Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) Read Free

brother—over which someone has draped a very used painter’s dropcloth, and onto the top of which someone has placed the severed head of a pitbull.   No, wait, pitbulls don’t have mustaches.   Perhaps this is the secret midget son of Buddy Hackett, wearing a paint-spattered toga as part of his fraternity initiation.   No, I have it now: this is R2-D2 dressed for Halloween.   Or maybe—
    We gaped at each other for a good five seconds of silence, the vision and I, before I tentatively—and correctly—identified it as the ugliest woman I had ever seen.   The moment I did so, I screamed and jumped back a foot—and at the exact same instant, she did the exact same thing.
     
    ***
     
    The difference was, I was holding a nearly full stein.  
    The lid flew open when I started, and a glog of the contents sailed out into the air: an elongated fluid projectile, like a golden version of the second, liquid-metal-model Terminator.   It caught her amidships and splattered, the splat-sound overpowered by the clop! of the stein lid slamming shut again.
    There was a short pause, and then she barked.
    I mean barked, like a dog.   In fact, yapped is closer to the sound she made—but doesn’t begin to convey the impact.   Even “barked” isn’t strong enough.   Maybe “bayed.”   Imagine a two-hundred-pound Pekingese with a bullhorn, and you’ve only started to imagine that sound.   It was something like all the fingernails in the world being drawn across all the blackboards in Hell and then amplified through the Madison Square Garden sound system at maximum gain.  
    I shivered rather like a dog myself, blinked rapidly without effect, and felt my testicles retreating into my trunk.  
    The vision barked again, louder—a sound which you can duplicate for yourself if you wish by simply inserting a power drill into each ear simultaneously.   As its echo faded, I heard the distant sounds of Zoey approaching to investigate.   She pushed the swinging doors open and joined me in the foyer—stopped short and gaped.
    The…I was finally beginning to believe it was a human woman, or something like one…gaped back at the two of us, staring from the naked hairy man to the extremely pregnant woman in the ratty bathrobe.   She opened her mouth to bark again, paused, blinked, looked down at the damp stain on her chest, sniffed sharply—the sight of her hirsute nostrils flaring will go with my to my grave—glared up at me, then at the stein in my hand, then back at me, then down at the stain on her chest again, then one more time at Zoey, and finally she threw back her head and howled .  
    A couple of glasses burst behind the bar.  
    I heard them just before my hearing cut out completely, as though God had accidentally overloaded the automatic level control on my tape deck.   I know I tried to scream myself, but don’t know whether I succeeded.   I also tried to jam my fingers into my ears, to stop the pain that continued long after actual hearing had fled.   Not only didn’t it help a bit, the stein I had abandoned to do so landed squarely on my bare right foot, with a crunch that I did hear, by bone conduction, and sprayed the last of its contents onto the creature’s behaired shins, pilled socks and orthopedic shoes.
    A pity, for it caused her to sustain her howl longer than she might have otherwise, and to shake at me a fist like a small wrinkled ham.
    Horrible as that shriek was—and it was, even without being audible—the end of it was worse, for now she had to draw in breath for the next one, and so I saw her teeth.   I can see them now.   My eyes sent my brain an urgent message asking how come they had to stay on duty when my ears had already bugged out.
    With that, my Guardian Idiot snapped out of his stupor, and reminded me that I did not have to endure this trial any longer than I chose to.   I closed the door quietly but firmly in her face.  
    Then I stood on one leg and cradled my mashed foot in