Tim Powers - Last Call (18 page)

A car alarm in the Norm's parking lot started up, monotonously honking
beep … beep … beep
as a couple of shabbily dressed men walked hastily away down the sidewalk. Stupid bums, Funo thought.

"It's," said the voice at the other end, "shit … I can't remember the name. Jim's the one who knows it, and he's on his way back … right now, matter of fact. Why don't you pick up Ozzie and Diana and bring them over to the house? Or just give me their numbers, sure. I—"

"I can't right now," said Funo. "How about if I call back soon, when Jim'll be home?" He spoke loudly, for he could hear the car alarm both directly and, more faintly, over the telephone.

"Could you give me their numbers?" asked the agitated young man. "Where do they live? Diana he 'specially needs to see."

"I don't know exactly, they're friends of friends. When can I call and catch Jim?"

"God, I don't know how long either of us is gonna be able to hang around here. Uh—are you at a number where Jim can get hold of you?"

Funo looked around at the gas station lot. "For the next half hour anyway, sure. Got a pencil?" He read off the number of the pay phone.

"Okay," said the voice on the other end, "got it. We'll get back to you quick."

"Thanks," said Funo. "I really appreciate it. I mean it."

He hung up the phone.

Something was bothering him, and he always paid attention to his hunches. What was it? That noise, the car horn honking on and on …

He'd heard it over the telephone as well as directly. Therefore, the young man at the other end had probably heard it both ways, too, and would know that Funo was calling from a nearby outdoor telephone.

Funo quickly folded himself into the Porsche and drove across Third and parked behind a Pioneer Chicken restaurant, then walked inside and sat at a table from which, through the tinted glass, he could watch the gas station. If nothing happened within half an hour, he would drive to another phone and call again.

Within five minutes the gray Jaguar had pulled into the Chevron station, and the fat man hauled his startling bulk out of the driver's seat. He looked at the telephone, and then for several seconds looked around at the nearby cars and pedestrians. After a while he stumped over to the cashier window and talked to whoever was inside.

Funo's heart was thumping, and a twitchy grin bared his teeth. Pretty good, he thought. They could tell I was within earshot to the north. I wonder what they had for south—another car horn, in a different pitch or cadence? A barking dog? A realistic-looking street lunatic chanting about Jesus?

Through the tinted window Funo watched as the fat man got back into the idling Jaguar, and for several minutes just sat there behind the wheel; then the car moved off, turning left onto Third Street, back toward Crane's place.

The Jaguar had a Nevada license plate. Funo wrote down the number.

The Commerce Casino was the first one Crane saw, a gigantic cubical building that from the front looked like some ancient Mediterranean temple, with its arched entrance and gold pillars and expanses of windowless wall, and looked like a prison from around in the back lot, where they had to park. There was even a little guard tower back there. To the south side of the casino a dozen high-tension electrical cables hung from the skeletal silver shoulders of a line of tall towers that marched away to the north and south; on the long, narrow plot of land under the towers, as if nourished by the electromagnetic fields, knee-high pine trees grew in dense rows.

Ozzie stared back at the cables and the trees as he and Crane and Mavranos slowly walked toward the building, and he muttered something about evergreens under hydroelectric power.

Mavranos told him that land under power lines wasn't good for much, and that a lot of such stretches were used as Christmas tree farms. "Come back here on New Year's Day, you see nothing but dirt."

Ozzie nodded, frowning.

The inside of the casino was one vast room; when a person had walked in through one of the several glass doors, street level became just the level of a wide, raised, railed walkway that ran all the way around the acre of playing floor five steps below. Tables and chairs and couches lined the rails, and doors in the high walls opened onto a delicatessen, a bar, a banquet room, a gift shop, and even a hair salon. Mirrored pillars, square in cross-section, rose to the high mirrored ceiling.

Mavranos sat down to have a beer, and Crane and Ozzie split up.

Crane hopped down the nearest set of steps to the playing floor and then limped through the maze of tables.

