Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (27 page)

“Oh
shit
,” Zoey and I both said together, and several people around us groaned or gasped.

One teleports naked or not at all.
 
Why this is so Erin has explained to me several times, and I still don’t get it, any more than I can grasp how she teleports in the first place, but the bottom line is, for whatever reasons, organic and inorganic matter can’t travel together in the same load.
 
You can teleport your clothing ahead of you, and dress on arrival, if you like—or you can simply rob a clothesline at your destination.
 
But if you’re wearing so much as a class ring, you can’t teleport at all.
 
As long as Erin wore those cuffs on her ankles, she was at the mercy of Tony Donuts Junior.

Zoey and I embraced.
 
Friends moved in from all sides and it became a group hug.
 
“Oh Jake,” she groaned in my ear, “
she’s only seven years old.
”

“She saved the universe when she was two,” I reminded her.
 

“Twice, really,” said Long-Drink McGonnigle, from somewhere to my left.

“With you and Nikola Tesla and Jim Omar and half a dozen other people.
 
She’s
alone
with that gorilla.”
 
Her voice was rising in pitch and speed.

“So better she’s seven than a teenager,” I said, tightening my embrace.
 
“The day she came out of your belly she was a thousand times smarter than Tony—”

“Sure—that’s how she ended up in chains in his car—most of the people he’s killed were smarter than him, nearly everyone is—”

I didn’t have a comeback for that one, and I could feel her working up toward hysterics.
 
Now that I thought about it, so was I.
 
Screw logic.
 
My irreplaceable daughter was in the murderous hands of a moronic mastodon, her secret weapon disabled, and
she was only seven
—

Tanya Latimer’s speaking voice is a lot like Pearl Bailey’s singing voice: low, liquid and soothing, absolutely unhurried and unworried.
 
From somewhere behind me she purred, “Zoey, honey, did you read comic books when you were a little girl?”

“Sure, what the hell has—”

“Did you ever read
Superboy
comics?”

“For awhile, but—”

“But you stopped after awhile, didn’t you?”

“Well—”
 
The onslaught of questions was confusing.

“I’ll tell you why you stopped.
 
No suspense.
 
Whenever Lex Luthor or somebody tried to kill that boy, you
knew
they were going to fail, didn’t you?
 
How did you know that?”

“Well, obviously, you knew he was going to grow up to be Superm—oh.
 
Oh
.”

We had seen Erin at ages above seven.
 
We had lived with a more-than-seven-year-old Erin daily for more than five years now.
 
Ergo, she was positively not going to die at age seven.
 
In fact, we knew for certain she would live to
at least
age twenty-one, because we’d already met her at that age.

Come to think of it, she was not even going to sustain any noticeable injuries—or we’d have noticed them, back when she was seven and she returned from this time-hop caper.

Zoey and I pulled apart just enough to look into each other’s eyes, and I could see we were in complete agreement.
 
No logic chain, however compelling, can be strong enough or solid enough when the fate of your child is at stake.
 
Thanks to Tanya, we could now
prove
there was nothing for us to worry about…so now we were only worried
half
to death.

But that was clearly better than panic, which was where we’d been heading.
 
Keep thinking, Butch—that’s what you’re good at…
 
“Thank you, Tanya.
 
Okay, I’m going to assume Erin is gonna get through this okay because we all broke our asses saving her.
 
That way I got something to do besides go berserk.
 
Anybody got a problem with that?”
 
No.
 
“Okay, she’s on her way north with the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
 
Prof, how good is his car?”

The split second hesitation cued me that the answer would not be comforting.
 
Can’t help you, Sundance
.
 
“Pretty good, Jake.
 
An old Dodge ragtop, kept up.
 
It moved pretty good.”

And I could guess what kind of driver Tony would be.
 
Rules?
 
In a knifefight?
 
Few humans could find Tony in their rearview mirror and continue to block his path for long.
 
“Shit.
 
What have we got?”
 
I didn’t own wheels myself, hadn’t since I sold the ancient schoolbus in which I’d brought my family down to Key West, ten years before.
 
But some of the gang kept up the hobby.

“I got a Lada,” Shorty Steinitz said.
 
Nobody laughed.

“I got a Vincent,” said Marty Pignatelli.
 

It didn’t register for me, but several people murmured “Holy shit!” or some equivalent.
 
“A what, Marty?”

“A Vincent Black Shadow,” he said.

Now it did register…and I said, “Holy shit!”
 
Even I’ve heard of the Black Shadow.
 
It’s sort of the Stradivarius of high-performance motorcycles.
 
It eats Harleys and shits Yamahas.
 
“I didn’t even realize you had a bike, Fifty.”

He shrugged.
 
“I was a statie.”

“Huh.”
 
Well, I was impressed…but on the other hand, the last time I’d ridden a bike, the ancient Irish blessing had come entirely too true: the road rose up to meet me.
 
Not stopping when it reached my ass.
 
I was starting to feel a little trapped.
 
You damn fool—the
fall
’ll probably kill you…

Double-Bill diagnosed my expression.
 
“I have something better, Jacob.”

“Hard to believe, but go ahead.”

“I have a little twenty-two-foot Grady White semi-V over at Houseboat Row, with a new pair of two-twenty-five Johnsons on her and full cans.”

I blinked at him.
 
“Moderate your language, suh—there are ladies present.”

“He means a fast boat,” Tanya said.
 
“Fueled up.”

Jim Omar was somewhere nearby in the hug.
 
“He means a floating rocket, Jake.
 
Traffic’s lighter on the Atlantic Ocean than on US 1.
 
You’ll probably be in Miami before Tony clears the Keys.”

Bolivia, huh Butch?
 
