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  CALLAHAN’S CON

  The discreet little bar that Jake Stonebender established a few blocks below Duval Street was named simply The Place. There, Fast Eddie Costigan learned to curse back at parrots as he played the house piano; the Reverend Tom Hauptman learned to tend bar bare-chested (without blushing), Long-Drink McGonnigle discovered the margarita and several señoritas, and all the other regulars settled into comfortable sub-tropical niches of their own. Nobody even noticed them save the universe.

  Over time, the twice-transplanted patrons of Callahan’s Place attracted a collection of local zanies so quintessentially Key West pixilated that they made the New York originals seem, well, almost normal. The elfin little Key deer, for instance—with a stevedore’s mouth; or the merman with eczema; or Robert Heinlein’s teleporting cat.

  For ten slow, merry years, life was good. The sun shone, the coffee dripped, the breeze blew just strongly enough to dissipate the smell of the puns, and little supergenius Erin grew to the verge of adolescence. Then disaster struck.

  Through the gate one sunny day came a malevolent, moronic mastodon of a Mafioso named Tony Donuts Jr., or Little Nuts (don’t ask). He’d decided to resurrect the classic protection racket in Key West—and guess which tavern he picked to hit first? Then, thanks to very poor accessorizing (she chose the wrong belt—and no, we’re not going to explain that one), Jake’s wife, Zoey, suddenly found herself in a place with no light, no heat, and no air. And no way home. The urgent question was where—precisely where—but that turned out to be a problem so complex that even the entire gang, equipped with teleportation, time travel, and telepathic syntony (you can look it up), might not be able to crack it in time.

  And while all this was going on, Death himself walked into The Place. But, this time he would not leave alone…

  With this latest chapter of the Callahan’s Place saga, Spider Robinson upholds his reputation for juggling serious themes and wacky characters, high tragedy and low comedy, sanity and silliness. The puns seem a relatively small price to pay, and can always be blacked out with a laundry marker.

  Books by Spider Robinson:

  *Telempath

  *Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon

  Stardance (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Antinomy

  The Best of All Possible Worlds

  *Time Travelers Strictly Cash

  Mindkiller

  *Melancholy Elephants

  Night of Power

  *Callahan’s Secret

  Callahan and Company (omnibus)

  Time Pressure

  Callahan’s Lady

  Copyright Violation

  True Minds

  Starseed (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Kill the Editor

  Lady Slings the Booze

  The Callahan Touch

  Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson)

  *Off the Wall at Callahan’s

  *Callahan’s Legacy

  Deathkiller (omnibus)

  Lifehouse

  *The Callahan Chronicals (omnibus)

  The Star Dancers (with Jeanne Robinson)

  User Friendly

  *The Free Lunch

  Callahan’s Key

  God Is an Iron and Other Stories

  *Callahan’s Con

  *Denotes a Tor Book

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  CALLAHAN’S CON

  Copyright © 2003 by Spider Robinson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by Patrick LoBrutto

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Spider.

  Callahan’s con / Spider Robinson.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN: 0-765-30270-5

  1. Callahan, Mike (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Bars (Drinking establishments)—Fiction. 3. Key West (Fla.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.O3 156C335 2003

  813'.54—dc21

  2003040285

  First Edition: July 2003

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to Larry Janifer,

  known to some as Oudis:

  senior colleague, Knave extraordinaire,

  and extraordinary friend

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For assistance and advice in matters of science and technology, this time around, I am deeply indebted to Douglas Beder, Jaymie Matthews, Ray Maxwell, Jef Raskin, Dave Sloan, and Guy Immega; as always any mistakes or inaccuracies are my fault for trusting them. Assistance of other kinds, just as valuable and appreciated, was provided by Rod Rempel, Lawrence Justrabo, and Colin MacDonald (the wizards behind my Web site), and by Bob Atkinson, Steve Fahnestalk, Daniel Finger, Stephen Gaskin, Paul Krassner, Alex and Mina Morton, Val Ross, Riley Sparks, the late Laurence M. Janifer, every one of the posters to the Usenet newsgroup alt.callahans, and others too numerous or fugitive to mention.

  Particular thanks go to one of my favorite writers, Laurence Shames, for his gracious permission to borrow, for the second time, his splendid creations Bert the Shirt and Don Giovanni. If you find them as delightful as I do, look for Mr. Shames’s novels Florida Straits, Sunburn, and Mango Squeeze.

  None of my thirty-one books—or anything else I’ve done—would have been possible without the advice, ideas, research assistance, not-always-credited collaboration, and ongoing love and support of my wife, Jeanne. This time out, however, she deserves even more than the usual thanks: this is the first book I’ve written since I quit smoking tobacco, and I estimate I was about 15 to 20 percent harder to live with than usual during its creation. (Neither of us is complaining; we both figure it’s a good trade. But still—thank you, Spice!) For the same reason and others, special thanks go to my longtime friend and agent, Eleanor Wood, and evenlongertime friend and editor, Pat LoBrutto, for believing in me and being patient.