The games were quick, the house dealers shuffling low to the table and then skimming the cards out across the green felt, the players checking and folding and betting so inconspicuously and rapidly that Crane several times found himself unable to tell whose bet it was, or what the amount. Some of the players had hamburgers—or even full dinners, with mashed potatoes and gravy—on little wheeled wooden carts beside them, and they found a calm second or two now and then in which to bend over the food and shovel some into their mouths without taking their eyes from the table.

Crowds of Asians stood around tables where some game was being played that involved dice in a brass cup as well as cards, and the chips being shoved back and forth in tall stacks were the black hundred-dollar ones. The hasty diners around these tables all seemed to be eating noodles with chopsticks.

Under the frequent loudspeaker announcements—"JT, One and Two-Stud," "DF for the one-three Hold 'Em"—were the constant click and rattle of chips.

Crane gave his initials to the floorman who was working the five- and ten-dollar Five-Card Draw chalkboard, and while he waited for his turn to get a seat at a table, he leaned against the rail and watched the nearest game.

It was as fast as the others he'd watched, with the white plastic disk that indicated the honorary dealer moving around the table at nearly the pace of a plate of food being passed at a Thanksgiving dinner, and he noticed that players had to chant, "Time … time … time," if they wanted to consider their next actions without risking being passed over.

For the first time since his teens, Crane felt intimidated by the idea of getting into a poker game with strangers. It's like some kind of fast, complicated folk-dance, he thought, that I'm not sure I know all the moves to.

"SC, five-ten Draw," said the floorman into his microphone.

Crane hopped down the steps and waved, and then walked to the indicated seat. The people at his table all seemed to have been there for at least hours, and seemed to have grown old in this room or others like it.

Crane bought a couple of stacks of yellow five-dollar chips and waited for his first hand. The dealer, an expressionless woman in the house uniform, shuffled and whirled out the cards. Crane was the first person dealt to, and he belatedly noticed that the dealer button lay in front of the bearded man to his right.
I'm under the gun,
he thought.

Crane gathered in his cards and curled up the corners—and repressed a smile. In a textbook example of first-timer's luck, he had been dealt a pat Full Boat, Tens over Queens. He passed, and then raised when the bet came around to him after someone else had opened; and when the draw came, he tossed out the two Queens, face up. "I know I can fill this Flush!" he remarked cheerfully.

The irrational move got some raised eyebrows and muttering from the others at the table—but one of the two cards he was now dealt was the last Ten, giving him Four of a Kind. Five people besides him stayed, and two of them were still in for the showdown after three raises. There was complete silence at the table when he showed his hand and swept the stack of yellow and tan chips into his corner.

On the next hand he had a Two, Five, Seven, Nine, and Ten, unsuited. Someone opened, someone else raised, and Crane raised again, and then raised again when the bet came around one more time. At the draw he threw all five of his cards away and asked for five more.

This time a couple of players muttered angrily, as though Crane were making fun of the game.

His new cards were a Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, and Queen, again unsuited. When the bet came around to him, he shook his head and threw the cards down face up. "Almost caught the Straight that time," he said, frowning thoughtfully.

After this he played tight, staying only with a pair of Aces or better before the draw and only with a very high Two Pair or better after it, and the lunatic image he had established with the first two hands impelled at least one of the other players to call him every time he stayed.

He had won about $350 when, after an hour and a half of play, he glanced at the ashtray and saw the smoke from his current Camel beginning to swirl in toward the center of the table. He looked at his tepid glass of Coke: The level was off, dipping toward the table.

It was before the draw, and he was holding three Hearts, Jack high, and the Joker. He would have liked to stay and try for the Flush, but he put the cards down on the table and pushed them away from him.

He gathered up his chips, tossed four yellow ones to the dealer, and stood up. "Thanks, everybody," he said, and walked away between the tables and up the stairs to where Mavranos sat drinking a Coors at a table by the rail.

"Check out the smoke," Mavranos said after Crane pulled up another chair and sat down.

Crane could see it at the nearest table, where a five-and ten-dollar Hold 'Em game was in progress: A little cloud was gathering over the center of the table.

Mavranos lit up a Camel and puffed, and the smoke drifted away over the sunken floor of the playing area. "And my beer's crooked," he said.

