Tim Powers - Last Call (49 page)

Mike frowned worriedly but didn't look around. "Followed us here? I don't like that—"

"I don't either. He's a dealer himself, and Hans never trusted him. Listen, let me have the keys, and I'll follow him when he leaves."

"
Follow
him? Why? I've got to get to work—"

"I just want to make sure he leaves the area. I'll be back in ten minutes at the most."

"Well, okay." Mike began sliding a key off his ring. "For you, Doreen," he added with a smile.

She pocketed the key and blew him a kiss and then started walking back toward the white Dodge.

Walk upstairs, Mike, she thought as the soles of her shoes knocked slowly along the sunny sidewalk and her purse swung at her side. Don't spook this guy by hanging around and watching.

She didn't look back, but apparently Mike had not done anything to alarm Funo. When she walked up to his car, he reached across and unlocked the passenger-side door.

She opened it and sat down on the seat, leaving the door open.

Funo was smiling at her, but he looked pale and exhausted. His white shirt and tan slacks looked new, though, and his laced-up white Reeboks shone, she thought, like the bellies of albino lobsters.

"My mystery man," Diana said.

"Hey, Diana," he said earnestly, "I'm sorry we got off on the wrong foot the other night. I didn't realize you were worried about your
children
."

She forced her shy smile to stay in place—but how could this man
say
that to her? After
shooting
one of her children?

"The doctors say the boy is going to be fine," she said, wondering if Funo might have called the hospital and found out that that was not true. She thought it probably wouldn't matter; she sensed that this was some kind of tea party charade, in which statements were only expected to be pleasant.

"Hey, that's great," he said. He snapped his fingers. "I've got something for you."

She tensed, ready to snatch the steak knife out of her purse, but what he pulled out from under the seat was a long black jewelry box.

When she opened it and saw the gold chain on the red velvet inside, she knew enough to show only pleasure, not astonishment.

"It's
beautiful
," she said, making her voice soft and breathy. "You shouldn't have—my God, I don't even know your name."

"Al Funo. I've got a present for Scott, too. Will you tell him?"

I'll tell him when I meet him in hell one day, she thought. "Of course. I know he'll want to thank you."

"I already gave him a gold Dunhill lighter," Funo said.

She nodded, yearning for the normal daytime street outside the car windows and wondering how long she could continue to do this fantasy dialogue correctly. "I'm sure he's grateful to have such a generous friend," she ventured.

"Oh," said Funo off-handedly, "I do what I can. My Porsche's in the shop; this is a loaner."

"Ah." She nodded. "Can we take you out to dinner some time?"

"That'd be fun," he said seriously.

"Do you—is there a number we can reach you at?"

He grinned and winked at her. "I'll find you."

The audience seemed to be over. "Okay," she said cautiously, shifting her weight onto her right foot, which was on the curb. "We'll wait to hear from you."

He started the car. "Rightie-o."

She ducked out of the car and stood up on the curb. He reached across and pulled the door shut, and then he was driving away.

Diana made herself walk slowly back toward the Nissan truck until the Dodge turned right at the corner; then she ran to it.

Traffic was light on Bonanza Road this morning, and she had to keep the truck well behind the Dodge in order to let other cars get between them; twice she feared she had lost him, but then well ahead of her she saw the Dodge turn right into a Marie Callender's parking lot. She drove on past, then looped back, taking her time, and drove into the lot herself.

The Dodge was parked, empty, in front of a windowless section of the restaurant.

Perfect.

She paused only long enough to memorize the license number, and then drove out of the lot again and sped back toward Mike's apartment.

Mike was pacing in the kitchen when she opened the apartment door. "Well," he said impatiently, "where did he go?"

"I don't know, he drove away down Bonanza. Listen, I got his license number, 'cause when I talked to him, he asked if you were Hans's friend Mike, and he knows you're a dealer. I guess Hans must have told him."

"Hans
told
him that? Hans is lucky he's dead." Diana thought Mike looked both angry and ready to cry. "I don't
need
this kind of bullshit!"

