Tim Powers - Last Call (44 page)

Through his left eye he saw the fat man who had ransacked his apartment, the fat man who had had on the seat of the gray Jaguar the envelope with the URGENTLY FOLD note about Diana, the fat man who had eaten the leaves from the ginger plant across the street from his house in Santa Ana.

And through his right eye Crane saw a man-size black sphere, with a black, warty head and stubby, bristly black arms; away from the boundaries of it, excluded by it, boiled away a Kirlian aura of green tendrils and teal carapaces and green fishtails and red arteries.

Handlebar! thought Crane—no, the Mandelbrot Man—and then Crane was running away, ignoring the blazing pain in his cut leg, blundering through the crowds and hearing only the whimpering in his own head.

Some traffic light must have been green under the blue-white neon suns of the Horseshoe, for the crowd stretched entirely across Fremont Street, and he found himself on the opposite sidewalk before he had even realized that he had stepped off the curb.

The crowd was sparser to his left, and he ran that way, his shoes flopping on the stained pavement. A street opened to his right and he spun around the corner, nearly losing his footing when his left knee refused to flex, and half hopped and half jogged toward the blue and red beer signs of a liquor store ahead.

This street, disorientingly, was nearly empty; a cab idled at the curb ahead of him, and a solitary man in overalls was trudging along the opposite sidewalk under the high shoulder of a parking garage. Crane ran for the cab … but out of the corner of his good eye he saw the man in overalls look alertly toward Fremont Street and then point at Crane.

"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.

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 front-runner 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 involved 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.

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.