Last Call (Last Call 1)

He closed the knife and put it into his pocket, smiled nervously at Mavranos, and then reached into the hole.

He groped around carefully in the cavity and found a little cloth bag that proved to be full of teeth and a small cracked mirror in a tortoiseshell frame—what must it one time have reflected, or failed to reflect?—and in a bottom corner there were three little hard lumps that might have been pomegranate seeds; and finally his groping fingers found, under everything, wedged flat against the floor of the space, the wooden box he remembered.

He pried it free, lifted it out of the hole, and opened it, and he shuddered to see again the innocent-looking plaid backs of the cards.

He turned over the first one. It was the Page of Cups, a young man standing on a rippled cliff edge holding a cup, and the corner was lightly stained. Hesitantly Crane licked that corner of the card, and he thought he faintly tasted salt and iron.

The Andrews Sisters started on "Sonny Boy:"

"Whe-e-en there are gray skies

I don't mind the gray skies …"

"We're out of here," Crane told Mavranos hoarsely. He left everything inside the hole but the wooden box, which he tucked inside his Levi's jacket.

A tall brown man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a white pith helmet and Sony Walkman earphones was smiling broadly and sweeping the lens of a video camera across the back lawn of the Oregon Building. Gleaming sunglasses hid his eyes.

"The basement service entrance, under the building on the south side," he said, still grinning, into the video camera's microphone. "Now's the time."

"Gotcha," came a voice over the earphones.

The tall man swung the camera toward the dock area under the building, catching in its focus a young man in a dark suit who was standing uncertainly by the stack of bathroom tissue boxes. The young man held something dark and oblong in his right hand, and the man with the camera instinctively felt for the bulk of the automatic in its holster on his right hip, under the untucked shirttail. He was showing a lot of white teeth in his smile now.

"Now's the time," he repeated.

Two men in unspecific tan uniforms were pushing a Dumpster down the paved ramp, and a station wagon with Montana license plates was weaving along the driveway between the Oregon and Arizona buildings.

One of the men with the Dumpster let go of it to approach the young man in the suit. Their conversation was brief, and the smiling man with the camera heard none of it, but a moment later the man in the suit was doubled over, his chin by his knees, and the two uniformed men grabbed him, took a gun away from him, and tossed him into the Dumpster and began pushing it back up the ramp.

The station wagon had stopped. Its tailgate was down, and the man in the suit was quickly bundled out of the Dumpster and into the car. The uniformed men climbed into the back with him and pulled the tailgate shut.

The smiling man had tucked the video camera under his arm and strolled across the grass to the car. He took off his white pith helmet and got in on the passenger side, still smiling.

The station wagon started forward again, turned east past the parking structure and around west onto Flamingo Road, signaling for every turn and proceeding at an inconspicuous speed.

They had thrown a blanket over Al Funo's head, and he could feel the bite of a narrow nylon tie-wrap drawn tight around his wrists behind his back; his ankles were bound together, too, doubtless with another tie-wrap.

His heart was thumping, but he could breathe again, and he was grinning toughly against the scraped metal bed of the station wagon. You've always lived by your wits, old son, he told himself, and you'll find some way to talk or fight or run your way out of this. Who are these guys anyway? Friends of Reculver and the fat man? Damn, and I almost had Scott Crane at last. I wonder if these guys mean to keep Crane's gold chain. They've got another think coming, if they do.

One of his captors spoke. "We got time for lunch before Flores comes in from Salt Lake. I never got breakfast."

"Sure," said another one from the front seat. "Where do you figure?"

"Let's go to Margarita's," said the first speaker.

Funo didn't appreciate being ignored. "The Dumpster and the uniforms was good," he said from under the blanket, proud of the ironic humor in his voice. "Like having a pencil behind your ear and carrying a clipboard—hey-presto, you're invisible."

"Shut up, Fucko," said the man in the front seat. "That's in the Frontier," he went on.

"So?" said the man sitting over Funo. "It happens to have the best chimichangas in town."

"Bullshit," said somebody else.

"There's a guy back there in the Flamingo basement," said Funo with a chuckle, "who ought to buy you guys lunch. You saved his life. I was gonna give him that gold chain and then drop the hammer on his ass."

"Shut up, Fucko."