Tim Powers - Last Call (7 page)

What the hell, he thought, at least you're fairly sober.

He flipped out the cylinder. All six chambers were still loaded, and he pushed up the ejection-rod to get one out. One hundred twenty-five-grain hollow-point cartridges, as he remembered. He let it fall back in and snapped the gun shut again and tucked it into his belt, hearing the cartridges rattle faintly in the chambers.

When he opened the front door, he paused.

"I might be a little late," he called to the empty house.

He stopped at a nearby 7-Eleven store for hero sandwiches, a couple of twelve-packs of beer, a box of No Doz and a dozen decks of cards, and then he got on the freeway.

Back to chasing the white line, he thought as the lane markings of the 5 Freeway flew past like fireflies under the tires of his old Ford. I can remember a hundred, a thousand nights like this, driving with Ozzie along the 66 and the 20 and the 40, through Arizona and New Mexico and Texas and Oklahoma. Always a game behind us and a game ahead of us.

It had been what Ozzie called a semi-retired life. They traveled and played during the three months of spring, and then lived off their winnings in the Santa Ana house during the other three seasons.

Scott had been five years old when Ozzie had found him, in the back of a boat on a trailer in a Los Angeles parking lot. Apparently he had been a messed-up little kid—one eye split open and dried blood all over his face. Ozzie had talked to him for a few minutes and had then driven him in his old truck to a doctor who owed Ozzie a lot of money.

Old Dr. Malk had fitted up young Scott with his first glass eye. The eyes were still real glass in the forties, and for kids they were round, like big marbles, to fill the orbit and make sure the skull grew correctly. The next day Ozzie had taken the boy home to the house in Santa Ana, and had told the neighbors that Scott was his cousin's illegitimate child and that he was adopting him.

Ozzie had been about forty then, in '48. He had quickly begun teaching Scott all about Poker, but he had never let the boy play with anyone else, and never for real money, until the summer of '59, when Scott was sixteen, and they went off on one of the annual trips together.

"You never play for money at home," Ozzie had said. "You don't want the cards to know where you live."

Scott had become known as Scarecrow Smith, because before about 1980 doctors couldn't effectively attach glass eyes to eye muscles, and so it was more natural-looking for him to turn his whole head to look at something than to have only one eye move to the side; to some players this had made his eyes seem painted on and his neck appear unnaturally loose. And "Scarecrow" had fitted with his adopted father's nickname: whenever Oliver Crane was asked where he lived, he had always just said, "Oz."

In fact, Ozzie had not let anyone in the Poker world know where he lived. He used the name Smith when he played and insisted that Scott do the same, and he always kept his car registered to a post office box.

"You don't want to take a chance on your work following you home," he'd said. To make that even less likely, he had always bought new tires and had his Studebaker tuned up before setting out, and he never went to a game without a full tank of gas. And there was always a twelve-gauge pump shotgun under a blanket on the back seat to supplement the pistol in his belt.

And he had made sure Scott understood when it was that you had to fold out of a game.

That had been the advice Scott had ignored in the game on the lake in '69.

"If the drink in your glass starts to sit at an angle that ain't quite level, or if the cigarette smoke starts to crowd in over the cards and fall there, or if plants in the room suddenly start to wilt, or if the air is suddenly dry and hot in your throat, smelling like sun-hot rock, fold out. You don't know what you might be buying or selling come the showdown."

By the end of the spring of 1969 Ozzie had been sixty or so, and Scott had been twenty-six.

Both of them had been wanting to get back home to Santa Ana—Scott had a girl friend whom he hadn't seen in three months, and Ozzie missed his other foster child, Diana, who was nine years old and staying with a neighbor woman—but they had decided to hit Las Vegas before once again burning on home across the Mojave to southern California.

They had got in on a Five-Stud game that started in the Horseshoe on Fremont Street in the evening, and at dawn they had moved it upstairs to one of the rooms, and in the middle of the afternoon, when all but Ozzie and Scott and a pudgy businessman called Newt had been eliminated, they had declared a sleep-and-food break.

