Last Call (Last Call 1)

For perhaps ten minutes he lay, stiff as a statue and hardly breathing, and watched the rat consume the beetle; and then the rat began to stop moving. First its head stopped its slow bobbing, and then the long tail, which had been flexing out in the air, curled around the body and disappeared. The bug was gone, and the rat's forepaws folded and then there was no motion from the lumpy darkness on the lampshade.

Moving as agonizingly slowly as had the animal combatants, Crane reached out and turned on the small bedside lamp next to his head.

In the sudden yellow light he saw that the dark mass on the lampshade was nothing but his shirt, tossed there carelessly when he had taken off his clothes.

Mavranos, he saw, had not yet returned. Crane got out of bed and walked over to the lamp. For a while he started at the shirt, and then he carefully lifted it away from the lampshade and tossed it into a corner.

Still suspending judgement, he got back into bed, closed his eyes, and waited for sleep to take him.

"I've seen her boyfriend going in and out," Trumbill said patiently, "but so far she hasn't showed."

He was sitting in a chair by the aluminum-frame window, wearing only a pair of baggy white shorts. Aside from the chair, there was nothing inside the stark apartment but a TV table, a telephone, two whirring fans, a Styrofoam ice chest, and the litter of used-up Ban roll-on antiperspirant tubes around the legs of the chair; he was rubbing a new tube over the vividly tattooed skin of his enormous belly.

He had hastily rented this apartment at dawn, and though the landlord had managed to hook up a phone, the air conditioner wasn't working; in spite of the antiperspirants, Trumbill was losing precious moisture.

"I'll keep on them about the air conditioner," said Betsy Reculver, who was standing behind him, "but you've got to stay here. We can't lose her, the way you lost Sc—lost Crane, in California." The cheap carpeting did nothing to muffle the quacking echoes of her voice.

Without looking away from the window, Trumbill held out the tube of Ban. "Do my back?"

"Forget it." He could hear the revulsion in her voice.

Trumbill shrugged and resumed rubbing it over his densely illustrated flesh, still looking out through the half-opened curtains at the white duplex across the street.

He wished he were at home doing the chores or raking his gravel garden, or driving the old Leon body somewhere in the air-conditioned Jaguar, but he could see that this had to be done. This was clearly the Diana they'd been trying to find. The police report had linked the Diana who lived at the duplex's address with Scott and Ozzie Crane, and, as Betsy had been quick to notice, the address was Isis on Venus.

"You didn't use it all?" said Betsy.

For a moment he thought she had reconsidered doing his back, but she was standing by the table and had picked up a fist-size blob of the pink Semtex.

"All of it would take out half the street," he told her. "The two golf ball-size ones I stuck in the basement grates will do fine—even with them, I won't be sitting by this window when I do it; I'll be around the corner in the hall."

"It looks like—like marzipan candy."

"Go ahead and shape it into a pig; it can't go off without a blasting cap. You could probably safely eat it."

She shivered and put it down. A moment later she said, "I suppose you like this decor."

Trumbill spared a glance around at the bare yellow walls and the flocked ceiling. "Painted white, and a lot cooler, it'd be all right."

"What have you got against … livelier things?"

I love them, Betsy, he thought. I just want them all to be within the boundaries of my skin. "Don't you have to go meet Newt?"

"Not till this afternoon—but very well, I'll leave you alone." He heard her footsteps scuff across the carpet toward the door. "But I'll call you every fifteen minutes or so," she added.

"You don't have to," he said, but she was already out the door and closing it behind her.

That meant she'd be on the phone with him more often than not throughout the day—unless Diana were to show. He sighed and stared at the duplex and reached into the ice chest for one of the strips of raw lamb.

The noon sun through the window glowed hot red in a prism paperweight on Detective Frits's disordered desk, but of course the office was chilly. Crane, perched in a swiveling office chair across from Frits, wished he had worn a jacket. His cup of coffee still steamed on the edge of the desk, but it was nearly gone, and he didn't want to finish it yet.

Crane had told Frits the same story he'd told the Metro officer last night, and now the detective was leafing through a notebook, apparently at random. His curly brown hair was disordered and receding from his high forehead, and when Crane first shook hands with him he had thought the tall, skinny detective had probably been a rock musician in his not-long-ago youth.

Crane's thoughts were far away from the little office and the gangly detective.

Move all-in.