And I could guess what kind of driver Tony would be. Rules? In a knife fight? Few humans could find Tony in their rearview mirror and continue to block his path for long. “Shit. What have we got?” I didn’t own wheels myself, hadn’t since I sold the ancient school bus in which I’d brought my family down to Key West, ten years before. But some of the gang kept up the hobby.
“I got a Lada,” Shorty Steinitz said. Nobody laughed.
“I got a Vincent,” said Marty Pignatelli.
It didn’t register for me, but several people murmured “Holy shit!” or some equivalent.
“A what, Marty?”
“A Vincent Black Shadow,” he said.
Now it did register…and I said, “Holy shit!” Even I’ve heard of the Black Shadow. It’s sort of the Stradivarius of high-performance motorcycles. It eats Harleys and shits Yamahas. “I didn’t even realize you had a bike, Fifty.”
He shrugged. “I was a statie.”
“Huh.” Well, I was impressed…but on the other hand, the last time I’d ridden a bike, the ancient Irish blessing had come entirely too true: the road rose up to meet me. Not stopping when it reached my ass. I was starting to feel a little trapped. You damn fool—the fall’ll probably kill you…
Double Bill diagnosed my expression. “I have something better, Jacob.”
“Hard to believe, but go ahead.”
“I have a little twenty-two-foot Grady White semi-V over at Houseboat Row, with a new pair of two-twenty-five Johnsons on her and full cans.”
I blinked at him. “Moderate your language, suh—there are ladies present.”
“He means a fast boat,” Tanya said. “Fueled up.”
Jim Omar was somewhere nearby in the hug. “He means a floating rocket, Jake. Traffic’s lighter on the Atlantic Ocean than on US 1. You’ll probably be in Miami before Tony clears the Keys.”
Bolivia, huh Butch? Falling off a rocket onto water did sound better than falling off a Vincent onto asphalt. And not only was Omar right about traffic, Florida boaters are slightly less likely than Florida motorists to assert the right of way with small arms fire. “Okay. Zoey, would you please call Bert and get an address for where Charlie Ponte does meets in Miami, while I get ready to go? Bill, you’ll drive this boat, okay? Tom, pack us a few of your Cuban sandwiches and a couple of beers, and dial up a thermos of Atherton Tablelands with cream and sugar.” The group hug began to break up. “I don’t suppose anybody’s got high explosives lying around handy?”
“Sure ting,” said Fast Eddie. “Grenades. How many ya want?”
Eddie lives next door to me. “Two should do it.”
Zoey stopped poking at the phone. “Jake, what the hell do you plan to do with a pair of grenades?”
“Just before we knock on Charlie’s door, I’m gonna have Bill duct-tape them into my hands, and then pull the pins. I don’t care how tough a guy is—you do that, and even Tony Donuts or Charlie Ponte is gonna go right to Plan B. And you and I and Erin are all bombproof.”
“I’m not,” Double Bill reminded me.
“Stand behind me and you’ll be fine.”
“Bull-grunty. You provide as much blast-shadow as a hat rack, you skinny bastard.”
Zoey got my attention by rapping the top of my skull with the phone. “Jake. Listen to me. No grenades.”
I don’t get it. She likes the Three Stooges. “Aw…you’re no fun.” Whack! “Ow. Okay, I promise. How about a nice little Uzi? Nobody’ll notice that in Miami.” I went to our cottage and changed into clothes a Mafia capo would find less contemptible than sandals, baggy shorts and a Hawaiian shirt emitting as many energetic photons as Duval Street. It was stuff I hadn’t worn since I’d left Long Island, high in polyester content. The hair and beard undid a lot of the effect, of course, but it always had.
As I was tying the last shoelace, Zoey came in and handed me a notepad sheet on which was written Charlie Ponte’s meeting-place address and his private phone number. She too was dressed as a tourist, and it looked a hell of a lot better on her. “Tell me this is going to be all right, Spice,” she said.
“It’s a pipe,” I said at once, straightening up and taking her by the shoulders. “You know the logic as well as I do. If anything were to happen to her, it’d be a paradox, and the universe abhors a paradox. We could probably stay here all night singing Beatles songs, and everything would still work out just fine—it has to.”