"You know," Newt had said slowly, almost reluctantly, as he finally unknotted his tie, "there's a game on a houseboat on Lake Mead tonight." Newt had lost more than ten thousand dollars.

Ozzie had shaken his head. "I never gamble on water." He tucked a wad of bills into his jacket pocket. He had increased his roll from about twelve to about twenty-four thousand in the past twenty hours. "Even when they had the boats out there in the ocean, three miles off Santa Monica, I never went."

Scott Crane was down. He had had ten thousand when they'd driven into Las Vegas, and he had about seven and a half now, and he knew Ozzie was ready to declare the season finished and start for home.

"What kind of game?" Scott had asked.

"Well, it's odd." Newt stood up and walked to the window. "This guy's name is Ricky Leroy, and ordinarily he's one of the best Poker players in town." The stout young businessman kept his back to them as he talked. "But for the last two or three days he's been playing this game he calls Assumption—weird game with a weird deck, all pictures—and he's losing. And he doesn't seem to mind."

"Assumption," said Ozzie thoughtfully. "Twenty years ago a guy was hosting a game of that out on a boat on Lake Mead. Different guy—George something. He lost a lot, too, I heard."

"My luck's gone here," Newt said, turning around to face them. "I'm going to drive out there tonight. If you want to come, I'll be standing under the million-dollar-display Horseshoe at eight."

"You may as well just go," Ozzie told him. "This was our last game of the season; we're going to sleep twelve hours and then drive home."

Newt had shrugged. "Well, I'll be there just in case."

Back in their own room at the Mint Hotel, Ozzie had at first been unable to believe that Scott wasn't kidding when he said he wanted to go meet Newt and get into the game on the lake.

The old man had kicked off his polished black shoes and lay down on one of the beds, and he was laughing with his eyes closed. "Sure, Scott—on water,
tamed
water, with a guy that always pays for hands, and playing with what obviously is a
Tarot
deck, for God's sake. Shit, you'd win a few signifying hands, and a month later you'd find out you've got cancer and you're getting arrested for crimes you never heard of and you can't get it up anymore. And then one day you'd walk out to the mailbox and find your goddamn
head
in there."

Scott was holding a glass of beer he'd picked up on the way to the elevator, and now he took a long sip of it.

Most Poker players had superstitions, and he had always conformed to Ozzie's, out of respect for the old man, even when it had meant folding a cinch hand just because some cigarette smoke was moving in ways the old man didn't like or someone had kicked the table and the drinks were wobbling.

Ozzie had folded some good hands, too, of course—hundreds, probably, in his forty years of professional play. But Ozzie could
afford
to: He had made a lot of money over the years, and though he rarely played the very-high-stakes games, he was regarded as an equal by the best players in the country.

And right now he had twenty-four thousand dollars rolled up tight in the hollow handles of his shaving brush and shoehorn and coffeepot.

Scott had less than eight thousand, and he was going home to car payments and a girl friend who liked steak and lobster and first-growth Bordeaux wines.

And he had heard that next year Benny Binion, the owner of the Horseshoe, was going to host a World Series of Poker, with all the best Poker players converging there to determine who was the very best. Scott could remember having met old Binion once, at a restaurant called Louigi's on Las Vegas Boulevard. Scott had been only three or four, staying out late with his long-lost real father, but he remembered now that Binion had ordered the house's best steak and had then shaken ketchup onto it.

He was sure he could win this competition … if he could come into town with enough money to spread a good-size net.

"I've
got
to go, Oz. My roll's short, and the season's over."

"
Your
roll?" The grin was fading from Ozzie's face as he raised his head to look at Scott. "What you've got in your pocket is a hair less than twenty-five percent of
our
roll, yours and mine and Diana's. We've got thirty-one and a half, and if that ain't lavish to live a year on, I don't—"

"I've got to go, Oz."

Ozzie now wearily forced himself back up onto his feet. His gray hair was disarranged, and he needed a shave. "Scott, it's
on water
. It's
Tarot cards
. You want to play, take our money to any of the hundred games in town here. But you
can't
go play
there
."

