Last Call (Last Call 1)

When he reached up and peeled off the wet suit hood, he heard his name being shouted across the water. He turned around. There was Deadman's Island, and there, perhaps a hundred yards away, was the speedboat, with Mavranos standing up behind the windshield.

Crane waved his free hand. "Arky!" he yelled hoarsely.

The boat roared, turned its bow toward him, and began to increase in size, rising and falling and throwing spray out to the sides.

He hoped Mavranos could handle the boat well enough not to run him down—especially since Mavranos was looking off to the starboard and pointing at something.

Crane blinked water out of his eye and looked more closely. Mavranos was pointing his revolver at something.

Crane twisted his head around in that direction and saw another boat, further away, with a couple of figures standing up in it.

Then Mavranos had arrived and had spun the boat out in a spray-flinging halt, blocking Crane's view of the other boat.

"In, Pogo!"

Mavranos had flung an end of rope over the side, and Crane grabbed it and pulled and kicked, and at the expense of all his remaining strength he managed to clamber aboard even with his tank and weight belt still on.

"You take the gun," Mavranos said, shoving the revolver into Crane's shaking, dripping hand. "I'm getting us out of here."

Crane obediently tried to hold the gun up and aimed at the men in the distant boat. "Who," he gasped, "are they?"

"I don't know." Mavranos sat down in the pilot seat and shoved the throttle forward. "Their boss and another guy went in the water with spear guns a little after you went in," he shouted over the roar of the engine, "and I looked at them and they looked at me, but neither of us had any real excuse to mess with the other—but they got real agitated just now when one of them, their boss, I guess, came back up."

He took one hand off the wheel to point, and Crane let himself glance away from the other boat long enough to see the hooded and masked head bobbing inertly on the surface of the water behind them. Mavranos's wake rippled under the head just then, and it rocked as loosely as a floating basketball.

"They don't know if he's dead," called Mavranos. "We want to be well away before they make up their minds what to do."

The distant boat seemed to be moving now, but Mavranos had a good head start, and the men in the other boat would probably stop to pull the floating body aboard.

Crane let his quivering arm lower the gun, and after just sitting and panting for a dozen bouncing jumps over the waves, he got up on his knees and popped open the release buckle of the weight belt … and then, though he could feel hot blood leaking across his skin under the torn wet suit, he stared for several seconds at the rough object the belt had been holding against him.

It was recognizably a semiautomatic pistol, but the wooden grips were gone, and the slide was rusted solid with the frame, and crusty brown corrosion had narrowed the muzzle to a rough-edged little bore that a .22 round wouldn't fit through.

He put it down carefully on the pebbled white plastic deck and after a moment remembered his cut side and reached for the backpack harness release buckle.

Under the neoprene skin, blood had blotted down his leg nearly as far as the knee and had gorily soaked his crotch, but the cut itself, though long and ragged, wasn't deep; when he tied the sleeves of his shirt around his waist, balling up the bulk of the shirt over the cut, the cloth didn't seem to be absorbing much blood.

He picked up the decayed gun and then dizzily groped his way forward and collapsed into the seat beside Mavranos. The lake breeze was wonderfully cool on his sweaty chest and in his wet hair.

"That's—that was their boss, all right," he said loudly, "and I believe he is dead. The lake won't contain a dead would-be King's head. If I'd died down there, my head'd be poking out."

Mavranos glanced at him with one eyebrow raised over a squint. "You kill the other guy, too?"

"I—yeah, I think so." Crane was shivering now.

"With what? Your knife?"

"Uh … with this."

Mavranos glanced down at the rusted chunk of metal on Crane's lap, and his eyes widened. "That's a gun, isn't it? What did you do, hit 'em with it?"

Crane was pressing his side above the bump of his pelvis. His cut was starting to ache, and he wondered if Lake Mead water was particularly infectious. "I ought to try to eat something," he said. "I'll tell you all about it, over dinner back in Vegas. Right now let's return this boat and get the hell out of these mountains. The wet suit's too full of blood to turn back in to the shop, and the weight belt's got a spear tear in it—I'll tie the whole lot of gear together and sink it before we get in. The dive shop can put it on my Visa."

Mavranos shook his head and spat over the side. "The way this goddamn royal family throws money around."