Tim Powers - Last Call (73 page)

It was as wavy and rippled as if a jigsaw had been working on it, as if it were meant to be a theatrical exaggeration of an eroded cliff face, and he remembered the Fool card in the Lombardy Zeroth deck: The Fool had been dancing on a cliff edge that had been scalloped like this.

And when he looked up again at Snayheever, Mavranos saw that the mad young man's coat was longer and looser, and belted with a rope, and that he wore a headdress of feathers.

He was terribly tall.

Pogue finally stepped up to the curb now, seeming to be only a few yards from Mavranos. The card was still in his hat-band like a lamp on a miner's helmet, and he blindly raised a little automatic pistol through the wet wind toward Snayheever.

Still leaning on the coping, Mavranos swung the barrel of his .38 into line, aimed at Pogue's chest, feeling the brass shells of the plastic-tipped Glaser rounds click back in the cylinder—and with his finger on the grooved metal of the trigger he froze, suddenly certain that he could not kill anyone.

Pogue's gun banged, jerking his hand up, but Snayheever's mad dancing didn't falter. Pogue's first shot had flown wide in the shattered, rainy air.

I'm still a damn good shot, though, thought Mavranos, sighting instead on the shimmering target of Pogue's outstretched gun hand. Maybe I won't
have
to kill him.

He pulled the trigger through the double-action cycle without the sights wavering at all, and when the hard
bang
punched his eardrums and the barrel flew up in recoil, he saw Pogue go spinning away.

But he had seen dust spring away from the wall and the sidewalk, and he wondered if the Glaser round had come apart, like a shot shell, before hitting Pogue's hand. If so, he
might
have killed Pogue, in spite of his careful aim.

Pogue was getting back up on his feet, though, and his hand was a splintered white and red ruin, jetting arterial blood; clearly Mavranos's shot had gone as aimed. The sight of the ruined hand drove a column of hot vomit up Mavranos's throat, and he resolutely clenched his jaw and swallowed … but for a moment he wondered if his gun had somehow shot
several
bullets, or rather several
likelihoods
of bullets.

Pogue was howling now in the green seaweed-tasting rain, and he lunged at Snayheever's ankles.

Mavranos raised his .38 again, but the two figures were together, and the pavement was shaking over the laboring heart of the dam, and he didn't dare shoot. Pogue had climbed up on the coping and was sitting straddling it beside Snayheever, and he had clasped his one good arm around Snayheever's legs. His hat had come off and gone spinning away down the afterbay wall, and his pompadour was broken into wet strands plastered across his forehead.

Snayheever was just standing there on the coping surface now, but still smiling into the dark sky and waving his arms. "
Blind as a bat
!" he roared, with Pogue and Mavranos moaning it in synchronization.

"Is there anyone that can hear me?" Pogue shouted over the hiss of the hot rain. His darkly swollen eyes were screwed shut, and the bandage taped over his nose was blotting with blood.

Mavranos waved his gun helplessly. "I can hear you, man," he called.

"Help me, please," Pogue sobbed. "I'm turned around, and I'm blind, but I've got to sink my head right now. I can't wait for the blood to behave! Am I on the
lake
side of the highway? Is it the
lake
below us here?"

If I say yes, Mavranos thought, he'll let go of Snayheever and jump, and I can yank Snayheever down from there.

But I'll be killing Pogue, as surely as if I'd shot him through the face.

If I say
no
, he'll throw Snayheever off and then cross the highway unimpeded. I won't be able to reach him, stop him, with his optical illusion magic going full strength again. He'll jump off the lake-side edge, and Diana will be doomed.

And if I say nothing at all …?

Okay then, he thought despairingly, I'll
go
to hell.

"That's the lake below you," he said loudly, feeling the words brand burns into his soul. "You're on the railing at the north side."

Pogue's lean face split into a white grin under the straggling wet hair and the bandage—

—And he snapped his head forward, buried his teeth in Snayheever's calf and swung his highway-side leg up and kicked Snayheever's knee.

