Business was still taking its time picking up at Tin Can, and besides, Alonzo had arrived for his shift and could carry some of the slack. These were rationalizations Colinaude regularly employed when he wanted to peruse the "Traverse Tracks" on the job. He told himself it wasn’t too hard, especially if he wasn’t going to be conducting conversations similar to the one with Cassie Dawes with every customer, or even every other. There were those who never wanted to chat. There were those who came to socialize with a bunch of the guys. There were those who spoke in one word sentences, and those could easily be handled if Colinaude wished to juggle his priorities.
Among the other things Alonzo liked to say, he was keen in pointing out how negligent Colinaude was being as a bartender when he did that. He said people came to drink, and find a place where they could be wanted, as someone with more than just cash to offer, or a drink to be offered. They came for solace, for companionship, for respite, for acceptance. And Alonzo was always threatening to quit and pack his bags for another state. He said he never felt quite at home in Alabama. He had a self-deprecating way of saying it, but Colinaude knew he wasn’t really joking. That was the thing with comics. They were able to get away with poking at the fabric of things and receive favorable responses from a wide swath of the population, because their delivery bespoke their words. They were politicians, but without the personal ambition.
Alonzo might also be considered a social critic, and that was something Colinaude liked about him. There was a certain kinship. And Alonzo wasn’t leaving any more than he was condemning reading the newspaper on the job. These were just things people liked to say, to burn off frustrations.
So Colinaude read his newspaper as they kept bar at Tin Can. He was currently in the midst of clue-finding, both in the sense of trying to rediscover some of the notes Hopper had made for him in a copy that presumably still sat on Peter Cooley’s desktop, and looking for his own discoveries. The double-crease he’d managed to create earlier now came in handy as he attempted to carry on as discretely as possible. It amazed him to think how much of what he did he tried to suppress from general knowledge, and he thought he understood why most government programs did the same. Doing so made accomplishing things so much the easier.
Unfortunately, the Cad and his kind had the same idea, which revealed the downside of the idea: making things easier to accomplish didn’t always mean those things should be accomplished. The trouble was, most people loathed adversity, and spent most of their lives trying to overcome it, as if admitting defeat was the very worst thing imaginable. A lot of history had been made on the broken backs of past failures, maybe more so than on successes. The explanation went like this: mankind sought to improve itself. Colinaude knew better.
The trick to accomplishing his second goal was in understanding associations. This meant Colinaude was equally concerned with goings-on reported in the business section as in seemingly harmless local news and crime reports on trials, arrests, unsolved mysteries; and there was also the always useful word puzzles, which in the cases of cities like Traverse who employed their own puzzle makers, often found themselves dealing with crafters hiding perfectly significant answers to questions not directly posed in the puzzle itself. Colinaude wished he could take credit for figuring this out by himself, but that was something Hopper had showed him once. It had helped him a number of times, and he’d coined that bizarre collective occupation as Minos. Hopper got to calling it Milo.
Some of the customers were usually good for helping him solve those. Leonard was especially good at it, but he wasn’t here yet. Colinaude instead concentrated on the non-Minos Milo sections. There were still articles following the Delenda affair he perceived Godsend as having botched. Those had been giving him leads on Cad for months now, some of which he’d turned over to be contacts around the city, and others he’d been working on with Cooley. That had been a topic he was going to breach with Peter earlier, but they’d never gotten around to it. Something was always coming up to prevent everything from falling in place, in a perceivably timely manner.
Timely manner had taken on a whole new definition today, as had his relationship with Cooley, whom he was becoming more concerned about all the time. They never spent much time trying to keep in touch beyond the usual office visits, and that had never seemed a bad thing. Until now. Even the minor appointments Cad was supposed to be attending, as outlined in the notes on Cooley’s desk, were becoming a source of concern for Colinaude. He began to sense there were no longer any minor appointments for Cad. He was stuck at work now. It would be unfair to leave Alonzo alone to handle the increasing patronage. But there was business not being taken care of, contacts he could have deployed to cover those appointments so he could have known what was going on. There was also the matter of the missed opportunity that had been the noon rendezvous. There was no telling how crucial that would have been, what Colinaude didn’t know now because of Viper, and Ratbeard.
Leonard finally appeared. Colinaude signaled him over right away, drawing the Minos Milo expert from the jukebox, which was better for everyone considering Leonard’s taste in music. Not that Colinaude enjoyed what Tin Can usually played. He motioned Leonard with the page he was going to be concerned with for the next hour, sometimes considerably less, sometimes more. The plump middle-aged software engineer, whose appearance belayed his latent brilliance, was always eager to help. He got a free beer out of it, not to mention the recognition from his fellow patrons, whom Colinaude always made sure were appreciative, and supportive.
They agreed to leave him alone, which in Leonard’s early visits had not exactly been the case. Colinaude scored that as a victory for the good guys. Johnny Cash was singing about John Henry right about the time Leonard reported back in, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Nothing seemed to jump out as holding any significance. It was more of the random garbage Minos Milo tossed out more often than not, to throw off anyone who might be catching on without determination enough to decide they were right about it. There were still other options.
Colinaude was no great detective himself, but he’d been around those with the right minds long enough to pick up a few skills. That served him well enough for Colinaude to be reasonably certain he found the places Hopper’s notes had been. It turned out the appointments were more routine than he would have liked to think. Like Ratbeard, Cad was not that much different from himself or the man who masqueraded as Solvent. It was in the application that they differed. All Cad had been up to today was reassuring himself of things he already knew, which would have been useful for Colinaude to know as well, but it wouldn’t have been likely that the appointments would have yielded much more than he already did. They would have been dead ends. The dinner date would have to suffice. He was bringing Calypso. He couldn’t wait to see who Cad would be.
And then there it was, buried in an innocuous editorial written by someone Cooley would have described as a half-wit. It was something Colinaude had been dying to know for months, something that would facilitate everything else that he would need to do. He had stumbled on the Cad’s base of operations.
It wasn’t an editorial, really, more like a column someone had decided the paper should include to give it a more personable verve. Stretched along the front page of the local news was a piece detailing the reaction to the Traverse Warhorses’ latest championship run. Not being a thoroughly competent sports fan, Colinaude had no idea which Warhorse team had accomplished it, and he didn’t really care. There was one sound-byte from Vinny Vegas. There was also one from Rufus Ferrante, who all but identified himself as a bookie by revealing he’d bet on them. Colinaude knew he was one. He also knew that he was the Cad’s personal bookie, and that the Cad kept his closest associates closest to him.
And where had Rufus, and Vegas, made his comment from? The Complex, a sports bar among other things but primarily a recreational facility rumored to have underground offices. Colinaude put two and two together, and came up with one. The rumors were true, and the underground offices of the Complex were home to the Cad’s operation. Allowing Ferrante to be quoted like that was exactly the kind of cocky behavior Colinaude expected from Cad, because up until now no one had been interested in him. He had gotten away with much, because it seemed little, and he was on the verge of getting away with a lot more, because he still seemed small. The Eidolon was not in the habit of measuring significance. He let others make that mistake. It always seemed to work out well for him.
Risk, however, was another matter. He played with risk as part of his general design. And he was going to be playing with it soon enough when Cotton Colinaude joined Cassandra Dawes for a visit to Marco’s, where they’d meet Rodrigo Ramirez, and perhaps the face of things to come.
He looked around Tin Can, watched as Alonzo filled some orders, filled some orders himself. There was a mood here that overlapped almost too perfectly with his other life. Maybe that was what had drawn him to this in the first place. It was a good thought, anyway, and what Colinaude needed now was more of those to keep him grounded for what was about to go down.
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