Tim Powers - Last Call (64 page)

The man with the Ace showing shakily put a dollar bill into the middle of the circle, staring at Crane's gun. All the players still in line to bet just folded except for Doctor Leaky, who smiled vacuously and rolled a punctured chip into the pot. Crane threw a dollar bill in.

He grinned with clenched teeth. "The hand, uh,
under the gun
is up for bid," he said.

Nobody moved or said anything.

Mavranos had the truck's engine running now. The taxi was still in the parking lot, stopped closer to the Flamingo Road entrance, its motor idling.

Crane could hear sirens—not out front yet, but not too many blocks away. He glanced at the body on the pavement. Dizzy with nausea, he wondered if it was dying, and what Lieutenant Frits would have to say to him about this.

"The hand is up for bid," he said, hearing the pleading tone in his voice.

Doctor Leaky blinked around. "I'll go two, Scotto," he said, laboriously pushing forward two flat pennies.

"And I don't bid," Crane yelled, "so it's yours!" He tucked the gun into his pocket and snatched up Doctor Leaky's hand and the four cards the old man had bought. Then he had scrambled to his feet, broad-jumped over the unconscious body, and was sprinting across the expanse of hot asphalt toward Mavranos's blue truck.

The police were right out front; he could hear the change in the echoes of the sirens and even the wheeze of the shock absorbers and thump of tires as they turned into the driveway.

The blue truck was rolling, turning to be able to leave through the side of the parking lot away from Flamingo Road, and Mavranos had opened the passenger side door.

Crane was running flat-out, his legs pumping furiously to stay under his full-tilt torso, but he knew the police cars would turn into the lot before he would reach the truck.

He heard a squeal of tires, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the taxi lunge forward and crash head-on into the first police car. He was aware that the taxi's doors were immediately flung open, but now he was level with the truck and had to scuff around, flailingly keeping his balance, to get to the open door.

He clawed his way in, crawling across the seat with his legs still kicking outside. "
Out the back
!" he yelled.

But Mavranos had pulled the steering wheel around the other way now, as if trying to make a figure-8. "Gotta pick up the girls," he said loudly over the battering racket of the engine.

Centrifugal force was pulling Crane out of the truck, and the playing cards crumpled in his hand as he dug his fingers into the upholstery. "
Girls
?" he shouted as his feet banged the swinging door, trying to get a purchase on anything.

Then, though the truck had not even slowed down, the back door was yanked open and a couple of people piled in back. Crane heard the gas pedal whomp down onto the floorboard, and the four-barrel carburetor kicked the truck hard forward.

As Crane's right foot finally found the door frame and pushed him inside, he was aware that Mavranos had made an abrupt U-turn into some kind of roofed entrance. When he sat up and pulled the door closed, he saw that they were in the Flamingo parking structure, driving slowly up the first ramp, hardly a hundred yards from where they had left the crashed police car.

"Oh, Arky," Crane whispered breathlessly, "this is a dangerous move."

Mavranos was frowning, and his face gleamed with sweat. "Shit, Pogo, tell me something I don't know. But if we tried to drive away on the Strip, they'd have radioed ahead and caught us within a block."

Mavranos swung the truck around the first bend, onto the second-floor ramp of the parking structure. Crane could hear sirens, but none of them were echoing as if they were in here too.

"Jesus, make it work," he whispered, clutching the dashboard with one sweaty hand. "Make them not think about looking in here."

"Turning in here was the best move," came a woman's voice from the back seat, and Crane turned around.

It was a young Asian woman in a cabdriver's uniform who had spoken; there was a branching pattern of blood running down her face from her forehead, but Crane was staring now at her companion.

And his heart was thumping harder now than it had when he'd been running. "Diana?"

Her nose was bleeding, and she was pinching it shut. "Yeah," she said thickly. "Hi, Scott. It's good to see you, Arky."

"Well, I'm lovin' life now," growled Mavranos.

To his own surprise, Crane felt even more frightened than he had a few moments ago. He had once played in a $500 buy-in Hold 'Em tournament—he had been too drunk to get all the rules straight before he started playing, and so he had not been expecting the option of being able to buy in again after going broke; and when he did go broke, and the re-buy was offered to him, he took it eagerly, happily paying out another $500. But the blinds and limits had been steadily increasing, and the minimum bet was now $150, and he realized belatedly that the expense of making the full investment again had only enabled him to play one more hand.

