Springboard (15 page)

Amazing.

There was a pond at the center of the park, where ducks swam. He’d brought part of an old loaf of bread to feed them, thinking it might amuse his son.

But maybe not. No one had bothered to tell him that babies younger than about six months tended to just
sit
there, not doing anything. Well, if you didn’t count eating, crying, and filling diapers. All his life he’d seen pictures and vids of babies crawling or running, or sitting up and playing. He just hadn’t been told that there was a time frame around such things.

Oh, well. He could always just sit and hold him.

He glanced down again, and little Mark was looking up at him.

“What are you looking at, little tiger?”

The boy grinned a toothless smile. Daddy was
talking
to him.

Jay wished he could have this much fun at work. He’d been struggling to figure out his latest puzzle. It seemed so
close
sometimes, as if there was something that he just wasn’t seeing.

One of his old mentors had said more than once that his intuition was a plus for programming: that it could short-circuit hours of scut work with one sudden realization. This time, though, it just wasn’t coming.

Ahead was the pond. He looked at the water. The breeze pushed ripples across it. A pair of white ducks swam sedately along. He noted the details for future VR work, and looked for a likely place to park the pram.

“Wahhhhhhhhh!”

At Mark’s sudden wail, Jay went tense.

“What is it, pumpkin? What’s the matter?”

He leaned down and sniffed. It didn’t smell like a full diaper.

He quickly ran through the list. Hungry? Didn’t sound like a hungry cry. He reached in the little incubator bag anyway and produced the bottle, warmed to just the right temperature.

Nope. He didn’t want that.

The crying went on. Jay began to feel an edge of panic.

He lowered the gemlike plastic pacifier to his son’s mouth, which popped open and latched right on.

The crying stopped immediately.

He pictured what he might have done if the binky hadn’t worked: running full-tilt across the park, heading home to get Saji.

He looked down and saw that Mark had spit out the binky. His little arms flailed around for it in frustration. Jay could see that it had fallen just to the right of the boy’s head, and reached down to get it. Mark’s hands twitched, trying to find his lost comforter. The boy had such a look of irritation that Jay found himself thinking about his own problems.

Yeah,
he thought,
all I need is a little help from someone else, get them to reach down and hand me the solution.

And then the realization clicked, the situation spun around, and he saw how he might beat the locked-room mystery.

Jay smiled at his son again, and stroked his head. Not bad—take the baby to the park, and cut the Gordian knot at the same time.

Mark’s eyes started to close. Get a binky, go to sleep. Must be nice . . .

Jay grinned.

He turned the pram around and headed home. Saji would be done teaching her lesson by now, the boy would nap for at least an hour, and Jay could get on-line and run with his new idea.

Instinct was like inspiration. Neither were things they taught in computer school, though a few of Jay’s teachers had spoken about one or the other. Nor were they things you should depend upon with any regularity; then again, they weren’t things you should ignore when they tweaked you, either.

Jay felt that tweak again now—a sixth sense of somehow knowing he was close. It was different from wishful thinking—he’d experienced that often enough to recognize the feeling.

The scenario wasn’t a complicated one. It was an old standby he’d built years ago, a town in the Old West, with cowboys and shopkeepers and schoolmarms, and that atmospheric
High Noon
twang underlying it. He had changed names and places and upgraded the sensoria, and it was one of his favorites.

Jay strode along the boardwalk, tipping his hat to the ladies he passed, inhaling the odors of dust and horse dung. Tumbleweeds had gathered in the alleyways, and the sun-bleached storefronts and graying wood buildings baked in dryness.

Ahead, at the entrance to the town saloon, the Hickory Branch, a figure suddenly moved from the boardwalk and into the place.

Jay wasn’t sure who he was hunting, but he knew, he
knew
that this was his quarry. His realization at the park with his baby son had pointed him in this direction, and it felt right.

