by Tim Powers
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.
“Okay,” the tall man said. “You can go.”
Mavranos rolled the window back up, then put the car into gear and steered back onto the road and stepped on the gas.
He and Ozzie both broke out in wild laughter, and after Crane had blown his nose on one of Mavranos’s old shirts, he was laughing, too, rolling around helplessly on the litter and making sure he didn’t bump the cocked shotgun and wishing, desperately, that he had a drink.
CHAPTER 17
The Sound of Horns and Motors
When the laughter subsided, Ozzie wiped his eyes and turned around to face Crane. “You didn’t drink anything back there at Dirty Dick’s, did you?”
“Just the Coke you saw.” Crane was glad he was lying in darkness, for Ozzie had always been hard to bluff.
The old man nodded and frowned in thought, and it occurred to Crane that in the old days Ozzie would have gone on to ask, Really? Crane’s apparent maturity, and the obvious importance of what they were trying to do, clearly led the old man to trust him.
“And of course you didn’t play cards there.”
“Sure didn’t,” Crane agreed, trying not to think of the video Poker. He sat up and lifted the shotgun back into the gun case.
“Then it’s my fault,” Ozzie said quietly, “for letting you play in that damned Go Fish game. That’s the only other thing that could have alerted them.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I wonder if I’m really…quick enough for this. Mentally.”
“Jeez, you’re fine, man,” said Crane hastily. “Those guys probably didn’t have anything to do with us; they were looking for a bus or something.”
“They were after us all right; the bus business proves that. Which reminds me—pull over as soon as you can, Archimedes, we’ve got to take down our camouflage.”
“I don’t like stopping, not with those guys slamming around out here,” Mavranos said.
“They’ll catch us again if we don’t—and then that jack with the hair and the voice will wonder why this vehicle keeps looking like a crowded bus to him. What’s wrong with right here?”
“Nothin’ we can’t adapt to, I’m sure,” said Mavranos wearily, turning the wheel toward the shoulder again and tromping the brake.
“Why did we look like a bus?” asked Crane.
“Moving, we’re a very busy, agitated wave form,” said Ozzie. “Those little plastic deer whistles make a complication of ultrasonic sound waves, all interfering and amplifying and damping each other, and the blood-spotted flags are a lot of organic motion, a lot of pieces of protoplasm, all elbow to elbow with each other, changing their positions all agitatedly. And then the main thing is the cards on the wheels, which are whizzing past the cards on the fenders, so you every second get a dozen new combinations of cards. Configurations. The card configurations aren’t personalities, but of course they’re descriptions of personalities, so all in all, at a hasty glance, a psychic would tend to assume that there are a lot of people traveling in one vehicle.”
“And when we stopped, it all stopped,” Crane said. “The whistles, the flags, the cards on the wheels…”
“Right. His bus evaporated, and we were standing there. Happen twice, he’ll know we are the bus, and that the guy he’s after—which is you—is aboard this car, this truck.”
The truck was stopped, and Mavranos had got out and was tearing cards off the left front tire. The desert breeze unfolded the car’s stale interior air and threw it away into the night sky; now the car smelled of cooling stone.
“Why did he think I was retarded?”
“I don’t know. I guess you’re a blur to him, being one of the King’s victims on the one hand and a son of the King’s on the other. To a psychic you must look like a nighttime and daytime double exposure. Either way you’re somebody an ambitious jack would want to kill.”
“Hey,” called Mavranos from outside, “you two don’t mind if this takes me a little while?”
“I’m coming,” Crane called as he opened the right rear door.
“Tell Archimedes to put a tire from one side onto the other side, with the cards still on that tire and fender, so the tire’ll be moving diesel now if it was windshield before, or vice versa. And I don’t care if they’re radials.”
“Tire from one side to the other,” said Crane, nodding. “Don’t care if they’re radials.”
