Tim Powers - Last Call (9 page)

Scott paused in his gathering and stacking. Those are
tells
, he thought; Leroy is
faking
dismay.

"You're taking the money for the hand," Leroy observed.

"Uh … yes." Again Scott was aware of the bulk of metal against his hip.

"You sold the hand."

"I guess you could put it that way."

"And I've bought it," Leroy said. "I've
assumed
it." He held out his right hand.

Puzzled, Scott put down some bills and reached across and shook hands with the big brown man in the white suit. "It's all yours," Scott said.

It's all yours.

Now, twenty-one years later, driving his old Ford Torino north up the dark 5 Freeway toward the 10 and Venice, Scott Crane remembered Ozzie's advice about games in which the smoke and the drink levels behaved strangely:
Fold out. You don't know what you might be buying or selling come the showdown.

He had not ever seen Ozzie again after the game on the lake.

The old man had checked out of the Mint by the time Scott got back, and after Scott had rented a car and driven west across the desert to Orange County and Santa Ana, he had found the house unoccupied, with an envelope tacked to the front door frame.

It had contained a conformed copy of a quit-claim deed giving the house to Scott.

He had talked to his foster sister Diana on the telephone a few times in the years since, most recently in '75, after spearing his own ankle, but he had not seen her again either. And he had not any idea where she or Ozzie might now be living.

Crane missed Diana even more than he missed old Ozzie.

Crane had been seventeen when he and Ozzie had driven out to Las Vegas to pick up Diana in 1960. The game on the lake had still been nine years in the future.

He and Ozzie had been driving home from a movie—
Psycho
, as Scott recalled—and the radio was playing Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight," when Ozzie had pulled the Studebaker over to the Harbor Boulevard curb.

"What's the moon look like to you?" Ozzie had asked.

Scott had looked at the old man, wondering if this was a riddle. "The moon?"

"Look at it."

Scott leaned down over the dashboard to look up at the sky; and after a few seconds he had opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk to see more clearly.

The spots and gray patches on the moon made it look like a groaning skull. The bright dot of Venus was very close to it—about where the moon's collar-bone would be.

He heard dogs howling … and though there were no clouds that he could see, rain began pattering down and making dark dots on the sidewalk. He got back in the car and pulled the door closed.

"Well, it looks like a skull," he admitted. He was already wary of Ozzie's tendency to read portents into mundane occurrences, and he hoped the old man wouldn't insist that they go swimming in the ocean now, or drive to the peak of Mount Wilson, as he had occasionally done at times like this in the past.

"A suffering one," Ozzie agreed. "Is there a deck of cards in the car?"

"It's November!" Scott protested. Ozzie's policy was to have nothing to do with cards except in the spring.

"Yeah, better not to look through that window anyway," the old man mused. "Something might look back at you. How about silver coins? Uh … three of them. With women on them."

The glove compartment was full of old auto registrations and broken cigarettes and dollar chips from a dozen casinos, and among this litter Scott found three silver dollars.

"And there's a roll of Scotch tape in there," Ozzie said. "Tape pennies onto the tails side of the cartwheels. Copper is Venus's metal, I heard from a witchy woman one time."

Envying his friends in high school who didn't have fathers who made them do this kind of thing, Scott found the tape and attached pennies to the silver dollars.

"And we need a box to put 'em in," Ozzie went on. "There's an unopened box of vanilla wafers in the backseat. Dump the cookies out in the street—not now. Do it when we're crossing Chapman; it'll be better in an intersection, a crossroads." Ozzie clanked the car back into gear and drove forward.

Scott opened the box and dumped the cookies out as the car surged through the intersection, and then he dropped the silver dollars into the box.

"Shake 'em around, like dice," Ozzie said, "and tell me what they say, heads and tails."

Scott shook the box, then had to dig in the glove compartment again for a flashlight. "Uh … two tails and a heads," he said, holding the flashlight beside his ear and peering into the box.

"And we're going south," said Ozzie. "I'm going to make some turns. Keep shaking them and reading them and let me know when they come up all heads."

It was when Ozzie turned east onto Westminster Boulevard that Scott looked into the box and saw three heads—three profiles of a woman in silver bas-relief. In spite of himself, he shivered.

