Tim Powers - Last Call (40 page)

He would have to get out of town as soon as possible. In addition to the police, Vaughan Trumbill would be after him … and Funo could feel a tension in the air, as if someone were leaning harder and harder against a plate glass window, or as if a fever were rising somewhere, with convulsions and hallucinations. Something was going to happen here, and it would probably involve the fat man and Scott and Diana, and Funo wanted to be safely back in L.A. in one of his alternate identities when it broke.

He rolled over on the narrow seat and tried to ignore the drumming of the rain on the roof. Better get some sleep, he told himself, if you're going to go make up with Diana tomorrow.

At dawn Diana ordered up a pot of coffee from the Circus Circus's room service. Oliver was still asleep in the bed, but she carried her steaming cup to the phone and dialed the number of Ozzie's room.

"Mph. Hello?" His old voice was scratchy. "Diana?"

"Yes," she said. "I—"

"Where are you calling from? Did you go to the hospital yesterday? I told you to stay away—"

She pressed her lips together. "No, I didn't go. I chickened out. Scat wouldn't have known I was there anyway, of course, but I still feel like—like I'm deserting him. Oz, listen, I"—she laughed uncomfortably—"took a shower in the rain last night, and I believe I saw my mother. I got the idea that I couldn't approach her, couldn't talk to her, because I'm not a virgin."

Oliver was awake now, she noticed. The boy rolled his eyes and mimed gagging himself with his forefinger.

Ozzie said, "Give me a minute." She heard the old man put the phone down, and then faintly she heard water running. After a while he came back on. "I wish you
were
still a virgin," he said grumpily. "The young men you—never mind. Okay, that may be true, I think it might be important that the daughter of the moon be a virgin. But you
are
still her actual biological daughter; there may be some way to … symbolically get your virginity back, you know? Was there any hint of hope?"

"Well, there was a thought, right at the end, after I asked her if there was a way for me to reach her. It was an idea, something like 'relic,' or 'link.' Something from when I was with her, back thirty years ago. I've been thinking about this most of the night; and I think if I could get some
thing
that belonged to her, to the Lady Issit, connecting me with her, I could reach her."

"God, I don't know how you'd do that. I suppose if you could find out where she came from or something—"

"Oz, that old baby blanket you brought me home in, when you and Scott came out here in 1960—was that something you had brought with you in the car, or did you find me in it?"

"Yes!" said the old man excitedly. "Yes, you were wrapped up in it, when I found you there behind the bushes! Do you still have it?"

"Well, not on me. But I think I know where it is at home. I'm going to send Oliver to your room. If I don't get killed getting the blanket this morning, I'll have you paged in the—the lobby of the Riviera, that's right across the street, at ten this morning. If I ask for Oliver Crane, you'll know I'm all right; if it's for Ozzie Smith, you'll know they've got me, and I'll want you to take my boy Oliver to the house of a friend of mine in Searchlight. Her name's Helen Sully, she's in the book, I used to work with her. Helen Sully, write it down, okay? She'll be happy to put him up; she's got a lot of kids of her own." Despite her resolve to be cool and businesslike about all this, there were tears on her cheeks and her voice quavered when she went on. "Have Scott do everything he can to protect Scat, even die; it's his fault my boy got shot."

Oliver had sat up in bed, but his expression was one of languid impatience. "I don't want to go somewhere with the old man," he began, but his mother silenced him with a wave.

"No, Diana," Ozzie was saying, his voice shaky, "I'll go, they won't care about me—"

"You wouldn't know where to look for it, Ozzie; it might not be exactly where I think it is. I'll be quick—no, listen to me, I'll pad myself out to look fat and wear a wig or something, and I'll go in a cab, so if somebody's watching the place, they won't be sure it's me"—she was talking loudly over the old man's shrill protests—"and then I'll leave by the back door and hop the fence and walk out on Sun Avenue, catch another cab on Civic Center."

"I'll tear the house up until I find it, Diana," Ozzie shouted, "I—"

"They're after you, too, Oz," she said. "If they're there, they wouldn't give you the time to find it. Ten o'clock, lobby of the Riviera. 'Ozzie Smith' means run for it."

