Tim Powers - Last Call (32 page)

Crane scribbled, HUSBAND. Above it he wrote, BRINGING YOUR.

Diana nodded. "I—I don't—I have to bring my husband. If he can't come, he won't let me see you ever."

There was a long pause, and Crane wondered if he'd ruined everything, if the young man would now simply hang up. Then, "My father's with you?" said the voice on the phone.

Crane bared his teeth in indecision, then shrugged and nodded.

"Yes."

"Sure. You both leave right now. The clock has begun to tick." There was a distant rattle, then the dial tone.

Diana hung up. "Let's go, Scott," she said.

"Right," said Crane, tense with an excitement that was almost joy, in spite of the evident fear that had bleached and leaned Diana's face. To Mavranos he said, "You guys can follow us, but way back. We're going to take a dirt road by a boarded-up gas station out of town on Boulder Highway, past something called Sunset Road, on the right. I'll have the .357 under my shirt."

"You're crazy," yelled Hans, "I'm calling the police! You
always
call the police with a kidnapping; they're trained—"

Ozzie's lined old face was twisted, as if he faced a painfully bright light. "This guy knew who Scott was, Diana, and he knows who you are: the Queen of Hearts, Isis, her daughter at least. He might just be able to know it, too, if you called the cops. Anyway, the police would make you stay in town for a while. And I really think you'll be killed if you stay. Your sons, too."

"What's this,
supernatural
?" Hans squalled. "
You
think she's Isis, the Egyptian goddess? Give me that phone."

"I'm the parent," Diana said forcefully to him. "It's my decision. I'm going, and the police won't be called. And we've got to go
now
."

Hans was shaking his head and taking deep, whooping breaths. "Okay! Okay! You're the parent, it's your decision. But
I'll
go with you, then, at least. I
am
your husband, practically, and I can certainly speak more effectively than this bum."

At the door Diana turned. "No. You're nothing like a husband."

Ozzie pointed at the fat little boy. "Oliver there should come along with Archimedes and me."

Hans forced a shout of laughter. "
Archimedes?
Have you got Plato out in the car, too? Let him do the talking."

"Wait here," Diana told him. "I'll call you when I know anything."

Ignoring Hans's continuing protests, the five of them hurried out to the cars.

Al Funo's teeth were chattering, and his face was puffy and streaked with tears, but he wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his silk shirt when he saw people hurry out of the duplex down the block.

There's Scott Crane, he thought, with a woman who must be the famous Diana. Mr. Mustache is giving Crane something from the other vehicle, and now Crane and Diana are in the Mustang. And Mr. Mustache and Ozzie and some kid are getting into the other vehicle. What a ridiculous, Jeepy-looking thing!

It sure does scoot, though, he admitted to himself. I doubt that anyone less than a professional driver could have kept up with them the way I did, from that supermarket. I'm glad I noticed that they were chasing the Mustang and not trying to shake me, before I got a chance to pull alongside and shoot them. If I had, I'd never have got a chance to meet Diana.

And she's an attractive woman. I have no problem with that. I'm not one of these guys who feel threatened by attractive women.

He started his engine and patted the wheel. And I can keep up with them this time, too, he thought. This Porsche can outperform anything. You don't find unimportant people driving Porsches.

Diana was driving, her blond hair fluttering in the night wind coming in through the driver's side window. "Nut," she said expressionlessly. "Baker. Maps. Go Fish." She glanced at him. "Who is this guy, and how did he find my son?"

"Well, his name's"—Crane impatiently snapped his fingers twice—"Snayheever, Dondi Snayheever. I think he's crazy. We met him in Baker, and he talks like—like a nut. He's one of the people who've been … waked up, motivated, galvanized, by all the stuff that's going on here right now, with the heavy Easter about to come 'round again, the game on the lake probably due to start up again next week, for the first time in twenty-one years. He's not the only one we met, coming across the desert, and they're probably coming in from other directions, too. In Baker he was talking about you—that is, the Queen of Hearts. He had a bunch of maps that he thought would lead him to you. We stole a couple, but I guess one of them did the trick for him."

