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

that he was a time traveler named Justin from the far distant future…and we all found it necessary to enter telepathic rapport together…and I found it necessary to set off an atom bomb I was holding in my hand at the time.   Busy night.
    When the dust settled, Mike Callahan was gone back home to his own ficton, Callahan’s Place was a radioactive hole in the ground, and I had started another bar for us all to hang out in just down the road: Mary’s Place, named after Mike’s daughter.   There we all spent an almost indecently happy year together, during which I met and successfully wooed my Zoey.  
    Then the night our daughter was being born, there was another of those annoying alien-destruction-of-Earth attempts—don’t you hate when that happens?—and we managed another of those group telepathic hookups to stave it off…only this time our group included Solace, a silicon person.   Solace was, in fact, the Internet itself, become alive and self-aware…and that night, just before she sacrificed her own life to save the human race that had unknowingly birthed her, she took the opportunity to interface directly with my baby Erin’s brain, as Zoey was in the act of birthing her.   Erin emerged from Zoey’s womb with an IQ and vocabulary better than those of a university graduate.   Hell, a university professor , these days.
    Unfortunately, under the stress of saving the world and birthing a supergenius, my friends and I—well, mostly I—managed to mortally offend our next-door neighbor, Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi, an infected pimple of a human being and a finalist in the Ugliest Person That Ever Lived sweepstakes.   The problem with offending her was her nephew Jorjhk.   By evil chance he was a Town Inspector…for our town…and there turned out to be some deficiencies in my liquor license, business license, operating permit, and fifty-’leven other required forms; namely, their nonexistence.   In establishing Mary’s Place I had seen no reason to waste anybody’s time, particularly my own, on paperwork.   This turned out to be a fatal mistake.   Bureaucracy, I ended up proving, is way more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
    In 1989, after a year of sulking, I was seized by either inspiration or madness—you pick—and moved my family and myself out of Long Island, all the way down the coast to Key West.   To my astonishment and joy, just about every one of my former customers opted to follow me, in a caravan of school buses, and I ended up opening yet another tavern, a little south of Duval Street, which I called simply The Place.  
    My mistake was in assuming that the entire Eastern Seaboard was enough distance to place between my bar and the vindictiveness of a pissed-off petty official.   There was, it appeared, an unofficial Old Pricks’ Network—as slow as a glacier, maybe, but just as deadly.   The long arm of Clan Grtozkzhnyi had finally reached all the way down to the ass end of the Florida Keys.
    And fallen into my pool.  
     
    *   *   *
     
    “Oh shit— of course .”
    “Ukrainians have long memories,” my daughter said.
    From the pool came a splash, and then a series of sounds familiar to me but probably not familiar to you.   In order for Lex to speak, in air, it’s necessary for him to empty his windpipe of whatever water is in it at the time, and then dry out his larynx by flexing his gills and breathing in and out—as quickly as possible since breathing air hurts his lungs.   The net effect is that conversations with him generally begin with the sound of a man vomiting, and then hawking and swallowing extremely juicy boogers for ten or twenty seconds.   The resulting tone poem has driven tougher people than the Field Inspector to depart the premises at high speed, even before they saw Lex’s legs.   In a weird way, it’s been a boon for Lex: not one of his friends is a silly, shallow person, distracted by trivia.
    Perhaps in consequence, he speaks with a distinct