As he stood under the million distant bright stars in the black sky and broke the little black whistles off the car and tore the spotted flags from the luggage rack, Crane wondered if he would ever dare to drink again, after this near-calamity; and, if not, how he could possibly keep from going crazy or killing himself; and he wondered what the old man meant by diesel and windshield; and he wondered if being the King’s son meant that he was a jack himself, with a claim to whatever this mysterious throne in the wasteland was.
An anonymous sedan swept past on the highway, and in the instant that he noticed it he imagined that the woman in the passenger seat, who glanced his way for a moment, had been Susan. Now he stared after the car. The face had been expressionless, but at least had not seemed to be angry.
You did give her a nice kiss, he thought as he remembered the bourbon and beer.
When he and Mavranos had stripped all the camouflage from the Suburban, they got moving again. Mavranos kept the speedometer needle at around seventy, but they didn’t catch up to the car in which Crane had possibly seen the ghost of Susan.
After a while they drove past the bright oasis of Nevada Landing, a casino built to look like two ornate east-facing Mississippi riverboats. The mock vessels had risen from the horizon ahead, and soon they sank below the horizon behind, and then the Suburban was driving in darkness again.
Maybe she stopped there, Crane thought, climbed aboard a boat. He looked back, wondering if she’d find him again.
“Two moons,” said Mavranos around his cigarette.
Crane blinked and shifted on the rocking seat. “Hmm?” He had nearly been asleep again.
“Doesn’t that look like any-second-now moonrise up ahead? But we got the moon behind us.”
“The one ahead of us will be Las Vegas.”
Mavranos grunted, and Crane knew he was thinking about the castle of randomness.
And, slowly, the ripplingly molten white and blue and orange towers climbed up out of that bright quarter of the horizon and dimmed out the stars.
They got off I—15 at last at Tropicana Avenue, then turned left onto Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip. Even down here at the south end it was glaringly lit, with the Tropicana and the Marina and the not-yet-opened Excalibur crowding back the night sky.
“Damn,” said Crane, staring out the car window at the Excalibur’s gigantic white towers and brightly colored conical roofs. “That looks like the grandest hole in God’s own miniature golf course.”
“Excalibur,” said Mavranos thoughtfully. “Arthurian motif, I guess. I wonder if they’ve got a restaurant in there called Sir Gawain, or the Green Knight.”
Ozzie was staring back at the place. “I read there’s going to be an Italian restaurant in there called Lance-A-Lotta Pasta. Restraint and good taste all the way. But yeah, Las Vegas seems to be sort of subconsciously aware of—of what it is. What Siegel made it.”
“Ben Siegel made it Arky’s perilous chapel?” asked Crane.
“Well,” said Ozzie, “I guess he didn’t exactly make it here; he invoked it here. Before Siegel this place was just ripe for it.”
“Keep on north?” Mavranos asked.
“Yeah,” said Crane. “There ought to be a fair number of supermarkets on Charleston; that’s the first big east-west street after the Sahara.” Which, he thought, is where we found the infant Diana in ’60. God knows where we’ll find her now. “Left or right—play it by ear.”
“And find us a coffee shop sometime,” said Ozzie. “Or no, a liquor store, we can get some Cokes and ice and put ’em in this cooler. Diana’s shift probably ends at about dawn, and we’re gonna need some caffeine to keep our eyes open till then.” He yawned. “After that we can find a cheap motel somewhere.”
Mavranos glanced at Ozzie in the rearview mirror. “Tonight we hit the grocery stores,” he said, “but tomorrow we hit the casinos, right? So I can start trackin’ my…phase change.”
“Sure,” Ozzie said. “We can show you the ropes.” He shifted on the seat and leaned against Mavranos’s Coleman stove with his eyes closed. “Wake me up when you find a supermarket.”
“Right,” said Crane, staring blearily ahead.
After the grandeur of the Tropicana intersection the street dimmed to normal urban radiance until Aladdin’s, and then Bally’s and the Dunes and the Flamingo raised their towering fields of billions of synchronized light bulbs.
