Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,63

like the one the Pharaoh dumped me in, only a lot more complicated. I’m guessing this is your world of dreams, and this particular piece of it is somebody dreaming about Monte Carlo. Or maybe a James Bond movie.”

“Very good.” Timon waved his hand. “That’s our host over there.”

He meant a little bald guy in black-rimmed glasses. He was sitting at a roulette table, but it didn’t look like he was placing any bets, talking to anybody, or even sipping the huge margarita that looked like he’d sneaked it in from a Viva Vallarta. His face sweaty and slack, he just stared at the spinning wheel and rattling, tumbling ball.

“Is he dreaming about losing?” I asked. “He doesn’t look like he’s having any fun.”

“His unconscious wanted to dream about something else entirely. But I thought a fellow gambler would enjoy these surroundings.”

“If you want me to enjoy my surroundings, just do something about your BO. You can cut that poor bastard loose.”

Timon scowled. “Your attitude… but that’s what we’re here to work on, isn’t it? All right, if you like, we’ll go to the permanent part of this place. That’s easier anyway.”

The casino spun away like water swirling down a toilet. For a moment, in the center of the whirl, the guy with the ugly glasses was standing on a driveway in front of the basketball hoop mounted on the garage. His mouth moved, though I couldn’t hear the words, and he pretended to shoot. A little girl was actually holding the ball, and, her round face squinting with concentration, she did her awkward best to copy the motion. But it all blinked away before I could see if she scored.

Now Timon and I were standing in a supermarket parking lot at the east end of Ybor City. There was marching-band music—a brassy version of some Latin pop song—playing somewhere down Seventh Avenue, and a different marching band in green and white uniforms forming up a few feet away from us. The band members all had the same build and the same face, like toy soldiers. It was only their instruments that made one different from the next.

“Climb aboard,” Timon said.

I looked around. He was clambering onto a gold and purple parade float. It didn’t seem possible that I’d missed it before. Maybe it really hadn’t been there.

I climbed up after him. He sat in the throne at the highest point on the thing. I found a place to stand beside the chair.

The drummers pounded out a cadence, and the marching band tramped out into the street. The float followed. It was the last thing in the parade. The big finish, like Santa on Thanksgiving. And as it neared the spectators crowded onto the sidewalks, they started going down on their knees.

“I thought,” said Timon, raising his voice so I could hear him over the band, “that perhaps you didn’t respect me as you should because you’d never seen the real me. You didn’t understand when I told you I’m a god.”

“First off,” I said, “I do respect you.” Well, his powers, anyway. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to do everything you say, even when my own judgment tells me different.”

“If you wanted my help to deceive the other players, you should have let me in on the scheme.”

“Is that what this is about? If we’d gone off somewhere private and talked, then staged an argument, the others would have been suspicious. Besides, the way we did it, you didn’t have to act. When you got upset, it was real.”

“It wasn’t your decision to make.”

I took a deep breath. Not a great idea since, even out in the open air, I was still inside his cloud of funk. “Look, I know you hate not being in total control. And I’m sorry if the way things happened worried you or made you feel dumb. But the trick worked. Gimble’s history. Isn’t that what’s important?”

“It’s not just the trick,” he said. “It’s everything.” He looked back out at the kneeling crowds. “I’m bored with this. Let’s make them livelier.”

The spectators jumped to their feet, stretched out their arms, and howled for his attention. Girls pulled up their shirts and flashed. Timon now had plastic beads in his hands, and he tossed them right and left. Jostling and shoving one another, people snatched them out of the air.

Timon turned his milky, seeping eyes on me and waited for a reaction.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I told him. “It’s