Tim Powers - Last Call (51 page)

"You can—" Crane took a deep breath. "You can pull a trigger. You can see well enough to drive in day glare. When it gets light, I've got to go see a guy who lives in a trailer outside town. I tried to make it yesterday, but I"—he laughed—"
but I got so damn depressed
. I had the DTs real bad, sat and cried in Diana's car most of the day, in a parking lot. Bugs were crawling out of holes in my face—imagine that! But now I've got some food in me, and I think I'm all right."

You
can still
eat
, at least, thought Mavranos angrily. "Then go," he said harshly. "Where's her car now?"

"Parked down the row here. I've driven through every casino lot in town, looking for this here truck. The Circus Circus said you'd checked out with no messages or anything."

"I don't
owe
you any messages, none of you. Goddammit, Scott, I've got my own life, what little is left of it. What the hell do you imagine I could
do
! Who is it you want me to—to pull a trigger on, anyway?"

"Oh, I don't know … me, maybe." Crane was blinking around, and he picked up Snayheever's maps. "If I become Bitin Dog again, for instance. At least I can make sure that my real father doesn't have
this
body to fuck people over with."

A car rushed by fast, and the reflection of its red taillights flashed through the cracks in the Suburban's windshield like the streak of a tossed-out cigarette butt.

"You want
me
to make sure of it, you mean," Mavranos said, "and probably go die in the Clark County Jail instead of with my family. I'm really sorry, man, but—"

He paused. Crane had unfolded a map of California, and, ignoring the twenty-dollar bill that fell out of it, was staring once again at the lines Snayheever had drawn on the state's uneven eastern boundary.

"These aren't route lines," Crane said absently. "They're outlines. See? Lake Havasu, where the original London Bridge is now, is the bridge of the nose, and Blythe is the chin, and the 10 highway is the jaw-line. And I can recognize the portrait now—it's Diana." There was no expression on his face, but tears were running down his cheeks.

In spite of himself, Mavranos peered at the map. The pencil lines
were
a woman's face in profile, he could see now, turned away and with the visible eye closed. He supposed it might be a portrait of that Diana woman.

Crane unfolded the map of "The Partition of Poland—1939," and this time Mavranos could see that the heavy pencil lines traced a fat, robed person of indeterminate sex daintily dancing with a goat-legged devil. Bleakly he imagined that this, too, might have to do with Crane's problems.

"I can't help you, Scott," he said. "I don't even have any extra money. I can drop you off somewhere right now, if it's on the way out of town, south."

Crane seemed to be calm, and Mavranos hoped he would ask to be driven to the Flamingo or somewhere, so that Mavranos could seem to be doing him at least some last, paltry favor.

"Not now," said Crane quietly. "When the sun's up. And I'll want to try for a couple of hours of sleep."

Mavranos shook his head, squinting and baring his teeth and trying not to remember the many afternoons he'd spent drinking beer on Crane's front porch.

Womb to tomb. Birth to earth.

He made himself say, "No. I'm leaving now."

Crane nodded and pushed the door open. "I'll wait for you—dawn, in the parking lot of the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel." He stepped down to the pavement. "Oh, here," he added, digging in the pocket of his jeans. He tossed a thick roll of twenty-dollar bills onto the seat. "If you're short."

"Don't!" Mavranos called, his voice tight. "I won't be there. You can't—you
can't
ask this of me!"

Crane didn't answer, and Mavranos watched the lean figure of his friend disappear into the darkness. After a while he heard a car start and drive away.

Mavranos slapped his pocket for change, then got out of the truck and began plodding back toward the casino. He needed to hear his wife's voice right away.

There was a bank of pay phones off the Sahara's lobby; one of the phones was just ringing steadily, and he fumbled a quarter into the slot of the one farthest from the noise and punched in his home number.

Through the tinny diaphragm he heard Wendy's voice, blurry with sleep. "Hello?" she said. "Arky?"

"Yeah, Wendy, it's me, sorry to call you at this hour—"

"Thank God, we've been so worried—"

"Listen, Wendy, I can't talk long, but I'm coming home." He covered his free ear and mentally damned whoever was making the other phone ring for so long.

