Tim Powers - Last Call (46 page)

The Two of Spades had signified departure, saying good-bye to loved ones; the Three of Clubs had been a second marriage for one or both of those loved ones; the Five of Diamonds had been a wedding present, promising prosperity and happiness in that marriage or those marriages; the Nine of Hearts, the "wish card," was another wedding present, happy fulfillment of ambitions.

Those had been for Scott and Diana. The three cards that had been face down were what he had had to buy for himself in order to try to buy lives for them. The Four of Hearts was the "old bachelor" card, to identify himself; the Eight of Diamonds was an old person traveling far from home; and of course, the Ace of Spades was, simply, Death.

A whiff of Diana's perfume drifted past his nostrils now as he shifted on the seat.

Time,
he thought.
Time … time … time.

But he patted his coat pocket and was bleakly reassured to feel the bulky weight of his little .22 revolver, loaded with hollow-point magnums.

You've had three days, he told himself. That's enough time.

South of town Susan turned onto the I-15. The red cones of road construction narrowed the highway to one lane for a while, but traffic was light enough so that she didn't ever have to slow below forty miles an hour, and when the construction was behind them, she sped up to a steady seventy or eighty. Out on the face of the desert the little widely separated houses or ranches seemed to Crane to look defensive, like forts.

South of Las Vegas, with the towers and streets left behind, the landscape broadened out; the vast plain around them was not perfectly flat but swept up at the distant edges to meet the mountains. Crane imagined that a car way out there without its emergency brake on would roll right back down to this highway—though from here he wouldn't even be able to see that car.

The breeze that fluttered his gray hair was hot, and in the roofless car the sun was a weight on his arms and legs, so he unscrewed the cap from one of the chilly bottles of Bitin Dog and took a long sip.

The dark wine, much harsher than beer, seemed to generate inside him a fire to repel the desert heat. It woke him up, too, stripped away the foggy blanket of inattention, but he found to his satisfaction that he no longer needed the blanket; he was indifferent now to Diana's death and the problems of Ozzie and Arky. This, he thought, finally, is real, cold adulthood, with not even a scrap of any need for a father.

"You want some of this?" he asked Susan, holding the bottle toward her.

"I
am
it, darling," she said without taking her eyes off the road. "How are you feeling?"

Crane took a moment to think of an honest answer. "Disattached," he said.

"That's good."

Some kind of wrecked old stone structure was visible now beside the highway ahead, on the right, and Crane leaned forward as he felt the convertible's brake drums take hold.

Crane peered at the place that was apparently their destination. Mirages made it hard to judge the outlines of the structure: Its broken gray stone walls seemed at one instant to stretch far back from the highway, and in the next instant looked like nothing but the narrow remains of an abandoned church.

Through the razory optimism of the morning's drunkenness he felt a flicker of uneasy reluctance. "Who," he asked carefully, "are we going to meet here?"

" 'Did you meet your father at the train station?' " Susan said in a quacking voice, quoting a joke his real, dead wife had once told him. " 'No, I've known him for years!' "

She swung the wheel and pulled off onto the gravelly shoulder. When she turned off the engine, the silence crowded right up to the car, then receded for the faint hiss of the wind in the sparse brush around the uneven stone walls.

As he got out of the car, carrying his bagged bottles and the one he was working on, Crane noticed that a gray Jaguar had pulled off a hundred yards behind them; and a moment later a tan Mustang drove on past, swirling up a faint wake of dust.

He knew he could remember both cars if he cared to, but he didn't care to. He was edgily confident that he had left his emotions behind, with the cast-off shell of his youth.

Susan had taken three steps out into the sand away from the highway, toward the doorway that held up a weathered stone lintel like a segment of Stonehenge. She looked back at him. "Let's walk."

He tipped up the open bottle for another slug of cold Bitin Dog. "Why not?"

The doorway led into a round, roofless area that was floored now only by rippling bone-colored sand. Dead cacti stood like randomly placed crucifixes across the uneven expanse. Crane blinked and rubbed his plastic eye, but he could not estimate the distance to the far wall.

