Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) by Spider Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

certainty, what she would say tomorrow if I let her go to sleep without telling her.   The question was, was I hero enough to accept that penance, in order to give my beloved a good night’s rest.
    Well, maybe I would have been…but I I hesitated too long making my choice.   One of her eyelids flicked, as if it were thinking about opening, and she repeated, “’thing ’kay?”
    I suppressed a sigh.   As casually as I knew how, I said, “A little hassle came up, but nothing you need worry about now.   Erin and I have it covered.”
    She made a half-inch sketch of a nod.   There was a long pause, and just as I’d decided she was under and I was home free, her eyelid twitched again, and she mumbled, “Wha’ troub’?”
    This time my sigh emerged.   “Well…”   Further amphigory would only be counterproductive.   I wish they made a tasty bullet.   “…this afternoon a state education inspector showed up.   She says she’s going to put Erin in foster-care because we’re unfit parents.   No big deal.   Go to sleep.”
    For about ten seconds I thought I had pulled it off.   Then one of her eyes opened wide.   “Name.”
    “Ludnyola Czrjghnczl.   Accent on the ‘rjgh’.”
    The eye powered up, swiveled to track me.   “Oh my God.   A relative of—”
    I hastily nodded, to spare her throat.   She’d been breathing barroom air all night.   “You guessed it.”
    Both eyes were open now, though the second wasn’t tracking yet.   “Was she carrying a briefcase?”
    “Afraid so.”
    She was sitting bolt upright in bed.   I hadn’t seen her move.   “Job title.”
    “Senior Field Inspector, Florida Department of Ed.”
    Her second eye caught up with the first and locked on to me.   “The home-schooling scam came apart?”
    I nodded, and she groaned.   “Oh, shit .”
    A man has to know when he’s in over his head.   What kind of coward would wake his teenager in the middle of the night to help him deal with an emergency?   This kind.   I fiddled with my watch, and Erin materialized next to us, and after that a whole lot of words got said,   but I can’t think of a rason to burden you with any of them.
    It wasn’t that bad.   It could have gone much worse.   It was no more than half an hour after dawn when I managed to get the last of us—me—to sleep.   But the upshot was, all three of us started the next day feeling unusually tired…and of course it turned out to be a worse day than the one before.
     
     
    Not that it started out that way.
    I was able to sleep in a little, for one thing.   I run the kind of bar where it’s not strictly necessary for me to be there when it opens.   Everybody knows where everything is, and just about any of them is competent to step in and serve a newcomer if need be.   (It must be hell to serve alcohol to people you don’t trust with your life.)
    When I finally emerged, showered and nearly human, from my home into the morning light, Long-Drink McGonnigle was behind the bar, and the dozen or so people in front of it all seemed content with his stewardship.   A glance at the sun told me it was early afternoon on a nice day, if that last clause isn’t redundant in Key West.   Two steps later I stopped in my tracks, paralyzed by a dilemma that might have killed a lesser man.
    Two paths lay before me.   The right-hand path led to the pool—where Zoey sprawled in a chaise longue, sunbathing.   (Not tanning.   Thanks to the Callahans, none of us is capable of it.   Our bodies don’t believe in ionizing radiation, any more than they believe in bullets.   Perhaps this is regrettable—but since it kept us from being toasted by an exploding atom bomb once, I’ve never quite managed to regret it.)   My Zoey has the most beautiful body I’ve ever seen—have I mentioned this?—as generously lush as my own is parsimoniously scrawny, the kind of body Rubens or Titian would have leapt to paint, the kind they call BBW on Usenet, and