Page 6 of Soothsayer

I was in the right part of town for that.

Chapter Four

Back in the sixties and seventies, Colfax Avenue was the place to go in this city if you wanted to satisfy the four biological imperatives: feeding, fighting, fucking, and if you played your cards wrong, fleeing. You could do practically all of them at once if you went to the right bars. Those days were mostly gone now, washed away in the bubbly fervor of urban renewal, but there were still a few places around where a person could get in touch with their primitive side. I was jazzed with adrenaline, antsy and keyed up, and the only way I was going to work those bugs out of my system was with some serious exertion.

The easiest thing would be to find a professional to spend a few hours exhausting myself with, but sex was risky. The odds of looking into the other person’s eyes during the act were pretty high, and during periods of stress—physical, mental, or emotional—fate became a lot easier to see. I could have a normal conversation with someone and walk away knowing nothingmore than what they’d given me and maybe what they were thinking about having for dinner that night.

With sex, I almost always got information I didn’t want unless blindfolds were involved, and most of the working guys were too cautious to go that route without being inside a specialty club, which I had no interest in. I had seen way more kink, debauchery, poorly executed sadism, and downright criminal levels of horniness in my mind than I ever wanted. I was no white knight, but a lot of my childhood had been spent running away from people who would have taken advantage of me, and I had no desire to be one of them. Especially not sincehim.

Fine, so not sex. I bounced on the balls of my feet as I considered the envelope in my jacket pocket, the cut of my suit, and the odds that I’d be able to land a whale today. At the very least, I had the cash to get into the exchange, and at this hour I’d have plenty of time to find myself the right sort of player to attach myself to. Gambling it was.

There was an underground sports betting exchange not far from Marisol’s, housedliterallyunderground beneath a pub that had once been a famous strip club. The exchange catered to the professional crowd, people who made their living gambling. It also acted as a hangout for whatever Irish mobsters happened to be passing through Denver on their way to more profitable cities.

The house controlled the doors, and if you wanted in to play, you paid a flat fee of five hundred dollars. Whether you made the money back or not was your business, not theirs—the house didn’t run any bets. Once you were inside, it was all about working the crowd. In-play betting was huge, and knowing the game was only half as important as knowing how to get your opponent to make the bets you wanted him to.

I sauntered down the street, keeping my walk slow as I passed the unmarked police car. The authorities tended to stare at mewhether I was breaking a law or not thanks to my ink, so I generally made myself as innocuous a target as possible.

It had worked so far. Even with all of the shit that had gone down in my life: the drugs, the fights, the kidnappings, I had only ever been picked up by the police once, on suspicion of soliciting. Never mind that I’d only stripped off my shirt to staunch the blood flowing from a head wound at the time. I’d been a young man covered in tattoos, with no discernible gang affiliation and half-naked to boot—had to be a prostitute! The fact that it was in rural backwater Louisiana and not New Orleans made no difference. I’d gotten out in no time, but still?cells were not something I enjoyed, no matter who the owner was.

There was the pub. I walked behind the building, past a man who grunted “Morning” to me as he sprayed the alley wall with a hose to clean off last night’s piss and vomit, and down a narrow flight of metal stairs to a solid black door with the number 8 painted in small white letters in the corner. The Magic Eight Ball. So cute. I knocked, and the door opened up a crack. I was in luck; Phin was the bouncer today.

“Cillian,” he said approvingly, looking down on me from his hulking height. The Irish places tended to give me the benefit of a doubt, thanks to Mom’s creative naming skills. “Here to play?”

“I’ve got the feeling it’s a good day for it,” I replied.

“Not many games going yet. So far’s just some footie, but we’ll have baseball up in a wee moment, and if you can stay until evening, it’ll be American football.” He leaned in close. “Got a good mark for you, someone you could make your whole day with if you don’t mind a few hurt feelings later on.”

Ah, this was the other reason I loved Phin—he understood my situation. He didn’t know the details, didn’t want to, but he had a touch of Sight himself. Nothing like mine, but what Phinwas good at was connections. Profitable connections, and if you treated him right, he wouldn’t steer you wrong.

“Sounds good,” I agreed. “Mobster?”

“Better.” He ushered me inside and accepted my six hundred dollars—the extra hundred was his bonus—with an appreciative nod. “Cowboy. You’ll know ’im when you see ’im.”

Did I ever. The betting exchange was a mishmash of lounge-style comfort and theater seating, all of the focus on the series of enormous televisions that lined the far wall. The only thing up right now was the soccer game, which a small group of fans was paying attention to, but my eyes went to the man sitting at the bar. Oh, wow…it was Steve McQueen reborn, right down to the expensive TAG Heuer watch on his thick wrist. He had the cowboy hat, the boots?his hair was even dyed the right shade of blond. Perfect. Looking at him, I felt a frisson of energy in my head that meant work could be done here.

I saw fates. It was my talent, my gift, my curse. It was what came easiest to me?it was what stayed with me forever, living on in my head. My mom had a much vaster ability, and while we’d been able to live together, she’d worked with me on mine, teaching me how to step back and take in less, to feel the energy in a room and let it guide my vision of where things were going to go, to let the fates I saw in other people—just glimpses—compel my own actions to manipulate circumstances in my favor.

You couldn’t think about the epistemological implications of that for long, the whole “chicken or egg” thing would drive you mad. Needless to say, there were times when I could work a whole room to my advantage, and I could already tell today was going to be one of those times.

I sat down next to the cowboy at the bar. He glanced my way, and as soon as I saw the glimmer of his eyes, I knew the tack to take. How about that?a true Southern gentleman in an Irish-run Denver betting exchange. I could see the arc of his trip: thecattle ranch he owned, the way his private jet was tied up in Baja thanks to the missus, her admonishment to have a good time…he’d be fighting a few preconceptions with me, but I could get around those.

“Howdy,” he said after a moment.

“Good morning,” I said, rounding my vowels a bit, letting my accent both elevate and harmonize with his own to make me seem more familiar. “It’s a little early for whiskey, isn’t it?” I asked, gesturing toward his glass.

The cowboy sighed. “Never too early for whiskey. Especially when there’s nothin’ good on TV.”

“Not a soccer fan, then.”

“That ain’t a sport worthy of the name, in my opinion. Buncha runnin’ around, kick kick, jog jog, ooh no I fell down…nah, not my game.”

“So I guess you wouldn’t be interested in a wager?”

“On soccer?” He looked at me askance and then laughed. “Hell no, boy! Nah, I’m here to bet on real American sports, something I can sink my teeth into.”

I shrugged. “No stakes, then, something just for fun.”

“Ain’t no fun if there’s no stakes.”

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