Tim Powers - Last Call (54 page)

Trumbill rolled his massive left shoulder. "Just feels strained now, like I've been digging ditches. Not numbed anymore. And I've been eating stuff to restore all the lost blood." He glanced out the window at the dark motel room. "I hate head wounds."

"You were lucky. Richard and the guard both took it square." Leon touched the forehead he had now. "Twice in a week I've been shot right out of a body."

Trumbill turned away from the window and stared at him impassively. "A drag, right?"

Leon grinned, then stopped when he remembered how the expression looked on this clown face. "At dawn I'll call the garage," he said "and have them send the Camaro over here. This thing can follow, but it can't chase."

" 'Kay. And I've got the tranky gun loaded up."

Leon sat down and shifted the chair to face the window. "I'll take the first shift watching," he said. "I'll get you up at"—he glanced at the clock on the plywood wall paneling—"four."

" 'Kay." Trumbill shuffled sideways into the back of the RV, where the bunk was. "Bathroom might be a little high by morning."

"As soon as we've got Crane in a cage, we'll sell this thing as is."

The sun was up and the air was already hot when Crane, still disheveled from sleep, walked back from the motel office and kicked the room door. When Mavranos opened it, blinking in the daylight, Crane handed him one of the cold cans of Coke.

"They don't have coffee," Crane said, stepping inside and closing the door. "This'll do; it's caffeine at least."

"Christ." Mavranos popped the top, took a sip, and shuddered.

Crane leaned against the battered dressing table. "Listen, Arky," he said, "did you ever do any scuba diving?"

"I was a city boy."

"Damn. Well, you can wait in the boat."

"That's what I'll do, all right. I'll wait in the boat. Your dead King's underwater somewhere?"

"I think he's in Lake Mead," said Crane. "I think his head is, anyway."

Mavranos took another sip of the Coke, then put it down and stalked outside. Crane heard the truck door clunk, and when Mavranos came back in, he was carrying a dripping Coors can.

"I
did
see the flies buzzing around the cards," Mavranos said slowly, after he'd taken a deep sip, "and I heard that guy Snayheever's words coming out of Buggy Joe's mouth. And those things
were
weird. And I'm willing to admit that there's a
lot
of weird shit going on. But how the hell are you going to have a conversation with a cut-off head, underwater?" He laughed, though not happily. "And with a scuba gadget in your mouth?"

"Oh," said Crane, slapping the air carelessly with the back of his hand, "as to
that
—I don't know."

Mavranos sighed and sat down on the bed. "Why do you think he's in the lake?" he asked quietly.

"When Snayheever was on the phone to Diana, he said somebody tried to sink a head in Lake Mead." Crane was pacing up and down the room now, talking rapidly. "Snayheever's aware of a lot of this stuff, even if he is nuts, so maybe sinking severed heads in the lake is something people involved in this kind of shit
do
. And he made it sound like the lake didn't take it and that it was foolish of the guy to have even tried, like the lake already
has
a head in it, see? And couldn't hold another, not that kind anyway. Tamed water Lake Mead is, remember Ozzie saying that? Maybe it tames any stuff
in
it, too, so that'd be a good place to put an old King's head, if you're the new King and want to keep an old one down. And I
don't
think it was my real father, the current King, who had me … shit,
kill
some poor Englishman at a Poker table at the Horseshoe. I think it was the king in the lake that did it, that made me do it, I think it was
him
that was grinning at me out of the Two of Wands card, with his head cut off and two metal rods through his head."

Crane grinned wildly at Mavranos. "You with me so far?"

"You poor fucked-up son of a bitch."

"And along with the severed-head Two of Wands, I had a strange King of Swords; it was an arm, with the hand holding a sword, poking up out of a body of water, like a weapon was being offered by somebody below the surface."

Mavranos just looked puzzled and irritated—and terribly tired. "And …?"

"And when I've dreamed about playing Assumption on Lake Mead, I see the Fool dancing on a cliff edge, but I also see—sense, really—a giant deep in the lake, and even though I can't see him, I know that he has only one eye."

"Orpheus, in Greek myths—they cut his head off, and it kept talking for a while, making prophecies and such stuff." Mavranos stood up. "Okay, okay. You've done scuba diving before?"

