Tim Powers - Last Call (6 page)

"No, it's not them." Betsy shook her head. "Come on." A few steps further up the sidewalk, when they were passing the west-facing Mississippi-showboat facade of the Holiday Casino, Doctor Leaky again became excited. "It's them!" he squeaked, pointing.

Statues in nineteenth-century dress stood on the deck of the boatlike structure, and in the fenced-off lagoon between the sidewalk and the building floated a moored raft with two Huck Finn-like statues on it. A red sign on the coping read: DANGEROUS CHEMICALS—KEEP OUT OF WATER.

"You moron," Betsy said.

Doctor Leaky giggled. Betsy noticed that a dark stain was spreading across the crotch of his suit pants.

"Oh, fine," she said. "God, why do I even keep you around?" In the middle of the sidewalk crowd she raised her hand, and a gray Jaguar XJ-6 pulled up and double-parked in the street.

She led the old man over the curb and across the pavement to the rear door. The driver, an obese bald man in a woolen Armani suit, had got out and was holding the door open. "My corpse pissed its pants, Vaughan," she told the fat man. "I guess we're going home."

"Okay, Betsy." The fat man took Doctor Leaky's forearm impersonally.

"It's them!" Doctor Leaky piped again.

Betsy sniffed the air again. The resonance was still on the hot breeze. "Who, Doctor?" she asked with weary patience and still a little hope.

"The people in Doom Town—the lady in the car, and the lady in the shelter in the basement, and all the rest of them. Those kids."

She realized that he was talking about the simulated town that had been built in the desert near Yucca Flats when the government had been testing the atom bomb in the early fifties, and false suns had seemed to rise instantly in the night sky beyond the Horseshoe Club and the Golden Nugget. To make it all more realistic, the Army had put mannequins in the houses and in the cars at the test site. Betsy could remember having gone out and looked at the fake city, which had been known to the locals as Doom Town.

"No, Doctor, get in the car, it's not them. Those were all fake people."

Doctor Leaky laboriously lifted one foot into the car. "I
know
that," he said, nodding with ponderous dignity. "The
problem
is that they weren't a realistic enough …"

"Unlike the plaster boys in front of Caesars, sure. Get in the car."

"As an
offering
, a
sacrifice
, they weren't realistic enough," the old man quavered. "The cards weren't fooled."

Vaughan leaned forward to help Doctor Leaky get the rest of the way into the car. For a moment Betsy could see the SIG 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol Vaughan wore in a shoulder holster under his coat.

Before getting into the car herself, she lifted her face into the breeze. Yes, at least one of the fish was grown to nearly keeping size out there.

Maybe it was the fellow who had swum up into her mind at the Dunes the other night. I wonder, she thought, who drink is to
him
.

The cycle took twenty years, but they did eventually ripen. Somebody's out there having a bad time right now.

Come Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, there would be another resurrection.

Crane got to his feet and carried a fresh beer out onto the porch. "What?" he said.

"I don't mean to be readin' your mail, Pogo," said Mavranos, "but you're gonna lose your house if you don't pay these people." He was holding out an unfolded sheet of paper with typing and numbers on it. The long gray envelope lay torn open on the table.

"Who's that? The bank?"

"Right. They're talkin' foreclosure." Mavranos was frowning. "You'd better pay 'em. I don't want to take my chances on a new neighbor who might object to a beery bum living next door." He leaned forward, and Crane could tell he was serious, for he used his Christian name. "Scott," Mavranos said clearly, "this is no joke. Get a lawyer, homestead the place, file chapter thirteen bankruptcy—but you gotta do
something
!"

Scott Crane held the paper up to his good eye and tried to make sense of it. He couldn't let himself lose the house, not now that it seemed Susan's ghost was here.

"I guess I've got to get back in business," he mumbled.

Arky blinked at him. "Are you still working at the restaurant?"

"I don't think so. They've called me a few times, but I haven't been in there … in weeks. No, I think that's gone. I've got to … get back into my
old
business."

"Which is what? It better get you a paycheck quick—and a big one."

