Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) by Spider Robinson Read Free Book Online

difference between my ass and one of these…”
    I awarded it a strangled groan.   “Not bad.   Okay, let’s get this show on the road.”   I raised my voice.   “May I have your attention, ladies and gents?”
    I don’t suppose I’ve ever had less trouble getting the undivided attention of everyone in the room.   I imagine most if not all of them had been dying to be invited into the conversation.   In something under a second, all other social intercourse had been suspended, including the darts game, and the only sound in Mary’s Place was the crackling of the flames.
    “My friend Buck here,” I said, “would like some help burning this money.”
    The response was immediate and enthusiastic.   There was a short, rousing cheer, and then my friends swarmed round and got down to business.   With a minimum of conversation, folks figured out how many tables needed to be pushed together to allow everyone access, and selected a spot near the chalk line from which toasts are made, and moved the guitar-case there and began stacking piles of bills around it.   And a massive kamikaze airstrike on my fireplace began.
    I had to leave off tossing myself, shortly, in order to help Tom Hauptman take orders for fresh drinks.   Soon we were both so overworked that Buck—who had already thrown enough bills to be developing a cramp—left off himself and came around behind the bar to give us a hand.   There was a definite party atmosphere in the room, and it was shaping up as one of the most enjoyable parties I’d ever been to.   I even went in back and woke up Zoey—who can nap through a riot—because I knew she wouldn’t want to miss this occasion; it would be good for the baby.
    But then…
    Remember back when I said some things happened that night that I classified as weird, by the standards of Mary’s Place?   Well, it was just then, as I got back with Zoey, that the first of them happened.

 
    3
     
    MR. ALARM
     
     
    It happened so fast that it might not all have registered—if I hadn’t long since become a close student of the kind of strange events that happen around the Lucky Duck.   That calls for a sharp, fast eye, sometimes.   Here’s the way I reconstruct the sequence:
    The Duck, flushed with his triumph at the dartboard, had joined in the money-burning, and had just thrown an elegantly folded airplane with particular vigor and an odd little twist of the wrist—
    —The shifting, writhing mass of burning money in the fireplace shifted and avalanched just then, releasing a sudden blast of heat—
    —The Duck’s arriving missile ran into it, banked sharply over the fire, burst into flame, completed a U-turn and headed back out into the room, trailing fire—
    —For the second time that night, a stranger walked into my bar, a short ugly man with long flowing brown hair—
    —The flaming missile kissed that hair lightly as it passed him, and set it alight—
    —He ignored this utterly, and kept on walking toward the bar—
    —Tommy Janssen either tried to douse the stranger’s burning hair with his drink, or started so violently as to fling said drink from him, with the same net result—
    —Tommy’s drink—a full cup of scalding hot coffee!—splooshed out the flames, and began running down the stranger’s neck, under his collar—
    —Which did cause the stranger to pause for a moment, long enough to catch a whiff of formerly burning hair in his immediate vicinity, and to shake his head back and forth with sudden violence—
    —Which caused droplets to be flung from his hair, and land on Tommy’s outstretched hand—
    —Which caused Tommy to say, “Ouch.   Shit,” with considerable volume, and begin shaking his scalded hand—
    —At which point everything returned to what passes for normal around my bar.   Total elapsed time, perhaps eight seconds.
     
    ***
     
    The newcomer deduced the general shape of what had just occurred, satisfied himself that his hair had ceased