Last Call (Last Call 1)

"When Snayheever was on the phone to Diana, he said somebody tried to sink a head in Lake Mead." Crane was pacing up and down the room now, talking rapidly. "Snayheever's aware of a lot of this stuff, even if he is nuts, so maybe sinking severed heads in the lake is something people involved in this kind of shit do. And he made it sound like the lake didn't take it and that it was foolish of the guy to have even tried, like the lake already has a head in it, see? And couldn't hold another, not that kind anyway. Tamed water Lake Mead is, remember Ozzie saying that? Maybe it tames any stuff in it, too, so that'd be a good place to put an old King's head, if you're the new King and want to keep an old one down. And I don't think it was my real father, the current King, who had me … shit, kill some poor Englishman at a Poker table at the Horseshoe. I think it was the king in the lake that did it, that made me do it, I think it was him that was grinning at me out of the Two of Wands card, with his head cut off and two metal rods through his head."

Crane grinned wildly at Mavranos. "You with me so far?"

"You poor fucked-up son of a bitch."

"And along with the severed-head Two of Wands, I had a strange King of Swords; it was an arm, with the hand holding a sword, poking up out of a body of water, like a weapon was being offered by somebody below the surface."

Mavranos just looked puzzled and irritated—and terribly tired. "And …?"

"And when I've dreamed about playing Assumption on Lake Mead, I see the Fool dancing on a cliff edge, but I also see—sense, really—a giant deep in the lake, and even though I can't see him, I know that he has only one eye."

"Orpheus, in Greek myths—they cut his head off, and it kept talking for a while, making prophecies and such stuff." Mavranos stood up. "Okay, okay. You've done scuba diving before?"

"Oh, sure. Last time I went, I shot a spear through my ankle." He was smiling when he said it, but a moment later he winced, remembering that fifteen-year-old Diana had called him then, as soon as he'd got home from the hospital.

"May as well go right now, I guess," Mavranos said. "I'm getting nowhere with my mystimatical cure."

Crane opened the door. " 'Maybe what you're waitin' for'll be twitchin' at the dance tonight!' " he said, quoting something Riff had said to Tony in West Side Story.

Mavranos smiled sourly as he slapped his jacket pocket for his keys. "You remember it killed Riff and Tony."

When he drove the Camaro under the 93 overpass, Vaughan Trumbill picked up the cellular telephone and punched redial.

Even with the seat levered all the way back, his belly kept getting brushed by the steering wheel, and the car still smelled of Betsy Reculver's flowery old-lady's perfume.

"Yeah, Vaughan," came Benet's squeaky voice over the phone.

"Bets—, uh, Benet—"

"From here on in just call me Georges."

Trumbill realized that he never had called him that, in any of the man's bodies. When Trumbill had first started to work for him, he was already in the Richard Leroy.

"Okay, Georges. They're heading out Fremont. Either they're going back to where that kid got shot, or they're going right on out Boulder Highway to the lake."

"Where the kid got shot." For some reason Georges's voice, even coming out of the Benet vocal cords, sounded stony. "Yeah, I remember that place. Some damned woman destroyed a nice Chevrolet of mine right there." For a moment the phone Trumbill held to his ear was silent, and all he could hear was the muffled roar of the Camaro's engine. "Okay," Georges went on, "if they stop there, take 'em when they get out away from the truck, it's good and private, and I don't see why they'd take guns out with them. You still got Moynihan's guys?"

Trumbill glanced at the rearview mirror. The florist's van was still there, a couple of cars behind him.

"Yes."

"Right, well, kill the mustache and dart Crane. But if they go on past there, toward the lake—Why would they be going to the lake? Rhetorical question, I don't need your guesses. I don't like it if that's where they're going." He sighed. "Catch them somewhere in the desert north of Henderson. Shoot a tire out or something and then just confront them."

"In the desert." Trumbill forced his mind away from the recollection of having only three days ago seen Death itself, the obscene skeleton under the skimpy dress of dried skin, capering in the desert south of town.

Confront them, he thought as he gunned the Camaro through the Desert Inn Road intersection and watched the dusty blue truck barrel steadily along on the bright highway ahead of him. I'm valuable to the old man, he thought, but when it gets down to the bone, I'm an expendable piece in his equation.

As I've always known I was.

He sighed heavily. "If they kill me out there," he said into the phone that was wedged under his pendulous jowl, "you won't forget your part of our old bargain."