Last Call (Last Call 1)

Officer Gould nodded out the window. "I think Hamilton sees a cab."

Hans walked around the counter and peered with them out through the window. One of the officers standing by the second police car out at the curb was staring intently down the street toward Civic Center Drive. After a few seconds a yellow taxicab pulled up behind the police car, and a moment later a fat woman got out.

Hans was about to tell them that it wasn't Diana, but then he saw the woman's face. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. It was Diana, but she had stuffed something into the rear end of her pants and the belly of her shirt, so that she looked both fat and pregnant. "Yeah," he said wonderingly, "that's her."

The policeman outside, Hamilton, apparently, walked up to her as she was paying the driver, and then he was escorting her toward the apartment.

As the cab drove away and Hamilton and Diana hurried up the walk toward the front door, Hans was annoyed to see that Diana didn't look annoyed by the officious policemen. Attention from a man in uniform, he thought.

The older officer pushed past Hans and opened the door. Diana and Hamilton walked inside, bringing the fresh smells of lawns and pavement into the musty dimness. Hans wished her foster-father had called to say that police would be coming over; he would have showered.

"As Officer Hamilton probably told you, ma'am," Gould said to Diana, "we got a phone call saying that your life was in danger. It was from an Oliver Crane, who we gather is your foster-father?"

"Your loony dad," put in Hans helpfully.

"Shut up, Hans," Diana said.

"Why don't you go sit down while we talk to her, Mr. Ganci?" said Gould, not very politely.

Ozzie's cab had rounded the Venus corner just in time for him to see the officer walk into the house with the ludicrously padded Diana, and he sighed and relaxed and sat back on the black vinyl seat.

"It looks like your mom's okay," he said over his shoulder to Oliver, who was sitting in the back seat.

"Smells like puke in here," said the boy.

The driver, who looked as though he might have been a boxer years ago, gave the boy an irritated glance in the rearview mirror. "You want me to stop?"

"Uh …" Ozzie couldn't take the boy into the house—gunfire or something still might erupt at any moment—but if he left him alone in the cab, he'd probably run away. "No, just park here. I want to see her leave with the cops."

"You got it." The man pulled in to the curb a couple of buildings down from Diana's duplex and put the engine into park.

Hans had watched with interest when Hamilton had gone cautiously through the house to make sure no killers were crouched in any of the rooms, and he had been making mental notes so that he could incorporate a scene like this into his screenplay; there was nothing like firsthand observation.

But when the officer said he'd check out the backyard, Hans could only sit down, as the man walked out the back door and down the two wooden steps, and hope no one was noticing how pale and sweaty he had suddenly become.

The dope plants, he thought with astonished dismay. He'll find the dope plants, and I'll go to jail. I'll claim I don't know anything about them, I thought those were just weeds out there by the fence. Will they think I'm a dealer? Will they find out I'm a friend of Mike's, who really is a dope dealer? I read in Hunter Thompson that you get … life in prison! … in Nevada if you're convicted of being a dealer. That can't still be true.

He thought he might wet his pants, right here and now. God, he thought, make him not find them. Please, God! I'll go to church, I'll make the protagonist of the screenplay a Christian, I'll marry Diana, just let him come back with no news so the world can go on being like it was.

He was afraid to pick up his cup of coffee. His hands would shake, and these cops would notice; they were trained to see that kind of thing. Instead, he looked around at the apartment; every trivial object suddenly seemed precious and lost, like the bicycles and fishing poles in the backgrounds of old photographs. He looked at Diana and loved her as he had never managed to before.

The back door creaked, and then boots clonked on the linoleum floor. Hans pretended to be studying the calendar over the telephone.

"You're the lady whose son was kidnapped and shot last night, aren't you?" he heard Hamilton say. Diana must have nodded, for the man went on, "And this is your boyfriend? He lives here with you?" There was a pause. "Okay." Hans heard him sigh. "I'm going to come back here in an hour or two, after I've looked up the shape of a certain sort of leaf in a book at the station, right?" There was another pause. "Right?"

Hans looked up and realized that the officer was talking to him now. His face was instantly hot. "Right," he said in a small voice.