Tim Powers - Last Call (41 page)

But when the officer said he'd check out the backyard, Hans could only sit down, as the man walked out the back door and down the two wooden steps, and hope no one was noticing how pale and sweaty he had suddenly become.

The dope plants, he thought with astonished dismay. He'll find the dope plants, and I'll go to jail. I'll claim I don't know anything about them, I thought those were just weeds out there by the fence. Will they think I'm a dealer? Will they find out I'm a friend of Mike's, who really
is
a dope dealer? I read in Hunter Thompson that you get …
life in prison!
 … in Nevada if you're convicted of being a dealer. That can't still be true.

He thought he might wet his pants, right here and now. God, he thought, make him not find them. Please, God! I'll go to church, I'll make the protagonist of the screenplay a Christian, I'll marry Diana, just
let him come back with no news so the world can go on being like it was.

He was afraid to pick up his cup of coffee. His hands would shake, and these cops would notice; they were trained to see that kind of thing. Instead, he looked around at the apartment; every trivial object suddenly seemed precious and lost, like the bicycles and fishing poles in the backgrounds of old photographs. He looked at Diana and loved her as he had never managed to before.

The back door creaked, and then boots clonked on the linoleum floor. Hans pretended to be studying the calendar over the telephone.

"You're the lady whose son was kidnapped and shot last night, aren't you?" he heard Hamilton say. Diana must have nodded, for the man went on, "And this is your boyfriend? He lives here with you?" There was a pause. "Okay." Hans heard him sigh. "I'm going to come back here in an hour or two, after I've looked up the shape of a certain sort of leaf in a book at the station, right?" There was another pause. "
Right
?"

Hans looked up and realized that the officer was talking to him now. His face was instantly hot. "Right," he said in a small voice.

Gould had been talking on his portable radio, and now he tucked it back into his belt. "Frits says the old man is eighty-two years old and didn't seem real clear about anything, even why he's in town. And the 911 operator said it almost sounded like he'd dreamed up this emergency. I think he's just upset and disoriented about his grandson." He looked at Diana. "I think we can leave. But be careful about things like answering the door, Mrs. Ryan, and call us if you get any odd phone calls or visitors."

"I will," Diana said, smiling. She shook hands with the cop. "Thanks for the help, even if it was a false alarm."

When the police finally left, and the door closed and Hans heard the engines start up and drive away, he picked up his coffee mug and threw it against the wall.

Hot coffee splashed all over the kitchen, and ceramic fragments rattled and spun on the floor.

"This is your goddamned family's fault!" he shouted.

Diana had hurried into the bedroom, and he stomped after her.

"What'll I do with those plants?" he demanded. "Bury them? I can't carry them out to the trash; they're
waiting
for me to do something like that!" She had thrown open the chest in which she kept old things like her high school annuals, and was tossing dolls and music boxes out onto the floor. "And they'll be watching me now," he went on, "anytime I drive down the street! How can I
possibly
go see
Mike
?" He punched the wall, leaving a dent in the dry wall. "Thanks a million, Diana! I thought you were
gone
!"

She stood up, holding some kind of little old ratty yellow blanket. "I am now," she said.

The telephone in the kitchen rang.

"Don't answer it!" she said urgently, so he ran back to the kitchen and triumphantly picked up the receiver.

"Hello?"

She was right behind him, still holding the foolish little blanket. He was pleased to see that her I've-got-more-important-things-on-my-mind-than-you look was gone. She was just scared now. Good.

"You say you want to talk to Diana?" he said, drawing out the pleasure of this moment.

She was white, shaking her head at him with the most imploring look he'd ever seen on a human face. "No," she whispered, "Hans, please!"

For a moment he almost relented, almost said,
No, she hasn't been home since yesterday; her sister's here if you want to talk to her.
Diana had suffered enough in this last twenty-four hours—leaving behind all her possessions, her son near dead in the hospital …

Through her own fault, and in the face of his sound advice. And now his dope plants were as good as gone, and he was a marked man in the eyes of the police.

