Yet there the T-shirt shops are—a couple dozen of them. None of them ever seems to have much in the way of customers inside, when you pass by them, but somehow none ever seems to go broke. Even stranger, they seldom put up signs claiming to be about to go broke. As far as anyone has ever been able to learn, they mostly seem to be owned by anonymous distant corporations. They’re usually managed and staffed by hired transients, with a turnover rate rivaling raw combat troops in a jungle war.
“I spent a little time and money at City Hall,” Bert told us, “and got a list a who owns ’em all. Turns out mostly it’s companies where the name is just initials annee address is a post office box. So last night I made a call ta Miami, an’ got a readin’ on who pays for the post office boxes. Come ta find out, it’s a buncha different guys, all over the world…but they all got one thing in common, sticks right out.” As an excuse to pause for effect, he leaned down and tugged Don Giovanni fully back into shade again.
“And that is?” Zoey prompted impatiently.
“Skis and coughs.”
Zoey and I exchanged a glance.
“Alla names ended in ski or cough,” Bert explained. “Like Tufshitski or Yubi Chakakov.”
“Russians? All of them?”
“Damn near.”
That was odd. Why would so many expatriates of the late Soviet Socialist Republic all pick the same eccentric capitalist trade, and all end up in Key West—on the same street? It was as puzzling as how they all managed to earn a living.
Bert said nothing now.
I closed my eyes and thought. But Zoey got there before I did. “Bert—are you telling us the Russian Mafia has been turning Duval Street into a giant money laundry?”
“Vaffanculo!” I exclaimed involuntarily.
“Dis is my teary,” he agreed. “I had my suspicions for a while now, but I think the skis an’ coughs nails it down.”
“Think about it, Jake,” Zoey said. “It makes a lot of sense. If you were a Russian gangster, a rat fleeing the sinking country, and you wanted to get a toehold in the U.S., where would you start? Someplace American gangsters won’t notice you, right? Somewhere that isn’t anybody’s turf, so you aren’t cutting into anybody else’s action. Someplace where nobody’s liable to notice you, because everybody else around is so weird or so drunk you can’t possibly stand out. How many places like that are there?”
Bert smiled fondly at her. “What a consigliere you woulda made, kid.”
Zoey smiled back at him, then sobered. “Speaking of which, you haven’t passed your suspicions…well, back up the chain of command yet, have you Bert?”
Bert sighed. “I been gettin’ ready ta,” he said. “But once I get on the horn ta Miami, either I’m wrong an’ I look like an asshole…or I’m right, an’ a war starts. Here. In Key West.” He spread his hands and shrugged. “There didn’t seem ta be any rush.”
I was beginning to see metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel. “So Little Nuts—”
“—maybe figures if he can roll up the Russkis and deliver them and their action to Chollie Ponte up in Miami, before Chollie even figures out they’re here, maybe it earns Tony Junior a button.”
“And he starts out by—”
“—by rollin’ up all the little joints on either side a Duval, first. Like you guys. He’s encirclin the bastids, get it? Standard strategy: lock up the neighborhood, from the outside in. Then when he finally squeezes them, the Russkis got no place ta go. They’re surrounded.”
Bert’s teary made a certain twisted sense. It would be easy enough to check with neighboring businesses and find out which of them had also been visited by Little Nuts recently.
Zoey was shaking her head and groaning. “This is not good news, Bert. Basically what you’re saying is, we’re not merely being shaken down by the Son of Kong, we’re actually at ground zero of an impending international gang war.”
Bert pursed his lips. “Yeah.”
“This is sounding less and less like something we can keep quiet.”
He nodded. “Yeah, it is.”
“What would you do if you were me, Bert?” I asked him.
“You said ya had a couple of players in your crew, right? Put them ta work on it.”
There are two reasons why Bert survived as long as he did in a dangerous occupation, and only one of them is luck.
*—recounted in Callahan’s Lady—ed.
