Fat Tony -- Section Ten

[I apologize for the slight cliff-hanger at the end of this section.  I'm not tormenting my readers on purpose, but I figured it was better to post something than make you wait another day to see what's going on at the mall.  Believe me, I want to see exactly how this turns out as much as you do.  Possibly more.]

    Fat Tony heard the Sergeant’s voice on the other end of the line.
    “This is Jo.”
    “Jo, Fat Tony.  I need to call in a favor.”
    “Sure, big guy, but hang on.  Are you driving?  I can hear the car noise.  You know that’s not safe.  Might as well be driving drunk.”
    “I’m using a headset, I know it’s not safe, and would you shut up?  This is a short notice favor.  Information.”
    “Anything up to classified and even a few things beyond, you know it’s yours.  Everyone at the Museum owes you too much.”
    “Don’t start falling on your sword for me just yet.  This is a simple one.  How much information did ART give to the FBI?”
    “On the pattern thing you saw?  Sheez, Tony, you know what it’s like trying to talk to those people.  We spent a half hour just convincing them to put someone on the phone who could understand what we were talking about, then another hour convincing that person that we weren’t crazy.  I swear, it’s like trying to suck peas through one of those miniature hot-chocolate straws.”
    “Nobody was paying attention?”  Fat Tony could see a glimmer of hope, a lighthouse on the horizon, guiding him towards the Tucson Mall and a Grandma in the clear.
    “Not a single person, until this Agent Fisk got on the phone.  That, Fat Tony, is a sharp lady.”
    Agent Fisk.  That was Sarah.  The rock under the lighthouse gave way and the entire edifice toppled silently into the sea.
    “What did Agent Fisk ask for?”
    “Everything.  She practically reached through the phone and dragged me out the other end.  She wanted locations, patterns, wanted us to email the sample you pulled out.  By the time we were done, she knew more about the magical signatures than I did.  You wanna know the funny thing?”
    “There’s something funny?”
    “Yeah, there’s something funny!  We’re all worried about city infrastructure being wiped out, but guess what department she’s in.”
    “Not in a guessing mood, Jo.”
    “Come on, Fat Tony.  This one is good.”
    “I’m driving here!”
    “Guess.”
    “Umm, okay, she’s in white-collar crime.”
    There was silence.
    “Sorry,” said Tony.  “Was I supposed to guess wrong?  Terrorism.  Organized crime.”
    “Why do I even bother?” asked Jo.  “Why?  The Major keeps telling me to give up, but I’ve got this masochistic streak wider than Broadway and I keep walking down the same road, over, and over, and over.”
    “I’ll leave you to walk down that lonesome road all by yourself,” said Tony.  “Thanks for the info.”
    “No problem,” said Jo.  “And we probably didn’t even break many laws doing it.  What’s this for, anyway?”
    Fat Tony said goodbye and hung up.  He found himself on the slim side of hopeful.  He supposed it was possible that the magical patterns he had found at ART had nothing to do with the Livingstone’s Cottontails, and Sarah—Agent Fisk—was off chasing an art thief or a radish salesman or had actually lied to get out of having to watch Tony eat mango with sticky rice.  Unfortunately for helping Grandma, that one kiss on the head convinced him otherwise, at least about the sticky rice.  He supposed the art thief was still a possibility.  Unlikely, but possible.
    A red light left him trying to fit the one piece back in that he couldn’t make fit with the others.  Why were those signatures showing up all over the city?  And why did they come and go, like twinkle-lights on the slow setting?  The green light dropped his foot onto the gas, Fat Tony lost a little weight using magic to push his car’s limits, and he pulled a left turn in front of oncoming traffic before said traffic had a chance to get going.  There were a few honks, but he knew he had limited time.  ART may be known for its analysts, but the FBI picked up the best of the sniffers, magical agents who were like human versions of bloodhounds, if you believed the rumors.  Fat Tony knew the limits on that sort of thing—magical trails can die out quickly, moving targets are hard to find, and really good identification needs line of sight—but if they got a good look at a running Grandma with a Cottontail under her sweater, chances were good they couldn’t joke their way out of it.