She closed her eyes. “Really? You’re sure?” Her shoulder muscles felt like rattan under my fingers.
“Absolutely.” I closed my own eyes and confessed. “That’s why it’s taking all my strength to keep myself from digging the Meddler’s Belt out of storage and using it to peek ahead to the back of the book.”
Barring Mike Callahan himself, the Meddler was the first time traveler I ever met. He was a freelancer, who’d come back from the not-too-distant future to the year 1975, to try and spare someone he loved great pain.* He hadn’t had access to the deluxe far-future no-moving-parts method of time travel the Callahans and Erin employed; instead he employed a time machine of his own invention, a belt roughly as bulky and cumbersome as the one heavyweight champions wear. Most people who were there that night, including the Meddler himself, believed they saw that belt destroyed with their own eyes, tossed into the fireplace by Mike Callahan. Only a handful of us knew that Mike had used sleight of hand, and the real Meddler’s Belt still existed…gathering mildew in my storage closet.
“Ah.” Now her shoulders were made of steel cable. “‘…but that would be wrong,’” she quoted, using a comedy Nixon voice that quavered too much. (First presidency to die of a staff infection.)
“Cheating,” I agreed.
Our eyes opened and found each other. “You got some kind of problem with cheating?” she asked softly.
I was tempted. Quite. But—“It’d be stupid. For several excellent reasons…but primarily because time travel is way more risk than we need to take,” I said. “You don’t gamble with the universe to calm your nerves.”
Her shoulders relaxed slightly. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Slim.”
“Gimme a kiss, we got a boat to catch.”
She did that, thoroughly. “You watch my ass and I’ll watch yours.”
“Deal.”
We left the cottage, saw Bill just past the bar at poolside with a small ice chest and an underseat bag he was just zipping shut. “We’re ready,” Zoey called. “Let’s go.”
He straightened, and looked embarrassed. You’d think a man who wears shirts that make mine look drab, a sarong, a Popeye cap, and a gold ring on his bare big toe would look embarrassed more often, but he doesn’t. “Uh—,” he said. “I have expressed myself poorly. I humbly apologize.”
“What are you talking about?”
He only hesitated a second, but that was long enough; Zoey and I had both guessed by the time he explained. “It’s a two-man boat.”
She stopped in her tracks. “I’ll squeeze in,” she insisted in a dangerous tone of voice.
We said nothing. Zoey masses only a little less than Bill and me put together. I’m scrawny and he’s short. She’s neither.
“I will fucking water-ski!”
Another good place for a silence.
“God damn it, Jake, I am not going to sit here, chewing my nails and loading the rifles, while the menfolk form a posse and go rescue my little girl from the Comanches, end of story. Forget it—I’d go completely out of my mind. If there’s only two seats, Bill’s gonna have to teach one of us to drive.”
“,” Bill and I said in unison.
She drew in the sort of vast chest-filling breath one might use to bellow or scream at someone hard of hearing on the far side of Mars, held it, held it…then she let it out so gently, it didn’t make a noise, and in a good imitation of her normal conversational voice she said, “I love you, Jake. Bring our daughter home safe to me.” She looked around her vaguely, not tracking. “Somebody give him a damn cell phone, okay?”
Men don’t know shit about bravery.
“He can have mine,” a voice I almost recognized said.
Field Inspector Czrjghnczl stood just inside the open gate, holding her briefcase in front of her with both hands. Men don’t know shit about bravery. She was dressed just as she had been ever since I first saw her, but her face displayed human feeling. “If I heard right,” she said to me, “your daughter is in danger. I can see you don’t have time to explain it.” She took one hand from the briefcase, found her phone and tossed it to me underhand; I caught it automatically. “Go with God.”
I was speechless.
“She’s right, Jake,” Doc Webster said.
Now I was breathless, and so was everybody else. I spun—and there he was, coming around from behind the bar, moving slow, arm in arm with his wife. He looked like he had a rotten headache, but that was as bad as he looked. His color was okay. “You can stay with us, Zoey. We’ll make a bucket of coffee and stay up and fret together, the three of us. Jake knows my number.”
He was right: if you converted Doc’s phone number’s numbers to their corresponding letters on the keypad (I’m so old I still think, “dial”), they formed a word I won’t repeat here, which was unforgettably obscene.