Diana crossed to where he stood and patted his spray-stiffened blond hair. "He doesn't know your last name," she told him, "and he doesn't know which apartment is yours."

"Still, I should tell my—the guy I—oh, hell, he'd make me move out of here."

"You've got to be getting to work." She smiled at him. "Tonight I'll see if I can't …
distract
you from your worries."

Mike brightened at that. "You're on," he said. "Gimme my key."

She handed it over, and after he had left and she heard his truck start up and drive away, she went to the telephone and called for a cab.

Then she hurried into the bedroom, looped a wire coat hanger around her wrist, and hauled out the briefcase. The bundles of cash she stuffed into her purse, and the Baggie of cocaine she emptied into the toilet, which she patiently flushed three times.

The toilet tank was hissingly refilling when she carried the empty briefcase out onto the walkway and locked the door behind her.

The Dodge was still parked in the Marie Calender's lot. She was glad Funo wasn't a man to rush through breakfast.

Now, she thought after she had paid the cab, you've got to work on sheer nerve for a few minutes.

Forcing herself not to hurry, she strolled over to Funo's car, pulling the coat hanger off her wrist and untwisting the double helix of its neck. She straightened it out and bent the loop into a sharper angle, and when she got to the car, she worked the loop in between the driver's side window and the window frame.

Her hands were shaking, but on the other side of the glass the loop was steady, and she managed on the first try to get it around the knob of the interior door lock button. She pulled upward, and the button came up with a muffled clank.

She looked around nervously, but no one was watching her, and Funo was not leaving the restaurant yet.

She opened the door and slid the emptied briefcase under the seat.

After she had relocked the door, she stepped around to the front of the car and popped the hood release. The hood squeaked when she raised it, but she made herself reach out calmly to the oil filler cap on the manifold of the slant-six engine and twist it off. Then she dug a handful of change out of her purse and tipped it all into the filler hole, hearing the dimes and quarters and pennies clatter among the valve springs within.

A moment later she had replaced the filler cap and lowered the hood and was walking away across the parking lot, breathing more easily as each step took her further away from the doomed man's car.

She had saved a quarter with which to call another cab.

The ducks in the pond turned out to like cheese even more than they had liked the bread, and soon the entirety of Nardie Dinh's meager lunch had gone into the pond.

She sat back in the shade of a cottonwood tree and looked past the duck pond, across the grassy hills of the park toward the office building where she worked during the day. Soon her lunch hour would be over, and she'd be walking back there, without having eaten anything.

Again.

She hadn't eaten anything at all since a salad early Wednesday evening, nearly forty-eight hours ago, just before going to rescue Scott Crane from Neal Obstadt's assassins.

And of course she hadn't slept—except, briefly, twice during this last week—since the beginning of the year.

She had celebrated Tet in Las Vegas, among the clang and honk and neon of the Fremont Street and Strip casinos, instead of the flower markets and firecrackers and tea-and-candied-fruit booths of remembered Hanoi, and the festive people all around her had been in cars rather than on bicycles, but in both places there had been the same sense of festivity in the shadow of disaster. Sunk into the sidewalks of Hanoi, every forty feet, had been little round air-raid shelters to climb into when the American planes were thirty kilometers away and alarm two sounded, and in Las Vegas she had her amphetamines to gulp whenever her wakefulness-spells began to weaken.

She was fasting just because the sight of any food, and particularly the prospect of putting it into her mouth and chewing it up and swallowing it and assimilating it, now revolted her; it wasn't a consciously adopted measure, as the wakefulness was; but she was uncomfortably aware of a mythological parallel. In an English translation of the thirteenth-century French
Morte Artu
, the Maid of Astolat, who became the Lady of Shalott in the Tennyson poem, offers herself to Lancelot and then, when he refuses her, kills herself by refusing to eat or sleep. Her body is put in a barge and rowed down the Thames.

