Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,58
realized Davis was going to have trouble supporting the Pharaoh and pulling out his chair at the same time, so I got up and pulled it out for him. The mummy’s dry, sunken eyes shifted in my direction. “Thank you,” he said. Magic let him whisper even without lungs.
“Are you okay?” I asked. It was hands down the stupidest thing I’d ever said.
But he answered, “Yes, actually. I keep my life in jars, and as long as they’re intact, there’s not much anyone can do to me that can’t be mended. You’d think other sportsmen would work that out once they’ve known me for a while. But I suppose that some of us simply have a less… analytical approach to competition.”
Wotan glared.
Davis put the Pharaoh’s body in the chair and his head on the table in front of it, looking out at the rest of us. Then he went to sit with the rest of the spectators, and the mummy showed us he could still work his arms just fine. He put a cheroot between his head’s withered lips and lit it.
“That’s better,” he whispered. “The clock’s about to strike. Shall we begin?”
We did. With his head on the table, the Pharaoh didn’t have any trouble seeing the cards. But his smokes kept going out. He had to light them over and over again.
While I found out I had my own problems.
Gimble went all in early on. I called with ace-jack suited, and he turned over a pair of fours. A coin toss. I caught a second jack on the flop, but he made trips on the river, and then he was right back in it.
And after that, the cards kept running against me in one of the worst possible ways. I got my share of decent starting hands, but rarely improved on the streets afterward.
At a weaker table, it might not have mattered. I still had more chips than anybody else, and I could have used them to push other players off their hands. But not here. Not tonight. The others had all decided they needed to play back at me, and they did, whenever they had anything or just decided I didn’t. They kept forcing me to fold, and nibbled away at my stack.
I switched into rock mode while I tried to figure out what was the matter. Had I developed a tell? I didn’t think so. Although you can never really know unless somebody takes pity on you and warns you.
Were the cards marked, then, and everyone knew it but me? I looked for crimps and scratches. I didn’t find them.
But maybe somebody had used some kind of magic to mark them in a way I couldn’t see.
I limped in late position with king-ten. The flop missed me as usual, and when Leticia smiled and raised, I folded. Then, hoping it would do some good, I flashed the Thunderbird. It was just a flicker, the symbol hanging in the air one instant and gone the next. I hoped that would keep anybody else from noticing I’d used any mojo.
The backs of the cards I was mucking didn’t change. But one of the cards face up in the center of the table did. For a second, it changed from the nine of spades to the ten.
Except that really, it didn’t. I could feel it had been a ten all along, but magic made it look like something different.
Nobody else seemed to notice it blink back and forth. That was good. I wanted to figure out the whole scam before I tried to deal with it.
At the moment, I had it half worked out. Somebody was using illusion to turn what would have been good cards for me into bad ones. But he couldn’t know which cards helped me unless he also knew what I had in the pocket.
When I figured it out, I almost grinned. Because, like the gadget built into Gimble’s forearm and his suggestion that we signal one another, this part wasn’t really magical. It was the kind of cheating I’d learned to spot long before I ever heard of the Old People. Although I had to admit, I’d never caught anybody doing it exactly this way.
A careful, honest professional dealer sends the cards skimming just above the felt. Because if they fly any higher, somebody might catch a glimpse of the faces. Or some shiny object on the table could reflect them.
The Pharaoh had two shiny objects, a case for his cheroots and his lighter,