Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  So there we were, slightly northeast of North East, with the wagons circled for the night, and a big communal barbecue thing just starting to happen in the center—ever have a barbecue in the dead of winter? It’s more fun than you might think—and the air was full of tantalizing smells and happy chatter and the blessed sound of laughing children. The light was just starting to go, and you could sense a pretty good sunset building, and I had finally walked off all the stiffness in my legs. Several of the people standing around the barbecue area were strangers; we had kind of drawn attention when we pulled up in twenty-four schoolbuses, and a certain amount of mingling was going on. At least one of the strangers was carrying a guitar in a backpack, and another had that indefinable look that suggests a blues harp player; I was thinking about unpacking my guitar, Lady Macbeth, and seeing if I could get a jam going, when a car pulled up and parked nearby. As the driver got out, he looked oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

  “Now where do I know that guy from?” I wondered aloud.

  Erin didn’t need me to point to know where I was looking; at the time she was about a foot behind my head, riding in her pack, which I had put on as a backpack in order to help stretch my lumbar area. “It’s Officer Marty, Daddy,” she said.

  “Cushlamachree!” I breathed.

  Sure enough. The plainclothes and unmarked car had fooled me. Hell, it wasn’t even really an unmarked car, technically—not a Plymouth Fury at all, but a civilian vehicle, a Honda Accord. (Ever wonder why all cops drive Furies? Donald Westlake says it’s the name. He says if they ever start making a car called “Kill,” the police departments will all switch at once.) But that was indeed Marty getting out of it.

  He spotted me almost at once and walked toward me, slowly and carefully. He seemed to be making a point of keeping his hands in sight and visibly empty. His body language told me he meant me no harm, and I believed it.

  He stopped a few yards away, close enough so we could converse without raising our voices, and nodded. “Evening, Mr. Stonebender.”

  “Jake,” I told him. “Evening, Marty.”

  He nodded again.

  “And this is my daughter Erin.”

  “Hello, Erin,” he said. “I’m pleased to meet you. I’m Marty Pignatelli.”

  “Hi, Marty. You look good in real clothes.”

  There was a brief silence then.

  “So what brings you to Maryland?” I asked finally.

  He looked unhappy, but determined. “I’ve been trying to think how to say this the last fifty miles. I still don’t know.”

  Like I said, he was considerably older than his partner Joe, about my age or a little older. He might have actually been a cop back when I was a hippie—he was my natural enemy of old. Maybe we’d both grown a little, as we aged. I wasn’t feeling any antipathy toward him that I could detect, and he wasn’t showing any toward me. As Robert Heinlein said, sometimes it’s amazing how much mature wisdom resembles being too tired.

  Of course, it may have helped that I’m bulletproof.

  “So say it wrong,” I suggested. “Then we got something to edit.”

  He nodded. “That makes sense. Okay.” He took out a pack of unfiltered Camels, offered me one, which I accepted though they’re definitely not my brand, and lit us both with the inevitable Zippo.

  “I been a cop a long time,” he said, and exhaled smoke. “No, even longer than that. One thing I’ve learned. Anyway, it’s always worked for me. If your brain tells you one thing, and your eyes tell you something different…go with your eyes. They’re way less likely to malfunction.”

  “Sound,” I agreed.

  “So my partner really did shoot you today, and you really didn’t much mind.”

  I nodded.

  “Your wife wasn’t even mad. And your dog talked to me.”

  I nodded. Not the time to explain that Ralph was not my chattel.

  “I gotta ask you to explain,” he said. “You don’t owe me an answer—but I gotta ask.”

  I smoked his tobacco and thought about it. I could see in his eyes that he was as close as he was ever going to come to pleading. He needed to know. He must need to know, because I could also tell he was as close as he was ever going to come to being scared shitless. I began to see it from his point of view. One possible explanation—indeed, one of the more plausible ones—was that I was some sort of alien monster mutant out of the X-Files, or an unstoppable cyborg killer from the future. In the movies, people you couldn’t hurt with a gun were hardly ever on your side.

  Hell, what harm could it do to tell him? Even if he believed me.

  Was there the slightest chance in hell that he would believe me? He did seem to have come a long way since the Sixties. I decided to run a small test. I took a joint from behind my ear and held it up. “Mind if I smoke?” I asked.

  He took it from me, lit it with the end of his own cigarette, took a long deep hit, and handed it back to me. “Good shit,” he said appreciatively after he exhaled. “Thanks.”

  So I explained.

  It wasn’t the first time I had told the story; I was able to cover most of the highlights in a little under half an hour. He listened carefully and well. From time to time he would make little involuntary interjections—“You set off a nuclear weapon you were holding in your hand?”—but always to confirm that he’d heard me right rather than to challenge what I’d said; basically he kept listening until I was done. Then he sat and thought for a minute or two.

  “Like I said, I been a cop a long time,” he said finally. “One thing I know, it’s when people are lying to me. Every word you just told me is the God’s honest truth.”