Then Snayheever had tipped, and Mavranos swore and started forward in horror. He couldn't tell whether the flailing of Snayheever's arms was a useless attempt to keep his balance or still part of the crazy dance; Snayheever disappeared over the side, and Pogue, his arm still around his legs and his teeth still in his flesh, rolled off the coping after him.

Mavranos slammed into the cement wall and peered over the edge.

For several seconds the locked-together figure that was Snayheever and Pogue spun free in the mist above the dizzying abyss, rapidly diminishing in apparent size. Then they touched the steep slope and bounced and tumbled away apart, arms and legs flailing horribly loose, and they cartwheeled and sprang all the way down to the cement power station roof, where they briefly shook in what must have been prodigious bounces, and were two tiny, still forms.

Then the resounding air was stilled, like a struck piano wire when the foot pedal is tromped on, and the dam under Mavranos's feet became again as solid as the mountains, and the flow of water through the mighty penstocks and giant turbines must abruptly have been restored to a full, even flow, for the face of the river below the dam quickly became as smooth as a plate of glass.

The rain of lake water stopped, and the wind was steady, and the bats and fish were gone. Clouds blocked the sun intermittently, and the edges of cloud shadow on the pavement were as sharp as if they had been razored out of black cardboard.

And Mavranos stood away from the gradual geometric curve of the coping, which stretched in an unrippled arc from one mountain to the other. He uncocked his revolver and put it back in his belt and pulled his shirttail over it. He took a deep breath, then swallowed, and swallowed again.

He tapped his jacket pocket, then fished out the Baggie. It had burst at some point during the last several minutes, but the little goldfish was still flopping in the wet plastic bag.

He walked quickly out onto the highway, between the cars and across to the lake-facing railing. He held the Baggie out over the abyss and the lake water below, and he shook the fish out, then leaned over and watched it tumble away until he couldn't see it anymore.

His exhaustion was gone. He sprinted away over the drying pavement, down the center of the long, curving highway, running with his knees well up, swerving effortlessly around the abandoned cars, toward the parking lot where he had left the truck.

And twenty-five miles away to the northwest in Las Vegas, every pair of dice on every Craps table had come up snake-eyes in the instant of Snayheever's death, and every roulette ball rocked to a solid halt in the OO slot, and every car in town that had its key turned in the ignition at that moment started up instantly.

The sky over the west shore of the lake was still almost as dark as night, and though the moon should have been three days past its full phase, it hung overhead as perfectly round as the worn white disk Diana and Nardie had shared.

The two of them were alone on their section of beach; Nardie, empty-handed now, was still in a defensive crouch, and Diana was swaying on her feet and clutching her throat. A hundred yards away to their left, the children and parents were hesitantly but at least loose-jointedly wandering back up the beach toward their towels and umbrellas, clearly puzzled and ill at ease and wondering about imminent rain.

Shapes seemed to rush through the sky on the rising wind, fluttering and sighing, but Diana sensed no threat in whatever the things might be; and the waves were high, as if giants under the water were shifting uneasily in sleep, but she thought that any such giants would not harm her.

She spat on the sand. "I'm bleeding." The inside of her mouth was cut, but the half disk had apparently broken up before reaching her throat. She spat again. "Kind of a lot."

Nardie straightened up lithely and laughed, coughing in the midst of it. "Me too. But I guess we won't die of it after all."

Diana took a step toward the water, hitching and wincing and wondering how many of her ribs might be cracked. "Let's get in the water."

Crane allowed himself to hang on to the edge of the table for a moment. The sky was brightening again outside the ports, and the yellow light cast by the lamps on the paneled walls began to look sickly.

"Dizzy," he said as Newt finished counting the bills in the middle of the table.

The Amino Acid bartender had pulled the ports closed again shortly after the huge voice had begun to roll its syllables across the lake from the direction of the Black Mountains and the dam, and the air in the cabin was stifling with the smell of Doctor Leaky and cigarette smoke. Crane thought his dizziness now might be as much from nausea as from the illusion of spinning … spinning
diesel
, as Ozzie would have said.

"Seventy-nine hundred," croaked Newt finally.

Leon separated out of his billfold a thick bundle of thousands and hundreds, and his good eye burned into Crane's good eye as he tossed the bills onto the stack Newt had counted.

