The Rackham Files (20 page)

My midbrain made its subconscious guess. If we were lucky, the Continental would regain enough traction to lurch back so that we could pass on the shoulder.

We weren't lucky. Neither was he. This was no gimmicked limo with tuned shocks and suspension but your truly classic two-ton turd, and it began to spin at us just past the bend. But a mass that size does everything in slow motion; by the time its overlong rump swung around, my hand was on the fan lever.

The trick to a Cellular's jackrabbit leap is in slapping the gear selector to neutral a split second before you engage the fans, so that all the engine's torque is available to energize those big air impellers inside the body shell. It doesn't halt your forward motion; in fact, removing your tires from macadam, it relinquishes all braking and steering control to the fan vents, so you can't obtain any strong side forces. With fans moaning, we soared over the trunk of the Lincoln by a two-foot margin, only to sideswipe the branches of a pinoak that showered us with twigs as my airborne Lotus tilted and veered back over the road. I kept my foot off the brake, let the fan vents remedy the tilt, chopped back on the impellers and didn't engage third gear until I felt the tires touch the road. After that I kept busy getting through the bend and decided to slow down a bit.

"Aren't we going to stop?" Kate was white-faced, her neck craned backward.

I hadn't risked a backward glance. "What for?"

"He rolled and hit a big sycamore next to the creek!"

I slowed while thinking it over, then let my biases show and pressed on. "If he was driving that kind of fat-cat barge with that kind of disregard," I growled, "the hell with him."

She started to reply, then gave me a judgmental headshake and tried the phone again. But communication lines, like other traffic, had become overloaded to the point of paralysis. When I ducked off the macadam onto the gravel access road to my place, the girl was still trying Shar's number fruitlessly.

I remoted the gate in the cyclone fence surrounding my place as we approached and caught sight of my friend Spot, whose ears could always discriminate between the sounds of my Lotus and any other machine. Kate studied the sign on the eight-foot fence, one of several around my five-acre spread that proclaimed:

CHEETAH ON PATROL

and she gave me a smirk as the gate swung shut behind us. "You don't expect anyone to believe that," she chided.

I drove slowly toward the garage, a partly converted smithy behind the house, and smirked right back. "Just so long as
he
believes it," I said, and jerked my thumb toward her door sill.

Kate's brow furrowed and then she turned and stared full into the dappled half-feline face of Spot, whose lanky stride kept his blunt muzzle almost even with hers. Her whole bod stiffened. Then she faced straight ahead, swallowed convulsively, and slid far down into her seat. Her knuckles on the torso restraint were bone-white, but, tough little bimbo that she was, Kate never whimpered.

I drove into the garage and killed the engine and delivered a long sigh, then traded obligatory ear sniffs with Spot while my head was still level with his. His yellow eyes kept straying to my passenger, more a question than a warning; I rarely brought nonfamily guests to my place. "Company, Spot," I said, and reached over to scratch Kate behind the ear.

She sat rigid. "Does that mean I'm one of your pets, too?"

"It means you're his peer; he'll let you take the first swipe. But Spot's no pet; he's my friend and a damn good watchcat. My Captive Breeding Permit from the Department of the Interior says I own him—but nobody's told
him
that."

"So how do I behave? No sudden moves?" I caught the tremor in her voice.

"Neither of us could possibly make a move he'd consider sudden," I said, and proved it by pushing my door aside abruptly. Spot, of course, pulled back untouched as I grunted my way out of the Lotus and waved for Kate to do the same.

But: "Don't leopards turn against people sometimes?"

"I wouldn't know. Spot isn't a leopard; he's a male cheetah in his prime and he stays healthy on farina mix and horsemeat. He's the nearest thing to a link between cats and dogs; his claws aren't fully retractile and he wasn't born with the usual feline hunting instincts. Even has coarse hair like a dog, as you'll find out when you pat him."

"Fat chance." At least she was getting out of the car.

"Or you can panic and run wild and wave your arms and scream," I said, "and he'll frisk circles around you and laugh at the funny lady. Come on, I need to check my incoming messages," I added, and let them both follow me to the tunnel while she stared at my house.

