I wasn't exactly shadowed, but I knew somebody had his eye on me as I wandered about the crowded casino, looking for Sniffles. As far as I could make out, she had vamoosed without trying to hustle another sucker. Her percentage of my winnings had certainly been a disappointment to her.
At last I went down the ersatz wooden steps into the neon-gashed night and started across the nearly deserted main drag toward the motel where I had registered. A powerful turbine howled as a car pulled away from the curb, perhaps a hundred yards up the way. His lights came on and snapped up to bright. I had a perfect flash of PC—I do have moments of it, no matter what the Lodge thinks. The car was going to take a dive into the fountain pool in front of my motel. But it sure didn't act like it. I froze in the middle of the road, hearing rubber scream as the driver floored the throttle and hurled the automobile right at me. He might as well have been on tracks. There was no place to go—I was in the middle of a six-lane boulevard, and could never make either curb before he ran me down.
This is when it pays to be a perceptive. I've talked to many TK's about how they visualize their lifts. We all conceive of it differently. With me a real strain is like shining a bright beam of light on the spot you're lifting.
Be glad, Wally Bupp, I had time to tell myself. Be glad for a mechanical mind. Where do you lift four thousand pounds of car aimed right at you? Well, there is a small valve, can't weigh half an ounce, lightly spring-loaded, that is in the power-steering mechanism. I seared a lift at it. You know what happened.
The feedback of the power-steering wrenched the wheel from the driver's hand—it was ten times as strong as he was, dragging its power as it did from a four-hundred horsepower shaft turning 30,000 rpm. The car careened and skidded across the curb. It took out a small marble rail around the fountain pool and dived in, still screaming rubber. The fountain went over with a crash and then the racket dwindled off in the shriek of twisted buckets. The turbine had gotten what for in the collision.
I didn't hang around to see what had happened to the driver. He was just some heavy who had the job of rubbing me out. But I did seek another haven. If they knew me that well, I'd never be safe where I had stashed my suitcase.
There was a 'copter squatting at the Sky Hi's ramp. I jumped for it and had him drop me toward the outskirts of the town of Lake Tahoe, and then walked a few blocks, mostly in circles to see if I were being followed, before darting into a fairly seedy motel a couple blocks off the main drag.
My room was on the third floor of the flea-bag. Part of the place was only two stories high. The door at the end of my corridor opened out onto the roof. When I had calmed down, I stepped through the door into the cool of the desert night.
The gravel on the built-up roof crunched in the darkness under my feet as I walked cautiously to the parapet and looked over its edge to the hunk of desert that stretched away toward Reno, out behind the motel. The third story, behind me, cut off the neon glare from the Strip and left the place in inky darkness. There was silence and invisibility out behind the motel.