Last Call (Last Call 1)

Remembering nothing, woe woe, remembering nothing."

Half a dozen men were sitting in a circle next to a Dumpster behind the liquor store, and Crane turned his wavering steps toward them.

When he approached to within a few yards of the Dumpster, they looked up warily, and he saw that they were playing some card game. Five of the men were in their twenties or thirties, but the sixth looked as if he were about a hundred years old; he was wearing a lime green polyester leisure suit, and his bony hands and bald head were stippled with brown spots.

One of the younger men gave Crane an unfriendly look. "You got a problem, Sluggo?"

Crane grinned, remembering that he had left his gun up in his room somewhere. "A problem?" he said. "Yeah, I got a problem. I got a bunch of beer here, and I can't find anybody who'll drink it with me."

The man relaxed and smiled, though he was still frowning. "Around here we help out strangers. Sit down."

Crane sat down on the asphalt with his back against the hot metal of the Dumpster. They were playing Lowball Poker, in which the worst hand wins, for quarters—though when a raise came around, he saw that the very old man was betting with the brown ovals of flattened pennies.

"Doctor Leaky gets to play with junk 'cause he buys the liquor," explained the one who had challenged Crane; his name seemed to be Wiz-Ding. "If you keep up the good work, maybe you can work up to playing with trash, too."

Crane managed to find a couple of dollars' worth of quarters in his pockets, and he played a few hands, but, like yesterday, he kept getting pat high Trips and Full Boats, which were loser hands in Lowball.

"You guys play here a lot?" asked Crane after a while.

The ancient man called Doctor Leaky answered him. "I been playing back here forever," he said. "I used to play around the trash cans behind the Flamingo—there were … bungalow-type buildings back there, then—with Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner." He chuckled absently. "That girl had a mouth on her; I never heard such language."

Wiz-Ding was sucking on a short dog, a bottle of cheap fortified wine, between slugs of beer, and he was steadily losing quarters.

He gave Crane a baleful look. "Since you sat down, I pair up every time I draw even one card."

Even with the beer starting to hit him, Crane knew it was time to leave. "I been getting hands that make me wish we were playing High Draw," he said placatingly, "and now you guys've taken all my quarters." He put his hands flat on the asphalt to lever himself up. "I'll come back after I've cashed in my IRA."

Wiz-Ding hit Crane while he was off-balance, and he fell over sideways with his feet waving in the air, disoriented by the hot pain in his left eye socket. When he managed to roll over and struggle up to his feet, two of the others had grabbed Wiz-Ding and were holding him back.

"Take off," one of them told Crane.

Doctor Leaky was goggling around uncomprehendingly. "His eye?" he mumbled. "What happened to his eye?"

Crane picked up his cap and put it back on his head and stood up. He knew better than to make any parting remarks or to try to retrieve the remaining beers. He just nodded and turned back toward the liquor store.

Another and another cup to drown, he thought, quoting Omar Khayyam this time, the memory of this impertinence.

But after he had gone inside and made his way to the beer cooler and carried two more six-packs to the counter, the clerk looked at Crane's swelling left eye and shook his head.

Crane sighed and walked out empty-handed onto the hot Flamingo Road sidewalk.

When he saw the blue Camaro convertible idling at the curb, he remembered that he had been expecting it. Behind the wheel Susan looked entirely solid; her lean, pale face reflected the sunlight as creditably as anyone's would, and her smile was radiant.

After a ten-second pause he shambled over and opened the passenger-side door. There was a freshly popped can of Budweiser standing up on the front seat, and he let that decide for him.

This is legal too, he thought as he lifted the can to his lips and sat down and pulled the door closed with his free hand. Just so the driver doesn't have any.

"What happened to your eye, darling?" asked Susan as she pulled out into traffic and got into the left-turn lane.

"Somebody named Wiz-Ding," he said. His left eye was swollen nearly shut, but luckily he found that he could again see through his false eye. So far things looked normal through it—the blue sky, the red facade of the Barbary Coast Casino to his right, the tall Dunes sign ahead with the rippling of its lights still faintly visible even in the hard daylight.

"That guy." She laughed, and Crane realized that whatever this woman-shaped thing was, it was intimate with all suicidal drinkers.

The thought made him jealous.

"Not pink elephants for him," she said. "What do you think would be appropriate?"