  “I hate to admit it,” I said. “It’d be such a grand lie, I wish I could claim it.”

  “You and your friends actually saved the fucking world.”

  I shrugged. “Twice, actually. But that was the first time, yeah.”

  He blinked, pursed his lips, and nodded.

  It was starting to get dark now. “Hey, Marty—you hungry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t we go get some of that food before it’s all gone?”

  It was the first time I’d ever seen him smile. “Thanks, Jake,” he said. “I think I’d like to meet your friends.”

  “I think they’d like to meet you,” Erin said.

  So we strolled over to the barbecue area together, and I introduced him around.

  The food was good, the conversation after was even better, and after a while I did manage to get a jam session going around the campfire that had been built, with the two guys I’d spotted earlier plus a few other camping musicians who’d been attracted by the noise and party atmosphere. Toward the end there we had three guitars, harmonica, tenor sax, alto recorder, and an autoharp going, and it got pretty juicy. We all had different repertoires and styles, so we set up a circle system: each of us got to pick a solo he thought the others might be able to jump in on, and in between each solo we’d do a Beatles number, since every musician knows at least a few Beatles tunes, and ought to be able to fake several more without too much strain.

  Every so often I’d catch sight of Marty deep in conversation with somebody. Zoey first, then Ralph, then Long-Drink (who could talk the ears off a cornfield), then the Masers…he got around quite a bit in a short time. There was no vibe that he was interrogating anybody, not in the cop sense. He was just asking a lot of questions, and listening to the answers.

  After the jam ended he wandered over to me and sat where I could see him. As soon as I’d finished putting Lady Macbeth away in her case, I gave him a questioning look.

  “I got my twenty in,” he said. “My wife got smart and left a long time back. There’s nothing in Jersey to hold anybody, but there’s less than nothing to hold me. There isn’t even anything in my apartment I want. I always wanted to see Key West. Eddie Costigan says I can ride in his rig if you say it’s okay.”

  If Fast Eddie had invited a police officer to ride with him, that w
as all I needed to know. Eddie has his own kind of radar. “What about your car?” was all I asked.

  He exhaled with relief. “Next big town down the line is Aberdeen,” he said. “I’ll set off early tomorrow and try to peddle the heap there; it’ll give me a stake to hold me until I can get my money transferred to Florida. With any luck by the time you people pack up and get that far, I’ll be waiting for you on the side of the road with my thumb out. You’re taking 95, right?”

  “Actually, I was thinking of taking Route 40.”

  “Even better,” he said. “Goes right smack through Aberdeen.”

  “You going to retire by phone?”

  He looked embarrassed. “I already did.”

  I was startled. “Before you even came after us?”

  He nodded.

  “How come?”

  “Two things,” he said. “First, I figured if there’s people around that don’t mind being shot, maybe it’s time to stop being a cop. The second thing…” He hesitated. “Well, I kept thinking if it hadn’t been for you being bulletproof, an innocent man might have gotten hurt today. I know Joe is an asshole, I knew that when he made me pull you over, and I still let things get way out of hand.”

  “Like I told you before,” I said, “it was my fault. In Joe’s shoes, I might have pulled the trigger too.”

  He grimaced. “Well…then maybe you shouldn’t be a cop either.”

  “Amen,” I said, and picked up my guitar case. “Well, we both have an early start tomorrow.”

  He nodded. “Look for me just this side of Aberdeen on 40.”

  “I will. Good night, Marty. And welcome to the caravan.”

  He met my eyes and held them. “Thank you, Jake.”

  “Like I said, you’re welcome.” A thought belatedly occurred to me. “Oh shit, wait, I just thought of something.”

  “Problem?”

  “Well…you’ll have to decide. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to give you fair warning about something.”

  “Okay.”

  “We pun.”

  His eyes widened. “All of you?”

  “To excess,” I confessed. “If that’s not redundant.”

  He paled slightly, but rallied. “Too late now,” he said philosophically. “I already quit my job.”

  “You’ll get numb and grow scar tissue eventually,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m tough enough,” he said. “I don’t even let my dentist give me Novocain when he’s doing a root canal.”

  “Really? How do you deal with the pain?”

  “Transcend dental medication,” he said with a straight face.

  I paled slightly myself…then awarded him a wince and a groan.

  “So you folks are all like ambitious Southeast Asians?” he went on.

  “Huh?”

  “Taipei personalities.”

  I grinned, even though that’s not really the proper form of applause for a pun. “Marty, I think this is going to work out. Wait’ll you meet Doc Webster.”

  He was waiting by the side of Route 40 the next morning as we came up on Aberdeen. Whether our Triple A rating on the interstate cop teletype was all Marty’s doing, I couldn’t say for sure—I never asked him—but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Capital Offense

  “I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy—but that could change.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle, May 22, 1989

  THE NEXT DAY WE SPLIT

  up, by common consent.

