Tim Powers - Last Call (50 page)

Nardie Dinh could see him now, below her, his duck-tail haircut gleaming over the big rhinestone-studded collar of his white leather jacket. He was holding an air pistol, and she knew what kind of dart it was loaded with, a syringe-tipped tranquilizer dart with the CAP-CHURE charge like the one that had brought her down on that December morning in the Tonopah desert, the bright red fletching of the tailpiece standing out like an eccentric decoration on the sleeve of her blouse.

Her arm, the same arm that had taken the dart, had now started to shake. Soon it would lose its awkward grip on the earring, and the earring would fall. Looking down, she estimated that it would land by his left foot. He would hear it, look down and see it, and then look up.

"I wonder if you can hear me, somehow," he said quietly, "in your head. I wonder if you'll come back here to this tree, if I wait. We both know you
want
to. You met him Wednesday night, didn't you? The King's son, the prince, the genetic Jack of Hearts. And you became trackable. And I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be trackable if you'd screwed him. What does that tell you?"

That I'm saving myself for you?
she thought.
Is that what you imagine?

Her shoulder was aching powerfully.
Am
I saving myself for him? she wondered. Has all this—stabbing Madame DuLac, running to Las Vegas, using the powers he gave me to avoid sleeping—been nothing but a show of defiance, a gesture, a sop to my self-respect before allowing myself to sink into the secure zombie-Queen role he has planned for me? Maybe I was afraid that Scott Crane
could
still defeat his father, and I just seized a plausible excuse to run away from him.

Maybe I do want to give in to Ray-Joe Pogue.

No, she thought. No, not even if it's true. Even if I've been living a pretense for the last three months, I hereby declare the pretense real.

She forced her elbow even harder against the tree, wishing she could press the earring right into her flesh.

A noise had risen from the traffic background—someone was driving a car nearby.

Below her she saw Pogue look sharply across the park, and she realized that the car must be driving right over the grass. Then she realized that it was more than one car.

"Shit," Pogue said softly. He took a quick step away from the tree, and then she could only hear him walking quickly away through the grass. She raised her arm and let the earring fall, wondering, even as she did it, if she was doing it too soon, if she had
meant
to do it too soon.

She could hear car tires tearing up the grass, and she turned around, away from the pond, and pushed aside a cluster of leaves. For an instant she glimpsed a white car flash across the grass; it had been one of those sort of pickup trucks, what were they called? El Caminos. Then she saw another one, identical to the first. Had they followed Pogue here?

She didn't hear any shooting or yelling … and then after several minutes she heard police sirens approaching. The sound of the cars on the grass diminished away in some direction.

When she heard the unmistakable sound of a police car engine approach and then stop and shift out of gear and begin to idle and heard the loopy sounds of a close police radio, she relaxed and began to climb down.

When those cars started tearing across the grass, she mentally rehearsed, I just went straight up the tree, Officer. Bernardette Dinh, sir, I work for the insurance office right over there.

Got lucky this time.

Diana saw Mike's truck pull up and park on the twilit street, and she reflected that she wouldn't have to fake being scared. She only hoped that she was guessing correctly about what he would do.

Hours ago she had eased the sliding glass pane out of the apartment's living-room window, and then she had gone into his bedroom and dumped out all the drawers and dragged all the boxes out of the closet and dumped them, too. She wished she had noticed a brand of cigarettes that Funo smoked so that she could have lit one and stomped it out on the tan rug.

The apartment door was open, and she could hear Mike's heavy tread approaching along the second-floor walkway.

And here he was, smiling and patting his sprayed hair and reeking of Binaca even across two yards of evening air.

"What's the matter, darlin'?" he asked, giving her what she thought of as a there-there-baby-doll look.

"The place was burglarized today while I was at the store," she said tensely.

Mike's smile was gone, though his mouth was still open.

"I didn't know if you'd want to call the cops," Diana went on, "so I've just been waiting here.
I
can't see that anything's gone, but maybe you can. They hit the bedroom pretty hard."

