Last Call (Last Call 1)

For a couple of hours he managed to lose himself in the recipes and advice columns and personality quizzes in a stack of old issues of Woman's World and Better Homes and Gardens, and he drank his beers slowly and set his cans down only on coasters. Then he watched television.

When the house had darkened enough so that he had to get up and turn on the lights, he reluctantly made coffee, then went into the bathroom to shave and take a shower. The shades in the living room were down, so a few minutes later he walked right from the shower to the chair by the telephone.

Today was Thursday. That was good; one of the most enduring mid-level red-spot games he had ever instituted had been an L.A. area Thursday night game. He pulled out the Orange County and Los Angeles white pages phone books and tried to remember the names of some of the people who had been the steadiest players a decade ago.

He found a name: Budge, Ed Budge, still living on Beverly in Whittier. Must be sixty by now. He dialed the number. "Hello?"

"Ed, this is Scott Smith. Scarecrow Smith, remember?"

"Jesus, Scarecrow Smith! What have you been doing? How's Ozzie?"

"I don't know, man, I haven't seen him in twenty years. I—"

"And he had another kid he used to talk about. What was her name?"

"Diana. I don't know, I last talked to her in '75 or so, just briefly on the phone. I dreamed—I mean, I heard she got married." Crane took a sip of his third consecutive cup of coffee and wished he would sober up faster.

He remembered the call from Diana. He had been scuba diving in Morro Bay and had managed to fire his three-barbed spear into his own ankle, and the telephone had been ringing when he got home from Hoag Memorial Hospital the next day. She had refused to tell him where she was, or where Ozzie was, but she had been upset, and relieved to hear that he was all right. She couldn't have been more than fifteen then. Three years later he had dreamed of her in a wedding.

There had been no contact since. Apparently neither of them had been seriously hurt, physically at least, in the last fifteen years—or else their psychic link had withered away.

"So," Crane said now, "is the game still going?" "I don't know, Scott, I quit playing a few years ago. One day I figured out I was bleeding away ten grand a year in that damn game."

Crane suppressed a sigh. If Crane had still been the motivating force of the game, Ed would never have quit. Crane knew how to baby valuable losers along—flatter their winning plays, never take full advantage of their weaknesses, make the game seem more social than financial—so that they kept coming back; just as he knew how to repel good, winning players by criticizing their Poker etiquette and refusing to lend them money and trying to upset them, and encouraging the other players to do the same.

"Oh," Crane said. "Well, do you keep in touch with any of the guys?"

"Keep in touch? Outside the game? Scott, do you remember the plain old breakfasts?"

This time Crane did sigh. Sometimes the game had gone on for eighteen hours or more, and the players had taken a break to eat at some local coffee shop at dawn; and the fractured, desultory table-talk had made it stiflingly clear that none of them had anything in common with one another besides the game.

"Okay, Ed. Have a nice life."

He hung up and looked through the phone books for another name. This was a solid game, he thought. It has to be still spinning out there. Old Ozzie taught me how to build 'em to last.

His foster father had been Oliver Crane. Using the name Ozzie Smith, the old man had been one of the country's respectable mid-level Poker players, from the 1930s through the 1960s. He had never quite been up there with the superstars like Moss and Brunson and "Amarillo Slim" Preston, but he had known them and played with them.

Ozzie had explained to Scott Crane that a good Poker game can have a life of its own, like a slow-motion hurricane, and he had shown him how to start them and vitalize them, all around the country, so that, like reserve bank accounts, they'd be there if you should someday need one of them. "They're like that great red spot on the planet Jupiter," the old man had said. "Just a lot of whirling gas, but always there."

If Ozzie were even still alive, he'd be … eighty-two now. Crane had no way of getting in touch with him. Ozzie had made sure of that.

Jube Kelley was in the book, living in Hawthorne now. Crane dialed the number.

"Jube? This is Scott Smith, Scarecrow Smith. Listen, is the game still going?"

"Hey, Scott! The game? Sure, you can't kill a game like that. I only go once in a while now, but they're doing it at Chick's house now. This is Thursday, right? They'll be there tonight."

"Chick's house. That's on Washington, in Venice?"

"Right," said Sam. "Between the old canals and the Marina Del Rey basins."