Pokergeist Read Online Free PDF Page A

more Jell-O shots for you! Hey, what happened to our picture?”
    The three heads looked down at the phone. “What’s that?”
    “It must be a reflection from the light,” Brittney reasoned. A large orb hovered before their faces in the picture, slightly obscuring their images. “Wanna do it over?”
    “I think I don’t feel too good.” Tiffany gagged, gagged again, and retched violently into the bushes, Siegfried and Roy silent observers to her agony. The girls patted her back, and then, hooking their arms under her shoulders, they headed off toward the hotel.
    “Let’s grab a cab?” Tiffany offered.
    “I’m out of money. And I don’t feel so well either,” Brittney responded, her face green in the weak light.
    “The evening air will do you good. We’ll walk until we can’t walk anymore.” They all laughed, weaving as they pushed on farther down the Strip.
    Clutch looked down at his vomit-covered shoes. That’s what you get for messing with the living, he thought ruefully. He could almost hear his grandpa say, “You stupid idiot; you touch shit, you gonna smell.” Clutch shook his feet and then strolled the Strip. He headed toward the Bellagio Fountains. He had nowhere else to go. People walked around him, through him, as if he weren’t there. Well, technically he wasn’t. He was there, but not there. Oh, he saw the light that everybody talks about, but he had no urgency to leave. It pulled at him, but he resisted. He wasn’t ready to go, he told a white-haired guy in an iridescent suit and enormous feathered wings. The fella was always hovering, just out of his eyesight. Sometimes it annoyed him, and he would try to ditch him. He thought back to that day right after he collapsed. He felt himself being lifted, high outside his body. He floated next to that colorless winged guy, watching in a detached manner. Wait, he couldn’t believe it. His daughter was in the crowd, watching, her eyes wide with horror. He hadn’t even known she was there. Hell, they hadn’t talked for over a year. He passed her, ruffling the hair on her dark head, and then meandered around the poker room, waiting there, watching the Ant get his check. His eyes caressed the bracelet, even as it was clamped around Adam’s thin wrist. He floated back to Ginny and watched her place his ashes on the table next to the television. She really mourned him, Ginny. He wished he had told her he loved her, at least once.
    His second-place winnings were in limbo, just like him. Jenny, his ex, and Ginny were battling it out in court. He’d never had a will—there never seemed to be a need. Now it looked like only the lawyers were going to get anything.
    He was at Ginny’s the day the goons came about a week after he died. They burst into the house, breaking the door, grabbing Ginny by the shoulders. They were thugs. One was short with tattoos covering his entire neck, going up his bald head. The other was so fat, he practically waddled. With a baseball bat in one hand, he knocked off her knickknacks from a small table.
    “Where’s the money?” the tattooed one demanded.
    “What money?” Ginny cried. “Who are you?” she asked, but she had a gut feeling she knew who they worked for.
    Clutch moved forward but found himself held in place by unseen hands. He kicked, used his elbows, but it was as if he were suspended in midair, entangled in an invisible web.
    “Clutch’s winnings. They say he won four and a half million at the game,” the short man told her in Spanish.
    “I didn’t get anything. It’s not mine to get.”
    “What do you mean?” he demanded.
    The first thug was walking around, opening drawers, looking in the closets. He picked up the bronze urn that held Clutch’s cremains. He lifted the finial, opening the lid.
    “Stop,” Ginny begged. “Please, it’s all I have left of him.”
    “Where’s the money, bitch?” The fat one slapped her across the face. Clutch fought with the invisible manacles holding him,