Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (22 page)

All of us except The Professor and Erin, who spent most of it way over on the other side of town, with nobody but Tony Donuts Junior for company.

7

Telling the tale

No conditions are permanent;

No conditions are reliable;

Nothing is self.

—the Buddha

Of Antonio Donnazio Junior his own mother had once said, “You know how some people don’t know shit?
 
Little Tony don’t
suspect
shit.”
 
(To which his maternal grandfather had replied, “Fuckin A.
 
Little prick makes his old man look like that Lord Stevie Hawkins.
 
Whaddya mean, who?
 
You know who I mean.
 
Rain Man in a wheelchair.”)
 
There had never been the slightest danger of Tony Junior suddenly needing a tuxedo because he’d been invited to Stockholm, and no one had ever, at least not with sincerity, asked his advice on anything.
 

Nevertheless, he’d had an entire night to integrate in his mind both brand new information—
I know somebody who can get younger
—with some of the oldest information his brain retained—
the world is owned by five very very old men
.

Everything he had been doing for the past few weeks, ever since he’d arrived in Key West, had the single purpose of impressing one or more of those very very old men.
 
For although he was not bright enough to have figured it out for himself, he had finally terrorized someone knowledgeable into explaining to him that this was what it would take for him to become a made guy—that no mere capo or even don would or even could make that decision.
 
Pressed, hard, his informant had explained that it wasn’t, at least not entirely, because Tony wasn’t Sicilian, and it wasn’t, at least not entirely, because he was let’s face it a potential discipline problem, and it wasn’t even that most people found him a little intimidating on a one-to-one basis, or even a one-to-six-heavily-armed basis.
 
What it mostly was, really, was that he was the son of Tony Donuts Senior, who in his own gaudy passage through life had made few even temporary allies and no friends, and not for nothin but it didn’t help he even had the same friggin
name
fachrissake.
 
This was monstrously, manifestly unfair, of course, but there was nothing Tony Junior could do about it except strangle his informant, which was small satisfaction.

Mulling it over for months, he’d seen that the Five Old Men could not be either frightened or reasoned with.
 
They would have to be bribed.
 
But they were used to being bribed by the best, with the most, so it was going to take a pretty big piece of money.

That was what had led to his southward migration.
 
The only plan he’d come up with himself for raising serious money was to double the tax he imposed on each of his personal stable of extortion victims.
 
It was not a great plan.
 
His standard rates had not been merciful, even by protection racket standards; doubled, they became a burden so crushing that a few of the goats actually dared to balk.
 
During one such renegotiation Tony found himself distracted, and digressed to ask the other party where in the
hell
he’d ever found such a stupid tee-shirt.
 
The shop owner had acquired the memorably obscene garment in question on Duval Street during a recent vacation in Key West, had noticed the obvious signs of Russian mob incursion there, and was well aware of Tony’s only frustrated ambition; in desperate hope of shortening his hospital stay, he invented the whole scam on the spot and gave it to Tony.
 
Go down there, roll up the Commies, give their balls and their loot to the old men, and they’ll give you a button.
 
It took two or three repetitions, each faster and more concise than the last, for Tony to grasp the nub of the scheme, but when he did he liked it so much that he generously put its inventor out of his misery at once.

On arrival in Key West he quickly learned that Einstein had screwed him.
 
The Russians were well dug in, in numbers that even he had to respect, and their principal racket appeared to be money laundering, about which Tony understood slightly less than nothing.
 
They’d be hard to take, and once taken would constitute a prize he wasn’t even sure how to pick up, much less present to the old men.
 

So he had stalled.
 
First he would lock up the rest of Key West, which anyone could see was a boat race for a man of his talents, and then from that power base he would take on the Russians.
 
So far, the strategy was not working a hell of a lot better than it had for Napoleon or Hitler.
 

It was just as much aggravation and legwork to lock up Key West as any other city, but once you had it there was far less than usual to steal.
 
Tony slowly learned that Key West was where all the losers in North America ended up, sooner or later.
 
A few days after he had that epiphany, it occurred to him that Key West was where
he
had ended up, and from that time on he tended to be even more impatient and irritable than his nature would have dictated.
 
Not good.

And then along came his lucky break, the unexpected answer to all his problems.
 
Not just a miracle, but
the
miracle: the only thing that the five old men wanted more than money.
 
In the possession of a girl.
 
Who got littler and more defenseless—and more infuriatingly insolent—every time he saw her.

Tony’s impatience escalated to a state not far short of frenzy.

*
 
*
 
*

So when he went to Duval Street to get his Jeep back the next morning, he was in no mood to waste any time on the transaction.
 
He had a broad to hunt.
 
And was aware that almost every other male on Duval Street was also hunting a broad, which was bound to obscure his view, and also that there were
thousands
of broads around, maybe half of them blonde, at least this week.

Fortunately for the peace of the commonweal, the staff of the emergency room at the hospital on Stock Island, and himself, the elderly tourist from Wisconsin was punctual.
 
When Tony got out of the cab, which departed without waiting for payment, there the geezer was, and there parked beside him was Tony’s Jeep.

Tony walked around the vehicle with a critical eye.
 
From the front bumper to the new rear one, it was visibly in far better condition than it had been yesterday.
 
He grunted in satisfaction.
 
Even the interior looked good: the floors had been swept, the ashtray had been emptied, and a crack in the driver’s seat upholstery that had been starting to annoy him was repaired.
 
He turned, leaned back against the vehicle, and said, “Ahright,” holding out his hand for the keys.

