Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (24 page)

It ain’t her
, he thought.
 
No way.
 
She just couldn’ta got back here that fast, not even on a fuckin Moped.
 
Forget about it—it would take a miracle for that girl there to be—

—Miracle Girl…

He began to run again, back the way he had just come.

Halfway back to Duval, he saw a blue Moped chained to a parking meter in front of one of the rare shops with a closed door.
 
The place had no windows, no muzak, and apparently no name, unless “AdultXXXXX 21+only” was a name.
 
The air above the Moped’s tailpipe shimmered.
 
Tony thundered to a halt, caught his breath, planed sweat from his forehead with the edge of his hand and flung it on the sidewalk, and went inside.

It was
dark
in there, after having been out in the sunshine, and only slightly less dark when he remembered to take off his sunglasses.
 
He stood with his back to the door, blocking the exit, while he waited for his eyes to adjust.
 
It was also massively air-conditioned in there, which Tony hated, especially after exercise; already he could feel a charlie horse threatening in his left calf.
 
The more he made out of his surroundings, the bigger his pupils got, and soon he could see just fine.
 
Tony had been involved in the distribution end of the porn business once or twice, until amateur video killed it—and some of the stuff offered for sale in this chilly little hole in the wall startled him, even shocked him in one or two cases.
 
He made himself ignore it and looked around for the girl.
 
No sign of her, and nowhere she could be hiding unless she could fit into a video box or hide behind a magazine.
 
The whole place was about the size of a New York kitchen.
 
There was a counter on the right, with an aging hippie behind it, but it didn’t look like he even had enough room back there to take advantage of the merchandise without barking his knuckles.

Still, there was nowhere else to go.
 
Tony approached the counter—racks of video tape boxes slid aside to make way for him—and confronted the clerk.
 
Long curly hair, lots of mustache, and a silly little tuft of beard hanging off his chin.
 
He reminded Tony of Buffalo Bill—or was it General Custer he was thinking of?—only with mostly grey hair.
 
He was dressed conservatively for a hippie, by Key West standards, but he didn’t look scared of
 
Tony so he must be very stoned.
 
Tony put enough menace and volume in his voice to get the guy’s attention.
 
“I’m lookin for a blonde, about thirteen, short hair.”

“Aisle three,” said the hippie.
 
“Second row from the top.”

Tony closed his eyes, took a deep breath and began counting to ten.
 
At five he forgot he was counting and said, “Not in a movie.
 
For real.”

The hippie shook his head.
 
“We don’t do live,” he said.
 
“Take a left on Duval, go about five blocks—but you better have a lot of money, and be prepared to settle for a pretty good fake.”

Tony started over from three, having lost his place, and this time got to seven before deciding screw it.
 
Softly, slowly, he said, “About a minute ago.
 
A real live little teenybopper.
 
Blonde hair, yellow outfit.
 
Got off a blue Moped and came in here.”

The hippie opened his mouth.

“If you’re ready to die, right now, keep on bullshittin me.”

The hippie closed his mouth.

“Or keep me waiting five more seconds,” Tony suggested.

The hippie again opened his mouth, and of course Tony could see he was getting ready to lie so Tony naturally got ready to hit him and of course the hippie could see that so he started to duck behind the counter where of course there would be some sort of lame weapon so naturally Tony decided to pound him on the top of his head so hard he’d lose interest in weapons for awhile, and he made his hand into a fist and his arm into a club and raised it high but before he could bring it down a soft high voice behind him, back there in the space where Tony had just personally made certain there were no people and no ways for one to enter or leave, said, “Let it go.
 
I’m afraid he’s not going to take no for an answer.”

Tony stopped and turned around and stared at the thirteen-year-old girl until even he realized that he looked like a parody of the Statue of Liberty and put his arm down at his side.

She wore what looked like the same sunsuit, a lemon yellow sleeveless one-piece affair that ended in shorts, only it looked a lot bigger on her today.
 
The outfit had a belt—no, two belts, only one of which went through the belt loops, what was that about?

“Thank you for your loyalty, Willard,” she went on, “but I won’t have your blood spilled on my behalf.
 
I fear I have far too much of that against my account already.”

“Your call, Ida,” said the hippie.
 
“I think you’re making a mistake.”

“If so, it won’t be the first, will it?
 
I’m
tired
, Willard.
 
Tired of hiding and running and being afraid.
 
Perhaps a…a really strong, brutal man is what I’ve needed all along.”

Tony was not a subtle man; nuance usually pissed him off.
 
But it was dawning on him that, in some way he was not equipped to parse, this kid did
not
sound like a thirteen-year-old trying to sound like a grownup.
 
What she sounded like was a very old lady trying to sound like a kid.
 
Physically she was perfect, looked just like a little kid on the verge of puberty.
 
Verbally, though, she was completely unconvincing.

“You ain’t no little kid,” he accused.

“And you are no fool,” she said.
 
Behind him, Willard the hippie smothered a sneeze, and excused himself.

Tony ignored him.
 
“How old are you?
 
Really?”

She sighed, looked up to the ceiling—then squared her shoulders and looked him in the eye as she answered.
 
“I was born in 1848.”

Tony knew how to solve arithmetic problems: frighten the nearest person into giving you the answer.
 
He frowned ferociously, swelled his shoulders, and asked, “How old does that make you?”

“She’s a hundred and fifty-one,” Willard said behind him.

Tony turned and looked at him.
 
He was pretty good at telling when people were bullshitting him—they tended to be pale and sweaty, and tremble noticeably—and this Willard seemed no more frightened than people usually were when confined in an enclosed space with Tony Donuts Junior.
 
