Lady Slings the Booze Page 30

  “I don’t see him,” I called.

  She spun in a slow circle. “Look!” she cried.

  One of the prettiest sights I had ever seen. Over by the base of a stairway leading up to the world: a little pile of dogshit.

  Ralph was alive! He must have recovered while The Miner was dealing with me, and even though he’d heard nothing from us, he was following the original plan…

  I went up those stairs, got off at the landing with the turd, followed my instincts and found myself in the main terminal. I skidded to a halt and spun around like a yokel. “Fan out,” I cried, and my friends each picked an exit and headed for it.

  I took the nearest one.

  Ralph was waiting by the mouth of the exit, peering cautiously around the corner into Seventh Avenue in an obvious agony of indecision.

  “Ralph,” I called out when I saw him.

  He whirled and spotted me. “Danke schön, lieber Gott,” he barked. “Qvigley, Ken! He iss in a car, he hass started it. He iss pulling away!”

  The nearest car I could see with muscle was a black-and-white, parked by the curb. It was empty; I couldn’t see its owners anywhere from where I stood. I didn’t like it—I couldn’t shadow him in a cop car, I’d be committed to capturing him fast—but there wasn’t time to hotwire something else.

  “Describe the car,” I rapped.

  “Red Ferrari Mondiale. Diplomatic platez.”

  Sure. What else could park outside Penn Station with impunity? Easy to spot. Hard to catch on the highway, maybe, but in midtown, with a black-and-white under me, nothing could lose me.

  “Run back inside and howl like a son of a bitch until you draw the others,” I said, and sprinted for the black-and-white.

  Keys present, thank the Lord for lazy cops. Engine fired right up. After five hundred movies, I was going to have my first real live car chase—in a copmobile, chasing a red Ferrari through midtown Manhattan at dawn. I began to almost enjoy myself.

  There he was! I gunned it out into traffic, causing an accident and not giving a damn. There was the red Ferrari, just turning west on Thirty-first with a predator growl. I made a similar growl myself and floored it, cornering like Jim Rockford.

  I squinted at him. My trick contact lenses made him zoom closer: I clearly saw him spot me in his rear-view, saw him start visibly as he recognized me behind the wheel. Now the car chase would begin!

  He stopped dead, in front of Madison Square Garden.

  I stood up on the brakes (which sucked). I was indignant. In the movies, the other half of the car chase never refuses to play. It was a given: you realize someone is on your tail, and you floor it.

  I took out the Smith and opened the car door.

  He peeled out.

  I leaped back into the seat and floored it, letting inertia slam the door.

  He stopped.

  I stopped, and said a word that should have curdled his brains in his skull even at that distance.

  Not once during all those movies had I ever considered what would happen in this situation.

  The bastard was damned smart, or near as intuitive as me. I was at the wheel of a cop car, and I certainly was not a uniformed officer, and I was not running lights and siren even in a situation where that would have been appropriate. Therefore I had stolen the cop car, and had some reason for not simply telling its rightful owners to run him down for me. For some reason, I did not want official involvement any more than he did. I was not going to start blasting away at him in front of Madison Square Garden. He was not getting away…but sooner or later, someone was going to come peel me out of this squad car and give him the chance to take off.

  I saw him staring at me in the rear-view mirror, waiting for my next move.

  I sighed, and opened the door again. As he started to shriek away, I took very careful aim and shot out both back tires.

  (Fellow movie fans, I’m very sorry, but there is nothing you can do to a car with a gun that will make it blow up. At most, you might start a fire under the trunk. Falling off a cliff won’t make a car blow up. Only a dissatisfied business rival or a stunt coordinator can do that. Pity the hundreds of spinal cases pulled every year from wrecks by movie fans afraid of the inevitable explosion.)

  He tried to keep going on the rims, but I ran him down easily, and put the gun to the driver’s side window. He stopped, and blinked at me through the window. He shut the engine off. I assumed shooter’s stance.

  “Freeze!” a stentorian voice bellowed from my right.

  I took a snap glance. A uniform with a dead bead on me.

  “I’m on the job,” I snapped. “Gold Shield out of the One-Three, Taggart. Hold down on this skell for me while I call for backup.”

  It should have worked. Five bits of cop lingo in one breath. “There’s no dick named Taggart in the One-Three,” he hollered back. “Drop the piece or I swear to God I’ll put you away.”

  I kept one eye on The Miner and put the other on the cop. He was serious, and he was not going to believe the truth. At best he would run us both in, and the shit would hit the media. Being shot was a nuisance I could tolerate, but to get rid of him without giving The Miner time to sprint for it, I would have to shoot. I took another look; no, I’d have to kill. I hate to shoot a good cop; there aren’t any spares. But I didn’t see any choice.

  I shot a wild glance over my shoulder, back toward Seventh Avenue. I saw something, squinted.