My white clapboard two-story house, I told her, was a basket case when I bought it. I reroofed it, then found myself shopping for antique wallpaper patterns and reflectors for kerosene lamps, and ended with an outlay of fifty thou and two hundred gallons of sweat only when the house was furnished à la 1910 from the foundation up. The basement and part of the old smithy were something else again: you can't maintain a Cellular, or an automated cheetah feeder, or a bounty hunter's hardware, amid dust and mildew.

I led Kate past gray shreds of wooden doors that led to my root cellar. The doors lay agape on an earth mound, flanking the dark stairs fifty feet from my back door. "Let there be light," I said on the stairs, and there was light. I could've said "Keep it dark," and the tunnel lights would've come on anyway. It was my voiceprint, and Shar's and Ern's, that the system reacted to. It didn't recognize Spot's sound effects. For all his wolfen ways, Spot had a purr like God's stomach rumbling. Plus a dozen other calls, from a tabby's meow to yips and even a ludicrous birdy chirp.

Kate Gallo negotiated the turn behind me. "Curiouser and curiouser, cried Alice," she gibed. "I can't decide whether you're behind the times or ahead of 'em, Mr. Rackham."

It was my turn to register surprise, and I stopped. So did she. "You didn't lift my wallet, so how'd you know my name?"

"You told me."

I merely shook my head, very slowly. Smiling.

"Okay, if your ego needs stroking: most people on the scam in the Bay Area know about you. You're seven feet tall and weigh four hundred pounds and leap tall buildings, et cetera, and inside that rough exterior beats a heart of pure granite. You've got no friends, no family, no home, and anybody who tries to negotiate with you had better do it with silver bullets. I suspect you invented some of that crap yourself. Satisfied?"

"Eminently," I said and laughed. "So why didn't you peel off when you first saw me?"

"Lots of fa—uh, heavyset men around," she amended, glancing at my backlit paneling. "Let's just say I'm stupid."

"Not me. You've suckered too many bright solid citizens into the badger game for me to make that mistake, Kate." She just grinned an impudent grin and, for good measure, deliberately laid her hand on Spot's patient head. I pressed on: "I know your family has money. Why'd you do it?"

"
Because
of my family—and because I damn well like making men squirm. If you knew my mother you wouldn't have to ask."

I nodded. Raised in a strict household where females were expected to keep the Sabbath holy, the pasta tender, and the men on pedestals, Kate Gallo had learned too much about the rest of the world; had cast aside her illusions and her virginity before reflecting that both had their good points; had decided she would make the system pay. And men ran the system, so-o-o. . . . "Ever meet a male who didn't undervalue your gender?" I asked.

"A few."

"Well, you've just met another one. Two, if you count him," I said, nodding at Spot. Who just sat there with his tongue showing in a doggy leer. "Time's awasting, Kate; and quit laughing, you skinny sonofabitch," I said to Spot.

Long before I'd asked Ern McKay to critique my ideas on "the place"—we seldom called my fenced homestead anything else. With twenty years at NASA's Ames wind tunnel in the south Bay Area, master modeler Ernest McKay was what the Navy called a mustang engineer; no degree, but bagsful of expertise. Ern had taught me about parsimony, i.e., keeping it simple. Why require two codes for my tunnel lights and basement door lock when a unique voiceprint was the key to both functions? It was my idea to hang the steel-faced door into my underground office so that gravity swung it open, and Ern's dictum to avoid an automatic door closer. That would've required a selenium cell, pressure plate, or capacitance switch—all fallible—when all I needed, quoth ol' Ern, was a handle. While helping me convert a basement into a livable modern apartment and office, Ern had briefed me on a lot of NASA's design philosophy.

The result was a subterranean Bauhaus living area without many partitions, where everything worked with a minimum of bells and whistles—and when something didn't work, like a clogged drain, it was easy to get at. You can carp all you like about exposed, color-coded conduits, but I liked knowing which plastic pipes were air vents and which one led from my basement john to my septic tank down the hill.
You
guess which was painted a rich brown.

Kate Gallo stepped onto the linolamat of my office and gawked while I heaved the door shut. "Up those stairs"—I pointed to the freestanding steel steps that melded into old-fashioned wooden stairs halfway up—"is the kitchen, and just off the kitchen is a screen porch. Grab the antique galvanized tub off the porch wall and all the pans in the kitchen, bring 'em down here to the john, and fill 'em with water."