He didn’t even look as if he expected Tony to believe him—that more than anything else made Tony think that the old hippie was telling the truth.

He turned back to Miracle Girl, took a long second look at her eyes, and mentally promoted her to Miracle Woman.
 
No, Miracle Hag.

Ambiguity and Tony were barely nodding acquaintances, but now he experienced a rare mixed reaction.
 
This was certainly good news: the little bitch was even more valuable than he’d realized.
 
Tony had a sudden mental image of one of the Five Old Men, just after Tony explained to him that he would soon be screwing like a teenager again, and picturing that smile made even Tony want to flinch just a bit—he was about to be richer than a CEO.
 
Hell, richer than a CEO’s lawyer.
 

On the other hand, the only kinds of humans Tony had ever had the slightest difficulty in controlling had been hags and little girls.
 
He could dimly sense that a combination of both was not going to be good for him.

But this little Miracle Hag seemed, at least for the moment, to have surrendered.
 
“Willard is correct,” she said.
 
“I was born Ida Alice Shourds in 1848.”
 
She waited, seeming to expect him to react to the name, then continued.
 
“If you look me up in the public records, you’ll be told that I died nearly seventy years ago, at the age of eighty-two.
 
I died in a little sanitarium in upstate New York, where I had been locked away for thirty-three years.
 
Can you imagine, sir, what passed for a mental hospital in Central Valley, New York, in the early part of this century?
 
What it was like to be confined in such a place?”

Tony felt his shoulders tighten.
 
“My old man died in a hatch,” he said.
 
“Federal prisoner.
 
They had him on drugs so bad he was takin guff from janitors.”

Ida’s face showed empathy that even he knew should have been impossible for a thirteen-year-old.
 
“Then perhaps you can appreciate that decades ago, before your father was born, they kept patients docile with methods that would one day make thorazine seem an enlightened breakthrough.”

“Doctors,” said Tony.

“Indeed.”

“So you faked bein dead somehow an busted out.”

She nodded.
 
“With Willard’s help.
 
He was a janitor at the sanitarium, then.”

Tony glanced over his shoulder at the hippie.
 
“How old are
you
?” he asked.

“Almost ninety,” Willard admitted.

“Ya don’t look a day over sixty.”

Willard thanked him solemnly.
 
Tony returned his attention to Ida.
 
“Okay.
 
So you died seventy years ago.
 
Continue the story.”

“My death may have been faked, but that most certainly did not make it painless,” she said.
 
“You see, at the time of my death my name was Ida Alice Flagler, and I was worth thirteen million dollars.”

“That’s 1930 dollars,” Willard put in.

“Of which I never got to spend a penny,” she said bitterly.

An encyclopedia compiled by Tony Donuts Junior would have been a very slim paperback, but he had been in the state of Florida for several weeks now.
 
If he’d spent as much time in Salt Lake City, the name Brigham Young would by now have begun to ring a bell.
 
“Flagler, Flagler…guy that invented Florida?”

She grimaced.
 
“In the same sense that Edison invented the lightbulb, that’s right.
 
Pretty much everything from St. Augustine to Key West, Henry Flagler built from nothing.
 
The day a little settlement called Fort Dallas incorporated and changed its name to Miami, a century ago, Henry owned six hundred acres of what is now downtown, and the railroad that was the only way to get there.
 
Before he was done, he drove that railroad to the end of the state and a hundred miles out to sea, to this very pile of coral we’re standing on—boarded his personal car in St. Augustine and stepped down off it here in Key West.”

“He musta had dough.”

Behind him Willard began, “He was one—”

Tony interrupted him.
 
“Getcher ass out here, Moonbeam.
 
I’m gettin a stiff neck lookin atcha.”
 
He allowed two seconds’ grace, then turned his whole body around.
 
“I
said
—”

“Okay, okay.”
 
Willard turned to his right, and in two strides reached the wall at the far end of the counter.
 
He did something behind the counter, and the wall opened on concealed hinges, became a doorway.
 
He stepped through it, closed it behind him—
snick!
—and in a few seconds a rack of video boxes against the back wall swung away to reveal another secret doorway, from which Willard emerged.
 
He closed that behind him, too, and came over to stand beside little Ida Flagler.
 
He did not quite touch her, but Tony read his body language and knew he would die for her if necessary.
 
Tough shit for him.
 

Tony had gotten a good close look as the hippie squeezed past.
 
“That’s a good rug,” he stated.
 
“So’s the beard.”

“Not many people can tell,” said Ida.

“So?” Willard said belligerently.

“So nuttin.
 
Finish yah story.”

Willard glared but continued.
 
“I was saying, Henry Flagler, Samuel Andrews and John D. Rockefeller were the three founders of Standard Oil, one of the greatest monopolies in history.
 
The first antitrust laws were invented specifically to stop
them
.
 
In today’s money, Flagler paid something like a billion dollars for his ticket to ride that train from St. Gus to Key West.
 
Yeah, he had dough.”

“He warehoused me in a hellhole for thirty-three years,” Ida said, “and left me a thirteen million dollar estate, like a tip, so that none of my heirs would raise any inconvenient questions about my competence—the bastard.”

Tony admired his technique.
 
“Well, you got your revenge.
 
I heard he croaked a long time ago.”

“In 1913,” Ida agreed.
 
“But I’m afraid his death was no more real than my own.
 
The only difference was, he
did
take it with him.
 
Henry is still alive.
 
He simply decided to duck out on the World War—the First World War, they call it now—and he never found a reason to come back up from underground.
 
He spent the first eighty years of his life piling up money,
doing
things…and he’s passed the last eighty spending it all, invisible to the world, accomplishing nothing whatsoever except to enjoy life.”