Free Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz Page B

favor her, beaming upon her the way a father might look upon a favorite daughter, accenting the natural luster of her hair, proudly revealing the porcelain smoothness of her complexion, lovingly molding itself to her sculpted cheekbones and artfully chiseled nose, suggesting but not fully illuminating great depth and many mysteries in her entrancing eyes.
    I stood, dumbstruck, and watched her for a minute or two while she went through her spiel. She teased a mark out of the onlookers, took his fifty cents, sympathized with his inability to drive the wooden block above GOOD BOY, and smoothly enticed him into shelling out a buck for three more whacks at it. She broke all the rules for ballying an attraction: She never taunted the marks, not even a little; she hardly ever raised her voice to a shout, yet somehow her message carried above the music from the gypsy fortune-teller’s tent, the competing spiel of the balloon game pitchman next door, and the ever-growing roar of the waking midway. Most unusual of all, she never got off the stool, did not attempt to draw the marks to her with an energetic display of pitchmanship, did not employ dramatic gestures, comic dance steps, loud jokes, sexual innuendo, double entendres, or any of the standard techniques. Her patter was slyly amusing, and she was gorgeous; that was enough, and she was smart enough to know it was enough.
    She took my breath away.
    With a self-conscious shuffle that I sometimes had around pretty girls, I finally approached her, and she thought I was a mark who wanted to swing the hammer, but I said, “No, I’m looking for Miss Raines.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œJelly Jordan sent me.”
    â€œYou’re Slim? I’m Rya Raines.”
    â€œOh,” I said, 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?”
    â€œSeventeen.”
    â€œYou look younger.”
    â€œGoing on eighteen,” I said defensively.
    â€œThat’s the usual progression.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œAfter 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?”
    â€œAren’t I talking?”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œYou’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.”
    â€œI 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