"I have to call you something."

Very slowly, his ma.s.sive head went left...right...stopped. "No, ya don't."

"I don't?"

"You ain't gonna be talkin about me. Unnastan whum sane?"

I sighed. "Aright. You wanna bottom-line this for me or what?" Amazing how easily New Yorkese came back to me, after all those years. Some things you never forget, I guess: like stealing a bicycle.

He took a step back and turned in a slow circle. People seemed to wither slightly under his gaze, in a wave, like wind pa.s.sing through a wheat field. Even Harry the Parrot was silent. The only one who didn't flinch was Fast Eddie, who grew up in darkest Brooklyn back when there were Dodgers there. Willard and Maureen actually ducked their heads and averted their faces.

The man monster took in the entire compound: the bar area with its big freestanding stone fireplace, the nearby pool, the scatter of tables and chairs, the five cottages, the sh.e.l.l and coral gravel parking area to the south that rarely held anything but bikes and mopeds, the flaming canopy of poinciana overhead, the handful of obligatory palm trees here and there, and the tall thick hedge that enclosed and shielded the property on all sides. With no apparent pause for computation, he named a sum. "That's what I figure ya take in, here; an average week."

I shook my head. "You're high. Way high."

He shook his. "Not when I'm workin. Now, I can prackly guarantee ya no trouble here for only a quarter a that."

"Twenty-five percent is pretty stiff," I said evenly. My hands were starting to ache from wishing they held a shotgun.

"Not when ya add it up," he said. "No fire ... no explosions . . . no armed robberies . . . no random drive-bys ... no customers mugged or raped onna way in or out . . . no wakin up onna bottom a the pool strapped to a safe...ya add it all up, chief, it's a f.u.c.kin bargain."

When in doubt, stall. "I have a partner I have to consult first."

"Notify, ya mean. Where's he at?"

I shrugged as eloquently as I could. It wasn't quite a lie: as long as I didn't look at my watch, I couldn't be certain whether Zoey was still rehearsing, or setting up for the gig. I poured a shot of Chivas and slid it across the bar to him. "Give me forty-eight hours."

He thought it over. So far I had not said or done anything disrespectful, even for form's sake. "Okay." He gulped the shot, turned on his heel, and lumbered away, dropping the shot gla.s.s onto the cement beside the pool as he pa.s.sed it. It broke, a musical period to his overture.

It was quite a while after he was gone before anyone moved or spoke.

"Holy this," Brad said finally. "How saw that guy, Jake?"

"Yeah," Walter agreed. "And what want he did exactly here?"

"Well, I didn't get his name," I said, "but I bet I can guess the name of the organization he represents."

"You're wrong, Jake," Maureen Hooker said.

Something in her voice made me look down the bar to her. Nearly all of us Callahan's Place alumni tend to tan so poorly that we're always being mistaken by tourists for other tourists. But now Maureen was pale, the kind of fish-belly white you usually see only on a night-shift worker from Vladivostok. So, I suddenly realized, was her husband Willard. Since I happened to know them both, from conclusive personal experience, to be about as timid and panicky as your average Navy SEAL, this caught my attention. "You're telling me that guy is not mobbed up?"

Willard answered. "You know the way some respectable Italian-American citizens resent the Mafia, for making all Italians look bad?"

"Sure," Fifty-Fifty said, and I nodded Irish agreement.

"Well, that's the way Mafiosi feel about him. They figure a guy like him makes regular Italian murderers and thieves look bad."

"Which is just backwards," Maureen added. "He makes Capone and Mad Dog Coll look good."

Doc Webster cleared his throat loudly. "All right, G.o.dd.a.m.nit, if n.o.body else will ask, I will: Who was that ma.s.sed man?" He paused a moment for people to resume breathing. "And where do you two know him from?"

Maybe Maureen's wince was due to the Doe's pun. (Mine was.) And maybe it wasn't. "I've never seen him before in my life, Doc. But there's only one person he could possibly be."

Her husband nodded glumly. "And until five minutes ago I'd have told you, with some confidence, that he couldn't possibly exist."

Maureen half turned in her chair to face him. "But there isn't any doubt, is there, sweet?"

Willard was frowning so ferociously he looked like a migraine victim. "Not in my mind," he said, and opened his arms.

They hugged each other hard.

The Doc cleared his throat again, perhaps half an octave higher, and said in his very softest, gentlest voice, "The first one who tells me who that guy is might very well be allowed to live."

Willard sighed. "That guy," he told us all, stroking his wife's hair, "pretty much has to be the son of Tony Donuts."

"I believe you," I said. "That's so weird, it almost has to be true. But it doesn't tell me anything, yet. Who exactly is Tony Donuts?"

