Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (14 page)

Oh, I thought, if only Mike were here!
 
Or Mickey Finn with his starkiller finger.
 
Or Nikky Tesla and his Death Ray…or the Lucky Duck with his paranormal power to pervert probability…or even just Long Drink with his hickory nightstick, and Fast Eddie with his wicked little blackjack…

None of them being present, the crisis got solved by Tom Hauptman and his brain.

Tom likes to be around conversation, especially good conversation, but he doesn’t talk much himself.
 
Which is sort of strange considering he was a minister for nearly a decade.
 
He lost the habit of talking, along with his wife and then his faith, in a banana republic dungeon where he was held incommunicado for ten years.
 
From the early Sixties to the early Seventies.
 
He managed to completely miss the Beatles—and all that implies.
 
The sexual revolution, civil rights, the murders of JFK/RFK/MLK, Vietnam, protest, pot, acid, mescaline, psylocybin, peyote, counterculture in general, Altamont, Woodstock, Apollo 11, Watergate—Tom missed all of it, busy watching his wife die, and then mourning her.
 
By the time he got out, sprung by the CIA, Reverend Hauptman was so hopelessly out of touch he would have been finished as a minister even if he’d still wanted to be one.
 
Heaven knows what might have happened to Tom if he hadn’t gotten confused and lucky enough to try and stick up Callahan’s Place with an unloaded gun.
 

That was the night his tenure as our backup bartender began…and for most of the ensuing twenty-five years or so, Tom has been a quiet mainstay behind the bar, calm, competent, cheerful and steady.
 
Now, all at once, he became a bonafide official Hero of The Place—by cutting through the Gordian Knot that baffled me with a single blow of his voice.

“Here.”

That voice was so soft, gentle and unafraid it stopped the juggernaut in his tracks, where a bellowed “Freeze, motherfucker!” might have had no effect.
 
Like a tank acquiring a target, Little Nuts swiveled to confront the upstart.
 
What he saw made the corners of his mouth turn up with pleasure—and made me and most of the rest of us gasp.

Tom was holding out the drawer from the cash register in one hand, at enough of a tilt that you could see it was pretty full of cash.
 
(I don’t go to the bank very often, because if I do, then I’m in the bank.)
 
In his other hand he held out an unzipped empty orange backpack made of some sort of lightweight space-age polymer.
 
When he was sure he had Tony’s attention, he emptied the drawer into the backpack.
 
First the change, then the ones, fives, tens, and twenties.

*
 
*
 
*

Pay the man
.
 

I’m not sure I can explain why not, but in a million years I would never have thought of that simple, brilliant ploy.
 
It would buy us twenty-four hours of scheming time, and all it would cost us was money.
 
You know that sports stadium maneuver, The Wave?
 
Eyebrows did that all around, as people grasped the elegance of the solution.

*
 
*
 
*

Tom set the empty cash drawer down, reached up the bar a ways, snagged the open cigar box from which people take their change on their way out, and added its contents to the backpack.
 
Then he dropped in his own wallet, pocket change and watch, and passed the sack to the nearest patron, Shorty Steinitz.
 
Looking glum but game, Shorty added his own wallet and change, and passed it on.

Okay, this was good.
 
Things were looking up.
 
We would fill the backpack with baubles, and the giant would go away, for now at least, and with him would go immediate danger, and we could finally get some furshlugginer thinking done.
 
I was
not
yet beginning to relax, but I was beginning to envision a universe in which relaxation was sometimes permitted to such as me, when I saw a fist break the surface of the pool, holding a beer can, followed at once by Lex’s head.

The geometry was such that he was, barely, out of Tony’s field of vision.
 
But I knew why he had surfaced, and my heart sank.
 
(Wait, let me just look at that sentence for a minute.
 
Okay, I’m good now.)
 
This had come up once before, and so had Lex.
 
(Sorry.
 
I’ll try and get control.)
 
From his point of view, tossing an empty beer can into the pool was like some clown lobbing trash through your livingroom window.
 
What he had done the last time it happened was to return the can, at high speed.
 
By then it wasn’t empty anymore but three-quarters full of pool water, and its previous owner, a tourist from California, had his back turned, so the impact dropped him like a poleaxed steer, and his friends ended up having to drive him up
 
to the emergency room on Stock Island.

I’d bought Lex a drink, then.
 
But I did not want him to do it again.
 
A beer
barrel,
full of cement, would probably not knock down Tony Donuts Junior.
 
It
would
make him turn around…whereupon he would see, treading water there in the pool, something that looked very much as if the Creature From The Black Lagoon’s dermatologist was finally beginning to make some headway with his complexion, but only above the waist.
 
This was the kind of sight that might make Little Nuts
big
time nuts.
 
But there was nothing I could do about it; where I was standing, Tony would see me if I tried to signal Lex to duck out of sight.

Beyond Tony I saw my grownup daughter, striking in that dress—then all at once I was seeing only the dress, falling empty to the ground.
 
In the pool, Lex’s head suddenly disappeared beneath the water, as if he’d been yanked downward
 
from below.
 
A human might have had time to yelp, but Lex had no air in his lungs yet.

Unfortunately, none of this was noticed by Marty, the last customer sitting at my end of the bar.
 
Having put his own valuables into the backpack, he got up to walk it down to the other end of the bar.
 
If he got where he was going, and Tony’s eyes followed him, the man-monster was going to notice that Erin wasn’t there any more…and then that her dress was.

The whistle was earsplitting, the strident thumb-and-pinky kind of whistle you use to summon a cab in New York.
 
