Free Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz Page B

startled, because she seemed like just a girl, hardly older than me, not the kind of canny and aggressive concessionaire for whom I expected to be working.
    A faint frown reshaped her face slightly, but it did not detract from her beauty. “How old are you?”
    “Seventeen.”
    “You look younger.”
    “Going on eighteen,” I said defensively.
    “That’s the usual progression.”
    “What?”
    “After that it’ll be nineteen, then twenty, and then there’ll be no stopping you,” she said, a distinct note of sarcasm in her voice.
    Sensing that she was the type most likely to respond better to spunk than to subservience, I smiled and said, “I guess it wasn’t like that with you. Looks to me like you jumped straight from twelve to ninety.”
    She didn’t smile back at me, and the coolness didn’t go out of her, but she gave up the frown. “You can talk?”
    “Aren’t I talking?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    By way of an answer, I picked up the sledgehammer, swung it at the striking pad hard enough to ring the bell and attract the attention of the nearest marks, turned toward the concourse, and launched into a spiel. In a few minutes I brought in three bucks.
    “You’ll do,” Rya Raines said. When she talked to me, she stared straight into my eyes, and her gaze made me hotter than the August sun. “All you have to know is that the game isn’t gaffed, which you’ve already proved, and I don’t want you being an alibi agent. Gaffed games and alibi agents aren’t allowed on the Sombra Brothers’ lot, and I wouldn’t have them even if they were allowed. It’s not easy to ring that bell; pretty damned hard, in fact; but the mark gets a fair shot at winning, and when he does win, he gets the prize, no alibis.”
    “I got you.”
    Taking off her coin apron and change-maker and passing them to me, she spoke as firmly and briskly as any no-nonsense junior executive at General Motors: “I’ll send someone around at five o’clock, and you’ll be off from five till eight, for supper, for a nap if you need it, then you’ll come back on and stay on until the midway closes down. You’ll bring the receipts to me, at my trailer, tonight, down in the meadow. I have an Airstream, the largest they make. You’ll recognize it because it’s the only one hitched to a brand-new, red, one-ton Chevy pickup. If you play straight, if you don’t do anything stupid like trying to skim the take, you’ll do all right working for me. I own a few other concessions, and I’m always on the lookout for a right type who can handle responsibility. You get paid the end of every day, and if you’re a good enough pitchman to improve on the average take, then you’ll get a slice of the higher profits. If you’re straight with me, you’ll get a better deal from nobody. But—listen up now and be warned—if you jack me around, buster, I’ll see to it that you wind up with your balls in a sling. We understand each other?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good.”
    Remembering Jelly Jordan’s reference to the girl who had started out as a weight-guesser and had worked her way up to a major concession by the age of seventeen, I said, “Uh, one of these other games you own—is it a duck shoot?”
    “Duck shoot, one guess-your-weight stand, one bottle-pitch, one grab-stand that specializes in pizza, a kiddy ride called the Happy Toonerville Trolley, and seventy percent interest in a sideshow called Animal Oddities,” she said crisply. “And I’m neither twelve nor ninety; I’m twenty-one, and I’ve come a hell of a long way from nothing in a hell of a short time. I didn’t put it all together by being naive or soft or dumb. There’s nothing of the mark in me, and as long as you remember that, Slim, we’ll get along just fine.”
    Without asking if I had any more questions, she walked off along the concourse. With each brisk stride she took, her small, firm, high ass worked prettily in her tight jeans.
    I watched her until she was out