He hurried toward the saloon. There were two ways into the Hickory Branch—the front door, which, unlike so many movies, wasn’t a pair of useless swinging doors that did nothing to keep out the heat, dust, and flies, but a wooden-framed etched-glass panel that closed just like any other door. There was also a back door, plain old wood, and generally kept locked save for when trash—of one sort or another—needed to be hauled out.

Jay left the walk at the gun shop, went down the alley to the back, and moved two buildings down to the Branch.

He tested the saloon’s back door. It was locked. Good.

Jay circled back to the street, passed the hitching post, which was empty—smart men didn’t leave their horses tied up there during the heat of the day, even, though there was a trough with water where the animals could reach it. If you lived in town, you walked to the saloon; if you came from elsewhere, you paid the livery stable boy a nickel to put your horse in the shade, and make sure he had food and water.

Jay opened the door and stepped inside.

It was Saturday, and the place was crowded, smoky, and not much cooler than outside. The beer was warm, too, but if you drank enough of it, you didn’t mind the heat, and these frontier towns were full of what would later be called “alcoholics”—men and women both.

The piano player didn’t pause, but kept on tinkling away at the off-key instrument, playing some kind of New York show tune from the late 1870s.

Jay didn’t look particularly threatening. He wore a shopkeeper’s duds—boiled shirt and starched collar over a pair of gray pinstriped trousers and low-heeled English-style riding books. His coat—even in the heat, men often wore coats when they went out—was a cutaway frocklike thing of gray wool. His hat was closer to a derby style than a cowboy ten-gallon.

He didn’t want to look threatening, not like some
pistolero
with low-slung strapped-down Peacemakers. More like a mild-mannered shopkeeper.

He had his gun, of course. The coat’s right-hand low pocket was heavy canvas stiffened with leather, and in it was a chrome-plated 1877 Colt .38 “Lightning,” with a two-and-a-half-inch barrel. The revolver looked like the Peacemaker, sort of, though the butt was rounded. It was a somewhat delicate machine compared to some weapons, but it had the advantage of being double-action, which meant that you didn’t have to manually cock the hammer for each shot. You could just point it and pull the trigger repeatedly until you ran out of ammunition. The hammer spur had been removed, so as not to catch on the pocket during the draw.

Billy the Kid had owned a similar gun. Pat Garrett had carried a larger model, the “Thunderer,” in .41 caliber. And John Wesley Hardin, one of the meanest of the gunslingers, had gotten one just like Jay’s as a gift from his brother-in-law, Jim Miller.

Definitely not a gun for shooting at targets twenty-five meters away. It was for taking out a bad guy ten or fifteen feet away. The short barrel made it easier to get out and working.

Jay moved to the bar, pretending a nonchalance he didn’t feel, while searching the faces for his quarry. The person he’d glimpsed out front had been a man, he was pretty sure—or a woman dressed like a man. That meant he could discount the three trulls in low-cut dresses who worked the crowd, and the woman playing cards in the side room with four men. He could probably eliminate those men, too, since the one he was after wouldn’t have had time to break into an ongoing game—there was usually a waiting list for poker on a Saturday.

Jay grinned. His scenarios were a mix of fantasy and genuine history, but when he put real stuff in, he usually had it from two or three sources.

“What’ll you have, friend?” the bartender said.

He was, like Jay, wearing a coat, white shirt and tie, and wool trousers.

“Beer.”

“Two for two bits, special.”

“Draw two.”

Jay took his hat off and hung it on a rack mounted on the wall next the bar. There were maybe thirty people sitting at tables or standing next to the long wooden bar, which was made from gleaming and well-waxed hickory, albeit stained and scratched in places. A big looking glass in a horizontal oval frame took up much of the wall behind the bar, and next to that, a painting of, of all things, a sea battle between sailing ships, blasts of smoke from the ships’ cannons and a raging fire on one of the vessels giving the painting a sense of action.

