by Ron Goulart
“Oof … not while I’ve got hold of you … ooof … there ain’t.”
“Not by me, by them.” She used her elbow again and broke free.
Out on the glaring stage the Latter Day Saints had concluded their first number. Great waves of shouting and applause came rushing up at them from the audience. With smiles on their golden faces, the five of them marched toward the floating footlights. They joined hands.
“That’s how they do it!” cried Hildy. “Sure, they join hands and—”
“Now I have you, you crazed spalpeen!” Pop had tackled her once more, his arms tightening around her knees.
She gave him a chopping blow to the neck, kicked free and snatched away his stunrod as he went slumping to the hard floor.
“This damn thing doesn’t have any range. I’m going to—”
Zzzzzzzummmmmmm!
Lafcadio Latterly stiffened, wings flapping twice, and went pitching over into the orchestra pit.
Zzzzzzummmmmmmm!
Screwball Smith was next, letting go of his comrades and collapsing.
Somebody up in the catwalks over the stage was using a stunrifle. Two somebodies. Hildy glanced up and saw twin beams of yellow come knifing down.
Zzzzzzzummmmmmmmmm!
Zzzzzzzzummmmmmmm!
Honey Chen and Trina Twain, still holding hands, fell into each other, wings and robes swirling and tangling.
Derrick Thrasher was still standing. He shook a fist at the rafters, shouting, “I can get you alone, by concentr—”
Zzzzzummmmmmmmm!
He hit the stage with a feathery thump.
A moment later Jake came sliding down a dangling plaz rope.
The huge audience had long since jumped to its feet, angry, waving arms, shouting, screaming.
“Murder!”
“Assassins!”
“They’ve killed LL!”
“Get ’em!”
“Police!”
“Feds! Call the Feds!”
“Screw the cops!”
“Get your Lafcadio Latterly gloshirts here! Sure to be collectors’ items!”
Jake, grinning, faced the outraged audience and held both hands high. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said into a dangling tokmike. “This is all part of the show. Nothing to be upset about. The management has asked me to assure you that—”
Thunk! Kathump!
Steranko hadn’t dropped down from above quite as gracefully as Jake. He fell the last ten feet, landing smack in the electric drum set.
Biddy diddy! Blam! Kablang!
“Now they’re wrecking his gear!”
“Killers!”
“Assassins!”
“To calm you all down after this exciting mock assassination,” Jake went on, “I am going to play my famous jazz medley on the piano. Starting with Fats Waller and—”
“Boy, they’ll lynch Jake if he tries that,” murmured Hildy.
“Somebody’ll lynch him. But it’ll be the U.S. Government.” Bullet Benton was standing beside her, a pleased snarl on his face. “I got here from the shuttleport just in time to catch your sex-crazed husband in the act of murdering five innocent souls.”
“Those innocent souls are the Big Bang killers,” she said. “And none of them is dead. Jake only stunned them. Like this.”
Zizzzzzummmmm!
She used the borrowed stunrod to fell the burly Federal Police Agency cop.
Out on the stage Jake was seating himself at the piano. “ ‘The B-Flat Blues,’ ” he announced and commenced playing.
CHAPTER 22
IT CAME BAWLING OUT into the grey afternoon.
“Oh, I ain’t no cyborg, baby, an’ I ain’t no cyborg’s son. But I can slip you my spare part ’till the cyborg comes.”
“Him again,” said Jake.
“I ain’t the downsize designer, mama, and I ain’t. …”
“We may still need him,” suggested Hildy, sliding out of their just-landed skycar.
“Why?”
“Bullet Benton, after he came to, was muttering something about pressing charges against me for assaulting an FPA agent.”
“Fooey,” observed Jake as he doubletimed up the ramp leading to their living room area. “The Zaboly Twins are speaking again and they won’t let the Feds do anything to us.”
“Bullet’ll try,” she said.
The freckled Lost Cause lawyer was again at Jake’s white upright, banging at the keys as he sang. “Oh, I ain’t the nuclear reactor repairman, baby, an’… Ah, the illustrious Paces return. Congrats.”
“That why you broke in here?” Jake asked. “To congratulate us?”
“I still have the electrokey your dear, and incredibly amiable when compared to you, wife presented me,” said John J. Pilgrim, facing them. “I did want to congratulate you and fill myself in on—”
“What’s that stain on the carpet?”