"A memory, now." He shuddered, and I don't think it was theatrical. "Not a good one."

"Well ... mixed," Maureen said.

"He was a mixed cursing," her husband agreed. "I can't deny that."

"Willard and I knew each other for years," Maureen said, "and at various times we were partners, lovers, friends. For a while we weren't anything at all. Then Tony Donuts came into our lives and brought us back together . . . and when the dust settled, we were married."

"Whoa," Long-Drink exclaimed. "And that's not enough to make him a good memory? What was he like?"

Willard looked thoughtful. "Picture the monster that just left here."

Long-Drink frowned. "Okay,"

"Two inches taller, fifty pounds heavier, ten years older." With each successive clause, Long-Drink's frown deepened. "Okay."

"With a permanently abcessed tooth."

Long-Drink's eyes completely disappeared from view beneath his eyebrows. "Ah," he said.

"That was Tony Donuts on a good day."

There was a brief silence, as we all tried to picture such a creature. "I see," Long-Drink said, though it's hard to imagine how he could have; by now even the bags under his eyes were obscured.

Fifty-Fifty spoke up. "How'd he get that name? Was he a cop once?"

Willard briefly sketched a smile. "No, Marty. He was born Antonio Donnazzio, that's part of it."

"And the rest?"

Willard grimaced. "With children present, I hesitate t-"

"One time he was raping a woman named Mary O'Rourke," Erin said, "and her husband kept trying to stop him." She saw Willard's surprise. "Lady Sally told me the story once. So Tony decided to secure Mr. O'Rourke out of the way, and the tools at hand happened to be a mallet and a pair of large spikes. Afterwards, one of the crime-scene cops voiced the opinion that Mr. O'Rourke's s.c.r.o.t.u.m now looked like a pair of donuts, and the name stuck."

"So did O'Rourke, it sounds l-ouch," Long-Drink said, the last syllable occasioned by the heavy shoe of Doc Webster.

"So how did you two get mixed up with him?" I asked Willard, to change the subject.

He sighed, looked down, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "Well ... this was back in the days when some people called me the Professor."

Yipes. I had a sudden flashback of several decades, and made a clumsy attempt to interrupt him. "Uh, look, we don't really need to go into this level of detail-"

Maureen was shaking her head. "Thanks, Jake, that's sweet-but it's okay. There isn't a single want or warrant outstanding for anyone of that name, in this or any jurisdiction," she said. "There never was." You could hear the pride in her voice. Not many world-cla.s.s confidence men can make that claim.

"In the course of business," Willard continued, ignoring my interjection, "I found myself in sudden urgent need of a fair amount of really good funny money. Fifty large, to be exact. So sudden and urgent that I was willing to deal with Tony Donuts, who had only recently finished murdering the best counterfeiter in the country and stealing his equipment. I knew better than to do business with Tony. And I was right, too. Almost the moment I had put the amusing currency to its intended use, and it was forever gone from my control...Tony decided he wanted it back again. The feds had got on to him, and suddenly he didn't want large blocks of evidence in circulation."

"Jesus," I said, "he wanted you to sell him back his counterfeit fifty grand?"

"No." He shook his head. "Just give it back."

"But that's not fair!" Erin exclaimed.

Willard did not smile. "He said he would keep the phony fifty thousand ... plus, to cover his time and general aggravation, the five thousand in real money I'd already paid him for it ... and in return, I could keep all twenty fingers and toes, and my genitalia. Sounded like a fair deal to me, at the time. A bargain, in fact."

"A steal," Maureen said. "With the genitalia."

"Ah," Erin said.

"If I could possibly have returned Tony's moneylike paper, I would have done so without regret-even though it was the bait in a million-dollar sting I had working. Unfortunately, that bait was gone, already deep in the water with a large shark's mouth around it. And disobedience was simply too novel a concept to risk baffling Tony Donuts with. So I changed my appearance and went underground at Lady Sally's House . . . which is where I hooked up with Maureen again." Without looking, he reached his hand toward her; without looking, she took it. "That complicated things."

"The Professor couldn't hide in a wh.o.r.ehouse and impress a girl at the same time," Maureen said, "especially not one who worked in the wh.o.r.ehouse. So he needed to cool Tony."

Willard took the narration back. I was pretty sure they hadn't rehea.r.s.ed this story; maybe they were pa.s.sing cues through their joined hands somehow. "There just wasn't any way to come up with another counterfeit fifty large-not of that high quality, not quickly."

"Besides, all the Professor's seed money was spent," Maureen said.

"There was only one thing to do," Willard agreed.

After the silence had gone on long enough, I finally got it. I drew a pint of Rickard's Red and slid it down the bar to him.