His smile was crooked with sweet malice. "Su-u-re," he said, "she's right here."

At the first word she had taken off running for the back door, shouting at him to follow her.

He had even put the phone down and taken one step after her before he remembered his pride. I don't need some damned hysterical woman, he told himself. I'm a writer—a creator all by myself.

With a last glance at the duplex across the street Trumbill laid the telephone receiver down on the table, picked up the little radio transmitter, and stood up. He had put on his pants and shirt and shoes when the police had arrived, and now he carried the transmitter around the corner into the hall, away from the glass of the front window.

Diana sprinted between the trash cans and the gas barbecue and pounded across the scruffy grass toward the redwood fence at the back of the lot, and even as she wondered if she was just making a fool of herself, she leaped, caught the splintery tops of the boards, and vaulted over the fence into the next yard.

A startled dog looked up at her, but before it could even bark she had crossed the yard and scrambled over a chain-link gate and dashed down somebody's driveway and was running across the empty expanse of Sun Avenue, the old yellow blanket flailing from her pumping fist.

Ozzie had opened the cab door and swung his feet out onto the curb and had started to stand up—

—when the hard
bam
punched the air and slammed the car door against him, knocking him over onto the curbside grass.

The front of Diana's apartment had exploded out across the street in a million spinning boards and chunks of masonry, and as Ozzie sat, stunned, on the grass, he watched a cloud of dirty smoke mushroom up into the blue sky. All he could hear was the loud ringing in his ears, but he could see pieces of brick and roof tile thudding into the lawn at his right and shattering on the suddenly smoke-fogged sidewalk, and his nose stung with a sharp chemical tang like ozone.

Oliver was out of the back of the cab and running toward the destroyed apartment. The cabdriver was pulling Ozzie to his feet; the man was shouting something, but Ozzie shook him off and started after the boy.

It was like walking in certain frustrating dreams he often had. The effort of dragging one leg, and then the other, through the thick soup of the air was so exhausting that he had to look down at the littered sidewalk to make sure that he was moving forward and not simply flexing and sweating in place.

A two-foot length of metal pipe whacked the pavement in front of him and instantly sprang away to devastate a curbside bush, and he had dimly, distantly heard it ring when it hit. Perhaps he was not permanently deafened. He kept walking, though it was not getting any easier.

The apartment was a hollowed-out shell, with three walls leaning outward and the roof entirely gone. A yard-long jet of flame fluttered where the kitchen had been. The apartment next door looked relatively whole, though there was no glass in any of the windows.

Oliver was standing on the walkway with his arms spread wide, and then he fell to his knees and seemed to be stressfully vomiting or convulsing, and it seemed to Ozzie that the boy was forcing himself to do it—even though the spasms looked to be tearing his ribs apart—the way a person might cut his hand to bloody ribbons just to cut out of the flesh the unbearable foreignness of an intrusive splinter.

A moment later Ozzie blinked and rubbed his eyes, wondering if he had suffered a concussion when the car door hit him, for he seemed to be seeing double—next to the little boy crouched on the walkway, and half overlapping him, was a semi-transparent duplicate image of the boy.

Then, though young Oliver didn't move, the duplicate image stood up, turned away, and stepped into invisibility.

Ozzie was having trouble breathing, and when he breathed out sharply, he realized that his nose was bleeding. There must be blood all down the front of his shirt.

He finally hobbled his way to Oliver, who was kneeling now. Ozzie knelt beside him. The boy's face was red and twisted with violent sobbing, and when Ozzie put his arms around him, he clung to the old man as if he were the only other person in the world.

In the laundry room of the apartment building on the other side of Sun Avenue, Diana braced herself against a washing machine and waited for her breathing and heartbeat to slow down.

She was too stunned by the almighty slam that had shaken the street under her feet to cry, but in her head was nothing but an endlessly repeating wail of
Hans, Hans, Hans …

At last she was able to breathe through her nose, and she straightened up. Mostly because she found herself facing a washing machine, she fished three quarters out of her pocket, laid them in the holes in the machine's handle, and pushed it in.