He couldn't remember now whether or not he had won that next hand.

"You two were in the cab that hit the cop car," Crane said.

"Right," said the Asian woman. "And I guess I'm surely committed to this," she said to Diana. "I left my cab there, and they saw us run. I can't claim you were holding a gun on me."

Mavranos had turned onto the third uphill ramp now. Still, there were no parking stalls empty, and the rumble of the exhaust filled the low-ceilinged space.

"Ozzie said you were dead," said Crane to Diana. "He said they blew you up."

"They nearly did. They
did
kill my poor boyfriend." Diana gave Crane a hard stare. "How is Ozzie?"

"I'm sorry. He's dead."

"Your fault?"

Crane thought about it bleakly. "Yes."

"Ah."

Her face was blank, but tears were running down her cheeks now to mix with the blood on her chin. Nobody spoke while Mavranos slowly turned the truck up onto the fourth level.

At last Crane recognized the young woman who had apparently been driving the cab. "I know you, don't I?" he said. "You drove me away from that shooting by Binion's. Your name was …?"

"Nardie Dinh." She was blotting her forehead with a handkerchief. "Incidentally I take back my advice that you kill yourself. You're everybody's best hope now, such as you are, and I find myself on your side."

Crane looked around at the three people who were in the laboring truck with him. "We're a side?" His voice sounded brittle and hollowly cheerful in his ears. "And I'm the leader, am I? What's your opinion of your leader, Diana?"

Her face was still blank. "I'm in a state of suspended admiration."

Mavranos turned the wheel and swung the truck into an empty stall, the tires echoingly squeaking on the glossy cement floor. "We're gonna have to get some paint up here," he said, "and paint this thing some other color." He turned off the engine. "What you got there, Scott? Something worth all that …
furor
?"

"Yeah." Crane opened his fist and straightened out the eight crumpled cards. "My father's real body."

Crane paid for two adjoining rooms in the Flamingo, and he bought two souvenir decks of playing cards in the gift shop before leading the way upstairs.

On one of the beds in the room that was to be his and Mavranos's, Crane broke the seals on the decks and scattered the cards face up across the bedspread.

Mavranos had carried the ice chest up, and Dinh called room service for six Cokes.

"What are you doing?" she asked Crane when she had hung up.

Crane was tentatively arranging the cards. "Trying to figure out how to stack a cold deck for a very complicated Poker game." He had separated out the eight cards that had been Doctor Leaky's hand: the Six and Eight of Hearts, the Knight of Clubs, and the Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, and King of Spades. "I wish my—my father's body had drawn a better hand.
Consisted
of a better hand. This has to win, and in thirteen-handed Assumption a King-high Flush isn't that great."

"Somebody's going to play with Flamingo cards?" Mavranos asked, sipping a Coors. Diana stood by the window, looking down at the pool.

"No," Crane said, "but I want to use these to set it up. Less wear and tear on my head. The actual game is going to be played with"—he sighed—"a Lombardy Zeroth deck."

Nardie glanced at him sharply. "My half-brother has a card from that deck," she said. "The Tower. He wants to use it to become King."

"Swell," said Crane. "I hope he looks at it cross-eyed and goes crazy."

"He already did," she said. "Are you … talking about the game on the lake?"

"Yes."

"You're not going to
play
in it, are you? Again?"

"Yes."

She shivered visibly. "You couldn't get me out on that boat."

Diana turned around. "When are you going to do this, Scott?"

He didn't look up from the cards. "The game's going to be played tonight and tomorrow night and during the day on Good Friday. I'll start tonight, and keep on playing until I get the trick done."

"Is that guy you conked gonna be there?" asked Mavranos.

"Yeah," said Crane. "In that body, if it's not dead or in a hospital. He's the host."

"He'll recognize you."

"He would, but I'll be disguised."

"How?"

There was a knock at the door then, and Diana walked across the room and let in the bellboy, who set the tray of Cokes on the table, and gave him some money.

