I emptied my own mug quickly. I was smiling as I lobbed it. Not one of my clientele had needed to be told that this once, for this toast, I didn’t mind them throwing mugs as well as glasses—that it was more important that every one of us be in on the toast. Maybe the task we had set ourselves would take us twenty years…but we had already made a start.
Then I thought of something, and glanced down the bar. Sure enough, there was one customer in the whole house who still had a drink in his hand.
“Hey Duck,” I called, not stridently but loudly enough to be heard over the general celebration. At once it dropped several decibels.
The Duck fixed an insouciant eye on me. “Yah.”
“You in?”
He did not answer right away. He looked slowly around the room, meeting pair after pair of eyes. Then he looked down into his drink—a shotglass of Cherry Heering: who else would order such a thing after drinking beer?—for a minute, and returned that direct, piercing gaze of his to me. “Let me get back to you,” he said.
I nodded. I knew the little flash of irritation I felt was unreasonable—but I felt it nonetheless. “No hurry.”
He caught me at it. “I know. How could anyone turn down an offer to get married to a couple of dozen people he’d only met the night before? The ungrateful rat.”
I started to protest that I wasn’t annoyed at all—and swallowed the words. Why would anyone want to get telepathic with a liar?
“You’re right,” I said. “It was stupid to ask, if I wasn’t prepared to hear an honest answer. I think we’re a pretty special bunch of human beings—but I’ve known us for years, been through a lot with us.”
“And since you know how terrific you all are,” he said, “you have no doubt in your mind that before long, either I will realize that, or I’m so much of a jerk you wouldn’t want me around anyway. So we have no problem.”
I had to grin. “Nope. I guess we don’t.”
“The heck we don’t,” Tom Hauptman said in genuine alarm from further down the bar. “We’re out of beer.”
△ △ △
Rooba rooba rooba. Consternation and astonishment competed for dominance. I went with denial. “Bullshit,” I cried, and turned to look.
Tom was holding down all six draft taps. Not a drop was flowing. “Tap city,” he said hollowly.
I forgave him; he was under stress. And so was I. “How is that possible—?” I began, and cut myself off when I heard my voice come out sounding like a Pekingese in a snit. I tried again. “There is no way in hell this many people could have drunk six barrels dry in a night and a half. Not even these people.” This time my voice was a little better, more like a beagle in a snit. “We’d be on the floor.”
“We are on the floor,” the Duck pointed out.
Rooba rooba rooba—
Could that thief of a distributor have sold me kegs that weren’t full? No, I’d hauled them in the door myself, and my lower back was certain they’d been full at the time. A leak that massive would have left the place smelling like a brewery. “Well, there’s only one sensible thing to do,” I said. “Have a drink on the strength of it. Reverend, fix me a cup of Geb, will you?—and double up on the Black Bush.”
“Sure thing, Jake,” Tom said, and shortly handed me another mug of Geb Keyserlingck’s magic brew from Daintree, Oz. I gave Tom some pocket change to toss in the Cough Drop for me, and took a deep gulp—it was delicious—and then I nearly choked. “Jesus, Tom, you forgot the whiskey!”
“The hell you say,” the ex-minister said, shocked enough to use profanity this time. Our eyes met and we exchanged a meaningful glance. “Oh my golly-gosh,” he said slowly.
He unlocked the front panel of the Fount of All Coffee and swung it open. Sure enough, the Bushmill’s bottle inside was empty. As we stared at it, the little red pilot light on the panel that warned of that very condition lighted for the first time. I looked to the row of replacement bottles waiting for their own turn beside the machine, and was only slightly startled to find them empty as well. So was every non-opaque bottle on the shelf above the cash register. Somehow I didn’t need to check the opaque ones to be certain they were equally dry on the inside.
Not every glass and container in the room was empty. Just the ones with alcohol in them.
