Last Call (Last Call 1)

"He called!" Crane shouted instantly, flipping over his two hole cards, which were the Ten and the King of Swords, but keeping his palm over the name printed at the bottom of the King, so that only the end of a sword could be seen on the card. "And I've got a Jack-high Straight Flush!"

"I didn't call!" yelled young Bob. "I just said 'Bob'! You all heard me!"

Crane instantly flipped the King back over, and then intentionally fumbled in turning over the Ten so that everyone could see it before it was again hidden.

Crane looked up then, trying to put a look of tight outrage on his made-up face. "I say he said, 'Call.' "

"You freak," said Newt, wiping his sweating old face. "He said, 'Bob.' "

The other players all nodded and mumbled assent.

Leon was staring at Crane. "You're awfully eager to get one more bet," he said, frowning in puzzlement. "But the boy said, clearly, 'Bob.' " Leon turned his unswollen eye on Crane's young opponent. "Do you want to call?"

"Against a Straight Flush? No, thank you." Young Bob turned his cards over and tossed them aside. "The Flying Nun can take a flying leap."

Crane shrugged in faked chagrin and reached out to rake in the pile of bills. Thank you, Ozzie, he thought.

"Ah ah!" said Leon, holding up one smooth brown hand. "I am a parent of that hand, remember." He turned on Crane a smile that was terrible under the bandage and behind the gray and purple swelling and the inflamed veins. "I'm claiming the Assumption." He pulled a billfold out of his white jacket and began fanning out hundred-dollar bills. "Newt, count the pot, would you?" Leon smiled at Crane again. "I'll make the last call—for everything."

Crane spread his hands and kept his head down to conceal the fast pulse in his throat. It was dark outside, and Crane was afraid to look out the ports; he thought he'd see solid brown lake water at each one, as if the boat had turned upside down and it were only some kind of centrifugal force that held the players in their chairs.

"Okay," Crane whispered, "though you—you know you've got a little bit of me anyway."

"If your heels be nimble and light," roared Snayheever, his voice shaking dust down from the mountainous slopes, "you may get there by candlelight!"

Ray-Joe Pogue was still trying to cross the street; one old woman had seen his hat and begun screaming, and he was blindly trying to grope his way around her. There were only a few other people, apparently injured, still visible along the top of the dam—everyone else seemed to have fled away on foot.

Mavranos had zig-zagged through the stalled and crashed cars, up over the curb to the sidewalk on the afterbay side of the highway, and he flung his arms over the coping a few yards from where Snayheever danced and for a breath-catching moment stared down past his .38, through the volumes of foggy air at the galleries of the power station far below, with the churning water of the disordered spillway overflow dimly visible below and beyond that—and then he straightened up hastily and stared at the cement coping he was leaning on and ran the calloused palm of his free hand along the edge of it.

It was as wavy and rippled as if a jigsaw had been working on it, as if it were meant to be a theatrical exaggeration of an eroded cliff face, and he remembered the Fool card in the Lombardy Zeroth deck: The Fool had been dancing on a cliff edge that had been scalloped like this.

And when he looked up again at Snayheever, Mavranos saw that the mad young man's coat was longer and looser, and belted with a rope, and that he wore a headdress of feathers.

He was terribly tall.

Pogue finally stepped up to the curb now, seeming to be only a few yards from Mavranos. The card was still in his hat-band like a lamp on a miner's helmet, and he blindly raised a little automatic pistol through the wet wind toward Snayheever.

Still leaning on the coping, Mavranos swung the barrel of his .38 into line, aimed at Pogue's chest, feeling the brass shells of the plastic-tipped Glaser rounds click back in the cylinder—and with his finger on the grooved metal of the trigger he froze, suddenly certain that he could not kill anyone.

Pogue's gun banged, jerking his hand up, but Snayheever's mad dancing didn't falter. Pogue's first shot had flown wide in the shattered, rainy air.

I'm still a damn good shot, though, thought Mavranos, sighting instead on the shimmering target of Pogue's outstretched gun hand. Maybe I won't have to kill him.

He pulled the trigger through the double-action cycle without the sights wavering at all, and when the hard bang punched his eardrums and the barrel flew up in recoil, he saw Pogue go spinning away.

But he had seen dust spring away from the wall and the sidewalk, and he wondered if the Glaser round had come apart, like a shot shell, before hitting Pogue's hand. If so, he might have killed Pogue, in spite of his careful aim.