"If it works, it does that. I quit doing it … eight, nine years ago. When I, when I married Susan, and started at the Villa. She never said anything, but I could tell it was time to get into something else. Yeah, that'll work, that'll work."

"So what
is
it? These people want their money yesterday."

Scott Crane had spilled some beer on his pants, and he rubbed at it ineffectually. "Oh, I—didn't I ever tell you?—I used to be a Poker player."

"You should have seen 'em tonight," he had told Susan at three o'clock one morning as he pulled wads of twenty-dollar bills from his pants pocket. "They were all quiet and grouchy, 'cause they didn't have any crank, and they kept looking up, real wide-eyed, every time they heard a car door slam, 'cause a friend who drives a tow truck had said he'd bring some by if he got a call to anywhere near the game. I could bluff 'em out any time with a five-dollar raise—they were having a terrible time, asking the guy whose house it was if he was sure he didn't have any old mirrors to lick, and even thinking about grinding up some of my No Doz and snorting that. Finally their friend did knock on the door and gave 'em a bindle, this little bitty folded bit of paper with about a quarter teaspoon of crystal meth in it, and then they were all happy and laughing and tapping the powder out on a mirror and scraping it into lines with a razor blade and then snorting it up through a little metal tube. Sudden cheer, yukking it up, you know? And suddenly they'd stay with any hand, and call any raise, and not give a damn if they lost. It was great. But then one of 'em's eyes go wide, you know, like this—and he gets up and runs for the bathroom. And a minute later all the rest of 'em are bowleggedying around in the hall like Quasimodo, banging on the bathroom door and cussing the guy in there. It turns out the crank was cut with some kind of baby laxative." Susan laughed, but was sitting up in bed and frowning as he took off his pants and shirt. "I don't mean to be critical, Scott," she said, "but these people sound like idiots."

"They are idiots, honey," he said, pulling back the covers and getting into his side of the bed. "It's not profitable to play Poker with geniuses." He reached up and turned out the light.

"But these are the people you … look for, and hang around with when you've found them," she said quietly in the darkness. "These are the people who you, what, do your life's work with … or at least who you do it to, or upon. You know what I'm saying? Aren't there any Poker players you admire?"

"Sure there are—but I'm not good enough to play with them and win, and I've got a living to make. And I admired my foster dad, but since he took off, I haven't found anybody to partner up with."

"It must be weird to look for people dumber than you, and avoid people as smart or smarter."

"Keeps you and me in groceries," he had said shortly.

Crane left Mavranos on the porch and went back inside.

For a couple of hours he managed to lose himself in the recipes and advice columns and personality quizzes in a stack of old issues of
Woman's World
and
Better Homes and Gardens
, and he drank his beers slowly and set his cans down only on coasters. Then he watched television.

When the house had darkened enough so that he had to get up and turn on the lights, he reluctantly made coffee, then went into the bathroom to shave and take a shower. The shades in the living room were down, so a few minutes later he walked right from the shower to the chair by the telephone.

Today was Thursday. That was good; one of the most enduring mid-level red-spot games he had ever instituted had been an L.A. area Thursday night game. He pulled out the Orange County and Los Angeles white pages phone books and tried to remember the names of some of the people who had been the steadiest players a decade ago.

He found a name: Budge, Ed Budge, still living on Beverly in Whittier. Must be sixty by now. He dialed the number. "Hello?"

"Ed, this is Scott Smith. Scarecrow Smith, remember?"

"Jesus, Scarecrow Smith! What have you been doing? How's Ozzie?"

"I don't know, man, I haven't seen him in twenty years. I—"

"And he had another kid he used to talk about. What was her name?"

"Diana. I don't know, I last talked to her in '75 or so, just briefly on the phone. I dreamed—I mean, I heard she got married." Crane took a sip of his third consecutive cup of coffee and wished he would sober up faster.

He remembered the call from Diana. He had been scuba diving in Morro Bay and had managed to fire his three-barbed spear into his own ankle, and the telephone had been ringing when he got home from Hoag Memorial Hospital the next day. She had refused to tell him where she was, or where Ozzie was, but she had been upset, and relieved to hear that he was all right. She couldn't have been more than fifteen then. Three years later he had dreamed of her in a wedding.

