Tim Powers - Last Call (17 page)

"Good thought," said Crane, wishing he had a drink.

There was a pay telephone back up the street in the entry of the Village Inn, and Ozzie put a quarter in the slot and then tilted the receiver aside as he punched out the remembered number.

After two rings there was an answer. "Yeah," a young man's voice said earnestly, "this is Scott Crane's residence, he's—listen, could you hold a minute?"

"Sure," said Ozzie, nodding grimly at Mavranos.

They heard the clunk of the distant telephone being put down; a dog was barking somewhere in the relayed background, and a car alarm was hooting.

After a few moments the voice came back on. "Yeah, hello?"

"Could I speak to Scott Crane, please?"

"Jesus, Scott was in an accident," the voice said, "he—wait, I can see Jim's car pulling up, he was off visiting Scott at the hospital, Jim's a friend of his, claimed to be his brother to be able to get in to see him, you wanna hang on 'til Jim gets in here? He'll be able to tell you what's what."

"I'm just calling for the
Orange County Register
," Ozzie said, "to see if he wanted to subscribe. Sorry to have disturbed you at a bad time." He pressed down the hang-up lever.

"Wow," said Crane. "They've got a guy in my place."

"Don't talk for a minute," Ozzie said. He walked away from the telephone, staring out the window at the yellow-lit street under the black sky. "I could put an ad in the personals," he said softly. "But I couldn't even hope she'd see it or get it unless I used her name, and I don't dare do that … and I don't even know what her last name is now …" He shook his head, frowning and unhappy. "Let's go outside."

Crane and Mavranos followed the old man out onto the Marine Avenue sidewalk and matched his slow pace south, back toward the water. Shingled roofs steamed in the sunlight on the houses along the street, even as rain silently made spots on the pavement.

"I haven't held a hand of cards since that game in the Horseshoe in '69," Ozzie said. "I couldn't take the chance on being recognized, and word getting back to you. I was sixty-one years old, with a car and twenty-four thousand dollars and a nine-year-old foster daughter and no skill, no trade."

Crane had started to say something, and Ozzie waved him to silence. "You already said you're sorry," the old man went on, "and it was a long time ago. Anyway, she and I went somewhere a person can live cheap, and after a while I got a
job
—first time in my life—and Diana went to school. I made some good investments, and for these last … say, ten years … I've been
comfortable
. I know enough about how things work to get help like I had this morning, and if it's only once in a long while, I can even afford it."

Ozzie laughed. "You know what I do for work now? I make ashtrays and coffee mugs and pots, out of clay. I've got a kiln in my back yard. I sell 'em to these boutique-type shops, the kind of place that's mostly for tourists. I've always signed 'em with a fake name. Anytime the demand for 'em gets serious, I stop making 'em for a year or so, 'til people forget they wanted 'em. One time a local paper wanted to do an article on me; I quit making the damn things for about six years after that. Publicity I don't want."

The rain was coming down more steadily now, and the light was fading.

"You ever been in jail, either of you?" Ozzie asked.

Both men nodded.

"Tell you what I hate, that little toilet with no seat, and you got six guys who gotta use it. And I hate the idea of someday maybe living behind a dumpster, wearing four dirty shirts and three pairs of weird old pants at the same time … and the idea of getting seriously beat up, you know, where you can feel stuff breaking inside you and the guys won't stop kicking. And I hate the idea of being in a hospital with catheters and ventilators shoved into me every which way. Bedpans. Bedbaths. Bedsores."

He sighed. "What I like is my house, little old Spanish-style place I live in, all paid off, and my cats and my Louis L'Amour books and my Ballantine scotch and an old Kaywoodie pipe stuffed with Amphora Red cavendish. And I've got all the Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby on cassettes."

"That's what you
like
," said Mavranos softly.

"Right," Ozzie agreed, staring ahead at the water. "Diana I love." His wrinkled old face was wet with rain. "But I wonder … if I can even
do
anything. Of course, that's my cats and L'Amours and cassettes talking:
There's nothing an eighty-two year-old man can
do
about it—so, sad as it is, stay home, with us.
"

"What's 'flying in the grass' mean?" asked Crane uncomfortably.