"Did you …"

"No. No, I'm still sick, but I want to …
be
with you and the girls." To be and not to be, he thought bitterly.

There was a long pause during which he helplessly counted the rings of the phone at the far end of the row, and then he heard Wendy say, "I understand, honey. The girls will want to see you. One way or another, they have a father they can be proud of."

"I should be back before lunchtime. I love you, Wendy."

He could hear the tears in her voice when she said, "I love
you
, Arky."

He hung up the telephone and started toward the door, but he stopped irritably in front of the still-ringing phone and picked up the receiver. "
What
?" he yelled into it.

The harsh laughter of a woman grated in his ear. "
I love
you,
Arky
," the woman said. "Tell Scott I said I love
him
, will you?"

Mavranos was shaking, but he spoke softly. "Good-bye, Susan." He hung up that phone, too, and walked out of the casino.

Back in the truck he started the engine—and then just sat there in the dark cab, staring at the money Crane had tossed onto the seat.

A father they can be proud of,
he thought. What does that mean? It
should
mean a father who doesn't
abandon
them.
A father they can be proud of.
What's wrong with just a father they can
love
for a few weeks? What the hell is so terrible about that?

Wendy had said,
I love
you,
Arky
. Well, who did she mean by that?
Who
was it that she loved? The man who had proudly gone off to find his health and who kept faith with his friends? They wore that guy out, honey, he doesn't exist anymore.

He picked up the money and put it in his pocket, knowing he and Wendy would be needing it.

Goddammit, he thought, can you really prefer a dead man that you can be proud of to a—a broken man you can at least
hug?
Can't we just pretend I never
met
Scott Crane?

At dawn the broad lanes of the Strip were a little less crowded—mostly with Cadillacs heading back to hotels after a night of heavy gambling, beat station wagons out for the forty-nine-cent breakfasts—and Crane was glad to park the Mustang in the Troy and Cress lot and walk away from it. The police might well be watching for the car, and though they shouldn't have any particular reason to hold him, he vividly remembered Lieutenant Frits's telling him that he could be thrown in jail.

Crane walked quietly past the closed multicolor doors of the honeymoon motel units. A frail smile kinked his face as he passed them. Have nice lives, you newlyweds, he thought. Put those HITCHED license plates on your cars, treasure those photos and videos, take home the Marriage Creed plaques and put them up on the walls of your bright new homes.

At the curb he leaned against a light post and stared up and down the Strip, looking for the blue truck. The dry air was still, poised between the chill of the night and the furnace heat of the coming day. His hands weren't trembling, and he liked the idea of stopping for breakfast on the way out to Spider Joe's trailer, but he was afraid that Mavranos, if he showed up at all, wouldn't want to eat. Last night he didn't look as if he'd been eating much lately.

Mavranos might be driving through Barstow right now, heading back toward the tangle of the Orange County freeways. Crane hoped not.

The top of Vegas World across the street glowed yellow with the first sunlight, and looking back toward the east, Crane could see the tower of the Landmark Hotel silhouetted against the glare of the coming sun.

He looked up and down the broad street. No blue truck.

He sighed, suddenly feeling a lot older as he turned back toward the Troy and Cress parking lot. Take the car? he wondered. How long could Frits hold me for? I could call a taxi, but would the driver wait outside Spider Joe's trailer? Probably not, if things started flying around like they did at poor Joshua's card-reading parlor on Wednesday.

He got into Diana's car and started the engine. Find a car dealership and just buy yourself one, he thought. You've certainly got the cash.

But he didn't put it into gear yet. He looked around at the interior of the car, at Diana's country-and-western cassettes and an old hairbrush and a pack of Chesterfields on the console. Did Diana smoke them? Chesterfields had been Ozzie's brand, before he quit. Had the old man bought a pack, suspecting that it didn't matter anymore?

A shotgun blast, out in the desert—and then dust scattered across the sterile sand. Crane leaned his head against the rim of the steering wheel and, in the midst of the anonymous sleeping newlyweds, he finally cried for the killed foster-father who had found him so long ago and taken him in and made him his son.

After a while he became aware of the muttering racket of a big, badly muffled engine behind him, drowning the steady burr of the Mustang's V-8.

