Tim Powers - Last Call (55 page)

Mavranos threw the gearshift lever into park, and then he and Crane were out the doors.

Crane didn't know where Mavranos was, but he crouched up the slope by the front bumper, coughing in the stinging dust cloud, and squinted over the barrel of the cocked .357 as he swung it from side to side over the hot hood.

Instead of the two recent shots, it was a shotgun blast from three days ago that was echoing in his mind. Bring me the fat man, God, he prayed, and you can have me.

"Freeze!" came a harsh, choked shout from out of the dust fog. "Police, Lieutenant Frits! Crane and Mavranos, step away from the truck with your hands on your heads!"

The wind was thinning the dust, and Crane could see Mavranos now—he was plodding slowly toward the gully, away from the back bumper, his empty hands raised.

Crane had lowered his own gun and straightened.

A vague silhouette was visible ahead, against the bulk of the Camaro. "Crane!" came the voice again. "Away from the truck, now!"

Uncertainly Crane stepped around the front of the truck and took two steps along the slope. His gun was still in his hand, but by his side, pointed at the ground.

A gust of wind cleared the air. The fat man, Vaughan Trumbill, stood in front of the Camaro, both arms extended forward, his left hand pointing an automatic at Mavranos and his right pointing a rifle at Crane. A white bandage bobbed on his spherical bald head, but his hands were steady.

"
Not
really," said Trumbill. "Drop it, Crane."

The van was rocking up into position behind the Camaro. Its windshield was opaqued with dust, and Crane could only wonder how many guns might be leveled at himself and Mavranos behind it.

Right, Crane thought dully. Frits would have had sirens or a light, even in an unmarked car.

Crane looked across the road at Mavranos. Mavranos's eyes squinted at him almost humorously over the dusty mustache.

"I'm okay," Mavranos called. "I liked Ozzie too."

Trumbill was striding toward Mavranos, his tie and the tails of his suit coat flapping like banners on a ship. "Drop it or I kill your buddy, Crane, he shouted, his pouchy eyes staring hard into Crane's face.

"
Hah
!" yelled Mavranos, stomping one foot in the dust. Trumbill's head whipped around toward him, his automatic up—

—And Crane, as aware of the imagined guns behind the van's windshield as he would have been of a scorpion on his face, was grateful to his friend for making this easy—

—as he snapped his revolver up into line and touched the cocked trigger.

The full-throated
bam
rocked his head back and he let the recoil spin him around to fall onto his knees with the gun aimed at the windshield of the van.

The van must already have been in reverse gear, for even as Crane was falling to his knees, its front end had dipped and it had begun to back away at full throttle, its front tires throwing up sand in two churning clouds.

Crane swiveled his gunsight toward the rear of the truck, but Mavranos was standing alone in the road, his back to Crane, looking away from the receding van now to peer down into the gully.

After one more tense, hard-breathing moment Crane raised the barrel and stood up.

The van, which Crane could now see had a florist's logo on its side, had reached a wide spot and backed around broadside; now it moved forward, turning back toward the highway, and drove away faster.

Crane plodded down the slope and across the road, and he stopped at the lip of the gully a few yards away from Mavranos.

Trumbill lay sprawled on his back in the sandy bed of the wash a few yards below them. His coat was open, and the white shirt over his belly was reddening fast. The rifle he had been carrying lay on the roadside near Mavranos, and the automatic rested upright against a stone halfway down the slope of the gully.

"Good shootin', Pogo," said Mavranos.

Crane looked at him. His friend hadn't been shot, but he was weaving on his feet and looked pale and sick.

"Thanks," said Crane. He supposed he must look the same way.

"
Camaro
," said Trumbill loudly. "
Take it to … telephone
." Speaking the words seemed to cost him a lot, but his voice was strong. "
Medevac
."

No, thought Crane. "No," he said.

I've got to kill him, he thought in sick amazement, finish him off. I can't take prisoners here. Would the police jail him? For what? Ozzie's body is gone, and even if the fat man left enough evidence to be charged with Diana's murder—which isn't likely—he would certainly be freed on bail. Of course he'd be in a hospital for a long time, but couldn't he work for my father from a hospital? He wouldn't let Scat and Oliver slip through his fingers, as he did with the infant Diana.