Crane stared at the Flamingo. The entrance doors and broad driveway sat in under a rippling red and gold and orange upsweep of lights that made the place seem to be on fire. He remembered seeing it twenty years ago, when there had only been a modest tower at the north end and a freestanding neon sign out front; and he dimly remembered the long, low structure it had been, set back from the highway by a broad lawn, when he had gone there with his real father in the late forties.
Siegel’s place, Crane thought. Later—maybe still—my father’s.
Even at midnight Fremont Street’s three broad one-way lanes shone in the white glare of the lights that sheathed Binion’s Horseshoe, and the tourists getting out of the cab were blinking around and grinning self-consciously. The fare was eleven dollars and some change, and when one of the tourists handed Bernardette Dinh a twenty, she looked at him with no expression and said, “Are we okay?”
As she’d hoped, he took it as meaning something like Is this downtown enough for you? and he nodded emphatically. She nodded, too, pocketed the twenty, and unhooked the microphone as though about to call for another fare. Too embarrassed now to ask for his change, the tourist closed the door and joined his companions, who were huddled uncomfortably in the sidewalk limelight.
Stage fright, she thought. They think everybody’s looking at them, and they’re afraid they don’t know the moves and the lines.
Strikers from the culinary and bartenders unions were walking back and forth carrying signs in front of the Horseshoe, and one of them, a young woman with very short hair, had a megaphone.
“Baaad luck,” the striker was chanting in an eerie, flat voice. “Baad luck at the ’Shoe! Come on oouut, losers!”
God, Dinh thought. Maybe I’d have stage fright, too.
Every Thanksgiving Binion’s gave a turkey to each cabdriver, and Dinh, known as Nardie to all the night people of Las Vegas, had always dropped off her downtown fares in front of the place. She wondered if she’d soon have to start unloading them back by the Four Queens.
A couple of police cars were parked across the street in front of the Golden Nugget, but the officers were just leaning against the cars and watching the strikers; the tourists on this Saturday-night-or-Sunday-morning were plentiful, ambling along the sidewalks and drifting from one side of the street to the other, lured by the racket of coins being spat into the payout wells of the slot machines, a rapid-fire clank-clank-clank that was always audible behind the car horns and the shouting of drunks and the droning blare of the striker’s megaphone. Nardie Dinh decided to wait for another fare right where she was.
Down here between these high-shouldered incandescent buildings she couldn’t see the sky—she could hardly make out the traffic signals in the sea of more insistent artificial light—but she knew that it was a just-ab
out-half-moon that hung somewhere out over the desert. Dinh knew she was working at half power—for the next few days she’d still be able to handle pennies without darkening them, to touch ivy and not wither it, wear purple without fading it and linen without blackening it.
But she was vulnerable, too; and would be all week—only able to really see through the patterns of the initialed dice at her other job, and able to defend herself only with her wits and her agility and the little ten-ounce Beretta .25 automatic under her shirt in her waistband.
In nine days the moon would be full—and by then she would have beaten both her brother and the reigning King…or she would not. If she hadn’t she would probably be dead.
A bearded man in a leather jacket was walking, apparently drunk, toward her cab. She watched him speculatively, thinking of some big losers who had in the past decided that this short, slim young Asian woman would be an easy target for robbery or rape.
But when he opened the rear passenger door and leaned in, he said, hesitantly, “Could you take me to a—a wedding chapel?”
Should have guessed, she thought. “Sure,” she said. The man’s face was pudgy and uncertain behind the bushy beard, and she knew she didn’t need to call in his ID and destination; and he looked prosperous and out of shape—no need to get a ten in advance; he wasn’t the runout type.
He got in, and she put the car in gear and pulled out into traffic. The chapels, of course, didn’t pay kickbacks on solo fares, so she decided to take him to one of the ones down below Charleston.
She stopped at a red light two blocks up, at Main, in front of the Union Plaza Hotel, and she suppressed a grin, for the hundreds of little white light bulbs over the hotel’s broad circular driveway shone in the polish on the unloading cars, making them seem to be luminously decorated for a Fremont Street wedding procession.