"Jesus," he said in a whispered wail as he started for the bedroom doorway, "you goddamn bitch, the bedroom, Jesus, make it not be true, make it not be true."

She followed him and watched him shuffle straight to the closet. He stared at the unobstructed ski boots and then peered around at the floor.

"Jesus," he was saying absently, "I'm dead, I'm dead. This was your friend that did this, Hans's friend, that stuff
didn't belong to me
, you're going to have to tell Flores that it was your fault—no. No, I can't say I let you stay here, a woman who—who led another dealer here. God damn you, you've got to get out of here and never come back, take any shit you brought with you." His face when he turned toward her was so pale and scraped with fear that she stepped back. "That license plate number," he said urgently, "I'll kill you right now if you don't remember that license!"

She recited it to him. "A white Dodge," she added, "roughly 1970 model. His name's Al Funo, F-U-N-O." Remembering to stay in character, she gave him a heartbroken look and said, "I'm sorry, Mike.
Can't
I stay here? I was hoping—"

He was walking slowly toward the telephone. "Go find a pimp; you're out of my life."

Diana had already shoved the little yellow blanket into her purse, and on the way out of the apartment she picked up the purse and slung it over her shoulder.

As she walked down the cement stairs toward the sidewalk and the street, she thought of Scat about to spend his fifth night in the hospital, wired to ventilators and catheters, and she hoped that what she had done would succeed in avenging the boy.

Just as the croupier had said, the little white plastic ball lay in the green double zero slot on the Roulette wheel. The man now reached out with a rake and slid the last of the blue chips off the mystical periodic table of the layout.

Archimedes Mavranos had now lost all the money he had won during his three days of gambling. It had taken him even less time to lose it than it had taken to win it. He reached into his coat pocket, and the croupier looked at him expectantly, apparently thinking he was going to buy more chips, but Mavranos was only palpating the plastic Baggie. The water was still cool; this current goldfish was probably still alive.

But Mavranos had not found the sort of phase-change that he hoped might slap the insurgent cells of his lymphatic system back into line.

He had found other things: the old women who played as obsessively as he did and who wore gardening gloves as they pulled the slot machine handles to fertilize a cold and stingy soil; he had seen players dazed by predawn winning who tipped the dealers nothing after hours of play and thousands of dollars won, or who absently toked cocktail waitresses hundreds for a glass of soda water; he had seen players so obese or deformed that their mere presence would elicit involuntary shouts of wonder in any town but this one, in which the facts of action made physical appearance genuinely irrelevant; and players who with no surprise had "got broke," as the phrase was locally, and were scrambling to raise another stake, which they knew in advance, which they almost
placidly
knew in advance, would soon be lost—one of these players had confided to Mavranos that the next best thing to gambling and winning was gambling.

In all of it he still seemed to see, sometimes, the outlines of his own salvation. Or he tried to believe that he did.

He reminded himself of Arthur Winfree, who had broken the circadian rhythm of a cageful of mosquitoes with a precisely timed burst of light, so that they slept and buzzed in no time pattern at all, and could be restored to their usual up-at-dusk, down-at-dawn pattern only with another flash. Winfree had apparently found the vulnerable point, the geometrical
singularity
, by studying the
shape
of the data on mosquitoes rather than the actual numbers that made up that shape.

People in Las Vegas had the shocked, out-of-step patterns of Winfree's mosquitoes. There were of course no clocks or windows in the casinos, and the man next to you at lunch might be an insomniac who had sneaked down from his room for a "midnight" snack. Mavranos wondered if one of the night-time atomic bomb tests in the 1950s had happened to throw its bright flash across the city at an instant that was a singularity.

He managed a sour smile at the thought that his best hope for a cancer cure might be the nearby detonation of another atomic bomb.

The wheel was spinning again. Roulette was the only casino game in which chips had no fixed denomination, and each player was simply given a different color; Mavranos moved away from the table so that somebody else could play with the blue chips.

