Last Call (Last Call 1)

Mavranos was getting impatient. "Who are these friends of yours? These the great guys that named you Barfin' Dog?"

"Your name is Archimedes!" Oliver shot back. "You think that's not a—a shitty name?" He took a few deep breaths, and again the strange calm descended on him. "But yeah, sort of. People were already calling me that, but tonight they made it my club name. It's my persona, if you've ever heard that word. They ride around in white El Camino pickups, but they bust off the El and the C from the logo on the fender, so it says 'amino.' They call themselves the Amino Acids."

"They've all got cars? How old are these kids?"

"They're not kids, they—"

Abruptly the boy had stopped talking, and when Mavranos looked over at him, he had seemed at first to be struggling not to cry. Then his eyes opened and rolled back, and Mavranos thought he'd have to follow Crane to the hospital, for Oliver seemed to be having a fit. A moment later, though, the boy was relaxed and staring sullenly ahead.

"You okay, boy?" Mavranos asked nervously.

"I'm not a boy."

They had not spoken again until Ozzie and Diana and Crane had joined them at the carousel bar.

Mavranos described the conversation to Crane as the bar slowly turned, and he was absently curious about Crane's not having yet touched either of his beers.

"Your sister's got a weird kid," Mavranos concluded. "It was a little boy talking, but it was as if part of him had dried out, kissed off childhood and become an adult by default, like I've read they can remove a gland from some kinds of larvae, and they go into a cocoon way before they should, and the adult butterfly that eventually crawls out is stunted and horrible."

Crane was thinking about this Amino Acids club and the "all in the cards" remark, and he decided he ought to get word of this to Ozzie.

Mavranos pointed at Crane's two bottles. "You gonna drink those beers?"

Crane picked one up and sniffed it; then he sighed. "No," he said. "You can have them."

Mavranos picked one up and tilted it to his mouth—then choked and put it down again. Foam was running down his neck into his collar and surging up out of the bottle neck and puddling on the table.

Mavranos coughed, then looked around in embarrassment. "I must have got some cigarette ash in it somehow. Ashes'll make 'em foam up like that."

Crane nodded, but he suspected that Susan was responsible, angered by Crane's rudeness. He had rebuffed her here, asking for the beers and then changing his mind and passing them on to a friend. "Let me buy you a Coors, Arky," he said, forcing himself to sound unconcerned. "I don't think you're going to have any luck with the other one there either."

Getting a room with cash proved to be no problem, and after Mavranos had unlocked the room door, Crane crossed to the telephone. He called the Metro police and was referred to a Detective Frits, who noted the room number.

"Oh, Mr. Crane," Frits added, "a team of officers went out Boulder Highway and found that shed. They say there's blood and broken glass and a chair with cut duct tape on it and a gun out in the sand, but there's nobody there. Car tracks behind the shed indicate he might have driven away in a very small car."

"I saw the car," said Crane quickly. "I forgot to mention it. It's a boxy little thing like a British Volkswagen, called a Morris. Covered with dust, impossible to tell the color."

"Ah. That'll help, thank you."

After Crane had hung up the phone, Mavranos opened the hall door. "I'm going out on the town, Pogo," he said. "You got your key, right?"

"Right. Have fun."

"Night like this," Mavranos said dully, "how could I not?" He left, closing the door behind him and rattling the knob to be sure it had locked.

Crane looked around the room. The carpet and chairs were bright red, and the walls were striped red and pink and blue. He turned off the light.

In the merciful near darkness he got undressed, and crawled into the window-side bed, wondering if he'd be able to sleep. He had become a night person during these last hundred hours or so, but in this town it wasn't supposed to matter.

He did manage to doze, but some hours later he opened his eyes—and tensed, sweat suddenly springing out all over him.

A rat, almost big enough to look like a possum, was clinging to the shade of the lamp across the room. Very slowly, its free paw turning and its head ducking and then coming up again so that the eyes glinted in the light from a slit between the drawn curtains, the rat was eating a big insect, one of those white beetles known as potato bugs or Jerusalem crickets, which the Spanish call ninos de la tierra, children of the earth. The bug, too, was moving slowly, waving its long, thick, jointed legs in the air. No sound was being made.

Crane just stared, his heart pounding, all judgment suspended.