Shadow Dancers Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t. All we can do is make that educated guess based on when your record-keeping started. But given what you have now, I’m willing to bet that Blackie is your original. He’s the guy who adds numbers to the dirty pictures and the guy who steals after he rapes. Whitey s got no interest in numbers or in trade. He’s the dreamer, as I said. The poet. Also, he’s passive. He’s a follower. Blackie is a trailblazer. He’d just as soon slit your throat as have a cup of tea with you. He’s got a plan to beat you every time. Take my word for it, Mooney. Blackie’s your Dancer; Whitey’s your Shadow.”
    In the next moment, as though someone had thrown a switch, she’d flipped over on her stomach and was fast asleep.
    Long after, Mooney still lay there in the dark, hands clasped behind his neck, thinking about what she’d said. You had to hand it to Fritzi, he thought, with a touch of professional resentment. She had a way of going at problems, a way of absorbing and processing information, then handing it back to you all wrapped up pretty in some condensed and highly ordered way that enabled you to see things there you’d never seen before. She had an unerring eye for sifting the valuable from a swamp of detail and chucking out the dross. She couldn’t care less for the old pro cops’ reverence for routine and logic. Fritzi was a true longshotter, and as any good handicap-per could tell you, over the long haul, longshot players lose. But if that was statistically correct, it had made little impression on Fritzi. In all of the years Mooney had known her, with all of her longshotting, buck for buck wagered, she was way ahead of the game.
    From outside in the kitchen, another sharp volley of oaths rattled through the darkened apartment. They came in the clipped, half-swallowed locutions of a bird’s voice box. A stream of comic filth to keep the goblins of the night at bay.

FOUR
    HE ALWAYS EXPERIENCED HIS GREATEST sense of elation when driving. The sensation of total freedom only occurred for him behind the wheel of a car. At such times a tremendous weight of care lifted from him. He surrendered to a terrifying buoyancy, letting the car take him wherever it chose.
    With windows wide open (even in the coldest weather) and the tape deck turned up to maximum volume, he listened to motets and Gregorian chants, alternating with mind-numbing bouts of heavy-metal rock with lyrics spouting easy blasphemies and conjuring the Devil. The one assured him of the indulgence of a kind and loving God; the other, of the delectable enticements of pure abandon.
    When off on these jaunts he liked to play a game. It was a sort of fortune-telling game — divination with license-plate numbers. Simply put, he would add up numbers on the plates of cars and watch for patterns to emerge. There were numbers that were good luck and others that were inauspicious. Any combination of numbers adding up to 9, 13, 18, or 22, or those numbers themselves, he considered propitious. Those combinations adding up to 8, 10, or 12 were bad. Sixteen was the most ominous of all. When he saw a frequently repeated series of plates with any combination of 432 or 576, or 112 or 220, he knew that all things were right with the world. The portents were good. The wind was at his tail.
    Double numbers were especially propitious … 11, 33, 99. But in his curious system of divination, 22 was the best you could get. He well knew that in the Sacred Tree there were ten circles of the Sephiroth, joining 22 lines. Twenty-two was the most sacred number of all. There were 22 cards of Tarot. He was born on the 22nd day of the 9th month, and the difference between the number of the day and the number of the month was 13.
    On the other hand, 666, even though it added up to the benevolent 18, was also the number of the Beast in Revelation, and that, under certain circumstances, could be terrifying.
    At first, when the game would commence, the numbers would be random, with no