Last Call (Last Call 1)

On Fremont Street the wet cars glistened with reflected neon rainbows, and the children who waited for their parents on the carpeted sidewalks huddled in the casino doorways. The hiss of the rain was the dominant sound—it muffled the rattle and rapid-fire clang of the slot machines, and though the strikers in front of Binion's Horseshoe kept on walking back and forth with their signs, the shouting of the young woman picketer was less strident without her electric megaphone.

Inside the casinos there was only the occasional whiff of wet hair to let people know it was raining outside, but at the Blackjack tables face cards were being turned up about half the time, and actively played Roulette tables were hard to find, owing to the number of wheels that had been shut down for testing because they came up with the zero and double zero more often than they should, and a number of elderly slot machine players had to be led out in tears, complaining that the machines were glaring at them.

Traffic was heavy south of Fremont Street—buses and old VW bugs and new Rolls-Royces and a procession of white Chevrolet El Caminos—and there were lines of people in gowns and tuxedoes standing patiently in the white-lit rain outside the wedding chapels. The big casinos to the south, the Sands and Caesars Palace and the Mirage and the Flamingo, were flares of lurid color in the wet night.

On the roof of the towering pink and white edifice that was the Circus Circus, in among cables and conduits, below the forest of antennas and satellite dishes, Diana clutched her robe to herself and shivered as the rain drummed and rattled around her.

The city, spread out below her in all its palaces and incandescent arteries, seemed as far away as the dark clouds overhead; the distant moon, not even visible now, seemed closer.

She had called the hospital an hour ago, and Dr. Bandholtz had told her that Scat's condition was a little worse.

The boy had already been connected to a catheter that was inserted under his collarbone and somehow threaded through a vein and then through the "right heart" and lodged in the pulmonary artery—it was to make sure the blood pressure in the lungs didn't rise, for the lungs would not be able to absorb oxygen if it did—but now he was breathing through an "endotrachial tube" taped into his mouth. If his breathing didn't stabilize soon, they were going to put him on an IMV, which she gathered was some very serious kind of ventilator.

After getting off the phone with the hospital, she had called her own apartment number.

And she had sighed with relief and frustration when Hans had answered. At least he was still alive.

"Hans," she'd told him, "you've got to get out of there; it's not safe."

"Diana," he had said, "I trust the police."

She had waited wearily for him to tell her that if she had let the police handle the kidnapping last night, Scat would not be dying in the hospital. He had told her that when she'd called last night, and she had hung up on him, and she knew she'd do the same if he said it again.

He didn't. "Besides," he said, "your foster-brother shot the guy, right?"

"No, don't you listen? The man who shot Scat is somebody else, and he knows where I live, and he's probably still in town. Get out of that apartment.

"If you're evicting me," Hans said pompously, "I am entitled to at least thirty days' notice."

"These people won't give you thirty seconds' notice, you idiot!" She reflected that Hans was guilty of what Ozzie had used to call felony stupid. "I'll call the cops and tell them about your dope plants, and—"

"Have you visited Scat today?" he interrupted angrily.

Quietly she said, "… No."

"Hmm, somehow I had thought not. Are you going to tonight?"

"I don't know."

"I see. Why don't you consult a Ouija board," he said, his voice quavering with the weight of his sarcasm, "to see if it would be safe?"

"Get out of there!" she yelled. She had hung up on him then.

If it would be safe.

Alfred Funo, she thought now as the rain clattered in the puddles around her bare feet. Someday I hope to be able to deal with Mr. Alfred Funo.

Funo had vacated the motel before the police arrived there last night, but his exit seemed to have been hasty, and they had found a couple of 9-millimeter bullets under the bed. Diana was in no doubt that Funo was the man who had shot her son.

And there were others out there: this Snayheever creature, and the fat man in the Jaguar, and, according to Ozzie, dozens of others.

Bathe in the fresh, wild water of this place, Ozzie had told her.

Her wet skirt, shoes, blouse, and underwear were draped over a taut cable on a big air-conditioning unit, and now she opened her robe and let it fall behind her and stood naked in the thrashing rain.

Mother, she thought, looking up at the sky. Mother, hear your daughter. I need your help.