Last Call (Last Call 1)

Her back was against the rough bark of the cottonwood tree, and abruptly she turned around and hugged it—she had not realized that she meant to climb it until she found that she had shinnied several yards up the gray trunk, probably ruining her wool jacket and skirt.

The tree's foliage was a dense mass of round yellow-green leaves, and she hoped that if she could get up onto one of the nearly vertical branches, she would be hidden. Hot, fast breath abraded her throat, and rainbow sparkles swam in her vision, but she didn't faint, though she was afraid that even picturing any face card right now would land her back on the grass, unconscious and ready for him.

She got her scraped hands into the crotch of the lowest branch, and then she swung a leg up, tearing out the seam of her skirt, and got her ankle in beside her left hand, and with an effort that wrung a groan out of her she pulled herself up into the tight saddle. She didn't rest until she had stood up and braced her back against the trunk and her feet high up against the branch, and then she held still and worked savagely on slowing her harsh panting.

At last, though she still had to breathe through her mouth, she was breathing silently. She could hear the whisper of traffic on McEvoy Street, sounding to her now like nothing so much as suitcases dragging around the coping of a luggage carousel at an airport, and the leaves that surrounded her rattled faintly like a lot of very distant castanets. Through a wedge of space between the leaves she could see the yellow square of a Kraft Slice rocking gently on the surface of the pond.

She tried to believe that she had been mistaken, that he wasn't here, but she couldn't. And when she heard feet swishing through the long green grass, she only closed her eyes for a moment.

"Bernardette," he said softly below her, and she had to bite her lip to keep from answering, from shouting at him the way a child in a hide-and-seek game might yell to end the terrible suspense when It was so close.

"No ham," he said now. His words had been clear, she hadn't misunderstood him, but the nonsensical statement made her want even more strongly than before to cry out. Surely he knew where she was hiding, and was only torturing her!

"Cheese," he said. "And bread. That's good, you're still staying away from the meat, that's my girl. Still hanging in there as Mrs. Porter's daughter."

Nardie remembered Ray-Joe telling her once about a very old song that still survived today—though in the current version "Persephone" had been phonetically debased to "Mrs. Porter."

She looked down—and felt her earring fall out of her pierced earlobe. In the same instant she pressed her elbow against the tree trunk, catching the little ball of gold awkwardly between the trunk and the fabric of her jacket. She could feel it pressing into the flesh above the point of her elbow, and, almost objectively, she wondered how long it would be before the muscles of her arm would begin to shake.

"Then up he rose, and donned his clothes," he said happily,

"And dupped the chamber door;

Let in the maid, that out a maid

Never departed more."

He was reciting some of Ophelia's insane singing from Hamlet. He had read the play to her frequently during her imprisonment in the shabby parlor house called DuLac's. In her head, rather than aloud, she recited a following couplet:

Young men will do 't, if they come to 't;

By cock, they are to blame.

She wondered if she would even be able to try to fight him off, if he were to see her up here.

He laughed. "Ray-Joe active!" he said to himself in a pep-talk tone. "Ray-Joe Free Vegas!"

Nardie Dinh could see him now, below her, his duck-tail haircut gleaming over the big rhinestone-studded collar of his white leather jacket. He was holding an air pistol, and she knew what kind of dart it was loaded with, a syringe-tipped tranquilizer dart with the CAP-CHURE charge like the one that had brought her down on that December morning in the Tonopah desert, the bright red fletching of the tailpiece standing out like an eccentric decoration on the sleeve of her blouse.

Her arm, the same arm that had taken the dart, had now started to shake. Soon it would lose its awkward grip on the earring, and the earring would fall. Looking down, she estimated that it would land by his left foot. He would hear it, look down and see it, and then look up.

"I wonder if you can hear me, somehow," he said quietly, "in your head. I wonder if you'll come back here to this tree, if I wait. We both know you want to. You met him Wednesday night, didn't you? The King's son, the prince, the genetic Jack of Hearts. And you became trackable. And I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be trackable if you'd screwed him. What does that tell you?"