The shout that followed it was nearly as loud and just as piercing.
 
“
Hey, Goliath—screw you!
”

Little Nuts became very still.
 
He did not even look toward the upstart, yet.
 
Only his face moved, slightly, and in a most unaccustomed way: his expression became thoughtful.
 
“Screw me?” he mused.

“
Yeah.
 
Screw your mother, too.
”

Tony snorted.
 
From his expression you could see that he had run into this sort of thing before—suicides who picked him rather than the cops to assist them—and that he regarded the chore as part of the white ape’s burden, tedious but sometimes unavoidable.
 
“Screw my mother too?”
 
His voice was getting quieter.

The other got even louder.
 
“
Why not?
 
Everybody else has.
”

Tony pursed his lips.
 
Time to swivel round and take a first and last look at this fool.
 
“Everybody else ha-oly
shit!
”

“
What are ya, a fuckin’
parrot
?
” Harry shrieked.
 
“
Damn right, everybody else has…except her husband, of course.
”

Little Nuts was so startled he blinked and backed up a half step.
 
“Jesus Christ.
 
A fuckin parrot…”

“
What are you, related to Robert Deniro?
 
Are you?
 
Are you related to Deniro?
 
I don’t see anybody
else
here related to Deniro—
”

A new, moving shadow appeared suddenly, on the poolside tile behind Tony, and begin sliding across the water toward me.
 
I glanced up quickly.
 
Through a gap in the poinciana canopy above I glimpsed Erin, a tiny figure perhaps half a mile above us, falling.
 
Why was she sky-diving at a time like this?
 
Oh, of course.
 
Air drying herself.
 
She plummeted down to maybe a hundred feet overhead, and winked out of existence.
 
The next moment—no, actually, the same one—she was standing where she had been before, down at the far end of the bar.

I was afraid Tony would turn and see her—how long could a bird hold his interest?
 
But Harry picked that moment to do his signature piece.
 
It captivated Erin when she first met Harry, at age two, and it did not fail to amuse Tony Donuts Junior now.
 
Behind the bar, on top of The Machine, stands a miniature toilet.
 
It’s a scale model of an old-fashioned water closet, the kind with an overhead tank of water you flush by pulling a chain, and it’s perfectly functional.
 
Harry hopped up onto it now, put it to its intended use, and yanked the chain with his beak, causing it to flush noisily.

Tony cracked up.
 
The sound was remarkably similar to the noise Lex makes when he surfaces and swaps the water in his lungs for air—if Lex were the size of a killer whale, that is, and lived in a fetid pool at the center of an immense dark dank echoey cave.
 
By the time the ghastly sound was over, Erin was dressed again.
 
I heaved a small sigh of relief.
 
A very small one.

Jim Omar had just finished contributing to the backpack, and there were no other potential donors.
 
Erin took the bag from his big hands before he could stop her and took it to Tony.
 
He heard her sandals slapping the tiles, turned his head, and his grin got wider.

When Erin reached him she solemnly handed him the backpack.
 
He lifted it up next to his ear, shook it, and listened to the sound.
 
Then he frowned in thought, a process which apparently involved moving his tongue in a slow circle against the inside of his left cheek.
 
“Ya light,” he said over his shoulder to me.
 
“Other hand, you an ya friends all showed respect.
 
Okay, what the fuck.
 
I don’t hurt nobody taday.”

He turned back to my grown daughter.
 
“Like the French guys say,
oh cunt rare
,” he told her.
 
He reached out one of his snow shovel hands and took a firm grasp on her right breast.

I moved forward to kill him with my teeth, but Zoey seemed to be in the way.
 
No matter how I moved, somehow she kept being in the way.
 
I stopped trying and watched to see what Erin did.

She acted as if Tony’s hand did not exist.
 
She met his gaze squarely, her own expression as serene as that of a meditating monk or a professional poker player.
 
Her voice when she spoke was pitched so low Zoey and I could barely make out her words, and we were the nearest people to her and Tony now.
 
“How would you like something that’s better than either sex
or
money?” she asked him.

He blinked at her a few times, and then snorted.
 
“No such t’ing.”
 
He kneaded her breast, not gently.
 
Zoey had a firm grip on my weapon arm by then, and her other hand over my mouth.

Erin continued ignoring Tony’s molestation, kept looking him square in the eye.
 
“You’re wrong,” she told him quietly.
 
“I’ll see you tomorrow.
 
Not here, in town.
 
If you don’t agree that what I show you then is better than sex or money, you can have both of them instead.”

Now I had a hand over Zoey’s mouth.

This proposal seemed to interest Tony.
 
He stopped kneading while he thought it over.
 
I couldn’t see his tongue tip circling on the inside of his cheek, from where I stood, but I could picture it.
 
“Oh yeah?”

Erin nodded once.
 
“Yeah.”

I hoped she had him figured right.
 
I’d have assumed, myself, that a guy like Tony would prefer them uncooperative.
 
And would be too childish to defer immediate pleasure for future reward.
 

But she had appealed successfully to his child’s curiosity.
 
“Okay,” he said, and let his hands fall and stepped back a pace.
 
“This I gotta see.”

She nodded.
 
“Tomorrow, then.”

He shrugged his right shoulder to settle the backpack, and turned to go, but she held up a hand to stop him.
 
“Tom,” she called over her shoulder, “don’t you have an indelible Magic Marker under the bar?”

“No, Erin.”

“Over by the controls for the pool lights.”

“I don’t think s…wait, you’re right, here it is.”