John Ringo - Cally's War

She pulled out the picture IDs and looked at the face, comparing it to the mirror. Yep, I did this one with cheek pads. What a pain in the ass. At least you can actually wash a new perm now. Three cheers for modern cosmetics. But the stuff for major hair work still stinks. She looked at the rain battering away at her windows and shook her head, opening the door to the rest of the apartment and flipping on the ceiling fan. That and the bathroom fan venting to outside would help, some. Anyway, she’d slept in worse stinks often enough.

She looked over at the clock. Barely nine. What the hell, maybe there’s an alternative. She wrinkled her nose and looked in the closet. Touristy, touristy… Blue Hawaiian shirt, white capris, white sandals, cheap tourist seashell jewelry. Perfect.

There was a really good seafood place a few blocks off Market — so good she had to consciously avoid going too often as too many people and setting a bad pattern. Not likely to have any cadets on a week night — definitely a bad week for cadets. Perfect place for tourists.

She pulled up Toledo Urb’s local news for the past few weeks on her PDA and set it for audio while she dressed. As always, she’d avoid natives, but she was covered for anyone else.

When she got to the Bristol she went ahead and ordered a tropical shrimp salad and an extra large mango margarita at the bar, then sat nursing her drink and listening to a three-chord lounge lizard massacre Jimmy Buffett with one ear while eavesdropping on her fellow patrons with the other.

“… so I told Tom that if he couldn’t get me some qualified help no way are we gonna make that October deadline…”

“… sometimes I think maybe she’s the one, but then I wonder…”

“… believe the prices here? Nothing costs this much in the Urb… Yeah, I know, but how much more can it be, I mean, the ocean’s right here …”

“… finally final, and I know I’m supposed to feel better and free and everything, but all I feel is like a chump for never wondering why she never bitched when it was time for my boat to go out…”

Bingo. She studied the guy talking to the bartender under her lashes. Fortyish, balding — but he cut it short and wore it with dignity — no comb-over or bad rug. A simple glitch ointment could have fixed it, but the fisherman apparently either couldn’t afford it or wasn’t that vain. Not fat. Well, a slight paunch, but without rejuv that was damned hard to fight. She looked at the shoulders and biceps from a lifetime of manual labor, and the weather-roughened skin, and decided she’d seen worse. She picked up her drink and moved over to the empty seat beside him, asking the bartender for a water and a slice of key lime pie.

“God that looks sweet,” the fisherman looked at her margarita and shuddered slightly, “and you’re having pie with it?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a bit of a sweet tooth.” She grinned at him.

“Well, if you’ll excuse me saying so, it doesn’t show.” He glanced briefly at her body but politely looked back away.

She grimaced as the guy with a guitar — calling him a musician would have been too generous — fumbled a chord change, then saw the fisherman wincing, too, and laughed.

“So since it’s obviously not the music, what brings a pretty young girl in here drinking with old farts like us?” He gestured around the bar with a hand. “Your boyfriend work here?”

“Did you ever have an evening where you just didn’t want to be alone?” Cally smiled gently at him.

“What, you mean like tonight?” He snorted, taking a long drink of his beer and staring off into nowhere. “All the time, lately.” He drained his drink and gestured to the bartender for a refill. “You don’t sound like you’re from around here, either. Aw, excuse me,” he waved her off. “I’m just being nosy.”

“Nah, it’s all right.” She offered her hand. “I’m Marilyn, and you’re right, I’m not from here. I’m on vacation, from Toledo.” She took a sip of her margarita and looked away. “This trip was supposed to be with my fiancé, well, ex-fiancé, uh… it just didn’t work out, I came anyway, and now I’m wondering if I should have.”

“You wanna paint the town red to show you ain’t hurt, but then you ain’t in the mood for partyin’.” He fumbled for the bills to pay for his arriving drink. “Guess there’s a lot of that goin’ around tonight.”

“You too?” She took a bite of the pie, watching him.

“Yeah, I just went through a divorce.”

“Bad?”

“It could’ve been if I’d made it. I could have taken it into court and made sure she got nothin’.” He took another drink. “Her good luck. When I walked in and, well, saw what I saw, I was so disgusted all I wanted was out as fast as I could get.”

“That’s lousy. I don’t know what I would have done if there had been another girl. I just finally got tired of us fighting all the time. He was one of those people who could find something wrong with everything.”

“Sounds like you had a lucky escape.”

“Yeah, well, you too. And I came out here planning to party all week, and, I guess it’s stupid, I just…” She trailed off and went back to her pie. She had obviously picked someone whose prime interest was getting good and drunk. Not a good pick. I should have known better.

When the bartender cut him off, later, she was a good enough sport to put him in a cab home before driving back to her own apartment to sleep in the hair fumes.

The receptionist was a hell of a looker. Not much in the tits, but her face just took your breath away. Besides, tits were easy enough to fix. Damn.

John Earl Bill Stuart, Johnny to friends and enemies alike, paced the outer office pretending a polite interest in the snooty art stuff scattered around the place. If any of it was real, it must have cost a mint. Most of it was probably those reproduction things meant for show. And he’d bet it worked with some people. He’d been more impressed with the view. This Terra Trade Holdings had the whole next-to-top floor, at least, of the old Sears Tower. They’d renamed it, but it was still — or again, depending on how you looked at it — the tallest building on Earth. He didn’t know who had the top floor, but it sure wasn’t open to the tourists any more and he figured the second to top floor view was closer than almost anybody got these days. Damned aliens, but there you were, and they were really no different from the old corporations, who had really taken it in the teeth when the aliens showed up, now were they? Just different people on top.

Johnny would have liked to have brought his camera and snapped a few pictures for Mary Lynn while he was up here, but that wouldn’t have been classy, and he knew you had to be classy at meetings like this. Pictures would have been nice, just to show her he’d really been here, but it couldn’t be helped.

“The Tir will see you now,” the girl said, just like one of the girls on the evening news. No Yankee accent like you heard a lot here in Chicago. No accent at all. Classy.

The Tir’s corner office was a criminal waste. Heavy drapes covered both walls of floor-to-ceiling windows, darkening the room to dim shadows as well as shutting out the view. It was a little like the guy who takes the last piece of chicken in the basket, not because he wants it but so you can’t have it. It was pretty much of a piece with his employers’ typical way of doing business.

He had never actually seen a Darhel before. Usually he had reported through Worth, but had had an emergency contact number to use when his immediate superior had dropped off the map sometime between Thursday and Monday of last week.