Tim Powers - Last Call (13 page)

Betsy would want the person, whoever it was, to be protected until after the game, when at last the twenty-one-year-old assumptions could be consummated, when her resurrections could take place.

Git along, little dogie,
he thought.
It's all your misfortune and none of my own.

The telephone buzzed, and he picked it up and wrote down the data the voice gave him: Scott Crane, born 2/28/43, address 106 East Second Street, Santa Ana. That was the old house at the corner.

He turned on the dome light and shuffled through the six manila envelopes. It was probably the young man who had used the name Scott "Scarecrow" Smith in the '69 game.

Trumbill opened the envelope and looked at the photographs of Scott Smith. In the twenty-one-year-old pictures he was a dark-haired, lean-faced young man, often in the company of an old man identified in ink on the margins as Ozzie Smith, evidently Scott's father. Paper-clipped to the photographs was a copy of a bill from the Mint Hotel in Las Vegas; the bill had a Montebello, California, address for both Scott and Ozzie, and someone had written across it "
Phony
."

Montebello was one of those cities that were part of Los Angeles—close enough to Santa Ana. This Smith person had to be the fish Trumbill was looking for. The nearest of the other five lived in Sacramento.

Also in the envelope was a photograph of a pregnant blond woman stepping out of a car; her face, caught turning toward someone out of the scene, was taut and strong.

"Issit," read the note taped to the back of the picture. "Born c. '35. Folded 6/20/60. Daughter, born 6/19(?)/60, believed to be alive—'Diana Smith'—possibly living with Ozzie Smith—address unknown—
urgently FOLD
.

Trumbill looked at the woman's face, absently remembering how the face had changed as he had fired three bullets through it, thirty years ago.

Diana Smith. Trumbill looked at the dark bulk of 106 and wondered if she might be living there, too. That would be all right.

He put the photographs back into the envelope and then pulled out his wallet and looked at his laminated FBI identification tag. It was the most recent version, with the gold band across the top, and nobody would believe that the obese Trumbill was a newly hired agent, but this Crane fellow wasn't likely to know anything about FBI IDs.

Better to leave the car here, he thought, in case any jacks are in the area who might be watching the place. Better to be a pedestrian.

He opened the door, pocketed his wallet, patted the holstered SIG 9-millimeter automatic under his coat, and began ambling in an aimless fashion toward 106.

Crane was breathing fast and shallow as he peered over the hood of one of Mavranos's impound-yard cars. Goddammit, he thought, it's not the guy in the Porsche, but it's got to be somebody
with
him.

Crane was shivering. Shit, he thought miserably.

The sky was graying behind him in the east. Crane had walked around a dozen blocks, and finally the cold and his weariness and the thought of his bed had convinced him that he must have been wrong about the man in the Porsche. It must have been one of those random freeway shootings, he'd told himself; probably I cut him off without knowing it, and he got mad and decided to kill me … A guy that would drive around with no rear window would probably do that kind of thing.

But here was a serious-looking man checking out Crane's car and talking on a cellular telephone and now walking toward his house. This was as true and horribly undeniable as a broken tooth or a hernia. Even if the man was a plainclothes policeman, something was going on, something that Crane didn't want.

He thought about the beers in his refrigerator. He'd been an idiot not to bring them along in a bag.

The fat man must nearly be up to his porch; impulsively Crane sprinted across the street to the parked Jaguar. By the streetlight's glow he could see some manila envelopes on the seat.

He looked at his house. The man was up the steps and onto the porch now, and if he walked up to the door, he wouldn't be able to see the Jaguar.

The man went to the door and disappeared from view.

Crane turned his back to the Jaguar and then drove his elbow hard at the driver's window; it shattered inward with no more noise than a bottle breaking inside a paper bag, and he spun around, leaned in and snatched the envelopes, and then ran back across the street to the dark, recessed door of Mavranos's half of the duplex. He banged on the door with his free fist.

After a few seconds he banged on it again.
Come on, Arky,
he thought.
I'll tell you what seeems to be the problem.

He could hear footsteps inside the house.

