Last Call (Last Call 1)

"You're not too old to be our dad," Oliver had said tearfully as Ozzie had driven Diana's Mustang south on the 95 this afternoon, toward Searchlight. "Scat and I need a dad." The boy had still been subdued and trembling, all the arrogance knocked out of him by the explosion of his home, the death of his mother.

"I'm going to try to get you a dad, Oliver," Ozzie had said. "Sorry—do you mind me calling you Oliver?"

"It's your name," the boy had said, "I don't mind it. Don't ever call me … that other name, that I used to want. That was the—I don't even know. I broke that off and chased it away."

The Sully woman lived in a big ranch-style house just outside the city limits of Searchlight. She had worked with Diana at a pizza parlor four years ago, and had liked her and kept up the friendship, and she had six boys of her own; she cheerfully agreed to take care of either or both of Diana's boys until their uncle would get around to showing up.

I broke that off and chased it away.

Ozzie now took a deep drag on the cigarette, and he didn't cough. His lungs remembered smoke, had evidently wondered what had become of it. And the kid wasn't speaking figuratively, he thought as he sipped some more of the beer. I saw the Bitin Dog personality walk away, in front of that blown-up apartment.

No, Scott might not get the message at the hotel, and an ad in the paper won't work. He finished the beer and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray.

He caught the bartender's eye. "Have you got a deck of cards around?" Ozzie asked.

"Think so." The bartender dug around among the litter by the cash register, then tossed a box onto the bar in front of Ozzie. There was a color photo of a smiling naked woman on the front of the box, and when Ozzie opened it and tipped the worn cards out, he saw that the backs of the cards were all the same picture.

"Hot stuff," he said dryly.

"You bet. You know any card tricks?"

"No." Ozzie wondered why he had not ever learned to do anything with the cards besides make a cautious living. "I was always too scared of them," he said. He looked up at the bartender, noticing that though the man was middle-aged and his apron was tight over an ample belly, he was younger than Scott, and incalculably younger than Ozzie himself. No time to spare, he thought. "Can I buy these from you?" he asked, tapping the sad, worn deck.

The bartender's look of puzzlement became half-concealed contempt. "You can keep 'em, Gramps," he said, turning away and staring at the television set on a shelf up under the ceiling.

Ozzie smiled sourly to himself. He thinks I'm going to go back to some hotel room and … and turn some card tricks, he thought, with this pathetic, repetitive paper harem. Oh well. One bartender's opinion of me is a pretty small factor in all this.

But he could feel that he was reddening, and he touched the carefully tied knot of his tie self-consciously.

North, he remembered, was to his left. He shuffled the deck quickly seven times, then laid out four cards in a cross. The Jack of Hearts was the card at the north end of the cross.

North it is, he thought, levering himself up off the barstool with his aluminum cane and then digging in his pocket for money to pay for the beer. As always, he left a precisely calculated fifteen percent tip.

Crane shifted in his chair and watched the bet go around the green felt table.

He was in the cardroom of Binion's Horseshoe, right next to the doorway that had been opened in the wall when the Horseshoe had taken over the Mint next door. From the paneled cardroom walls looked down framed photographs of members of the Poker Hall of Fame—Wild Bill Hickock, Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson—and as Crane sipped his newest bourbon on the rocks, he wondered what the old masters thought of his playing.

He had opened under the gun—the first player to the dealer's left—with three Jacks. Tonight, no matter where he played, he couldn't seem to get any bad hands—and now three other players were calling his fifty-dollar bet. That was good; he'd draw two to his Jacks, and the other players would probably figure he was so drunk that he might well be drawing to a pair and a kicker—or even to a three Flush, or nothing but dreams—instead of high Trips.

It was true that he was drunk. The field of his vision seemed to be shifting up all the time, like a television with bad vertical control, so that he constantly had to be bringing his gaze down to focus on anything.

And whenever he looked at his cards, he had to close his false right eye, or else through it he would see his hand as consisting of Tarot cards. Not his real father's lethal deck, thank God, nor even the one that poor Joshua had tried to read for him, but a deck he had dreamed of—the deck in which the Two of Batons was a cherub's head speared through by two metal rods.

"Cards?" said the house dealer loudly.