Rooba rooba ROOBA ROOBA—
“AARGH!” the Duck exclaimed, and as we turned to look he yanked both hands away from his shotglass. It hung in mid-air, like Wile E. Coyote ten feet past the edge of the cliff, for long enough that I could see the tumbler was bone-dry, somehow emptied while he’d held it in his hands; then it fell, hit his foot, skittered across the floor at high speed, rolled up Merry Moore’s leg and under her skirt, and committed a mischief upon her. She made the same sound the Duck had, in a higher octave, and…expelled the glass, somehow. It bounced high off the floor, once, and as it descended, the Duck tugged his waistbands an inch or two away from his belly with an air of weary resignation. Thop. The shotglass landed squarely in his basket. He flinched slightly, recovered, and let go of his various pants. Snap. “Should have known better,” he said sourly. “My own fault.”
Silence, as glutinous as old peanut butter…
“There’s a few more cases of juice outside in the van,” Tom Hauptman suggested tentatively.
“If it’s still there,” I said, “it’s going to stay there until I figure out what happened to the last load. Booze costs money; I can’t go pissing it away.”
Nobody reacted to the lame joke. Good friends; they knew when not to hear you.
“Duck,” I said, “could all this be something to do with you?”
“Possible,” he admitted, “but I can’t figure out the mechanism. Maybe there’s some uncertainty in the probabilities of how fast alcohol evaporates…no, it would have happened before now. I think. You’d better hope it is me: if it is, your hooch will probably be back shortly. But somehow I don’t think so. This doesn’t feel like me.”
I had a decision to make. Noah Gonzalez always carried a flask in a zipped-up inside pocket of his coat, because he strongly preferred his own homemade white lightning to any other sauce. Since he’d always had the idea that might anger Mike Callahan, he’d always made an elaborate point of concealing the flask from Mike, sneaking his hooch into glasses of ginger ale when he thought Mike wasn’t looking. No one had ever ratted on him, because everyone knew perfectly well that Mike knew about the flask and didn’t want to embarrass Noah by mentioning it. I wanted to know if that flask—which had been zipped away safely for most of the night—was as empty as all the rest of the hooch containers in the house. If it was not, we were dealing with a garden-variety practical joker here—and my money was, reluctantly, on the Duck. If the flask was empty, then we were up against something more…ominous. But now that I was the innkeeper, I was supposed to have forgotten that I ever knew about the flask. Did I want to know the level in Noah’s tank badly enough to risk embarrassing him?
No. I would presume it empty unless and until he offered me a drink. Now: what did assuming that tell me?
Well, it probably wasn’t a plague of wino flies.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pissed off,” Doc Webster growled, belatedly playing off my feeble pun. “Whoever this son of a mother is, he’s certainly struck right at the heart of this place. Or the liver, anyway.”
“I was just about ta quench my toist,” Eddie said darkly. “I been blowin’ my ass off tanight.” Playing piano is thirsty work.
“No booze, and all of a sudden I don’t feel very goddam merry,” Tommy Janssen snarled. “All that leaves is sharing…and trying to read the mind of the bastard that thought this up. Gimme a…cup of coffee, Jake.”
I passed one over, and sipped at my own. Come on, neurons!
Trying to defuse the tension a little, Long-Drink McGonnigle put on a heavy Irish brogue. “If I get my hands on the spalpeen, the Dullahan will call at his door this night,” he said.
“Mike’s go
ne,” Fast Eddie said.
“Not Callahan, Eddie: the Dullahan,” the Drink said patiently. “Spelled D-u-b-h-l-a-c-h-a-n—‘Dullahan.’ Gaelic for ‘dark sullen person’—but it refers to the grim, headless lad who drives the Costa Bower, the Death Coach. It arrives at midnight as an omen that someone in the house will die shortly. I’m surprised at you: you’ve been hanging out in an Irish bar since Callahan had hair; you’d think by now you’d have learned a little something about Jesus Christ!”
People jumped a little, partly because of the sudden volume of the last two words and partly because I had shouted them in chorus with him. Long-Drink and I stared at each other, thunderstruck. We had figured it out at the same instant.
“Well,” Eddie said diffidently, “I do know a little somet’in about Him…”
I waved at him absently, too busy to explain. My nostrils flared, and I saw Long-Drink’s do likewise. The solution to the mystery of the disappearing booze was right over our noses. And it was bad news.