"
You
didn't lead him to me?"

"No. We just arrived in time to help answer the phone. We've been looking for you in every supermarket in town since Saturday night. Barely found you tonight. I recognized you."

A rushing streetlight highlighted the planes of her face for a moment. "So is this all actually
true
?" she demanded angrily. "All this supernatural shit?"

Crane thought of the thing that seemed to be the ghost of his dead wife. "I think it must be."

"God." She took a deep breath and let it out. "I guess I didn't ever
really
believe all of Ozzie's warnings."

"Don't feel bad. I didn't either."

"What do you
mean
, don't feel
bad
? You sound like that crazy man on the phone: 'I know this must
bother
you.' My son's life is in danger because I didn't do exactly what that old man said."

"Diana, my wife
died
because
I
didn't listen to him. I didn't mean to sound flip."

She glanced at him for a moment. "I know. I'm sorry. I sensed it, when she died. I meant to call you, but I didn't know what to say, and then it was—it seemed too late."

"I would have pretended she was fine. I fooled everybody, even myself eventually."

"So what are we going to do here?"

"Jesus, I don't know. I think he does just want to talk to you, but he might just as likely want to kill you. I don't think he's got anything against your kid—Scat?"

"Nickname for Scott. He's named after you."

He remembered the way she'd written
Scott
on the crayon portrait of him she'd done when she was eight years old—with one bar through the T's, which she had thought was very sporty—and there were tears in his eyes. "Diana, I swear to you we'll get you and your kids out of this."

She didn't answer, just kept her eyes on the cars ahead. She did reach over and squeeze his hand.

It was the first time they'd touched in two decades.

Waiting for a fare in front of the Four Queens on Fremont, Nardie Dinh fainted at the wheel of her cab. She was unconscious for only a moment, fortunately not long enough for any dreams to illuminate her unconscious mind and pinpoint her location for her brother, but her cab had rolled forward and clanked the bumper of the cab ahead.

She opened the car door and stepped dizzily out onto the noisy, crowded, ripplingly lit pavement, hoping that if she fainted again, the pain of the fall might wake her up, and she fumbled a little plastic bottle out of her shirt pocket and chewed up two crosstops, amphetamine capsules.

The driver of the other cab was standing by her front bumper. He had been cursing until he saw that the negligent driver was a pretty young Asian woman, and now he was just gruff.

"Just a minute," she told him. "I'll be back in a minute."

She hurried in through the open doors of the casino and blundered through the chilly tobacco-scented dimness until she found a Blackjack table. The dealer was using a multiple deck, and two of the hands on the red felt table showed a Jack of Hearts next to a Queen of Hearts.

"Shit," she whispered, really frightened for the first time since escaping from DuLac's.

Dondi Snayheever waited in his idling car in the parking lot of the abandoned gas station until there were no headlights very close in either direction, and then he switched off his own lights and drove very slowly off the cracked old concrete and up the dirt road.

His father had bought this land sometime in the early fifties, and might still own it. The old man had said that the place had strong
vibrations
, that it would be a good place for the boy to learn, that the cards would be livelier here.

His father. His father was coming to see him, for the first time in nine years. With his mother!

Snayheever didn't seem to be able to hold on to any one feeling about his father. Over the years since 1981 he had sometimes missed the old man so badly that he had returned to the Baker box, crawled inside, and then just shouted for him until he was hoarse, thinking that he might that way turn back time, so that his father would not have disappeared yet; at other times he wanted to kill him for having left his son to deal with an incomprehensible world all alone.

The little car lurched over the top of the low hill, and he could see his plywood box off to the left among a stand of yucca.

It occurred to him that young Aristarchus here was his brother. Snayheever was treating him a little harshly, for a brother. He'd have to lift the kid up and put a cushion on the chair under him.

Outside town the glow of the Mustang's headlights on the rushing highway ahead of them was the only light besides the faint silvery glow thrown by the half-moon.

