Tim Powers - Last Call (36 page)

"They've all got cars? How old are these kids?"

"They're not kids, they—"

Abruptly the boy had stopped talking, and when Mavranos looked over at him, he had seemed at first to be struggling not to cry. Then his eyes opened and rolled back, and Mavranos thought he'd have to follow Crane to the hospital, for Oliver seemed to be having a fit. A moment later, though, the boy was relaxed and staring sullenly ahead.

"You okay, boy?" Mavranos asked nervously.

"I'm not a boy."

They had not spoken again until Ozzie and Diana and Crane had joined them at the carousel bar.

Mavranos described the conversation to Crane as the bar slowly turned, and he was absently curious about Crane's not having yet touched either of his beers.

"Your sister's got a weird kid," Mavranos concluded. "It was a little boy talking, but it was as if part of him had
dried out
, kissed off childhood and become an adult by default, like I've read they can remove a gland from some kinds of larvae, and they go into a cocoon way before they should, and the adult butterfly that eventually crawls out is stunted and horrible."

Crane was thinking about this Amino Acids club and the "all in the cards" remark, and he decided he ought to get word of this to Ozzie.

Mavranos pointed at Crane's two bottles. "You gonna drink those beers?"

Crane picked one up and sniffed it; then he sighed. "No," he said. "You can have them."

Mavranos picked one up and tilted it to his mouth—then choked and put it down again. Foam was running down his neck into his collar and surging up out of the bottle neck and puddling on the table.

Mavranos coughed, then looked around in embarrassment. "I must have got some cigarette ash in it somehow. Ashes'll make 'em foam up like that."

Crane nodded, but he suspected that Susan was responsible, angered by Crane's rudeness. He had rebuffed her here, asking for the beers and then changing his mind and passing them on to a friend. "Let me buy you a Coors, Arky," he said, forcing himself to sound unconcerned. "I don't think you're going to have any luck with the other one there either."

Getting a room with cash proved to be no problem, and after Mavranos had unlocked the room door, Crane crossed to the telephone. He called the Metro police and was referred to a Detective Frits, who noted the room number.

"Oh, Mr. Crane," Frits added, "a team of officers went out Boulder Highway and found that shed. They say there's blood and broken glass and a chair with cut duct tape on it and a gun out in the sand, but there's nobody there. Car tracks behind the shed indicate he might have driven away in a very small car."

"I saw the car," said Crane quickly. "I forgot to mention it. It's a boxy little thing like a British Volkswagen, called a Morris. Covered with dust, impossible to tell the color."

"Ah. That'll help, thank you."

After Crane had hung up the phone, Mavranos opened the hall door. "I'm going out on the town, Pogo," he said. "You got your key, right?"

"Right. Have fun."

"Night like this," Mavranos said dully, "how could I not?" He left, closing the door behind him and rattling the knob to be sure it had locked.

Crane looked around the room. The carpet and chairs were bright red, and the walls were striped red and pink and blue. He turned off the light.

In the merciful near darkness he got undressed, and crawled into the window-side bed, wondering if he'd be able to sleep. He had become a night person during these last hundred hours or so, but in this town it wasn't supposed to matter.

He did manage to doze, but some hours later he opened his eyes—and tensed, sweat suddenly springing out all over him.

A rat, almost big enough to look like a possum, was clinging to the shade of the lamp across the room. Very slowly, its free paw turning and its head ducking and then coming up again so that the eyes glinted in the light from a slit between the drawn curtains, the rat was eating a big insect, one of those white beetles known as potato bugs or Jerusalem crickets, which the Spanish call
ninos de la tierra
, children of the earth. The bug, too, was moving slowly, waving its long, thick, jointed legs in the air. No sound was being made.

Crane just stared, his heart pounding, all judgment suspended.

For perhaps ten minutes he lay, stiff as a statue and hardly breathing, and watched the rat consume the beetle; and then the rat began to stop moving. First its head stopped its slow bobbing, and then the long tail, which had been flexing out in the air, curled around the body and disappeared. The bug was gone, and the rat's forepaws folded and then there was no motion from the lumpy darkness on the lampshade.

