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 pa.s.sed. 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 h.e.l.l 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 a.s.sorted 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, s.e.xist, racist, scatological, and soph.o.m.orically 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, ma.s.sive 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 s.h.i.t out of these T-shirts!' Only-"

"-only n.o.body'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 Succession. 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. h.e.l.l, we'd stymied interstellar invasion three times out of three, so far, and saved the whole d.a.m.n universe for an encore. Who knew? It might even be possible, with the right combination of luck, perseverance, delicate diplomacy, and ma.s.sive 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, b.u.mped 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 wra.s.sle Satan. But he was certainly still and silent and extremely attentive. The att.i.tudes 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 rea.s.suringly 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.ds 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 a.s.sured 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. "f.u.c.k appointments."

"Ah. Good point."

A second gulp drained the bottle; he c.o.c.ked his arm to toss it too into the pool. An attractive young woman down at the far end of the bar said, "Gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s goes in the fireplace. See?"

She pointed, and automatically he looked, and sure enough, the big stone fireplace was full of broken gla.s.s. 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? n.o.body 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 pinkie 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 h.e.l.l 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 -G.o.d, the years between thirteen and twenty-one change so much about a girl! Height ... voice . . . posture .. . demeanor . . . att.i.tude ... 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 -d.a.m.n it, what the h.e.l.l is that tall tower of testosterone doing back here a day earlier than he said? I'm not ready for him yet! I intended to spend the rest of today and tonight devising a Special Plan in consultation with all my friends, especially Willard and Maureen. Right now, I got nothing -This certainly is a tilted picnic -What am I gonna do?

-Stall.

"So what can we do for you?" I asked him after the above extremely busy second.

He didn't even need a second to choose his answer. "Money," he said, and held out an upturned palm much like a snow shovel.

s.h.i.t. "Uh ... like I said, I wasn't expecting you back until tomorrow."

In response he merely pursed his lips, as if to say, Yeah, life sucks sometimes.

"So I didn't get to the bank today. But tomorrow-"

"Ya partner get back yet?"

For an instant the question baffled me. Zoey was standing there right beside me, big as life. Then I realized that in Little Nuts's universe, partner and woman simply did not go together. I started to explain . . . and then thought, well, I don't really have any particular reason to lie to him, but why do I need a reason? "Uh, no, actually. My partner's been held up."

As surrept.i.tiously as possible, Zoey stepped on my foot. I find pressure situations an excellent time to make bad puns; my beloved holds a differing view.

"So it's up to you, then," he said. He was still holding out that big snow shovel hand. I had not seen a snow shovel since I'd left Long Island to come down to the Keys.

"Well ... I can write you a check, if you give me a name to make it out to."

He just snorted.

To negotiate with an Italian you need both hands for gesturing. I used them to emphasize a shrug. "Then I can't come up with anything like the amount you mentioned yesterday. Not until the bank opens again tomorrow."

Little Nuts slowly lowered his hand until it was at his side again. "I unnastan. Any new business relationship, there's gonna be little kinks startin' up. I gotta make allowances. Like ya said, you got the day wrong, so it ain't all your fault. And you ain't gimme no att.i.tude yet." He sighed. "So here's what we do. You empty the register, plus gimme everythin' you got on ya, plus your ATM card and PIN code, plus tell me you're really sorry an' promise not to f.u.c.k up no more. Then I break a coupla unimportant fingers an go away, an we put the whole thing behind us. You can make up the shortage tomorra when ya partner gets back. Sound like a plan, chief?"

I caught Jim Omar's eye, shook my head microscopically. Just in time; he'd been preparing to attack. With his bare hands, and whatever utensils he might find on his way to the enemy. Others were bristling, too; I could sense it. I began whistling loudly through my teeth, as if from nervousness. "Do Nothing till You Hear from Me." There are times when it's good to have a clientele who are somewhat musically sophisticated. I felt a slight relaxation in the vibes, and knew everyone would stay calm and let me handle it. All I needed now was a clue how to handle it.

Once again my mind did that business of cloning itself in order to think multiple thoughts in the same split second.

Suppose Tony Donuts Junior decided to punch me in the face. There were basically two possible outcomes.

First, the invisible protective shield given me by Mickey Finn might a.s.sess the incoming punch as being of lethal force, and instantly activate to protect me: I'd feel nothing, and Tony would break his hand. This would probably clue him in that there was something unusual about me, which was something I was hoping very much to avoid. If he found out he couldn't hurt me, he would not only become curious, but a little afraid of me, as well. All in all, you'd have to call that a bad outcome.

Alternatively, my magic cyborg defensive system might diagnose the punch as sublethal, and do nothing. That was really the more likely result: Tony in fact did not want to kill me (yet), and the Finn Shield is usually pretty accurate. Probably, then, the punch would land. On my personal face bone. This, too, met my criteria for a bad outcome.

