Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) Read Online Free Page B

corpse down there ,” she screamed as she broached.   “ A dead bod— ” and by then she had fallen back below the surface of the water again.
    See what I mean?
    No friend would leap to a conclusion like that.   Not even a fair-minded stranger.   The only corpselike thing about Lex at all is his custom of taking naps at the bottom of the pool.   And why shouldn’t he?   Perfectly normal thing for a merman to do, especially at that time of the day.
    All right, he doesn’t look much like someone raised on a diet of movies and cartoons would expect a merman to look.   Specifically, he has no tail.   Unlike Daryl Hannah in Splash! , even when he’s immersed in water, Lex has two legs, just like thee and me—they’re just a lot scalier, that’s all.   Well…and they bend in a few directions ours don’t.   And the toes are webbed.   Other details of his lower anatomy I leave to you to imagine for yourself, except to say that while he may not have a tail himself, my understanding is that he gets plenty of it.  
    Also unlike Daryl Hannah, he is not amphibian.   If you kept him out of the water long enough to dry off, he would not metamorphose into a smooth pink human being; he would die .   And would probably soon smell like dead fish.
    Lex has lived in the waters around Key West for most of his life.   Most of the old time Conchs know him, especially the fishermen, guides, charter boat skippers, divers, the Houseboat Row gang, and other water people.   Nobody actually discusses him at any length, you understand; the word just went around a long time ago that if you got into trouble out there on the briney, and you weren’t an asshole, help might just come to you if you were to lean over the side and slap the water in a certain manner.   And that if that did happen, the next time you went out it would be a good idea to toss a large sack of salt water taffy overboard at the same spot.   Then there was the fishing boat skipper who accidentally dropped a waterproof Walkman with a cassette of Rubber Soul in it over the side, and from that day forward could not go out without catching large, sought-after fish in great quantity.   For years afterward the word was that leaving a cassette tape on a buoy on your way to sea was good luck.   Word of another kind also went around about Lex from time to time, but only in the scuba community, and only among the ladies.
    I’d been hearing about him since I moved to the Rock, and wanted to meet him, but I’m not any kind of a boat guy, and my wife is crazy about me, and anyway hates to scuba, so there was no occasion for our paths to cross.   Then a few weeks ago my friends William Williams and Doc Webster (you’d expect a doctor and a guy called Double Bill to get along, wouldn’t you?) came to me and asked if it would be all right if Lex moved into The Place’s pool for a while, while the Doc experimented with a couple of possible treatments.   It seems that in recent years, the water around Key West has finally become so befouled by the crap we dump into it that Lex had developed a really serious rash on his upper half, and some sort of scale infection on his lower half.   If The Place is about anything, it’s Welcoming the Weird, so I agreed at once to help.   I had the pool filled with salt water, and raised a volunteer crew to help transport him, and one dark Tuesday night we did it.  
    Double Bill lined the back of his pickup truck with plastic, filled it with sea water, and we transported Lex in that.   At one point Bill stopped a little short at a traffic light on Truman Street, and I guess Lex bonked his head back there, because he let out a bubbly shout loud enough to be heard in the cab.   A couple of tourist college boys standing nearby came over and looked in the back of the truck, and the last I saw of them they were still standing there, solemnly assuring each other in hushed voices that the stuff definitely was worth three hundred an