She hung up in the middle of the old man's pleadings.

Ozzie had hung up, too, and immediately punched in 911. As soon as a woman had answered, he had begun talking fast, trying to find the words and delivery that would get police to Diana's house most quickly.

Sitting on the hotel bed now but leaning forward over the telephone cradle, Ozzie held the handset tightly in his lean, brown-spotted hand.

"My name's Oliver Crane," he was saying shrilly, "and her name is Diana, uh, Ryan. I
am
calm. Fifteen fifteen Venus, in North Las Vegas. Her son was kidnapped and shot last night, you'll have records of it … No, I don't know what this guy looks like; his name is Alfred Funo … Your detective said today …
Trust
me, she's in danger! … What? … Yeah, there'll be her idiot boyfriend there, his name is Hans … No, I don't know his last name … six foot, fat, scraggly beard. She'll be coming in a cab … Of course I don't know what company! No, I won't be here; I'm going over there right now … No, I'm going, I have to be there. Listen, try to make it
two
units, okay?"

Ozzie hung up the phone, and he had barely had time to put on his pants and a shirt before there was a knock at his hotel room door.

He hobbled across the room and let the fat little boy in.

"Where's your mother?" Ozzie snapped, stepping out onto the hall carpet to peer up and down the corridor.

Oliver shrugged. "She's gone. She held the elevator until she saw your door open. She'll be in a taxi before you can get your shoes on." He walked to the window and pulled open the drapes.

Ozzie winced at the white desert sunlight. "I'll have my shoes on soon enough, sonny." He glanced instinctively at his portable coffeepot. No time for that, he thought. He hesitated—
No,
he thought,
I'll need it
—then walked quickly to the dressing table and with trembling fingers opened a Ziploc plastic bag and shook a lot of instant coffee into one of the hotel glasses.

"Now listen," he said as he carried the glass into the bathroom, "I'm going to leave you somewhere out in the children's area here." He turned on the hot-water tap in the sink. "And I want you to wait there for me, y'understand?" he shouted over the roar of the faucet. The water heated up quickly, and he ran some into the glass and stirred the foamy brown stuff with the handle of a Circus Circus souvenir toothbrush. "I'll be gone for only an hour or so, I think, but if noon rolls around and I'm still gone, you call the police and tell them everything, and tell them you need to be hidden from the same people that shot your brother."

"Everybody's ditching me," said Oliver.

Ozzie hurried back into the room and sat down on the bed near his shoes. "I'm sorry," he told the boy. "It's just that there's trouble, and we don't want you to get into it." He drained the barely hot double-strength coffee in one fast series of gulps. "
Jesus
." He shook his head. "Oh, and
don't
call these Amino Acids friends of yours, okay? Do you promise?"

The boy shuddered. "I'm grown up. I can decide who I talk to."

"Not in this kettle of fish, kid." Ozzie tossed the empty cup aside and, with an effortful grunt, bent down and picked up his shoes and began levering them onto his bare feet. "This is stuff you don't know about. Trust me, I'm your grandfather, and we're doing this for your mother's safety."

When the boy spoke again, his voice was pitched lower. "Call me Bitin Dog."

Ozzie closed his eyes. I can't go, he thought. If I leave this kid alone, he's going to call his evil friends, sure as I'm sitting here.

Well …

Well, so I stay here, and
don't
go over there to Venus Avenue. The cops will be there. What could one old man do for her that the cops couldn't? Especially an old man whose guts are acting up and who wouldn't have had time to properly go to the bathroom.

"Well, Mr. Bitin Dog," he said tiredly, "maybe you've got a point about everybody ditching you. Maybe you and I could … just go have breakfast somewhere—"

"Somewhere where they serve beer," the boy interrupted. "You order it, and then I can drink it when they're not looking, okay?"

"No, you can't have any beer. My God, it's not yet eight in the morning." He was still holding the laces of his right shoe, and to his dull surprise he saw that his knobby old fingers were tying them. Socks, he told himself; if you're not going to Venus, you've got time to put on socks.

His fingers finished the knot and moved, apparently of their own volition, to the other shoe.