I should have got the kids out of town, at least, Diana thought, as soon as I got off the phone with Scott on Friday night. Anything, like Moses' mother putting her baby son in a boat and just letting the river take him, rather than let them stay for this. That's what a good mother would have done. At least Oliver is with his grandfather in the truck a hundred yards back.

"Closed gas station up ahead," said Scott.

"I see it."

She slowed and signaled for a right turn—and then she saw something out of the corner of her eye, and gunned the engine and yanked the wheel around, and the car spun out in the roadside gravel and came to a halt on the shoulder, rocking on the abused shocks, pointing back the way they'd come. The engine was quiet—stalled.

"What is it?" Scott whispered urgently. His hand was under his shirt, on the grip of the revolver.

"A car—" Dust from the spinout swirled outside the windows of the rocking car, but she could see well enough to know that it had been a hallucination. "I must be going crazy. I thought I saw a car leave the road real fast and blow up—right over there." She pointed at a half-demolished cinder-block wall on the south end of the gas station lot.

Crane squinted in the direction she was pointing, and for just an instant he saw a blooming yellow fireball, curdling black at the edges, rising into the sky, in perfect silence—then it was gone, leaving nothing but a dark blur in his vision.

"I saw it too, for a second—" he began. Then he paused, his mouth still open.

He had seen it through his right eye. The plastic eye.

"What's the matter? What was it?"

"I don't know," he said, opening his door and stepping out onto the highway pavement. The broken cinder-block wall at the south end of the lot was weathered and cracked, surrounded by windblown trash, and didn't seem to have been even approached by anyone for decades.

Diana had got out, too, and was standing on the curb. The night wind blew the stirred-up dust away across the desert.

Crane looked at her and shrugged. "Maybe it was something that happened here a long time ago, and the Jack and Queen of Hearts arriving together stirred old images out of the ruins."

"Well, let's get back in the car, the dirt road is—"

The flat, hard pop of an outdoor gunshot interrupted her, and Crane heard the whine of a ricochet off the asphalt a dozen yards to his right.

He hurried around the car, grabbed Diana and pulled her back to the highway side, and forced her down into a crouch behind the fender.

"My father first!" came a call from the crest of a low hill behind the station. "My mother wait in the car, for just a minute. Everything's fine! Everything's fine!"

Well, I
guess
you got a gun, Crane thought, echoing what Snayheever had told them in Baker two days ago.

"Okay," Crane whispered. "Ozzie and Arky are parked back there; you can just see the car with its headlights out, see it? If you hear another shot, run back and get them. They'll have some ideas."

"But you're not this guy's father! Won't he see that right away?"

"It's dark," Crane said, "and he's crazy. If I can get close to him and he's not actually pointing his gun at your kid, I'll kill him. I imagine he'll have the gun pointed at me."

"So
you'll
be killed."

"Maybe not. Anyway, I'm dead already, ask Ozzie."

He stood up and limped slowly around the car. Diana had turned off the Mustang's headlights, so the moon was the only light, but its radiance was bright enough to show the dilapidated station and the lot and the dirt road that curled away behind it to the top of the hill.

"Scott."

He looked back. Diana was standing up behind the car, and now she hurried to him and hugged him tightly. "I love you," she said. "Come back safe."

"
Two little lovebirds
," sang Snayheever up on the hill, "
sittin' in a tree, kay-eye-ess-ess-eye-en-gee
."

"Christ," Diana whispered, "get my son away from that man."

"I will," Crane told her as he started forward again. "Get back behind the car and stay there."

Crane was sweating as he limped up the dusty, hummocky road, and the breeze not only chilled him but seemed to sting, as if he'd rubbed Ben-Gay all over himself. His bad leg stung and ached. Why hadn't he got a beer from Mavranos as well as the gun?

He wondered how much he might happen to resemble Snayheever's father. Would the crazy young man simply shoot him from a distance when he saw that Crane was the wrong man?

Was Snayheever's finger tightening on the trigger right now?

Crane flinched, but kept limping up the hill.

He tried to imagine being shot, in the frail hope that picturing it would enable him to face it and not stop right where he was and turn around and go hopping and sliding and whimpering back down to the car.