Tim Powers - Last Call (60 page)

He swung the knife back to the east wall and pressed the point against the newer cement. The blade cut through as easily as it would cut cardboard, and after a few moments of sawing—while Mavranos stared—Crane had cut the disk of cement free and pushed it inside.

"Do you happen to hear … music?" Crane asked.

"I hear nothin' but my heart, and I don't want to have to start worrying about
it
. Why? Do
you
hear music?"

Crane didn't answer but peered into the hole.

The space inside the wall was about a cubic yard in volume. Dimly he could see a very old and fragile-looking Tarot card, the Tower, tacked to the far wall of the little chamber. The card was upside down.

He closed the knife and put it into his pocket, smiled nervously at Mavranos, and then reached into the hole.

He groped around carefully in the cavity and found a little cloth
bag
that proved to be full of teeth and a small cracked mirror in a tortoiseshell frame—what must it one time have reflected, or failed to reflect?—and in a bottom corner there were three little hard lumps that might have been pomegranate seeds; and finally his groping fingers found, under everything, wedged flat against the floor of the space, the wooden box he remembered.

He pried it free, lifted it out of the hole, and opened it, and he shuddered to see again the innocent-looking plaid backs of the cards.

He turned over the first one. It was the Page of Cups, a young man standing on a rippled cliff edge holding a cup, and the corner was lightly stained. Hesitantly Crane licked that corner of the card, and he thought he faintly tasted salt and iron.

The Andrews Sisters started on "Sonny Boy:"

"Whe-e-en there are gray skies
I don't mind the gray skies …"

"We're out of here," Crane told Mavranos hoarsely. He left everything inside the hole but the wooden box, which he tucked inside his Levi's jacket.

A tall brown man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a white pith helmet and Sony Walkman earphones was smiling broadly and sweeping the lens of a video camera across the back lawn of the Oregon Building. Gleaming sunglasses hid his eyes.

"The basement service entrance, under the building on the south side," he said, still grinning, into the video camera's microphone. "Now's the time."

"Gotcha," came a voice over the earphones.

The tall man swung the camera toward the dock area under the building, catching in its focus a young man in a dark suit who was standing uncertainly by the stack of bathroom tissue boxes. The young man held something dark and oblong in his right hand, and the man with the camera instinctively felt for the bulk of the automatic in its holster on his right hip, under the untucked shirttail. He was showing a lot of white teeth in his smile now.

"Now's the time," he repeated.

Two men in unspecific tan uniforms were pushing a Dumpster down the paved ramp, and a station wagon with Montana license plates was weaving along the driveway between the Oregon and Arizona buildings.

One of the men with the Dumpster let go of it to approach the young man in the suit. Their conversation was brief, and the smiling man with the camera heard none of it, but a moment later the man in the suit was doubled over, his chin by his knees, and the two uniformed men grabbed him, took a gun away from him, and tossed him into the Dumpster and began pushing it back up the ramp.

The station wagon had stopped. Its tailgate was down, and the man in the suit was quickly bundled out of the Dumpster and into the car. The uniformed men climbed into the back with him and pulled the tailgate shut.

The smiling man had tucked the video camera under his arm and strolled across the grass to the car. He took off his white pith helmet and got in on the passenger side, still smiling.

The station wagon started forward again, turned east past the parking structure and around west onto Flamingo Road, signaling for every turn and proceeding at an inconspicuous speed.

They had thrown a blanket over Al Funo's head, and he could feel the bite of a narrow nylon tie-wrap drawn tight around his wrists behind his back; his ankles were bound together, too, doubtless with another tie-wrap.

His heart was thumping, but he could breathe again, and he was grinning toughly against the scraped metal bed of the station wagon. You've always lived by your wits, old son, he told himself, and you'll find some way to talk or fight or run your way out of this. Who
are
these guys anyway? Friends of Reculver and the fat man? Damn, and I almost had Scott Crane at last. I wonder if these guys mean to keep Crane's gold chain. They've got another think coming, if they do.

One of his captors spoke. "We got time for lunch before Flores comes in from Salt Lake. I never got breakfast."

