Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (13 page)

The pretty young girl said nothing, didn’t so much as blink.

He turned his back on her and faced toward me and Zoey again.
 
He opened his mouth to speak, and another LaBrea Tar Pits belch emerged; from fifty yards away I seemed to feel the breeze, and smell a whiff of primordial decay.
 
Behind him, the girl did blink now.
 
No, in fact, she was
winking
.
 
At me.
 
And grinning.

Okay, so I’m an idiot.
 
I’m sure you would have figured it out much sooner, if you’d been in my sandals.
 
It was only when I saw that impish grin that I finally recognized her.
 
I felt the seismic tremor through the soles of my feet as the shock of recognition went through my wife’s body too.
 
There was no mistaking who that was, even though neither of us had ever seen her before.
 
In my profession I have become fairly expert at telling whether someone is twenty-one or not.

It was our daughter Erin.
 
Just about twenty-one years old.

*
 
*
 
*

There are physical limits to how fast electrical impulses can propagate between neurons.
 
The following sequence of thoughts seemed to arise, uh,
 
sequentially, but I don’t believe they could have because when I was all done thinking them no more than a second of realtime had elapsed.
 
I think what happened is that my brain instantly copied itself a large number of times and thought them all simultaneously:

—poker face poker face pokerfacepokerface—

—Holy Christ, she’s as beautiful as her mother!
 
Is that even
possible
?
 
Her hair is really amazing, long like that—

—I am looking at my daughter at something over age twenty.
 
The universe does not appear to be collapsing.
 
Ergo, the Erin I know—thirteen-year-old Erin—is no longer present in this ficton, this here-and-now.
 
She must have not merely teleported away from here, but time-hopped to some other ficton, to make room in this one for her older self—

—Why the hell is she going through all this?
 
Is it simply because yesterday Little Nuts scared her, made her feel just for once like her calendar age?
 
Temporal shenanigans of this sort are supposed to be a real bad idea, as I understand it…which I don’t—

—If the two Erins simply swapped places, then “my child,” the one I know, is presently wandering around 2006 without valid ID.
 
Or she may have opted to go
back
in time, to any era prior to 1986 that interested her—and that she has not already visited before.
 
I wonder which she picked: forward or back—

—Back her play.
 
She wouldn’t go to this much trouble frivolously: she’s running some kind of scam on Little Nuts, and it already looks like a pip.
 
Whatever it is, back her play…or at least try not to screw it up—

—poker face poker face poker—

—Could Little Nuts possibly notice a resemblance between this Erin and the thirteen-year-old he glanced at
 
here in this compound yesterday?
 
If not, how much danger is there that he’ll think of it a little later on?—

—Don’t be silly, Jake.
 
It took
you
a while to spot her, and you’re her father.
 
Body language says it was the same for Zoey.
 
And the two of you know about and believe in the existence of time travel.
 
It’s about as likely that Little Nuts will sequence her DNA—

—God, the years between thirteen and twenty-one change so
much
about a girl!
 
Height…voice…posture…demeanor… attitude…self image…facial structure…walk—

—chest size—

—pokerfacepokerfacepokerfacepokerfacepo—

—
Look
at that face! My heart sings to behold it.
 
That face says plain as print that she is a strong, confident, kind, and happy young woman.
 
She looks as if she has had, if such a thing is even remotely possible, a great childhood and an endurable adolescence. She looks like I couldn’t have been such a rotten parent after all.
 
From the grip of Zoey’s hand on my shoulder I know she is as pleased as I—

—Damn it, what the hell is that tall tower of testosterone
doing
back here a day earlier than he said?
 
I’m not
ready
for him yet!
 
I intended to spend the rest of today and tonight devising a Special Plan in consultation with all my friends, especially Willard and Maureen.
 
Right now, I got nothing—

—This certainly is a tilted picnic—

—What am I gonna
do?—

—
Stall
.

“So what can we do for you?” I asked him after the above extremely busy second.

He didn’t even need a second to choose his answer.
 
“Money,” he said, and held out an upturned palm much like a snow shovel.

Shit.
 
“Uh…like I said, I wasn’t expecting you back until tomorrow.”

In response he merely pursed his lips, as if to say, yeah, life sucks sometimes.

“So I didn’t get to the bank today.
 
But tomorrow—”

“Ya partner get back yet?”

For an instant the question baffled me.
 
Zoey was standing there right beside me, big as life.
 
Then I realized that in Little Nuts’s universe, “partner” and “woman” simply did not go together.
 
I started to explain…and then thought, well, I don’t really have any particular reason to lie to him, but why do I need a reason?
 
“Uh, no, actually.
 
My partner’s been held up.”

As surreptitiously as possible, Zoey stepped on my foot.
 
I find pressure situations an excellent time to make bad puns; my beloved holds a differing view.

“So it’s up to you then,” he said.
 
He was still holding out that big snow shovel hand.
 
I had not seen a snow shovel since I’d left Long Island to come down to the Keys.

“Well…I can write you a check, if you give me a name to make it out to.”

He just snorted.

To negotiate with an Italian you need both hands for gesturing.
 
I used them to emphasize a shrug.
 
“Then I can’t come up with anything like the amount you mentioned yesterday.
 
Not until the bank opens again tomorrow.”

Little Nuts slowly lowered his hand until it was at his side again.
 
