Last Call (Last Call 1)

At dawn the broad lanes of the Strip were a little less crowded—mostly with Cadillacs heading back to hotels after a night of heavy gambling, beat station wagons out for the forty-nine-cent breakfasts—and Crane was glad to park the Mustang in the Troy and Cress lot and walk away from it. The police might well be watching for the car, and though they shouldn't have any particular reason to hold him, he vividly remembered Lieutenant Frits's telling him that he could be thrown in jail.

Crane walked quietly past the closed multicolor doors of the honeymoon motel units. A frail smile kinked his face as he passed them. Have nice lives, you newlyweds, he thought. Put those HITCHED license plates on your cars, treasure those photos and videos, take home the Marriage Creed plaques and put them up on the walls of your bright new homes.

At the curb he leaned against a light post and stared up and down the Strip, looking for the blue truck. The dry air was still, poised between the chill of the night and the furnace heat of the coming day. His hands weren't trembling, and he liked the idea of stopping for breakfast on the way out to Spider Joe's trailer, but he was afraid that Mavranos, if he showed up at all, wouldn't want to eat. Last night he didn't look as if he'd been eating much lately.

Mavranos might be driving through Barstow right now, heading back toward the tangle of the Orange County freeways. Crane hoped not.

The top of Vegas World across the street glowed yellow with the first sunlight, and looking back toward the east, Crane could see the tower of the Landmark Hotel silhouetted against the glare of the coming sun.

He looked up and down the broad street. No blue truck.

He sighed, suddenly feeling a lot older as he turned back toward the Troy and Cress parking lot. Take the car? he wondered. How long could Frits hold me for? I could call a taxi, but would the driver wait outside Spider Joe's trailer? Probably not, if things started flying around like they did at poor Joshua's card-reading parlor on Wednesday.

He got into Diana's car and started the engine. Find a car dealership and just buy yourself one, he thought. You've certainly got the cash.

But he didn't put it into gear yet. He looked around at the interior of the car, at Diana's country-and-western cassettes and an old hairbrush and a pack of Chesterfields on the console. Did Diana smoke them? Chesterfields had been Ozzie's brand, before he quit. Had the old man bought a pack, suspecting that it didn't matter anymore?

A shotgun blast, out in the desert—and then dust scattered across the sterile sand. Crane leaned his head against the rim of the steering wheel and, in the midst of the anonymous sleeping newlyweds, he finally cried for the killed foster-father who had found him so long ago and taken him in and made him his son.

After a while he became aware of the muttering racket of a big, badly muffled engine behind him, drowning the steady burr of the Mustang's V-8.

He looked up at the rearview mirror and smiled through his tears to see the blue bulk of the Suburban, with Mavranos's lean face glowering at him from behind the wheel.

He switched off the engine and got out of the car, and Mavranos opened the truck's passenger side door.

"That was eight hundred bucks you gave me last night," Mavranos said belligerently as Crane climbed in and pulled the door closed. "You got a lot more?"

"Yeah, Arky, I got"—Crane sniffed and wiped his eyes—"I don't know, twenty or thirty thousand, I think." He slapped his jacket pocket. "What I gave you was just my twenties. I can't lose lately, except at Lowball."

"Okay." Mavranos drove forward and then clanked the shift into reverse. "For helping you out here, I want all of it except for what we need for expenses. My family's gonna need it."

"Sure." Crane shrugged, "When we get a couple of hours free, I'll make a lot more for you."

Mavranos backed into a parking space and then shifted back to drive and spun the wheel to head out of the parking lot. "We likely to get killed on this errand today?"

Crane frowned. "Not likely to, I don't think. As soon as I mess with the cards, the fat man will know where I am, but we ought to be long gone by the time he'd get there, even if he's not in a hospital—and anyway, he apparently works for my father. He wants to keep me alive." He looked over his shoulder at the piled junk in the back of the truck. "You still got your .38 and the shotgun?"

"Yeah."

"I hope we do run into the fat man."

"Great. Well listen, before we drive out there, I want to stop by a Western Union, and send Wendy a big bundle."

"Oh, sure, man." Crane glanced at him. "Have you, uh, talked to her?"

"Yeah, last night—and I called her again just before I left to come here," Mavranos said. "Told her I wasn't gonna … quit, on anything I shouldn't quit on. She understood." His tired face was expressionless. "I believe she's proud of me."