Last Call (Last Call 1)

Crane remembered that she had said she was a contender. He sat up straighter and looked hard at her with both eyes, though the vision through the false one had nearly dimmed out.

Through the left eye she was certainly a slim Asian young woman, cute in her little uniform in spite of the hard set of her mouth; was there something different about her, viewed through his false eye? A hint of a glow, the shadow of a crescent at the front of her cap?

"Are you, uh … volunteering?" he asked, awkwardly.

"With the moon's daughter dead, I'm the best there is," she said. "I've been exposed to the pictures. I've got to assume you know what pictures I mean—"

Crane sighed. Where was a drink? Susan was waiting for him. "Yeah, I know the goddamn pictures." Out the passenger side window he saw a sign—ART'S PLACE, LOUNGE AND RESTAURANT—GRAVEYARD SPECIALS. Those are the only specials this town seems to have, he thought.

"And for years I haven't eaten red meat or anything cooked in an iron pan, and"—she glared at him—"and I'm a virgin."

Jesus. "That's good—your name was what? I'm sorry."

"Nardie Dinh."

"That's good, Nardie. Listen, you seem like a nice girl, so I'm going to give you some really, really good advice, okay? Get out of Las Vegas and forget all this. Go to New York, go to Paris, go far away, and never play cards. You'll only get killed if you get involved with this stuff. My God, you saw a guy get shot just a few minutes ago, doesn't that—"

"Shut," she said, "the—fuck—up."

Her hands were clenched on the wheel, and her breath was whistling through her flared nostrils. She was half his age, but Crane found himself cringing away from her, his face reddening under her evident rage.

"Osiris!" she spat. "Adonis, Tammuz, Mr. Apollo Junior himself—not just a broken-winded old drunk, but a—a blind, fatuous idiot, too! Christ, you make my brother look good, I swear."

The cab was stopped now, idling in the left-turn lane facing the Strip intersection. "Look," said Crane stiffly, yanking the door lever, "I'll get out here—"

She stomped the gas pedal and lashed the cab out into the Strip traffic, tugging the wheel around to make the left turn in the jiggling glare of oncoming headlights. The opened passenger-side door swung out on its hinges, and Crane braced himself with his feet and his left hand on the dashboard to keep from tumbling right out onto the rushing pavement; horns honked and tires screeched, and Crane heard at least one bang behind them as she straightened the wheel and sped down the fortunately open southbound lanes.

Crane relaxed a little, and when the head wind blew the opened door back in line, he grabbed the handle and pulled it closed so hard that the handle broke off in his hand.

A car's a lethal weapon, he thought, and I don't want to die any soberer than I have to. Humor this lunatic.

"What I meant—" he began, in a grotesquely light, conversational tone, but she interrupted him.

"Oh, no," she said in a mock-bright voice, "do let me finish my thought, dear." She was driving fast, passing other cars as the hideous pink and white giant clown in front of the Circus Circus swept by on Crane's side. "Let's see. First off, I'm not a girl, okay? I don't think I ever was. And I'm not nice—I knifed an old woman in a house near Tonopah on New Year's Eve, and I really hope that my brother is the only one I'm going to have to kill between now and Easter. But I won't hesitate to … If your Queen of Hearts wasn't dead, I wouldn't have hesitated to kill her, if she'd got in my way." She seemed to have talked away her anger, and now she shook her head almost bewilderedly. "If I was a nice girl, I couldn't save your life."

Crane had relaxed back into the seat again and was consciously having to flex his eyelid muscles to keep them open. "I don't think you can anyway, Nardie," he said. "My father's got his hooks into me pretty deep. I don't think there's been any hope for me since '69, when I played Assumption on his houseboat."

Nardie made an abrupt right turn into the parking lot of Caesars Palace, sped up the driveway, and parked in the line at the cabstand.

She shifted around on the seat to face him. Her eyes were wide. "You played Assumption?"

Crane nodded heavily. "And … won, so to speak. I took money for my conceived hand."

"But … no, why would he do that? You were already his son."

"He didn't know that. I didn't know that."

"How the hell did you wind up there, on his boat? Were you drawn to it or something?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. I was a professional Poker player, like my foster-father. It was a Poker game."

"Get out of the car."

Crane held up the broken-off handle. "You'll have to let me out."

In a moment she had opened her door and run around the front bumper and had pulled open his door.

He got out and stood up and stretched in the hot, dry air.

"Some good advice?" said Nardie, looking up at him with an unreadable stare.

Crane smiled. "I guess it is your turn."