The beers came, in heavy glasses. Jay put a quarter on the bar, picked up one of the beers, and sipped at it. Warm, acrid, sudsy, the way beer used to be drunk. He used the mirror to see what he could, then turned slightly to regard the smoky room.

Every other person in here smoked. Hand-rolled cigarettes, cigars, pipes. Some chewed and spit at strategically placed bell-mouthed brass spittoons, and some of the spitters were very accurate, the local equivalent of NBA three-point shooters.

Twenty years from now, if they survived the other ills of the frontier, a lot of these folks would have emphysema, lung cancer, or throat cancer. Jay shook his head.

He started eliminating suspects mentally as he sipped at the beer, which he held in his left hand so as to keep his gun hand free. Just in case.

Anybody who was obviously part of a group that seemed to have been there a while—easy enough to judge from empty glasses on their tables—was out. Jay’s quarry had just come in, so he looked for men with glasses that were mostly full.

That dropped the numbers to maybe six or seven on the floor, and two at the bar besides himself.

Then Jay looked for men who seemed to be alone, not part of a conversation. This wasn’t a sure thing, but—and this was where his intuition came in—Jay was sure that the man he wanted wasn’t a local, but somebody passing through.

Right away, that narrowed it down to the men at the bar.

Of the two, one was a tall, greasy-looking cowboy with a full beard, wearing leather chaps over canvas pants, a patterned flannel shirt with a dark blue bandanna at the throat, and a short stag-handled sheath knife on his belt. No hat, and no gun, and no place to hide a shooter of any size, at least not that Jay could see. He might have a little revolver or a derringer in his pants pocket, but if so, neither would be coming out with any speed, judging from the cut of those trousers. Six months away from his last bath, easy.

The second man was shorter and paler. He was hunched over his beer so that Jay couldn’t get a good look at his face, but from what Jay could see the man looked clean-shaven. Like Jay, he wore a cutaway-style coat over dark trousers, and low-top shoes with buckles.

Jay glanced away, trying to see the shorter man’s face by using the mirror. At that moment, the fellow looked up at the mirror himself, and Jay had the feeling he was also using the mirror to check the patrons.

Jay cut his gaze away, so as not to be caught looking. But before he did, he had the impression of something odd about the man’s eyes. Nothing he could pin down immediately, but . . .
some
thing.

It was one of these two. He was sure of it.

But—which? Cowboy, or Buckles?

In his quarry’s position, Jay wouldn’t be going around in any scenario unarmed—in this case, “armed” being a metaphor for defensive programs that would be apparent to anybody bright enough to be here. Since Cowboy didn’t seem to be packing—and that knife would only be good at close quarters, unless he was an expert at throwing, and even then, he’d only have one chance—then that pointed to Buckles.

Then again, maybe the quarry was banking on the idea that somebody looking for him would assume he’d be armed, and the fact that he wasn’t would allay suspicion.

Buckles could be carrying a hand-cannon in that big floppy coat pocket, or have a hidden belt holster under it, though he, too, could be unarmed.

Jay took another long pull at the beer. It was a problem.

He wanted this guy alive, to question, whichever one he was, and so drawing his revolver and potting them both was out.

If he drew down on the wrong one, the other would be forewarned, and Jay would be behind the power curve.

If he did nothing, eventually one or both would leave, and he would have to choose which one to stay with, since he obviously couldn’t follow them both.

Not unless they hooked up, which wasn’t likely in
this
scenario. Men who came out of the closet in these times were not regarded fondly in such a town where they’d surely be thought an abomination.

The bartender came over and wiped at the already clean wood with a rag. “You want some pickled eggs? Free lunch.”

Jay shook his head. “You know those two down at the other end of the bar?”

The bartender didn’t look at the men, but smiled at Jay. He had a big, droopy moustache stained with tobacco, as were his teeth.

Jay caught the inference. He pulled a silver dollar from his pocket and put the cartwheel onto the bar. He slid it toward the bartender.

The man laid his hand over the coin and neatly palmed it.