Mei-Ling held out a hand. “Come on, Zo.”
“Everybody else is welcome to hang out too,” the Doc added.
Zoey hesitated. She looked over at Field Inspector Czrjghnczl, and sighed. “Want to join us?” she asked. “I’ll try and explain what’s going on.”
The bureaucrat blinked. “I’d love to.”
What comes after speechless and breathless? Beliefless?
I filed it all to be dealt with later, squeezed Zoey’s hand, and went to get the thermos Tom Hauptman had just finished filling.
* See “The Law of Conservation of Pain,” in Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon—ed.
9
BA-DA-STING!
Our lives are based on what is reasonable and common sense; truth is apt to be neither.
—Christmas Humphreys
A minute later Double Bill and I were pedaling like madmen. Duval to South (“Where do all the hippies meet?”) to Reynolds to Atlantic Boulevard, past Higgs Beach and Smathers Beach, to the beleaguered but so far unbeaten remnants of Houseboat Row—practically every step of the way was a visual LSD trip, thanks to the Fantasy Fest madness I had forgotten was due to begin that evening. The great lungfuls of air I sucked in as we pedaled tasted not only of the usual sulfur, iodine, frangipani, lime, sunblock, rotting seaweed, and coral, but also of an astonishing potpourri of many different varieties of pot, hash, beer, wine, rum, perfume, perspiration, flatulence, and (least noticeable by far) tobacco. I welcomed the panoply. Whenever I’m frightened enough to retract my own testicles, I like all the distractions I can get. Few places on earth could have provided so many, of such high caliber.
Double Bill’s floating rocket, the Flat Rock, was moored between a lavish three-story penthouseboat with three satellite dishes and an elaborately trellised gangplank, and a half-sunken century-old derelict tub, in such a way that it was hard to see from the land but easy to get to. I don’t know anything at all about boats or sailing or seamanship or navigation, but I’ll tell you this: The Flat Rock was well named. Once we cast off and Bill gunned it, it behaved much like a skipped stone, touching the water only occasionally. It was like the backwards of a spacecraft reentering earth’s atmosphere: every time the ship glanced off the water, its speed increased. God be thanked, I don’t get seasick, so once I accepted that all my vertebrae would be fused into a single bone and I would never walk again, I started to almost enjoy myself a little. Then all at once it began to rain so hard the name Flat Rock took on a whole different meaning, involving aerial bovine urination.
Nonetheless, I had not quite cut my throat by the time we began to smell Miami, so I’d have to agree the voyage was less aggravation than driving would have been. No traffic lights, no accidents, no potholes, no seniors with the left turn-signal permanently on doing thirty in the passing lane, no endless reshuffling of the same five gas stations and six fast-food brands, no billboards, speed traps, or gunplay, neither oblivious idiots ahead nor homicidal maniacs behind.
By the same token, of course, no Jeeps full of bronzed twenty-somethings in dental-floss bikinis. Life is imperfect.
In the movies or on TV, a meet between a Tony Donuts Junior and a Charlie Ponte would have taken place in a black stretch limo, or in the back room of an espresso joint nobody but mobsters ever went into, or in an abandoned warehouse, or at poolside in Charlie’s opulent mansion fortress. Charlie hated cars, coffee, and cobwebs, and nobody he didn’t own body and soul ever set foot on his personal home turf. His meets therefore took place in an anonymous cheesy two-bedroom house on an eighth-acre in a suburban development so vast it had its own zip code. It was called Bay Vista Estates, although it was nowhere near a bay and the longest unobstructed sightline anywhere in it was less than fifty yards unless you looked up.
The “estate” itself was the cheapest possible dwelling that white people with all their teeth or brown people who aspired to become citizens would live in. Its house number had six digits in it, and it was on 851st Lane, and there were also an 851st Street, 851st Way, and 851st Road—all identical to each other and to all their hundreds of companion byways—and then there were also West, East, North, South, NE, SE, SW, and NW variants for each of all of them, and none of these ribbons of tar-heavy asphalt ever went even momentarily in a straight line. So although in theory anyplace can be located by GPS, in practice no SWAT team on earth could have located a given address in that tract in under an hour, much less stormed it. It took me and Double Bill every damn minute of the lead we had gained in taking the Flat Rock just to find the right furshlugginer house.
