The sawbones was there in three minutes. I guided the tip of his hypodermic into a vein in her right arm, the one that still had blood coursing through it. He depressed the piston, pumping the antidote into her bloodstream. Little by little I let up on the clamp on her wounded left arm, dribbling the poisoned blood into her system, so that the antidote could react with it gradually. She stayed unconscious.
Then I felt it. Her heart muscle tugged back at my lift. It was struggling to beat on its own. I matched my lifts to its ragged impulses, feeling it steady to a normal seventy-two as the antidote took effect.
Her eyes opened at last, and we stopped respiration. "Billy Joe!" she smiled. She was back from the dead.
In an hour we had returned to the motel. She was as good as new, but badly shaken.
"I still don't know what happened," she said.
I shrugged. "Smoke screen, Pheola. Every time there's a run of luck on a crap table, somebody yells 'TK!' And I suppose there's a number of TK's who aren't in the Lodge, and who figure to make a killing here and a killing there by tipping the dice. But any decent TK, even a Fowler Smythe, can spot them.
"There was TK in this, but not tipping dice. Smythe is a skunk. He's no Twenty-fifth, or he wouldn't have any need to go crooked. He saw a chance to make a killing. He suggested it to Rose, who fell for it and went along. Rose decided to steal Simonetti's half of the business from his partner with Smythe's help. It was no more complicated than smuggling thousand dollar bills off the table in false bottoms of trays that drinks were being served on. Smythe was using TK to lift the bills into those false bottoms, well screened by the trays from the TV monitors. Barney was in on it, of course. And after the joint had lost enough dough that way, Rose and Simonetti would have had to sell out. Only the buyer would have been a dummy for Rose and Smythe, using money Smythe had lifted off the tables.
"The whole TK business was just a smoke screen to keep matters confused," I concluded.
"How come they dared send for a TK like you? Why weren't they scared you'd catch them, just like you did?"