Last Call (Last Call 1)

"You're you, still," the man said. Crane noticed that the voice was not perfectly synchronized with the movement of the lips. "I was afraid you might not be." From inside his jacket he pulled a shiny automatic pistol. Crane tensed, ready to jump at him, but the man took the gun by the barrel and laid it on the table in front of Crane. "Take it. Safety's off, and it's chambered. All you gotta do is pull back the hammer and pull the trigger."

Crane picked it up. It was heavy Springfield Arms .45 with wooden grips. He paused, wondering if the man wanted him to do anything with it; then his host turned away, and Crane shrugged and tucked the gun into the belt of the gray slacks that had replaced the black wet-suit pants.

The man walked to an open sliding glass door at one corner of the pool-facing side of the room, and looked back and beckoned with a manicured hand.

Crane got to his feet, noting that he was wearing shoes instead of rubber fins and that he didn't seem to have the weight or bulk of the scuba tank on his back, and he walked across the carpet and followed his host out onto a small square terrace.

Below them a green lawn dotted with palm trees stretched out to the concrete apron of the pool, and beyond the pool was the casino, painted pistachio green. On the far side of the casino, past the narrow highway, the desert stretched away to the horizon, and Crane had to lean over the terrace coping and look to his right to see the nearest building, a low, rambling structure on the highway's far side half a mile north.

He recognized it. He'd been there many times as a little boy.

That was the Last Frontier, a sort of dude ranch casino and motel with western decor and a short "street" of transplanted ghost town buildings behind it to entertain children.

It was later sold, reopened in 1955 as the New Frontier, and then was torn down in '65. The Frontier Casino in which he had been playing Poker last week was built in '67 on the same spot.

And of course he knew where he was. He looked down, and shivered to see the remembered rose garden.

He was on the penthouse terrace of the Flamingo Hotel as the place had been in early '47, before the murder of Benjamin Siegel—popularly known as "Bugsy," though the man had seldom been called that to his face. This was how the Flamingo had looked when it was still the only elegant casino-hotel in Las Vegas. With its fourth-floor penthouse, it was the tallest building within seven miles.

Crane straightened and looked at the flashily dressed man standing beside him. He tried to say, "Mr. Siegel," but only succeeded in blowing air out of the regulator.

"You know what place this is," said Siegel. Crane caught a trace of a New York accent, and he saw that the sound was now synchronized with the mouth.

Crane nodded.

"My castle," Siegel said as he turned and walked back into the long living room. "Your father probably took you here, after he shot me up."

He paused at a narrow bookcase that was built into the wall; the lower section was enclosed, and he winked at Crane and lifted away the knee-level bottom shelf, spilling books onto the floor. Under the shelf, instead of the narrow box of a cupboard, was a rectangular shaft that receded away into darkness below, with a wooden ladder mounted against the far wall of it.

"Bolt-hole and hidey-hole," Siegel said.

He tossed the shelf aside and strode back to the table and resumed his chair.

"Sit down," Siegel said.

Crane walked back across the carpet and perched himself on the edge of the opposite chair, aware of the hard bulk of the gun under his belt. He reminded himself to breathe steadily and not hold his breath; back in the real, 1990 world, he might be rising or sinking right now, or even floating on the surface.

"John Scarne showed me a gimmick for a proposition bet one time," said Siegel, peeling off the paper wrappers from the sugar cubes. He put the bared white cubes out on the table and then unscrewed the cap of the can of Flit. "It's called la mosca. That means 'the fly' in Spanish."

From below the table he lifted an intercom microphone. "Hey, chef?" he said into it. "This is Benny. Jack's here, and we need one live fly." He let go of the microphone, and it dissolved into smoke.

Siegel dipped a finger into the can and then lightly touched the top face of each sugar cube. "I won ten grand off Willie Moretti with this, once, right here in this room. The idea is, you bet on which sugar cube the fly will land on. It looks like an even-up bet, right? But what you do, you turn the cubes so the one your man picked has the DDT face up, and the other is DDT down. The fly always goes for the unpoisoned face, and you win your bet."

A quiet knock sounded on a hallway door behind Crane, and Siegel called, "Come in!"

Crane heard a door open, and then a figure in a tuxedo had walked up from behind and stopped beside his chair. Siegel pointed at the tabletop.