"Let me in, Arky," he said in an urgent, low voice. "It's me, it's Scott!"

He heard a chain slide through its channel and rattlingly fall, and then the door was pulled open and Crane had pushed his way inside. "Close it and lock it and don't turn on the lights," he gasped.

"Okay," Mavranos said. "What're you, delivering mail now?" Mavranos was wearing a shirt and undershorts and socks.

"Jesus, I hope you've got a beer."

"I've got enough for the disciples, too. Let me put my pants on."

"Your fat man's out there," Crane said, with false and querulous bravado, after taking a solid slug of Coors in Mavranos's dark living room. The place smelled like an animal's cage. "He was messing with my car, and then he ate the goddamn bushes across the street, and now he's gone to my house. What's his name? Handlebar?"

Crane was on the couch and Mavranos was standing by the window and peeking out through the blinds. "Mandelbrot is the name you're trying to think of. He's the guy that outlined him. All I see is a Jaguar with its window broke."

"I broke it. Fucker ate the bushes."

"What're the envelopes?"

"God, I don't know. I took 'em out of his car. I can't go home."

"Susan still up there?"

"No, she—she went to her mother's house, we had a fight, that's how come I was out walking and saw this guy."

"You can stay here. But we gotta talk."

"Sure, sure, let's talk."

"Is this the fat man that shot the moon in the face?"

Scott Crane exhaled and tried to think clearly. "Great God. I don't know. It might be. I didn't see him, in '60. We got there after." He rubbed his good eye and then drank some more beer. "God, I hope it isn't connected to all that crap. But it probably is. The first night I go play cards. The goddamn cards."

Mavranos was still standing by the window. "You ought to tell me about the cards, Pogo."

"I ought to fucking
know
about the cards, I don't know shit about them; it's like letting a kid play with blasting caps or something."

"Your fat man's coming back."

"He's
your
fat man."

"He just noticed his window; he's looking around. I'm gonna hold the blinds just like they are."

"I've got a gun," said Crane.

"So do I, Pogo, but let's hold our horses. He's getting in the car. He's starting it up. Nice car, no way it's the original Jag engine in that. He's moving off, but my guess is he ain't going far." Mavranos let the blinds fall and turned around. "Nobody'll see a light in the kitchen; bring your envelopes there."

"I'll just leave 'em here. In fact, if I could just go to sleep on this couch—"

"Sleep later, and right now bring them into the kitchen. I
am
in this for my health."

Crane just stared at the note on the back of the photograph of Lady Issit while Mavranos shuffled the photographs from the other envelopes around on the kitchen table and read the notes attached to them.

"So who are these people?" he asked. He looked up, then snapped his fingers at Crane. "Hmm? What's this …
category
you're a part of?"

Crane blinked and looked up. "Oh, they're—a couple of 'em I recognize. Poker players. One of them was in a game with me in '69, in a houseboat on Lake Mead. He won a big pot, what in this game is called the Assumption. He—" Crane sighed. "He took money for the hand. So did I. These others were probably at one of the other lake games that week, and I bet they won some Assumptions, too."

Crane looked back at the note on the picture of Lady Issit. For the dozenth time he read, "
Diana Smith—possibly living with Ozzie Smith—address unknown—urgently FOLD.
" He realized that his heart was pounding and his palms were damp. "I've, uh, got to get in touch with somebody," he said.

"You can use the phone."

"I don't know where she is. And I don't know anybody that would."

"I got no Ouija board, Pogo."

Urgently FOLD.

He thought of the awed care with which he had held her during the long drive back from Las Vegas in 1960, and of the portrait she'd done of him, and he tried to remember what each of them had said the last time they'd talked, when she'd called him after he'd put the fishing spear through his ankle. When she'd been fifteen.

He'd dreamed that she got married. He wondered if she had children. She'd be thirty now, so she probably did. Maybe her psychic link was with the children now, and no longer with him.

Mavranos had got up and slouched back into the living room; now Crane heard him say, quietly, "Blue van just pulled up, and three guys got out of it; they're heading for your place."