There had been no contact since. Apparently neither of them had been seriously hurt, physically at least, in the last fifteen years—or else their psychic link had withered away.

"So," Crane said now, "is the game still going?" "I don't know, Scott, I quit playing a few years ago. One day I figured out I was bleeding away ten grand a year in that damn game."

Crane suppressed a sigh. If Crane had still been the motivating force of the game, Ed would never have quit. Crane knew how to baby valuable losers along—flatter their winning plays, never take full advantage of their weaknesses, make the game seem more social than financial—so that they kept coming back; just as he knew how to repel good, winning players by criticizing their Poker etiquette and refusing to lend them money and trying to upset them, and encouraging the other players to do the same.

"Oh," Crane said. "Well, do you keep in touch with any of the guys?"

"Keep in touch? Outside the game? Scott, do you remember the plain old
breakfasts
?"

This time Crane did sigh. Sometimes the game had gone on for eighteen hours or more, and the players had taken a break to eat at some local coffee shop at dawn; and the fractured, desultory table-talk had made it stiflingly clear that none of them had anything in common with one another besides the game.

"Okay, Ed. Have a nice life."

He hung up and looked through the phone books for another name.
This was a solid game,
he thought.
It has to be still spinning out there. Old Ozzie taught me how to build 'em to last.

His foster father had been Oliver Crane. Using the name Ozzie Smith, the old man had been one of the country's respectable mid-level Poker players, from the 1930s through the 1960s. He had never quite been up there with the superstars like Moss and Brunson and "Amarillo Slim" Preston, but he had known them and played with them.

Ozzie had explained to Scott Crane that a good Poker game can have a life of its own, like a slow-motion hurricane, and he had shown him how to start them and vitalize them, all around the country, so that, like reserve bank accounts, they'd be there if you should someday need one of them. "They're like that great red spot on the planet Jupiter," the old man had said. "Just a lot of whirling gas, but always there."

If Ozzie were even still alive, he'd be … eighty-two now. Crane had no way of getting in touch with him. Ozzie had made sure of that.

Jube Kelley was in the book, living in Hawthorne now. Crane dialed the number.

"Jube? This is Scott Smith, Scarecrow Smith. Listen, is the game still going?"

"Hey, Scott! The game? Sure, you can't kill a game like that. I only go once in a while now, but they're doing it at Chick's house now. This is Thursday, right? They'll be there tonight."

"Chick's house. That's on Washington, in Venice?"

"Right," said Sam. "Between the old canals and the Marina Del Rey basins."

Crane was frowning, and he wondered why he was uneasy … He realized that he wasn't looking forward to being that close to, that
surrounded
by, the ocean; and going so far west seemed … mildly difficult, like pressing the positive poles of two magnets together. Why couldn't they have moved the game east?

"You still there, Scarecrow?"

"Yeah. What stakes are they playing these days?"

"Ten and twenty, last I heard."

Perfect. "Well, I gotta run, Jube. Thanks."

Crane hung up and walked slowly into the bedroom. The cool evening wind sighed in at the window, and he saw no ghost.

He relaxed and let out an unwittingly held breath, not sure whether he was disappointed or not.

He was still damp from the shower, but he got dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and old sneakers and another flannel shirt. He tucked a lighter and three unopened packs of Marlboros into his pockets and picked up the Versatel card; he could draw three hundred with it, and he had another forty or so on the bookshelf. Not lavish, but he ought to be able to make it do. Play the first hand noticeably loose, then tighten up for a while.

And the car keys are in the living room, he thought as he started out the bedroom door—and then he paused.

If you bring a machine, you'll never need it,
Ozzie had always told him.
Like a fire extinguisher in a car. The day you don't bring it is the day you'll need it.

Not
, Crane thought now,
not
in a ten and twenty game at Chick's! He laughed self-consciously and stepped into the hall, then stopped again.

He shrugged and went back to the dresser by the bed.
This isn't the time to ignore the old man's advice
, he thought. He pulled open the top drawer and dug behind the socks and old envelopes full of photographs until he found the blocky stainless steel Smith & Wesson .357 revolver.