"Thank you, Jake." He raised his mug to me, took a long sip, set the mug down, held up one finger, and looked down at his belt for a long moment. Finally he threw his head back, belched ringingly, lowered his finger, and said, "We stiffed Tony Donuts. We gave him real money."

Well, there was a bit of rooba-rooba-rooba over that, of course. All of us simultaneously saying some version of, I thought you said you were broke, where'd you come up with fifty thousand bucks? Finally I whistled for silence.

And when I got it-I once studied whistling under a traffic cop-I said, "I thought you said you were broke. Where'd you manage to come up with fifty kay?"

"Oh, that." The Professor shrugged. "We robbed a bank." Pause.

"Of course," I said. "Only sensible thing you could have done." General murmur of agreement.

He nodded. "Unfortunately, the moment Tony examined the money we brought him, he recognized that it was bogus. Or rather, not bogus: fake counterfeit, if you will."

"How could he tell?"

He sketched a grimace. "It's a long story."

"And it doesn't matter," Maureen said. "The point is, he was going to tear us limb from limb, and not metaphorically speaking either. So we brought the problem to Lady Sally, and she . . . fixed things." She glanced around automatically, making sure the lodge was tyled, that all present had been stooled to the rogue. "When it was over, Tony Donuts was doing life in a maximum security federal facility ... and there is no question it was hard time. The Lady had made certain subtle alterations to his brain."

"What, you mean like a lobotomy?" Doc Webster asked. Willard's grimace was a grin now. "Way subtler. And way nastier. A permanent hand-eye coordination problem. When Her Ladyship was done with Tony, if he tried to hit somebody, he always missed. By at least an inch. The same if he tried to shoot them, or stab them, or throw something at them, or even just grab them. You might say he always aimed to please." His wife jabbed him with an elbow, but he was expecting it.

I was awed. "I can see where a maximum security prison would be an unfortunate place in which to have a condition like that."

Willard nodded wordlessly, and by now the whole front of his head was mostly grin. Maureen was trying to suppress her own grin, and failing. "Especially for someone too stupid to unlearn a lifetime of aggression and arrogance," she agreed. "I can't imagine he survived long, and death was probably a blessing when it came."

"Anyway," Willard said, "the other upshot of the whole business was . . . the other two upshots were, that I decided to give up s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g people for a living and become an honest prost.i.tute instead ... and that Maureen consented to park her cotton b.a.l.l.s under my bathroom sink." They kissed. "So things worked out in the end."

"Only it wasn't de end," Fast Eddie said.

Willard and Maureen stopped smiling.

"Apparently not," he admitted. "Whatever the nature of Lady Sally's mojo, either it was not hereditary, or-far more likely-Tony had already sp.a.w.ned by then. The man who just left here did not seem as though he'd ever had much trouble hitting anything he wanted to."

"You're sure he's your Tony's kid," I said.

Willard looked at me. "Jake, can you picture random chance producing a set of genes like that twice? Not only am I sure that was Little Tony Donuts, I'm prepared to wager twenty bucks that every single gene his mother tried to contribute to the mix was a recessive that died waiting for reinforcements."

"Another twenty says she died in childbirth," Maureen said. "n.o.body has that kind of pelvis anymore."

"He resembles his father so closely that even though my forebrain knew better, my hindbrain kept insisting he was Tony Donuts. I kept turning my face away so he wouldn't recognize me."

"Me, too!" Maureen said. "Somebody like Tony, you see him again thirty years later, you expect him to look absolutely unchanged. Like Mount Rushmore."

"This," Alf said, "is an interestingly tricky situation."

"How do you mean?" fellow quadruped Ralph asked.

"You people have to fight a guy even the Mafia is scared to mess with. But not only can't you kill him...you can't even let him try to kill you. For the same reason: It'd cause talk."

"Aw, this is Key West," Long-Drink argued. "People are reasonable, here. n.o.body'd mind too much if we put down dangerous wildlife like a Tony Donuts Junior."

I had to side with Alf. "The deer's right, Drink. Sure, the community might well decide Little Nuts needed killin'...that's not the point. The point is, even this place isn't so laid back that it's safe to display paranormal powers here. If Tony kills one of us and we don't die, it might take a week or two, but sooner or later we're all gonna find ourselves talking to somebody from Langley, Virginia."

"I think you're all overlooking something," Erin said.

If it seems strange to you that a thirteen-year-old girl got the respectful attention of a barroom full of adults, remember that most of them watched her save the entire macrocosmic universe back before she had a single permanent tooth in her head. "Yes, honey?"

"You keep a.s.suming that just because you can't be harmed by gunfire or explosion, you can't be harmed."