Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) by Spider Robinson Page A

can approach him without first floating down a tunnel toward a very bright light.
    We found him where we expected to, sitting in a lounge chair under an umbrella, watching the zoo parade of beach people across the street.   Under the chair, in the small pool of shade it and Bert’s bony flanks afforded, lay what looked like a heap of bread dough that hadn’t risen very well, except that it pulsed in slow rhythm.   As we came near it rose slightly at one end and emitted a sustained baritone fart that any camel would have been proud to claim.   Bert leaned sideways slightly and glowered down at it.
    “Hi, Bert.   Hi, Don Giovanni,” Zoey said happily.
    The object under the chair lifted its other end enough to reveal a face, and turned it up toward the sound of Zoey’s voice.   The face made Bert’s look young.   Well, younger.   Both eyes were so heavily cataracted they looked more like immies than eyes.   There were about four surviving whiskers, randomly placed.   The nose was the only part of him still capable of running.   Basically Don Giovanni is one of the very few blind dogs to have a seeing-eye human.
    “Hey, kiddo,” Bert said to Zoey with real pleasure.   “Whadda ya say?”   He nodded politely enough to me, but it was clearly my wife’s appearance that had made his day.   She gets that a lot.
    Today the shirt was midnight blue silk, a wide-collar thing with an almost liquid sheen and real ivory buttons, an impressive garment even by Bert’s standards.   As usual it and his pants were covered with a fine mist of white hairs the length of eyelashes; nonetheless he was almost certainly the snazziest-dressed man in Key West, that or any other day.
    “It’s time to move him,” Zoey replied.
    Bert grimaced and nodded fatalistically.   Without looking down, he reached under the lounger and tugged Don Giovanni a few inches, until the dog was once again completely in the shade.   Don Giovanni shuddered briefly in what might have been gratitude or merely simple relief, and became completely inert once more.   “I’m his personal ozone layer.   I never laid anybody from Ozone Park in my life.   Hello, Zoey; hiya, Jake—what brings ya all around ta this side a the rock?”
    “Trouble,” Zoey replied, pulling another lounger up alongside his and sitting down.   I did the same on the other side.
    Bert nodded again, even more fatalistically.   “Everybody could use a little ozone.   What’sa beef?”
    Zoey looked at me.   Discussing homicidal psychopaths with a representative of the Mafia was the husband’s job.   “Ever hear of a traveling mountain range called Donnazio?” I asked.
    Bert sat up straighter so suddenly that the lounger bounced.   Somehow Don Giovanni bounced the same amount at the same instant, so the lounger’s feet failed to come down on him anywhere.   “Tony Donuts’ kid, ya mean?   Tony Junior.   Little Nuts, they call him.   He’s your trouble?”
    So the kid’s name really was the same as his dad’s.   “Yah.”
    When a serious man like Bert, who usually looks solemn even when he’s having fun, suddenly looks grave, the effect is striking, and a little demoralizing.   He looked away from me, sent his gaze out across the Atlantic and frowned at Portugal.
    “Ya got a beef with Little Nuts,” he said, “my advice is ta shoot yourself right now.   Try and run, you’ll just die tired.”
    “Neither one is an option, Bert.”
    He snorted.   “Right, I forgot.   You guys don’t get shot.   You wanna keep somethin like that quiet.   CIA hears about it, you’re up Shit Creek.   Okay, ya better explaina situation ta me.”
    So we did.   It took longer than if one person had done it, but not twice as long.   Quite.   In no time Bert had grokked the essentials.
    “So ya can’t kill this bastid, and ya don’t even want him to figure out he can’t kill you .”
    “That’s basically it,” I agreed.   “Either one would be liable to