Vegas Knights (5 page)

 
 

CHAPTER FIVE
 

I sat back down on the bed. "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "Don't play dumb with me. Your friend here started making drinks disappear and reappear, and then he started levitating over the couch he'd been sleeping on."

  "Oh, that," I blushed. "He's an amateur stage magician. Sometimes he gets carried away."

  The woman cocked her head at me. She gave me a look like my mother used to, the one that could see right through me.

  "Don't kid a kidder," she said. "You're wasting my time, and it makes you look like a jackass."

  I gritted my teeth and put my head in my hands. When Bill woke up, I was going to kill him. We'd gone through this over and over while we planned our trip out here, and Professor Ultman had drilled it into our heads over and over again. Magic was the greatest secret left in the world, and before he'd agreed to take us on as students, we'd had to swear that we would keep it that way.

  Now, in one drunken night, Bill had blown it.

  "Hey," the woman said, her voice soft and almost kind, "it's not the end of the world."

  I looked up at her and shook my head. Then I looked over at Bill and said, "You dumb bastard."

  When I turned back to the woman, she had her hand out. "Let's start over," she said. "I'm Powaqa Strega. Call me Powi."

  I shook her hand. It was warm and soft. "That's an unusual name."

  "My father's Italian, and my mother's Hopi Indian." She waved the explanation off with the resignation of someone who'd run through it a million times. "How about you?"

  "Jackson Wisdom."

  "There's an ironic last name."

  I faked a smile. "Nice. I've never heard that one before."

  "Any relation to Luke Wisdom?"

  My fake smile melted away. "Why?"

  "Ah," Powi said. "That explains a lot."

  "I'm not here to see him," I said. "Bill and I are here on spring break."

  Powi gave me an understanding nod. "Not a very close relation then."

  I shrugged. "I haven't seen him in years."

  "He's playing at Bootleggers four nights a week," she said. "He wouldn't be hard to find."

  "I don't know if I'll have the time. Weren't you about to run me out of town?"

  Powi smirked. "It doesn't work like that. I'm not part of the magic machine around here. I'm just trying to do you and your friend over there a favor."

  "By ruining our good thing?"

  She glanced over at the still-snoring Bill. "I think you can manage that all by yourselves."

  "What do you want then?"

  Powi crossed her arms. "I've seen this happen before. It's never pretty. I just thought I'd try to save you two some grief. Gambling and magic don't mix."

  "They seemed to go together just fine last night."

  I got up to grab myself a glass of water and a couple ibuprofen.

  "It won't last," she said, calling after me. "It never does. You think you've got it all figured out, but you have no idea what you're doing or who you're dealing with."

  "So enlighten me," I called back as I swallowed the painkillers.

  "Do you think you're the only people in the world who know how to use magic? I mean, real magic. Not that stagecraft stuff."

  Honestly, I hadn't really thought about it. Most of the time, it did seem like Bill and I were alone in the world with Professor Ultman, like a couple of the last Jedi knights training under an old East Indian version of Yoda.

  "Of course not," I said, "but it's not like there's a Facebook fan page or a national convention, right?"

  She said nothing.

  I walked back into the room and sat down in the chair across the table from her. My head had started to clear a bit, although I desperately needed a hot shower, and I could see in the light streaming in through the window that I'd been right. She was gorgeous.

  "Right?" I said.

  "It's never billed as that," she said. "But anytime you get a group of magicians together, it's close enough. And Vegas is the convention capital of the world."

  I rubbed my head, confused. "You mean stage magicians? Like Siegfried and Roy? Or Penn and Teller?"

  Powi nodded.

  "But those guys just do tricks. My dad taught me all sorts of stage magic when I was a kid. It's nothing like the real thing."

  Powi gaped at me. "Luke Wisdom is your dad?"

  I froze, then nodded. Much as I might have wanted to, I found I couldn't deny I was my father's son. I glanced over at Bill, grateful he was out cold.

