Last Call (Last Call 1)

"Did he indeed. And you've seen the cards, a full deck. Are you all right?"

Crane pressed his side and enviously watched Mavranos sip beer. "No."

"Trust me," said the voice on the telephone, "it won't help you to look at those things again. Absorb yourself with crossword puzzles and daytime soap operas. Actually, obtaining a lobotomy might be your wisest course."

The line clicked and went dead.

"No luck," Mavranos observed as Crane hung up the phone.

"No," Crane said. "He said he might be able to get me part of a deck for half a million dollars. And then he told me I should get a lobotomy."

Mavranos laughed and stood up, then braced himself on the wall and felt the bandanna around his throat. He looked angrily at his beer can. "These things just aren't working, Pogo."

"Maybe you're not drinking them quite fast enough."

"Possible." Mavranos tottered to the ice chest and crouched to lift out another. "Your dad's got a deck."

"Sure, but even if I could find them, he couldn't use them if I had them, could he?"

Mavranos blinked. "Guess not. Can't have archaic and eat it, too—har-har-har." He popped open the fresh beer. "But he had another deck once."

"The deck he cut out my eye with, yeah. He probably didn't use it again, not with my blood on it."

"You figure he threw it out?"

"Well, no. I wonder if you'd even dare burn a deck of those things. I suppose he …"

Crane stood up and crossed to the window. Outside, palm trees waved in the breeze over the morning traffic.

"I suppose he hid it," he said softly, "with the other things that might otherwise be used to hurt him."

"Yeah? Where would he hide such stuff?"

Crane remembered the last day he had spent with his father, in April of 1948. They had had breakfast at the Flamingo, but before they had gone inside, his father had put something into a hole he'd knocked into the stucco under the side of the casino's front steps. Crane could still remember the rayed suns and stick figures scratched into the stucco around the hole.

But that old casino wasn't there anymore. That whole building, and the Champagne Tower at its south end, had been knocked down sometime in the 60s. A big glass and steel high-rise stood there now, with the present-day casino, much bigger, as the ground floor.

Still, it was his father's place, the old man's castle in the wasteland—his tower.

Crane shrugged. "Let's go look around the Flamingo."

Al Funo tapped his finger against the cab windshield. "That blue truck," he told the driver. "Follow it—I'll make it worth your while, even if you've got to follow it back to L.A."

The Glock 9-millimeter, fully loaded with eighteen rounds of Remington 147-grain subsonics, hung in his shoulder holster, and the oblong jewelry box was in his jacket pocket. Time to settle Scott Crane's hash, he thought. Give him the good news—he patted his jacket pocket—and the bad news—and he touched the lump under his armpit.

"I can't go outside the city limits," said the cabdriver.

"Then you just better hope they don't go outside the city limits," Funo said in a hard voice.

"Shit," said the driver derisively.

Funo frowned, but forced himself to relax and watch the truck ahead. He would take a bus home to Los Angeles this afternoon. The Dodge he'd been sleeping in was no good.

Saturday morning, when he'd started the car in the Marie Callender's parking lot, the engine had made the most horrible clattering din he'd ever heard; it had quieted down, though, and he'd been able to drive it until last night—when he went over a speed bump in the parking lot of the Lucky supermarket on Flamingo Road, and the terrible noise chattered out from under the hood again, and the engine had simply stopped for all time. He had managed to push the old Dodge into a parking space, and he spent the night in it right there.

And then this morning, while he'd been away for breakfast, somebody had broken into the car, had popped the lock right out of the driver's side door! Nothing had proved to be missing. To judge from the scattering of dust bunnies, the intruders had groped around under the front seat, but Funo hadn't been keeping anything there.

Funo was bobbing slightly on the cab seat now, staring at the blue truck ahead. Settle his hash, he thought tensely, pop a cap, drop the hammer, sell him the farm, hand him his ass, feed him his shorts.

Mavranos parked the truck in the multi-story parking structure behind the old Flamingo buildings, and he and Crane got out and took the elevator down to street level and then walked around to the Strip side face of what was now the vast Flamingo Hilton Casino Hotel.