“Yessir,” said the geezer.
The keys had bounced off his face and landed somewhere near his feet.
He made no attempt to retrieve them, moved no voluntary muscle, until Tony turned away to enter the alley.
Nearly at once the man monster found that the alley was barely wide enough to accomodate
him
, and no cleaner than anything else along Duval Street.
He cursed under his breath and plunged ahead anyway.
In six steps his double-breasted suit needed dry-cleaning.
He thought of giving up and going back…but behind him he heard the geezer from Wisconsin trying to start up the Jeep, and yelling at his geezette to follow him back to the motel, and Tony just didn’t feel like dealing with all that crap.
So he pressed on, and in six more steps his suit needed reweaving.
The next time his passage was impeded by an air-conditioner sticking a few inches out into the alley, he drove it entirely into the building with a single blow from the heel of his fist, and kept going.
Behind him, a drunk biker stuck his head and a handgun out the hole, looked at Tony’s back, changed his mind and withdrew without speaking or opening fire.
“Act of God, man,” Tony heard the biker say to someone inside.
At the end of the alley was another alley running parallel to Duval Street, wider than the first but not by much.
Not wide enough for most delivery trucks, for example, which is another of the reasons why traffic runs so slow on Duval, and a hint as to how long ago downtown Key West was laid out.
Tony reached this mews just in time to catch a good look at the blonde, before she entered the back door of some shop or other.
But when he reached the door, it was locked.
He was already sweating in his suit.
He was
always
sweating in his suit, he just didn’t know any gangster costume with short pants or a tank top.
He considered giving up the chase.
It was after all just a broad.
But he’d had two pretty good looks at her, now, and he was pretty sure.
Having lived in a few states with different statutory ages of consent, Tony had become almost as good as a barkeeper at judging ages, especially female ages…and he was just about positive what he was following now was the sassy broad whose boob he’d honked the day before—only today she was a good three or four years younger.
It was the boob that nailed it down for him, actually.
Broads could make themselves look younger, and God knew they could make their boobs look bigger, even be bigger…but in Tony’s experience they did not make boobs
smaller
.
It’s her kid sister
, he told himself.
Her kid sister, that’s all it is.
Sisters look a lot alike sometimes.
But he kept remembering her waving goodbye as she’d entered the alley.
Something had been written on the palm of her hand, in magic marker.
Too far away to see clearly, but it
could
have been his signature…
And if it
was
her, she was not only an interesting mystery, but a mystery who had promised that today she was going to show him something better than money or sex.
So Tony mopped at his soaking forehead with a handkerchief so expensive it was almost useless, sighed again, punched the door once and then walked over it.
He found himself in an everything shoppe, one of those dimly-lit mildewy-smelling overstuffed junkyards in which the only thing you
can’t
find is the way out.
It looked like where all the yard sales live during the week.
He tried to spot the broad, but the place stunned the eye somehow.
A coot (the stage right after geezer, when you aren’t even trying to fake it any more) stood nearby, gaping at Tony where a door should be; Tony grabbed him by the shoulder and said, “Blonde come in just now?
Yellow playsuit?”
The coot nodded so rapidly the vertebrae of his neck sounded like castanets and dust flew out of his beard.
Tony lifted him clear off the floor with the one hand, straight-arm, with no apparent effort.
“Where?”
The coot gestured with the arm that still functioned, toward the front of the shop, toward Duval Street and its crowds.
“Out?”
More frantic nodding.
Tony brought the coot so close their eyes were inches apart.
“Where to?”
But when the coot pissed himself Tony knew he didn’t know, so he just let him drop and stepped over him.
The front of the store was deserted, which figured.
As he looked around to see if she was hiding somewhere, a photocopy machine he hadn’t noticed suddenly wheezed noisily into life a foot away, surprising him.
Tony didn’t like surprises, so he punched the machine to teach it a lesson, and the piece of paper it had just extruded as its dying act went fluttering to the floor.
He would have ignored anything white with print on it…but this sheet was dark.
It stirred his memory, catapulted him back to carefree days of youth spent documenting the crack of his own and others’ buttocks in the school library.
It was a photocopy of an open human hand, in such high contrast that the skin didn’t look as poorly-mummified as usual, and it was quite easy to make out Tony’s own signature across the palm.
He still couldn’t see the way out of the dump, so he made one of his own.
Soon he was outside in sunshine again, surrounded by rubble, broken glass, and an expanding ring of tourists, fugitives, weirdos and college students on break.
The majority of them were either stoned or drunk, and nearly all of them had come there for the specific purpose of exhibiting bad judgment—but nobody jostled Tony, or criticized him for blocking traffic, or even raised an eyebrow.
Nobody ever did.
He looked east, failed to spot the blonde in the crowd, looked west just as she blew past him on a bicycle, barely missing him.
As she went by she lifted her hand, displaying his autograph again, and when he raised his own hands to deflect a possible slap, she darted under his guard…and pinched his left nipple.
He gaped after her.
He was a man not often astonished.
There were other bicyclists too nearby to escape; he could have had his pick of bikes.
It was just too frigging hot for a bike race in a business suit.