  Lady Sally’s blessed face zoomed at me. She was squinting too. Our eyes met.

  I looked back to the cop, ostentatiously raised my piece and made it safe. When it hit the pavement a satisfactory distance away from me, he lifted his own gun a scant few inches and began to approach. I turned to face him, hands high.

  Lady Sally McGee appeared on the sidewalk behind him. In her upraised arm was a bottle of champagne I later learned she had commandeered from the liquor store in Penn Station. She pegged it accurately and vigorously at the back of the cop’s head. He went down like a felled steer.

  I heard the Ferrari door pop open. I had judged the distance nicely. As The Miner made his break, I pivoted, screwed my feet into the pavement, and brought my right hand down in a long looping arc that gathered up all the momentum of the pivot and all the weight of my body and delivered them to the point of that lordly Gallic nose, spreading it flat across his skinny face.

  He sat down in the street and said, “Sacré bleu,” which I have never in my life understood. Why would anyone under stress say, “Holy blue?”

  Lady Sally trotted out to join me. “Topping shot, Ken,” she said.

  “I can’t take you anywhere,” I said, caressing my knuckles, which had not broken thanks to her roll-on protection.

  She shrugged. “Lady slings the booze,” she said.

  I gave no reaction at all. I was unarmed.

  Many people were staring, and not a few of them were nervously fingering guns of their own. New York is one of those cities where you see signs saying, “Hospital zone: please affix your silencer.” I frowned.

  “Let’s get this clown out of here,” I suggested.

  “Take his hand and mine,” she directed.

  I did so, and three seconds later I was sinking, heavily and gratefully, into her cushy desk chair in her glorious House.

  SHE left me there with him for a few moments and ducked into the wall again. Reggie held down on him with a big scattergun, one of those Atcheson alley-sweepers, but it was quite unnecessary. The Miner kept both hands on his smashed nose, did not move anything but his eyes. He seemed fascinated by the bullet holes in my clothes.

  When Arethusa emerged from the bare wall, he began to whine very much like a dog, and backed up, using only his hams to propel himself, until he banged against the bookcase opposite.

  I sprang back up from the chair, and she ran into my arms. I began to shiver as if I were freezing. We clung to each other and sobbed together.

  Ralph Von Wau Wau emerged from the wall. “Vunderbar,” he said when he
saw The Miner. “Nice vork, Ken!”

  The Miner began to sob.

  Shortly Lady Sally arrived with the rest of the crew. They all looked The Miner over with intent, silent interest. For some reason it was the sight of Mistress Cynthia that caused him to finally go into genuine hysterics. The Lady touched him behind one ear, and he slept.

  “Leave us now, children,” she said musically. “You too, I’m afraid, Arethusa. Ken and I have some private calls to make. He’ll come for you when he’s done.”

  “Count on it,” I said into her shining eyes.

  “I am,” she told me.

  Was it a trick of light, or was there just about twice as much brightness as usual in those eyes?

  Everyone filed out, and Lady Sally punched a number on her speakerphone. It had thirteen digits. I heard one ring. She hung up, pressed redial, let it ring three times, and disconnected again. This time when she redialed it was answered in the middle of the first ring. “Yes,” said a robot-like voice.

  “The Greeks reckon time by the kalends,” she said carefully.

  “One moment.”

  A short pause, and a different, more jocular voice came on the line. “Don’t look at me,” it said. “I wasn’t anywhere near there nine months ago.”

  “It must be yours, George,” Lady Sally said. “I can’t get it off the tit.”

  “So it’s not stupid. That doesn’t prove it’s mine. Hi, Honeybritches. Who are your two friends?”

  I was impressed. That phone circuit had existed for less than fifteen seconds. “I’m Ken Taggart,” I said. “The other guy’s asleep, and I don’t know his name.”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Taggart?” he asked.

  “George,” Lady Sally said, “I’m going to initiate scramble.”

  “If you wish,” he agreed. After a few squawks, his voice returned. “Go ahead.”

  “The sleeping gentleman, name not known to myself either, is a member of the diplomatic community—never mind what nation.” (It turned out to be Switzerland, by the way. They speak French there, some of them. I don’t know where he’d been when his alarms went off; maybe it had been Canada.) “Acting—to my certain knowledge—purely as a private individual, he assembled a small organization which has planted a radio-triggered nuclear device in midtown Manhattan, and in twenty-nine other cities around the world.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” he scroaned, “shut up!”

  “I thought this line was secure,” she said irritably.

  “It is—from enemies!” he said. “But do you want this to leak? Give me a moment…there. Go on—but for God’s sake, quickly!”

  “Mr. Taggart, an artist in my employ, has wrecked the New York bomb and placed its master under citizen’s arrest. He proposes to meet with you privately and deliver the said terrorist, detailed maps of the other twenty-nine bombs—one in Washington, and several annotated in Cyrillic alphabet—and most important of all, the precise radio frequency which must be jammed to neutralize them.”