  Howe Sound, British Columbia

  8 September 2002

  Teach us delight in simple things,

  And mirth that has no bitter springs.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  The man who listens to Reason is lost:

  Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.

  —George Bernard Shaw

  Give up owning things and being somebody.

  Quit existing.

  —Jalā ad-Dīnar ar-Rūmī

  When you can laugh at yourself, there is enlightenment.

  —Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

  CONTENTS

  1

  Another Day in Paradise

  2

  Little Nuts

  3

  Big Stones

  4

  Dog Deer Afternoon

  5

  Pros and Cons

  6

  When she was seventeen

  7

  Telling the tale

  8

  Burying the hook

  9

  Ba-da-sting!

  10

  Who knows where or when?

  11

  Need in a haystack

  12

  God’s idea of slapstick

  1

  ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE

  The basic condition of human life is happiness.

/>   —the Dalai Lama

  A little more than ten years after we had all arrived in Key West, saved the universe from annihilation, and settled back to have us some serious fun, bad ugliness and death came into my bar. No place is perfect.

  I noticed her as soon as she came through the gate.

  I always notice newcomers to The Place, but it was more than that. Before she said a word, even before she was near enough to get a sense of her face, something—body language maybe—told me she was trouble. My subconscious alarm system is fairly sensitive, even for a bartender.

  Unfortunately I’m often too stupid to heed it. I did register her arrival, as I said…and then I went back to dispensing booze and good cheer to the happy throng. Trouble has walked into my bar more than once over the years, and I’m still here. Admittedly, I did require special help the night the nuclear weapon went off in my hand. And I’m the first to admit that I could never have succeeded in saving the universe that other time without the assistance of my baby daughter. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that she might not have succeeded without my supervision. All I’m trying to say is that in that first glance, even though I recognized the newcomer as Trouble looking for the spot marked X, not a great deal of adrenalin flowed. How was I to know she was my worst nightmare made flesh?

  If the Lucky Duck had been around—anywhere in Key West—there probably wouldn’t have been any trouble atall, atall. Or else ten times as much. But he was away, trying to help keep Ireland intact that winter, in a town with the unlikely name of An Uaimh. My friend Nikola Tesla might have come up with some way to salvage things, but he was off somewhere, doing something or other with his death ray; nobody’d heard from him in years. Even my wife, Zoey, could probably have straightened everything right out with a few well-chosen words. She had a gig up on Duval Street that evening, though, sitting in with a fado group, and had brought her bass and amp over to the lead singer’s place for a rehearsal she assured me was not optional.

  So I just had to improvise. That only works for me on guitar, as a rule.

  It was late afternoon on a particularly perfect day, even by the standards of Key West. The humidity was uncommonly low for the Keys, and thanks in part to the protection of the thick flame-red canopy of poinciana that arched over the compound, we were just hot enough that the gentle steady breezes were welcome as much for their coolness as for the cycling symphony of pleasing scents they carried: sea salt, frangipani, fried conch fritters, Erin’s rose garden, iodine, coral dust, lime, sunblock, five different kinds of coffee, the indescribable but distinctive bouquet of a Cuban sandwich being pressed somewhere upwind, excellent marijuana in a wooden pipe, and just a soupçon of distant Moped exhaust. The wind was generally from the south, so even though The Place is only a few blocks from the Duval Street tourist crawl, I couldn’t detect the usual trace amounts of vomit or testosterone in the mix.

  It was the kind of day on which God unmistakably intended that human beings should kick back with their friends and loved ones in some shady place, chill out, get tilted, and say silly things to one another. I’ve gone to some lengths, over the years, to make The Place a spot conducive to just such activity, so I had rather more customers than usual for a weekday. And they were all certainly doing their part to fulfill God’s wishes: I was selling a fair amount of booze, and the general conversation tended to be silly even if it wasn’t.

  On my left, for instance, Walter was trying to tell Bradley a perfectly ordinary little anecdote—but since they each suffer from unusual neurological disorders, even the mundane became a bit surreal.

  “I was down walking Whitehead Street when there was suddenly big this boom, and I’m on my lying back,” Walter was saying. Thanks to severe head trauma a year or two ago, his whack order is often out of word: he can say eloquently things, but not right in the way. After you’ve been listening to him for about five minutes, you get used to it.

  Bradley’s peculiarity, on the other hand, is congenital, some sort of subtle anomaly in Broca’s Area. I’ve always thought of it as Typesetter’s Twitch: Brad tends to vocally anagrammatize, scrambling letters within a word rather than scrambling the order of the words themselves like Walter. Sometimes that can be even more challenging to follow. Right now, for instance, he responded to Walter’s startling news with, “No this!”

  Walter nodded. “I to swear God.”

  “What went grown?”

  “What went wrong some was criminal trying to district the scare attorney who sent jail to him,” Walter explained.

