Without warning she dragged down her winnings and leaned close to me, sniffling. "You'll get all wet!"
I looked around, seeing a waiter near me. He had just served drinks to the rear, half of the table, to the gamblers nearest the dealers. His tray was still half-full. This was the moment. It was a generalized sort of lift, the kind of thing that qualifies a TK for the Thirty-third degree. I heaved at the thousand-dollar bills I had had marked in the morning, without the faintest idea of where they were. The tray lurched in the waiter's hand, throwing glasses to the floor. Most of them shattered when they struck the real wood planks, splashing whisky and mix on our legs.
I looked across the table and grinned at Fowler Smythe. His scowl had an awful lot of forehead to work on. "What the devil!" I could read his lips say over the racket. But Barney, the stick-man who'd felt my Blackout, caught on a lot quicker.
I was about to freeze him with a clamp on his thyroid. It's just as effective as wrapping your fingers around the throat. But Pheola upset the apple cart.
She grabbed my right arm, so newly powerful. "No, Billy Joe!" she cried. "I don't want to die!"
"Who's dying?" I snapped.
"He's shooting me!" she gasped.
Shoot? With what? I had one terrified moment—what to lift? What was aimed at her? At the last possible moment I saw it. His crap-stick was a hollow tube, and he was raising it toward me, not toward Pheola. I'd heard of things like that—a gas-powered dart gun. Silent, and shooting a tiny needle with a nerve poison in grooves cut in its tip.
I lifted, but half in panic. Fowler Smythe squeezed his trigger and the tiny dart leaped unseen across the crap layout. My lift had been way off—it should have thrown the stick toward the ceiling, where no one would have been hurt. Instead it merely twitched the crap-stick, and the dart struck Pheola in the left hand. She screeched a little and grabbed at the needle-prick with her fingernails.