He still had about fifty dollars in cash out in the truck, folded into one of crazy Dondi Snayheever's maps, and—and he didn't know what he would do with it. He could try again to eat something, though that was beginning to seem like a pointless, humiliating exercise, or he could use it as a buy-in for some game. What hadn't he tried? Keno … the Wheel of Fortune …

When he pushed his way out against the spring-resistance of the glass doors, he saw that it was night—God knew what the hour was—and that he had been in the Sahara Casino.

As he plodded dizzily along the walk toward the parking lot, he tried to figure out what it was that he really wanted, and he saw himself working on some old car in the garage, with his wife stirring something on the stove inside, and his two girls sitting on the living-room couch he had reupholstered, watching television. If I use the fifty dollars for gas, he thought, I could be there tomorrow morning, and have … a month or so, maybe, of that life.

Before I got so sick that I had to go into the hospital.

He had health insurance, a policy that cost a hard couple of hundred a month and stated that he had to pay the first two thousand dollars of medical costs in any one year—after that the company paid 80 percent or something—but even if dying were to cost nothing, he would still be leaving Wendy and the girls with just a couple of IRAs and no income. Wendy would have to get a job as a waitress again somewhere.

He paused in the white glow of an overhead light, and he looked at his hands. They were scarred and calloused from years of gripping tool handles, and some of the scars on the knuckles were from youthful collisions with jawbones and cheekbones. He used to be able to get things done with these hands.

He shoved them in his pockets and resumed walking.

Mavranos paused when he was a few yards away from his parked truck. In the dim parking lot shadows he could see a figure hunched over the hood.

What the hell's this, he thought nervously, a thief? There's two guns in there, as well as my remaining money. But why's he leaning on the hood? Maybe it's just a drunk, pausing here to puke on my truck.

"Move it, buddy," he said loudly. "I'm driving the truck out of here."

The figure looked up. "Arky, you gotta help me."

Though the voice was weak, Mavranos recognized it. This was Scott Crane.

Mavranos walked around to the driver's side, unlocked the door, and swung it open. The dome light lit Crane's face through the windshield in dim chiaroscuro, and Mavranos flinched at the black eye and the hollow cheeks and the stringy hair.

"Ahoy, Pogo," Mavranos said softly. "What …
seeeems
to be the problem?"

Mavranos got in and reached across to open the passenger side door. "Come in and tell me about it," he called.

Crane shambled around the door and climbed up onto the seat, then laid his head back with his eyes closed and just breathed for a while through his open mouth. His breath smelled like a cat box.

Mavranos lit a Camel. "Who hit you?"

"Some drunk bum." Crane opened his eyes and sat up. "I hope Susan gives him a lot of big bugs."

Mavranos felt the ready tears of exhaustion rise hot in his eyes. His friend—his closest friend, these days, these bad days—was broken. Clearly Crane was not succeeding in freeing himself from his troubles.

But neither am I, Mavranos thought. I've got to go home while I still can; I've got to spend what time I have left with my family. I can't waste any of that time trying to help a doomed man, even if he is—was—my friend.

Womb to tomb, he found himself thinking. Birth to earth.

Shut up.

"Ozzie's dead," Crane was saying now. "The fat man shot him. Ozzie died saving me; he knocked me loose from them for a little while, at least. He saved my life, gave it back to me."

"I can't—" Mavranos began, but Crane interrupted him. "He always used to put … a
banana
in my lunch bag, when I was in grade school," Crane said, his face twisted into what might have been a smile. "Who wants a mushy old warm banana at noon, you know? But I couldn't bear to throw it out—I always ate it—because—he had gone to the
trouble
—see?—to put it in there. And now he's gone to the trouble—Jesus, it's killed him—to give me my life."

"Scott," Mavranos said tightly, "I'm not—"

"And then I got a note he'd left for me, saying I should take care of Diana's kids. Diana's dead, too, they blew her up, but her kids are still alive." He exhaled, and Mavranos rolled down the window. "We've got to save them."

Mavranos shook his head unhappily and squeezed Crane's shoulder. Very little of this was making any sense to him—bugs and bananas and whatnot—and he was afraid most of it was hallucinatory nonsense. "You go save them, Pogo," he said softly. "I'm too sick to be any use, and I've got a wife and kids who ought to see me before I die."