Instead he found himself staring, mesmerized, at the teenage buttocks and thighs that were pedaling her away from him.
It was only after she’d turned north a few blocks down and disappeared from view that he realized he could have jacked a Moped just as easily as a one-speed clunker bike, and maybe caught her.
Tony had not been in Key West long enough yet to think of Mopeds as serious transportation.
Screw it, he decided.
Key West was a speed bump; she wasn’t going anywhere.
Put her on the To Do list and get back to work.
He began looking around for the donor of his next car.
This time something with air conditioning.
The hooker he rented that night earned every penny.
*
*
*
As for us, there really wasn’t much worth reporting for us to
do
, that day.
Tony came by at his usual time for his daily bite, refraining from robbing my customers individually now that we had established a business relationship.
Instead he tried to pump me about the mysterious blonde broad.
Bolstered by the company and telepathic support of my friends, I found the courage to look him in his fearsome eye and convince him I knew nothing about her, had never seen her before yesterday, couldn’t tell him where she was.
(It helped that technically I wasn’t, quite, lying.
I’d never met either the 21- or the 17-year-old Erin, had never seen either before yesterday…and didn’t have a clue where either was now.
Only
when
they were.)
Tony believed me and left, and that was that day as far as our con was concerned.
Nevertheless it was the most memorable day of the entire affair for me—all because of what started out that night seeming to be the sort of absolutely generic, standard issue, garden variety philosophical conversation for which bars are notorious.
*
*
*
It was late, getting on toward closing time.
Few remained, Eddie had packed it in for the night, and people were keeping their voices down in consideration of those who might be asleep in the five cottages.
I had left my post behind the bar, and gone around back of it—
behind
behind the bar, if you follow me—to empty the used-grounds hopper of The Machine into a trashcan.
The area back there behind the big wall of booze bottles is relatively secluded, and not heavily used due to the nature of trashcans in Florida sunshine; if the breeze fails, the smell can be something you could raise houseplants in.
But we aren’t becalmed much at The Place, and some folks like privacy, so I keep a few tables back there.
I came upon Doc Webster sitting alone at one now.
That was odd; the Doc may not be the most gregarious man I know, but he’s definitely in the top three.
We’ve had a firm no-prying policy in force for decades, but it’s pretty much always been blatant hypocrisy.
Rather than simply stepping over there and asking him why he was by himself, however, I began singing a new song parody I was working up, softly, as if to myself.
The tune was Sir Paul’s title song for the James Bond film “Live and Let Die.”
When we were young, with our heads in an open book
We used to read Niven/Pournelle
(you know you did, you know you did, you know you did)
And in this ever-changing world, Pournelle and Niven
hope the fans will still buy…
I paused, and waited hopefully.
And was pleased when, as I’d hoped, the Doc was unable to prevent himself from singing, “
THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE
—”
He was willing to accept company.
“Let me guess,” I said, strolling over to his table.
“You’re sitting by yourself because some Cuban-Irish guy persuaded you to try a taco scone.”
He was off his game.
It took him a whole second to identify the straightline, see the punchline I planned, and improve on it.
“The famous ‘scone with the wind,’ yes, it was Tara-ble.”
I took a seat downwind of him and fired up a doobie.
Slimmer than a soda straw, but it was Texada Timewarp from British Columbia; two or three hits would be plenty.
And again the Doc surprised me.
I’d sat downwind out of courtesy, because I knew he wasn’t a head, but he reached out and took the joint out of my fingers, and shortened it an inch with a single toke.
Which he held so long the exhalation was barely visible, long enough for me to have two more tokes of my own.
Our eyes met, and we beamed at each other like twin Buddhas, one chubby and one skinny, while the night began to sparkle in our peripheral vision.
I offered him a second hit but he waved it away, so I set the joint down in an ashtray.
After a few minutes of shared silent stone, he suddenly asked, “Do you think we’ll ever see Mike again, Jake?”
That toke had hoarsened his voice a little.
The question took me by surprise.
“Why, sure.
I guess.
One of these days.”
“It’s been ten years, now.”
He was right.
The question had been bothering me too. I didn’t often let it rise up to conscious level.
“I guess he figured we were ready to solo.
You know?”
“Well, I wish he’d asked first.”
“Doc, are you pissed off about something?
At Mike Callahan?”
“At myself.
At all of us idiots.
For
years
we had him around all the time.
We didn’t really know for sure that he was
literally
superhuman until right near the end, there, but it was pretty much always clear that he knew stuff nobody else knew.
Am I right?”
I hear that question a lot.
The answer is always, “Yeah, you’re right.”
This time it happened to be accurate.
“Every fucking night of the week we had him.
And then he buggered off to the ass end of space or the far end of time or some damn thing—but he came back to visit at fairly frequent intervals, partied with us for days at a time, helped us save the world once, am I right?”
After the first one, a nod suffices.
“And then when we all moved down here he showed up for Opening Day, spent one whole night with us, and we haven’t seen hide nor hair of the wonderful son of a bitch since, not him nor his whole fam damily, am I right?”
Nod.
“What’s your point, Doc?”