  "Wow," she said. "I'd figured he was a distant cousin or an uncle. But your dad? Really?"

  "Ever since I was born. What's so strange about that?"

  She squirmed in her chair. "It's just that, well, you're at least part black, right? And Luke Wisdom is as white as they come."

  "My mother was Louisiana Creole. I take after her."

  "Clearly."

  "Hey."

  She narrowed her eyes at me. "No offense. Now that you mention it, I do see some resemblance. Mostly around the nose and the lips. Maybe the cheekbones and the eyes."

  "Tell me about the magicians."

  She smiled and leaned forward in her chair, warming to the subject. "It's a natural cover, isn't it? If you can do real magic, pretend to be someone who fakes it. That way, if anyone ever spots you, you can just claim it was a trick that they haven't yet managed to figure out."

  A thought struck me. I couldn't be sure whether it was my hangover or the ramifications of that thought that was making me queasy. "Aren't there an awful lot of stage magicians already in Las Vegas?" I asked.

  "Now you're catching on," Powi said. "Why do you think that is?"

  I took a shot in the dark. "Gathering together for the betterment of humanity?"

  Powi reached out and caressed my cheek. Despite the way she mocked me, I enjoyed the contact far more than I wanted to let on. "So adorable," she said. "You think Las Vegas was built for the betterment of humanity."

  "What's your theory?" I asked, trying to strip any hostility from my voice.

  "It's so they can keep an eye on each other. It's comforting to know where your enemies are when you need to find them."

  "That's insane."

  She shrugged. "What part of magic isn't insane?"

  "All of it," I said. "That's the stigma that surrounds magic – that it's the product of demonic pacts or other crazy things – but it's nothing close to the truth. Using your mojo is simply the conscious manipulation of the quantum state of things. By taking control of an altering probability, we can make things happen that seem magical, but every bit of the process can be explained with science."

  "They teach you that sort of thing in college these days?"

  I shrugged. "We're part of a secret degree program in magic studies through the University of Michigan's Residential College. They call it 'trans-quantum postulating,' but it's really all about figuring out how to do magic."

  Powi made a face. "I learned magic on my mother's knee, and she had it taught to her by her mother, my Grandma Mamaci. They never mentioned anything about quantum mechanics."

  "For most folks, it's like a computer. You don't have to understand how it works to be able to use it. You just need to know which buttons to push and when."

  "Whatever you say, but I didn't come here for a lecture from Professor Not A Clue."

  "No, you came here to drop off Bill and chase us out of town."

  "Your friend there's just lucky I'm the one who found him showing off like that. Some other magicians might have taken him for a ride into the desert, handed him a shovel, and told him to start digging."

  "We didn't do anything wrong," I said. The lie tasted horrible on my tongue.

  Powi sat back in her chair and spread out her arms. "You used magic to cheat a casino."

  "Ask anyone." I smirked. "There's no such thing as magic."

  "Trans-quantum postulation then. What you did was wrong."

  "We just played a little blackjack."

  "Call it whatever you like. A polite robbery is still robbery."

  I scoffed at that. "Isn't that what the casinos do here every day? Look at this place. It's built on the wallets of people who can't do math. Come to Vegas and win big, right? But these places only run games that give the house a huge edge. There's nothing fair about it."

  Powi put up her hands. "Fine," she said. "I tried. I did more than I had to. More than I should have. You don't want to listen to me, it's your problem, right? Not mine."

  I stood up and gestured toward the door. "Sounds right to me. We're big boys. We'll get along fine."

  She patted me on the cheek. "Vegas isn't a town for boys, no matter how big they are. The grown-ups run this place."

  She headed for the door and let herself out. As she left, she turned back to say one last thing. "Have a good life. Here's hoping I never see you and your friend over there again."

  As soon as the door shut, I went over to shake Bill awake. He kept snoring away. I gave up and decided to get cleaned up.

  By the time I was done, Bill had woken up. He lay there on the bed, moaning in pain.

  "Have a good time?" I asked.

