I used the excuse of straightening up the stack to get a touch, myself. I could have done it visually, of course, or I could have straightened them up with TK, but touch helps my grip. I took a good look at the door to the main casino, a heavy job of varnished native cedar. Just to show him, I turned my back on the bar, leaning against it with one foot on the brass rail. The lift was as clean as I've ever managed. Anger, fear, any strong emotion, is a big help. They came up all together, staying in a stack, and I could perceive that they hung in the air behind me, a good foot clear of the bar, and about twenty feet from the door to the casino. In a smug show of control, I dealt the cartwheels off the top of the stack, one at a time, and fired them hard. Each one snapped away from the hovering stack, like a thrown discus. My perception was of the best. Each coin knifed into the soft cedar of the door, burying itself about halfway. My best sustained lift, I suppose is about two hundred times the weight of a silver dollar. But with the lift split by the need to keep the stack together, about twenty gees was all the shove I gave the cartwheels. Still, you might figure out how fast those cartwheels were traveling after moving twenty feet across the bar at an acceleration of twenty gees.
Smythe gasped. I doubted he had ever seen better, even in the controlled conditions of Lodge Meeting. "A little something to remember me by," I said, as I opened the silver-studded door. "Now let's see the boss."
"You're a TK bruiser," he said, impressed. "If you hit Barney's eyes like that, he's a Blind Tom for fair."
"Hardly," I sniffed. "You ought to know that no respectable TK would lay a lift on a retina. I just squeezed off a couple of small arteries. He's back in business already, I'd say."
Had I mentioned the rustic decor of the Sky Hi Club? When Las Vegas had deteriorated to the point where it would turn most stomachs, the better clubs migrated up among the tall pines, along the shores of Lake Tahoe. And in place of the dated chromium glitter of Vegas, they had reached way back to the "Good old days" for styling. The Sky Hi Club was typical. The outside was all hand-hewn logs. The inside had a low, rough-beamed ceiling, and a sure-enough genuine wood floor. The planks were random-width, tree nailed to the joists. Even the help was dressed up like a lot of cow-pokes, whatever cow-pokes were.
This ersatz ranch-house was owned by two completely unlovelies. Peno Rose, who had used his political leverage to get me on the job, I had known since he'd been a policy number runner on the lower East Side. His partner, Simonetti, was something else, but somehow I wasn't looking forward to meeting him any more than I was to seeing Rose again.
I guess it's the filth within these croupier types that makes them surround themselves with the aseptic immaculacy of iridium and glass. Their office was in a penthouse perched on the slanting roof shakes of the casino. It was big as a squash court, and as high and as square. Every wall was glass. It couldn't have been in greater contrast to the contrived hominess of the casino if they'd thought about it for a year. Then, for the last twist, the furnishings were straight out of the old Southwest—Navajo rugs, heavy, Spanish oak desks, and a pair of matching couches or divans of whole steer leather stretched over oak frames.
Peno Rose came quickly toward me the moment Fowler Smythe showed me into the office, spurs jingling. "Hey! There he is! The boy they had to rule off the track! How's a boy, Lefty? Long time no see." He had his hand stuck way out ahead of him. His sharp, dried-out features repelled me twice as much as they had ten years before. That hatchet face of his was gashed with what he thought was a smile. I've seen sharks with a pleasanter gape. Naturally, I didn't take his hand.