Last Call (Last Call 1)

"Yes," said Diana. "Nardie and I have to go get baptized."

Crane plodded around the bed and picked up his purse. "Give me half an hour to stack my deck, and I'll go, too."

Nardie and Diana had bought a couple of big cans of red paint and some brushes the day before and had painted Mavranos's Suburban.

As he jiggled on the front seat of the barreling truck now, Crane tried to hold his head in a position at which the cracks in the windshield would not pick up the garish red of the hood. He didn't like to see what seemed to be a metallic red spider flickering on the horizon.

"Visions and dreams and a crazy man's talk," Mavranos said resentfully, squinting ahead and steering with the fingers of one hand. "We're probably all crazy, too—look what they've done to my truck, Ma." With his free hand he lifted his can of beer and took a foamy sip. "I knew a guy once who claimed he was a Martian. His TV set had told him he was. Makes just as much sense as any of this. Poor old Joe Serrano, I should apologize to him."

Diana stirred on the back seat. "That's not a Martian name," she said, "that's a Mexican name. Who was he trying to fool?"

Crane started laughing, and soon they all were, and Mavranos put his beer between his thighs to grip the wheel with both hands.

CHAPTER 49: Ahoy, Cinderella!

At Boulder Beach, still short of the marina, Mavranos pulled over and stopped on the shoulder to let Diana and Nardie climb out. The beach was only a hundred yards away, beyond the ranks of colorful campers and RVs with their awnings flapping, and the lake was blue against the distant jagged brown mountains of the far shore.

"By afternoon everything should be over," Diana said, standing on the roadside gravel and leaning in through Crane's rolled-down window. "Us girls will walk up to the marina after we've had our dip. There's a hotel there, Scott says, the Lakeview Lodge. Let's meet at the bar." She kissed Crane, and he curled his fingers in her blond hair and kissed her fiercely.

"And tomorrow," he said when he had finally let go of her, "we'll get married." His voice was hoarse.

"That's what we'll do," she said. "Arky, Scott—both of you watch it, hear? And we'll be careful, too. We need to have a bride and groom and maid of honor and best man. All four."

Mavranos nodded, then took his foot off the brake and gave the engine gas and in seconds had swung back onto the highway.

"Drop you off at the marina?" he said, loudly over the wind in the open windows.

"Sure, that's close enough. I'm getting better at walking in these shoes."

"Couldn't tell to watch you do it."

"I'd like to see you try it."

"I bet you would, Pogo." Mavranos took another sip of his beer. "On the phone—she tried to talk you into ditching Diana and going with her instead?"

"Yeah." Crane shivered in his dress. "I talked myself out of it."

"Jawed from the snatch of defeat."

"Yeah, right." He shifted around on the seat. "Arky, I—"

"Don't say it. You may be wearing a dress, but that don't mean you can kiss me, too."

Crane smiled, feeling the makeup in the creases of his face. "Okay. Be there this afternoon."

Mavranos made a right turn, toward the marina, and at a red light Crane climbed out of the truck and straightened his dress. He rapped on the red hood the way a Craps shooter might blow on dice, and then the light had changed and the blotchy truck boomed on across the intersection.

Crane walked slowly down the slope toward the gleaming white boats moored at the docks and slips, and he was not even aware now of derisive hoots from a passing car. He walked in the sunlight and the cool breeze and the smells of lake water and gasoline and sage, and he thought of all the people who were dead: Susan, and Ozzie, and the fat man, and probably Al Funo, too, considering the way Diana had said she'd set him up. And tomorrow night Crane and Arky and Diana and Nardie might be down in the black water themselves, down where the Archetypes lived. He wondered if in some dim way ghosts were able to talk among themselves, and, if so, what they would all talk about.

"Ahoy, Cinderella!" came a call from ahead of him. He looked up, and saw one of the Amino Acids waving at him from the deck of the houseboat. Crane quickened his pace.

"You wait till high noon," the young man said, "and you'll turn into a pumpkin left on the dock here. Skate your weird ass over, girl, and step into my metal detector, as the spider said to the fly. There're a dozen aboard now already, and you're number thirteen."

Diana stood in the hot sand in her Nikes and looked up and down the beach at the broad towels and beer coolers and scampering children.

"I guess it would be a mistake to go to jail over this," she muttered to Nardie.

"I think they're pretty conservative around here," agreed Nardie with a nervous giggle. "Even in our underwear we'd probably get arrested. Fully clothed it is."