Tim Powers - Last Call (63 page)

As if choreographed, each of the ragged players tore the rubber band off his bundle and riffled incredulously through the bills.

"On this basis," said the young man who had spoken, "you can call any game at all, dude." He stuck out a grimy hand. "I'm Dopey."

Crane decided that the young man meant it was his nickname. He shook his hand. "Glad to meet you." Crane had kept one of the bundles for himself, and he now peeled off a dollar and tossed it onto the asphalt in the middle of the circle. "Everybody ante a buck."

Doctor Leaky was blinking and shaking his head. "No," he said, on a rising note almost as if it were a question. "I'm not going to play with you." His trembling right hand scratched aimlessly at the empty crotch of his lime green pants.

All the others had tossed in their antes.

"Pot's not right," said Crane softly, "Dad."

The last word visibly jarred Doctor Leaky. He gaped at the bills on the parking lot pavement, and then down at his pile of flattened pennies and holed chips. Then, slowly, he reached down and pushed one of the chips forward. "Pot's right," he muttered.

"Okay," said Crane. He was tense, but he put easy assurance into his voice. "This game is sort of Eight-Card Stud, but you gotta make your hand by buying someone else's."

And as he took the fixed-up deck of Bicycle cards out of his pocket and shuffled them, he began, carefully and clearly, to explain the rules of Assumption.

Tonight it starts.

Tall and muscular and still genuinely dark-haired at the age of seventy-five, and immaculate now in a suit, the Art Hanari body stood in the sun by the curb in front of La Maison Dieu's front doors, waiting impatiently for the ordered limousine.

From behind the blue eyes in the unlined, sunlamp-tanned face, Georges Leon watched the big camouflage-painted trucks trundle past along Craig Road. La Maison Dieu, at the north end of North Las Vegas, was a discreet complex of green-lawned condominiums and medical facilities tucked between the Craig Ranch Golf Course and the Nellis Air Force Base Pumping Station, and most of the traffic out here was military vehicles.

Tonight the game starts,
he thought.

Getting out of this glorified old folks' home had proved to be more difficult than he had anticipated. When, as Betsy Reculver, he had put this perfect body away here for safe-keeping, he had made sure that the contract stipulated that Hanari was free to leave at any time he might choose—but when he had tried to exercise that clause yesterday morning, the staff had tried to block him, had got the security men to tie him to his bed and refused to fetch his clothes.

In a way he couldn't blame them. After dying on the linoleum floor of the hospital cafeteria yesterday morning, strangling on his own closed bronchial tubes and then feeling his heart agonizingly seize up and stop in his chest, he had awakened in his bed here—in his only remaining body. When his heartbeat had slowed down and his breathing was under control, he had pushed the button that summoned his caretaker—but when the man had arrived, and Leon had opened the Hanari mouth to ask to be released, it had been the voice of a querulous old woman that had come out of him.

It had been the voice of Betsy Reculver, moaning about being abandoned in the desert and about to lose her body. And then he had heard Richard's voice resonating out past his helpless vocal cords and chattering teeth, droning on about sitting on a bungalow roof in the rain; and of course after that had come old Beany with Poker talk, chortling over rolled-up Trips that had become Aces-Full on Fifth Street.

When Leon had finally got control of the body and, in measured tones, asked to be released, the caretaker had at first dismissed the request entirely. When Leon had insisted, threatening legal action, they had tried to call Betsy Reculver or Vaughan Trumbill, and of course they had not succeeded.

Finally, this morning, they had decided to wash their hands of him, and had had him sign every sort of declaration and waiver. They had even videotaped him, to have evidence that he seemed to be in his right mind.

And at last they had let him get dressed and call a limousine and walk out. They'd been very friendly then, patting him on the back—something he hated—and telling him to be sure to come back for a visit sometime. His physical therapist had made some remark about finally getting some use out of the penile implant, and had winked, but Leon hadn't even wanted to stay long enough to file a complaint.

He had to find Doctor Leaky and then prepare for the game. He would have to call Newt and remind him to have thirteen players ready at the Lake Mead marina dock at sunset.