He looked up at the rearview mirror and smiled through his tears to see the blue bulk of the Suburban, with Mavranos's lean face glowering at him from behind the wheel.

He switched off the engine and got out of the car, and Mavranos opened the truck's passenger side door.

"That was eight hundred bucks you gave me last night," Mavranos said belligerently as Crane climbed in and pulled the door closed. "You got a lot more?"

"Yeah, Arky, I got"—Crane sniffed and wiped his eyes—"I don't know, twenty or thirty thousand, I think." He slapped his jacket pocket. "What I gave you was just my twenties. I can't lose lately, except at Lowball."

"Okay." Mavranos drove forward and then clanked the shift into reverse. "For helping you out here, I want all of it except for what we need for expenses. My family's gonna need it."

"Sure." Crane shrugged, "When we get a couple of hours free, I'll make a lot more for you."

Mavranos backed into a parking space and then shifted back to drive and spun the wheel to head out of the parking lot. "We likely to get killed on this errand today?"

Crane frowned. "Not
likely
to, I don't think. As soon as I mess with the cards, the fat man will know where I am, but we ought to be long gone by the time he'd get there, even if he's not in a hospital—and anyway, he apparently works for my father.
He
wants to keep me
alive
." He looked over his shoulder at the piled junk in the back of the truck. "You still got your .38 and the shotgun?"

"Yeah."

"I hope we do run into the fat man."

"Great. Well listen, before we drive out there, I want to stop by a Western Union, and send Wendy a big bundle."

"Oh, sure, man." Crane glanced at him. "Have you, uh, talked to her?"

"Yeah, last night—and I called her again just before I left to come here," Mavranos said. "Told her I wasn't gonna … quit, on anything I shouldn't quit on. She understood." His tired face was expressionless. "I believe she's proud of me."

"Well," said Crane, mystified, "that's good. Hey, take it quiet past these rooms; it's all newlyweds sleeping off their wedding night champagne."

Then he just winced and closed his eyes, for Mavranos swore harshly and leaned on the horn all the way out onto the street.

"That's the place," Crane said two hours later, leaning forward and pointing at the big rusty Two of Spades sign rippling in the heat waves ahead.

"Shit," said Mavranos. He tipped up his current can of Coors, and when it was empty, he tossed it over his shoulder into the back of the truck. "I thought you said you have a lot of money."

Crane had to agree that the trailer-and-shacks structure standing alone by the side of the desert highway didn't look affluent. "I don't think this guy's in it for the bucks," he said. He held out his palm with two shiny silver dollars on it. "This was all I was told to bring."

"Huh."

The two of them had hardly spoken during the drive out from town. Crane had spent most of the drive watching the traffic behind them, but he had not seen any gray Jaguar. Perhaps the fat man had died of a concussion from his gunshot wound, or couldn't track him when he was … avoiding Susan.

Mavranos slowed the truck now and signaled for a turn off the highway, and Crane peered at the odd little settlement that was their destination. A big old house trailer—shored up with wooden frameworks and patched and haphazardly painted several faded shades of green—seemed to be the original core of it, but a lot of corrugated iron-roofed sheds had been added onto the back, and there seemed to be pens and chicken coops attached to the side. Two pickup trucks from about 1957 sat in rusty ruin in the unpaved yard between the trailer and the highway, with a newer-looking Volkswagen van behind them. The whole place had clearly been baked and warped by decades of merciless sun.

"
Chez
Spider Joe," said Crane with false cheer.

"That guy was hosin' you," Mavranos said as he slowed almost to a halt and turned onto the dirt yard. "The one who told you about this place." The truck shook, and the tires made popping and grinding sounds as they revolved. "
Hosin'
you."

At last he switched the engine off, and Crane waited until the worst of the kicked-up dust had blown away and then levered the door open. The breeze was hot, but it cooled the sweat on his face.

Aside from the ticking of the engine and the slow
chuff-chuff
of their steps as he and Mavranos plodded toward the front porch, the only sound was the rackety whir of an air conditioner. Crane could feel attention being paid to them, and he realized that he had been feeling it for the last mile or so.