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

I flopped on the bed, stretched my arm out against the counterpane. She ran her fingers over it—the old "laying on of hands." If she were the real thing, I knew what it was—perception at a level a TK can't match. The real healers feel the nerves themselves. I'd been worked on before. The more hysterical healers, some really creepy witches, had given me some signs of relief, but none could ever find the real "weak place," as she called it.

She was mumbling to herself. I guess you could call it an incantation. I got a picture of a nubile waif, too freakish to fit where she'd been raised. What had her Hegira been like? In what frightful places had she found herself welcome? From her talk, it could have been an Ozark backwater. I didn't want to know what backwoods crone had taught her some mnemonic rendition of the Devil's Litany.

Her hands passed up beyond my shoulder, to my neck. "It's in yore haid," she said. "In yore darlin' haid!" Fingers worked over my scalp. "Oh, there!" she gasped. "Hit's ahurtin' me! Hurtin', hurtin', and I'm a draggin' it off'n yuh!" Her backwoods twang sharpened as she aped some contemporary witch.

Hurt? She didn't know what it meant. She fired a charge of thermite in my head, and it seared its way down my arm to my fingers. My right arm came off the bed and thrashed like a wounded snake. She wrestled it, climbed onto the bed, and held it down with her boney knees. Her fingers kneaded it, working some imaginary devil out through the fingertips, till the hurt was gone.

We sat close together on the edge of the bed at last, as I worked and moved my arm, one of us more in awe of what had happened than the other. It was weak—with those flabby, unused muscles, it had to be. But I could move it, to any normal position.

"I never done like that before," she breathed. "Jest small ailin'."

"You're a healer, all right," I said. "And a prophetess, too, from what I saw at the dice table. You know what a Psi personality is?" I asked her. "Say, what is your name, anyway?"

"Pheola," she said. "Yes, I've heard of them," she said.

"You're one," I told her. "You can heal many people."

She shook her head. "Only could do it because I love you, Billy Joe," she said.

"We'll teach you," I promised her. "Would you like to learn? You've heard of the Lodge, haven't you?"

"Lordy!" she gasped.

"You're as good as in it," I told her. "Now tell me, what am I going to do tomorrow morning?"

She got up and started to pace the room, sniffling. "Why would you do that?" she said at length. "You are going to the bank, first thing. You've got all that money. It's thousand dollar bills! And you're writing on them." She frowned at me, sniffling again. "Do I really see it?" she asked. "Is that right?"

"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 Washington brass got me carte blanche before banking hours at the Tahoe bank that supplied the Sky Hi Club with its cash.

Working with the cashier, 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 cocktail 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 glasses 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 pass!" 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 "Pass" to "Don't Pass" 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 glasses to the floor. Most of them shattered when they struck the real wood planks, splashing 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 crap-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 crap 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 crap-stick, and the dart struck Pheola in the left hand. She screeched a little and grabbed at the needle-prick 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