Moving as agonizingly slowly as had the animal combatants, Crane reached out and turned on the small bedside lamp next to his head.

In the sudden yellow light he saw that the dark mass on the lampshade was nothing but his shirt, tossed there carelessly when he had taken off his clothes.

Mavranos, he saw, had not yet returned. Crane got out of bed and walked over to the lamp. For a while he started at the shirt, and then he carefully lifted it away from the lampshade and tossed it into a corner.

Still suspending judgement, he got back into bed, closed his eyes, and waited for sleep to take him.

"I've seen her boyfriend going in and out," Trumbill said patiently, "but so far she hasn't showed."

He was sitting in a chair by the aluminum-frame window, wearing only a pair of baggy white shorts. Aside from the chair, there was nothing inside the stark apartment but a TV table, a telephone, two whirring fans, a Styrofoam ice chest, and the litter of used-up Ban roll-on antiperspirant tubes around the legs of the chair; he was rubbing a new tube over the vividly tattooed skin of his enormous belly.

He had hastily rented this apartment at dawn, and though the landlord had managed to hook up a phone, the air conditioner wasn't working; in spite of the antiperspirants, Trumbill was losing precious moisture.

"I'll keep on them about the air conditioner," said Betsy Reculver, who was standing behind him, "but you've got to stay here. We can't lose
her
, the way you lost Sc—lost Crane, in California." The cheap carpeting did nothing to muffle the quacking echoes of her voice.

Without looking away from the window, Trumbill held out the tube of Ban. "Do my back?"

"Forget it." He could hear the revulsion in her voice.

Trumbill shrugged and resumed rubbing it over his densely illustrated flesh, still looking out through the half-opened curtains at the white duplex across the street.

He wished he were at home doing the chores or raking his gravel garden, or driving the old Leon body somewhere in the air-conditioned Jaguar, but he could see that this had to be done. This was clearly the Diana they'd been trying to find. The police report had linked the Diana who lived at the duplex's address with Scott and Ozzie Crane, and, as Betsy had been quick to notice, the address was Isis on Venus.

"You didn't use it all?" said Betsy.

For a moment he thought she had reconsidered doing his back, but she was standing by the table and had picked up a fist-size blob of the pink Semtex.

"All of it would take out half the street," he told her. "The two golf ball-size ones I stuck in the basement grates will do fine—even with them, I won't be sitting by this window when I do it; I'll be around the corner in the hall."

"It looks like—like marzipan candy."

"Go ahead and shape it into a pig; it can't go off without a blasting cap. You could probably safely
eat
it."

She shivered and put it down. A moment later she said, "I suppose
you
like this decor."

Trumbill spared a glance around at the bare yellow walls and the flocked ceiling. "Painted white, and a lot cooler, it'd be all right."

"What have you got against …
livelier
things?"

I love them, Betsy, he thought. I just want them all to be within the boundaries of my skin. "Don't you have to go meet Newt?"

"Not till this afternoon—but very well, I'll leave you alone." He heard her footsteps scuff across the carpet toward the door. "But I'll call you every fifteen minutes or so," she added.

"You don't have to," he said, but she was already out the door and closing it behind her.

That meant she'd be on the phone with him more often than not throughout the day—unless Diana were to show. He sighed and stared at the duplex and reached into the ice chest for one of the strips of raw lamb.

The noon sun through the window glowed hot red in a prism paperweight on Detective Frits's disordered desk, but of course the office was chilly. Crane, perched in a swiveling office chair across from Frits, wished he had worn a jacket. His cup of coffee still steamed on the edge of the desk, but it was nearly gone, and he didn't want to finish it yet.

Crane had told Frits the same story he'd told the Metro officer last night, and now the detective was leafing through a notebook, apparently at random. His curly brown hair was disordered and receding from his high forehead, and when Crane first shook hands with him he had thought the tall, skinny detective had probably been a rock musician in his not-long-ago youth.

Crane's thoughts were far away from the little office and the gangly detective.

Move all-in.