But he had to find Doctor Leaky first of all.

All day yesterday, when he was not arguing with the staff, Leon had been brooding, and then nearly panicking, about something old Doctor Leaky had said in the hospital cafeteria.

The cards aren't fooled by any of the rest of it,
the wrecked old body had said at first.
The people in Doom Town, and all the human-sacrifice statues around town.

Leon had suspected for years that the mannequins in the built-to-be-bombed houses out at Yucca Flats in the 1950s had been, unknown even to the technicians who had set them up, sacrifices to the gods of chaos that were about to be invoked by the detonation of the atomic bomb, and it had seemed to him, too, that the multitude of statues around Las Vegas, from the stone Arabs in front of the Sahara on the Strip to the towering figure of Vegas Vic over the Pioneer Club on Fremont Street, exposed constantly to the sun and the rain, were offerings to the random patterns of the weather, another manifestation of the chaos gods. Chaos and randomness, after all, in the form of gambling, were the patron saints of this city and had to be appeased.

If the cards, the personifications of randomness and chaos, weren't fooled by those tokens of human sacrifice, it didn't really bother Leon.

But the old body,
his
old body, had gone on to say,
All your Fijis that died, too, they haven't changed anything. It's still just me.

Belatedly it had occurred to Leon that this might refer to the bodies he had inhabited that had died, Reculver and all the rest of them; perhaps Doctor Leaky had meant
effigies
, and that these token deaths that Leon had suffered were not fooling the cards.

It's still just me.

Maybe, in spite of all his body switching, Leon was still fated to die when the senile, emasculated Doctor Leaky body died.

The Hanari body shuddered, and Leon snapped its fingers in a passion of impatience.

He had taken such shabby, contemptuous care of the broken-brained old thing all these years! He had avoided death only by chance many times, if this guess was true. Yesterday he had even hoped that the police would kill it!

He had to assume that what it had said was true, and take measures. A week and a half ago, on the same night when he had sensed the big jack and the big fish crossing the Nevada border, a thought had come from nowhere into his head: the notion of a chicken heart, cut out of the chicken and kept artificially alive for many many times the normal lifetime of a chicken. Grown now to the size of a couch.

Right now
, before starting the preparations for this new game on the lake, he had to find the Doctor Leaky body and put it somewhere safe. Afterward Leon would bribe or terrorize some doctor into cutting out the heart and keeping it pumping for decades, and then passing it on to other doctors so that it would keep beating for centuries, and grow no doubt to the size of a house.

The mind that was Georges Leon would still be immortal, still be King.

He could see the limousine sedately approaching up Craig Road now, moving past the grassy hills of the golf course.

Your next stop, Leon thought at the driver, who was invisible behind the tinted windshield, is that parking lot behind the liquor store where the old fool always plays cards with bums.

And you're going to move a good deal faster.

The sun was nearly overhead now, and Crane had twice had to give one of the players money to run back to the liquor store for more beer.

Now the deal had finally come back around to Crane—he was grateful that by common consent Doctor Leaky was not expected to deal—and he shuffled rapidly and thoroughly and spun the cards out to the players. Two each down, and then one up to bet on.

At first the players had objected to the four extra cards Crane had put into the deck, four Kings with the letters
KN
laundry-markered across the faces, but Crane had finally got them to agree to accept the cards as Knights, ranking between Jacks and Queens, and it had taken several hands before they caught on to the way the bidding worked and how a player could often make more money by selling the unconceived four-card hand than by buying somebody else's four and staying in for the showdown; but for the last several hands the game had gone smoothly. A couple of the players, including Dopey, had substantially increased their stacks, and Crane had had to give additional cash-rolls to two players and agree to do the same for the rest of them.

But Doctor Leaky had still not bought a hand, and seemed to be getting restless. He had wet his pants, and the smell of urine evaporating on the hot pavement seemed to bother him.

Crane had been hesitant to interfere with whatever natural processes might be at work here, but the game on the lake was supposed to start tonight, and Doctor Leaky looked as if he were ready to leave.