  “My God,” he said hoarsely. “I can be there in an hour and a half. Are you still at the same location?”

  “George, George,” she chided. “‘If it’s messy, eat it over the sink.’ Let’s meet elsewhere.”

  “Forgive me,” he said. “And pardon my language just now. Uh…Honeybritches, do you remember where we…?” He trailed off.

  “Of course I do,” she said, smiling reminiscently.

  “An hour and a half?”

  “Make it two,” she said. “It’s been a long night. Our delegation will consist of myself, Mr. Taggart, one other associate, and the alleged perpetrator. He’s a pacifist-type terrorist, by the way. And George…do come alone.”

  “Something I do all too often these days,” he said mournfully. “Two hours from…mark.”

  The connection was broken.

  Lady Sally held up a hand to me for silence. After a short time there was a screech. Another voice said, “I think they both hung up at once. Holy sh—”

  Now the line was dead.

  “Poppycock,” she muttered fondly. “I’d bet my House George hasn’t come alone since 1939.” She pressed the button that hung up her end. “But he will arrive alone. He’ll be there an hour from now, of course, but he’ll arrive alone and wait alone, and he’ll be alone when we get there. George is an honorable man.” She smiled. “I, on the contrary, am neither honorable nor a man. Fortunately.”

  She got another dial tone, punched another complex number, went through a similar routine, and had a substantially similar conversation—in Russian, this time. It sounded a little bawdier in spots, and once he made her laugh deep in her throat.

  NO sense dragging this story out any longer. We had a meet with George and Anatoly. You don’t need to know anything more about them. They were considerably startled to see and recognize each other, but they got over it; they had always secretly wanted to meet each other. They took everything we were prepared to give them, and they didn’t try too hard for too long to take too much more, and after about an hour they left together, with thirty maps and The Miner. I knew that they would not let him leave their sight until they had personally wrung him dry together, and I knew that they would wring him dry. Of course, some of what he would say, they’d have to discount as obvious hallucination…

  All of us in Lady Sally’s inner circle kept a close eye on the papers and TV news for the next while, hoping for blessed silence and holding our collective metaphorical breath. But the single ripple that appeared on the media pond, several months later, nearly made me bust a gut laughing. It seems a certain TV news personality I had always despised was accosted on the sidewalk near his home in the Upper East Eighties by two men with foreign accents, in trench coats, who proceeded to beat the mortal shit out of him…while repeating, over and over again, the cryptic words “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” He was never the same after that, and eventually the day came when people stopped commenting to me on the resemblance…

  MY original client never did get an explanation of what he had paid me to do—and he did pay me, in full—but he did get a Lifetime Comp at Lady Sally’s House out of the deal. Then less than a year later the House closed, for reasons too complex to explain here, and shortly he retired a broken man. So everyone in the city made out a little, in a sense. Above and beyond simply not being killed or vanished.

  ON a more somber note, I must report that it was her pianist-avatar—the one with the best hand-eye coordination—that Arethusa had elected to send through that wall into combat. I never did get to hear her play the piano…and I never will: she will not touch the instrument any more. That is a loss neither of us will ever really stop mourning. But we’re learning to live with it.

  And Lady Sally, in her capacity as consulting xenogeneticist, assures us that our son will combine both of my wife’s talents, and my own. I hope I can stand the little bastard. (His conception predated our marriage by hours, I’m told.) He’ll probably have a life filled with lots of good luck and lots of bad luck, powerful intuition, fine music, and a whole lot of love…and what the hell more can you ask of life, anyway?

  NIKOLA Tesla is doing…what he does. How the hell would I know what? How would I explain it to you if I did? You will hear more of him again one day, I promise you that. His historic bad luck seems to be slowly changing at last, just like mine.

  I have a sneaking suspicion Lady Sally may be his Luck…

  AS for Lady Sally, she and Mike were alive and well and happy last time I heard, practicing other professions in a place far from here and now, and that is all you need to know about them at this time. At least I hope so, for if you would know more of those two, you must look elsewhere.

  BUT all of what I’ve described, believe it or not, was not only not the last case I ever worked on…it wasn’t even the weirdest case I ever had.

  I haven’t got room here to tell you about that last one—a thumbnail sketch of a synopsis of the treatment would take twenty pages—but as long
as I live, I’ll never forget the day it began, or the remarkable words that began it:

  “Was it necessary,” asked the judge, “to produce this entire lake in evidence?”

  SPIDER ROBINSON has been the recipient of virtually every award in science fiction. His works include Time Pressure, Starseed (written with his wife, Jeanne), and Mindkiller, as well as the ever popular Callahan books: Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, Callahan’s Secret, and Callahan’s Lady. He lives in Vancouver with his wife and his daughter, Terri.