Last Call (Last Call 1)

So much for the target that shoots back, he thought. So much for moving all-in. I'm about to step out of cover empty-handed; fold after calling all but the last terrible raise.

What was it Ozzie said?

They blew her up.

I suppose, Crane thought, that the reason I didn't feel her death through our old psychic link was that she didn't feel it either. Instantaneous destruction—what's to convey?

He lifted the shot glass and stared at the amber whiskey. I could just not do this, he thought; I could put this glass down and get a cab to the police station. Call the raise, and keep on living.

For what?

I didn't share her pain, because there wasn't any. But maybe I'm sharing her death.

He drained the shot glass in one long sip, feeling the rich, good burn of the stuff warm his throat and his stomach. Then he drank half of the icy Budweiser and sat back in the canvas chair, blinking and blank-eyed and waiting.

The telephone in front of him rang, and he lifted the receiver to his ear.

"Hi, Susan," he said. He inhaled, glanced indifferently around the bar for some delaying factor and found none, and exhaled. "Can you forgive me?"

And in the lobby and casino and restaurants of the Riviera, over the babble of the guests and the gamblers and the ceaseless rattling of chips, the disembodied public-address voice called, "Paging Oliver Crane; paging Oliver Crane," for a while, and then gave up on that and went on to other announcements and summonings.

BOOK THREE: The Play of the Hands

But there was heard among the holy hymns

A voice as of the waters, for she dwells

Down in a deep; calm, whatsoever storms

May shake the world, and when the surface rolls,

Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

All in a hot and copper sky,

The bloody Sun, at noon,

Right up above the mast did stand,

No bigger than the Moon.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

NANO: Now prithee, sweet soul, in all thy variation

Which body would'st thou choose, to keep up thy station?

ANDROGYNO: Troth, this I am in: even here would I tarry.

NANO: 'Cause here the delight of each sex thou canst vary?

ANDROGYNO: Alas, those pleasures be stale and forsaken.

—Ben Jonson, The Fox

Hopes die, and their tombs are for token

That the grief as the joy of them ends

Ere time that breaks all men has broken

The faith between friends.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dedication

CHAPTER 28: Bedtime at Last

Though he hadn't been to Las Vegas for twenty years before this trip, Ozzie knew this sort of off-the-Strip bar. In the early evening it would have been full of husky construction workers downing their after-work beers. Now the clientele was stage hands and theater people, and cold white wine was the most commonly poured drink. After midnight the prostitutes would drift in for whatever it was that they favored.

For Ozzie this was the eye of the storm, the period of calm between the first fight and the last.

Ozzie peeled open the pack of Chesterfields he'd bought from the cigarette machine in the corner and shook one out. He had quit smoking in 1966, but he had never quite forgotten the sometimes profound satisfaction of lighting up and hauling smoke deep into his lungs.

The bartender tossed a book of matches onto the bar beside Ozzie's mug of beer.

Ozzie gave him a tired smile. "Thanks." He struck a match and puffed the cigarette alight.

Before he put them away, he took a last look at the other choices.

A message in the personals column of the Sun or the Review-Journal, he thought. No, Scott won't be reading papers.

And maybe, he thought then, I've done enough by leaving the message at the Circus Circus desk: I've left young Oliver with a woman named Helen Sully in Searchlight. She's in the book. Diana's dying wish was that you take care of her two sons. It's what you can do—do it. Love, Ozzie.

But Scott might not go back to the Circus Circus.

Ozzie sipped the cold beer and frowned, remembering how the fat little boy had begged him to stay with him.