"Now they're all heads," he said.

"East it is," said Ozzie, speeding up.

The coins had led them out of the Los Angeles area, through San Bernardino and Victorville, before Scott worked up the nerve to ask Ozzie where they were going. Scott had hoped to spend the evening finishing the Edgar Rice Burroughs book he'd been reading.

"I'm not
certain
," the old man replied tensely, "but it sure looks like Las Vegas."

So much for
The Monster Men
, Scott thought. "Why are we going there?" he asked, keeping most of the impatience out of his voice.

"You saw the moon," Ozzie said.

Scott made himself count to ten slowly before speaking again. "What's going to be different about the moon when we're in Vegas than it was when we were home?"

"Somebody's killing the moon, the goddess; some woman has apparently taken on the—what would the word be—goddess-hood and somebody's killing her. I think it's too late for her, and I don't know the circumstances, but she's got a child, a little girl. An infant, in fact, to judge by how close Venus was to the moon when we saw it."

Here I am, Scott thought, holding a vanilla wafers box with three crumb-covered silver dollars in it with pennies taped to them, driving to Las Vegas and not reading Edgar Rice Burroughs—because Venus was close to the moon tonight. Venus is probably close to the moon all the
time
.

"Dad," said the seventeen-year-old Scott, "I don't mean to be disrespectful, but—but this is nuts. For
one
thing, there may be a lady being killed in Las Vegas tonight, but you don't know about it from looking at the moon, and if she's got a baby, it's got nothing to do with Venus. I'm sorry, I don't mean to … and
even if there was
, what are we supposed to do? How is it the job of two guys in California and not the job of somebody in Vegas?"

Ozzie laughed without looking away from the highway rushing up at them beyond the windshield. "You think your old man's nuts, eh? Well, a lot of people in Vegas would
like
it to be their job, I can tell you. This baby is a daughter of the goddess, and so she's a T-H-R-E-A-T to them, you bet. A
big
threat. She could bounce the King, if she grows up, which …
certain persons …
would like her not to do. And there's other people who want her to grow up but would want to, what, be her manager, you know? Boss her, use her. Climb into the tower by means of her Rapunzel hair, yes, sir.
Right
into that tower."

Scott sighed and shifted on the seat. "Okay, look, if we
don't
find a baby, will you agree—"

"We'll find her. I found you, didn't I?"

Scott blinked. "Me? Is this how you found me?"

"Yep."

After half a minute of silence Scott said, "You shook coins in a cookie box?"

"Hah! Sarcasm!" Ozzie glanced at him and winked. "You think your old man's nuts, don't you? Hey, I was swimming down in Laguna late one afternoon in '48, and the surf was full of fish. You know how it is when they're bumping into you under the water? And you gotta get out 'cause you know it's gonna attract barracudas? That's how it was, and the sky was full of those cirrus clouds, like they were spelling something out in a language nobody's got a Rosetta stone for. And Saturn was shining in the sky that evening like a match head, and I know that if I'd had a telescope I'd have seen all his moons disappearing behind him, being devoured like the myths say Saturn devoured his children. There's a Goya painting of that, scare the crap out of you."

The signs along the side of the highway were beginning to refer to Barstow, but Scott didn't ask his foster father to stop for dinner.

"So I got me a deck of cards," Ozzie went on, "and I started shuffling and drawing them to see where to go, and it led me straight to Lakewood, where I found you in that boat. And I walked across the parking lot to that boat
slow
, with my hand on my old .45 that I had in those days, because I knew I wasn't the only one who'd be tracking you. There's always some King Herod around. And I drove to Dr. Malk's in a
highly circuitous
fashion."

Scott shook his head, not wanting to believe these weird and morbid things. "So am I the son of some goddess?"

"You're the son of a King, a bad one, an honorary Saturn. I grabbed you for the same reason we're going to grab this little girl tonight—so that you could grow up outside of the net and then
decide
what you want to do, once you're old enough to know the rules of the game."

