Tim Powers - Last Call (23 page)

"Twenty to the Sixes," said the dealer patiently. Old Stuart Benet always needed to be reminded. Right now Benet was snorting at an asthma inhaler.

" 'At's you, Beanie," said the player to Benet's left.

"Oh!" The fat old man put down the inhaler, lifted the corner of his seventh and last card, and squinted down past his white beard at it.

"Beanie, you just
said
it was a Jack," said another player impatiently. "And if it is, you got Two Pair, and I got somp'n better anyway."

Benet smiled and pushed four orange chips forward.

The remaining players called, and at the showdown Benet proved to have only the pair that was showing in his up cards.

"Hey, Beanie," said the winner as he gathered in the chips, "what happened to that Jack you were shouting about?"

The dealer suppressed a frown as he collected the cards and began to shuffle. Benet was employed as a shill to fill out sparse tables in the Poker room, and even though the casino had hired him as a favor to a valued business associate, he was good at the work—always cheerful, and happy to stay and call and lose money. But shills weren't supposed to bluff or raise, and that
God, there's a Jack
yell had been a kind of bluff.

The dealer made a mental note to ask Miss Reculver to remind Benet of the rules. The old man never seemed to listen to anyone else.

The reference desk at the UNLV library always got busy around six in the evening. The students who worked during the day all seemed to come in at once, always shuffling hesitantly up to the desk and beginning in one of two ways: "Where would I look for …" or, even more often, "I have a quick question …" Old Richard Leroy would listen patiently to their intricate descriptions of what they wanted and then, almost invariably, either lead them to the business desk or show them where the psych indexes and abstracts were. Right now he was methodically replacing an armful of books to their proper places on the shelves.

A few of the students were still glancing at him warily, but he had forgotten having yelled, and was back in the state his co-workers called "Ricky's ticky-tocky."

And Betsy Reculver, the one who had voluntarily spoken the simultaneously chorused sentence, walked slowly along the broad, brightly lit and always crowded sidewalk in front of the Flamingo Hilton.

For a while she stared up at the procession of stylized flamingos, illuminated by what must have been a million light bulbs, that strutted along in front of mirrored panels above the windows of the new front of the casino. Behind the casino, hidden from the traffic on the Strip, was a long swimming pool, and on the far side of that, dwarfed now by the glass high-rise buildings that were the modern sections of the hotel, stood the original Flamingo building, the place Ben Siegel had built to be his castle in 1946.

Now it was her castle, though the Hilton people would not ever know it.

Some other people knew it, though—the magically savvy would-be usurpers called jacks—and they would like to take it away from her. This new jack, for example, whoever it might be. I've got to gather in my fish, she thought, and avoid the jacks while I do it.

She turned and looked across the street, past the towering gold-lit fountains and pillars of Caesars Palace, past the blue-lit geometrical abstraction of its sixteen hundred hotel rooms, to the still faintly pale western sky.

A jack from the West.

The phrase bothered her, for reasons she didn't want to think about, but in spite of herself, for just a moment she thought of an eye split by a Tarot card, and the bang and devastating punch of a .410 shot shell, and blood-slick hands clutching a ruined groin. And a casino called the Moulin Rouge, which hadn't got around to appearing until 1955.
Sonny Boy,
she thought.

She thrust the memories away, fleetingly resentful that they had followed her from the old body.

It doesn't matter
who
this jack may be, she told herself.
Whoever
it is, I've defeated better men before this, and women, too: Siegel, Lady Issit, and dozens more. I can do it again.

Suddenly in her mind she tasted liquor—and then a flood of cold beer. She was still facing west, and she could tell that the impression was coming from that direction.

And there's one of the fish, she thought with cautious satisfaction. Probably a male one since he's drinking boilermakers. Across the border now, driving into Nevada, onto my turf, following the irresistible impulse to flee the ocean and seek the desert, to abandon everything and make his way
here
—or maybe tied up in the trunk of Trumbill's Jaguar, if it was that particular fish and if we're lucky.