On Wednesday night she had offered herself to Scott Crane, and they had more or less refused each other. Could this involuntary starvation be a consequence of that?

With a sudden splashing and clatter of wings, the ducks all took to the air. Startled, she looked up at them in alarm to see which way they would fly, but they just scattered away into the empty blue sky in all directions, and in a few seconds she was alone beside the choppy water.

She stood up lithely. He's here, she thought, realizing that her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. Ray-Joe Pogue is here somewhere. He found me, way out here in Henderson.

Her gaze darted around the green hills visible from where she stood, but there was no one in sight.

I should run, she thought, but in which direction? And if he sees me, he'll be able to outrun me, weakened as I am from hunger.

I should run, I should run, I should run! I'm wasting seconds!

The sky seemed to be bulging down at her, and she was afraid that just the sight of her half brother—tall and slim and pale, dressed like Elvis Presley, another King who was not allowed to be dead, striding over the crest of one of these hills—would rob her of the ability even to move at all.

Her back was against the rough bark of the cottonwood tree, and abruptly she turned around and hugged it—she had not realized that she meant to climb it until she found that she had shinnied several yards up the gray trunk, probably ruining her wool jacket and skirt.

The tree's foliage was a dense mass of round yellow-green leaves, and she hoped that if she could get up onto one of the nearly vertical branches, she would be hidden. Hot, fast breath abraded her throat, and rainbow sparkles swam in her vision, but she didn't faint, though she was afraid that even picturing any face card right now would land her back on the grass, unconscious and ready for him.

She got her scraped hands into the crotch of the lowest branch, and then she swung a leg up, tearing out the seam of her skirt, and got her ankle in beside her left hand, and with an effort that wrung a groan out of her she pulled herself up into the tight saddle. She didn't rest until she had stood up and braced her back against the trunk and her feet high up against the branch, and then she held still and worked savagely on slowing her harsh panting.

At last, though she still had to breathe through her mouth, she was breathing silently. She could hear the whisper of traffic on McEvoy Street, sounding to her now like nothing so much as suitcases dragging around the coping of a luggage carousel at an airport, and the leaves that surrounded her rattled faintly like a lot of very distant castanets. Through a wedge of space between the leaves she could see the yellow square of a Kraft Slice rocking gently on the surface of the pond.

She tried to believe that she had been mistaken, that he wasn't here, but she couldn't. And when she heard feet swishing through the long green grass, she only closed her eyes for a moment.

"Bernardette," he said softly below her, and she had to bite her lip to keep from answering, from shouting at him the way a child in a hide-and-seek game might yell to end the terrible suspense when It was so close.

"No ham," he said now. His words had been clear, she hadn't misunderstood him, but the nonsensical statement made her want even more strongly than before to cry out. Surely he knew where she was hiding, and was only torturing her!

"Cheese," he said. "And bread. That's good, you're still staying away from the meat, that's my girl. Still hanging in there as Mrs. Porter's daughter."

Nardie remembered Ray-Joe telling her once about a very old song that still survived today—though in the current version "Persephone" had been phonetically debased to "Mrs. Porter."

She looked down—and felt her earring fall out of her pierced earlobe. In the same instant she pressed her elbow against the tree trunk, catching the little ball of gold awkwardly between the trunk and the fabric of her jacket. She could feel it pressing into the flesh above the point of her elbow, and, almost objectively, she wondered how long it would be before the muscles of her arm would begin to shake.

"Then up he rose, and donned his clothes," he said happily,
"And dupped the chamber door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more."

He was reciting some of Ophelia's insane singing from
Hamlet
. He had read the play to her frequently during her imprisonment in the shabby parlor house called DuLac's. In her head, rather than aloud, she recited a following couplet:

Young men will do 't, if they come to 't;
By cock, they are to blame.

She wondered if she would even be able to try to fight him off, if he were to see her up here.

He laughed. "Ray-Joe active!" he said to himself in a pep-talk tone. "Ray-Joe Free Vegas!"