Hail Hibbler Page 5

  “Don’t heckle me, Connie. I feel wretched enough.”

  “Hand-To-Hand Combat with Crazed Gorillas. My land, a man your age.”

  “Thirty-six is old now? Thirty-six is senile or something? Besides, Connie, I decked the first three of those darn shaggy bastards before they started jumping up and down on. …”

  Avoiding the squabbling couple, Jake veered toward the Spanish Inquisition.

  Out in front of the imitation Castillian castle, a naked girl of fourteen was being scourged by a black-robed priest. A barker in a neostraw hat was promising, “… unspeakable horrors … stomach-churning vileness … nauseating tortures … all that and more for only a. …”

  Something poked Jake in the back.

  He spun, found himself facing the dark-haired sharpshooter. She’d used her forefinger to jab at him. “Yeah?” he inquired.

  “My name’s Billijean Trubble. Here.” From a pocket over her perked left breast she extracted a crisp business card and handed it to him.

  “ ‘Billijean Trubble, Trick Shot, Marksperson, Gunfighter. Available For Vid, Film, etc.,’ ” read Jake. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Trubble.”

  “Actually Billijean Trubble is merely my stage name,” the girl informed him. “I had originally intended for it to be Billijean Trouble. Didn’t realize I was too stupid to spell trouble right till after I had me five hundred of these darn business cards printed up by a botshop over to the Solvang Sector.”

  “It’s a striking name, no matter how you spell it.”

  Billijean went up on tiptoe, got her lips close to his ear. “You looking for Angel?”

  He nodded. “Know where she is?”

  “You might mean to do her harm.”

  “Might, but I don’t. My name’s Jake Pace. Probably you’ve heard of me and—”

  “Nope, haven’t. Is that your for real name?”

  “All my life so far, yep. Now what about—”

  “Let’s mosey on back to my quarters,” she invited, taking him by the arm. “I work here, you know.”

  “As what?”

  “As what you just now got through seeing me do. I’m a shill.”

  “And a pretty fair shot. Or was that faked?”

  “I don’t have to fake nothing.”

  She led him through the French Revolution, around the Plague of London and on a plaz bridge over the Indianapolis 500.

  “After awhile here,” Billijean said loudly, “the noise starts doing things to your headbone.”

  “Eh?” He cupped his ear.

  Billijean gave a small snorting laugh. “I guess you consider yourself something of a wiseacre.”

  “I do. I’d give you one of my wiseacre business cards, but I’m fresh out.”

  “I had a sense of humor once, when I was much younger.” They walked through a relatively quiet stretch of pine forest to a sprawl of thatch-roof cottages. “That’s me over yonder, Quaint Cottage Number 26.”

  “Not bad for a shill.”

  “I got to share it with two girls from the Spanish Inquisition, but they’re on duty right now. So we can have us a real private chat, Mr. Pace.” She let go of his arm, inserted all ten of her fingers into the print lock on the heavy neowood door.

  The door swung open inward, lights blossomed beyond.

  There was a cozy parlor, done in the style of the early 20th century. Everything was period except the racks of guns on the far wall.

  “Your collection of firearms?” asked Jake.

  “Sure enough are. I love collecting them.” Billijean crossed to the wall, lifted a silver pistol off its hook. “This here’s one of my favorites. It’s sort of an antique, one of the first stunguns ever made.”

  “I’d feel more at ease, Billijean, if you pointed it at some target other than me.”

  “Got to point it at you, Mr. Pace, if I’m going to shoot you.”

  The stungun hummed.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE PATTER OF LITTLE feet grew ever louder as hundreds of bootied dolls converged on Hildy. They were waving their sharp little knives, crying, “Kill! Kill!”

  “This isn’t my idea of a jolly reception.”

  Hildy reached for the ignition switch of her skybelt.

  The nearest toussle-haired doll leaped up to slash at her hand.

  A second doll made a stab at Hildy’s thigh.

  Kachow! Kathunky! Hunk! Hunk!

  The engine came alive.

  Licking the blood off the back of her hand, Hildy flipped the fly-switch. She left the floor and headed upward, with five of the baby dolls clinging to her ankles and calves.