    Finding parking by the Dillard’s was a strange game of Hide and Seek and Hide.  Trying to keep his distance from any police or mall security or people who might possibly be FBI, while looking for a close space, while particularly trying not to run into Sarah.  Fat Tony couldn’t even imagine the conversation they’d be having if they ended up in the same place.  Well, he could imagine it a little, but it was the sort of conversation that curled his toes in his shoes and included words like ‘set-up’ and ‘betrayal’ and ‘never talking to you again,’ not to mention ‘arrest’ and ‘jail.’  Put mildly, it was a conversation he really, truly, desperately wanted to avoid.  The date was short, but so much fun.
    Of course, not fun enough to let Grandma end up in jail so he could have another, but still fun.  Fun like Gilmore Girls in the first three seasons.  That kind of off the wall, can’t wait for next week kind of fun.  There!  A parking space, empty cars on all sides, close to the mall-way that led to Dillard’s.  He slammed into it, cutting off two teenagers in something sporty, but necessity was the mother of aggressive driving.  Fat Tony took a few calming breaths, both to slow himself down—no use attracting attention by running—and to open himself up to magical flows.  He kept it passive for the moment, but the slight risk of being noticed was outweighed by his need to know exactly what was happening around him.
    His walk to the doors was enough to send a quick text—I’m here.  Stay put.—and he was in the mall.  A hunch made him stop long enough to buy four prepaid phones from a teenager with an oil-slick for hair.
    “You want them activated now?”
    “Yes.”
    “And how will you be paying?”
    “Crap.”
    “I’m not sure we take that.”
    “You think you’re funny, kid?”
    “Sometimes.”
    Fat Tony took another deep breath.  “Okay, it was funny.  Ish.  Credit card.”
    If he managed to attract any attention tonight, the FBI would know he bought these, but his stop at the ATM hadn’t included any plans for cell phones.  Also, buying four prepaid phones wasn’t illegal.  Highly suspicious, but not illegal.  Just a bit like walking around with safe-cracking equipment.
    Fat Tony dumped the boxes in two different garbage cans and programmed numbers into the speed dial while he walked.  So far there was no sign of Sarah or of any people carrying signs saying ‘FBI’ on them, but there were plenty of people talking on cell phones, which, Tony figured, might be about the only clue he would have before they jumped on him and arrested him for aiding and abetting the illegal breeding and sale of really cute rabbits.  He’d never had to do any covert stuff back at ART, so all he was going by was based on TV.  He hoped the FBI watched the same shows he did, because then he might actually get Grandma out of the mall without being noticed.
    He dialed up Grandma on his regular phone.
    “Where are you?”
    “Just outside the store.  Which dressing room?”
    “The ladies.”
    “Roger, too?”
    “He’s sitting outside looking casual.”
    “How do you know he’s looking casual?”
    “He usually looks casual.”
    “Fine. I’m headed your way.  I’m assuming you have one of your friends with you?”
    “In a Dillard’s bag with holes in it.”
    “No chance I could convince you to leave the thing and walk out the door with me?  You’ve still got nineteen others, right?”
    “You haven’t ever seen one of these, have you, Anthony.”
    “Only heard the stories.”
    “That’s why you could ask that.  I’m not leaving Buttons in the mall.”
    “Buttons?  You named it?”
    “I named all twenty.”
    “Buttons—Buttons?  Really?—Buttons would be just fine, Grandma.  They’d find her and she’d be taken care of.  Also, on the positive side, they wouldn’t find you.”
    “Two problems,” said Grandma.  “First, Buttons is a boy.”
    “A boy?  You named a boy ‘Buttons?’  Do you hate him?  He’s so dead when he hits cute rabbit middle school.”
    “Second, security cameras.”
    “They have security cameras in the dressing rooms?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Oh,” said Fat Tony, but then his brain caught up.  “But they do have them outside the dressing rooms, and if they find your little package inside, it might not be too long before they’re knocking on your door.”
