Page 19 of Shadow Ticket
“Listen.” Eight quick bars of “On the Sunny Side of the Street” on amplified uke.
“It’s coming over the radio, how’s that work?”
“Kid out in Waukesha showed me, you take a record needle, wire it up to the speaker here, see? You want the real Tom Swift, it’s this Lester kid, calls himself Red, playing hillbilly guitar up and down Bluemound Road for nickels and dimes, drive-ins, roadhouse parking lots, gets to where he needs to be heard over the traffic, so he figured this out.”
“White kid named Red on Bluemound Road, check and triple check, pretty patriotic, ain’t it.”
“Also known as the Wizard of Waukesha. Me, I’m just another brass-pounder, but this kid’s the goods, I tell ya.”
“Hicksie, you got a minute?” It’s Skeet, dragging over who, natch, but the till recently incommunicado Stuffy Keegan.
“Well, Stuffy. Sorry about the truck.”
“Hope you ain’t working for anybody that’s looking for me.”
“Couple of clients naturally curious about who did it and why, wondering who’ll try to collect the insurance, nothin more personal than that.”
“See, when it blew I was supposed to been in it. Last-minute yen for a Giant Bar, pulled over, just about to step in the candy store, feeling around for change, suddenly ka-blooey, all hell, whizzin around my ears, thought itwas giant mosquitoes but it was pieces of my rig. Somehow I begin to get this feelin…”
“MPD say they’re on the case, some think it’s the Outfit, some say the Nazi Youth.”
“Two different kinds of trouble, ain’t it, one you end up dead, the other dead and in hell.”
“Just in time, Stuffy,” Drover back at the shortwave equipment. “Your sub just showed up again.”
Stuffy finds another set of earphones and jacks in.
“His what?” sez Hicks.
“The U-13,” Drover explains. “An unsurrendered Austro-Hungarian submarine. Supposed to be broken up by terms of the Versailles Treaty, but somehow they dodged it.”
“Where are they?”
“Out in the Lake someplace. Closer to the other side where there’s less ice.”
“A submarine in Lake Michigan. Come on, kid.”
“Hmm, traffic’s light tonight, everybody must be down below at the bowling alley.”
“The, um…”
“There’s a big tournament on.”
“Bowling alley on a submarine, Drover?”
“Sure, quite common in fact, you never heard of20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?”
Stuffy meantime has gone off into some trance of his own, as if monitoring the U-13 could be no more weird or peculiar than listening to a normal radio show over a Thrill Box of unconventional design.
“Each episode,” Stuffy explains later, “the U-13 visits a different port of call. A different chore. Pickup and delivery, tobacco, dope, guns, hooch, live passengers with their papers not always in order who need to be here or there in a hurry and don’t mind being stashed with the cargo.”
“Anybody we might know, Stuffy?”
“Sure—and if I tell ya, you’ll get all agitated, with your lousy cop reflexes, start calling names, mania this, phobia that, unnatural emotions, and givin me that look. Yeah, right there, that one.”
“Your personal affair, Stuffy, man wants to be U-boat happy, what’s it to me?”
“Yeah, well, they’re picking me up tonight.”