Falling off a rocket onto water did sound better than falling off a Vincent onto asphalt.
 
And not only was Omar right about traffic, Florida boaters are slightly less likely than Florida motorists to assert the right of way with small arms fire.
 
“Okay.
 
Zoey, would you please call Bert and get an address for where Charlie Ponte does meets in Miami, while I get ready to go?
 
Bill, you’ll drive this boat, okay?
 
Tom, pack us a few of your Cuban sandwiches and a couple of beers, and dial up a thermos of Atherton Tablelands with cream and sugar.”
 
The group hug began to break up.
 
“I don’t suppose anybody’s got high explosives lying around handy?”

“Sure ting,” said Fast Eddie.
 
“Grenades.
 
How many ya want?”

Eddie lives next door to me.
 
“Two should do it.”

Zoey stopped poking at the phone.
 
“Jake, what the
hell
do you plan to do with a pair of grenades?”

“Just before we knock on Charlie’s door, I’m gonna have Bill duct-tape them into my hands, and then pull the pins.
 
I don’t care how tough a guy is—you do that and even Tony Donuts or Charlie Ponte is gonna go right to Plan B.
 
And you and I and Erin are all bombproof.”

“I’m not,” Double-Bill reminded me.

“Stand behind me and you’ll be fine.”

“Bull-
grunty
.
 
You provide as much blast-shadow as a hatrack, you skinny bastard.”

Zoey got my attention by rapping the top of my skull with the phone.
 
“Jake.
 
Listen to me.
 
No grenades
.”

I don’t get it.
 
She likes the Three Stooges.
 
“Aw…you’re no fun.”
 
Whack!
 
“
Ow
.
 
Okay, I promise.
 
How about a nice little Uzi?
 
Nobody’ll notice that in Miami.”
 
I went to our cottage and changed into clothes a Mafia capo would find less contemptible than sandals, baggy shorts and a Hawaiian shirt emitting as many energetic photons as Duval Street.
 
It was stuff I hadn’t worn since I’d left Long Island, high in polyester content.
 
The hair and beard undid a lot of the effect, of course, but it always had.

As I was tying the last shoelace, Zoey came in and handed me a notepad sheet on which was written Charlie Ponte’s meetingplace address and his private phone number.
 
She too was dressed as a tourist, and it looked a hell of a lot better on her.
 
“Tell me this is going to be all right, Spice,” she said.

“It’s a pipe,” I said at once, straightening up and taking her by the shoulders.
 
“You know the logic as well as I do.
 
If anything were to happen to her, it’d be a paradox, and the universe abhors a paradox.
 
We could probably stay here all night singing Beatles songs, and everything would still work out just fine—it
has
to.”
 

She closed her eyes.
 
“Really?
 
You’re sure?”
 
Her shoulder muscles felt like rattan under my fingers.

“Absolutely.”
 
I closed my own eyes and confessed.
 
“That’s why it’s taking all my strength to keep myself from digging the Meddler’s Belt out of storage and using it to peek ahead to the back of the book.”

Barring Mike Callahan himself, the Meddler was the first time traveler I ever met.
 
He was a free-lancer, who’d come back from the not-too-distant future to the year 1975, to try and spare someone he loved great pain.
 
He hadn’t had access to the deluxe
far
-future no-moving-parts method of time travel the Callahans and Erin employed; instead he employed a time machine of his own invention, a belt roughly as bulky and cumbersome as the one heavyweight champions wear.
 
Most people who were there that night, including the Meddler himself, believed they saw that belt destroyed with their own eyes, tossed into the fireplace by Mike Callahan.
 
Only a handful of us knew that Mike had used sleight-of-hand, and the real Meddler’s Belt still existed…gathering mildew in my storage closet.

“Ah.”
 
Now her shoulders were made of steel cable.
 
“‘…but that would be wrong,’” she quoted, using a comedy Nixon voice that quavered too much.
 
(First presidency to die of a staff infection.)

“Cheating,” I agreed.

Our eyes opened and found each other.
 
“You got some kind of problem with cheating?” she asked softly.

I
was
tempted.
 
Quite.
 
But— “It’d be stupid.
 
For several excellent reasons…but primarily because time travel is way more risk than we need to take,” I said.
 
“You don’t gamble with the universe to calm your nerves.”

Her shoulders relaxed slightly.
 
“You’re right.
 
I’m sorry, Slim.”

“Gimme a kiss, we got a boat to catch.”

She did that, thoroughly.
 
“You watch my ass and I’ll watch yours.”

“Deal.”

We left the cottage, saw Bill just past the bar at poolside with a small ice chest and an underseat bag he was just zipping shut.
 
“We’re ready,” Zoey called.
 
“Let’s
go
.”

He straightened, and looked embarrassed.
 
You’d think a man who wears shirts that make mine look drab, a sarong, a Popeye cap, and a gold ring on his bare big toe would look embarrassed more often, but he doesn’t.
 
“Uh—” he said.
 
“I have expressed myself poorly.
 
I humbly apologize.”

“What are you talking about?”

He only hesitated a second, but that was long enough; Zoey and I had both guessed by the time he explained.
 
“It’s a two-man boat.”

She stopped in her tracks.
 
“I’ll squeeze in,” she insisted in a dangerous tone of voice.

We said nothing.
 
Zoey masses only a little less than Bill and me put together.
 
I’m scrawny and he’s short.
 
She’s neither.

“I will fucking water-ski!”

Another good place for a silence.

“God damn it, Jake, I am
not
going to sit here chewing my nails and loading the rifles while the menfolk form a posse and go rescue my little girl from the Commanches, end of story.
 
Forget it: I’d go completely out of my mind.
 
If there’s only two seats, Bill’s gonna have to teach one of us to drive.”