4
DOG DEER AFTERNOON
On the way home we had to bike along half of Duval Street to reach the turnoff for The Place. As I pedaled along—moving slowly, but faster on average than the cars—I couldn’t help but glance into every T-shirt shop we passed. There were so many of them, it was nearly as much strain on my neck as watching a tennis match.
It was equally true that not one of them I saw had more than three customers in it, most of whom looked more like browsers than live ones. In nearly every case, clerks outnumbered customers. On a pleasant sunny weekday in tourist season. The bars and the few remaining Duval Street enterprises that were neither bars nor shirt-shops all seemed to be doing reasonably, seasonably brisk business.
Whenever I saw anyone behind a shirt-shop counter who seemed old enough to be an owner and not stupid enough to be a manager, he looked Russian to me. But that could be overactive imagination—how the hell did I know what Russians looked like, really? From movies where they were played by English actors?
I found myself looking at the T-shirts themselves. Each store displayed as many different shirts as physically possible, in windows, doorways and streetside racks. I had long since noticed that just about every store seemed to carry more or less the same basic inventory of shirts and shirt logos. Now that I was paying attention, their stock seemed literally identical. Roughly half the shirts were souvenirs, bearing the name Key West in assorted fonts and sizes, usually accompanied by some lame graphic of vaguely Floridian motif, and not all of them were horrible. The other half were moron labels: attempted-comedy shirts, emblazoned with some of the lousiest jokes ever composed, so brutally stupid, sexist, racist, scatological, and sophomorically obscene that I don’t think I’ll give any examples. I could not seem to find one joke that wasn’t on display in every window.
Then I began to notice the people all around me—and what they were wearing. Just as at Smathers Beach, the vast majority of pedestrians, drivers and cyclists on Duval Street, whether tourist or local, were wearing T-shirts of some kind. It was the kinds I started noticing. I took a mental tally, and by the time we reached our corner and hung a left, I was bemused by my findings. Roughly 30 percent of the T-shirts I’d seen were Key West souvenirs. Another 25 percent were souvenirs of someplace else, most often Disney World. A whopping 5 percent were dirty-joke shirts. And the whole remaining 40 percent were generic plain white undershirts, either T-shirts or the sleeveless kind popularly known in Pittsburgh as “wife-beaters.”
I had not seen a single plain white undershirt of either type offered for sale on Duval, as far as I could recall.
“It’s weird,” Zoey said as we approached The Place. “And it’s even weirder that I never noticed how weird it is before. Each shirt store’s the same. Gaudy signage, overkill display, loud rock music, massive air-conditioning with the doors wide open, huge inventory with identical wide selection. Each store says, at the top of its lungs, ‘Hey, look at me here, selling the shit out of these T-shirts!’ Only—”
“—only nobody’s wearing what they’re selling.”
“That’s it,” she agreed. “You noticed it too, huh?”
“Yep.” We were home now; I dismounted, feeling the mild rush that comes with effortless exertion. “I also notice Jim Omar is a man of his word.” The gate Little Nuts had destroyed was rehung now, as Omar had promised, latched open at the moment—with the crack down the center intact.
It cheered me absurdly, that small silly symbol of continuity with the original Callahan’s Place. Drunkard’s dharma transmission. The Alcoholic Success
ion. If the spirit of Mike Callahan was still with us, surely a trivial problem like a crazed killer giant trying to start a Criminals’ Cold War in Key West—funded by us—was something we could deal with. Hell, we’d stymied interstellar invasion three times out of three, so far, and saved the whole damn universe for an encore. Who knew? It might even be possible, with the right combination of luck, perseverance, delicate diplomacy, and massive bribes, to work something out with the Florida Department of Education. Thinking these hopeful thoughts, I waved my wife through the open gate first, stepped through it myself, bumped hard into her, glanced past her, and at once saw Tony Donuts Junior leaning back against my bar with his arms folded, cowing my clientele.
Even Omar looked a little intimidated. Well, that’s too strong a word. I suspect if it ever came to it, Jim would be willing to wrassle Satan. But he was certainly still and silent and extremely attentive. The attitudes of the dozen or so others present appeared to cover the spectrum from there down to paralyzed with terror.