"Where's Ozzie?"

"He's in that Seven-Card Stud to the right there."

Crane stood up and walked over to the section of brass rail nearest Ozzie's game.

The old man was looking at the cigarette in the tray by his chair, and the dealer had to remind him that it was his bet.

The players were about to be dealt the seventh card, and there were only two staying with Ozzie, for the old man had three Queens showing and the other two hands showed only low pairs.

Ozzie turned his three Queens over and pushed the cards toward the center of the table.

A cocktail waitress walked past Crane, and he was about to wave at her … but then he thought of Ozzie's three abandoned Queens. Gotta make sacrifices, he thought. He sighed and turned back to watch the table.

One of the remaining two players had won with a Full Boat, and as the man scooped in the chips, Crane idly wondered what sort of luck the man had sold.

Ozzie stayed in all the hands now, folding only after what Seven-Stud players called Sixth Street, the sixth card dealt. Even at the rail Crane could see that the old man's play was drawing the attention of the other players; at one point Ozzie folded showing a high Two Pair when nothing else at all showed on the board.

Crane drank three Cokes while he watched, and smoked half a pack of Camels. The smoke kept swirling out over the tables, and Ozzie kept folding before the showdown.

And so Crane was surprised when in one hand, finally, Ozzie hesitated at Sixth Street.

The old man was showing a Two of Spades, a Three of Clubs, a Five of Diamonds, and a Nine of Hearts.

One of his opponents showed four Hearts, and another showed Two Pair, black Kings and Tens. The Two Pair bet ten dollars, and the four Hearts raised it ten—strongly representing a Flush, thought Crane.

"Twenty to the Nine," said the dealer to Ozzie.

He looks a hundred years old, thought Crane anxiously as he stared at his foster father. The old man's eyes were down, looking at his cards.

"Time," said Ozzie, so quietly that Crane could deduce what he said only from the motion of his wrinkled lips. "Time … time … time …"

The smoke was a funnel over the table, and the constant undertone of clicking chips suddenly sounded shriller to Crane, like the whirling of a rattlesnake's tail. The air-conditioned breeze was as dry as the breath of the desert.

Ozzie was shaking his head. "Time!" he said again, loud enough this time now for even Mavranos to hear him and look up from his beer.

Ozzie's lip was curled now in something like defiance or resentment, and he looked up. "And ten," he said clearly, pushing forward three tan chips.

Crane saw the other players look curiously at this old contender, whose best hand could only be Two Pair, Nines and Fives. From their point of view he could only be hoping to fill a Full Boat, and the Kings and Tens looked like being a better one.

The man with the Kings and Tens raised, and so did the man with the probable Flush.

Ozzie pushed more chips out.

He sighed. "Call," he said.

The dealer spun another, face down, to each of the players.

The Kings and Tens bet, and the Flush raised.

"Call," said Ozzie clearly, pushing more chips forward.

It was the showdown now, and the players flipped their down cards face up.

The Kings
were
a Full Boat, Kings over Tens, which beat the Heart Flush Crane had expected. Ozzie's hand, which he exposed almost ceremonially, was the showing Two, Three, Five, and Nine, and, down, the Eight of Diamonds, the Ace of Spades, and the Four of Hearts.

Nothing at all. The other players must have thought he'd been trying to fill a Straight—which would have been beaten by either a Flush or a Boat, which the other hands had been, and had looked to be all along.

Ozzie pushed his remaining chips toward the dealer as a tip, then stood up and walked across the burgundy carpet toward the far stairs. Crane looked back to Mavranos and cocked his head after the old man. Mavranos nodded and stood up, bringing his beer with him as they walked around the sunken playing floor.

Ozzie was standing by an awning with PLAYERS CORNER scripted above it in neon. "I'm having a drink or two," he announced. "You," he said to Scott, "are sticking to coffee or Coke or something, right?"

Crane nodded, a little jerkily.

Slowly, but with his bony chin well up, the old man led Crane and Mavranos into the bar and to a tartan-patterned booth against the back wall.