Last Call (Last Call 1)

Crane got up again and followed the man to a small room down the hall. The officer pulled the door closed, and Crane looked around. The anonymity of the room—a couch, a couple of chairs, soft light from a lamp beside a telephone on a table—seemed incongruous in a hospital. It occurred to him that he'd be more comfortable talking in a corner of some white hallway, interrupted frequently by hurrying doctors and nurses pushing IV-hung gurneys.

"Can I see some identification, please?"

Crane dug out his wallet and handed the man his California driver's license.

"Do sit down," the officer told him. Crane reluctantly lowered himself into one of the chairs. "This Santa Ana address is current?"

"Yes," Crane said.

The officer wrote down the numbers and handed the card back. "I'm doing the drive-by shooting report," he said. "Why don't you tell me what happened out there?"

Crane told the man exactly what had occurred, starting with Snayheever's phone call—though, as Ozzie had insisted during the high-speed drive to the hospital, he implied that they had driven out from Los Angeles to visit Diana purely for social reasons, and he didn't mention having been shot at in Los Angeles on Thursday, nor having met Snayheever in Baker. He said Snayheever had told him his name tonight. Halfway through the story the officer called in on his hand-held radio to have a police car sent out to where Crane had left Snayheever unconscious and probably shot.

"I think the man who shot her son is staying at our motel," Crane said. "The guy who was in the room next to ours drives a white Porsche, and my foster father called him a zombie the other day, and he seemed to get pissed—and then tonight, out where all this happened, a guy in a white Porsche, probably the same guy, tried to pick up on Diana and she told him to get lost. Rudely. He might have been shooting at her or at the old man."

"Okay." The officer wrote on his clipboard. "The detectives will check that out." He looked at Crane incuriously. "The revolver you shot at the kidnapper with—where is it?"

"In the car, outside."

"Is it yours?"

"Yes."

"Registered to you?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Where will you be staying?"

"God, I don't know. The Circus Circus, I guess."

"Do that, and let us know your room number as soon as you're checked in."

" 'Kay."

The man clicked his ball-point pen and tucked it away in his shirt pocket. "For the time being we'll be considering this two possibly-related events. I've got the names and addresses of the other witnesses, and they say they'll be staying at the Circus Circus, too; the detectives will probably be talking to all of you tomorrow."

Crane blinked at him. "That's it?"

"For tonight. Stay here; the doctor will be in soon with the other family members." The officer tucked the clipboard under his arm and left the room, pulling the door shut.

Crane leaned back in the chair and exhaled. That had been easy; he had been afraid that he'd automatically be jailed for shooting at somebody, or at least have the gun confiscated. I guess I look like an innocent person, he thought.

But goddammit, I am an innocent person! The only thing I've ever done wrong was play Assumption twenty-one years ago!

He thought of the bourbon and beer at Whiskey Pete's on Saturday night, then thrust the thought away impatiently.

The door opened again, and Ozzie and Diana shuffled in, followed by the young doctor. Crane found himself resenting the man's perfectly combed black hair. Nobody sat down, so Crane stood up and leaned against the wall.

"I'm Dr. Bandholtz," the doctor said. "Of course you all know that the boy has been shot. The bullet broke the ring of bone around the eye, and the bone of the temple back to the ear. It bled a lot, the head is a very vascular area, but there was no serious loss of blood. I think we can save the eye and rebuild the orbit."

"Will there," whispered Diana, "be any brain damage?" Bandholtz sighed and ran the fingers of one hand through his hair, mussing it up.

"There is probably some brain damage," he said, "but eighty-five percent of the brain is ordinarily never used, and the functions of damaged areas are often assumed by other areas. The problem we'll have is swelling of the brain; that's bad because there's no room for it to swell, without cutting off the blood supply. We've got him on steroids to fight that, thirty milligrams of IV Decadron tonight and then four milligrams every six hours after that. Also we're giving him Mannitol, that's a diuretic, to shrink the tissues. Some doctors would use barbiturates to forcibly shut down the brain function during this, but I feel that's still an experimental procedure, and I'm not going to do it."

"When will he regain consciousness?" Diana asked.