"You know," he said to the body of his father, "you
can
buy a hand from somebody."

From under the rose-decked straw hat Doctor Leaky gave him a glance behind which Crane almost imagined he could perceive a spark of intelligence. "You think I don't know the rules, Scotto?"

Staring into those well-remembered eyes, even though now they were pouched in dry, wrinkled skin, made Crane feel small and futile, and he found that his own gaze had dropped.

For relief he looked around the parking lot as the bet went around the circle. Mavranos's blue truck was parked at the far end of the lot, and a taxicab was idling not far away from it, and now a shiny black limousine was turning in from Flamingo Road.

"Your bet, Scotto," said one of the players.

Crane saw that Doctor Leaky had pushed three copper ovals into the pot, wincing as though they were painfully hot. Crane threw in three dollar bills and dealt everybody a second up card.

"Ace bets," he said, nodding to the player on his left.

Then he heard heavy tires grind to a halt close behind him, and he turned around in alarm.

The limousine had stopped a couple of yards away from where he sat, and a back door opened, and a man stepped out. He was tall and tanned and dark-haired—Crane had never seen him before, but he recognized the gold sun-disk on a chain around the man's neck. It was identical to the one Ricky Leroy had worn when he had hosted the game on the lake in '69.

This,
Crane thought with a sudden hollowness in his chest, is
really
my father.

The front of the man's pants bulged, and Crane wondered bewilderedly what there might be about this scene to give him such a rampaging hard-on.

Crane got slowly to his feet, aware of the stiffness in his leg and the pain in his side but aware, too, of the bulk of the revolver in his jacket pocket.

His fingertips were ringing like struck tuning forks. I could shoot him right now, he thought. But what good would that do if he's got another couple of bodies he can switch into? And look at all these witnesses; even that taxi is moving forward.

"We're in the middle of a hand right now," Crane said, trying with some success not to let tension drive his voice up into the falsetto range. "But we can deal you in on the next one."

The tall man turned his calm, unlined face on the cards that lay on the pavement. "It's Razz you're playing now, no doubt," he said. "Always low end for you people. Well, Doctor Leaky is going to have to forfeit his hand, I'm afraid. I'll fade his investment in the pot." He reached into his coat and pulled out a leather billfold.

"The doctor will finish playing the hand," Crane said.

The eyes in the smooth brown face focused on Crane. "You're Scott Crane, aren't you?" The face didn't smile. "You do get around. Go play high-end for big money somewhere; you'll do better, take my word for it." He looked down at the old man in the wet pants. "Come along, Doctor," he said, "we've got to get you cleaned up."

Crane put his left hand on Doctor Leaky's bony shoulder, holding the old man down. "He's going to finish the hand."

Crane heard Dopey's voice from behind him: "Jesus, who cares? Let the old man go."

"Why don't you wait for him over there?" Crane said to the tall stranger who was his father. "This should only last another couple of minutes."

The man's eyebrows rose just enough to express puzzlement. "I said I'd cover his bets with cash." He shook his head. "Oh, very well, I'll wait." He started to turn back toward the limousine.

But then one of the players said, "Good, I want to buy the old guy's King and Knight."

And when the tall man turned back from the limousine, there was a snub-nosed revolver in his hand.
"No,"
he shouted,
"he is not to play Assumption!"

For a moment the man's eyes were on Doctor Leaky, and in one smooth motion Crane drew his own revolver and with all his strength cracked the butt of it into the tall man's face.

The tall body fell heavily against the side of the limousine and then clopped and thudded in a limp heap to the pavement, bright red blood already masking the face and spotting the gray asphalt.

Several of the players had started to get to their feet, but Crane turned the gun on them.

"Sit down. We're going to finish this hand."

The limousine was clanked into gear and drove away, the back door still open and swinging. Slowly and tensely the players sat back down.

"Ace bets," Crane said again. "Hurry." God, he thought, how long before the limo driver calls the police on the car phone he undoubtedly has?