"Oh, and you're too young for beer anyway," he said. "I was going to say, before you interrupted me, that you and I could go have breakfast somewhere after we go by your mom's house to make sure she's okay." The shoes were tied, and he stood up, feeling frail. The coffee felt like a shovelful of road tar in his stomach. "You ready to go? We want to get there before she does. We'll be hurrying and she won't, and I hope she'll have the sense to make her cabbie circle the block a time or two first, but she's got a head start on us. Come on."

"What if I don't want to go to—" the boy began, but he flinched back and stopped talking when the old man turned a hard glare on him.

"Come on," Ozzie repeated softly.

Oliver stared at him for a moment; then he let his shoulders droop and he was just a little boy again, and he followed his grandfather out of the room.

Hans was justifiably upset.

The police had actually been pointing
drawn revolvers
at him when he had answered their urgent knocking—of all the John Wayne stunts!—but they had holstered them when he answered the door and blinked at them in sleepy astonishment, and now, as he tremblingly made coffee in the little kitchen, Hans was at least grateful that Diana's crazy old foster-father had given them a
description
of him. Evidently if they hadn't recognized him as Diana's reported "boyfriend," they'd have handcuffed him and thrown him on the floor!

He looked over the counter at the two policemen standing on a patch of sunlit carpet by the front window. "You guys want coffee?"

The older cop, Gould, gave him a blank look and shook his head. "No, thank you."

"Huh." Hans watched the glass pot steam up as the hot coffee started to trickle into it. "Completely nuts," he went on, trying not to talk too fast or sound ingratiating. "The old man—and Diana's brother, too—think she's this Egyptian goddess Isis."

"We're not concerned with their religious beliefs, Mr. Ganci."

"Fine." Hans shrugged and nodded virtuously. "I
told
them to go to the police last night."

"So you said."

Officer Gould nodded out the window. "I think Hamilton sees a cab."

Hans walked around the counter and peered with them out through the window. One of the officers standing by the second police car out at the curb was staring intently down the street toward Civic Center Drive. After a few seconds a yellow taxicab pulled up behind the police car, and a moment later a fat woman got out.

Hans was about to tell them that it wasn't Diana, but then he saw the woman's face. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. It
was
Diana, but she had stuffed something into the rear end of her pants and the belly of her shirt, so that she looked both fat and pregnant. "Yeah," he said wonderingly, "that's her."

The policeman outside, Hamilton, apparently, walked up to her as she was paying the driver, and then he was escorting her toward the apartment.

As the cab drove away and Hamilton and Diana hurried up the walk toward the front door, Hans was annoyed to see that Diana
didn't
look annoyed by the officious policemen. Attention from a man in uniform, he thought.

The older officer pushed past Hans and opened the door. Diana and Hamilton walked inside, bringing the fresh smells of lawns and pavement into the musty dimness. Hans wished her foster-father had called to say that police would be coming over; he would have showered.

"As Officer Hamilton probably told you, ma'am," Gould said to Diana, "we got a phone call saying that your life was in danger. It was from an Oliver Crane, who we gather is your foster-father?"

"Your loony dad," put in Hans helpfully.

"Shut up, Hans," Diana said.

"Why don't you go sit down while we talk to her, Mr. Ganci?" said Gould, not very politely.

Ozzie's cab had rounded the Venus corner just in time for him to see the officer walk into the house with the ludicrously padded Diana, and he sighed and relaxed and sat back on the black vinyl seat.

"It looks like your mom's okay," he said over his shoulder to Oliver, who was sitting in the back seat.

"Smells like puke in here," said the boy.

The driver, who looked as though he might have been a boxer years ago, gave the boy an irritated glance in the rearview mirror. "You want me to stop?"

"Uh …" Ozzie couldn't take the boy into the house—gunfire or something still might erupt at any moment—but if he left him alone in the cab, he'd probably run away. "No, just park here. I want to see her leave with the cops."

"You got it." The man pulled in to the curb a couple of buildings down from Diana's duplex and put the engine into park.

Hans had watched with interest when Hamilton had gone cautiously through the house to make sure no killers were crouched in any of the rooms, and he had been making mental notes so that he could incorporate a scene like this into his screenplay; there was nothing like firsthand observation.