The machine went on with a clunk, and she could hear water running inside the thing. The still air smelled of bleach and detergent.

Hans, you damned, arrogant, posing fool, she thought—you didn't deserve a whole lot, but you deserved better than this.

She forced herself not to remember the times, in bed but also cooking dinner or out with Scat and Oliver on a holiday, when he had been thoughtful and tender and humorous.

"Was that a bomb?" came a woman's voice behind her.

Diana turned around. A white-haired woman pushing an aluminum walker was angling in through the door, kicking along in front of her a plastic basket full of clothes.

Diana knew she should say something, seem curious. "I don't know," she said. "Uh … it sounded like one."

"I wish I could go look. I was shoving this stuff down the breezeway, and
boom
, I see all this shit go flying into the air! Probably it was a dope factory."

"A dope factory."

"PCP," the old woman said. "Could you put my clothes in here? It kills me to bend over."

"Sure." Diana stuffed the yellow blanket into her tight hip pocket, then hauled the clothes out of the basket and dumped them into a washer.

"They need chemicals like ether and stuff to make their PCP, and they gotta cook it. And since they're dopers, they get careless. Boom!" The old woman looked at the other machine, which was spinning its empty drum. "Honey, these machines are for tenants only."

"I just moved in." Diana dug a twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket. "I don't have a car yet. Could I pay somebody here to drive me to work? It's just—just over at the college."

The old woman eyed the bill. "I can drive you, if you can wait for my stuff to get done, and if you don't mind being seen in a beat-up ten-year-old Plymouth,"

"I don't mind the car, but could we go now?"

"What about your clothes?"

Diana waved at a wooden shelf on the white wall. "I'm sure the next person to use the machine will just put 'em aside."

"I'm sure." The old woman took the twenty. "Okay, if you'll fish my stuff out again and carry it all back to my apartment for me. I can do mine later, I guess."

"Great," said Diana. Her elbows and knees had begun shaking, and she knew she was going to break down crying very soon, and she didn't want it to happen while she was still anywhere near this tract of unlucky celestial bodies.

Crane was about to leave his room at the Circus Circus when the telephone rang.

He had left a note for Mavranos, who was off somewhere chasing his statistical phase-change, and had tucked the .357 into his belt and zipped up his nylon jacket, and now he paused with his hand on the doorknob and stared at the ringing phone.

Ozzie or Arky, he thought. Even Diana doesn't know we're here. If it's Arky, he'll want me to go help him in some fool way, and I've got to get out to Spider Joe's trailer. Of course, if it's Ozzie, he might have some news about Diana, some way I can help her, some way I can maybe at least fractionally redeem myself with her.

For Diana, he thought as he started back toward the phone, I'll put Spider Joe off for another day.

He picked up the phone. "Hello?"

At first he couldn't tell who it was—only that it was someone sobbing.

"What?" said Crane uneasily. "Speak!"

"It's Ozzie, son," came the old man's voice, choked with tears. "I'm at the police station again, and they want you to come down, too. And Archimedes."

"Why? Quick!"

"She's dead, Scott." The old man sniffed. "Diana's dead. She went back to her apartment to get something, and they blew her up. I was there, I saw it—I would have followed her in, but I had Oliver with me—oh God, what good have I been to either one of you?"

Diana was dead.

All the tension and hope went out of Crane, and when he spoke, it was with the gentle relaxation of total despair. "You've … been a good father, Ozzie. Everybody dies, but nobody gets a father better than you've been to both of us. She loved you, and I love you, and we both always knew you loved us." He sighed, and then yawned. "Oz—go home now. Go back to the things you said you liked, your Louis L'Amour novels and your Kaywoodie pipes." Go gentle into that good night, he thought; rest easy with the dying of the light.

The telephone receiver was fatiguingly heavy, but Crane hung it up without a sound.

For a while he sat on the bed, hardly thinking at all. He knew that the police wanted to talk to him and would eventually knock on his door, but he had no impulse either to seek them out or to avoid them.