"Sure," said another one from the front seat. "Where do you figure?"

"Let's go to Margarita's," said the first speaker.

Funo didn't appreciate being ignored. "The Dumpster and the uniforms was good," he said from under the blanket, proud of the ironic humor in his voice. "Like having a pencil behind your ear and carrying a clipboard—hey-presto, you're invisible."

"Shut up, Fucko," said the man in the front seat. "That's in the Frontier," he went on.

"So?" said the man sitting over Funo. "It happens to have the best chimichangas in town."

"Bullshit," said somebody else.

"There's a guy back there in the Flamingo basement," said Funo with a chuckle, "who ought to buy you guys lunch. You saved his life. I was gonna give him that gold chain and then drop the hammer on his ass."

"Shut up, Fucko."

Funo was glad the blanket was over him, for suddenly he could feel his face reddening. Good God, he'd said he wanted to give Crane a gold chain, and then he'd said something about "the hammer," and "his ass." What if these men thought he wanted to
sodomize
Crane?

"I—I went to bed with the guy's wife—" Funo began desperately.

"Shut
up
, Fucko." Someone knocked him stingingly on the back of the head with a finger knuckle. "And they make their own tortillas right there, you can see the guy making them."

"I just want a burger somewhere," said the man in the front seat.

By the steady roar of the engine and the smoothness of the ride, Funo could tell that they were on a highway; he couldn't tell which one, but all highways in Las Vegas lead quickly out into desert.

One of these men
might
be the person who he had all along known was out there in the world somewhere, the person who would one day kill him, become the most important person in Al Funo's life.

And now—
now!
—they wouldn't even talk to him!

Every time he tried to initiate a dialogue, sincerely and with no judgmental attitude, they rapped him on the head and called him Fucko. It was a worse thing to be called than
fucker
. At least
fucker
implied that you had had sex. Fucko sounded like the name of a clown.

At last the car was slowing, and soon Funo heard gravel grinding under the tires.

He braced himself. When the car came to a stop, he would lash upward and back with his head, hoping to hit the face of the man over him; with the blanket off his head he might be able to grab the man's gun and then pull his bound hands far enough around one side of his body to be able to shoot.

The car rocked to a halt, and he used the rebound of the shock absorbers to get more force into his move—

But the man who had been above him had apparently shifted over against the back door since last speaking, and Funo's head just brushed the car's ceiling before he tumbled back down onto his face again.

The men might not even have noticed the action. Funo heard the tailgate swung down, and even under the blanket he smelled the spice of the dry desert air, as workmanlike hands took hold of his ankles and dragged him out; other hands gripped his upper arms, and then he was lowered onto the sand, and the blanket was snatched off his head.

He twisted his face up from the sand and blinked around in the sudden glare. The men had stepped back. One of the uniformed fellows was squinting away, apparently watching the road. The tall man in the Hawaiian shirt had his pith helmet on and was smiling with all his white teeth as he jacked a round into Funo's own gun.

"There's something you should probably know about me," Funo began in a confident tone, but the man in the pith helmet just kept smiling and aimed the muzzle into Funo's face, and Funo realized that the man was about to simply kill him, with no discussion at all.

"
For what, f-f-for wh-what?"
Funo choked, thrashing on the dry dirt. "My n-name's Alfred F-F-Funo, tell me your name at least, we're imp-p-p-portant to each other,
at least t-t-tell me your n-n-n-name
!"

The hard
boom
of the gunshot rolled away over the bright desert, startling tiny lizards into brief, short darts across the sand.

"Puddin' Tame," said the cocaine dealer, wiping off the gun with a handkerchief and then tossing it down beside the bound body. "Ask me again and I'll tell you the same."

On Tuesday morning Mavranos dropped Crane off in front of the liquor store on Flamingo Road and then drove around the block to park the truck in the back lot and just sit and watch.

Inside the liquor store Crane noticed that the clerk at the register wasn't the same one who had been working last Thursday, and anyway, Crane's black eye had by now faded to the faintest yellow tinge. He was able to buy two six-packs of Budweiser without getting a second glance.

