Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) Read Online Free PDF Page A

ounce.
    Anyway, I’d had Lex as a houseguest (well, poolguest) for a few weeks now, and he’d been no trouble at all.   He spent a lot of his time at the bottom of the deep end, listening to his Walkman, and unfortunately, while engaged in that harmless pursuit he bore a slight but persuasive resemblance to a water-logged corpse.
    Which is why Field Inspector Czrjghnczl left the pool very much like a Trident nuclear missile leaving an atomic sub: straight up, and with a great deal of foam, fuss and noise.
     
    *   *   *
     
    Folks hauled her out of the pool—fun new game: Bobbing for Bureaucrats—and set her on her feet, and passed her a few towels, earning not a particle of gratitude from her.   Her mouth opened and she gestured with her hands, but she was so terrified and enraged, words failed her.  
    “God, I love it when she’s wet!” Harry the Parrot shrieked, flying in a circle around her head.
    She swiveled her head to glare at him, raised a hand—
    Suddenly there was a cat on her head.
    She removed Pixel’s tail from her mouth, spit a fine spray of orange cat hair, and tried very hard to hit him, very hard.   Slow learner.   She very nearly knocked herself back into the pool when he vanished just before her fist arrived.
    “What a knockout,” Harry squawked.
    When it comes to mollifying monumentally pissed off women, any man alive can use some advice.   “What should I do?” I asked Erin.
    She shrugged.   “Survive.”
    It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but she was right.   Nothing I could possibly have said or done would have been of the slightest possible use.
    The soaked civil servant did say things, a number of them—and I’m pretty sure they were in English—but since her voice had gone hypersonic by that point I’m not sure what they were.   It doesn’t matter, because she said them over her shoulder on her way to the gate, and she probably summarized them effectively with the violent slam that cracked the gate itself down the center and knocked it off its hinges.
    Not one of my best days, so far.   Zoey wasn’t going to think so, anyway.
    The sudden departure left a silence.  
    It seemed a shame to break it.   But Long-Drink McGonnigle managed to find the right words.
    “I’m not going in that pool again until it’s been drained and scrubbed.”
    He brought the house down.
    “Oughta get Nikky to oil it with his breath day,” Doc Webster said.
    “Huh?”
    “I say, we ought to get Nikola Tesla to boil it with his death ray.”
    I blinked at him, wondering if he was pulling my leg or my ears were starting to go—then got distracted by the sudden recollection of what Erin had said to me just as the Field Inspector had emerged from the water.
    “You said ‘aha!’,” I said to her.
    “Yes, Papa.”
    I like to think I’d have thought of it myself, in time.   Erin has often told Zoey and me that she isn’t really any smarter than we are, just quicker at it.   I’ve never been sure if the distinction means anything.   “Aha what, honey?”
    “Well, I can’t be sure, of course,” she said.   “But how much do you want to bet that she’s a relative of either Nyjmnckra or Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi?”
    Thunderbolt.  

 
    2
    Little Nuts
     
     
    Some recap may be useful here.
     
    I met most of my friends while we were all patrons of a tavern on Long Island, New York, named Callahan’s Place, owned and operated by a man who called himself Mike Callahan.   It was an unusual tavern in many ways—customers were permitted to make their own change, for instance, and were welcome to smash their glasses in the fireplace… if they were willing to propose a toast, first.   Enough interesting things happened there that I’d need three books this size just to hit some of the highlights—and then, one fateful night, it fell to us to defend the planet from destruction by hostile extraterrestrials.   In the course of that evening, Mike found it necessary to reveal to us all