The socket of Crane's false eye throbbed, and he wasn't quite able to close the eyelid. Good joke, he thought, if I succeed here but die later of meningitis. Gingerly he touched the corner of his eye. It hurt, and his fingertip was smudged with mascara.

"Cut for high card," said Leon.

Crane looked across the room at Doctor Leaky. Once again alertness seemed to glitter in the old man's gaze, and Crane looked away in case his father's body might guess something, say something that would warn Leon.

But the senile old body couldn't have been alert and guessed Crane's purpose, for it didn't say anything at all.

Crane flexed his right hand, noticing for the first time that he had chewed the painted nails down to the quicks, and he lowered his fingers over the deck and lifted half of it off.

He showed the card to the other players, then looked at it himself.

The Page of Cups. His card, Ozzie had said; soon to be replaced by the King? He quickly lowered the cards back down onto the deck, fearing that Leon might notice the card's faintly stained corner.

Leon was smiling, and panting. "A tough one to beat!" he said.

Newt leaned forward, slid the deck to himself, and shuffled it again, then pushed it to a spot in front of the shivering Hanari body.

With a trembling hand Georges Leon lifted off the top half of the deck, and he hesitated even as he raised the cards.

Crane's heart seemed to have stopped.
He missed the crimped card,
Crane thought.
He's going to come up with an Ace—

But the card Leon showed was the Ten of Swords. Crane's heart was beating again, and he laughed weakly and rapped the table with a fist. "
Yes
!" he said, letting his hot burst of triumph show, for everyone would assume he was just pleased at having won the doubled pot. "Gotcha!"

"Aw, bad beat," said one of the other players to Leon.

Leon grimaced and shrugged. "You win," he told Crane. "I don't know when I'm going to learn that that's not a smart bet."

"Thanks," said Crane hoarsely.

"You're taking the money," said Leon.

Crane thought of Ozzie, and stared coldly into the unswollen eye. "Looks like it."

"You're selling the hand. I've bought it, I'm
assuming
it."

"It's all yours, believe me."

Crane tamped the stacks of bills and slid them in between his spread elbows, leaving one hundred out on the table as his ante for the next hand.

He had done it.

He had sold Leon the hand that Doctor Leaky had conceived in the informal Assumption game by the Dumpster behind the liquor store on Wednesday.

Crane had no idea what might happen now. This scheme might not work, and he might lose his body tomorrow, but he had done all he could.

"That's two hundred to you."

Crane looked up from his gnawed fingernails. Leon had been speaking to him.

"Oh," said Crane. "Sorry." He lifted four hundreds from one of his stacks and tossed them into the pot. "I make it four," he said.

"You haven't looked at your down cards!" said Newt petulantly. "You're raising blind?"

"Raising blind," Crane agreed.

Station wagons with luggage belted onto the rooftop racks jammed the marina streets on this Friday afternoon, and tanned young men and women in scanty swimsuits thronged the sidewalks and drank beer from dewy cans or drove puttering scooters between the slow, smoky lanes of traffic.

Easter break, thought Crane as he walked slowly up the street, carrying his high-heeled shoes under his arm and feeling the hot pavement abrade the soles of his nylons. We could all do with an Easter break.

"Ahoy, Pogo!" came a shout from among the horns-and-laughter-and-chatter background noise.

Crane smiled tiredly as he looked back and shaded his eyes.

Arky Mavranos was striding toward him at his old gangly pace, and though he was pale, he seemed solemnly happy, too.

"You look like a real piece of the old shit today," said Mavranos quietly when he reached Crane. They began walking on toward the Lakeview Lodge, Mavranos ostentatiously walking a yard or two to the side of Crane and letting an occasional pedestrian pass between them.

"You did it," said Mavranos.

"Sold it to him," Crane agreed, "bought and paid for."

"Good."

"How did it go with you?" asked Crane, in a moment when they were alone in a sunny crosswalk.

"They're both dead," Mavranos said softly. "Snayheever and Pogue. Pogue didn't get to screw things up. I'll … tell you about it, tell all three of you … sometime later." He coughed and spat. "Maybe not today, all right?"