Crush Read Online Free PDF Page B

like it would come off her lithe, sleek body at the slightest encouragement.
    â€œAnd what is it regarding?” Rush asked, in his deepest, most imposing voice.
    â€œOral, I think,” she answered. “Unless he wants to pay extra.”
    Sometimes you just have to talk to The Principal. Rush went below deck and knocked on his cabin door. Stanley Trask opened it. His ruddy face seemed to extrude from his bulging bathrobe.
    â€œMr. Trask, there’s a woman here to see you,” Rush said. “She says her name is Tianna. With two Ns.”
    Trask beamed. “Send her in!”
    â€œMr. Trask, you hired us to protect you. There is noway we can do a background check on this woman on such short notice.”
    Trask wiped his hands with antibacterial gel (coconut-lime-verbena-scented, he could tell) and spoke to Rush like a patient uncle. “Listen. The people who sent me those death threats, do you know what they’re trying to do? They’re trying to affect me, trying to change my way of life. Change my path, as it were. Now I could listen to them—I could run scared. Or I could choose to defy them. Well, I choose defiance. I stick to my path.”
    There you had it—if that hooker didn’t give Stanley Trask a blowjob right now, the terrorists would have won. It was so patriotic it made Rush want to puke.
    So he went back on deck to get Tianna. Guzman had volunteered to leave the homey confines of the surveillance van to relieve Rush while he went down to visit Trask. When Rush re-joined them, she was handing Guzman a business card.
    â€œNice embossing,” Guzman said to Rush, a little embarrassed.
    Nice embossing indeed.
    But that meant that there was a period of about three minutes when only Stegner was in the van, watching the monitors. In the postmortem, after all the damage was done, Stegner swore he never fell asleep at his post, nor did he take his eyes off the monitors to empty his bladder. So just how did Bob Steinkellner get on the boat? Magic, Rush decided. Pure and simple magic.
    Bob Steinkellner was a magician, after all. He specialized in that most difficult and unappreciated form of prestidigitation, sleight of hand. Coin tricks, to be precise. So transporting his three-hundred-pound body from dock to yacht without being seen was not exactly in his wheelhouse.
    Bob started doing magic when he was small, like a lot of boys do. They think that if they learn the card and coin and matchbox tricks from The Blackstone Book of Magic and Illusions , they’ll be more popular and get invited to more parties and, let’s face it, get girls. The fact that performing magic actively repels members of the opposite sex is something that never occurs to them until it’s too late. By then, the damage is done. They’re hooked. Poof! They’re magicians.
    At least that’s the way it seemed to Bob Steinkellner, once his early middle age had set in and he saw what magic had done to his life. Poof! It had disappeared! It had disappeared in the hours, weeks, months spent locked in his room, perfecting finger rolls and the Dancing Handkerchief illusion. Disappeared in the ten years spent performing at children’s birthday parties and old folks’ homes and, disastrously, at a few bachelor parties. Disappeared in endless afternoons at the Magic Castle, the magician’s club, talking with other (what he now called) magic-holics about how David Copperfield was a hack and David Blaine was a poser and Ricky Jay was the only halfway decent sleight-of-hand artist around, but when they hit the big time,they’d show the world what magic could really be.
    Then, when he hit thirty-four, it happened. He realized that he fucking hated doing magic tricks. Loathed them. Despised them. Every time he cracked open a new deck to do the Amazing Card through the Window Trick, one that had taken him months to perfect and that he used to perform with relish, he felt his skin