“But I hoid He toined water inta wine—not wine inta air.”
Long-Drink and I exchanged a meaningful glance. It was terribly important that we not fuck this up. The very survival of Mary’s Place was at stake. The Drink looked as worried as I felt. And at any moment someone else might twig, and blurt something out. If that happened, just about all the hopes I had left in my life were lost, maybe for good. I thought so fast and hard I felt my scalp get warm.
Bingo! I had one effective on my tac roster who might just have the right combination of special talents. It was ironic that just about all those special talents would probably have struck most people as liabilities—right now, they were worth gold. Maybe literally…
Tanya Latimer is visually challenged—or as she puts it, blind. (She says euphemisms are for the differently brained.) So maybe I could safely assume both a better-than-average sense of smell, and experience in working without visual cues. Furthermore, she is an ex-cop…which is how she got blinded, which is another story, except that it wasn’t her fault. So I could be reasonably sure that she would be both fairly handy in a crunch—at least a close-in kind of crunch—and fairly quick on the uptake.
The trick was to find a way to cue her. Fortunately, my late Uncle Al was a Gold Shield in the NYPD for several decades.
“Sister Tee,” I said—quietly, but as compellingly as I could—“hear me good, and chill. Ten-thirteen.”
She rummaged casually in her purse for kleenex with both hands, took some out with her left hand. “Tell it,” she said softly.
“Don’t name it, but you know the thing they do rocks and ice and boo and the legal in?”
“Yah.” Honk! She took a deep breath through her nose, the way you do after you blow your nose, to check results. Most natural thing in the world.
“The legal at twelve o’clock…he’s wrong.”
“I hear that.” She balled up the kleenex and fumbled for another with the hand that was still inside the purse. “What’s my play?”
“Got your jewelry?”
“I hadda go through Long Island to get here, didn’t I?”
“Don’t miss,” I told her.
She smiled lazily. “When?”
“When I get you his twenty.”
She nodded, still smiling. Most of the gang were staring at us in puzzlement—but bless ’em, nobody demanded an explanation. Tanya’s husband Isham, who was getting maybe one word in three, understood that smile, at least, and began to be visibly alarmed. It is rare to see Ish visibly alarmed. He is built on the scale of Mike Tyson, and seems quite terrifying to the stranger until he opens his mouth and this Radar O’Reilly voice comes out. Even then, people rarely mess with him. In consequence of which, he knows almost nothing about fighting. His wife’s smile told him as plain as print that she planned to do something drastic to someone, soon, and he wasn’t a hundred percent sure that it wasn’t him. He’d have paled if he’d been equipped for it.
Which meant there was no time to lose.
“Hey, Naggeneen,” I hollered, “your father was a Firbolg, and your mother was a fairy!”
A screech of rage came from the rafters above our heads. “It’s a damnable libel! The man was an honest respectable cluricaune, just like meself!”
We all stared upward. Everyone but Long-Drink and Tanya and I was startled to see a withered little old man, three feet tall, perched in the crotch of a rafter. He wore a crimson coat with forked tails, a tall cap in a state of sublime disrepair, a leather apron, pale-blue stockings, and glossy black high-heel shoes with silver buckles, nearly all of this obscured by a great cascade of snowy white beard which made his angry cheeks seem even redder. He was smoking a pipe like a white check-mark, and at the moment the bowl was glowing nearly as brightly as his bloodshot eyes. But redder than coat or cheeks or eyes or pipe-bowl put together was his lordly nose. He was toweringly drunk, shaking his fist at me with such force that he was near to toppling from his perch. He kept trying to get a grip with his other hand, but no matter how he flailed, he couldn’t seem to find anything with it, and he couldn’t spare attention from shouting at me.
“Come on up beside me and say that, ya scut, if you’re man enough!” he thundered. “Ya whey-faced ridiculous git of a nearsighted merrow and some kind of perverted eel, I’ll use yer elongated spine for a homemade accordion! Come, and I’ll pull that preposterous beard o’ yours out of yer mouth by the roots, hair by hair! I’ll put yez to bed with a mattock, I will! An’ ya take to yer heels like a sensible coward, I’ll fill up yer household with spiders and snakes! Well, what’s it to be?”