“Ignore it,” advised the lawyer. “Don’t remind me of the sad fact that I spilled near a half liter of Chateau Discount Carbonated Pinot Noir with Extra Fluoride. One of my favo—”
“That gunk’ll eat clean through the floor, you besotted shyster, and—”
“John, wouldn’t you like to hear all the details about how Jake cleaned up the Big Bang case?” Hildy was holding Jake back from charging at the rumpled little attorney.
“I heard some of it, but—”
“Tell him, Jake. You did, after all, a brilliant job on this one.”
Jake grinned. “I did, in fact. You were brilliant, too, Hildy. In your own way.”
“It was you, Jake, who stopped them from blowing up Tilda Host and Bonny Prince Freddy.” She arranged herself in a slingchair.
“True,” admitted Jake.
Pilgrim said, “I heard you and that skinhead Steranko got yourselves locked up in a chalet. How’d you manage to—”
“That was not one of the more brilliant aspects of the investigation,” said Jake, pacing some. “Matter of fact, we sort of got suckered into walking into what the gang figured would be a trap for us. They knew I had Steranko along, so they laid a false trail for him to pick up. They wanted us to believe nothing in the way of assassinations was planned for the first night of the festival. Actually they’d arranged for Latterly to appear and they stunned and mindwiped his real group. Trina left her snide dummy Woodrow behind, with a voxcaz stuffed into his inner workings, so he’d sit up and heckle us about being caught. She is fond of little nasty touches like that.”
“How’d you get out?” asked Pilgrim while searching himself for a spare bottle.
“Well, I can’t take all the credit for that.”
“Would you care for a glass of spring water, John?” asked Hildy.
“Gung,” he replied. “Go on with the yarn, Jake.”
“There was a terminal for the home computer in the room they’d locked us up in,” Jake said. “Steranko made friends with it and persuaded the damn thing to open up and let us go. He’s got a way with machines.”
“If not with people,” added Hildy.
Pilgrim said, “How’d you sneak into the jazz pavilion?”
“Posed as musicians,” replied Jake. “When I saw the real group out cold, I knew the gang planned to substitute and blow up somebody that night.”
“I saw a vidtape of your piano medley, Pace, and I don’t see how you get off criticizing my left hand,” said the lawyer. “Wow, on the James P. Johnson segment you muffed—”
“I didn’t muff a damn thing. And at least I—”
“Tell him about the confession,” Hildy prompted.
After coughing into his hand, Jake said, “Derrick Thrasher gave the FPA and the Department of Security a full confession, which’ll make the prosecution of the case a lot simpler.”
“What prompted him to do a halfwit thing like that?”
“Foodopoly,” said Jake. “They pulled assorted strings and the upshot is that if Derrick Thrasher tells all and helps the government put away the rest of the Novem bunch, he’ll get off
with six weeks at Murderers Home. After that—”
“But that whey-faced lad, working in a sinister symbiotic relationship with those other psychopaths, is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people.”
“After he gets out of the pokey,” said Jake, “Derrick’ll go to work for Foodopoly.”
“Doing what? Slaughtering hogs for their—”
“He’s got the Barrel implant in his skull,” Jake said. “He can puff oats.”
“He can also blow up people who—”
“Not alone.” Jake shook his head. “To do that, as the class of ’99 discovered, you need at least five of them. They have to be physically in contact with each other, joining hands, before they can concentrate and pool their psi powers to make an explosion where they want it. A big explosion, that is. Little ones Derrick can do alone.”
“Suppose he builds new implants, based on the design of the one that’s imbedded in his useless coco?” The frazzled lawyer was bouncing on the piano bench. “He can recruit a new group of five and we’re back where we started.”
“Jake did what he could,” said Hildy. “He warned Secretary Strump about just such a possibility, but Foodopoly is damned powerful. All we can do is send back the darned bonus.”
“What bonus?”
Jake said, “Bunny Thrasher sent us an additional $250,000 for locating Derrick for them. We turned that down.”
Pilgrim blinked. “I thought you’d do anything for money, Pace.”
“Almost anything,” said Jake.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1982 by Ron Goulart
Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons
978-1-4532-5719-7
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