    “With just our description, Roger said there’s not enough for a warrant.  With our description and Buttons, they’d be knocking with gusto.  And we don’t want them knocking on my door, especially not with gusto.  Too much left over from when we had all twenty there.”
    “Even after I cleaned up those droppings?”
    “Even after.  Thanks for doing that, by the way.  Usually they didn’t glow, but Pumpkin and Rosalie had been acting sick, and we didn’t know what that would do to their droppings, so you were the closest thing to an expert that we could bring in safely.”
    “I’m a magical analyst, Grandma, not an arcanovet.  Also, I’m here.”
    Fat Tony hung up and walked over to the white-haired man he assumed must be Roger.  There was some standing and shaking hands and name exchanging, and then Grandma joined them.  Roger looked okay to Fat Tony—casual, yes, Grandma had been right—though a little too casual for Tony’s taste.  He was sure he was biased, given that this was likely the man who had involved Tony’s grandmother in something cute but illegal, but still.  Too casual for being chased by the FBI.
    “You know, Alberta,” said Roger, “he looks an awful lot like Bob did.”
    “You knew Grandpa?”
    “Business partners.”
    “Business?  Or business?”
    “We’ll get together for dinner, Anthony,” interrupted Grandma.  “But for now, we need to get out of here.”
    “Right,” said Fat Tony.  “Especially with that glowy little package you’re carrying.  No, keep it closed.  I do not want to see Buttons.  One of us may need to be able to make hard decisions without being addled by big brown eyes and cute horns.
    “Blue eyes,” said Grandma.
    “My point exactly.”
    “Does the package glow that much?” asked Roger.  “It seems muted to me.”
    “I’m extra sensitive, and you can bet that at least some of the people looking for you are pretty sensitive, too.  Here, Grandma, take these.”
    “Phones?”
    “I have a matching pair.  Your green is programmed to call my green, and the same with the yellows.  They’re prepaid, so they’re not connected to us.  We won’t use them tonight, though.  We’ll only switch to these if things go badly and we think they might be keeping track of our phones.  If that happens, leave your cell somewhere and switch to these.”
    “Clever,” said Roger.  “Like your grandfather.”
    “I’ll pass the compliment on to primetime television,” said Tony.  “You stay here for now and I’ll head over to the entrance, see if we can’t just walk right out.”
    “Wouldn’t that be a dream,” said Grandma.  “But what are we doing after?”
    “Almost forgot,” said Tony.  “Here.  My keys.  My sedan is in the first spot on the other side of the handicapped parking, right out those doors.  I sometimes have to carry magical tools in my trunk for work, so it’s pretty well shielded.  Drop Buttons in the trunk and you ought not to be noticed.  Get her—him to your place, and we’re good to go.”
    “We can’t,” said Grandma.  “Mr. Negi has a pacemaker.”
    “I’m confused,” said Fat Tony.
    “The reason we took them all out of my house was because the clocks in Mrs. Negi’s house started running too fast.”
    “And,” finished Tony, “A fast pacemaker is slightly worse than a fast wall clock.”
    “We couldn’t take the risk.  We split them up and started putting them in different places around the city, and we’ve been moving them regularly.  Buttons was at that pet shop in the strip mall next door.”
    Roger spoke up.  “We were on our way out when a man with a very prominent nose made his way in.  He was paying more attention to the bag than we liked and his car followed us to the mall.”
    “So he has your license plate.”
    “My plate, yes, not your grandmother’s.  We’ll have to abandon my car, I know, at least for now.  Why do you think I finally let your grandmother call you?”
    “He kept saying he didn’t want you involved, Anthony.  I told him you could handle yourself.”
    “How did you lose the nose?”
    “We found parking, he didn’t, and we went through the food court.”
    Fat Tony nodded in respect.  Lots of little magic going on in there.
    “So they have your description, but that’s about it.”
