Last Call (Last Call 1)

He scooped up his chips in both hands and walked away from the table. No use attracting attention. At some casino tonight—last night, if it was daytime outside—he had won so much at the Blackjack table, raising and lowering his bets to try to conform to the almost reggae pattern of the slot machine bells, that the personnel had assumed he was an accomplished card counter, and two men had demanded to see his ID and then told him that if he ever came into that casino again, he'd be arrested for trespassing.

He frowned worriedly now as he dumped his pile of chips onto the counter of the cashier cage; he couldn't remember which casino that had been. He might go back there by accident …

"Jesus," said someone behind him. Mavranos turned around and saw a man staring at him with amused contempt. "What's the matter, sport, your luck was running too good to duck to the men's room?"

Mavranos followed the man's gaze downward and saw that the left leg of his faded jeans was dark with wetness. For one horrified moment he thought that the man must be right, that in his exhaustion he had wet his pants without noticing it. Then he remembered the fish, and his trembling hand darted into the pocket of his denim jacket.

The Baggie was limp; he must have popped it with his elbow when he was carrying the chips to the cage. The goldfish, which he had been carrying around as a "seed crystal" because he had read that they never died of natural causes, was certainly dead or dying now.

He hadn't slept for twenty-four hours, and somehow the thought of the little goldfish dying in his pocket struck him as unbearably sad; so did the idea that his daughters' father was standing in a casino at dawn seeming to have wet his pants.

Tears were blurring his vision, and he was breathing unevenly as he pushed out through the front doors into the oven heat of the morning.

The passenger-side door of Mike Stikeleather's Nissan truck had a rear-view mirror bolted to it, and after the brief and sparsely attended funeral service had broken up and they had walked back out to the parking lot, Diana had twisted the mirror so that she could watch the traffic behind—and she was tensely pleased now to see that the white Dodge was following them.

Last night Mike had taken her to an Italian restaurant near the Flamingo, and when they got back to his apartment, he had tried to kiss her. She had fended him off, but with a wistful smile, saying that it was too soon after Hans's death; Mike had taken that pretty well, and had let her sleep on his water bed alone, while he took the couch—albeit with a just-for-this-first-night manner.

At the first light of dawn, listening carefully to Mike's snores from the living room, she had got up and searched his bedroom, and in the closet she had found a briefcase. She had memorized its position, how it leaned against a pair of ski boots, and had then taken it out and opened it. The white powder in a well-filled Ziploc bag had had the numbing taste of cocaine, and the bundles of twenty-dollar bills added up to more than twenty thousand dollars. She had put it all back the way it had been and got back into bed. Later, while making coffee, she had managed to slide a stout steak knife into her purse, though it was no part of her plan to have to use it.

So far so good.

And at the funeral a few hours later she had said a thankful prayer to her mother, for one of the mourners was Alfred Funo himself.

She had hoped he would show up there. It was the only way she could think of for him to find her, and it would fit in with his weirdly sociable approach to assassination.

And there he had been, standing behind Hans's parents under the canvas pavilion on the grass, smiling sadly at her across the shiny fiberglass casket. She had smiled back at him and nodded and winked, helpless to imagine how he could suppose she wanted to see him, but understanding from his answering wink that he did suppose it.

The car he had got into afterward was a far cry from the Porsche he had been driving when she'd seen him Monday night—the Porsche from which he had shot Scat—but he was at least managing to stay behind Mike's Nissan.

When Mike pulled in to the curb in front of his apartment building, the white Dodge parked a hundred feet behind them.

Diana got out of the truck and waited for Mike by the front bumper.

"Don't turn around," she said quietly, "but a friend of Hans's followed us back from the funeral. I think he wants to talk to me."

Mike frowned worriedly but didn't look around. "Followed us here? I don't like that—"

"I don't either. He's a dealer himself, and Hans never trusted him. Listen, let me have the keys, and I'll follow him when he leaves."

"Follow him? Why? I've got to get to work—"

"I just want to make sure he leaves the area. I'll be back in ten minutes at the most."

"Well, okay." Mike began sliding a key off his ring. "For you, Doreen," he added with a smile.