Last Call (Last Call 1)

Now that he was here, sober and prepared at least to the best of his abilities, he felt relaxed, almost contented. Some sleight of hand would be required when he got the deal and had to switch the cold deck in and do the pull-through shuffle and the table shift to negate the cut, and these cards were bigger than normal playing cards, but Ozzie had taught the young Scott how to do those moves smoothly before he was ten years old, and he had no doubt that his hands remembered the skills; Ozzie had never recommended cheating, but had believed that a good Poker player should know all the ways it's done.

The six other people in the lounge were younger than he was: a couple of out-of-town executive types in suits, several denim-clad men who might be professional players, and two young women sitting on a couch, watching the television set hung over the bar. Crane wondered what they thought of this battered old transvestite, and what they would think if they knew he was there, among other things, to save their lives.

He opened the Caro book and began absentmindedly reading about Five-Card Draw.

CHAPTER 46: We're Now Thirteen

Several more people arrived singly over the next hour, and then four came shuffling and mumbling aboard at once. Crane looked up, and recognized the one among the newcomers who was not young. The face was a hard couple of decades older, but was still recognizable … Newt, that was the name, the man he and Ozzie had played Five-Stud with at the Mint in 1969, the man who had then met Crane at the Horseshoe and driven him here on that terrible long-ago evening. Apparently Newt was a procurer for Leon.

Leon followed them in, and Crane heard the boat's engines start up.

"We're now thirteen," Leon said, sitting down at the table and reverently laying a wooden box down on it. "Let's play cards."

The boat surged as it moved out onto the face of the twilit lake.

The way Crane had stacked his Lombardy Zeroth deck required that he sit at Leon's right, and he got to that seat a second ahead of one of the young women. Leon gave Crane a cold look but let him sit there.

"Hundred-dollar ante," said Leon, "and then it's two hundred a bet, and then there's the mating, at which time you can bid for a hand or sell yours. After that there's another round of bets, still at two hundred."

Same stakes as twenty-one years ago, Crane thought as he pulled his roll of bills out of his purse, peeled off a hundred, and tossed it into the center of the table. Very damned high ante, so that you've got an investment before you even see your first card and then no sharp increases to chase anybody out.

His father opened the wooden box and fanned the Tarot cards out across the table's green felt surface.

Though they did still start up a ringing wail in his head, Crane was able to look at the cards without flinching now; it was as if the sight of them had broken his identity so many times that his identity had finally begun to conform to them. The Hanged Man and Death and the Two of Sticks now seemed to stare up at him as if at a peer.

Other players weren't so fortunate. One of the necktied executives bolted his drink and tremblingly crossed himself, and the two young women gagged, and no one at all looked happy. One man was suddenly crying, very softly. No one remarked on it.

Several people had cigarettes smoldering in ashtrays, and the smoke from all sides drifted in over the center of the table.

Leon separated out the twenty-two Major Arcana cards and put them aside. Then he flipped the remaining cards over, quickly shuffled them seven times, and began to deal out the first two face down cards.

Crane of course had to wait through twelve hands for the deal to come all the way around to him. During that time he never bought a hand, but managed five times to sell his own uncompleted four-card hands for a profit, and by the time it was his deal he had made a couple of hundred dollars. Several of the players seemed to be checking, and then either calling or folding, without subjecting themselves to the ordeal of actually looking at the cards they held.

When the deck was at last shoved across the green felt to Crane, he picked it up and said, with a little bit of urgency, "What time is it?"

During the moment when everybody was looking at a watch or craning to find a clock on the wall, under the cover of one spread hand he quickly spilled the deck into the open purse on his lap and flipped out the stacked deck.

"Eight and some change," called the Amino Acid bartender from the other end of the lounge.

"Thanks," said Crane. "I get luckier after eight." He split the switched-in deck and riffled the two blocks together, but then, while the interleaved blocks were still at right angles, he smoothly pulled them through each other as though he were separating two meshed combs; he did this rapidly several more times, seeming each time to shuffle the cards thoroughly but actually keeping them in the same order.