If he's not with Trumbill, I hope that jack out there doesn't find him. I can't afford to be losing my future vehicles, my customized garments—the
selves
I'm going to have to rely on for the next twenty years.

It didn't occur to her that the jack and the fish might be the same person.

She smiled when the walk signal at Flamingo Road turned green just as she reached the curb. And, ignoring the curious stares of the tourists crowding past in their colorful shorts and printed T-shirts and foolish hats, she quoted aloud four lines from Eliot's
The Waste Land:

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea …

She turned her smile on the purple western sky.
Come home,
she thought.

Come home.

Crane drank off the last inch of his second Budweiser and tucked his last quarter into the slot in the bar. He tapped the deal button and watched as his cards appeared. A pair of Twos, a Four, a Queen, and the one-eyed Jack of Hearts.

He pushed the hold buttons under the Twos, then hit the draw button. The other cards blinked away and were replaced by a Four and a King and a Two. Three of a Kind. Three quarters clattered into the well.

He stood up and scooped out the coins. They were warm, almost hot; and for a moment he remembered shiny copper ovals that had been pennies before the L.A. train thundered over them, and he remembered his real father juggling the hot, defaced coins into his hat to cool off.

He limped back onto the gaming floor, and as he was passing the slot machine that had paid for his drinks and the video Poker, he noticed a cellophane-wrapped peppermint in the payout well.

"Thanks," he told the machine as he took the mint and unwrapped it. "One-armed bandit," he said thoughtfully, popping the mint into his mouth, "but on my side, right? One-armed. You're … maimed, aren't you, like so many of these people? I'm maimed, too." He touched the surface of his right eye. "Fake, see?"

A man who seemed to have had his entire lower jaw taken out shambled up to the machine and managed to convey a question.

"No, I'm not playing this machine," said Crane. "I was just
conversing
with it."

Come home.

It was time to be moving on, eastward. He walked back to the restaurant, where Mavranos and Ozzie were sitting over their empty plates and still talking about the imaginary fat man.

Ozzie squinted up at Crane with exhausted eyes. "What kept you?"

"That Baker cheeseburger didn't sit right with me either," Crane said cheerfully. "Between us you and I must have grossed out half the guys here tonight."

Ozzie didn't seem to have heard. "From what you remembered of Diana's statements to you on the phone last night, I believe she works at a supermarket, a late-evening shift. When we get to Las Vegas, we can start checking all the markets."

Back on the highway, Ozzie fell asleep in the back seat again, and Mavranos was whistling tunelessly as he frowned at the pavement rushing by under the glow of the headlights.

Crane had stretched out his bad leg and was drifting in and out of a doze, lulled by exhaustion and roused by Arky's occasional random high notes.

He kept promising himself that he would complain soon, and had finally reached the point of keeping himself awake, waiting for the next high note—when Mavranos stopped whistling.

"Speeder behind us," Mavranos said.

Crane hunched himself around and looked out through the dusty back window. A pair of bright headlights was coming up on them quickly.

"How fast are we going?"

"Seventy."

A red light came on above the approaching headlights, making a pink field of the Suburban's back window.

"Wake up the old man," said Mavranos, "and get in the back and unlock the gun case. Do it," he added as Crane opened his mouth to protest.

"But it's
cops
!" Crane protested as he nevertheless scrambled over the top of the front seat, accidentally hitting Ozzie's arm with his knee.

"It looked like a pickup truck before the red light came on," said Mavranos.

Ozzie was awake, blinking forward and to the sides and then twisting his head around to look back. "You're not slowing down," he said.

"I think it's a truck," Mavranos said. "Would people want to stop us bad enough to fake being cops?"

"Sure," said the old man harshly. "I've still got my gun in my pocket. Where's yours?"

"In the box. Got it open?"

"Yeah," quavered Crane, "you want yours?"

"Pass it over subtle."

Crane knelt on the litter of books and clothes to block the view as he passed the gun to Mavranos's upheld hand.