  He rolled over on his back and grinned through his groan. "It was awesome," he said. "I think."

  I shook my head at him. "You blew it, brother."

  "Hey," said Bill, "you were the one who blew chunks all over the patio. I was the one who ran off with the two hotties."

  "And passed out on them. And slept it off at the Thunderbird for eight hours. And started doing magic in front of strangers when you woke up."

  "Oh, yeah." A lopsided smile toppled across Bill's face. "That."

  I frowned at him. "You can't do that. We promised Professor Ultman we'd keep it on the down low."

  "I think we also promised him we wouldn't do anything stupid with it, like going to Las Vegas."

  That one burned, but I refused to acknowledge it. "What do you think's going to happen if someone spots us doing magic?"

  "Oh, come on. It's not like the Feds are going to break down our door and haul us off to Area 51 for medical experiments. This isn't
E.T."

  "The woman who hauled you back to the room said it would be worse."

Bill smiled. "A woman, eh? Was she hot?"

  "That's not the point."

  "So she was, huh?"

  "Focus, would you? She said that Vegas is full of magicians."

  Bill snorted. "Sure, the kind that do card tricks and saw ladies in half."

  "The real kind. Like us. Only they probably know what they're doing."

  "Aw, don't be like that."

  Bill sat up and grinned. He wasn't hungover at all. I hated him for that.

  "We did fantastic last night," he said. "You were amazing. This town is ours. Nothing can stop us!"

  I unclenched my fists. "She was probably just trying to scare us off."

  "Right! That's it. Afraid we'd come after her casino next."

  I stared out the window. We'd come around to look down at the Strip again. In the bare, blazing sunlight, the place had lost a lot of its dazzle. If you looked closely, you could see the cracks in the facades. The casinos seemed like the girls Bill sometimes brought back to our dorm room in East Quad – not as pretty as they might have appeared the night before.

  "She's not the problem, brother. It's you."

  "Hey, now–"

  "She wasn't the one who got drunk and risked exposing everything."

  "You got pretty loaded yourself last night."

  I grimaced to admit that. "But I got back to the room and didn't do any harm to our plan."

  I turned back toward Bill. "Seriously, brother. If the casinos think we're cheating them, they won't care how we're doing it. It won't matter if we used science or magic or bribes. They'll come down on us hard. We could wind up in jail – if we're lucky."

  "All right." Bill put up his hands in surrender. "You got me. You're right. I screwed up. I'm sorry. I won't do it again."

  I nodded in grim acceptance. "I think maybe we ought to just head back to Ann Arbor. It ain't safe here."

  "Aw, no," Bill said. "It's spring break! It's too damned cold back in Michigan."

  "Hey, with what we raked in last night, we can grab a flight to someplace else warm: Padre Island, Lake Havasu, Miami Beach, Cancun. And we'd still have plenty left over."

  Bill waved that off. "For what? Beer money? Textbooks? You'd seriously be satisfied with that?"

  I stared back out the window. I didn't want to let on, but Powi had scared me. If half of what she said was true, doing magic in the casinos was far more dangerous than we'd guessed. And Bill had shaken my faith in him.

  "Come on, Jackson," he said. "Michigan is the most expensive public university in the world. I know you've got some grants, but you're covering the rest of your expenses with student loans. You – or your grandmother – have to pay all those back someday. Wouldn't you like to never have to worry about that again?"

  He was hitting me as low as he could, and he knew it. I hated the fact that I'd be so far in debt when I got out of school, and it made me ill that my grandma would be on the hook for it too. The fact that Bill didn't have those worries made them burn that much hotter.

  I needed the money. He didn't. He was doing this for the thrills.

  "OK." I nodded. "We stick it out. But no more partying then."

  Bill threw himself back on the bed and groaned. "You take all the fun out of winning."

  "Seriously," I said. "If we're here for a job, to work the casinos, then that's what we do. We take it seriously. When we're done, we can go someplace else and party until our families figure out we never went back to school. Then we can start back fresh in the fall."