Zoey belonged to that latter group. I tried to reassuringly squeeze her tension-stash muscles, right where her shoulders meet the back of her neck, and hurt my fingers—it was like trying to knead rebar. I could not blame her. This was her first encounter with Little Nuts. Sure, she’d been told…but actually seeing him, smelling him, was something else again. The brain circuitry involved was way older than the cerebral cortex.
I wasn’t in a lot better shape myself. I remember thinking, Waterfall? When did I acquire a waterfall? and then realizing the thunderous roar I heard was my own bloodstream trying to squirt out my ears. I told my adrenal gland to knock it the hell off; neither fight nor flight was an option here.
No sense trying to push Zoey ahead of me like a shopping cart; she outweighed me. I stepped up beside her, took a deep breath, and—all gods be thanked—a pair of hands came around from behind my head and covered my mouth.
I did not jump a foot in the air, despite my hypercharged state, because I’d had a split second of subconscious warning—and more than a decade of conditioning. Materializing behind me without warning is a game my daughter invented the second day of her life, and has never tired of since—and whenever she does it, there’s almost always a faint but distinctive pop sound of displaced air as she winks into existence. This time was a little unusual, though: usually her hands go over my eyes rather than my mouth.
I thought it was a spectacularly bad idea to let Tony Donuts Junior see Erin teleporting around like this. But as I framed the thought she whispered urgently in my ear, “Remember, Daddy: You don’t know his name,” and was gone again. And I realized three things at once: First, Little Nuts hadn’t even noticed Zoey and me yet; second, even if he had, Erin would have been concealed behind us; and finally, if she had not done what she just did, I would unquestionably have used the deep breath still sequestered in my lungs to call out, “Hi there, Tony.” The Professor and Maureen had assured us that Tony’s IQ could not legally order a drink, being under twenty-one—but surely he possessed enough rat shrewdness to notice if someone addressed him by a name he was not giving out.
I learned to deal with the humiliation of being way dumber than my child about the same time she invented materializing behind me without warning. By now her mother and I are just thankful she still chooses us to make look like idiots. She almost never rubs it in unless she absolutely positively feels like it.
“Hi there,” I called across the compound, to the vast relief of my lungs, and Tony looked up. “I must have got it wrong: I thought our appointment wasn’t until tomorrow.”
“That’s right,” he said. He picked a longneck bottle of Rickard’s Red up off the bar top, snapped the neck off the bottle with his other hand, tossed the still-capped stub into the pool, and drank deep. “Fuck appointments.”
“Ah. Good point.”
A second gulp drained the bottle; he cocked his arm to toss it too into the pool. An attractive young woman down at the far end of the bar said, “Glass goes in the fireplace.”
He turned slowly around and stared at her.
“You can pee in the pool if you want,” she told him. “Everybody else does. But glass goes in the fireplace. See?”
She pointed, and automatically he looked, and sure enough, the big stone fireplace was full of broken glass. It pretty much always is. He looked back at her, frowned hard as if in thought…well, maybe not that hard…and emitted a belch that made bottles rattle behind the bar. She met his gaze without flinching.
Tony shrugged and flicked the empty bottle into the fireplace; it burst with a musical sound. She awarded him a Mona Lisa microsmile and said nothing.
I was confused. She spoke as if she were a regular, and indeed there was something oddly almost-familiar about her…but I was fairly sure I did not know her. She was too pretty to forget. Her long curly chestnut hair alone was too pretty to forget. She was tall, shapely, and very young, the youngest person in the compound besides Erin, whom I did not see anywhere. In fact, now that I looked closely with my professional bartender’s eyeball, I wasn’t even certain she was old enough to buy a drink in the state of Florida. She could be a youthful twenty-three…or she might be a late teenager of uncommon poise. Who had she come here with who’d explained our fireplace customs to her? Nobody I could see seemed a plausible candidate to be with anyone that pretty and that young.
