Last Call

by Tim Powers

  “Yes!” yelled somebody from behind Crane.

  The man in overalls was suddenly facing Crane, crouching and holding his clasped fists toward him.

  Bam.

  An instant’s smear of white light had obscured the man’s fists, and concrete chips were hammered out of the wall at Crane’s back.

  Without thinking, almost as if something else were acting through him, Crane unzipped his jacket and hoisted out the .357; another shot exploded the edge of the curb in front of him, but he raised the revolver in both hands and pointed it at the man across the street and pulled the trigger.

  He was deafened and dazzled by the explosion, and the recoil seemed to shatter the bones in his sprained wrist; he stepped back and sat down heavily on the sidewalk.

  Two sharp bangs echoed down from Fremont Street. Crane looked in that direction, blinking against the red glare-blot floating in his vision, and he saw the thing that was both the fat man and the black sphere; it was growing in size, waving its misshapen arms as it rushed toward him.

  He stood up and cocked the pistol, dreading the thought of what another recoil would do to his wrist. Then out of the corner of his false eye he caught a glimpse of a woman standing beside him, and once again he involuntarily turned to look.

  This time she was there: a short Asian woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties; she was wearing a cabdriver’s uniform, and she grabbed his arm.

  “Shoot ’em from the cab,” she said quickly, “as we’re driving away. Hurry, get in!”

  Crane’s thumb lowered the revolver’s hammer as he scrambled into the passenger side of the cab; the young woman had already got in behind the wheel, and sudden acceleration pushed Crane hard into the seat as he pulled the door closed.

  CHAPTER 29

  Mr. Apollo Junior Himself

  Crane tucked the revolver back into his belt. Lights out, the cab made a squealing left turn onto Bridger, gunned past the dark courthouse, and caught green lights right across the Strip and into the dark tracts beyond.

  “Did I hit that guy,” panted Crane as he gripped the armrest and stared ahead at the rushing asphalt, “the one…I shot at?”

  “No,” said the driver. “But the fat man following you did. Two shots, both hits—knocked Mr. Overalls right down. Who was the fat man?”

  Crane frowned, drunkenly trying to imagine a reason for the fat man to save him.

  He gave up on it. “I don’t know, actually,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “Bernardette Dinh,” she said. She had turned right on Maryland Parkway and was now driving at a normal speed through a neighborhood of trees and streetlights and old houses.

  There were two baseball caps on the seat between them, and she picked one up and with a practiced motion pulled it on from the back of her head so that her long black hair was caught up under it. “Call me Nardie. And put on that other cap.”

  “What,” Crane asked as he put on the hat, “are you, in all this?”

  “In a minute. Open the glove box; the thing in there that looks like a mouse skin is a fake mustache, okay? Put it on.”

  Crane opened the glove box. The mustache looked more like a strip of horsehide, and when he stuck the adhesive side of it onto his unshaven upper lip, the bristles hung down over his mouth. He thought he must look like Mavranos.

  He slouched down in the seat so that the cylinder of the .357 wouldn’t poke him in the hip-bone.

  A lot of guns on Fremont Street tonight, he thought.

  The thought raised an echo in his head, and then he was laughing, softly and unhappily, for he realized that that must have been what the doomed Englishman had meant by a lot of goons.

  “We’ll circle the block around the Flamingo windshield,” said Nardie, “to make sure they don’t sense you.”

  Crane wiped his eyes on his shirt cuff. “The Flamingo windshield?”

  “Circle the place windshieldwise,” she said. “The old term is ‘widdershins,’ means counterclockwise. Opposite of ‘diesel,’ clockwise.”

  Crane remembered Ozzie’s having used those terms when he’d had him and Arky reverse the tires on the Suburban. So that’s what the old man had been talking about. Useless bullshit. He sighed and sat back in the rattily upholstered seat.

  “You reek of liquor,” said Nardie, sounding surprised. “Hard liquor! Are you drunk?”

  He thought about it. “Soberer than I was in the casino,” he said, “but yes, I’m definitely drunk.”

