Last Call (Last Call 1)

"Black," said Mavranos, and Crane nodded, and Booger handed steaming cups to them; she then stirred three sugar cubes into each of the other two cups and handed one to Spider Joe.

"My deck here," said Spider Joe, "is just the standard Sola Busca deck. Sorry. But it'll do. It's a reproduction of a set owned by a Milanese family called Sola Busca—the name means 'the only hunting party,' by the way—which set they permitted to be photographed in 1934. That family and those cards have since disappeared."

Mavranos sipped his coffee and leaned forward, reaching out to touch the margin of one of the cards. "They're marked!" he said. "Brailled, I guess I should say."

Crane looked down at the cards and noticed that each of them had at least one hole poked through the margin of it somewhere, as if they had been tacked up again and again, in all sorts of positions on a succession of walls.

"Yeah, that's how I read them," Spider Joe said. "But also it's a kind of safety measure, that every card in any heavy Tarot deck have at least one tack hole in it. All the serious decks from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have tack-holes in the cards."

"Ahoy," said Mavranos, "that sounds like stakes through a vampire's heart, or silver bullets for a werewolf."

Spider Joe smiled for the first time. "I like that. Yeah, I suppose it works like that, but only in the—the head of the beholder. If there's nobody, no human being, looking at these things, they're just rectangles of cardboard. It's what they become when they enter your head through your eyes that's potent, and a few tack holes are enough of a topographical violation to step-down their power. It's like the smog equipment on modern car engines." He rocked where he sat, and his antennas bobbed in the air. "Both of you touch the silver dollars to your eyes now, and then pass 'em across."

Crane lifted the two coins to his eyes, and let the silver edge of the right one tap against the plastic surface of his false eye just for luck. He handed them to Mavranos, who touched them to his own closed eyes and then clicked them down onto the Formica surface of the table.

Spider Joe found them and tucked them behind the lenses of his sunglasses. He squared up the deck of cards and pushed them across to Crane face down. "Shuffle."

Crane did, seven times, though each time it was hard to slide the cards into a block, with the edges of the holes sticking up and catching on the card edges.

Spider Joe reached out and felt for the deck, then pulled it to his side of the table. "What's your name?"

"Scott Crane."

"And what, exactly, is your question?"

Crane spread his hands wearily, then realized that his host couldn't see the gesture. "How do I take over my father's job?" he said.

Spider Joe swiveled his head back and forth as though he were looking around the shabby living room of his trailer. "Uh, you do know you're in some trouble, right? Having to do with a game you must have played on Lake Mead twenty years ago?" He grinned, exposing uneven yellow teeth. "I mean, that's your question? Something about your dad?"

Crane grinned pointlessly back. "Yep."

Booger hummed something in the back of her throat, and Crane guessed belatedly that she was a mute.

"Look," said Spider Joe, his voice angry, "I'm here to help you. I'm not here to do anything else. I think you're probably a dead man, an evicted man, but there might be something you can do. Ask the cards about that, not about some damn job."

"He's my father," said Crane. "I want his job. See what the cards say."

"Check it out," Mavranos said to Spider Joe, "deal the cards. If everybody's not happy with what you get, we'll go back to town for another two bucks."

For several seconds Spider Joe just rocked on the carpet, his haggard brown face expressionless. "Okay," he said, and picked up the deck.

CHAPTER 37: A Dead Guy Who You Don't Know Who He Is

The first card flipped out face up onto the table was the Page of Cups, an engraving of a young man in Renaissance costume gazing at a lamp on a pedestal.

Crane found that he was bracing himself on the shabby couch in the dim trailer living room—for rain, or for the sound of cars crashing out on the highway, or for the cards all to jump into his face. But though the sunlight slanting in through the Venetian blinds seemed to have taken on a glassy quality, like light through clear gelatin, and the thwick of the card slapping the tabletop had been particularly liquid and distinct, the only physical change in the room was the buzzing, looping intrusion of a couple of houseflies from the kitchen.

The next card was a picture of a man in armor in front of a globe cut into three sections; the title was NABVCHODENASOR, presumably an attempt to spell Nebuchadnezzar.