You can't go play there,
thought Scott, as the beer amplified his own massive fatigue. That's what you say to a kid who wants to ride his tricycle to a park where there might be bad boys.

I'm twenty-six, and I'm a damn good player on my own—not just as
Ozzie's kid
.

The cross-cut wooden grip of his .38 revolver was poking up out of the dirty shirts in the open suitcase on the bed. He pulled the gun free and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

"I'm going," he said, and went to the door and pulled it open and strode rapidly down the hall toward the door to the stairwell.

And he was crying by the time he stepped out of the cool darkness of the casino into the brassy afternoon sunlight, because for at least several floors he had heard Ozzie shuffling in his stocking feet down the stairs behind him, calling and pleading weakly in his frail voice as he forced his exhausted old body to try to catch up with his adopted son.

"Assumption," Newt said.

He was talking quickly, hunched over the steering wheel of his Cadillac as the hot dark desert swept past on either side. "This guy Leroy won't play it unless there are twelve other people at the table with him. A hundred dollars ante. Everybody's dealt two down cards and one up card, and then there's a round of betting, two hundred a bet, and then one more up card and another round at two hundred."

Scott popped the cap off a fresh bottle of beer. "That's fifty-two cards," he said blurrily. "You're out of cards, except maybe for a Joker."

"Nah, he won't play it with a Joker, and actually there's four more cards left, 'cause there's an extra face card in each suit, the Knight. And the suits are different, they're Sticks and Cups and Coins and Swords. But anyway, no more cards are dealt."

The lights of the bars and brothels of Formyle swept past. The Cadillac was now four miles out of Las Vegas and must, Scott thought, be doing a hundred by now.

"What happens then," Newt went on, "is that each four-card hand in turn goes up for bid. The term is 'the mating.' Say you've got two Kings down and a Three and something up, and you see a hand with a King and a Three showing; well, you'd want to bid on that hand, 'cause if you got it, you'd have a Full Boat in your eight-card hand—or, if one of his down cards turned out to be the [case] King, you'd find yourself with four Kings, get it? When you put the two hands together, yours and the one you bought, they say that the resulting eight-card hand has been
conceived
, rather than completed or something. With the bidding you usually wind up paying a guy, for his hand, a hundred or so more than what he's got in the pot. A lot of guys never mean to stay for the showdown, they just want to sell their hands at the bid, at the mating. And when it gets down to the last three guys who haven't bought a hand or sold theirs, the competition gets hot 'cause nobody wants to be left out in the cold holding an unsold and unplayable—unconceivable—four-card hand."

Scott nodded, staring out through the dusty windshield at the dim bulk of the McCullough Range denting the dark sky ahead. "So there might be as many as … six guys in at the showdown."

"Right. And even if you're out of the hand, you're still watching 'cause you've still got an investment in the hand you sold your four cards into. You're called a parent of the hand, and if it wins, you get ten percent of the pot. That's another reason a lot of guys just want to sell their hands and get out: they can clear a fair profit at the mating and then still have a one-in-six chance of getting a tenth of a pretty sizable pot."

Scott Crane drained his beer and pitched the bottle out the open window into the gathering night. "So have you played it yet?"

"Sure I've played it," said Newt, apparently angry. "Would I bring guys to it if I hadn't played it? And I've played Poker with Leroy a lot."

Scott was suddenly sure that Newt had lost a lot, too, to Leroy, and owed him at least money. For just a moment he considered making Newt pull over to the shoulder and getting out of the car and hitchhiking back to the Mint.

Lightning made silent jagged patterns over the mountains, like the momentarily incandescing roots of some vast tree that carried the stars as buds.

"And then there's the Assumption option," said Newt as he leaned over the big wheel and tugged it back and forth, sounding as tired as Scott felt. "If you're the absentee parent of the winning hand, you're free to put up an amount of your own money equal to the amount in the pot, and then have the deck shuffled, and cut the cards for the whole thing."

Scott frowned, trying to make his sluggish mind work. "But you'd already be getting a tenth of the pot. Why risk … fifty-five percent to win forty five, on a fifty-fifty chance?"