"How are you going to disguise yourself?" Mavranos asked again when the bellboy had left.

Crane grinned worriedly at his friend and shook his head. "I don't know. Shave my head? Wear glasses? Dye my face and hands black?"

"None of those sound very good," said Diana.

"You could go in full clown makeup," Nardie said. "I think they do it for free at Circus Circus."

"Or you could go in an ape suit," said Mavranos. "There's gotta be a place in town that rents ape suits."

" 'Each one volunteered his own suggestions,' " quoted Crane with a forced smile. " 'His invaluable suggestions.' "

"That's Lewis Carroll," said Nardie.

Crane looked at her, and his smile became genuine. "Right." She and Diana had told him what her connection was to all this, but now he really paid attention to her for the first time, and he noticed her fine black hair and porcelain face. "I love that poem," he said. " 'Neither did he leave them slowly, with the—' "

"A woman," Diana interrupted harshly.

Mavranos raised his beer as if in a toast. "A woman!"

Crane frowned at her. "What?"

"Go as a woman. It's the only disguise that will work."

Crane laughed shortly—but saw that Mavranos and Nardie had raised their eyebrows as if considering the idea.

"No," he said. "This is going to be tough enough without showing up in
drag
, for Christ's sake. I'll shave my head and wear glasses. That'll—"

"No," said Nardie thoughtfully, "your face is too distinctive. I haven't seen you very often, but I'd recognize you bald and with glasses. I think drag is it—lots of makeup, lipstick, a striking wig—"

"Makes
me
hot," allowed Mavranos.

"It wouldn't work," said Crane in a confident, dismissing tone. "What about my voice?" He pitched his voice falsetto and said, "
Do you want me to talk like this
?"

"Just talk normally," said Diana. "They'll all just write you off as a brassy transvestite."

"Nobody's gonna look hard at a queer," Mavranos agreed. "If anybody starts to, just wink at 'em."

Somehow, dwarfing his fear that he would fail, and that Diana would be killed, and that he himself would lose his body on Holy Saturday when his father assumed the bodies he had bought during the 1969 games, Crane felt light-headed with panic at this new suggestion. I will not do it, he assured himself. Don't
even
worry about it.

Nardie touched his shoulder. "What if it's the only way?" she asked softly. "Do you remember Sir Lancelot?" Crane shook his head stubbornly, and she went on. "He was riding to rescue the Queen, Guinevere, and on the way he had to ride in a cart. It was a horrible disgrace to ride in a cart in those days; criminals were paraded up and down the streets in them, so that people could jeer and throw things, okay? Lancelot hesitated for just a moment before climbing in, and afterward, when he had rescued her, she wouldn't speak to him because of his brief hesitation, because for a couple of seconds he had put his personal dignity ahead of his duty to her. And he agreed that she was right."

"God." Crane stared down at the cards.

It
would
be the best disguise, he admitted to himself. And what do you care, really, if a bunch of strangers—
and your father
—think you're a drag queen? They won't know who it is. Is Diana's life worth less than your—your raddled dignity?
Your
dignity, the dignity of a trembly old bum only six days on the wagon? Six days on the wagon and at most three days on the cart.

He looked at Diana, and she didn't look away. "Let the record show," he said hoarsely, "that I hesitated no longer than Lancelot did." He turned to Dinh. "Did Guinevere forgive him?"

"That was in Chretien de Troyes's book, right?" said Mavranos. For a moment Dinh was clearly baffled by his barbarous pronunciation of the name, but then she blinked in comprehension and nodded, and Mavranos told Crane, "Yeah, she did eventually."

"Hear that, my lady?" Crane said to Diana.

As if to punish them all, he pulled his father's wooden box out of his pocket, opened it, and spilled the Lombardy Zeroth deck out on the bedspread. With a trembling hand he fanned them out.

"
Ah
," sighed Nardie, her voice suddenly wounded and sad.

Crane was staring at the horribly affecting, morbid old miniature paintings, but he was peripherally aware that Mavranos had stood up and Diana had stepped closer. Suddenly sorry, Crane reached out to hide the cards.

"No," whispered Diana, catching his hand tightly. "I need to … meet these things."