Alternatives-- I could speak the name Pixel aloud, and Little Nuts would very suddenly acquire a large heavy orange fur hat, anch.o.r.ed firmly in place by ten of h.e.l.l's hatpins, in such a way that its removal would necessarily involve the removal of Tony's face, as well. This might distract him long enough for me to have a brainstorm. Or it might just really p.i.s.s him off.

I could convert to Buddhism and set myself on fire. Keep that one in reserve.

I could ask Tom Hauptmann behind the bar for "a double shot of the twelve-buck stuff," and hold up my hand. We'd rehea.r.s.ed this-we sell alcohol in south Florida-so I was fairly confident the double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun would arrive positioned so I could grab it out of the air and start firing at once. If I shot Little Nuts enough times at close range, perhaps I could wear down his resolve. But the noise would cause talk in the neighborhood, and the police would probably be curious.

I could page Mike Callahan. I had an emergency number that could theoretically raise him anytime. But I hadn't used it back when we were threatened by the end of the universe, so I was reluctant to use it for one lone human, however formidable. I didn't really know exactly what it was that Mike and his family were doing together, far off somewhere else in s.p.a.ce and time-but I'd been given to understand that it was important.

There was always, of course, the option that had served me perfectly well for the past half a century. I could split: spin on my heel and run like a scalded son of a b.i.t.c.h. The open gate was only steps behind me; in under two seconds I could be out of the compound. Within which Tony would have my wife and daughter, some of my friends, my bar, and my home on which to vent his irritation. It was actually even a little worse than that, because the version of Erin present today was old enough to qualify as rapeable for someone like Tony. No, bugging out didn't sound like fun.

Perhaps the scattergun was my best option after all. Shoot Tony as many times as it took to kill him, kick his body into the pool, cover it, and when the cops arrived, have everybody blink and say, What noise? I was just settling, most reluctantly, on that option when Erin spoke up.

"How would you like something better than money?"

"No such thing," Tony Donuts Junior said automatically. Then he registered who had spoken and turned slowly to regard Erin. She met his gaze without flinching. She was standing with all her weight on her right leg and a hand on her left hip, which was slightly toward him. It was not an explicitly provocative pose . . . but even her father had to admit she looked d.a.m.ned good.

Tony made a horrid sound with both snort and snicker in it, and shook his head. "No such thing," he repeated with a.s.surance.

"Are you sure about that?" she asked.

She didn't put any innuendo into it at all, but of course Tony heard some anyway. "f.u.c.kin'-A. I want that," he said, gesturing with his chin toward her body, "I take the first piece goin' by I like. Money, I gotta wait for some a.s.shole to hand me."

Erin started to reply-and then seemed to think better of whatever she'd been about to say. He gave her a second or two to come up with something else, then decided he'd won the point, and turned back to me. "And waitin really p.i.s.ses me off"

He began walking toward me, looking remarkably like a Jack Kirby character. The Incredible Hulk after he'd finally found a competent tailor, perhaps, or Ben Grimm with body hair, or Doctor Doom in mufti. I could feel his footsteps through the soles of my feet.

Oh, I thought, if only Mike were here! Or Mickey Finn with his starkiller finger. Or Nikky Tesla and his death ray...or the Lucky Duck with his paranormal power to pervert probability...or even just Long-Drink with his hickory nightstick and Fast Eddie with his wicked little blackjack...

None of them being present, the crisis got solved by Tom Hauptman and his brain.

Tom likes to be around conversation, especially good conversation, but he doesn't talk much himself. Which is sort of strange, considering he was a minister for nearly a decade. He lost the habit of talking, along with his wife and then his Faith, in a banana republic dungeon where he was held incommunicado for ten years. From the early Sixties to the early Seventies. He managed to completely miss The Beatles-and all that implies. The s.e.xual revolution; civil rights; the murders of JFK, RFK, MLK; Vietnam; protest; pot, acid, mescaline, psilocybin, peyote; counterculture in general; Altamont, Woodstock, Apollo 11, Watergate-Tom missed all of it, busy watching his wife die, and then mourning her. By the time he got out, sprung by the CIA, Reverend Hauptman was so hopelessly out of touch, he would have been finished as a minister even if he'd still wanted to be one. Heaven knows what might have happened to Tom if he hadn't gotten confused and lucky enough to try to stick up Callahan's Place with an unloaded gun.

That was the night his tenure as our backup bartender began...and for most of the ensuing twenty-five years or so, Tom has been a quiet mainstay behind the bar, calm, competent, cheerful, and steady. Now, all at once, he became a bona fide official Hero of The Place-by cutting through the Gordian knot that baffled me with a single blow of his voice.

"Here."

That voice was so soft, gentle, and unafraid, it stopped the juggernaut in his tracks, where a bellowed "Freeze, motherf.u.c.ker!" might have had no effect. Like a tank acquiring a target, Little Nuts swiveled to confront the upstart. What he saw made the corners of his mouth turn up with pleasure-and made me and most of the rest of us gasp.

