Last Call (Last Call 1)

Crane was about to leave his room at the Circus Circus when the telephone rang.

He had left a note for Mavranos, who was off somewhere chasing his statistical phase-change, and had tucked the .357 into his belt and zipped up his nylon jacket, and now he paused with his hand on the doorknob and stared at the ringing phone.

Ozzie or Arky, he thought. Even Diana doesn't know we're here. If it's Arky, he'll want me to go help him in some fool way, and I've got to get out to Spider Joe's trailer. Of course, if it's Ozzie, he might have some news about Diana, some way I can help her, some way I can maybe at least fractionally redeem myself with her.

For Diana, he thought as he started back toward the phone, I'll put Spider Joe off for another day.

He picked up the phone. "Hello?"

At first he couldn't tell who it was—only that it was someone sobbing.

"What?" said Crane uneasily. "Speak!"

"It's Ozzie, son," came the old man's voice, choked with tears. "I'm at the police station again, and they want you to come down, too. And Archimedes."

"Why? Quick!"

"She's dead, Scott." The old man sniffed. "Diana's dead. She went back to her apartment to get something, and they blew her up. I was there, I saw it—I would have followed her in, but I had Oliver with me—oh God, what good have I been to either one of you?"

Diana was dead.

All the tension and hope went out of Crane, and when he spoke, it was with the gentle relaxation of total despair. "You've … been a good father, Ozzie. Everybody dies, but nobody gets a father better than you've been to both of us. She loved you, and I love you, and we both always knew you loved us." He sighed, and then yawned. "Oz—go home now. Go back to the things you said you liked, your Louis L'Amour novels and your Kaywoodie pipes." Go gentle into that good night, he thought; rest easy with the dying of the light.

The telephone receiver was fatiguingly heavy, but Crane hung it up without a sound.

For a while he sat on the bed, hardly thinking at all. He knew that the police wanted to talk to him and would eventually knock on his door, but he had no impulse either to seek them out or to avoid them.

The telephone was ringing again. He let it ring.

He had read that the weight of the air at sea level was fourteen pounds per square inch. Vaguely he wondered if he would be able to stand up against that, or even keep from falling backward across the bed.

Eventually a smell broke through to him. A morning smell, he knew what it was—hot coffee.

He turned his head toward the bedside table—and then started violently.

A steaming coffee cup stood there beside the clock, a white McDonald's "Good Morning" cup like the ones he and Susan had somehow acquired half a dozen of.

He stood up and left the room.

The police might come looking for him at the carousel bar, so he took the elevator all the way down to the ground floor and walked out the front doors of the Circus Circus, across the broad parking lot to where a giant white stone ape waved at the traffic coursing south on the brightly sunlit expanse of Las Vegas Boulevard. He flagged a cab and asked to be taken to the Flamingo.

When it dropped him off, he walked slowly across the crowded sidewalk and up the steps and through the brass-framed glass doors into the casino, then threaded his way through the sudden carpeted dimness between the slot machines and the Blackjack tables to the bar at the back.

"A shot of Wild Turkey," he told the waitress who eventually strode over to his corner table, "and a Bud chaser. Oh, and could I have a telephone brought over to this table? I'm expecting a call."

The bar was nearly empty at this early morning hour, and was brightly enough lit so that the casino floor beyond the open arch was a darkness full of meaningless clanging and flashing lights.

"Honey, I can bring you a phone, but you better call whoever it is. We got a lot of lines—the odds are bad on you getting any call."

Crane just nodded and waved.

He leaned back and looked nervously around at the framed pictures on the walls. My dad's place, he thought. I wonder if he still comes back here, if he still has a hidey-hole for things that might hurt him. If so, it might be anywhere. It couldn't be in the same place, that hole in the stucco under the front steps; those steps are gone, along with the Champagne Tower and Siegel's rose garden and the front lawn. Maybe he does still come back—maybe he'll come back here sometime in this very body of mine, once he's taken it.

Crane thought about his father, who had taken him as a little boy on fishing trips out on Lake Mead, and had taught him about the tides of cards; and who had then hurt Crane, and gone out of his life forever.

The shot and the beer arrived with the telephone, and after Crane paid the waitress, he just stared for a while at the three objects on the dark tabletop.