Last Call (Last Call 1)

" 'Bout time," commented one of the players, holding out his free hand without looking away from his cards.

Crane pulled another beer loose and put it in the hand, then set the bag down on the hot pavement. "Where's my old pal Wiz-Ding?" he asked.

The man who had spoken looked up at him now. "That's right, you're the guy he hit last week, aren't you? What'd you do, put a Gypsy curse on him?"

Again Crane thought about the ringing pay phone. "No, why?"

"He got the horrors real bad that night, ran out into traffic and dived under a bus."

"Jesus." Crane tipped his opened can up to his mouth, making certain to do no more than wet his lips. "Uh," he said as if it were an afterthought or a tactful change of subject, "how about that real old guy? Doctor Leaky?"

The player's attention had returned to his cards. "Hah. You're hoping to score a big pot of flat pennies, right? He ain't here today."

Crane didn't want his next question to seem important, so he sat down lithely, scratching his hot scalp and wishing he hadn't lost his Jughead cap. "Deal me in the next hand," he said. "Does old Doctor Leaky play here steady?"

"Most days, I s'pose. Buy-in's ten bucks."

Resigning himself—and Mavranos—to an hour of wasted time, Crane suppressed a sigh and dug in his pocket.

The full moon hung in the sky to the east like the print of an ash-dusted penny on indigo velvet.

Finally the full moon, thought Diana as she glanced at it through the windshield. And our monthly cycles are matched, for whatever archaic, repulsive value that might have. Hold my hand, Mother.

The blocks around Shadow Lane and Charleston Boulevard, north of the Strip and south of Fremont Street, all seemed to be taken up with hospitals, and Diana wasted ten minutes in circling before finding a parking space in the University Medical Center parking lot. She locked the rented Ford, pushed her sunglasses up on her nose, and walked swiftly toward the gray buildings on the far side of the lot. She was wearing a loose shirt—not linen—and jeans and sneakers, in case she might have to run, and she wondered why she had not borrowed a gun from Ozzie and Scott, or even Mike Stikeleather, when she had had the chance.

Her steps were light on the radiant asphalt in her new white Nikes, and she spread out her hands in front of herself, as if surrendering to something, and tossed aside the cloud of her blond hair to look at her knuckles and wrists.

All the old scars were gone: the crescent of a dog bite, the hard line where a jackknife had unexpectedly closed, all the tiny pale graffiti of the years. This morning, rousing from yet another motel pillow wrapped in the old yellow baby blanket, her forehead had been itching, and in the bathroom mirror she had seen smooth skin where the boy in fourth grade had hit her over the left eye with a rock.

And of course she had been dreaming, for the sixth night in a row, about her mother's island, where owls hooted in the tossing, bending trees and water clattered over rocks and dogs bayed out in the darkness.

Like her skin, her memory was growing younger. On Sunday she had decided to visit Hans's grave, but after getting into a taxi, she'd discovered that she couldn't remember where he had been buried, nor even what he had looked like; and as she had sheepishly improvised some destination for the driver to take her to, she had realized with no alarm that the faces of all her long-ago lovers were likewise gone; and yesterday, after she had felt the death of the man who had been called Alfred Funo, it had occurred to her that she no longer knew anything about her onetime husband except his last name, and knew that only because it was the name on her driver's license.

But her son Scat was somewhere inside this building ahead of her, pierced through with drains and hoses, and her son Oliver was at Helen Sully's place in Searchlight, and she could remember both of them perfectly, their faces and voices and personalities; and her abandonment of them, though she had had to do it to protect the boys, had bulked constantly in her consciousness like an infected splinter. She had talked to Oliver several times on the telephone, and though Scat hadn't regained consciousness, she had called the doctor every day and had sent a cashier's check to cover Scat's treatment.

And she could remember Scott Crane. He had been with her on her mother's island in several of the dreams.

She blushed now and frowned behind her sunglasses and quickened her steps.

Three agitated old men sat at a table in the hospital cafeteria. They had been sitting there for an hour. Two of them had had to go to the men's room, and the other was wearing diapers under his high-waisted polyester pants.

Through the merry eyes of the Benet body, Georges Leon squinted sideways at his companions. Newt looked nervous, and Doctor Leaky, with his jaw of course foolishly hanging open, looked as if he'd just heard of some appalling impending threat.