Ozzie blinked and looked over at him. "Hmm? Oh—it's an old pilots' term for flying very low, crowding the ground, to avoid showing up on radar screens. Scoot in around the hills and barely clear the power lines, and you're just one more bit of the base-fuzz that's the features of the terrain. You can be right under the enemy's nose, but you're keeping such a low profile that he doesn't even see you."

They were back to the storm drain warning sign, and Ozzie led them to the right along the waterfront walk, toward the ferry. Mavranos, evidently impatient with the slow pace of his companions, was walking backward in a zig-zag pattern ahead of them.

"What have you got in the way of travel necessities?" the old man asked. "I don't think it'd be smart to go anywhere near your place."

"Actually," said Crane, touching his pocket, "I've got about two grand on me."

"I've got some bucks, too," said Mavranos, "and Scott's got a .357 in the car, and I've got a .38 Special in the glove compartment, and I gather you've got a gun. A shotgun and ammo we can pick up on the way—and a locking box so we'll be legal when we cross the border."

Ozzie was nodding.

"Border?" repeated Crane. "Where are we going?"

"To where your foster sister is," said Mavranos impatiently, "to the Chapel Perilous in the Waste Land. Las Vegas."

Ozzie was shivering. "Yes. Back to Las Vegas." He began walking faster. "Let's step it up here, gentlemen," he said in a brittle, nearly cheerful tone. "Do you have a heater in your fool truck, Archimedes? I probably forgot to say that being cold is also one of the things I hate."

"Got a heater that'll hard-cook eggs in your shirt pockets," Mavranos assured him. "But I got no air conditioner; that'll be a factor when we're out in the nowhere middle of the Mojave Desert."

They filled the Suburban's gas tank and radiator and checked the tires, and then spent two hundred dollars at the Grant Boys on Newport Boulevard for a Mossberg shotgun and a box of number six shells. The shotgun was a pump-action twelve-gauge with a seventeen-inch barrel and no shoulder stock, just a hard black-plastic pistol-grip, and Crane winced at the thought of all that recoil slamming into the palm of his hand; Ozzie would probably shatter his old wrist if he were ever to shoot it. They also bought a four-foot-long gun-carrying case with an orange plastic finish molded to look like alligator hide; it had a piano-hinge down the long side away from the handle, and when it was opened out flat, the interior was two sheets of gray foam rubber knobbed with patterns of rounded pyramids. Mavranos said it looked like an electron microscope view of atoms in a crystal, and Ozzie said shortly that he had already gathered that Mavranos was smart, and didn't need to be reminded all the time.

Ozzie let the two younger men carry the purchases out to the truck—Scott moving slowly and favoring his bad leg—and then the old man climbed carefully into the back seat and got himself settled before Mavranos started the engine and turned right onto the boulevard.

The interior of the truck was steamy, and Crane cranked down his window to get relief from the smells of motor oil and old socks and crumpled takeout bags from Taco Bell.

Newport Boulevard had just broadened out into the Newport Freeway when Ozzie leaned forward from the back seat and tapped Mavranos on the shoulder. "Take the 405 north there, like you were going to the LAX airport."

Crane looked back over his shoulder at the old man. "I thought we were going to Vegas—straight up the 55 here to the 91 east."

"Do as I said, please, Archimedes," said Ozzie.

Mavranos shrugged and made the long turn northward onto the 405. He took a sip from a fresh can of Coors.

"Uh," said Crane. "Isn't this … the
long
way to Las Vegas?"

"You think your old man's nuts," said Ozzie tiredly, rocking on the back seat next to a battered tin Coleman stove. He sighed. "Listen, you wouldn't sail to … Catalina, even, would you, without checking reports on the weather and currents and tides? And there's nothing between here and
Catalina
that would particularly love to see you dead, and anyway, it's only twenty-six miles. Well, boy, right now you're aiming to drive more than
two hundred
miles, through all sorts of weather and tides you never even
heard
of, with a lot of bad guys watching for you." He shook his head. "You gotta clock the tides first, boy." He bared his yellow teeth in what might have been a grin. "We gotta check the weather, lick a finger and hold it up in the breeze, so we'll know what kind of rigging to use. We gotta go to Gardena."