Susan took the bag and held his freed hand. As the two of them plodded over the sand, her hand in his eventually became dry and pebble-knuckled; he drank some of the wine to restore her suppleness, and then before long had to do it again.

The sun was a chunk of magnesium burning whitely in the dome of the sky. Crane could feel its dry heat diminishing him.

The very stones underfoot seemed frailed by rot, honeycombed by some internal erosion; and he saw scuttling snakes and scorpions that were inorganic, made of jewels and polished stones; and dry shells of birds whirled past overhead, making sounds like glass breaking.

He knew that if he could open his swollen-shut left eye he would be seeing a different landscape than the one his false eye was showing him.

When he had first stepped out of the car, he had seen spots of green, and white and red and orange flowers, brought out by Tuesday night's rain—but after he had entered the ruined chapel and walked awhile across this vast floor, he could see only stone and sand and the brown-dried cacti, which, he saw when he and Susan passed the first of them, were split open to show hardened lacy cores like the marrows of dry bones.

His own hands had begun to dry out and crack, so he dropped his now-empty bottle and took another one from the bag Susan was carrying and twisted the top off it, and he sucked at it more frequently than he had at the last one, for he was drinking to maintain both of them now. Astringent sweat stung his forehead under the brim of his Jughead cap.

The wind was singing in the uneven ridges of the broken walls, a monotonous chorus that seemed to Crane to issue from the dry throat of the idiot desert itself, all message lost in a profound, malignant senility.

Ozzie had turned the Mustang around on the shoulder and driven back northward, back toward the desolated building—which he knew had no sane business being here—and he slowed the car and angled over toward the east edge of the highway after he had seen the fat man and a white-haired man walk through the stone doorway into the vast ruin. A third man, younger and wearing a tan security guard uniform, had also got out of the gray Jaguar, but he stood now on the shoulder, watching Ozzie park on the opposite side.

Ozzie noted the holster on the young man's belt. Well, he thought as he switched off the Mustang's engine, I'm armed, too. I'll just have to deal with this fellow, and not let myself forget who he works for.

He buttoned his coat with trembling fingers, then opened the door to the desert heat and began the task of angling his aluminum cane out from the passenger side of the seat.

Behind him he could hear the security guard's street shoes knocking on the pavement of the highway, coming closer. Ignoring the horrified, despairing wail in his head, Ozzie slipped his hand into his suit coat pocket.

During his long life he had four times had to hold a gun on a man, and even that had each time made him tremble with nausea. He had never actually shot anyone.

The man had called something to him.

Ozzie looked over his shoulder at the young security guard, who was right behind him now. "What?"

The guard's brown hand was on the checked wooden grip of the holstered .38 revolver. "I said get the fuck away from the car." He drew the gun and pointed it at Ozzie's knees. "You're not wearing feathers, so you must be the real old guy. Your name's, uh, Doctor Leaky?"

Call it
, Ozzie thought. "That's right, sonny."

"Okay, Mr. Leroy said you might show up. You're to stay outside. I'm instructed to kill you if you try to follow them in, and I will."

"Can I sit in the Jag and run the air?"

The young man was still pointing the gun in the direction of Ozzie's knees and staring hard into his face. For a too-brief moment he glanced across the highway at the Jaguar. "I guess so."

"Could you get my cane out of the car? I can't bend over so good."

The man stared at Ozzie in exasperation, clearly wondering if he was worth the trouble of frisking. "Oh, hell," he said finally, and holstered his gun and stepped toward the Mustang.

God forgive me, Ozzie thought. Don't forget who he works for; he's a soldier in their army. He stood back from the open car door.

When the guard leaned in, Ozzie pulled the little .22 from his coat pocket and reached in and touched the muzzle to the curly hair at the back of the man's head.

And feeling his soul wither in his breast, he squeezed the trigger.

The man dived forward across the seat, and his legs flexed and then stood straight out of the car for a moment as he thrashed and huffed and grunted inside; after a moment he went limp, and through tear-blurred eyes Ozzie looked up and down the empty highway.