  “A D.A.? Which neo?” Brad is a court recorder.

  “The new one, Tarara Buhm. He trapped her booby car with a bomb smoke.”

  Our resident cross to bear, Harry, cackled and yelled one of his usual birdbrained comments: “You’re welcome to smoke these boobies, bubbelah!” No one ever reacts to Harry any more, but it doesn’t seem to stop him.

  “Wow,” said Bradley. “I bet she was sacred.”

  “Her scared? I pissed about my just pants!”

  “How did it?”

  “Some named fool Seven and a Quarter.”

  “Seven and a Quarter?” Bradley said. “Pretty wired name.”

  “His apparently mother picked it out of a hat. But if you think that’s name a screwy—”

  Listen to too much of that sort of conversation without a break and the wiring can start to smoke in your own brain. I let my attention drift over to the piano, where Fast Eddie Costigan was accompanying Maureen and Willard as they improvised a song parody.

  A nit is a tiny little pain in the ass

  The size of a molecule of gas.

  The average nit’s about as smart as you,

  Which means that you may be a nitwit too.

  …and if you don’t ever really give a shit

  You may grow up to be a nit.

  “Knit this!” Harry screamed at the top of his lungs, and was roundly ignored as always.

  Or would you like to swing on your dates

  Carry on at ruinous rates

  And be better off than Bill Gates

  Or would you rather be a jerk

  A jerk is an animal whose brain tends to fail

  And by definition he is male…

  Maureen and her husband both started pelting each other with peanuts at that point, so Fast Eddie went instrumental while they regained control and thought up some more lyrics.

  From over on the other side of the bar, Long-Drink McGonnigle’s buzz-saw voice cut through the Gordian knot of conversation. Apparently he’d been inspired by a couple of words in the song’s chorus. “Coming soon to your local cinema,” he declaimed, trying to imitate the plummy tones of a BBC announcer, “the latest entry in the longest-running comedy series in British film history: a romp about air rage entitled, Carry-On Baggage.” There was general laughter.

  Doc Webster jumped in, with a considerably better fake British accent. “Joan Sims will play the baggage—fully packed indeed—Charles Hawtrey will handle ’er, and they’ll spend the movie squeezed together, either under the seat or in the overhead compartment, while flight attendant Sidney James offers everyone his nuts.” Louder laughter.

  Doc has been topping Long-Drink—hell, all of us, except for his wife, Mei-Ling—for decades, now. But the McGonnigle likes to make him work for it a little. “Rest assured that once they get their belts unfastened and locate each other’s seat, they’ll soon be flying united,” he riposted.

  “—in the full, upright position of course,” the Doc said at once, “and setting off the smoke detectors. The Hollies will provide the baggage theme song, ‘On a Carousel,’ performed by Wings in an airy, plain fashion while eight miles high. As the actress told the gym teacher, ‘It’s first-class, Coach.’”

  Long Drink raised two fingers to his brow to acknowledge a successful hijacking and joined in the round of applause. As it faded, Willard and Maureen tried another take, together this time:

  A jerk is an animal who’s here on sprin
g break

  He sure can be difficult to take (raucous laughter)

  He has no manners when he swills his ale

  He’d sell one kidney for a piece of tail

  So if it’s years till you have to go to work,

  Then don’t grow up: just be a jerk

  “Jerk this!” Harry shrieked inevitably. After a brief pause for thought, Maureen launched the next chorus:

  Hey, would you like to swing on a bed

  Try to moon some frat boy named Fred

  And be better off when you’re dead

  Or would you rather get a life?

  “Excuse me,” a stranger’s voice said, when the cheering had faded enough.

  It had taken that long for the newcomer to make it as far as the bar. I’d vaguely noticed her doing a larger-than-usual amount of gawking around at The Place on her way, examining it intently enough to have been grading it by some unknown criteria. I turned to see her now, and a vagrant shaft of sunlight pierced the crimson leaves overhead, forcing me to hold up a hand to block it, with the net effect that I probably looked as though I were saluting.

  It seemed appropriate. The short pale Caucasian woman who stood there was—in that Key West winter heat—so crisp and straight and stiff and in all details inhumanly perfect that I might well have taken her for a member of the military, temporarily out of uniform, an officer perhaps, or an MP. But she wore her severe business suit and glasses as if they were a uniform, and in place of a sidearm she carried something much deadlier. From a distance I had taken it for a purse. The moment I recognized it for what it really was, I started to hear a high distant buzzing in my ears.

  A briefcase.

  With an elaborate crest on it that was unmistakably some sort of official seal.

  I felt a cold, clammy sweat spring out on my forehead and testicles. Suddenly I was deep-down terrified, for the first time in over a decade. My ancient enemy was in my house.

  The others were oblivious; most of them could not have seen the briefcase from their angle. “No, excuse me, ma’am,” Long-Drink said politely. “I didn’t see you there. Have a seat.”