I strode around the apartment divider, a rough masonry interior wall that served as a central crossbeam under the floor above, grabbed my remotable comm system handset from my computer carrel, and headed for the john while querying for incoming messages. In the back of my head was envy for Kate, who was evidently slender enough that she didn't make those top stairs squeak on her way upstairs.

The first message was from a bail bondsman, who assured me positively that Kate Gallo had run to Sacramento. I muttered an anatomical instruction for him under my breath while readying my oversize bathtub for filling; started back to my office as the second message pinged; stopped dead as I saw why Signorina Katerina hadn't made squeaky music on my stairs. She was still standing on my linolamat, arms crossed in defiance. We traded hard stares as the message began, and Spot's ears twitched in recognition of the voice from my speaker.

"We're on the way, Harve, at—uh, eleven fifteen or so. Ernie and Cammie are putting bikes in the vanwagon and Lance is clearing out the freezer. I dumped our medicines and toilet things into a box and I'm checking off everything, and we'll take the Livermore route to avoid freewayitis. In case you haven't heard, Ernie says tell you somebody at Ames got word from Satellite Test Center at Lockheed: they're monitoring evacuation out of Leningrad and Moscow . . ."

Then we caught part of a McKay tradition in the background, young Lance throwing one of his patented tantrums. " . . . but he's not taking mine and he
knows
I gotta have it, he can fix it, I know it, Iknowitiknowit—" and then a slam of something. I knew it wasn't the impact of Shar's palm on Lance's butt; that was beyond reasonable hope.

My sis again: "Poor Lance, his bike is broken so he's been using Cammie's in spite of everything we've—well, Ernie isn't packing it so of course the child is broken up," she went on quickly, ending with a breezy, "Well, we'll cope. We always do. Oh! You said to be specific, so: we're taking Route Six-Eighty toward Livermore, then the old Morgan Road to your place. Don't worry, bubba, we should be at your place by three pee-em unless we have to fire the second-stage. Coming, hon," she called to someone, and then the line went dead.

"Poor Lance," I snarled, tossing my handset control and catching it instead of hurling it against a wall. "Little bastard beats the bejeezus out of his bike, too lazy to fix it, and now that he realizes why Ern nagged him to keep it in shape it's too late, so he takes his frustration out on everybody else. And why the fuck aren't you collecting water containers," I shot at Kate.

"Because the fuck," she said, sweetly enunciating it to extract its maximum gross-out potential, "I didn't relish being ordered around like a servant. What was all that stuff in the garage about peers, mister?"

I took two long breaths; stared at my reproduction of Bierstadt's
Rocky Mountains
near the stairwell for solace. "I believe I said you're Spot's peer, Kate. Not a pet but a working part. He keeps the place free of swagmen and rabbits, and if he didn't, he wouldn't have any place here. I'll be as democratic as I can—which means not very, when it's my place and I know the drill and you don't, and since there has to be a leader it is going to be the one who knows what must be done.

"That was my sister Shar, on tape. They're two hours late and I don't like wondering why, and if you think I'm stuck with you here, you should know that you are exactly one more smart-ass refusal away from getting tossed over my cyclone fence." My one office window gave me a view of Mount Diablo and, reluctantly, I cranked its wire-reinforced outer panels closed. I hated the thought of shoveling dirt against those panels, since it would block off the only natural light into my basement. But that was part of the original drill we'd worked out long ago, after Shar inexplicably signed up for an urban survival course at a community college.

I went back to the john and shut off the water, painfully aware that I'd given the girl a galling choice; also aware that I meant every word. When I glanced at her again she had aged astonishingly, arms hanging loosely, no longer the pert rebel—maybe ever again. "All right," she choked, and went up the stairs. "You know I don't have any choice."

Following her, I said, "Neither do I. I hope you can be part of the solution, Kate—and I can't afford you as part of my problem. Cheer up, kid, maybe this is all just—"

"Please," she said, looking around her at my turn-of-the-century kitchen, "just leave me alone. Please?" Then, spotting the squat bulk of my cast-iron wood stove, she allowed a piece of a chuckle to escape as she passed it. "Boy, you are really weird—don't do that," she added suddenly.