The bang, muffled inside the car, had hardly been more than a loud snap, and Ozzie knew the wind had carried it away unheard.

He thought about folding the dead man's legs in under the steering wheel. And then he thought about retrieving his cane from under the body.

At last he just leaned in over the man's broad back, resolutely looking at the holster and not at the blood, hooked out the revolver, and turned away to limp, unaided, across the highway and into the perilous chapel in the wasteland.

Like the floor of the ruined Colosseum, the surface across which Crane and Susan walked was hatched with trenches, as if corridors in some vast cellar had collapsed long ago. Walking in the trenches kept the wind-blown sand out of their eyes, though it did nothing to protect them from the weight of the sun.

Every time the two of them climbed a sand slope back up to floor level, Crane could see that the far wall had drawn a little closer.

The wound in his thigh, which had been healing, had begun to bleed again, making a black, shiny spot on his jeans.

At last he climbed up and saw only flat sand between himself and the wall, and he could see an ancient architectural gap in it, blocked now by a tumble weed.

Crane turned to look back and see if he could gauge how far they'd come, but a thing hanging on one of the nearest cacti made him jump and swear.

It was a dried human body, hung upside down. One ankle was tied to the top of the cactus, and the other leg, though obviously as stiff as driftwood now, had once bent at the knee under gravity and was now bent that way forever. Desiccation had given the face an expression of composure.

And then the eyes opened, their whites glaring against the brown leather of the face, and Crane screamed and scrambled back away from the autistic malice that shone in the bright black pupils.

From behind, Susan touched Crane's arm. "You remember him. Come on and meet the others."

Numbly Crane let her turn him toward the doorway.

The tumble weed that blocked it was as big as a stove, and even as he focused his eye on it, the round dry bush exploded into twigs; a flat, hollow boom shook the super-heated air, and Crane realized that somebody had fired a shotgun at the tumble weed.

He stopped walking and stared at the blown-open bush.

When he heard the two harsh, metallic lisps of the shotgun being re-chambered, he turned around.

A few yards behind him the fat man was stepping carefully over the uneven ground, wearing a business suit and carrying a shotgun slung under his arm, pointed at the ground. Crane was vaguely glad that the fat man wasn't appearing as the warty sphere today. A few steps further back was another man, on whom Crane couldn't get his false eye to focus. Apparently they had been pacing Crane and Susan in one of the parallel trenches.

Susan's bony fingers were still on Crane's arm. "Come on," she said. "Meet
me
."

Crane let her push him through the broken stone doorway. He took a few steps out across the floor of the next wide, roofless expanse of sand, and then he turned and looked back at her.

His head was suddenly singing with shock, but he just stepped back.

Susan had apparently taken off all her clothes since the last time he had focused his eye on her. If he had noticed it, he would have warned her about what would happen, what
had
in fact happened—she had dried out completely, and her nakedness was horrible now.

She was a skeleton covered tight with thin, sun-shrunken leather; her breasts were empty flaps, and her groin was a hole torn open in a sawdust-stuffed doll; her eyes and mouth were pulled so wide open that she couldn't shut them, and steam was wafting out of the holes as her tongue and eyeballs withered away.

But she was smiling, and with a bony brown foot she kicked a big puffball loose from its mooring in the sand, and then she strode long-legged to another and kicked it loose, too.

There were a lot of the ball things poking up out of the sand, he noticed now, and when he made his eye focus on them, he saw that they were the blinking, grimacing heads of people buried up to their necks in the desert. There were arms sticking up, too, holding fanned-out playing cards.

Susan was bounding lightly from place to place, waving her long, thin brown arms over her head like a monkey, pausing before each next leap only long enough to kick another head loose from the stem of its neck.

The senile chorus of the wind in the broken stones was louder here, and Crane was suddenly desperate for a drink.

The bottle he was carrying only had an inch of warming wine sloshing in it, and he tipped it up to his lips—then choked and lowered his head and filled the bottle with vomited blood. He threw it away, and the blood that sprayed from the neck dried to dust in mid-air.