What's in the pot is gone,
Ozzie had always said.
It ain't yours anymore. You might win it, but until you do, you gotta regard it as spent, not chase it.

"Up on your porch now," Mavranos said.

Of course, when the antes or blinds have been high, so high that it's as much as you're worth to stay in a dozen hands, why then you gotta play looser.

"Lights on in your living room," Arky said. "Kitchen now. Spare bedroom. Real bedroom, too, probably, but I can't see it from here."

And if the antes have been so big that guys are staying just because of it, sometimes you can bet everything you've got and win with a damn poor hand.

Crane turned the photograph over and looked at the pregnant woman. Then he got up and walked into the living room and stood beside Mavranos. Crane watched the silhouettes moving in his house. One was obviously the fat man. He must have met the van somewhere nearby. "I've got to get in there," he said.

"No way tonight—and these guys'll probably watch the place for a couple of days. What's in there that we can't get somewhere else?"

"The phone."

"Shit, I told you you could use mine."

"It's gotta be that one."

"Yeah? Tell me why." He was still staring out the window. Crane looked at Mavranos's lean silhouette, the narrowed eyes glinting in reflected streetlight glow. The man looked like a pirate.

Can I trust him? Crane wondered. He's obviously got some sort of stake in this situation, but I'll swear he's a loner, not associated with any of these—these murky thrones and powers and assassins. We've been sociable neighbors for a while, and he always got along with Susan. And God, it would be wonderful to have an ally. "Okay," Crane said slowly. "If we both tell the other guy everything we know—I mean, that he knows—himself—about this stuff—"

Mavranos was grinning at him. "You mean we lay our cards on the table."

"That's it." Crane held out his right hand.

Mavranos enveloped it in his own calloused, scarred right hand and shook it firmly twice. "Okay."

Eighteen hours later Crane was crawling on his hands and knees across the floor of his own living room toward the telephone, his right eyelid stinging and his cheek saltily wet.

The intruders had turned off the lights when they had left, but the blinds were raised, and the traffic and neon signs and streetlights of Main Street gave the room a flickering twilight glow in the middle of this Friday night.

Ten minutes earlier Mavranos had driven his car up to the curb in front of Crane's house and had got out and walked up to the front door, to attract the attention of anyone who might be watching the place. After knocking and getting no response, he had gone back to his car, leaned in through the open window, and honked the horn three times—two shorts and one long.

Crane had been in the alley behind the house.

At the first of the short blasts Crane pushed his way through his dilapidated back fence; the second honk blared as he was sprinting across his dark, unkempt back lawn, and when the third began, he punched a leather-gloved hand through his bedroom window, brushed the glass splinters away from the bottom edge of the frame, and dived through and scrambled across the bed.

By the time the horn stopped he was standing beside the bed. The air was warm, almost hot; the heater had been running all night and all day and half the night again, and of course the stove was on.

He took off Arky's work glove and tossed it onto the floor.

The bedroom had been ransacked. The blankets and sheets had been torn off the bed, and the mattress had been slashed, and the bureau drawers had been dumped out on the floor.

He walked down the hall to the bathroom, stepping carefully in the darkness and bracing his hands on the walls, for the floor was an obstacle course of scattered magazines and books and clothes. The bathroom was completely dark, and he groped through the litter of boxes and bottles that had been spilled out of the medicine cabinet into the sink.

He hadn't been able to stop yawning, and his palms were damp.

Among the litter in the sink he had come across the rubber bulb and the bottle of saline solution, and he'd shrugged. As long as you're here, he thought.

Working by touch, he poured some of the solution into the coffee mug that was miraculously still on the sink. He reached a finger up to his face and pushed inward on the side of his right eye. With a sort of inner
sploosh
the plastic hemisphere came loose from the Teflon ring that was attached to two of the muscles in his eye socket. The medial rectus, he remembered, and the lateral rectus. He'd had the ring put in about 1980. Before that he'd had a glass eye, and once a month he'd had to go to the eye man to have it taken out and cleaned. Now it was a task to be done every day at home, like cleaning contact lenses.