She seemed to puzzle Tony, too. For him the speed of thought would always be slower than it was for most other people, or even most mammals, but he stared at her for a few seconds longer than that would account for. It didn’t seem to bother her. It was as though there were invisible zoo bars between them.
He shrugged again. He seemed to have asked Tom for a sampler of beers; this time he picked up a big sweating quart can of Foster’s from the selection beside him on the bar. He glanced down at the pop top. Then he turned the can upside down and, holding it one-handed, punched a hole in the bottom of it with his thumb. Spray arced high, and part of the sound was people gasping. Omar became still as a statue of a panther. With exaggerated care, Tony reached up with his pinky and delicately used its nail to cut a smaller hole on the far side of the can. He drank the quart in a single draft. When it was empty, he caught the pretty young girl’s eye…and tossed the can into the pool. He hadn’t even bothered to crush it first; it floated on the surface, gleaming in the sunlight.
The pretty young girl said nothing, didn’t so much as blink.
He turned his back on her and faced toward me and Zoey again. He opened his mouth to speak, and another LaBrea Tar Pits belch emerged; from fifty yards away I seemed to feel the breeze, and smell a whiff of primordial decay. Behind him, the girl did blink now. No, in fact, she was winking. At me. And grinning.
Okay, so I’m an idiot. I’m sure you would have figured it out much sooner, if you’d been in my sandals. It was only when I saw that impish grin that I finally recognized her. I felt the seismic tremor through the soles of my feet as the shock of recognition went through my wife’s body too. There was no mistaking who that was, even though neither of us had ever seen her before. In my profession I have become fairly expert at telling whether someone is twenty-one or not.
It was our daughter, Erin. Just about twenty-one years old.
There are physical limits to how fast electrical impulses can propagate between neurons. The following sequence of thoughts seemed to arise, uh, sequentially, but I don’t believe they could have because when I was all done thinking them, no more than a second of real time had elapsed. I think what happened is that my brain instantly copied itself a large number of times and thought them all simultaneously:
—poker face poker face pokerfacepokerface—
—Holy Christ, she’s as beautiful as her mother! Is that even possible? Her hair is really amazing, long like that—
—I am looking at my daughter at something over age twenty. The universe does not appear to be collapsing. Ergo, the Erin I know—thirteen-year-old Erin—is no longer present
in this ficton, this here-and-now. She must have not merely teleported away from here, but also time-hopped to some other ficton, to make room in this one for her older self—
—Why the hell is she going through all this? Is it simply because yesterday Little Nuts scared her, made her feel just for once like her calendar age? Temporal shenanigans of this sort are supposed to be a real bad idea, as I understand it…which I don’t—
—If the two Erins simply swapped places, then “my child,” the one I know, is presently wandering around 2006 without valid ID. Or she may have opted to go back in time, to any era prior to 1986 that interested her—and that she has not already visited before. I wonder which she picked: forward or back—
—Back her play. She wouldn’t go to this much trouble frivolously: She’s running some kind of scam on Little Nuts, and it already looks like a pip. Whatever it is, back her play…or at least try not to screw it up—
—poker face poker face poker—
—Could Little Nuts possibly notice a resemblance between this Erin and the thirteen-year-old he glanced at here in this compound yesterday? If not, how much danger is there that he’ll think of it a little later on?—
—Don’t be silly, Jake. It took you a while to spot her, and you’re her father. Body language says it was the same for Zoey. And the two of you know about and believe in the existence of time travel. It’s about as likely that Little Nuts will sequence her DNA—
—God, the years between thirteen and twenty-one change so much about a girl! Height…voice…posture…demeanor…attitude…self-image…facial structure…walk—
—chest size—
—pokerfacepokerfacepokerfacepokerfacepo—
—Look at that face! My heart sings to behold it. That face says plain as print that she is a strong, confident, kind, and happy young woman. She looks as if she has had, if such a thing is even remotely possible, a great childhood and an endurable adolescence. She looks like I couldn’t have been such a rotten parent after all. From the grip of Zoey’s hand on my shoulder I know she is as pleased as I—
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