Last Call (Last Call 1)

He unfolded the map the boat rental clerk had given him. "Let's see what we got," he said, tracing his finger along the outline of the Boulder Basin. "I don't know, here's Moon Cove; that sounds possible. And Deadman's Island; I like that."

Mavranos leaned over and breathed beer fumes at him. "Roadrunner Cove," he read. "I like that. Beep-beep."

Crane looked back at the gear bag, wondering if he would even get into the wet suit today.

"Let's just go," he said finally. "I'll take it slower, but hang on."

He drove the boat along at a steady twenty miles an hour northward, paralleling the west coastline up toward Moon Cove.

Blank your mind, he told himself. Maybe the dead King is ready to guide you, but the static racket of your thoughts is keeping him from getting through.

He tried, but he wasn't able to make himself really relax into it. Blanking his mind in these circumstances seemed too much like leaving one's car running and unlocked in a bad neighborhood.

After only a few minutes they had rounded the cove's north point. Crane consulted the map and learned that the inlet ahead of them was called Pumphouse Cove. A houseboat with bright blue awnings was moored there, and he could see a family and a dog around a picnic table on the shore.

This didn't feel like the right place. The sun was hot on his head, and he envied Mavranos his cap and his beer.

He swung the boat around and headed back south, angling further out away from the shore, heading for the string of islands poking up above the water like a dead god's vertebrae in the southern reaches of the basin.

"What kind of fish they got in here?" Mavranos called over the burbling roar of the engine.

"Big catfish, I hear," said Crane loudly, squinting in the breeze. "And carp. Bass."

"Carp," repeated Mavranos. "That's goldfish grown up, you know; they don't die of natural causes, I heard. And they survive winters frozen solid in pond ice. The molecules in their cells just refuse to take the shape of crystallization."

Crane was glad that the breeze and the motor roar made it natural not to reply. His search for a sunken severed head almost seemed rational compared with Arky's notions about math and science: anti-carcinogenic beer, phase-changes in the sports betting at Caesars Palace, goldfish that couldn't be killed …

Deadman's Island, hardly more than a bumpy good-size boulder with a narrow beach around it, was the closest of the islands. He squinted at it, and then stared at the red fishing boat that stood on the water very close to the east shore of it.

Mavranos had brought his battered Tasco 8 x 40 binoculars from the truck, and Crane let off on the gas and took them out of their box.

He stood up on the fiber glass floorboard and leaned on the top of the windshield to steady the binoculars, and then he got the fishing boat in his view and twisted the center focus wheel.

The little fishing boat sprang into clarity, seeming now to be only a dozen yards away. The fisherman was a slim man in his thirties with dark hair slickly combed back, and he was staring straight at Crane, smiling. He bobbed his fishing pole as if in greeting.

"Arky," said Crane slowly, "is that the same guy there, fishing, that we saw when we first stopped? 'Cause I don't see how he could have got here so fast from—"

"Fishing where?" Mavranos interrupted.

Still staring straight at the man through the lenses, Crane pointed out over the bow of the boat. "There, by the island."

"I don't see anybody. There's some water skiers way off."

Crane lowered the binoculars and glanced at Mavranos. Was he blind drunk?

"Arky," he said patiently, "right there, by the—"

He stopped talking. The fishing boat was no longer there. And it could not have moved around the island out of sight in less than several minutes—certainly not in the second and a half that he'd looked away.

He exclaimed, "It's gone!" even though it seemed like a stupid thing to say.

Mavranos was staring at him impassively. "Okay."

Crane exhaled, and realized that his heart was thudding in his chest and that his palms were damp.

"Well," he said, "I guess I know where to dive."

He sat back down and cautiously stepped on the gas pedal.

The level of the lake was down, and the lower stretch of the Deadman's Island shore was a morass of once-drowned and now reexposed manzanitas, their short branches hung with strings of algae—like, Crane thought, Spanish moss strung on cypresses in a bayou. Here and there, too, were algae-covered angularities that must have been long-lost fishing poles. The rocks were just slick-looking humps with no definition under the blanket of green algae, and the breeze near the island was tainted with the wet, fermenting smell of the stuff.

"It's a real soup you're gonna be divin' into," observed Mavranos as Crane sat on the gunwale and worked his arm through a wet suit sleeve.

"Cold, too," said Crane morosely. "And rented wet suits never fit snug. There's a special kind of headache I get when I'm under cold water for too long."