When they'd got to Las Vegas at about midnight, Ozzie had made Scott shake the box and peek into it continuously as Ozzie steered the car through the brightly lit streets. The flashlight's battery was getting weak when they rounded a corner and saw the whirling red lights of police cars by one of the side entrances of the Stardust.

They parked and joined the crowd on the sidewalk around the police cars. The night air was hot, with a dry wind from the stony mountains to the west.

"Somebody shot some lady," said a man in answer to Ozzie's
What's up?

"It was that Lady Issit, the one who's been kicking everybody's ass at the Poker tables," another man added. "I heard tell a big fat guy shot her right in the face, two or three shots."

Ozzie had walked away, shaking the coins in the vanilla wafers box. Scott followed him.

"She ditched the baby, or Venus would have been
behind
the moon," Ozzie said. "And the moon's still up and Venus is down, so the kid's still around somewhere, alive."

For an hour, while Scott grew more and more impatient and embarrassed, the two of them walked up and down Las Vegas Boulevard as Ozzie kept shaking the box and looking into it.

And to his own chagrin Scott was not surprised when they heard an infant's sobbing from behind a row of bushes on the south side of the Sands.

"Careful," Ozzie said instantly. The old man's hand was inside his jacket, and Scott knew he was holding the butt of the Smith & Wesson .38.

"Here." Ozzie turned to Scott and passed the gun to him. "Keep it out of sight unless you see somebody coming at me."

It was only a few steps to the bushes, and Ozzie came back with a baby, wrapped in a light-colored blanket, in his arms.

"Back to the car," Ozzie said tensely, "and don't watch us,
look around
."

The baby had stopped crying and was sucking on one of the old man's fingers. Scott walked behind Ozzie, swinging his head from side to side and occasionally walking backward to monitor all 360 degrees. He wasn't doubting his foster father now.

It took only five minutes to get back to the car. Ozzie opened the passenger-side door and took the gun, and then Scott got in and Ozzie handed him the baby—

—and for a moment Scott not only could feel the baby in his arms but could also feel the pale blanket surrounding him, and could feel protective arms sheltering him. Something in his mind or his soul had for years been unconnected, flapping loose in the psychic breezes, and was now finally connected, and Scott was sharing the baby's sensations—and he knew she was sharing his.

In his mind he could feel a personality that consisted of nothing but fright and bewilderment.
You're all right now,
he thought.
We'll take care of you now; we're taking you home.

The link he shared with the infant was fading, but he did catch a faint surge of relief and hope and gratitude.

Ozzie was behind the wheel, starting the car. "You okay?" he asked, glancing at Scott.

"Uh," Scott said dizzily. The link was gone now, or had receded below the level at which he could sense it, but he was still so shaken by it that he wasn't sure he would not start crying, or laughing, or trembling uncontrollably. "Sure," he managed to say. "I just … never held a newborn baby before."

The old man stared at him for another moment before clanking the car into gear and steering out onto the street. "I hadn't thought of that," he said, alternately looking ahead and peering at the rearview mirror. "That's … something I hadn't … considered." He gave Scott a brief, worried glance. "You going to be okay?"

Ask
her
, Scott thought. "Sure," he said.

On the long drive home Ozzie had alternately driven very fast and very slow, all the while asking Scott what headlights he could see behind them. When they got back to the familiar streets of Santa Ana, the old man wasted a full hour driving around in circles, lights off and lights on, before at last pulling up to the curb in front of the house.

Diana had been passed off as another illegitimate child of Ozzie's cousin's. The nonexistent cousin was getting quite a reputation.

Now Scott Crane parked the Torino in front of Chick Hurzer's bungalow on Washington Street, and after he turned off the engine and lights, he just sat in the dark car for a few minutes. For the first time in thirteen weeks he was thinking about a different loss than the loss of his wife.

Ozzie and Diana and Scott.

They'd been a family,
his
family, in that old house. Scott had fed Diana, had helped teach her to read, had admired the crayon drawings she had brought home from first and second grades. She had done a drawing of him as a Christmas present in 1968. Once she had broken her arm falling off the jungle gym on the playground, and once some neighborhood kid had thrown a rock at her forehead, and she'd got a concussion; both times he had been miles away but had known about it, and had gone looking for her.