Al looked exasperated. “I know you don’t like thinking about yourself,” he said with heavy irony, remembering a time or two when Sam, tried beyond his endurance, had attempted to change a Leap for his own benefit, “but could you spare a thought for Wickie? He’d probably like to live, too.”
“No matter what I do, somebody’s going to get hurt,” Sam said without thinking. Then his eyes met Al’s, and he drew breath for an apology.
Fists pounded against the bathroom door. “Wickie, sweetie, did you fall in? Do you need help?” The two men could barely distinguish the words in the gales of laughter that accompanied them. Grateful for the distraction, Sam gave Al a desperate look.
“Those women are maniacs,” he muttered.
“Yeah, isn’t it great?”
“You’d think so. I’ll bet you would jump out of a cake for them.”
Al grinned reminiscently. “Don’t knock it. I did once. Place called the Tonga Tiki. It was a chocolate-whipped-cream cake, and all the ladies had dessert forks. They were all gathered around, drooling, and I. . .”
“Oh, please. No.”
Sam always cut him off before he could get into any of his best stories. He snorted, took another drag on the cigar, and studied the blinking lights of the handlink. They stuttered, and he whacked the handlink with the side of his hand. The pattern steadied, made sense again.
More pounding on the door, with accompanying shouts and hoots and yowls. Sam shuddered. So did Al, but for reasons of his own.
“Ladies, give a man some privacy,” Sam shouted at last.
“Wickie, get your tail back out here. You’ve got thirsty customers.” It was Rimae this time, and her order was supported with yips of glee. Then the other voices receded, and Sam threw Al one more despairing glance and stepped over to the bathroom door.
“Salutari te morituris,” he said.
Al didn’t have Latin, but he spoke Italian, and he recognized the quotation and raised a fist encouragingly.
“Kiss me quick, baby!” one woman said as Sam ducked gratefully behind the barrier of the bar.
“I beg your pardon?”
Al shook his head pityingly. “It’s a drink, Sam. Kiss Me Quick. Haven’t you ever heard of it?”
From the look on Sam’s face, it was obvious he hadn’t: Al tapped ash from his cigar and started orchestrating. “You need your Pernod, and some Curasao, and Angostura bitters, and club soda.”
Sam got out the ingredients, muttering something between his teeth. Al didn’t need to hear him to know what it was.
“Of course I used to tend bar. What did you expect? Okay, you mix a couple ounces, more or less, of the Pernod, a slosh of Curasao—”
This was more than the scientist in Sam’s soul could take. “How much, exactly, is a ‘slosh’? ”
“A little bit more than a slush and less than a lush,” the customer said promptly.
“Wave the bottle over it,” Al advised.
Several drops of Curasao were added to the Pernod. Sam reached for the Angostura, hesitated.
“Just a little.”
Sam added “just a little” and reached for the club soda.
“No! No, you’ve got to mix what you already have. That’s why it’s in the shaker, dummy. Add cracked ice, then put it in a brandy snifter and then add the club soda—there, that’s right—” Al took a certain paternal pride in broadening Sam Beckett’s education in these areas. Sam didn’t much appreciate it, but managed a certain flourish as he presented the drink to his customer. The wave of women sloshed away.
“Could’ve been worse,” Al observed. “She could have asked for a Bang Your Head Against the Bedpost, Baby.”
Sam shot him a look of disbelief. “Are you kidding?”
“Nope.” He grinned. “I never kid about things like that, Sam.”
“I’d just as soon bang my head against the nearest wall, thank you,” Sam muttered.
The women had retreated to a table in the middle of the room—actually several tables pushed together—and were watching the bride-to-be opening gifts. One of the advantages of being a hologram, as far as Al was concerned, was that he could always take the shortest way between two points; in this case, the point behind Sam being the first, and the woman holding the lacy black teddy up to herself being the second.
“Oooooo,” Al murmured, stepping through the table. He was wickedly aware that Sam was glaring at him from across the room. “Nice pair of gabonzas.”
“That’ll wake him up at night,” one of the women chortled.
“I’ll say,” Al agreed. “Tina has that one in red—”
He stopped abruptly and bit down hard on his cigar.
Tina had that one? What about Janna?
Guilt lanced through him. He was a happily married man. Very happily married. Wasn’t that the whole reason he was torn up about this Leap? So why was he acting the way he used to act?
Maybe time spent in the past with Sam didn’t count?
He wasn’t actually cheating, after all. He was just looking. He couldn’t even touch—it really wasn’t anything to feel guilty about, it—it wasn’t fair. That blonde was built.
Stepping away from the cluster of women, he looked up to see Sam watching him worriedly. For some reason this only made him angry.
Sam made a show of looking for something behind the bar, then stepped out from behind it and headed for the back door.
“Wickie, baby, where you going?” one of the women called, and Sam froze like a spotlighted fawn.
“I, er, I wanted to check the kegs,” he stuttered.
“Oh, let him go, Jackie, he can’t get far.” Rimae waved him on.
Sam waggled his eyebrows at Al, signaling him to follow. One of the women wolf-whistled. Sam fled down the narrow hallway to the door leading outside.
Al cast one more glance back at the black teddy—no, come to think of it, Tina’s had a black satin ribbon right—
He yanked his attention back to the job, not without regret, and went after Sam.
He found the other man outside, draped over a stack of undersized beer kegs, his head in his hands, moaning to himself. It said a lot for the crime rate in Snow Owl, Al thought, that the
