I’ve seen cops deal with unexpected deaths (usually a heart attack) or the occasional riot (overexuberant fans trying to get too close to their favorite writer or actor), but I’d never seen cops come to investigate a bomb scare.
And that’s what this was, though I didn’t tell the police that. If I had, they would have evacuated the hotel, which would have made CrapCon famous, along with that D.C. convention where two non-fans used a sprinkler head on the ceiling as part of their bondage party and managed to break the entire fire suppression system, getting the fen (and not those two people!) banned from that hotel chain for more than a decade.
I explained to the dispatch that there was a suspicious object, but this being a science fiction convention suspicious objects were relatively common, and could they bring their experts in quietly, which they promised to do.
Quietly, however, was not how the day started for me. The day had started for me on the floor of the Hospitality Suite with my cell phone vibrating against my left ear.
I had apparently passed out in the middle of a late-night discussion about Australia’s growing Geek culture, which if I remember correctly included some YouTube video of the rock group Tripod, comparing them favorably to the Barenaked Ladies. Someone had made some Blue Goo, and I had too much of it, and the room was spinning.
CrapCon’s version of the Blue Goo had neon blue dye, a lot of alcohol of varying types, and some kind of sweetening agent. I usually didn’t drink like that, especially when I couldn’t identify half the ingredients of the concoction, but after the day I’d had — hell, the week I’d had — I felt I deserved something. CrapCon wasn’t worth saving, but I’d given it the old college try and decided I’d have some fun while I went down with the ship.
That, along with Tripod’s YouTube version of “Hot Girl in The Comic Shop,” was the last thing I remembered until the phone vibrated against my ear, and I realized that I had drooled in my sleep on a heavily trampled rug that smelled vaguely of beer and vomit. Or maybe not so vaguely.
I blinked hard to open my eyes, saw party cups, two other passed-out members of the convention committee, and three random fen, all of whom looked like they too had been victims of the Blue Goo.
The Blue Goo still glowed in its gigantic punch bowl, the glow muted by half a layer of water from the melted ice. Either that or the vodka had separated from the rest of the ingredients, a thought that made my stomach churn.
The phone vibrated again, making my teeth ache. I sat up, wiped the drool off my mouth, and did not look at the caller ID before picking up the line.
“What?” I said, although it sounded a lot more like “Wha...?” even to my rather forgiving ear.
“Spade?” Paladin.
I sat up. Jeez, that woman had a talent for finding me at my worst. Of course she did. She was one of the few attractive women on the planet who actually liked spending time with me, not because she was attracted to me, but because we were in the same business, kinda.
As she liked to remind me, she actually got paid for the crimes she solved. And she didn’t solve them with finesse and brilliance and observation. She solved hers with her fists, and when that didn’t work, she fought dirty.
Mostly, Paladin rescued people. She took her business card from the old Have Gun, Will Travel television show from fifty years ago. She wasn’t Richard Boone, and she didn’t offer her services from some saloon in San Francisco, but then again, this wasn’t the Old West, either. Instead of asking folks to wire her like Boone’s card did on the show, her business card said:
She got a lot of work that way. Heartbreaking, hard work, most of it, tracking runaways and child molesters. But her fannish work wasn’t heartbreaking; it was the stuff of legends. I most admired her takedown of an art dealer selling fake limited editions, but the fen loved her rescue of a kidnapped Chihuahua, a famous one that had won a lot of costuming awards (don’t ask). Paladin hated talking about that job because she felt it had been beneath her.
Besides, she had solved it in less than an hour, and then the damn dog bit her.
“Spade?” she said again, this time sounding worried.
“Yeah,” I said and ran a hand over my face. “Yeah, it’s me.”
“It doesn’t sound like you.”
I shrugged, which she couldn’t see, and said, “Yeah, well, you woke me up.”
“I thought the Great Spade didn’t sleep at cons.”
I usually didn’t, but those were cons that I enjoyed. “Not sure if I actually fell asleep.”
“Then how could I have — oh, never mind,” she said. “I’m in Con Ops. Your chair is here, but you’re not. Nor are you in your room. So where the hell are you?”
“How do you know I’m not in my room?” I asked, still rubbing my hand over my face.
There was a long silence on the other end. She probably didn’t want to tell me how she could get into the room even though she didn’t have an official keycard, and I didn’t want to tell her how thrilling and appalling it was to think of her in my room, running her beautiful hand across the undisturbed bed while she thought of me.
That thought made me press my fingers on the furrow in my forehead. I’d learned long ago about the futility of thinking about beautiful women in connection to me. I just tended to forget while hungover on Blue Goo.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. Last I heard, she was working a case in Nevada.
“Looking for you,” she snapped. “I need your help.”
When Paladin needed my help, my heart soared. It meant I got to spend time with her. It also made me nervous and self conscious.
“Get down here,” she said. “This can’t wait.”
“It’ll have to,” I said. “I need fifteen minutes.”
I needed three days. I’d slept in my clothes and someone else had clearly slept on them. Or walked on them. Then there was the matter of the Blue-Goo sweat-stink and the drool marks. I wasn’t about to let Paladin — or anyone — see me like this.
“I’m coming up to your room, then,” she said.
“No, you’re not,” I said. “I’ll be down in fifteen minutes. Get donuts. And coffee. I’ll need coffee.”
“We don’t have time—”
I hung up on her. I’d never hung up on Paladin before, but I hung up on her now because I had less than fifteen minutes to shower and shave and find clean clothes. If I took my full fifteen minutes, she would have barged into my room, which would have created a memory I wouldn’t have been able to handle.
I hurried — and I’m not the kind of man who hurries, and wouldn’t be even if I had the build for hurrying. Fortunately, my room was only one floor up and the staircase wasn’t far.
I found an unworn and supposedly slimming black T-shirt that had EVIL GENIUS emblazoned in red across the center, and a pair of black pants that I had only worn once (I think). I showered slower than planned (damn Blue Goo hangover) and shaved so fast that I shocked myself.
I still managed to get down to Con Ops with two minutes to spare.
Paladin was sitting in my chair, munching on a Krispy Kreme. My chair is huge, formfitting, and extremely expensive. I have it — or one of its five cousins — shipped to whatever convention I’m working on that weekend, along with my Tower of Terror, the computer system that is constantly being upgraded and moved from one convention to another.