Last Call (Last Call 1)

As she walked down the cement stairs toward the sidewalk and the street, she thought of Scat about to spend his fifth night in the hospital, wired to ventilators and catheters, and she hoped that what she had done would succeed in avenging the boy.

Just as the croupier had said, the little white plastic ball lay in the green double zero slot on the Roulette wheel. The man now reached out with a rake and slid the last of the blue chips off the mystical periodic table of the layout.

Archimedes Mavranos had now lost all the money he had won during his three days of gambling. It had taken him even less time to lose it than it had taken to win it. He reached into his coat pocket, and the croupier looked at him expectantly, apparently thinking he was going to buy more chips, but Mavranos was only palpating the plastic Baggie. The water was still cool; this current goldfish was probably still alive.

But Mavranos had not found the sort of phase-change that he hoped might slap the insurgent cells of his lymphatic system back into line.

He had found other things: the old women who played as obsessively as he did and who wore gardening gloves as they pulled the slot machine handles to fertilize a cold and stingy soil; he had seen players dazed by predawn winning who tipped the dealers nothing after hours of play and thousands of dollars won, or who absently toked cocktail waitresses hundreds for a glass of soda water; he had seen players so obese or deformed that their mere presence would elicit involuntary shouts of wonder in any town but this one, in which the facts of action made physical appearance genuinely irrelevant; and players who with no surprise had "got broke," as the phrase was locally, and were scrambling to raise another stake, which they knew in advance, which they almost placidly knew in advance, would soon be lost—one of these players had confided to Mavranos that the next best thing to gambling and winning was gambling.

In all of it he still seemed to see, sometimes, the outlines of his own salvation. Or he tried to believe that he did.

He reminded himself of Arthur Winfree, who had broken the circadian rhythm of a cageful of mosquitoes with a precisely timed burst of light, so that they slept and buzzed in no time pattern at all, and could be restored to their usual up-at-dusk, down-at-dawn pattern only with another flash. Winfree had apparently found the vulnerable point, the geometrical singularity, by studying the shape of the data on mosquitoes rather than the actual numbers that made up that shape.

People in Las Vegas had the shocked, out-of-step patterns of Winfree's mosquitoes. There were of course no clocks or windows in the casinos, and the man next to you at lunch might be an insomniac who had sneaked down from his room for a "midnight" snack. Mavranos wondered if one of the night-time atomic bomb tests in the 1950s had happened to throw its bright flash across the city at an instant that was a singularity.

He managed a sour smile at the thought that his best hope for a cancer cure might be the nearby detonation of another atomic bomb.

The wheel was spinning again. Roulette was the only casino game in which chips had no fixed denomination, and each player was simply given a different color; Mavranos moved away from the table so that somebody else could play with the blue chips.

He still had about fifty dollars in cash out in the truck, folded into one of crazy Dondi Snayheever's maps, and—and he didn't know what he would do with it. He could try again to eat something, though that was beginning to seem like a pointless, humiliating exercise, or he could use it as a buy-in for some game. What hadn't he tried? Keno … the Wheel of Fortune …

When he pushed his way out against the spring-resistance of the glass doors, he saw that it was night—God knew what the hour was—and that he had been in the Sahara Casino.

As he plodded dizzily along the walk toward the parking lot, he tried to figure out what it was that he really wanted, and he saw himself working on some old car in the garage, with his wife stirring something on the stove inside, and his two girls sitting on the living-room couch he had reupholstered, watching television. If I use the fifty dollars for gas, he thought, I could be there tomorrow morning, and have … a month or so, maybe, of that life.

Before I got so sick that I had to go into the hospital.

He had health insurance, a policy that cost a hard couple of hundred a month and stated that he had to pay the first two thousand dollars of medical costs in any one year—after that the company paid 80 percent or something—but even if dying were to cost nothing, he would still be leaving Wendy and the girls with just a couple of IRAs and no income. Wendy would have to get a job as a waitress again somewhere.