“Had to pay double to have it ready this fast,” the geezer said, greatly relieved by Tony’s approval.
 
In a wild spasm of optimism he passed over the receipt along with the keys.
 
“Come to thirteen hundred.”

“You got fucked,” Tony told him.
 
He climbed into the Jeep, started it up, and drove away without looking, confident that the stream of traffic would let him in.

His plan was to drive a few blocks further, park, and go up to the observation deck of the Holiday Inn LaConcha.
 
It is one of the tallest structures in Key West (the tallest with an elevator), and centrally located: the only way to get a better view of the entire island at once is to rent a helicopter, and helicopters are noisy and don’t serve booze.
 
But before he’d driven even half a block, Tony’s attention was distracted by something irritatingly not-right about the brake pedal.

He stopped to examine the problem.
 
(Fortunately the driver behind him today was more alert than the geezer had been yesterday, and stopped so far short of rear-ending Tony that even when his own car got rear-ended and punted forward a foot, he was still okay.)
 
The problem turned out to be just what it had seemed to be: a piece of paper, ridiculously taped to the brake.
 
With difficulty he bent and picked it up.
 
(Another collision occurred, several vehicles back; croquet effect pushed the first car in line to within a few inches of Tony’s brand new rear bumper, and the driver began having an anxiety attack.)
 

It was a photocopy of a delicate hand with Tony’s own inimitable signature on it, and its middle finger was extended.

Tony had just two seconds ago inspected the interior of the Jeep, and there had been no paper taped to its brake pedal then.
 
Therefore, the little miracle broad was no more than a couple of hundred yards behind him, laughing at him.
 

He climbed out of the Jeep just before it was jolted forward a foot by the car immediately behind it, amid a blaring of horns that fell silent when he appeared.
 
Automatically he started to tell the other driver to have the Jeep back here, fixed, by tomorrow, but the man seemed to have fainted.
 
Tony had no time to screw around; he gave the responsibility and keys to the second driver in line—an elderly nun from Fresno—and forgot the Jeep’s existence for now.

He could see the geezer from where he stood, sitting now in the front seat of his own car, being berated by his geezette.
 
He had begun to drive away from there, but then the traffic had halted, stopping him halfway out of his parking space.
 
Apparently he was farsighted; before Tony had taken more than a few steps in that direction the old bird saw him, paled, spun the wheel hard left, and stomped on the gas.
 
His car slammed into a gap between two of the vehicles blocking it, and burst through them; the impact helped it complete its U-turn on the narrow street, and then it was dwindling into the distance, bound directly for Wisconsin.
 
The hectoring geezette seemed to be pinned in place by her personal safety device, now: an airbag supporting a gasbag.

Tony Donuts Junior didn’t do running.
 
He walked rapidly to the spot where his Jeep had been parked only moments before, planted himself in the empty parking space, and began turning in a slow clockwise circle.
 
He was sure the girl he was looking for would appear.

It didn’t turn out well for him.
 

The first pedestrian he saw was another geezer—no, a coot—this one solidly built, heavily tanned, balding on top, and possessed of a splendid round grey and white beard.
 

Tony’s gaze continued moving clockwise, and five degrees later encountered another stocky coot with a tan and a Kris Kringle beard.
 

A little to the right of him, a third sanguine Santa in khaki shorts and sandals was gesturing with his pipe at a fourth bronzed Gepetto in a Hawaiian shirt.
 
Tony’s gaze slowed but kept moving.

A few people to the right of them, a pair of Japanese tourists were excitedly photographing yet another florid white-bearded senior, this one in slacks and a jacket with lots of pockets and epaulets.

Tony and his gaze stopped rotating, and his pulse climbed.
 
Almost nothing frightened him, and hardly anything made him uneasy—but he had heard terrified drunks in bars read aloud from the
Post
or the
Enquirer
on this very subject more than once, and had seen numerous movies about it, all nearly identical (ironically), and all of them creepy.

Jesus,
he thought,
they’re all the same fuckin guy—they’re whaddyacallit, clunes!

He tried to recall what it was about clunes that was so creepy—were they from space?—but could remember for sure only that there were scientists involved.
 
Tony regarded scientists the same way Conan the Barbarian did wizards.
 
Even strength and balls were no use against them.

Still, these clunes were doing nothing overtly threatening, and nobody else on the street seemed alarmed by them, plus which anyway how much trouble could even half a dozen Xerox copies of an overweight Obi-Wan Kenobi be for a guy like Tony?

The word “copies” reminded him of his
other
science project.
 
Miracle Girl.
 
Who, come to think of it, had been using photocopies to taunt him—was this more of her work?
 
Tony really hated it when people were subtle.
 
More determined than ever to wring the secret of youth from her, so he could then wring her neck in good conscience, he was just about to resume his clockwise scan, when something belatedly registered on him.
 
He backed up dubiously, but no shit.
 
There between Gepetto and Santa, holding Gepetto’s hand in fact, was a woman his eye had subtracted the first time because she was the wrong age, race and shape to be Miracle Girl, an Asian in her thirties (he estimated) with no hips and a pleasant smile.
 
Tony was well aware that standards in Key West differed greatly from those of Brooklyn, particularly at the beaches, but he was sure this was the first woman he had seen stark naked on Duval Street in broad daylight.

No, not naked: she was wearing paint.
 
Some talented artist had painted fishnet stockings, a frilly white garter belt, a lacy white cupless bra and tiny white crotchless panties on her tanned skin.
 
And the high heels had to be real.