Tom was holding out the drawer from the cash register in one hand, at enough of a tilt that you could see it was pretty full of cash. (I don't go to the bank very often, because if I do, then I'm in the bank.) In his other hand he held out an unzipped empty orange backpack made of some sort of lightweight s.p.a.ce-age polymer. When he was sure he had Tony's attention, he emptied the drawer into the backpack. First the change, then the ones, fives, tens, and twenties.

Pay the man.

I'm not sure I can explain why not, but in a million years I would never have thought of that simple, brilliant ploy. It would buy us twenty-four hours of scheming time, and all it would cost us was money. You know that sports stadium maneuver, The Wave? Eyebrows did that all around, as people grasped the elegance of the solution.

Tom set the empty cash drawer down, reached up the bar a ways, snagged the open cigar box from which people take their change on their way out, and added its contents to the backpack. Then he dropped in his own wallet, pocket change, and watch and pa.s.sed the sack to the nearest patron, Shorty Steinitz. Looking glum but game, Shorty added his own wallet and change and pa.s.sed it on.

Okay, this was good. Things were looking up. We would fill the backpack with baubles, and the giant would go away, for now at least, and with him would go immediate danger, and we could finally get some furshlugginer thinking done. I was not yet beginning to relax, but I was beginning to envision a universe in which relaxation was sometimes permitted to such as me, when I saw a fist break the surface of the pool, holding a beer can, followed at once by Lex's head.

The geometry was such that he was, barely, out of Tony's field of vision. But I knew why he had surfaced, and my heart sank. (Wait, let me just look at that sentence for a minute. Okay, I'm good now.) This had come up once before, and so had Lex. (Sorry. I'll try to get control.) From his point of view, tossing an empty beer can into the pool was like some clown lobbing trash through your living-room window. What he had done the last time it happened was to return the can, at high speed. By then it wasn't empty anymore but three-quarters full of pool water, and its previous owner, a tourist from California, had his back turned, so the impact dropped him like a poleaxed steer, and his friends ended up having to drive him up to the emergency room on Stock Island.

I'd bought Lex a drink, then. But I did not want him to do it again. A beer barrel, full of cement, would probably not knock down Tony Donuts Junior. It would make him turn around ... whereupon he would see, treading water there in the pool, something that looked very much as if the Creature from the Black Lagoon's dermatologist was finally beginning to make some headway with his complexion, but only above the waist. This was the kind of sight that might make Little Nuts big-time nuts. But there was nothing I could do about it; where I was standing, Tony would see me if I tried to signal Lex to duck out of sight.

Beyond Tony I saw my grown-up daughter, striking in that dress-then all at once I was seeing only the dress, falling empty to the ground. In the pool, Lex's head suddenly disappeared beneath the water, as if he'd been yanked downward from below. A human might have had time to yelp, but Lex had no air in his lungs yet.

Unfortunately, none of this was noticed by Marty, the last customer sitting at my end of the bar. Having put his own valuables into the backpack, he got up to walk it down to the other end of the bar. If he got where he was going, and Tony's eyes followed him, the man-monster was going to notice that Erin wasn't there anymore ... and then that her dress was.

The whistle was earsplitting, the strident thumb-and-pinkie kind of whistle you use to summon a cab in New York.

The shout that followed it was nearly as loud and just as piercing. "Hey, Goliath-screw you!"

Little Nuts became very still. He did not even look toward the upstart, yet. Only his face moved, slightly, and in a most unaccustomed way: his expression became thoughtful. "Screw me?" he mused.

"Yeah. Screw your mother, too."

Tony snorted. From his expression, you could see that he had run into this sort of thing before-suicides who picked him rather than the cops to a.s.sist them-and that he regarded the ch.o.r.e as part of the white ape's burden, tedious but sometimes unavoidable. "Screw my mother, too?" His voice was getting quieter.

The other got even louder. "Why not? Everybody else has."

Tony pursed his lips. Time to swivel round and take a first and last look at this fool. "Everybody else ha-oly s.h.i.t!"

"What are ya, a f.u.c.kin' parrot?" Harry shrieked. "d.a.m.n right, everybody else has ... except her husband, of course."

Little Nuts was so startled, he blinked and backed up a half step. "Jesus Christ. A f.u.c.kin' parrot ..."

"What are you, related to Robert De Niro? Are you? Are you related to De Niro? I don't see anybody else here related to De Niro-"

A new, moving shadow appeared suddenly, on the poolside tile behind Tony, and begin sliding across the water toward me. I glanced up quickly. Through a gap in the poinciana canopy above I glimpsed Erin, a tiny figure perhaps half a mile above us, falling. Why was she sky-diving at a time like this? Oh, of course. Air-drying herself. She plummeted down to maybe a hundred feet overhead and winked out of existence. The next moment-no, actually, the same one-she was standing where she had been before, down at the far end of the bar, dressing hastily.