    “We have some breathing room there, too,” said Roger.  “I bought a new T-shirt and threw out my hat, and Alberta left her sweater in the changing room here.  Why are you looking at me like that?”
    Fat  Tony shook his head.  “Now I really want to know what business you were in with Grandpa.  But later.  For now I’ll go pretend I’m interested in women’s shoes and find out if the entrance is clear.  If it is, I’ll call you, and you come separately, since they’re looking for an older couple together.  Is that redundant?  A couple together?”
    “Go, Anthony,” said Grandma.  “I’m taking Buttons back into the dressing room.”
    Fat Tony turned to go, but then stopped.
    “Roger, if they catch you….”
    “Don’t worry, Tony.  I wanted to share the good parts of this deal with your grandmother, not the bad parts.  If we’re caught, we’re caught.  I won’t let things get messy.  I’m not much of a fighter, anyway.”
    “Thanks.”
    Fat Tony made his way past unmentionables, dresses, and a few faceless, impossibly slender mannequins, then settled in to pretend he was looking at stiletto heels.  A saleswoman made chirpy, ‘can I help you’ noises at him, but he waved her off with something about looking for inspiration for a birthday present.  Wife?  No, girlfriend, maybe, if he was lucky.  She wished him luck and fluttered away, and Fat Tony got down to his real business in women’s shoes.
    The biggest worry was magical observers.  They had a fighting chance at fooling eyes, but they weren’t getting Buttons past trained and magical FBI spotters, and with rumors of twenty Livingstone’s Cottontails around—cute packages of chaos waiting to build up and explode—they would have out every trained spotter they could grab.
    Tony took a deep breath and dropped himself even further into observation mode.  The wisps and trails of magic that filtered through the store leapt to vivid life around him.  Even the faintest traces stood out like neon, and what had been a faint glow from over by the dressing rooms made him want to shade his eyes.  He wasn’t sure how the owners of every department store a) knew about magic and b) found the right people to enhance their mirrors, but it was the one constant Fat Tony had seen between every store from WalMart to Macy’s.
    Other than that, the store was almost empty of magic.  There was one man between the suit racks who was either having a hard time making up his mind or he was—nope, he was having a hard time making up his mind.  He had picked out a gray suit and was moving to the dressing rooms, and there wasn’t anything magical about the man except, perhaps, the dark brown of his hair, but Fat Tony was betting that had more to do with hair dye than with anything arcane.  He looked around for another thirty seconds, giving time to the salespeople as well, but most of those were slightly less magical than broccoli.
    Fat Tony put down the shoe, pulled out his phone, and walked to the exit.
    “Hello?” said Grandma.
    “I think we’re good.  I’m taking a quick look outside, but I think you can go ahead and—wait right where you are.”
    “You spotted someone?”
    Fat Tony had stepped out the door and immediately picked up a faint hum from a man standing by one of those midget-pillars with an ashtray on top.  Immediately, Fat Tony dropped his meditation.  It wasn’t easy to pick up on someone who was just looking for magic and not actually using it—Tony had only ever met two others who could do it, one with a back so hairy it practically needed mowing, and the other as large as Tony—but he wasn’t taking any chances.  The man by the ash tray was on a cell phone, just listening, and looking for magic.  Also, his nose was unusually large.
    “I’ll call Tanya and have her come pick you up,” said Tony.  “I need to finish picking out something for Grandma at Dillard’s.”  He heard Grandma telling Roger that the entrance was being watched.  “I have to go back in now.  I’ll talk to you later.”
    Fat Tony hung up and stepped back into the store, walking quickly once he was out of sight of the man with the nose.
    “Someone’s there?” asked Roger.
    “Your friend with the large probos—probis—”
    “Proboscis,” said Roger.
    “That’s it.  Big nose.  We’re not getting past him, and if they can afford to have him sitting in one place and just watching, that probably means they have enough people to cover all the entrances and a few more to walk the mall.”
    “Do we try running?” asked Grandma.
    “We try a distraction,” said Tony.