Ozzie was panting. "I think you've got to pull over. If they're not cops, don't get out of the car. And—and if they've got guns … I don't know. If they raise the guns, point them at us, I think we've got to kill them. God help us. God help us."

The Suburban shifted when Mavranos hit the brakes, and Crane braced himself as he lifted out the short black shotgun and with trembling fingers tucked five shells into the magazine tube. Then he clicked off the safety and racked the slide back and forward, chambering the first shell, and tucked one more shell into the tube.

He slid the gun under Ozzie's seat, then picked up his .357, loaded it, and shoved it down inside the waist of his jeans and pulled his jacket closed and zipped it an inch.

"They're right behind us," he heard Mavranos say. Crane had his hand on the shotgun's plastic pistol-grip, and though his breath was fast and his heart was pounding, in his mind he was rehearsing how he would pull the gun out from under the seat and swing the barrel in line and fire it with his trigger hand down by the point of his hip-bone. All six as fast as you can pump them out, he told himself tensely, right through the windows, and then grab the revolver in both hands for accurate aiming. Christ.

The Suburban grated to a stop on the sandy shoulder, and a moment later Crane could hear a car door open and close, and then he could see flashlight beams highlight the dust on the side windows and gleam on Ozzie's scalp.

"Shit," came a voice from outside, "there's only three people in it."

"Two of 'em," said Mavranos softly. "One right here and one hanging back."

There was a rap on the driver's side window, and Crane heard the crank squeak six times, and a moment later he smelled the dry, cooling desert.

"Step out of the car," said the voice outside, clearer now.

"No," said Mavranos.

"We could drag you out, asshole."

Crane could see a corner of Mavranos's grin. "I pity de fool," Mavranos said cheerfully, in a bad imitation of Mr. T.

The man outside laughed shortly. "We've got guns." Ozzie leaned forward, and his old voice was steady. "You open with checks like that, son, in a no-limit game like this, you might see some powerful raises."

The man stepped back, and a flashlight beam danced across the litter in the back of Mavranos's truck. "Three's it, all right," he called to his companion. "They could maybe be hidin' a dog or a baby somewhere, but there ain't no more adults."

Against the headlights of the pickup truck Crane could see the tall silhouette of the other man, who now walked slowly to Mavranos's truck. Crane saw a sculpted-looking profile and wavy, styled hair.

"No," said the newcomer, "this vehicle no longer seems to be the one that contains a lot of people. The one we want is very close, though." He turned to Mavranos and, in his carefully modulated baritone, asked, "Have you seen a bus, or an RV, or a big van, driving along this highway during the last half hour?"

"I don't know about the last half hour," drawled Mavranos, "but since dark we've probably passed more buses and such than regular cars. Las Vegas, you know," he added, gesturing ahead helpfully.

"I know."

The man turned toward the back of the Suburban and spat on the glass. He turned to his companion. "Would you clean the glass, Max?" he asked.

The other man obediently rubbed at the spot with the sleeve of his nylon jacket, and when the glass was cleaner, he turned the flashlight on Crane's face.

Crane was blinded by the glare, but he could feel the leader staring at him, and he just blinked and tried to keep his face expressionless.

After half a minute the light was gone, and the leader was at Mavranos's opened window. "The man in the back there," the leader said. "What's the matter with him?"

"Oh, shit, you name it," Mavranos said.

"Is he … mentally retarded?"

"Clinically," said Mavranos, nodding. It was one of Mavranos's favorite words to give a statement authority. "He's
clinically
mentally retarded. Aren't you, Jizzbo?"

Crane was sweating, and his heart was pounding with real fear, for he could tell that his tension was close to breaking out in hysterical giggling. He bit his tongue very hard.

"You're not helping when you talk to him like that," said Ozzie.

Crane could no longer contain himself—the best he could do was to emit his hysteria as a sort of harsh, choked quacking. He coughed blood from his bitten tongue out through his nose, then snorted and leaned forward, gagging loudly.

"Jesus," said Max.