And I'd be in jail, at least for a while. Maybe a long time. What the hell kind of story could I tell the police?

I've got to kill him. Right here. Right now.

"
Mavranos
," Trumbill called now. "
I can cure your cancer. You can … go back to your family … a healthy man. Decades.
" He inhaled loudly enough for the men up on the bank to hear. "
Trank darts—in rifle. Shoot Crane
."

Crane turned and looked at the rifle that lay a yard from Mavranos's feet, and then he looked up and met Mavranos's gaze.

Crane didn't think Mavranos could get the rifle up before he could raise the revolver and shoot him—but he realized that he was physically incapable of shooting Arky. He slowly opened his hand and let the revolver clank to the dirt.

"Do what you gotta do, Arky," he said.

Mavranos nodded slowly. "I'm thinking of Wendy, and the girls," he said.

Slowly he stepped over to where the rifle lay on the ground, and then he kicked it away, toward the truck's front tire.

"Wendy saved you."

Crane exhaled and nodded, then turned back to Trumbill and swallowed hard as he crouched down to retrieve the revolver.

"
Okay
," moaned Trumbill. His face was pale and gleaming with sweat in the harsh sunlight, and his pudgy hands were fists. "
Last request! Call this number … tell him where my … body is. Three-eight-two—
"

"No," said Crane, shakily raising the mirror-bright gun. "I don't know what kind of magic he could do with your corpse." He blinked tears out of his eyes but spoke steadily. "Best you rot out here, feed the birds and the bugs."

"
No-o-o-o-o
!" Somehow in spite of his terrible wound, Trumbill was roaring down there, and the fearful, jarring noise seemed to fill the desert and shake the remote sky. "
Not the skinny man, not the skinny man, not the—
"

Crane thought of Ozzie and of Diana, both killed by this man.

And he pulled the trigger.

Bam.

"—
Skinny ma-a-a-a-an
—"

Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.

Click.

The hot air of the flat desert gave back no echoes from the shots. Crane lowered the emptied gun and stared, astonished, at the red-spattered body sprawled motionless in the sand of the dry stream bed.

Then the dirt surface of the road was under Crane's face, between his spread hands, and he was spasmodically vomiting up the dregs of the Coke he'd had for breakfast.

When he was able to roll away to the side, spitting and gasping, he saw through his tears that Mavranos had opened the back of the truck and was lugging the jack to the flat tire.

"I can do this, Pogo," Mavranos called. "Why don't you see if you can't push that Camaro into the wash. I've got a couple of tarps we can throw over it and weight down with rocks. No harm if this goes
undetected
for a while, and I don't think the boys in that van are gonna make any calls."

Crane nodded and got wearily to his feet.

Fifteen minutes later they were driving slowly back along the dirt road toward the highway, Mavranos absently cursing the damage that he imagined had been done to the truck's suspension. Crane rocked in the passenger seat and stared out at the broken stones of the desert, trying to feel a grim satisfaction at having avenged Ozzie, or to feel pride in having competently shot the fat man, or to feel
anything
besides the remembered horror of pulling that sweat-slick trigger again and again and again.

After they had got back onto the highway and were again rolling south toward the lake, he looked at his right hand, and for a moment he hoped that his father would succeed in taking this body away from him.

"This don't look much like Vegas," Mavranos said as he steered the shaky, dusty truck through the quiet streets of Boulder City. Somehow the radio was playing what Crane thought was the best rock song ever recorded, Big Brother and the Holding Company's "Combination of the Two."

Today Crane felt as though he'd lost the right, the
ability
, to participate in it.

He blinked and looked around at the complacent Spanish-style houses and the green lawns. "Hmm? Oh—no, it's not anything like it." His voice sounded oddly flat in his head. He was making an effort to talk normally, to talk as he would have if he had not just …
killed
a man. "This is the only place in Nevada where gambling's not legal," he went on doggedly. "In fact, hard liquor only became legal here in '69."

"No gambling at all?"

"Nope." He grinned stiffly and shook his head. " 'Cept for a—a certain Poker game on a houseboat once every twenty years or so."

