Makers Part 48

"No. Cops. They've shut down the ride."

Kettlewell opened the door a crack and stared at him with a red-rimmed, hung-over eye. "Cops shut down the ride?"

"Yeah, they say there's an injunction."

"Gimme a sec, gotta put some pants on." He closed the door. As Perry listened to the sounds of him getting dressed, he reflected that he'd done Eva the favor she'd been seeking: he'd found something to keep Kettlewell busy.

Kettlewell quizzed him intensely as they drove back across the road to the police-cars. He called Tjan and got voicemail, left a brief message, then got out of the car and stood still outside it, waving at the cop-cars.

"What?"

The male cop looked even more dyspeptic.

"Hi there! I wondered if I could get you to explain what's going on here so we can open up shop again?"

"We've shut you down to enforce an injunction."

"What injunction is that?"

"A court injunction."

"Which court?"

The cop looked really angry for a second, then he got back in his car and fished around. "Broward County." He sounded aggrieved.

"Is that the injunction there?" Kettlewell said.

"No," the cop said, too quickly. They both knew he was lying, jerking them around.

"Can I see it? Does it have information about who to talk to to get the injunction lifted?" Kettlewell's tone was even, pleasant and very adult. The voice of someone used to being obeyed.

"You'll have to go to the courthouse. They open in a couple hours."

"I'd really like to see it."

"Oh for chrissakes," the female cop said. "Just show it to them, Tom. G.o.d." She spat on the ground. Her partner gave her a look, then handed the paper over to Kettlewell, who pored over it intently. Perry shoulder surfed him and gathered that they were being shut down for infringing Disney Parks Company trademarks. That was weird. You could hardly go ten feet in Florida without tripping over a bootleg Mickey, so why should the market-stalls' Mickey designs trigger legal action?

"All right, then," Kettlewell said. "Let's make some phone calls."

They got in the car and drove across the road to the shantytown. There was a tea-house that opened early and they commandeered its window table and spread out their things. Perry called Lester and woke him up. It took two or three tries to get his head around it -- Lester couldn't figure out why they'd shut down the market-stalls, but once he got that the ride was down too, he woke up fast and promised to meet them.

Kettlewell's conversation with Tjan was a lot more heated. Perry tried to eavesdrop but couldn't make any sense of it.

"All the rides are down," he said once he'd dropped the phone to bounce a couple times on the tabletop, making the coffees s.h.i.+ver. "Every one of them was shut down by the cops this morning."

"You're s.h.i.+tting me. But they don't all sell the same stuff."

"They were shut down because of Disney trademarks in the ride itself, or so it seems. Now, what are we going to do? Tjan's hired a lawyer for the Boston group and we can hire one for here, but I don't think we're going to be able to hire fixers everywhere that there's a ride. That's going to be really expensive. Disney's filed all the injunctions at the state level -- they have an industry a.s.sociation they work through that has cooperating attorneys in every city in the country, so it was easy for them."

"Holy c.r.a.p."

"Yeah. Who did you p.i.s.s off, Perry?"

d.a.m.ned if he knew. He literally couldn't think of a single person who'd want to do this -- someone had convinced the Disney company to clobber him like G.o.dzilla going after Tokyo. It just didn't make any sense.

"So what do we do?"

Kettlewell looked at him. "I have no clue, Perry. You aren't a company. You aren't a network of companies. You aren't an industry a.s.sociation. No one can speak for you. You can't lobby or even field a spokesman. I mean, none of that stuff works for you -- and that's the only way I know to fight back in court."

"I thought we were immune to this stuff. If there's no one to sue, how can they sue us?"

"If there's no one to sue, there's no one to show up in court and object, either."

"Yeah."

"I don't think we can incorporate you in time to make a difference,"

Kettlewell said. "So we need to think of something else."

Suzanne slid into the booth beside them. Her hair was tied back and her makeup was spare and severe. She had on European-cut trousers, high like a bolero-dancer's, and a loose, flowing white cotton over-s.h.i.+rt on top of a luminescent pink tank. Perry couldn't tell whether it was formal or informal, but it looked good and a little intimidatingly foreign. She didn't meet Perry's eye.

"Brief me," she said. She held out her phone and put it in record mode.

Kettlewell ran it down quickly and she nodded, jotting notes.

"So what happens next?"

"Not much we can do," Kettlewell said.

"The riders will be along shortly. Oh, and the merchants." Perry still couldn't catch her eye.

"I'll go take some pictures," she said.

"Be careful," Perry said.

She mugged for him. "Sweetie, I take pictures of the mafiyeh." Then it was all right between them again, somehow.

"Right," Kettlewell said. "How's our time looking?"

"Got thirty minutes until the first of the merchants show up. An hour until the riders start turning up."

"You don't have a lawyer, do you?"

Perry quirked his funny eyebrow.

"Stupid question. OK. Right, I'll make some more calls. Let's get some people out of bed."

"What can I do?"