Alan Foster - Exceptions to Reality

They might be looking for him.

They had chased him clear across the United States, from Vegas, to the riverboat casinos of the Mississippi, to the enclosed gambling palaces that ringed the Great Lakes, and finally to Atlantic City. Then through Europe, where he had barely managed to give them the proverbial slip. Upon reaching South America, he had begun his run in Rio before moving on to São Paulo, and now found himself here. For the well-traveled Bull Threerivers, Salvador was a comparative backwater, big city or no.

He took only one carry-on bag with him. It contained a few items of personal interest, one change of plain clothing, one of exceedingly expensive custom-tailored attire, and little else besides his passport and a dozen bankbooks held together with rubber bands. The bankbooks tallied accounts listed under half a dozen aliases in Switzerland, the Caymans, and the Cook Islands. Cumulative numbers in those books reached seven figures. When they reached eight, Threerivers would stop. That was the goal he had set for himself. That was when he felt he could safely cease working.

The people who were after him wanted him to stop now . He had been warned. Ignoring the warnings, he had fled eastward from his home in Los Angeles. Twice, they had almost caught up with him. Once in Connecticut, and months later in Monaco. Both times he had slipped away, though not before taking a bullet in the shoulder before leaving France. He’d had it removed and had waited for the wound to heal in a rented private residence on the borders of the souk in Casablanca. Money bought speed and silence.

He did not know if they had been able to track him to Brazil. Logic dictated a move on his part from Europe to South Africa or Australia, where the casinos and the pickings were bigger. By recrossing the Atlantic, he hoped he had finally thrown them off his trail. His confidence had been buoyed by his successes in Rio and São Paulo. From Salvador he intended to move on to other major South American cities, then to Australia, concluding his odyssey of personal financial enhancement with a visit to the fleshpots of Asia. As to where he would retire, he found his present surroundings more than congenial. Though he hailed from another continent, his Indian features allowed him to move easily among the locals, and he had discovered that both the food and climate suited him.

No one paid any attention to him as he wandered through the casino. There was no reason why they should. Though tall for a local Indian, he was not of eye-catching height or appearance. He flourished no jewelry and flaunted no evidence of the considerable wealth he had steadily accumulated in the course of his travels.

From time to time he would pause, seemingly at random, before a slot machine and drop a few coins. That was his modus. After half a day or so of aimless drifting he would zero in on a chosen machine. On the right machine. On the one with just the right scent of ripeness.

Bull Threerivers could smell electricity.

Not the way ordinary folk smell a wire that’s hot and burning. Most people can do that. With a sniff and a pause, Threerivers could scent the actual flow of electrons; could detect their moods and motions, their flux and flavor. It was a talent he had not realized was unusual until he turned nine and observed that none of his playmates in the run-down LA neighborhood where he grew up could do it. Even then he had thought little of the odd aptitude and kept the knowledge to himself. No kid likes to be thought of by his peers as “weird.”

It was only when he reached his teens, an age traditionally devoid of rewarding prospects for members of his ethnic faction, that he realized his ability might be useful in finding a job. He actually found two. Alternating between the auto electronics repair shop and a small local store that fixed TVs and other appliances, he demonstrated what seemed to his bosses to be an uncanny ability to find within minutes the source of any electrical problem in any device. Often, he killed time taking gadgets apart to make it look like he was working.

What he was actually doing was sniffing out the location of the defect. Short circuits, for example, had a sickly, unhealthy aroma. Dead contacts smelled not dead, but rather like burned cinnamon. Weak connections stank of damp sesame seed. Misbehaving chipsets reeked of rotten eggs. And so on, with each flaw possessing a distinctive aroma of its own: a unique identifying fragrance only he could detect. Struggling to find an explanation for his condition in the local library and on the Net, he could uncover nothing like it in the medical literature. It was then he decided that his situation was unique. Something was cross-wired in his olfactory nerves, something that enabled him to sense the ebb and flow of electrons in a current the way a master chef could taste the difference in the same kind of spice that had been grown in different locales.

From helping to fix car stereos and auto diagnostic systems on the one hand, and toasters and microwave ovens and vacuum cleaners on the other, he moved on to computers, pinpointing the location of hardware problems so intractable that the owner of the business where he had been working literally cried when Bull announced that he was leaving. Even the offer of a doubling, a tripling of his salary was not enough to induce him to remain. Because Threerivers had found a far more lucrative application for his peculiar talent.

He had started in Las Vegas. If he had confined his activities to Nevada, and perhaps New Jersey, his singular activities might have gone unremarked upon. But he made the mistake of spreading himself around, in a sensible effort not to draw attention to himself by winning too much in any one place. His travels soon led him to the many casinos that were located on individual Indian reservations throughout North America. He was observed, and then followed. For some time, security personnel sharing information were at a loss to figure out how he was managing his remarkable success.

Then, running through tape after security tape of the extraordinarily lucky Native American gambler, one particularly attentive agent with an open mind and no preconceptions happened to notice the subject of all the attention leaning forward to sniff a machine he was playing just before it paid off. Subsequent reviews of other tapes invariably captured similar moments on video. Incredible as it seemed, and without understanding how or why it was happening, casino security personnel could agree only on the incredibly obvious.

The subject, a certain Bull John Threerivers of Los Angeles, California, could somehow smell a slot machine that was about to pay off.

Tribal owners and administrators engaged in soft-voiced but quietly frantic caucus via telephone and fax and e-mail. It was not the money they were losing that set them on the knife-edge of panic. It was something much worse and of potentially far greater import.

And so the pact was made and the decision taken that as quietly as possible this one seemingly innocuous if fortunate gambler had to be stopped. A delegation from several tribes had been appointed to confront him at his discreetly lavish condominium in Los Angeles. Inviting them in, Threerivers had listened politely, even intently, to their expressions of concern. When they left, it was with his assurances that he understood the gravity of the conundrum and would take appropriate steps to see that their concerns were fully addressed.

When they came back to check on him in person, after discovering that his phone had been disconnected, it was to learn that he had moved out the day after their visit. That was when it was decided that, given what was at stake, stronger measures would have to be implemented.

Threerivers had barely escaped the first attempt on his life, which took place in the parking lot of a riverboat casino docked outside Memphis. Only the timely arrival on the scene of a bunch of semi-delirious college students on spring break had forced the three men who had pinned him against the side of a truck to let him go. Threerivers had never been so glad to see a bunch of drunken white men in his life. After that he moved quickly, erratically, staying in no one place for more than a few days. He thought he had shaken his pursuers when he shifted his activities to Europe, but soon found them on his trail once more. Fortunately the presence of several large Amerindian males in a casino in, for example, Copenhagen, was obligingly conspicuous. On such occasions he was always able to flee prior to any actual confrontation.