Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,81

have made him sound goofy-looking. Up close, he was anything but. I could feel the cold determination in the lidless, slit-pupiled eyes, and, long as it was, his body looked thick and solid with muscle. It was easy to imagine him blowing me away, then swallowing the body whole and crawling around with a Billy-shaped lump in the middle of him.

“You aren’t as clever away from the poker table,” he said at last. “After I shoot you, Sylvester and I will simply drive away.”

“A’marie!” I yelled. “Hit it!”

To my relief, the horn of Sylvester’s pickup blared. She’d managed to sneak around to it while its owner and the snake were focused on me.

“It will only take her a second to trash the ignition,” I said. “Then you and Sly over there will go down in Old People history as the dumb-asses who tipped off the human race that your kind are real. Is that what you want?”

He kept staring. The snake face was impossible to read.

“You better hurry and make up your mind,” I said. “The cops are going to show up soon.”

“How do you wish to proceed?” he asked.

“Give me the Lugers.”

“So you can shoot me?”

I gestured with the letter opener. “This isn’t much of a knife, but if I’d wanted to, I still could have jammed it into Sly’s neck. And yours. But never mind. I probably wouldn’t give me the guns, either. Just drop the mags, and get the rounds out of the chambers.”

He did, and I sighed and started to relax. That was when something jerked tight around my right ankle and jerked my leg out from under me.

As I fell, I saw how he’d looped the end of his tail around under the parked cars to sneak it up behind me. Then I banged my head on a fender, and it clacked my teeth together.

Epunamlin dropped the Lugers, lunged at me, and reached with his wooden hands. I had a hunch it was to lift me up to make it easier to wrap his tail around me. I screamed, stiffened my hand, and stabbed my fingertips into his eye.

He let out a rasping screech and jerked backward. The grip on my ankle tightened to the point of agony for an instant, but then loosened. I kicked free and floundered backward.

Epunamlin didn’t follow. He stayed where he was and clapped one hand over his eye.

“Are we done now?” I panted.

“Yes. I think you scratched the brille.”

“The what?”

“The membrane that covers my eye. It hurts. I need to see my vet.”

I smiled. “Well, if you’ll just stop being an asshole, we can take care of that.”

We collected Sylvester, told him the fight was over, then hurried to the truck. A’marie climbed out of the cab, and Epunamlin looked her over with his good eye. “What was she going to use to incapacitate the truck?” he asked.

“She was supposed to have a screwdriver or something,” I said. “But I didn’t see one during the second I was inside the trailer. You just have to give us credit for having the right idea.”

Sylvester gave A’marie a hangdog look. “I really didn’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“Sylvester,” she said, “you wrecked my car.”

He broke down crying. She sighed, hugged him, and told him it was all right. Epunamlin and I traded looks of disbelief.

Then we hurried them through their Dr. Phil moment, and we all piled into the cab. With the modifications, Sylvester’s king-sized seat took up most of the space, but there was room for the rest of us if we didn’t mind the squeeze. Figuring that if he and Epunamlin still meant to kill me, there wasn’t much I could do about it now, I gave back the scarves. They tied them on, and I wondered which was really less conspicuous, a truck with a weeping willow man for a driver or one that looked like it was driving itself.

We got out of there before the cops showed up and had a chance to take a look at either. Then I explained my plan.

No one else who’d heard it had offered to put me up for a Nobel Prize, and Sly and Epunamlin were just as unimpressed. The snake started to tell me everything that was wrong with it, and I cut him off.

“Tough,” I said, “it’s what we’re doing. And I do mean we. Because I’m drafting you.”

They thought about it for a second, and then Epunamlin said, “Agreed. We believed our moment had come, and