Last Call (Last Call 1)

Crane had taken a deep sip of beer to quell a moment of panic. "Oh. Sure. A little. You know, Catholic schools and all."

Actually he had never been a Catholic, and knew no Latin beyond legal terms picked up from mystery novels. And what he'd said didn't sound like any part of the Catholic Mass he'd ever heard about.

Sitting on the kitchen floor now, he put the beer down and wondered if he was simply going insane—and if it made any difference.

He thought about going into the bedroom.

What if there's some form of her in there, lying on the bed?

The thought both frightened and excited him. Not yet, he decided—that might be like opening an oven door before a soufflé is done. The house probably needs time to exude all of her accumulated essence. Fossils need time to form.

He struggled wearily to his feet and brushed the gray hair back from his forehead. And if it's not quite her, he thought, I won't mind. Just so it's close enough to fool a drunk.

On the oven-hot sidewalk of Las Vegas Boulevard, just across the highway from the fountains and broad colonnade of Caesars Palace, Betsy Reculver paused and sniffed the desert air. The wrinkles in her cheeks and temples deepened as she narrowed her eyes.

The very old man walking beside her kept hobbling along, and she reached out and caught his sleeve. "Halt your ass a sec, Doctor," she said loudly. Several brightly dressed tourist women stared at her as they walked rapidly past.

The old man who was known as Doctor Leaky had apparently not heard. For a couple of seconds he tried to continue walking, then seemed to grasp the fact that he was being impeded by something. His bald, spotty head slowly turned around on his corded neck, and his eyes widened as if in vast astonishment when he saw that Betsy had taken hold of his sleeve. "Hah?" he said hoarsely. "Hah?" He was wearing an expensive gray suit, but somehow he always tugged the pants up too high. Right now the silver belt buckle was up around his solar plexus. And of course he could never manage to lift his slack lower jaw and close his mouth.

"Can't you smell it anymore, you worthless old jug? Sniff." sShe inhaled deeply.

"It's them!" exclaimed Doctor Leaky in his shrill, birdy voice.

She looked at him hopefully, but he was pointing at several life-size painted statues of men in togas under the Caesars Palace sign across the street. A tourist had wedged a Bic lighter into the outstretched hand of one of them and was having his picture taken leaning close to it with a cigarette in his mouth.

"No, it's not them." Betsy shook her head. "Come on." A few steps further up the sidewalk, when they were passing the west-facing Mississippi-showboat facade of the Holiday Casino, Doctor Leaky again became excited. "It's them!" he squeaked, pointing.

Statues in nineteenth-century dress stood on the deck of the boatlike structure, and in the fenced-off lagoon between the sidewalk and the building floated a moored raft with two Huck Finn-like statues on it. A red sign on the coping read: DANGEROUS CHEMICALS—KEEP OUT OF WATER.

"You moron," Betsy said.

Doctor Leaky giggled. Betsy noticed that a dark stain was spreading across the crotch of his suit pants.

"Oh, fine," she said. "God, why do I even keep you around?" In the middle of the sidewalk crowd she raised her hand, and a gray Jaguar XJ-6 pulled up and double-parked in the street.

She led the old man over the curb and across the pavement to the rear door. The driver, an obese bald man in a woolen Armani suit, had got out and was holding the door open. "My corpse pissed its pants, Vaughan," she told the fat man. "I guess we're going home."

"Okay, Betsy." The fat man took Doctor Leaky's forearm impersonally.

"It's them!" Doctor Leaky piped again.

Betsy sniffed the air again. The resonance was still on the hot breeze. "Who, Doctor?" she asked with weary patience and still a little hope.

"The people in Doom Town—the lady in the car, and the lady in the shelter in the basement, and all the rest of them. Those kids."

She realized that he was talking about the simulated town that had been built in the desert near Yucca Flats when the government had been testing the atom bomb in the early fifties, and false suns had seemed to rise instantly in the night sky beyond the Horseshoe Club and the Golden Nugget. To make it all more realistic, the Army had put mannequins in the houses and in the cars at the test site. Betsy could remember having gone out and looked at the fake city, which had been known to the locals as Doom Town.

"No, Doctor, get in the car, it's not them. Those were all fake people."

Doctor Leaky laboriously lifted one foot into the car. "I know that," he said, nodding with ponderous dignity. "The problem is that they weren't a realistic enough …"

"Unlike the plaster boys in front of Caesars, sure. Get in the car."

"As an offering, a sacrifice, they weren't realistic enough," the old man quavered. "The cards weren't fooled."