Vigorish by John Berryman (fox in socks read aloud .txt) 📗

the suckers a peek at the seamy side. They might just take their money to the next clip joint down the street.

He didn't look like the others, somehow. He was older, for one thing. Perhaps it was his nearly bald scalp, perhaps the thick, bookish glasses 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 muffled 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 glasses. "You can go now," he said, like a schoolmarm dismissing class.

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 password 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 Crap 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 identity. My gimpy right wing was a dead giveaway. "Thirty-third degree," I added.

He had a crooked grin, out of place beneath his scholarly glasses. "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 apron. 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 brass 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 shores 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 glass. 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 glass. 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.