“I unnastan.
 
Any new business relationship, there’s gonna be little kinks startin up.
 
I gotta make allowances.
 
Like ya said, you got the day wrong, so it ain’t all your fault.
 
And you ain’t gimme no attitude yet.”
 
He sighed.
 
“So here’s what we do.
 
You empty the register, plus gimme everything you got on ya, plus your ATM card and PIN code, plus tell me you’re really sorry an’
 
promise not ta fuck up no more.
 
Then I break a coupla unimportant fingers an go away, an we put the whole thing behind us.
 
You can make up the shortage tomorra when ya partner gets back.
 
Sound like a plan, chief?”

*
 
*
 
*

I caught Jim Omar’s eye, shook my head microscopically.
 
Just in time; he’d been preparing to attack.
 
With his bare hands, and whatever utensils he might find on his way to the enemy.
 
Others were bristling too, I could sense it.
 
I began whistling loudly through my teeth, as if from nervousness.
 
Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me.
 
There are times when it’s good to have a clientele who are somewhat musically sophisticated.
 
I felt a slight relaxation in the vibes, and knew everyone would stay calm and let me handle it.
 
All I needed now was a clue how to handle it.

Once again my mind did that business of cloning itself in order to think multiple thoughts in the same split second.

Suppose Tony Donuts Junior decided to punch me in the face.
 
There were basically two possible outcomes.
 

First, the invisible protective shield given me by Mickey Finn might assess the incoming punch as being of lethal force, and instantly activate to protect me: I’d feel nothing, and Tony would break his hand.
 
This would probably clue him in that there was something unusual about me, which was something I was hoping very much to avoid.
 
If he found out he couldn’t hurt me, he would not only become curious, but a little afraid of me.
 
All in all you’d have to call that a bad outcome.

Alternatively, my magic cyborg defensive system might diagnose the punch as sublethal, and do nothing.
 
That was really the more likely result: Tony in fact did not want to kill me (yet), and the Finn Shield is usually pretty accurate.
 
Probably, then, the punch would land.
 
On my personal face bone.
 
This too met my criteria for a bad outcome.

Alternatives:

I could speak the name “Pixel” aloud, and Little Nuts would very suddenly acquire a large heavy orange fur hat,
 
anchored firmly in place by ten of Hell’s hatpins, in such a way that its removal would necessarily involve the removal of Tony’s face as well.
 
This might distract him, long enough for me to have a brainstorm.
 
Or it might just really piss him off.

I could convert to Buddhism and set myself on fire.
 
Keep that one in reserve.

I could ask Tom Hauptman behind the bar for “a double shot of the twelve buck stuff,” and hold up my hand.
 
We’d rehearsed this—we sell alcohol in South Florida—so I was fairly confident the double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun would arrive positioned so I could grab it out of the air and start firing at once.
 
If I shot Little Nuts enough times at close range, perhaps I could wear down his resolve.
 
But the noise would cause talk in the neighborhood, and the police would probably be curious.

I could page Mike Callahan.
 
I had an emergency number that could theoretically raise him anytime.
 
But I hadn’t used it back when we were threatened by the end of the universe, so I was reluctant to use it for one lone human, however formidable.
 
I didn’t really know exactly what it was that Mike and his family were doing together, far off somewhere else in space and time—but I’d been given to understand that it was
important
.
 

There was always, of course, the option which had served me perfectly well for the past half a century.
 
I could split: spin on my heel and run like a scalded son of a bitch.
 
The open gate was only steps behind me; in under two seconds I could be out of the compound.
 
Within which Tony would have my wife and daughter, some of my friends, my bar and my home on which to vent his irritation.
 
It was actually even a little worse than that, because the version of Erin present today was old enough to qualify as rapeable for someone like Tony.
 
No, bugging out didn’t sound like fun.

Perhaps the scattergun was my best option after all.
 
Shoot Tony as many times as it took to kill him, kick his body into the pool, and when the cops arrived, have everybody blink and say, what noise.
 
I was just settling, most reluctantly, on that option when Erin spoke up.

“How would you like something
better
than money?”

“No such thing,” Tony Donuts Junior said automatically.
 
Then he registered who had spoken, and turned slowly to regard Erin.
 
She met his gaze without flinching.
 
She was standing with all her weight on her right leg and a hand on her left hip, which was slightly toward him.
 
It was not an explicitly provocative pose…but even her father had to admit she looked damned good.

Tony made a horrid sound with both snort and snicker in it, and shook his head.
 
“No such thing,” he repeated with assurance.

“Are you sure about that?” she asked.

She didn’t put any innuendo into it at all, but of course Tony heard some anyway.
 
“Fuckin’ A.
 
I want that,” he said, gesturing with his chin toward her body, “I take the first piece goin’ by I like.
 
Money, I gotta wait for some asshole ta hand me.”

Erin started to reply—and then seemed to think better of whatever she’d been about to say.
 
He gave her a second or two to come up with something else, then decided he’d won the point and turned back to me.
 
“And waitin really pisses me off.”
 

He began walking toward me, looking remarkably like a Jack Kirby character.
 
The Incredible Hulk after he’d finally found a competent tailor, perhaps, or Ben Grimm with body hair, or Doctor Doom in mufti.
 
I could feel his footsteps through the soles of my feet.