  A sharp blade cut through the cloth of her slax, nicking the flesh.

  By kicking vigorously, she dislodged all but one of the golden-headed parasites.

  “Kill! Kill!” persisted the final one, shinnying up her leg and trying to stab the knife into Hildy’s lower abdomen.

  “I’m very vain about that section of me, damn it!” Hildy got hold of the doll’s head, twisted.

  “Awk!” screamed the doll.

  The head came clean off, the knife went spinning down twenty feet to fall into the crowd of lethal dolls.

  Tossing the carcass away, Hildy came to a hovering stop just under the ceiling beams. Gazing across the big factory room she spotted movement on a catwalk some fifty yards off.

  She twisted a dial, flew over to the catwalk. Turning off the skybelt, she alighted on the narrow plaza ramp. She started running along it.

  Up ahead of her a hefty young fellow was running, too, a small silver box tucked up under one arm.

  Hildy lunged, grabbed his collar and brought him to a halt. “Joshua Steelybrass, how handy,” she said. “I busted in here tonight especially to find out something about you.”

  The blond, curly-headed young man teetered, lost his grip on the box. It tumbled down to smash into a cluster of angry dolls. “Beg pardon, miss, but I fear you’ve mistaken me for—”

  “You controlled the dolls with that box, huh, Josh?”

  “Obviously you’ve mistaken me for some lookalike of mine. What say we both go on about our—”

  “Anybody else hereabouts, Josh?”

  “Miss, I happen to be Gramps the night watchman.”

  “Gramps?”

  “All night watchmen have to be called Gramps, it’s a union rule. Suppose you leave the same way you—”

  “Ever seen a ring like this, Josh?” She held up her right hand to display a gold ring set with a large glistening yellow stone.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. I believe when I joined the Captain Triumph Fan Club at the age of nine or ten they sent me one for two Puffed Granola boxtops and fifteen bucks,” he answered, eyes on the stone. “Does yours whistle, decode and open beer cans? Mine did, and if you looked in it the exactly right way you could see who was sneaking up behind you. Although I always thought, since I was a sharp little cookie even then, that if I suspected I was being tailed I wasn’t going to slow down and go through all the silly contortions necessary to—”

  “Notice the way the light hits the stone. A soothing amber glow, isn’t it? Especially when I move the ring back and forth, to and fro, back and forth. …”

  “I really am not this Joshua Steelybrass, miss. You’re really wasting your time trying to hypn ….” Steelybrass stiffened, eyes going wide and staring.

  “You alone here?”

  “Inside, yes,” he answered. “They let me have a room in a loft. I’m sort of a fugitive from the law.”

  “Did you do a job on a servo named Inga?”

  “Yes, one of my best ID plate forgings. Fooled everybody I hear, even those smug GLA cops,” answered the entranced Steelybrass.

  “Who hired you?”

  “I’d be snuffed out if I spilled.”

  “You’ll never even remember you’ve told.”

  “Say, that’s right, isn’t it? I can rat on them and still go around with a clear conscience. Neat.”

  “Who hired you to work on
that killer ’bot?”

  “Listen, I only faked the plate, you understand. Some other techs rigged it to kill and planted it where it could do in the Fed cop.”

  “Who?”

  “I was hired by Skytrader Smith.”

  “Fella who sells space lots?”

  “The same. He’s down in Texas, very rich.”

  “Is the Joyful organization involved in this?”

  “Nope.” Steelybrass shook his curly head. “I moonlighted the job. All I have to do here is make cheap Javanese pooping dolls look like expensive items. Beneath me really, which is why I enjoyed the challenge of Smith’s job. Ah, if one could always work at that which is most congenial, without having to stoop to hack—”

  “You’ll wake up in ten minutes, Josh,” Hildy informed him. “You won’t remember anything of our conversation or my visit. When they ask you why you activated the guard dolls, you’ll explain you had a nightmare and did it while in a trance.”

  “Very thin excuse,” protested the dazed Steelybrass. “They’ll never believe that.”

  “Probably not,” admitted Hildy. “But that’s going to be your problem.”

