Free Flux by Orson Scott Card

I.
    â€œI got him or I kill him,” he says, showing more teeth than a primate’s supposed to have.
    â€œYou got me,” says I. “But don’t go thinking you can kill me.”
    He just laughs. “I got you and you’re so good, you can bet I got me a girl who’s at least as good at what she does.”
    â€œNo such,” says I.
    â€œTell me his P-word and then I’ll be impressed.”
    â€œYou want quick results? Then go ask him to give you his password himself.”
    Dogwalker isn’t one of those guys who can hide it when he’s mad. “I want quick results,” he says. “And if I start thinking you can’t deliver, I’ll pull your tongue out of your head. Through your nose.”
    â€œOh, that’s good,” says I. “I always do my best thinking when I’m being physically threatened by a client. You really know how to bring out the best in me.”
    â€œI don’t want to bring out the best,” he says. “I just want to bring out his password.”
    â€œI got to meet him first,” says I.
    He leans over me so I can smell his musk, which is to say I’m very olfactory and so I can tell you he reeked of testosterone, by which I mean ladies could fill up with babies just from sniffing his sweat. “Meet him?” he asks me. “Why don’t we just ask him to fill out a job application?”
    â€œI’ve read all his job applications,” says I.
    â€œHow’s a glass-head like you going to meet Mr. Fed?” says he. “I bet you’re always getting invitations to the same parties as guys like him.”
    â€œI don’t get invited to grown-up parties,” says I. “But on the other hand, grown-ups don’t pay much attention to sweet little kids like me.”
    He sighed. “You really have to meet him?”
    â€œUnless fifty-fifty on a P-word is good enough odds for you.”
    All of a sudden he goes nova. Slaps a glass off the table and it breaks against the wall, and then he kicks the table over, and all the time I’m thinking about ways to get out of there unkilled. But it’s me he’s doing the show for, so there’s no way I’m leaving, and he leans in close to me and screams in my face. “That’s the last of your fifty-fifty and sixty-forty and three times in ten I want to hear about, Goo Boy, you hear me?”
    And I’m talking real meek and sweet, cause this boy’s twice my size and three times my weight and I don’t exactly have no leverage. So I says to him, “I can’t help talking in odds and percentages, Dogwalker, I’m vertical, remember? I’ve got glass channels in here, they spit out percentages as easy as other people sweat.”
    He slapped his hand against his own head. “This ain’t exactly a sausage biscuit, either, but you know and I know that when you give me all them ex act numbers it’s all guesswork anyhow. You don’t know the odds on this beakrat anymore than I do.”
    â€œI don’t know the odds on him , Walker, but I know the odds on me . I’m sorry you don’t like the way I sound so precise, but my crystal memory has every P-word I ever plumbed, which is to say I can give you exact to the third decimal percentages on when I hit it right on the first try after meeting the subject, and how many times I hit it right on the first try just from his curriculum vitae, and right now if I don’t meet him and I go on just what I’ve got here you have a 48.838 percent chance I’ll be right on my P-word first time and a 66.667 chance I’ll be right with one out of three.”
    Well that took him down, which was fine I must say because he loosened up my sphincters with that glass-smashing table-tossing hot-breath-in-my-face routine he did. He stepped back and put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall. “Well I chose the right P-man, then,