Trickster Read Online Free

dragged his chair back over without standing up and sat next to me like a dog that had just been kicked.
    “Heller in Jersey,” I said slowly, unhappy. Resigned. A good idea to get the hell out of Manhattan. I looked at Mags. “Let’s get out of the city for a few days and go join the circus.”

3

    P laying cards at one of Heller’s parties, room 37 of the Starlight Hotel—a desolate hole on Route 1/9 in New Jersey—I felt hot and weak. I’d been bleeding myself a lot, and half the cash piled up in front of me on the table was speckled with my blood: singles, gassed up to look like twenties, fifties, hundreds. Most of the blood boiling away as I cast, leaving behind crumpled dollar bills. I was pushing it, but desperate times called for desperate measures. The booze wasn’t helping; I was thin and half the liquid pushing through my veins now was liquor, light brown, searing.
    The room was crowded. Heller lived his whole life this way, moving around, motel to motel, always seedy and off the highways, always cheap. He set up shop and threw a party. His customers came to score some weed or coke, meth or ecstasy, and they brought friends. Working girls showed up like magic,like fucking magic, like there was a wireless network only whores could see that announced things like drugged-up assholes in a motel. More likely, Heller passed the word for a cut of the action. Music played softly, a throb at the edge of perception, bubbling under the fuzz of voices. The room had been transformed. The beds removed, tossed into the parking lot. Tables brought in for cards, chairs set up. Heller went all out for his High Rollers, who followed his game. The whores followed the High Rollers, and the Tricksters, we followed everyone. That was the natural food chain.
    People moved constantly. As I sat there trying to concentrate through the distant pounding of surf in my head, the crowd beyond swirled and shifted. Girls in short skirts and torn stockings, their makeup reapplied so many times this one night that they looked like ghouls, their hair stiff and their hands papery from hand sanitizer. Guys who didn’t blink, their pupils the size of pins, still nodding at something they’d heard an hour before, leather jackets steamy and skin red and angry. The swells, in their ugly, expensive suits. The dealers, in their sneakers and jeans and fanny packs. It all swirled around. It smelled like feet in the place. Smoke and sweat and vomit and blow jobs all swirled together into something you didn’t want to breathe in.
    The Bar Kids worked the room on an honest tip. Or semi-honest. They ran around, taking orders. They were Heller’s kids, recruits. Mostly Hispanicand Arabic kids from his home neighborhood. They came with him and did waiter service and made more money in three nights than they could in a month at any straight part-time job. Then on Monday they were back in school, tired and wired, but flush. Everyone left the Bar Kids alone and let them earn their tips and steal as much as they could without being obnoxious about it.
    And in the midst of it all were my people. Idimustari . Some of us were just as badly off, just as tweaked out, and just as desperate. But mostly we were better off. A little sallow and anemic, maybe, but clear-eyed and sharp, our little weasel noses twitching, smelling money. All the Normals were our marks. If you couldn’t smell the gas in the air, if the Words didn’t make you prick up your ears, heart pounding, then we worked you, and worked you hard. Some of us worked the whores. A Charm Cantrip was good for a lot of things. A freebie, if you didn’t mind being ninth in line that hour. Bleed a bit more and put a few more words into it and she’d be tithing her take up to you all night long, slipping you half of what she got every time she went to the bathroom with some guy.
    Some of us worked the High Rollers. Like me and Mags, playing cards. Prick your thumb under the greasy table and you could win