  “And the dice still led me to you,” she said wonderingly. “You must be the biological son, all right. Any mere…ambitious contender, like my half brother, would be disqualified forever by just a sip of beer. I’ve never tasted alcohol.”

  “Don’t start,” said Crane. The streetlights swept past overhead in bright monotony, and he was getting sleepy. “It’s not for amateurs.” He saw the lights of Smith Food and Drug ahead, where Diana had worked, but mercifully Nardie turned right onto Sahara Avenue.

  “I’m not an amateur, buddy,” she said, and her voice was so fierce that he looked over at the lean profile against the passing lights. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said. “What are you?”

  “I’m a contender. Look, I know you just met the frontrunner Queen of Hearts. I…felt it when you and she touched for the first time, Monday night. And yet here you are tonight acting against your better interests—getting drunk, letting Neal Obstadt’s guys nearly kill you.”

  “She’s dead,” Crane said remotely. “Somebody killed her, the Queen of Hearts, this morning.”

  Nardie Dinh gave him a sharp look. “This morning?”

  “Early.”

  She blinked, and then opened her mouth and shut it again. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, she’s out of the picture, then, right? Now look, you’re—” She looked over at him. “You do know what’s going on, don’t you? What you are?”

  Crane was slumped down in the seat, and his eyes were nearly shut. “I’m the bad King’s son,” he recited. “Hey, could we stop for a drink somewhere?”

  “No. Don’t you know that alcohol weakens you, puts you at the mercy of the King and all the jacks? You’ve got a good shot at unseating your father, if you don’t blow it.” She rubbed one hand over her face and exhaled. “There’s one thing, though, that you haven’t got.”

  “A diploma,” said Crane dreamily, thinking of The Wizard of Oz movie. “A medal. A testimonial.”

  “A Queen,” said Nardie impatiently. “It’s like Hold ’Em, okay? You gotta come in with a pair of cards. A King and a Queen, in this case.”

  Crane remembered that she had said she was a contender. He sat up straighter and looked hard at her with both eyes, though the vision through the false one had nearly dimmed out.

  Through the left eye she was certainly a slim Asian young woman, cute in her little uniform in spite of the hard set of her mouth; was there something different about her, viewed through his false eye? A hint of a glow, the shadow of a crescent at the front of her cap?

  “Are you, uh…volunteering?” he asked, awkwardly.

  “With the moon’s daughter dead, I’m the best there is,” she said. “I’ve been exposed to the pictures. I’ve got to assume you know what pictures I mean—”

  Crane sighed. Where was a drink? Susan was waiting for him. “Yeah, I know the goddamn pictures.” Out the passenger side window he saw a sign—ART’S PLACE, LOUNGE AND RESTAURANT—GRAVEYARD SPECIALS. Those are the only specials this town seems to have, he thought.

  “And for years I haven’t eaten red meat or anything cooked in an iron pan, and”—she glared at him—“and I’m a virgin.”

  Jesus. “That’s good—your name was what? I’m sorry.”

  “Nardie Dinh.”

  “That’s good, Nardie. Listen, you seem like a nice girl, so I’m going to give you some really, really good advice, okay? Get out of Las Vegas and forget all this. Go to New York, go to Paris, go far away, and never play cards. You’ll only get killed if you get invol
ved with this stuff. My God, you saw a guy get shot just a few minutes ago, doesn’t that—”

  “Shut,” she said, “the—fuck—up.”

  Her hands were clenched on the wheel, and her breath was whistling through her flared nostrils. She was half his age, but Crane found himself cringing away from her, his face reddening under her evident rage.

  “Osiris!” she spat. “Adonis, Tammuz, Mr. Apollo Junior himself—not just a broken-winded old drunk, but a—a blind, fatuous idiot, too! Christ, you make my brother look good, I swear.”

