"Callahan 06 - The Callahan Touch 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

"For one thing, I'm talking about whatever kind of magic it was that watched over that Place like a door-checker. The Invisible Protective Shield-a selectively permeable shield. You all know damn well what I mean. Did anybody ever wander into Callahan's who didn't belong there? And did anybody who needed to go there bad enough ever fail to find it?"
That stopped them. "I don't know about that last part," the Doc said. "There were suicides on Long Island during those years. And I can remember one or two jokers that came in who didn't belong there. But as Susie said a minute ago, I take your point. Those few jokers didn't stay. In all those years, '48 to '86, we never seemed to get normal bar traffic. No bikers, or predators, or jerks looking to get stupid, or goons looking for someone drunk enough to screw even them-"
"Hell, no drunks," Long-Drink said, looking thunderstruck. "Not one."
"No grabasses," Margie said.
"No brawlers," Tommy supplied. "No jackrollers."
Fast Eddie summed it up. "No pains in de ass."
"Was that magic?" the Doc asked. "Or some kind of advanced technology we don't savvy yet? Like Mickey Finn's 'magic' raincoat?"
"What's the difference?" I told him. "We haven't got it- and so this is going to be a different kind of joint. It doesn't matter what it was. For all I know, it was just a sustained run of incredibly good 1-"
SCREECH!
I had been peripherally aware of rapidly growing automotive sounds from the world outside, but before I could finish my sentence we all heard the nerve-jangling shriek of brake shoes doing their very best (a sound I happen to find even more disturbing than most people do), much too close to the door. We all froze, expecting a vehicle to come crashing in and kill us all. Just as the noise reached its crescendo and died away, there was a violent, expensive-sounding clang! crump!, and then a single knock at the door.
Silence.
There was a harsh emphatic crack! sound. Behind me, in the bar. And then a heavy, dull thop! from the same place, followed by a gasp, and a faint, hard-to-identify sound that made me think of a gerbil, curling.
Fast Eddie happened to be closest to the outside door. He opened it experimentally, and it was a good thing it opened inward. The front grille of a Studebaker filled the doorway, faint tendrils of steam curling out of it. The rest of a Studebaker was attached in the usual manner. The only unusual thing about it was the pair of rumpled frayed blue jeans on the hood.
"Hi, guys," Shorty Steinitz's voice came hollowly from the passenger compartment. "Sorry I'm late. Did I kill him?"
One mystery solved. Shorty is the worst driver alive. But how had he managed to punch someone through that door and through all of us and into the bar, without any of us noticing it happen?
I turned and pushed open the swinging door, just as tentatively as Eddie had opened the outside door.
A stranger was sitting at my bar, in one of the tall armchairs I use instead of barstools. Kindling lay in the sawdust at his feet, and there appeared to be either more sawdust or heavy dandruff on his hairy head. He was just finishing a big gulp of beer. Tom Hauptman, my assistant bartender, was gaping at him. This seemed understandable, for the stranger had no pants on.
He caught my eye, looked me up and down briefly, and pursed his lips as if preparing to sneer. "Evening, stringbean," he said. He gestured toward the fireplace. "Mind if I warm myself at your fire?"
"Na dean fochmoid fainn," I heard myself say, and wondered what the hell that meant. It sounded a little like Gaelic- and I don't speak Gaelic.
"What choice have I got?" he replied.
He was short and hairy. His eyes and nose and lips and the upper slopes of his cheeks were the only parts of his head that were not covered with tight curls of brown hair. As far as I could see, they did not share that distinction with any other part of his body except his fingernails. He made me think of hobbits. Surly hobbits. He wore a brown leather jacket, a long scarf, a black turtleneck, basketball shoes, and white jockey shorts. There were a motorcycle helmet and a pair of leather gloves on the bar beside him.
"How did you get in there?" I asked, as calmly as I could, aware of people gawping over my shoulder.
He looked at me as if I had asked a very stupid question, and pointed silently upward.
Like Callahan's Place before it, Mary's Place had an access hatch to the roof. Or rather, it had had. I hadn't rigged up a ladder to it yet, because it was awkwardly placed, almost directly over the bar. Now there was no longer a hatch there- just a yawning hole where the hatch had been. The hatch cover was the kindling around the stranger's feet.
"You broke in from the roof?" I said.
He grimaced. "Not voluntarily," he assured me. "I could have done without the last eight feet or so of that little journey. But I didn't get a vote. This is good beer." He made the last part sound like a grudging admission.
"Rickard's Red," I said, seeing the color. "From Canada."
"No," he said, frowning as though I'd called an automatic a revolver, or spelled "adrenalin" with an e on the end. "From Ontario. Americans always make that mistake."
Shorty came bustling up behind me. "Is he alive?" he asked.
"Are you alive?" I asked the stranger.
"No, I'm on tape," he said disgustedly, and gulped more beer.
"Honest to God, Mister," Shorty said, trying to push past me, "I never saw you. Be honest, I wasn't looking-it just never occurred to me anybody could be on my tail at that speed-"
"I was in your slipstream, Andretti, saving gas; are you familiar with the concept or shall I do a lecture on elementary aerodynamics? Even a rocket scientist like you will concede that there's not much point in doing that unless the guy is going at a hell of a clip, now is there?"
"Well, I never seen ya," Shorty said uncertainly.
"That's because you weren't looking," the stranger explained.
"One of you want to tell me what happened?" I asked. To my pleased surprise I heard my voice come out the way Mike Callahan would have said it in my place. A quiet, polite request for information, with the explicitly mortal threat all in the undertones.
The stranger looked up at the ceiling again. No, at the sky. Apparently God signaled him to get it over with. He sighed. "I was following that maniac at a-"
'Idiot,' " Long-Drink interrupted. "If they're in front of you, they're idiots."
The stranger glared at him, and decided to ignore him. "-hundred and twenty when he made an unsignaled left into your parking lot without slowing. On a Suzuki at that speed, you don't want to bust out of the slipstream at an angle, so I swallowed my heart and cornered with him-better, of course-and there we both were, bearing down on a brick building at a hundred and twenty together, and I would like to state for the record that I would not, repeat not have hit him if his God damned brake lights had been working!"
"Are they out again?" Shorty asked mournfully.
The stranger looked at him. "Or if his brakes hadn't been so God damned good."
"I hafta get new shoes every couple of months," Shorty said.
"No shit, Sherlock. How did I magically divine this information before you told me? I don't know, I must be psychic."
"You ploughed into the back of Shorty's car on a motorcycle?" I asked.
"That," he agreed, "was the very last moment I was on a motorcycle this evening. A microsecond later I was airborne."
"Jesus," Doc Webster said, and pushed Shorty aside to take a turn at trying to get past me. But even he couldn't manage it.
The stranger finished his beer and signaled Tom Hauptman for another. Tom didn't move, kept staring at him. "So I hit the trunk like a flat rock, up the rear window, and into the wild blue," he pointed upward, "yonder. Somewhere along the way my trousers left me. The next thing I know I'm sitting here with a draft in my jockeys and a glass of Rickard's in front of me. Snappy service."
Tom shook off his stasis. "I'd just drawn myself a beer when he came crashing in. I was so startled I just-" He made a sort of pushing motion away from himself with both hands. "And it went-I mean, right smack dab-as if I'd-" He pantomimed
sliding a schooner down the bar like you see in old movies. "Bang into his hand."
Dead silence.