Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,82
perhaps it really has. Just not quite the way we imagined.”
“Great. You can celebrate making the team by explaining how you tracked us down. I’m guessing the Pharaoh. White and gold are his team colors.”
“Yes,” Epunamlin said. “He told us he’d found out you and A’marie were sneaking out together during the day, so he had his servant plant a transponder on her car.”
“Then he gave you the receiver and the matching scarves,” I guessed, “along with a pep talk about how if you just killed me, it would get rid of Timon, too.”
“Essentially, yes.”
“Are you mad at us?” asked Sly. He sounded like a little kid despite his deep, slow voice.
I sighed. “I probably should be, but I’m not. How would I even know I was in hobbit land if somebody wasn’t trying to kill me, or mess with me somehow?”
“‘Hobbit land?’” repeated Epunamlin. “Are you an admirer of Professor Tolkien’s oeuvre?”
“Sure,” I said, stretching a point for the sake of male bonding. “You?”
“There was a time when I considered changing my name to Smaug.”
I didn’t tell him I didn’t know who that was.
Sylvester dropped A’marie and me off in the alley, and we sneaked back into the Icarus the same way we’d gotten out. She begged a passkey from another member of the Tuxedo Team so I could get back into my room.
“Well,” she said, “I need to change, too. And then spread the word.”
“I really am sorry about your car,” I said.
“It wasn’t in the best shape,” she said. “But it was the nicest thing I had. But if you can make this work, it’ll be worth it.” She took my hand, gave it a squeeze, then left me standing beside the service stairs.
I groped my way up and made it back to my room without anybody else trying to whack me. I showered the smell of the bay off me, dressed, and took a couple of my Tylenol 3’s to kill the ache in my head and feet. I could have asked Red to do it. By then, the mojo tank was filling up again. But I was liable to need it for other things.
When I was ready to go out, I had to decide who to track down first. I decided to let anger be my guide and find the Pharaoh.
I found him playing billiards.
The pool, snooker, and billiards room, with one table for each, was on the first floor, and candle-lit like the rest of the hotel. The Pharaoh looked better than the last time I’d seen him. Somehow he’d reattached his head and leg, or Davis had done it for him. Fresh bandages, looking very white on top of the dirty, ragged old ones, wrapped the joins. He also had a steel head brace, and extra plastic splints to immobilize the leg. He was sucking on a cheroot and sitting in a wheelchair.
That all makes it sound like he shouldn’t have been able to play. But magic made his cue float around and shoot on its own. As I came in, he made a semi-massé.
When he saw me, his shriveled lips quirked into a smile. “Billy,” he said in his high-class, jolly British voice. “Would you care to join me?”
I glared at him. “Listen, you son of a bitch.”
That brought Davis surging up out of his chair. But the Pharaoh lifted a hand to signal him that he didn’t need to kick my ass just yet.
“I take it that you not only survived your encounter with Epunamlin and Sylvester,” the mummy said, “you prevailed on them to disclose who set them on your trail.”
“Bingo,” I said.
“Then let me offer my sincere congratulations. I found myself quite uncharacteristically ambivalent about dispatching them in the first place. But it’s pointless to play unless one does one’s very best to win. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Here’s how it is,” I said. “You can take your best shot at me. But when you put somebody else in danger, that’s over the line. If you do it again, I’ll find those special jars of yours, break them, and piss all over what’s inside. Are we clear?”
“Entirely,” the Pharaoh said. “If I apologize, and agree to your stipulation, can we put the incident behind us?”
I hesitated. I still had mad in me that wanted to come out. But I realized that, like most of the time at the poker table, there was no advantage in letting it out. “I guess.”