The pay phone on the back wall rang as he reached out to push open the parking lot door, and it occurred to him that, for plausibility, he ought to be carrying an opened beer when he approached the Dumpster in the back lot.

He reached into the paper bag as he stepped out into the heat, and tugged a can free and popped it open. Chilly foam burst up around his forefinger.

His hand was halfway up to his mouth, the wet finger extended, before he remembered his new resolves, and remembered, too, the ringing pay phone—and he lowered his hand and wiped the beer foam off on his shirt.

The Lowballers were again hunkered down in a circle in front of the Dumpster, but Crane didn't see the very old man they had called Doctor Leaky.

He didn't recognize any of them as Wiz-Ding, the young man who had given him the black eye, either.

"It's just me, the beer man," he said with forced cheer when a couple of the ragged young men looked up at his approach.

" 'Bout time," commented one of the players, holding out his free hand without looking away from his cards.

Crane pulled another beer loose and put it in the hand, then set the bag down on the hot pavement. "Where's my old pal Wiz-Ding?" he asked.

The man who had spoken looked up at him now. "That's right, you're the guy he hit last week, aren't you? What'd you do, put a Gypsy curse on him?"

Again Crane thought about the ringing pay phone. "No, why?"

"He got the horrors real bad that night, ran out into traffic and dived under a bus."

"Jesus." Crane tipped his opened can up to his mouth, making certain to do no more than wet his lips. "Uh," he said as if it were an afterthought or a tactful change of subject, "how about that real old guy? Doctor Leaky?"

The player's attention had returned to his cards. "Hah. You're hoping to score a big pot of flat pennies, right? He ain't here today."

Crane didn't want his next question to seem important, so he sat down lithely, scratching his hot scalp and wishing he hadn't lost his Jughead cap. "Deal me in the next hand," he said. "Does old Doctor Leaky play here steady?"

"Most days, I s'pose. Buy-in's ten bucks."

Resigning himself—and Mavranos—to an hour of wasted time, Crane suppressed a sigh and dug in his pocket.

The full moon hung in the sky to the east like the print of an ash-dusted penny on indigo velvet.

Finally the full moon, thought Diana as she glanced at it through the windshield. And our monthly cycles are matched, for whatever archaic, repulsive value that might have. Hold my hand, Mother.

The blocks around Shadow Lane and Charleston Boulevard, north of the Strip and south of Fremont Street, all seemed to be taken up with hospitals, and Diana wasted ten minutes in circling before finding a parking space in the University Medical Center parking lot. She locked the rented Ford, pushed her sunglasses up on her nose, and walked swiftly toward the gray buildings on the far side of the lot. She was wearing a loose shirt—
not
linen—and jeans and sneakers, in case she might have to run, and she wondered why she had not borrowed a gun from Ozzie and Scott, or even Mike Stikeleather, when she had had the chance.

Her steps were light on the radiant asphalt in her new white Nikes, and she spread out her hands in front of herself, as if surrendering to something, and tossed aside the cloud of her blond hair to look at her knuckles and wrists.

All the old scars were gone: the crescent of a dog bite, the hard line where a jackknife had unexpectedly closed, all the tiny pale graffiti of the years. This morning, rousing from yet another motel pillow wrapped in the old yellow baby blanket, her forehead had been itching, and in the bathroom mirror she had seen smooth skin where the boy in fourth grade had hit her over the left eye with a rock.

And of course she had been dreaming, for the sixth night in a row, about her mother's island, where owls hooted in the tossing, bending trees and water clattered over rocks and dogs bayed out in the darkness.

Like her skin, her memory was growing younger. On Sunday she had decided to visit Hans's grave, but after getting into a taxi, she'd discovered that she couldn't remember where he had been buried, nor even what he had looked like; and as she had sheepishly improvised some destination for the driver to take her to, she had realized with no alarm that the faces of all her long-ago lovers were likewise gone; and yesterday, after she had felt the death of the man who had been called Alfred Funo, it had occurred to her that she no longer knew anything about her onetime husband except his last name, and knew that only because it was the name on her driver's license.