Last Call (Last Call 1)

After Diana had opened a can for him and handed it across the back of the seat, the old man took a deep sip. "Yeah," he went on. "You've paid the blind, this latest involuntary bet, and now maybe the only thing you can do is move all-in, shove your whole pile of chips out there right now."

The old man's chasing the white line again, thought Crane. Toward a game where they're likely to kill us all.

"They won't expect alligator blood," Ozzie went on, "in somebody who's been playing like such a rock."

Crane remembered the term alligator blood—it was how old Johnny Moss had described the toughness of real Poker players. As far as Crane knew, Moss was still winning tournaments at Binion's Horseshoe, and by now Moss must be … as old as Ozzie.

"So what are the chips?" Diana asked. "And how do I push them in?"

"Uh … you ought to consult the Queen," said Ozzie, "but she's dead. That was your mother." The old man sipped his beer with a hand that he was visibly forcing to be steady. "Her … ghost will probably be rousing up lately, with this unholy Holy Week almost on us, and the moon is at the half and filling now, so she and you should be getting more powerful. And there will be other women in town now, trying for the queenhood, but you're the daughter, you're already standing where they want to be. They're wanting to find you and get you out of the picture and then stand there instead. You're the one the real Queen of Hearts would … give an audience to."

Crane was stopped at a traffic light next to Caesars Palace, and he stared at the crowds of pedestrians crossing the street toward the torches and imperious statues above the casino's entrance temple.

"So what do I do?" Diana asked. "Consult a Ouija board? Take acid and meet her in a hallucination?"

"No, no. I'm pretty sure anything like that would just make you conspicuous, let your rivals know right where you are. And stay away from playing cards or any gambling. In fact, stay away from Scott—he's to the King what you are to the Queen, and when the two of you are together, it probably shines like a road flare."

"No problem," said Diana.

Crane stared ahead through the cracked, neon-streaked windshield and didn't respond, but his lips were pulled back from his clenched teeth. I stabbed my leg, he thought, to be able to warn you about all this, three whole days ago. If you'd run then, Scat would be fine. I walked up that hill. I got the nut to turn his gun away from your son, onto me.

"Water, fresh water," Ozzie was saying now. "It's associated with the moon goddess. I think if you could bathe in the fresh, wild water of this place, and try to … think to her, your mother, Lady Issit, you might get something."

"Bathe," said Diana doubtfully. "But Ozzie, I bathed in the water of this place just this afternoon, and nothing happened. I've been bathing in this water every day for eight years!"

"No, you haven't. Don't you read the papers? They're having a water war in Nevada these days. Las vegas is Spanish for 'the meadows,' it's in an artesian basin, but even in the forties the wells had begun to run dry, sink-holes started to appear, as the water table dropped. It was only in eighty-two that the city got access to Lake Mead water, and now that's not enough, and they're after the water in central Nevada—Railroad Valley, Ely, Pioche. Las Vegas is supposed to take no more from those places than rainfall puts back, but the city has applied for the right to take more, what they call mining the aquifers."

Crane thought about his vision of the vast entities deep in the psychic water table. He wondered if it, too, was low around here, depleted by some unimaginable use.

"The bad king," Ozzie went on, "has almost certainly encouraged all this. He doesn't want any wild goddess power under the ground. He wants tamed water to serve as the counterweight. Don't you go near Lake Mead before talking to your mother."

Construction was going on at the Holiday Casino to the right. Crane frowned at the big neon-lit replica of a riverboat. The massive, balconied structure was facing north now, and he distinctly remembered it as having faced west the last time he'd paid attention to it. Was it revolving?

"Like," Diana said slowly, "a well? Rain?" In the rearview mirror the right side of her face was whitened by the electrically glaring words HOLIDAY CASINO emblazoned across the towering paddle wheel.

Crane thought about how this road had looked when he had driven out here with his real father, so long ago. The Frontier had been a casual ranch-style place, the El Rancho Vegas up ahead had been a little Spanish-looking inn, and the Flamingo had stood in solitary grandeur far away in the darkness to the south.

"Or the ice cubes in drinks that have been sitting around since the forties," he told Diana.

CHAPTER 23: Go Ahead and Shape It into a Pig