Absolutely Captivated Read Online Free PDF

question
later.
    “Las Vegas.” Kyle
sounded very serious. “I keep seeing them escorting me through
the Star Trek Experience .”
    Travers grabbed his
paper-thin pillow and pummeled Kyle with it. Kyle laughed again,
grabbed his pillow, and whapped Travers with it. They had a good,
old-fashioned pillow-fight as the Tonight
Show theme song faded into the jazzy
opener for Conan
O’Brien .
    Then he and Kyle collapsed on their
respective beds, sweaty and laughing, and very tired.
    They agreed to go to sleep, and Kyle
went through his routine first, using the bathroom, brushing his
teeth, and putting on his pajamas. Travers shut off the television
and lay on his bed, thinking about the conversation.
    It left him unsettled,
although he couldn’t say why. Perhaps it was the belief in Kyle’s
voice as he discussed his own psychic ability. Perhaps it was the
long day with the three chattering, oblivious women. Or perhaps it
was the mention of Las Vegas.
    Travers had been avoiding
Las Vegas his entire life. He had no logical reason for doing so.
It was a numbers-man’s Mecca, a place where a CPA could meet a game
theorist could meet a statistician, and all of them would have
enough math to keep them happy for the rest of their lives. He
could watch the average person in a controlled gambling environment
and see his pet theories proven again and again.
    Normally, most accountants
and mathematics fiends loved places like Vegas, where odds were a
way of life.
    But Travers didn’t trust odds. They
never worked quite right for him. And he hadn’t discussed that with
anyone—especially not his superstitious family.
    Fortunately, they
had never asked him how he paid for college after Kyle was born. He
didn’t want to tell them that he had done so with his lottery
winnings. Not that he had won the big Powerball Jackpots or
anything that spectacular. No. It was quite simple. He would stand
in front of the scratch-off counter in a convenience store and
know, somehow know , that the third ticket from the bottom was worth fifty
dollars. That was the only time he would then do the math. If he
made a profit after buying all the tickets to that one, he’d buy
them. If not, he’d tell the clerk that the third ticket from the
bottom was worth the fifty dollars. Later, the clerk would always
tell him he was right.
    The weirder ones were
Powerball. He never hit the automatic number-choosing button. He
always closed his eyes and imagined the little Ping-Pong balls in
their little blower. He would see them come up—not the way they did
on TV—but with big red numbers above the rotating Ping-Pong balls,
as if someone, somewhere were trying to tell him which numbers
would win.
    He never put in all of the numbers. He
just couldn’t. It wasn’t fair. So he’d see how low the pay-out was,
and put in three or four, and take home his $20,000 or his
$150,000. He never told anyone, and his name was never printed in
the paper. Only the people who ordered the names of the weekly
winners ever saw his. And they apparently never made the
connection.
    Not even Kyle knew. Travers kept that
strange ability to himself, and lived as comfortably as he dared
without calling attention to his wealth. CPAs made good money. They
just didn’t make great money. So he made sure he looked like he was
worth good money and nothing more.
    But Travers knew that as tempting as
Powerball was for him—and he had trouble walking past one of the
kiosks without seeing the damn red numbers—Vegas would be worse. He
always imagined himself watching the numbers come up correctly on
the roulette table or in craps or even at the blackjack table,
where math and luck lived together in an uneasy
alliance.
    It was—in Kyle’s word—Fate, and
Travers didn’t want to tempt it.
    If Kyle was right, and those women
needed to go on to Las Vegas, Travers would help them find the
right public transportation to get there. He was never going into
that city.
    His life would change once