Freak?" I said, laying it on his mitral valve. After his heart had missed about eight beats, he started to sink, and I quit the lift. "Be polite, Simonetti," I said to the panic in his yellowish face. "Next time I'll pinch down tight. The coroner will call it heart failure.

Tough."

He wanted his stiletto. He needed it. He was sorry he had ever quit carrying it. A couple seconds of reflection told him I was too tough for him. He went for his partner, his face darkening with rage now that his heart could get some blood to it. He had his hands out, for Rose's throat, I guess. For my dough it took guts to put fingers that close to all those teeth. But he never got a chance to try it. An ashtray, one of those things with a shot-loaded cloth bag under it, flew off a desk, smacked him in the back of the head, and dropped to the floor with a thump.

It wasn't a hard blow, but an upsetting one. Fowler Smythe grinned at him from where he was sitting in one of the leather divans. "Sit down and shut up, Sime," he suggested coolly.

Simonetti sagged with defeat. "Look, Rose," he gasped. "I want out. Bad enough that our losses can't be stopped by this creep Smythe. Now you drag in another TK. Buy me out!"

"What's a business worth that's losing its shirt?" Rose sneered. "We were in clover, you fool, till this cross-roader got to us. This is our only chance to get even."

That finished Simonetti. He went back to his desk and slumped against it, scowling at the points of his handtooled boots.

Rose looked over at me. "Let's make sense," he said quietly. "We watched you on the TV monitor from the time you came in."

"Sure," I said.

"What about it?" he demanded.

I shrugged. "I had my way with the dice, Peno. I dropped nine yards as fast as I could, then won it back. The spots came up for me every single roll but two, when I had my eye on something else."