"Oh, sure. Last time I went, I shot a spear through my ankle." He was smiling when he said it, but a moment later he winced, remembering that fifteen-year-old Diana had called him then, as soon as he'd got home from the hospital.

"May as well go right now, I guess," Mavranos said. "I'm getting nowhere with my mystimatical cure."

Crane opened the door. " 'Maybe what you're waitin' for'll be twitchin' at the dance tonight!' " he said, quoting something Riff had said to Tony in
West Side Story
.

Mavranos smiled sourly as he slapped his jacket pocket for his keys. "You remember it killed Riff and Tony."

When he drove the Camaro under the 93 overpass, Vaughan Trumbill picked up the cellular telephone and punched redial.

Even with the seat levered all the way back, his belly kept getting brushed by the steering wheel, and the car still smelled of Betsy Reculver's flowery old-lady's perfume.

"Yeah, Vaughan," came Benet's squeaky voice over the phone.

"Bets—, uh, Benet—"

"From here on in just call me Georges."

Trumbill realized that he never had called him that, in any of the man's bodies. When Trumbill had first started to work for him, he was already in the Richard Leroy.

"Okay, Georges. They're heading out Fremont. Either they're going back to where that kid got shot, or they're going right on out Boulder Highway to the lake."

"Where the kid got shot." For some reason Georges's voice, even coming out of the Benet vocal cords, sounded stony. "Yeah, I remember that place. Some damned woman destroyed a nice Chevrolet of mine right there." For a moment the phone Trumbill held to his ear was silent, and all he could hear was the muffled roar of the Camaro's engine. "Okay," Georges went on, "if they stop there, take 'em when they get out away from the truck, it's good and private, and I don't see why they'd take guns out with them. You still got Moynihan's guys?"

Trumbill glanced at the rearview mirror. The florist's van was still there, a couple of cars behind him.

"Yes."

"Right, well, kill the mustache and dart Crane. But if they go on past there, toward the lake—Why would they be going to the lake? Rhetorical question, I don't need your guesses. I don't like it if that's where they're going." He sighed. "Catch them somewhere in the desert north of Henderson. Shoot a tire out or something and then just
confront
them."

"In the desert." Trumbill forced his mind away from the recollection of having only three days ago seen Death itself, the obscene skeleton under the skimpy dress of dried skin, capering in the desert south of town.

Confront them, he thought as he gunned the Camaro through the Desert Inn Road intersection and watched the dusty blue truck barrel steadily along on the bright highway ahead of him. I'm valuable to the old man, he thought, but when it gets down to the bone, I'm an expendable piece in his equation.

As I've always known I was.

He sighed heavily. "If they kill me out there," he said into the phone that was wedged under his pendulous jowl, "you won't forget your part of our old bargain."

He heard Georges sigh, too. "Packed tight in the center of a big cement cube within an hour of your death, Vaughan, don't worry. But I hardly think these guys will take you. Blood pressure, a sledge-hammer of a stroke, is what's going to take you out, my friend."

Trumbill smiled, his cold eyes still on the truck ahead. "Okay. I'll call you after."

He hung up the phone and returned his full attention to the blue truck.

Neither Crane nor Mavranos spoke as the abandoned gas station swept past on their right.

That's where it all really started to go wrong, Crane thought. To think that we could have just killed Snayheever or broken his arms or something in Baker, if we'd known, if the goddamn cards had told Ozzie about it in the Los Angeles Poker casino. But instead here we are, Scat probably dead by now in the hospital, Oliver in some state home for orphans, Diana and Ozzie certainly dead, Arky and I not looking good at all—why couldn't Ozzie have seen it in the cards?

He hiked around in his seat and looked back. No Jaguar, he thought, but that green Camaro has been hanging around behind us for a while. Probably just tourists wanting to go see the dam—but if he doesn't pass us before long, I'll tell Arky to pull over and let him go on past.