And that starts up tomorrow night, he thought. And when this latest series of games is done, come Holy Saturday, he'll assume this old body of mine, unless I've stopped him somehow.

On the radio Janis Joplin was wailing, but not for him.

"Huh," said Mavranos. "Nothing to do me any good. Maybe I can get in a game of penny-lagging."

Crane glanced at Mavranos, feeling oppressed now about him, too. Mavranos was definitely thinner and paler than he had been when they'd driven out from Los Angeles, and now he was never without the bandanna tied up tight around his throat. I wonder, Crane thought, if Trumbill
could
, possibly, have cured Arky's cancer. Surely that was just a desperate bluff.

"Left up ahead there, on Lakeshore Road," Crane said.

"We're not going to the dam?"

"No. The nearest marinas and beaches are up the west shore of the lake. That's where we can rent scuba gear and a boat. At the dam all you can do is look."

"I wanted to see the dam."

"We'll go see it later, okay?" said Crane shortly. "Later in the week. You can buy a T-shirt and everything."

"It's one of the seven man-made wonders of the world."

"Yeah? What are the others?"

"I don't know. Montezooma's Revenge at Knott's Berry Farm's one, I think."

"We'll get you a T-shirt there, too, on the way home."

Their laughter was brief and tense. Mavranos finished his beer and popped another. Poor dead Janis Joplin howled on out of the speakers that were hung on adhesive tape from the roof struts behind the front seat.

At a dive shop near the Government Dock Crane rented a new outfit of U.S. Divers scuba gear and a full wet suit with hood and boots and a gear bag to carry it all in. They rented a speedboat at the Lake Mead Resort Circle, and by noon they were gunning out across the blue face of the lake under the empty blue sky.

After a few minutes they had left behind the water-skiers and had got out to where the wind was raising random choppy waves, and Crane pulled back on the Morris throttle, reversing the engine and bringing the boat to an uneven, rocking halt. Mavranos had been hanging on to the dashboard bar during the bouncy, spray-flinging ride, and now he took off his Greek fisherman's cap, whacked it against his knee, and put it on again.

"You through shakin' us up?" he asked in the sudden quiet. "I'm gonna step back to the ice chest, but not if you're gonna bounce me right out."

"Yeah, I'll take it easy."

They were alone out on the water under the arching, cloudless sky, but Crane had to focus his eye to stop seeing the fat man's body jumping and bursting as the bullets hit, and he yawned so that his ears would pop and he would blessedly hear only the wind and the idling engine.

Well, he thought, here I am. What do I do now, just jump in?

A little red fishing boat rocked on the water a hundred yards away, and the man in it seemed to be looking at them. Crane wondered if their crashing arrival out here had scared off all the fish.

Mavranos came back and sat down in the bucket seat, a fresh beer foaming in his fist. "Ride did the beer a lot of good," he growled, wiping foam off his mustache. "Where's the head?"

"You gotta just piss over the side, man," said Crane. "No, I know what you meant." He brushed the wind-disordered hair back from his forehead and looked around at the vast face of the lake. "I, uh, don't know, exactly. It's probably in this section of the lake, the Boulder Basin; there's also the Overton Arm and the Temple Basin and Gregg Basin, miles away over those mountains, but this is certainly the most
accessible
part."

There should be a hand holding a sword, he thought helplessly, sticking up out of the water.

He unfolded the map the boat rental clerk had given him. "Let's see what we got," he said, tracing his finger along the outline of the Boulder Basin. "I don't know, here's Moon Cove; that sounds possible. And Deadman's Island; I like that."

Mavranos leaned over and breathed beer fumes at him. "Roadrunner Cove," he read. "I like that.
Beep-beep
."

Crane looked back at the gear bag, wondering if he would even get into the wet suit today.

"Let's just go," he said finally. "I'll take it slower, but hang on."

He drove the boat along at a steady twenty miles an hour northward, paralleling the west coastline up toward Moon Cove.

Blank your mind, he told himself. Maybe the dead King is ready to guide you, but the static racket of your thoughts is keeping him from getting through.

He tried, but he wasn't able to make himself really relax into it. Blanking his mind in these circumstances seemed too much like leaving one's car running and unlocked in a bad neighborhood.