Crane wasn't sure whether his hallucination last night, the vision of the rat eating the beetle, had been mild delirium tremens or not—but either way, he had decided to stay sober.

This morning, as he and Mavranos had been walking to the Circus Circus coffee shop to get some breakfast, a middle-aged woman had pushed a baby stroller into their path and asked Crane to heal her little boy by touching him. To get rid of her, Crane had sheepishly touched the boy's forehead—whatever was the matter with the child, he didn't improve visibly—but later, over his fried eggs and bacon, it occurred to Crane that she might not simply have been crazy. She might have sensed what sort of … crown prince he was.

And it occurred to him that in spite of the fact that he had taken the money for the Assumption hand in '69, Diana might not be the only one who could become the target that shoots back—who, in Ozzie's phrase, could move all-in. Maybe the way to survive was to challenge his real father on the old man's own terms.

Frits had stopped now at one page in his notebook and looked up. "So the three of you just decided to come visit your foster-sister."

Crane blinked and forced himself to pay attention to this. "Right."

"And Mavranos is your next-door neighbor, back in Santa Ana."

"Right. He's got cancer, and he hadn't ever been to Vegas."

"Your foster-father lives where?"

"I don't know," Crane said, shaking his head and smiling apologetically. "We happened to run into him on Balboa Island." He shrugged. "It was all very spur of the moment."

"Most trips here are." Frits sighed and flipped back through his notebook.

Crane nodded and reached for his coffee now with a steady hand, and he didn't let his relief show in his face or his breathing or any visible pulse.

Frits looked up, and from his smile Crane thought he was going to make another remark about spontaneous trips to Las Vegas.

"Why did you yell, 'Everybody down,' when the Porsche stopped?"

"It was obvious to me," said Crane instantly, buying the virtue of an apparently unconsidered reply at the expense of committing himself to a random beginning, "that he wasn't just a Good Samaritan, pulling over to help. There were two vehicles parked on our side, after all, head-to-head like we had jumper cables, and four adults and a couple of kids visible." He had it now. "Clearly we didn't need help. I figured he had to be a partner of the kidnapper, a lookout who'd been watching from a distance and came up fast when Arky drove up in the Suburban and got out with a gun."

"And then, in fact, he did shoot the boy."

"Right," Crane agreed. He remembered what he had told the officer last night, so he added, "But after Diana told us about the Porsche guy trying to pick up on her, and him sounding like the guy Ozzie had called a zombie the day before, it didn't seem like he was a partner of the kidnapper after all." He shook his head. "Might as well have been, the way it worked out."

Frits stared at him. Crane stared back, at first blankly and then with a faint quizzical smile, as he would have at someone taking a long time to fold or call a bluff.

"I could have you arrested," Frits said.

"For what?" Crane asked quickly, not having to fake alarm. "Shooting at the crazy kidnapper? Or after the Porsche?"

"After the Porsche, say." For a moment Frits continued to stare at him. Crane just stared back, a little more wide-eyed than before. "Where do you know Alfred Funo from?" Frits asked.

Crane exhaled. "I suppose that's the name of the guy registered next to us at the motel? I've never heard the name before. How
would
I know him? Does he live in Orange County?"

"L.A. County."

"I've never heard the man's name. I never saw the car before yesterday, unless it passed me on the freeway sometime."

After three more long seconds Frits looked back down at his papers. "You're staying at the Circus Circus?"

"Right. The room's under Mavranos's name."

"Okay." Frits sat back and smiled. "We'll be in touch. Thanks for coming in."

Crane leaned forward with a concerned frown on his face. "Look, maybe this is standard procedure, this … threatening attitude, these insinuations, but if you really think I'm
involved
in this thing, I wish you'd just say so, so I could explain whatever it is you've got wrong. I don't—"

Frits had been nodding sympathetically, and now he held up his hand, and Crane stopped talking. "Thanks for coming in," Frits said.

Crane hesitated, then put the coffee cup down on the desk. "Uh … thank you." He got up out of the chair and let himself out of the office.

Mavranos was waiting in the truck. "Didn't take long," he said as Crane climbed in and pulled the door closed. "Were Diana and Ozzie in there?"