Crane looked out at the scrubby, baking dirt receding away to the distant mountains under the cloudless sky, and he remembered driving along this highway on that early evening in '69, in a Cadillac convertible with—what had his name been? Newt—with Newt at the wheel, nervously explaining to Crane the rules of Assumption Poker. By that time Ozzie had probably already checked out of the Mint and had been gunning for home, to move Diana and all their stuff out of the house and tack the quit-claim up on the front door. It occurred to Crane now, for the first time, that Ozzie must have had the quit-claim ready in case the fact of Crane's terrible father ever became a threat to young Diana. Well, it hadn't
become
a threat, as it happened, Crane had
made
it a threat. Crane had almost certainly led the fat man to her.

He looked over his shoulder again. The Camaro was still several car lengths behind them, its chrome trim winking in the sun. And behind it was a van that, it seemed to him now, had been in
that
position for a while.

He popped open his seat belt and turned around, kneeling on the seat, to rummage in the back.

"Change your mind about the beer?" said Mavranos.

"I'm probably imagining things," said Crane as he found his .357 and Mavranos's .38 and wrapped them in a shirt, "but why don't you pull over and let that Camaro and that van pass us, if they want to." He sat back down in his seat and unwrapped the guns.

Mavranos's eyebrows went up when he looked at the items in Crane's lap. "Pull over where? This shoulder's just gravel. By the time I slowed up enough to pull off, they'd have either passed us already or come right up our tailpipe."

Crane was silent for a while, staring ahead; then he pointed. "There's a slant-in cutoff for a dirt road up there, see it? You could turn in to it without slowing down much, if we hang on. And then if they're bad guys, we should be able to leave them behind on the dirt road. Neither of them's sprung as high as this thing."

"Shit," said Mavranos, "I wish we'd sent Wendy another five grand." He reached over and picked up his revolver and tucked it into his belt.

The truck bucked when the big tires hit the unpaved track, and the jack and spare tire and toolbox all banged back down onto the bed after having been flung into the air, and Crane pitched forward against the dashboard, grabbing his bouncing .357 and squeezing the trigger nearly hard enough to fire it. The truck was shaking violently back and forth, and Mavranos was squinting furiously ahead and shouting curses.

Crane held on to the back of the seat and looked back at the whirling dust cloud the truck had kicked up, and for a moment he thought the two vehicles had gone on past down the highway, and he opened his mouth to tell Mavranos to slow down; then he saw the nose of the Camaro plunging along after them through the dust.

Again he almost spasmodically fired his revolver.

"They're after us!" He shouted to be heard over the cacophony of squeaking and banging. "Go!"

Mavranos nodded and held on tight to the steering wheel. They were onto the dirt road now, some surveyor's track, probably, and booming straight out into the desert at what seemed like breakneck speed.

Crane glanced back again. The Camaro was falling back a little, its suspension not made for this kind of hummocky road. The van had left the highway too, he noticed, and was wallowing along farther back. A tall, three-legged plume of dust was streaming away to the south.

A particularly rough bump threw Crane against the door, and he blinked ahead through the cracked windshield at the road. A gully paralleled the road on the left, with a low slope rising to the right. The road still stretched straight as a pencil line ahead, and he wondered if it could possibly go all the way to the I-15. He and Mavranos would certainly have left their pursuers behind long before that, assuming this truck didn't blow a tire or break an axle.

Even over the racket inside the truck, he heard the hard boom of a gunshot.

"Faster!" he yelled. He grabbed the window handle and started to crank it down, thinking to shoot back at the Camaro, but he could hardly brace himself well enough on the jumping seat to turn the handle, and it occurred to him that he would have little chance of hitting the car, shooting from such a shaky position, and he might need every bullet if the truck were to be stopped.

And the next
boom
was simultaneous with an echoing slam from the rear of the truck—and then the truck, still thundering forward, was sliding around to the left, kicking and jumping on the sandy road, and Crane grabbed the dashboard with his free hand and braced his feet against the floor, thinking the vehicle was going to roll over on his side. Mavranos was fighting the wheel, trying to wrestle it to the right and turn out of the skid.

"Shot out the left rear tire," Mavranos gasped as he finally got the back end in line and then stomped on the brake, bringing the truck to a clanging, thudding halt turned sideways across the road, pointed up the slope and away from the gully.