And when we did, there was no good way to surveil it. The whole development had been designed by the same people who do airliner interiors. Everything was not only made of the cheapest possible materials, but shrunk to the absolute minimum possible dimensions, as well. There was nowhere to park that wasn’t in front of a hydrant or somebody’s house, and most families were already parked in front of their house because the driveways were precisely long enough to accommodate a single Accord and there were no garages.
The car we’d rented at the marina where we’d left the Flat Rock was convincingly crummy, so once we were sure we had the right place this time—the car sloppily parked in front of it was a Dodge convertible—Bill faked engine trouble and stalled out there. As I fiddled around under the hood, mourning the long gone days when I recognized anything at all under the hood of a car, I studied the layout of Charlie Ponte’s meet place out of the corner of my eye.
It didn’t look promising. You almost had to turn sideways to walk between houses. The tallest tree I saw anywhere was shorter and skinnier than me. There seemed to be a brief mocking sketch of a fenced yard around back, mate to the band of lawn that separated the front of the house from the single-file sidewalk, but although I could only see a corner of it, I could tell that “backyard” was barely big enough to contain a few deck chairs, a frosted-glass-top table and a gas grill, none of which would provide very effective cover for a ninja bartender or commando realtor. I don’t know what they call that kind of roof, but if you took a thousand short pipes made of brick and sawed them all in half lengthwise, you’d have the materials; assuming a man could somehow get up there unnoticed, his every step would sound like a horse on cobblestones. I decided we were screwed.
Then I noticed something about the high backyard fence. Only a short stretch of it was visible, but I could see that it was made of some opaque space-age composite I didn’t know, and that it was about the first thing I’d seen in the whole damn Bay Vista development that ran in a straight line.
I closed my eyes and tried to point my ears like a bat. Sure enough, I picked up a distant rhythmic sound, a sort of pulsing hiss, like wind or seashore but the wrong tempo. I opened my nostrils,
and even over the open-hood smells right in my face, I was able to detect an evocative soupçon of diesel in the breeze.
We were right at the perimeter of the tract, mere yards from the outside world despite all our meandering. Just beyond that backyard fence was a real road, a state road, a road that went in a straight line for miles during which there were no speed bumps at all, and on which it was not only possible but necessary to exceed twenty-five miles per hour.
“Slip me a beer,” I murmured to Double Bill, and came round to the side of the engine compartment furthest from the house. He started to pass a bottle out the window. “No, a can,” I said. He shrugged and complied, and I took it around to the front of the car. I poked around in there with my free hand awhile, cursing freely and with increasing volume. Finally I cried, “This stupid thing is fucked,” spun to my left and flung the beer can as high and far as I could.
As I did, a front window of the house came up two inches and a rifle barrel appeared in the opening. I was expecting it—and even so, it was eerie. But the gunman was a pro: he saw that what I’d thrown was not a Molotov cocktail, and that in any case it would easily overshoot the house, and that I was not a hitman but a dork, and he chose not to shoot me. That was good. It would have upset him when the bullet bounced off. And the ricochet might have hurt Double Bill, who is not bulletproof.
Unfired on, I watched a perfectly good beer soar high in the air, cross the property, and come down like a mortar round on the far side of that fence. I listened hard. Several muffled horns, faint sounds of shrieking brakes—but no crunch of impact or tinkle of broken glass. That was a relief. I stuck my head under that hood one more time, touched something that looked like it wouldn’t kill me and didn’t, emerged with a huge smile of triumph and slammed the hood with a flourish. “We can go now,” I said to Double Bill, and we did.
Locating the spot out in the real world that lay just beyond that particular section of anonymous backyard fence was a nontrivial problem. Simply finding the nearest exit from the tract was a spaghetti-bowl nightmare, and it turned out that six different roads ran past the place at various points, and since they were state roads in a Miami suburb, traffic on all of them sucked. But finally we spotted the skid marks and stains where the can of beer had come down, burst, and been run over one or more times. Bill put his emergency flashers on and slowed to a stop in the right lane just past the spot…then backed up until we were twenty yards short of it, and put her in park. Horns blared, and two lanes began merging to get past us.
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