  It was only another fifty miles or so to Washington, and everybody wanted to sightsee, i.e., gawk, and of course no more than two buses could agree on exactly what to gawk at, so there was no sense in trying to stay together. Some of us wanted to see the White House, some the Mall, some the Capitol, some the Library of Congress, some the Smithsonian—some of us wanted to slip across the river to Arlington or the Pentagon—there were even a few who decided to skip the District of Columbia altogether, left the caravan at Baltimore, and headed down 97 to Annapolis. (Jim Omar went with that contingent…then left them behind and went on farther south to the Smithsonian’s Institute for Environmental Studies, just across the bay from Beverly Beach.)

  So we went our separate ways for a while. I will spare you the details of just which sites my family and I chose to gawk at, and note only that we had a good time.

  No, I’ll mention one small disappointment. I had been to D.C. once before, as a child back in the late Fifties…and I was dismayed to learn that nowadays the F.B.I. Headquarters tour no longer offers American children the opportunity to fire a tommy gun. I’d told Erin about how much fun it was, and promised her that I’d bully them into letting her have a crack at it somehow…and had to renege. I complained to the official who gave me the news, and he said the feature had been dropped from the tour due to lack of interest. I expressed polite incredulity—kids no longer wanted to operate a machine gun? “I think they all have their own now,” he said.

  That’s all I feel like telling about our time in the nation’s capital. When I’m on my deathbed, regretting my myriad sins and failures of character, one of my few proud consolations will be that I seldom made anybody look at my vacation photos. On that ground alone I believe I may just escape the fires of hell.

  We had set up a rendezvous point in Falls Church, Virginia, where we’d been offered accommodation by a friend of Doc Webster’s who lived there and had lots of parking room. The one thing we had all managed to agree on was that we could probably visit all the tourist traps on our personal target list within forty-eight hours.

  Naturally we were wrong. I was there on time…and so were exactly two other buses (Fast Eddie’s and Noah Gonzalez’s). The rest took days to trickle in. One or two of them limped in, in need of repairs. And by the time the very last of the prodigal vehicles had finally showed up, several of the earlier arrivals had slipped away again, on assorted errands or excuses. I started to feel like I was running a traveling day-care center, and we were out of Ritalin…

  I tried to force myself to be philosophical about it and not fret. Our host Ted was a pleasant gent, the area was tolerable, the company was good, and we were, after all, in no hurry. What was there to worry about?

  I succeeded so well at not worrying that Zoey and Erin finally had to kick me in the ass.

  “Daddy,” Erin said, “you’re acting my age.”

  “She’s right,” Zoey said.

  I drew in a deep breath to bellow, “God damn it, I am not!”—and thanks be to God, I heard myself saying it before I actually said it, and decided it wouldn’t help my mood any just now to sound like an asshole, and didn’t say it. One of my rules of thumb is that if you hear yourself sounding like an asshole, there’s a fair chance it’s because you’re being an asshole. So I let that breath back out, slowly, and took in and released a few more like it, and thought about the tantrum I was having. Or trying to have.

  No, dammit, it still seemed to me I was entitled to this one. “That’s easy for you to say, Pumpkin,” I told my daughter. “You’ve never been responsible for over a hundred people. Over a hundred irresponsible people.” Now I didn’t sound quite so much like an asshole. More of a whiner. Erin squirmed on my lap, but said nothing.

  “They’ll all show up, eventually,” Zoey said, and nothing in her tone or facial expression indicated that it was about the dozenth time she’d said it in the last hour. She was making herself a sandwich at the back of the passenger area of our bus, slathering honey mustard mayonnaise sauce on a roll.

  “Sure—but when? And in what condition? You know how it works, Zo. It’s not enough just to get everybody here. Oh no! We can’t roll until everybody is here and has their assorted tanks pumped out and pumped full, and has all their shopping done and their flats fixed and their brakes tightened and their oil topped off, and every driver’s had at least eight consecutive hours’ sleep…and then, you watch: in the first fifty miles somebody will th
row a rod, somebody else will want to peel off and visit the great aunt he hasn’t seen in thirty years, and two of them will just plain get lost because keeping track of two dozen big yellow buses right ahead of them will be too much of a mental strain for—”

  “You’re doing it again, Daddy.”

  Was I? Just in case, I stopped.

  “So what?” Zoey asked. “What’s the difference? We’re on some kind of a schedule? The window for Key West closes soon?”

  She’d very nearly poked a hole in my bag of wind, with those first three sentences…but the way she phrased that last one gave me some ammo. “No, but the window for the Shuttle sure does! You know how attached I am to seeing that.”

  “But they always hold, don’t they, Daddy?” Erin asked.

  “They usually do, yes, Pigeon—but no law says they have to. And the way my luck runs—”

  “Do you believe in luck, Daddy?”

  I blinked at her.

  “Only when he’s mad, honey,” Zoey told her, and filled her roll with Bavarian ham and thick slices of Edam cheese. “Jake, relax. We’ve still got time. If we start running so late that it looks like we’ll miss the launch, nobody will mind if we put the hammer down and go on ahead of them—we could be there in a day if we gunned it.”