News Flash

Bar TV is pretty much the same all over. The glimpse I gave you the last time I made an entry into this dog-eared journal of mine wasn't the worst of it, either. I mean, like all taverns mostly patronized by the male species, we get way too much sports on the tube at Think-A-Holic Lounge. Especially illegal sports like dwarf tossing and bowling for dollars.

But every now and then you get real crap. Like a newsflash. Nobody at the Lounge likes a newsflash. Breaking news might give you an instant rush on celebrity-worshiping planets like Earth but here at the edge of nowhere we just get perturbed. Especially when the so-called "Breaking News" is about a known thief and con artist like Fred Fortune.

Who cares if this top-hatted grafter "escaped on their asses" as he always claims to be doing? There's no way in hell that "Federico Fortunato" could have gotten his butt off Mars unless... unless he found a wormhole that didn't bring him back. That's the trouble with wormholes. They always bring you back.

But, if "Freddy Fingers" did manage to find a wormhole that whisked his lying ass off the Red Planet and if the wormhole didn't return him to his point of origin (the most annoying things about a natural wormhole) then there is that possibility that Fred Fortune could have commandeered a roving wormhole and is, at this moment, headed our way.

Angus McCloud, our bigass head bartender and the 400-year-old ghost of a dead Scottish poet, must have read my mind when I entertained the horrible notion that Fred Fortune might be headed our way again. Angus set me up with a shot of think-a-hol and an imported bubbly chaser, on the house.

"Don't even think about it, " the ugly old spook told me as he plopped two paper coasters down in front of me. "He's probably still on Mars. Or else in prison on Pluto, where he belongs. Besides, only his astral or dreaming self can darken our doorway anyhow. And, in that case, I'll just toss him out on his ear again."

"You're right," I replied, before tossing back the think juice. "He's probably down in the Martian canals right now sucking on red stones." I knocked back the elixir and chugged half the chaser. In two seconds I felt like Richard the Lionhearted. "Hey, how about changing the channel?" I barked at Angus McCloud. "We're missing that senator tossing tournament on Saturn!"