  CHAPTER 12

  THE AIRSHIP WAS A relic of the last century, a combustion engine biplane known as a Sopwith Camel. It had a wing span of twenty-eight feet, a length of eighteen feet nine inches and a 130 HP Clerget engine. Jake awakened to find himself gagged, trussed up and jammed in the cockpit of the craft, which was circling the night sky above glittering Funn! island at an altitude he guessed to be at least five hundred feet.

  “Out-foxed by a girl hardly out of her teens,” he grumbled.

  The Sopwith Camel began to execute a loop. By hooking his bound ankles around the stick, Jake managed to stay inside the open cockpit while the droning ship was upside down.

  It was during those unsteady dangling seconds that he noticed the other plane and recalled the nature of this amusement.

  Each of the antique planes was controlled from the ground, his Camel and the approaching black Fokker Dr-1 triplane. The objective was to score three hits on your opponent with the special electronic machine gun mounted behind the propeller. The only way to avoid being hit was to outfly and outmaneuver. Somewhere down there, five hundred feet or so below, two Funn! patrons were competing. They had no idea Jake’d been dumped in one of the ships, wouldn’t until he fell out and came plummeting down toward them.

  “That was Billijean’s notion, obviously.”

  The sharpshooter had wrapped him up in lengths of plaz clothesline. Eventually, rather sooner than later, he’d fall right out of the cockpit while his Camel was looping and banking through the night.

  The chances of staying put until the dogfight was over were slim.

  “Or so she thinks.”

  What Billijean didn’t know was that he’d spent a year studying with one of the most gifted escape artists of the world. The Great Anmar, who hinted he’d hung around remote Tibet wizards’ hideaways a lot, could ease out of almost any type of restraint. He’d passed much of his knowhow on to Jake.

  “Whoops!”

  The fellow who was handling his plane put it into a shaky Immelmann turn. Jake had to use his knees as well as his ankles to stay in the cockpit.

  Concentrating, forcing his body to go lax, he started on the job of working free. Billijean was not an expert at tying knots, but she’d devoted considerable time to festooning him.

  Jake twisted, twitched and got a hand free. He undid his gag, flung it away.

  “Hey! Land this damn thing!” he shouted.

  The white neosilk gag flicked down through the night. His cries were swallowed by the roar of the amusement island. No one heard.

  Keeping in mind all the Great Anmar had taught him, Jake wriggled and writhed.

  His other arm came out of the cocoon of ropes.

  “Okay, that’s enough fooling around.” Swiftly he shed the remaining tangles of rope.

  His Camel all at once quivered, went sluicing sideways.

  From below came an enthusiastic cheer, indicating a hit by the Fokker apparently.

  Jake, using a small tool he kept concealed in his boot, detached the apparatus which connected his plane to the unseen fun-seeker below.

  A few more modifications gave him full control of the Sopwith Camel.

  He couldn’t resist performing a few stunts. He executed a perfect outside loop, banked and came diving head-on at the black Fokker triplane. He scored a hit with his electronic machine gun, then climbed away.

  Jake could sense a pool of silence below as he flew clear of the prescribed dogfight area.

  He circled the island, in ever widening circles, looking for some sign of Billijean Trubble. The tiny pair of night binoculars he kept in his other boot helped.

  Jake dodged the moon rockets and the space shuttles. Soon he was at the edge of the island.

  “Ha! There she goes.”

  It was most certainly Billijean, dark hair fluttering out behind as she ran for a landvan.

  “Painted yellow and red. Be easy to follow.”

  The girl sent the vehicle bucketing across a parking yard, leaped it across a ramp and went roaring along the highway that led to Gringo Mexico.

  Jake’s Camel swooped down. When he was ten feet over the speeding van, he wired the controls in place. Then he eased out of the cockpit, went walking along the wing.

  From the wing, when he was hanging from it by his hands, to the top of the escaping van was a very short drop.

  He dropped.

  CHAPTER 13

  JAKE LIMPED INTO THE enormous white kitchen and gave his wife a Stoic grin.

  She’d been passing instructions to the stove. Straightening, brushing back her long red hair, Hildy asked, “Have you been fighting with your feet again?”

