Last Call (Last Call 1)

Frenziedly he took up hobbies—stamp and coin collecting, buying items and staring at the faces and denominations and trying to read the meanings of them. He slept only when exhaustion knocked him down, and paid no attention to the ringing of the telephone.

For hours he sat painfully on the floor of the den, inventing a new form of Poker; for he now needed another way to become a parent.

Finally one night he could ignore the issue no longer, and at midnight he crawled out of the bedroom on his hands and knees and crouched on the kitchen floor with a cigarette lighter.

The card still lay where Donna had dropped it after pulling it out of Scotty's sliced eye. For a long time in the darkness Leon sat with his trembling fingers on it.

At last he turned it over, and he ignored the wind whispering around the bungalow as he spun the flint wheel of his lighter and looked.

The card was, as he had feared, the profile figure of the Page of Cups, the equivalent in modern terms of the Jack of Hearts. A one-eyed Jack.

The wind rattling the flimsy screens was from out of the west, sighing across the Mojave Desert from Death Valley and beyond. For at least an hour Georges Leon crouched on the floor and stared in that direction, knowing that it was from that quarter of the compass that his adversary, the one-eyed jack, would one day come.

BOOK ONE: The People in Doom Town

You know, my Friends, how long since in my House

For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:

Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,

And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

—The Rubdiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward J. Fitzgerald Translation

"Stetson!

"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"

—T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land

I watched her fly away for Vegas, sure,

I waved the plane out of sight,

Then I tried to drive home without stopping at a bar, but I

Didn't make it, quite.

And sitting with those blue-jeaned shadows there, that had

Been there all night,

I found myself shivering over my chilly drink,

Half dead of fright.

—William Ashbless

CHAPTER 4: A Real Clear Flash

Crane recoiled out of sleep, instantly grateful that the sun was shining outside.

His heart thudded in his chest like a pile driver breaking up old pavement. He knew he'd been dreaming about the game on the lake again, and that something in the real world had awakened him.

The nights were still chilly in March, and though the sun was now well up—it must have been nine or ten o'clock, at least—the can of Budweiser on the floor beside his bed was still cool. Crane popped the tab and drank half of it in one continuous series of gulps, then absently wiped a trickle of beer from the gray stubble on his chin.

The can had left a pale ring on the hardwood floor. Susan never criticized his drinking, but she didn't seem to like it in the bedroom; she'd pick up the can as casually as if it were a magazine or an ashtray and carry it out to the living room. After he noticed the habit, he had purposely set his Budweiser on the bedside table a few times, but her patient persistence had made him feel mean, and now he did it only accidentally.

The doorbell bonged, and he assumed that it had rung a few moments before, too. He levered himself up out of his side of the queen-size bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, then plodded out into the living room. Still buttoning his shirt, he opened the door; he never bothered to look through the peephole anymore.

His next-door neighbor Arky Mavranos was standing on the porch. "Ahoy, Pogo!" Mavranos said, waving two cans of Coors. "What seeems to be the problem!"

All this was Mavranos's standard greeting, so Crane didn't reply but just stepped outside, sat down in one of the porch chairs and accepted a beer from him. "Ah," Crane recited dutifully as he popped the cold can open and held the foaming thing to his ear, "the sound of breakfast cooking."

"Breakfast?" said Mavranos, grinning through his unkempt brown mustache. "Noon's gone—this is lunch."