Last Call (Last Call 1)

Ozzie winced at the white desert sunlight. "I'll have my shoes on soon enough, sonny." He glanced instinctively at his portable coffeepot. No time for that, he thought. He hesitated—No, he thought, I'll need it—then walked quickly to the dressing table and with trembling fingers opened a Ziploc plastic bag and shook a lot of instant coffee into one of the hotel glasses.

"Now listen," he said as he carried the glass into the bathroom, "I'm going to leave you somewhere out in the children's area here." He turned on the hot-water tap in the sink. "And I want you to wait there for me, y'understand?" he shouted over the roar of the faucet. The water heated up quickly, and he ran some into the glass and stirred the foamy brown stuff with the handle of a Circus Circus souvenir toothbrush. "I'll be gone for only an hour or so, I think, but if noon rolls around and I'm still gone, you call the police and tell them everything, and tell them you need to be hidden from the same people that shot your brother."

"Everybody's ditching me," said Oliver.

Ozzie hurried back into the room and sat down on the bed near his shoes. "I'm sorry," he told the boy. "It's just that there's trouble, and we don't want you to get into it." He drained the barely hot double-strength coffee in one fast series of gulps. "Jesus." He shook his head. "Oh, and don't call these Amino Acids friends of yours, okay? Do you promise?"

The boy shuddered. "I'm grown up. I can decide who I talk to."

"Not in this kettle of fish, kid." Ozzie tossed the empty cup aside and, with an effortful grunt, bent down and picked up his shoes and began levering them onto his bare feet. "This is stuff you don't know about. Trust me, I'm your grandfather, and we're doing this for your mother's safety."

When the boy spoke again, his voice was pitched lower. "Call me Bitin Dog."

Ozzie closed his eyes. I can't go, he thought. If I leave this kid alone, he's going to call his evil friends, sure as I'm sitting here.

Well …

Well, so I stay here, and don't go over there to Venus Avenue. The cops will be there. What could one old man do for her that the cops couldn't? Especially an old man whose guts are acting up and who wouldn't have had time to properly go to the bathroom.

"Well, Mr. Bitin Dog," he said tiredly, "maybe you've got a point about everybody ditching you. Maybe you and I could … just go have breakfast somewhere—"

"Somewhere where they serve beer," the boy interrupted. "You order it, and then I can drink it when they're not looking, okay?"

"No, you can't have any beer. My God, it's not yet eight in the morning." He was still holding the laces of his right shoe, and to his dull surprise he saw that his knobby old fingers were tying them. Socks, he told himself; if you're not going to Venus, you've got time to put on socks.

His fingers finished the knot and moved, apparently of their own volition, to the other shoe.

"Oh, and you're too young for beer anyway," he said. "I was going to say, before you interrupted me, that you and I could go have breakfast somewhere after we go by your mom's house to make sure she's okay." The shoes were tied, and he stood up, feeling frail. The coffee felt like a shovelful of road tar in his stomach. "You ready to go? We want to get there before she does. We'll be hurrying and she won't, and I hope she'll have the sense to make her cabbie circle the block a time or two first, but she's got a head start on us. Come on."

"What if I don't want to go to—" the boy began, but he flinched back and stopped talking when the old man turned a hard glare on him.

"Come on," Ozzie repeated softly.

Oliver stared at him for a moment; then he let his shoulders droop and he was just a little boy again, and he followed his grandfather out of the room.

Hans was justifiably upset.

The police had actually been pointing drawn revolvers at him when he had answered their urgent knocking—of all the John Wayne stunts!—but they had holstered them when he answered the door and blinked at them in sleepy astonishment, and now, as he tremblingly made coffee in the little kitchen, Hans was at least grateful that Diana's crazy old foster-father had given them a description of him. Evidently if they hadn't recognized him as Diana's reported "boyfriend," they'd have handcuffed him and thrown him on the floor!

He looked over the counter at the two policemen standing on a patch of sunlit carpet by the front window. "You guys want coffee?"

The older cop, Gould, gave him a blank look and shook his head. "No, thank you."

"Huh." Hans watched the glass pot steam up as the hot coffee started to trickle into it. "Completely nuts," he went on, trying not to talk too fast or sound ingratiating. "The old man—and Diana's brother, too—think she's this Egyptian goddess Isis."

"We're not concerned with their religious beliefs, Mr. Ganci."

"Fine." Hans shrugged and nodded virtuously. "I told them to go to the police last night."

"So you said."