  The cab was stopped now, idling in the left-turn lane facing the Strip intersection. “Look,” said Crane stiffly, yanking the door lever, “I’ll get out here—”

  She stomped the gas pedal and lashed the cab out into the Strip traffic, tugging the wheel around to make the left turn in the jiggling glare of oncoming headlights. The opened passenger-side door swung out on its hinges, and Crane braced himself with his feet and his left hand on the dashboard to keep from tumbling right out onto the rushing pavement; horns honked and tires screeched, and Crane heard at least one bang behind them as she straightened the wheel and sped down the fortunately open southbound lanes.

  Crane relaxed a little, and when the head wind blew the opened door back in line, he grabbed the handle and pulled it closed so hard that the handle broke off in his hand.

  A car’s a lethal weapon, he thought, and I don’t want to die any soberer than I have to. Humor this lunatic.

  “What I meant—” he began, in a grotesquely light, conversational tone, but she interrupted him.

  “Oh, no,” she said in a mock-bright voice, “do let me finish my thought, dear.” She was driving fast, passing other cars as the hideous pink and white giant clown in front of the Circus Circus swept by on Crane’s side. “Let’s see. First off, I’m not a girl, okay? I don’t think I ever was. And I’m not nice—I knifed an old woman in a house near Tonopah on New Year’s Eve, and I really hope that my brother is the only one I’m going to have to kill between now and Easter. But I won’t hesitate to…. If your Queen of Hearts wasn’t dead, I wouldn’t have hesitated to kill her, if she’d got in my way.” She seemed to have talked away her anger, and now she shook her head almost bewilderedly. “If I was a nice girl, I couldn’t save your life.”

  Crane had relaxed back into the seat again and was consciously having to flex his eyelid muscles to keep them open. “I don’t think you can anyway, Nardie,” he said. “My father’s got his hooks into me pretty deep. I don’t think there’s been any hope for me since ’69, when I played Assumption on his houseboat.”

  Nardie made an abrupt right turn into the parking lot of Caesars Palace, sped up the driveway, and parked in the line at the cabstand.

  She shifted around on the seat to face him. Her eyes were wide. “You played Assumption?”

  Crane nodded heavily. “And…won, so to speak. I took money for my conceived hand.”

  “But…no, why would he do that? You were already his son.”

  “He didn’t know that. I didn’t know that.”

  “How the hell did you wind up there, on his boat? Were you drawn to it or something?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I was a professional Poker player, like my foster-father. It was a Poker game.”

  “Get out of the car.”

  Crane held up the broken-off handle. “You’ll have to let me out.”

  In a moment she had opened her door and run around the front bumper and had pulled open his door.

  He got out and stood up and stretched in the hot, dry air.

  “Some good advice?” said Nardie, looking up at him with an unreadable stare.

  Crane smiled. “I guess it is your turn.”

  “No offense, but I really think the best thing you can do, at this point, is kill yourself.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  She walked back around to the open driver’s-side door and got in. As the car was shifted into gear, Crane noticed a sticker on the rear bumper: ONE NUCLEAR FAMILY CAN RUIN YOUR WHOLE DAY.

  After she had driven away, he stared for a while across Las Vegas Boulevard at the enormous surging neon pyre that was the Flamingo.

  When it began to loom larger in his sight, he realized that he was walking toward it. They’ll have a room available on a Wednesday night, he thought.

  CHAPTER 30

  Work Up to Playing with Trash

  Susan had, of course, been waiting for him—hungrily. He had quickly got out of his clothes and crawled into bed with her, and they had made desperate love for hours.

  Crane hadn’t even been aware of the point when his consciousness had finally been pounded away into the oblivion of sleep—there had been a full bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon in the hotel room, and he had pulled his mouth free from Susan’s hot wetness whenever she began to deflate under him, and he had each time taken yet another slug from the bottle to restore her sweaty, demanding solidity—but when he woke up, hours later, it was with an almost audible crash.

  He was lying naked on the carpet in a patch of sunlight, and for several minutes he didn’t move at all beyond working his lungs; the abused machinery of his strength was entirely occupied with trying to hold back the pains that were drawn tight through his body and seemed to have stitched him to the floor. His head and groin were the unthinkably stained, dried-out husks of run-over animals by the side of some savage highway.