  “You forgot,” he said, “to turn off the dogs.”

  “They’re not supposed to attack you or me.” She moved toward him. “Did they do something?”

  “One of ’em sank his razor-sharp fangs into me.”

  “Sounds like that would hurt.”

  “Yep. Took six stitches.”

  “Sew it up yourself?”

  “Naturally.”

  “You really are multi-faceted, Jake. I’m a fortunate lass to be hooked up with—”

  “You sure you set the dogs not to jump me? The 71 folks we’re borrowing this place from did leave the maintenance book behind for you to—”

  “I let the robot attack dogs on so they could safeguard me against outside intruders, not you,” Hildy explained. “Even in the Bel Air Sector we’re not really all that safe if—”

  “That’s okay, not your fault. Probably won’t even leave a permanent scar.” He hobbled to a plyosling chair, settled into it, grimacing.

  “There are four German shepherds and three Dobermans. Which one nipped you?”

  “Unimportant. How’d you—”

  “That gray wolf-like one strikes me as the nastiest. Was it he?”

  “Well, actually, Hildy, it was the poodle.”

  Her eyebrows climbed. “Poodle?” Shaking her head, she said, “Darn, that’s the one I didn’t think to reset, since poodles are so cute and charming that—”

  “This poodle is the apparent exception,” said Jake. “How’d you fare up in Carmel Valley?”

  “Pretty well.” She gave him an account of her visit and her conversation with Joshua Steelybrass.

  Knuckling his chin, Jake said, “Okay, you go to Texas in the morning to follow up the Skytrader Smith angle. I’m going to Arizona.”

  Hildy turned to the stove. “Drop your temp a few degrees.”

  “Yes, memsahib,” replied the stove.

  “Why Arizona, Jake?”

  “Angel Tolliver may be hiding out there,” he replied. “In New Rome, somewhere near the Shrine of Saint Bubbles.”

  “Someone at Funn! told you?”

  “Well, eventually.”

  “How’d you extract the information? Tru
th gum again, mesmerism or—”

  “Charm.”

  Hildy laughed. “You are a charming devil, no denying,” she said. “Who was the target?”

  He tossed a business card on the realwood table. “Young lady called Billijean Trubble. A stage name.”

  “Catchy.”

  “Angel Tolliver worked on the island in various menial jobs for about two months. She and Billijean shared a cottage for most of that time.” Jake stood, wandered to the stove to peek into the oven. “The night Kazee was murdered she came back, gathered up her gear and departed. She confided a little in Billijean, who was her only friend thereabouts. Said Kazee’d been killed, she was afraid they might try for her. She has friends in New Rome, officials in the Holy Streamlined Christian Church, Billijean thinks. Going to hide out there for a spell.”

  “This Trubble girl was cooperative?”

  “She tried to kill me at first, but then came around,” Jake said. “What is that sizzling in there?

  “Gluten and soysub shish kebab.”

  “Oh.” He drifted away from the stove. “Billijean had made up her mind to get rid of anyone who came looking for Angel. Assuming such folk would be killers. Thus far I’m the only one who dropped by Funn!”

  “She mistook you for a killer, huh?” Hildy nodded. “Has to be that grin of yours, Jake. Sometimes it’s pretty unsett—”

  “I persuaded her I could be trusted,” he said. “By the way, remind me to add the cost of a Sopwith Camel to our expense account.”

  “You bought one?”

  “Borrowed, but the thing crashed into the sea after I jumped from it onto Billijean’s fleeing van,” said Jake. “I’ll give you the details after dinner.”

  “Care for a drink?”

  “Soy wine?”

  “There’s real champagne cooling, if you’re in that sort of mood.”

  “I might be at that.” He crossed to the imposing white refrigerator. “Won’t open.”

  “You have to command it.”

  “Open the hell up, nit-wit.”

  “To hear is to obey, tuan.” As the refrigerator spoke, its wide door popped open.

  Jake reached for the green glaz bottle, said, “Yow!” and withdrew his hand. “Why is there a blond, wavy-haired tot laid out in there?”