Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [30]
“How?” The other man’s face was a mix of concern and confusion as he stared not at his partner but at their stoic captive. “I didn’t make a sound.”
The other man gestured. “You wearing anything electronic?”
Shutting the door to Threerivers’s room behind him, the intruder considered the question. “Only a watch. And my cell phone is off.”
“But charged,” replied his partner. “He probably sniffed it. Same way he does the machines.” The small, hard pressure in the middle of Threerivers’s back pressed sharply inward. “Didn’t you?”
Threerivers shrugged indifferently as they started down the hall. It was late, and none of the other guests was around. Hopefully he and his new companions would encounter a maid or someone checking hotel security. The hotel’s main building had only two floors and was situated right on the sand. Right now the beach would likely be completely deserted. That was not good.
“Cell phones stink of spoiled fruit juice,” he murmured absently. “A watch hardly smells at all.”
“Freak,” snapped the man who had been concealing himself in Threerivers’s room.
Bull replied in Cheyenne, which neither of his captors understood. “There’s no need for this,” he insisted as they walked him down the hall in the direction of the dark, empty beach and the wide Atlantic beyond. “Whatever they’re paying you, I can add zeros to it.”
“Sorry, brother,” responded the one holding the pistol. “It’s all been explained to us. There is too much at stake here.”
“What? One guy’s few winnings?”
“Few millions, is how I hear it,” declared the other man. “It’s not the money, though. You know that. You know what it is. The elders told you.”
“Maybe I don’t.” Threerivers was defensive. “Why don’t you explain it to me again?”
“All those hundreds of millions pouring into reservation casinos every year,” the man with the gun told him. “The salvation of dozens of tribes. The basis for the preservation and the resurrection of the pride and culture of the Indian nations. Everybody’s content with the arrangement: the white folks who happily gamble their money away and the tribes that gladly collect it. Then you come along. An Indian who can smell out a winning jackpot. What happens if the white media get hold of a story like that?”
“I’m the only one who can do it,” Threerivers told him.
“Maybe,” admitted the hired assassin. “A lot of elders and council members sure hope so. But try and tell the white man that. If they think there’s one of us who can put the fix on slot machines, they’ll start wondering if there are others. And if they start wondering if there are others, they’re liable to stop coming to the casinos on the reservations.”
“I haven’t been on a rez since I left New York for London,” Threerivers protested. “I haven’t cost one tribe an Indian nickel in the last year and a half.”
“You’re too dangerous to have around,” the other man pointed out. “If anyone, anywhere, finds out about what you can do, the news will get back to the States. And then we have the problem. Once the wendigo is out, you can’t put him back in his hole.” He gestured downward. “Mind the stairs.”
Threerivers turned left instead of right. Before they could question his decision, they found themselves confronted by a waiter wheeling a hot room-service dinner for two toward a second-floor room. Threerivers had turned that way because he had smelled the electric food warmer approaching. He was counting on the fact that the assassin would not risk shooting the waiter and that the pistol he was holding was not equipped with a silencer. When he made his break, darting forward and around the startled server, he gave the food cart a hard shove sideways. Spicy Brazilian food went flying, the waiter yelled in surprise, someone stuck her head out a door to see what was happening, and Threerivers was sprinting for the service exit. Whenever he checked into a new hotel, one of the first things he did was mark the location of alternative exits.
They didn’t catch him. By