Four or five seconds of extremely total silence ensued. I used them trying to think of a good way to set things up for Tanya.
But it was Long-Drink who solved the problem. Actually, the solution suggested itself. The Drink and I both knew exactly what the reaction of the rest of the gang at Mary’s Place to this apparition was going to be; we could both predict almost word for word what someone was going to say, any second now. So Long-Drink said it first.
“Oh, is that all it is? A leprechaun?”
The little old gent let out a shriek of inarticulate rage, thrust his pipe between his teeth, and leaped tipsily from his perch, aiming for Long-Drink’s head.
Halfway there, in mid-air, with every eye on him, he disappeared—
—vanished, dwindled to a wispy contrail of smoke—
—and Long-Drink began doing an imitation of the villain in the last act of an Invisible Man movie, snapping his head from side to side and making a coughing sound and fanning air—
“Now, Tanya—,” I said.
6
The Cluricaune
But she was already in motion. Tanya’s not awful fast, but she’s got a whole lot of quick. She had her jewelry—two bracelets of a ferrous nature, joined by a small but sturdy chain—already in her left hand; as her right closed and held on empty air a foot from Long-Drink, she fumbled briefly and closed one of the cuffs around a column of equally empty air, only inches from the Drink’s throat. She shifted her grip to that air, let go with her right hand, and grabbed some more air, on the other side of Long-Drink’s neck. With a grunt of effort, she bent it away from him and around in an arc, into the embrace of the second cuff. “Cushlamachree,” the little old man’s voice roared. Both cuffs promptly plunged toward the floor as if heavily weighted—and then rose skyward like a rocket, spraying sparks and smoke, lifting Tanya a few inches off the ground for a moment. She hung on like a summer cold, dangling from the apex of a V made of handcuff chain, her heels off the floor, a rain of Gaelic curses showering on her head. I was impressed by the strength of our diminutive antagonist. The reason Tanya’s not awful fast is that if she ever took it into her mind to turn pro, they’d class her as a middleweight at least, possibly a light heavy. Gorgeous woman.
As I yelled, “Get her!” Isham was moving. A little large for a heavyweight, he was short on quick but long on fast; he reached his wife in moments and added his we
ight to hers, while trying to climb up her and get a grip between her hands on the chain. Doc Webster arrived just then, freeing Ish to go up for the jumpshot. Between them they managed to wrestle the astonishingly lively pair of handcuffs back to about chest level—whereupon the little old bearded fellow reappeared within the iron bracelets, finished the obscenity he was in the middle of, and spat with terrible accuracy in Ish’s eye.
“Don’t, honey,” Ish said quickly, “let him live.”
Tanya nodded and kept her deathgrip on the cuffs.
“God damn,” Ish said, wiping his eye and looking the little man up and down, “he’s so ugly his nails ain’t got cuticles.”
She nodded. “Somehow I sensed it,” she said.
The little man turned into a large werewolf.
Most of us jumped back a foot or two. The werewolf was still cuffed—but his hind limbs looked dangerous now, and he was snarling and slavering and seven feet tall and generally presented an intimidating aspect, one which spoke directly to the hindbrain. Ish and the Doc, being larger and massier than most, only traveled backward six inches or less apiece—but Ish did lose his grip on the handcuffs, which promptly tried to head for the rafters again, werewolf and all—
But Tanya, of course, was not intimidated in the least…and in less than a second, Isham had regained his hold.
The moment the werewolf realized that it wasn’t working, he gave up, returned to chest level, and became a drunken little old man with a white beard again, sitting tailor fashion on air with his hands spread out before him. There wasn’t room for two more fists the size of Doc Webster’s on that handcuff chain, so the Doc settled for a wraparound grip on a coattail.
The ex-wolf was still snarling. “Blind as a bat, in the bargain, bedad! It’s dishonest and cowardly!” He blinked blearily at her. “Jazus, yer lucky: ya don’t know yer ugly, ya corpulent sow.”
The Callahan Touch Page 9