Mavranos squinted into the rearview mirror. "
Gardena?
"

"There's legal Poker clubs in Gardena," Crane said, "and in a lot of the other areas of L. A. around there." He shifted around on the front seat. "But you always said not to play in those places."

"Not for money, no," said Ozzie, "paying for your seat and playing with people whose betting habits you don't know. But we're not after money today, are we? And the worst thing about trying to make
money
at these big Poker emporiums, with like fifty or a hundred tables working, is that the fortune-telling effect naturally happens that much more often, and when it starts at one table, a lot of times it'll spread."

"Like a seed crystal again," said Mavranos.

"Right. You'll find the savvy players always have cigarettes burning even if they don't smoke, so they can watch how the smoke behaves—it starts puddling above the middle of the table, they get out—and they'll have some drink, mostly just Coke or water, so they can keep an eye on the level of it, same reason. But I'm gonna
want
to see the … tides of fortune. And I'll get into some smoke-puddling games, and if the hands I get apply to us, I'll try to buy us good luck, or sell bad luck to somebody else."

"What do you want us to do?" asked Mavranos.

"You got cigarettes?" Ozzie asked.

"Half carton of desert dogs back there. Camels."

"Well, you two can play if you'll keep cigarettes lit and watch the smoke—and fold out when it acts funny. Now I think of it, Scott, it might be a good idea for you to play some; if they sense you, they'll put you in L. A., which you're not gonna be for much longer. Otherwise be railbirds—watch, have a sandwich, whatever." Ozzie was peering out ahead through the cracked windshield. "North on the 605 here—catch the 5 and take it north, that should take us into the middle of it, and being close to the L.A. River won't hurt, though it's always dry."

Even after twenty-one years Crane knew Ozzie's voice well enough to know that the old man was scared—taking risks he'd avoided even in the days of his prime, jumping out of his comfortable old man's routine with no time at all to prepare, without even spare clothes or personal possessions or books or any idea of where he would wind up sleeping tonight, or the night after—but Crane could sense, too, the disguised excitement.

The old man was chasing the white line again.

Al Funo drove slowly past the old Spanish house that was 106 East Second Street. He had put the rear window back into the Porsche, and the heater was keeping him warm in spite of the chilly wind shaking the palm trees.

He drove on past the house, and when he saw the old green Torino with its shot windows in the parking lot beyond the duplexes, he smiled. This was the guy all right.

He had got the address from a friend who could run license plate numbers; it had taken more than twenty-four hours, but Scarecrow Smith—or, as his real name seemed to be, Scott Crane—apparently hadn't gone anywhere.

A blue van with tinted windows was parked on the other side of the street, and as Funo drove slowly past it, he noticed a faint, powdery white mark on the front side of the rear tire; that implied that a meter maid had chalked the vehicle recently, so recently that the driver had moved only a few yards before parking again. Was someone watching Crane's house? Obstadt's man had warned him that this assignment might be contested.

He looked more closely at the other cars parked along the street under the carob tree boughs, and noticed: an old pickup truck, empty; a Honda, empty; and a gray Jaguar, with a fat bald man sitting inside.

Funo turned left onto Bush Street and then right onto Third. He drove for a block and then pulled into a Chevron station that had a pay telephone at the edge of the asphalt apron, out by the self-serve air and water hoses. He got out of his car, got Crane's telephone number from information, and punched it in.

The phone rang twice at the other end, and then a young man's voice said, breathlessly, "Scott Crane's residence, can you hold a minute?"

"Sure, friend," said Funo easily, watching the sweep second-hand of his Rolex. He had at least three minutes before anybody could possibly trace the call, even if they'd managed to get Pacific Bell security to put a trap on the line.

"Sorry," said the voice after only ten seconds. "Scott was in an accident, he's in the hospital."

Nicked him after all, thought Funo. "Jesus," he said in a shocked tone, "what
happened
! I was playing Poker with him Tuesday night!"

"You were? Listen, he keeps asking for two people—he's semiconscious—two people named Ozzie and Diana. Do you by any chance know who they are?"

"
Sure
I know Ozzie and Diana!" said Funo instantly. "Listen, what hospital is he in? I'll bring them over."