  Eventually one thought made its way through his mind like a man climbing through the roofless, wreckage-choked hallway of a bombed-out house: If that was sex, I am ready to gladly embrace Death.

  From where he lay he could see the Wild Turkey bottle, empty and lying on its side on the rug. He realized dully that he was completely blind in his false eye again.

  For a while he had no further thoughts. He climbed up onto his knees—noting dizzily that the disarranged bed, though stained with blood and bourbon, was empty—and then got all the way up onto his feet. He swayed perilously as he tottered to the uncurtained window.

  He must have been on about the tenth floor. Below him was a big swimming pool in the shape of an oval with its ends dented in, and framing the pool on the east side like a parenthesis was the scabrous roof of a building he recognized at once, despite seeing it from above for the first time.

  It was the original three-and four-story Flamingo building, dwarfed and diminished by the mirror-glass high-rise towers that now surrounded it on three sides and hid it from the Strip, and he was obscurely depressed to see that concrete, and pink chaise lounges with tanned bodies on them, covered the spot where Ben Siegel’s rose garden had stood.

  He lurched away from the window and shakily picked up his pants. If thine eye offendeth thee, pluck it out, he thought; and if thine alertness offendeth thee, go out and find something to drown it with.

  There was a liquor store on Flamingo Road just behind the hotel’s multi-story parking structure, and after walking up and down its narrow aisles for a while, he fumbled a hundred-dollar bill loose from one of the wads in his pocket and paid for two six-packs of Budweiser and—it seemed important—a cheap leather Jughead-style crown-cap with silver-painted plastic animals hung all over it and LAS VEGAS printed in gold across the front. The clerk had no trouble making change for a hundred.

  Crane put the cap on his head and tucked the bagged six-packs under his arm and started walking back toward the Flamingo. After a few steps in the hot sun he dug one of the cans out of the paper bag and popped it open. Legal to drink on the street in this town, he told himself.

  He took a sip of the cold, foamy stuff and smiled as it cooled the overheated machinery of him. And malt does more than Milton can, he thought, quoting A.E. Housman, To justify God’s ways to man.

  He was walking more slowly now, enjoying the dry sun-heat of the morning on his face, and he began to sing:

  “Makin’ breakfast of a…pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop…six-pack,

  I fought the dri-ink and the…drink won,
<
br />   I fought the dri-ink and the…drink won.”

  He laughed, took another deep sip, and started another song:

  “I’m back on the sauce again,

  Gonna take up…that old True Cross again

  Gonna welcome that loss again,

  Remembering nothing, woe woe, remembering nothing.”

  Half a dozen men were sitting in a circle next to a Dumpster behind the liquor store, and Crane turned his wavering steps toward them.

  When he approached to within a few yards of the Dumpster, they looked up warily, and he saw that they were playing some card game. Five of the men were in their twenties or thirties, but the sixth looked as if he were about a hundred years old; he was wearing a lime green polyester leisure suit, and his bony hands and bald head were stippled with brown spots.

  One of the younger men gave Crane an unfriendly look. “You got a problem, Sluggo?”

  Crane grinned, remembering that he had left his gun up in his room somewhere. “A problem?” he said. “Yeah, I got a problem. I got a bunch of beer here, and I can’t find anybody who’ll drink it with me.”

  The man relaxed and smiled, though he was still frowning. “Around here we help out strangers. Sit down.”

  Crane sat down on the asphalt with his back against the hot metal of the Dumpster. They were playing Lowball Poker, in which the worst hand wins, for quarters—though when a raise came around, he saw that the very old man was betting with the brown ovals of flattened pennies.

  “Doctor Leaky gets to play with junk ’cause he buys the liquor,” explained the one who had challenged Crane; his name seemed to be Wiz-Ding. “If you keep up the good work, maybe you can work up to playing with trash, too.”

  Crane managed to find a couple of dollars’ worth of quarters in his pockets, and he played a few hands, but, like yesterday, he kept getting pat high Trips and Full Boats, which were loser hands in Lowball.