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

stealing his equipment.   I knew better than to do business with Tony.   And I was right, too.   Almost the moment I had put the amusing currency to its intended use, and it was forever gone from my control…Tony decided he wanted it back again.   The feds had got on to him, and suddenly he didn’t want large blocks of evidence in circulation.”
    “Jesus,” I said, “he wanted you to sell him back his counterfeit fifty grand?”
    “No.”   He shook his head.   “Just give it back.”
    “But that’s not fair!” Erin exclaimed.
    Willard did not smile.   “He said he would keep the phony fifty thousand…plus, to cover his time and general aggravation, the five thousand in real money I’d already paid him for it…and in return, I could keep all twenty fingers and toes, and my genitalia.   Sounded like a fair deal to me , at the time.   A bargain, in fact.”  
    “A steal,” Maureen said.   “With the genitalia.”
    “Ah,” Erin said.  
    “If I could possibly have returned Tony’s money-like paper, I would have done so without regret—even though it was the bait in a million-dollar sting I had working.   Unfortunately, that bait was gone , already deep in the water with a large shark’s mouth around it.   And disobedience was simply too novel a concept to risk baffling Tony Donuts with.   So I changed my appearance and went underground at Lady Sally’s House…which is where I hooked up with Maureen again.”   Without looking he reached his hand toward her; without looking she took it.   “That complicated things.”
    “The Professor couldn’t hide in a whorehouse and impress a girl at the same time,” Maureen said, “especially not one who worked in the whorehouse.   So he needed to cool Tony.”  
    Willard took the narration back.   I was pretty sure they hadn’t rehearsed this story; maybe they were passing cues through their joined hands somehow.   “There just wasn’t any way to come up with another counterfeit fifty large—not of that high quality, not quickly.”  
    “Besides, all the Professor’s seed-money was spent,” Maureen said.
    “There was only one thing to do,” Willard agreed.
    After the silence had gone on long enough, I finally got it.   I drew a pint of Rickard’s Red and slid it down the bar to him.
    “Thank you, Jake.”   He raised his mug to me, took a long sip, set the mug down, held up one finger and looked down at his belt for a long moment.   Finally he threw his head back, belched ringingly, lowered his finger and said, “We stiffed Tony Donuts.   We gave him real money.”
    Well, there was a bit of rooba-rooba-rooba over that, of course.   All of us simultaneously saying some version of, I thought you said you were broke, where’d you come up with fifty thousand bucks?   Finally I whistled for silence.  
    And when I got it—I once studied whistling under a traffic cop—I said, “I thought you said you were broke.   Where’d you manage to come up with fifty kay?”
    “Oh, that.”   The Professor shrugged.   “We robbed a bank.”
    Pause.
    “Of course,” I said.   “Only sensible thing you could have done.”   General murmur of agreement.
    He nodded.   “Unfortunately, the moment Tony examined the money we brought him, he recognized that it was bogus.   Or rather, not bogus: fake counterfeit, if you will.”
    “How could he tell?”
    He sketched a grimace.   “It’s a long story.” *  
    “And it doesn’t matter,” Maureen said.   “The point is, he was going to tear us limb from limb, and not metaphorically speaking either.   So we brought the problem to Lady Sally, and she…fixed things.”   She glanced around automatically, making sure the lodge was tyled, that all present had been stooled to the rogue.   “When it was over, Tony Donuts was doing life in a maximum security federal facility…and there is no question it was hard time.   The Lady had made certain subtle alterations to his