Trickster Read Online Free Page A

every hand. Be a little creative and lose every hand but somehow end up with the pot anyway. Go easy all night and no one would notice. They were all used to losing anyway.
    Some of us worked the dealers, some of us workedthe bodyguards, some of us worked the adventurers who’d found their way by accident. We all worked somebody .
    No one worked Heller. Heller was one of us. He was just organized . And the booze was free.
    This particular motel reminded me of my father, picking me up from Cub Scouts one night after I hadn’t seen him in months, kidnapping me. Literally. He was waiting outside the meeting and didn’t smile when he saw me, just gestured me over and told me to get in the car. I was excited, I was happy. Looking back now, I could see he was drunk. We drove for hours, hours and hours, and I gave up being happy halfway through and just sat glumly in the front seat.
    “Hey, hey,” the fat guy across the table from me barked, snapping his fingers at my face. “You fucking sleeping? It’s fifty bucks to you.”
    I blinked, my eyes feeling like they were shrouded in sandpaper, and made a show of looking at my cards. “You snap your fucking fingers at someone, they might get bitten off, Magilla.”
    I glanced up in time to see him grin and snap his fingers at me one more time. I nodded, letting my cards drop back down. I tossed a real fifty on the pile. “Call.”
    I was using a Glamour I’d learned a few years ago to win. It was a nifty little spell, compact and efficient, and didn’t need much gas to keep at a simmer, though I was keeping the wound on my left palm open under the table to feed it. The beauty of it was, you didn’t tryto make every card look like what you needed, or try to make every hand look like a winner. It was similar to a Charm Cantrip: You made everyone at the table think you won, and let them supply the details. They just saw whatever winning hand they preferred. It was elegant. Elegance was lost to most of us. Most of us learned rough spells that got the work done but took too long to say, wasted the gas with inefficient rambling. It didn’t take much to study the logic of it, the patterns, and find faster ways. Elegant ways.
    The bet went around again, and my mind wandered like smoke. There were six of us aside from the Bank. The Bank had been the only constant in the game since we’d gotten there, an old man with deep bags under his eyes, wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and paint-splattered work pants. He didn’t appear to be breathing. His big, spotted hands dished the cash in and out of the strongbox in front of him and he never twitched or blinked or seemed to care who won or lost.
    The rest of the game had been evolving. The current slate had been steady for about three hours:
    Fat Boy, who had a thick gold chain around his neck and a big gold ring on his left hand, thought he was bright because he kept ordering vodka on ice from the Bar Kid and letting it melt, untouched. Something he saw in a movie, staying sharp. He’d arrived recently, strutting about in his polo shirt and loafers, looking angry.
    The old woman with her hair like a cloud of unnaturally colored blond wire rising from her head had takenher seat at the same time I had, back in the misty past when I’d merely been dog-tired and desperate. Her lips were smeared almost purple, her eyes done up in a thick, dark blue mascara. She played with hundred-dollar bills that were crisp, unwrinkled, and uniformly dated from twenty-five years ago, extracted with ritualistic precision from what was apparently a tote bag full of them.
    The twitchy kid in the shit-brown leather coat and sunglasses who was five minutes from stroking out in front of us or going bust, whichever came first, had been a resident for a few hours.
    The unnaturally tan, thin gentleman in an Italian suit and a gold watch that flopped sinuously around his thin wrist, face half hidden behind huge round dark glasses, had logged six hours so far and