Last Call (Last Call 1)

"Tomorrow," he said, "I'll see a doctor. I've got to be back here at the lake at dawn. My father will want to start assuming bodies as soon as the sun's up, and I've got to see the end. And I want to disarm and ditch the two decks of cards, if I can, if the … poisoned sugar cube gets him." He blinked at her through his good eye. "Tomorrow," he repeated. "Not before."

The drinks arrived then, and Crane took a deep gulp of the cold but comfortless soda water. He inhaled. "So," he said, "did you ladies get your bath?"

Diana let go of Crane's shoulder and sat back, still frowning.

Nardie drank a third of her beer. "Eventually," she said with a shiver.

She described the phantom statues that had tried to stop them and how she and Diana had fought them and then finally dispelled them by actually eating the yin-yang Moulin Rouge chip.

Mavranos brushed beer out of his mustache and smiled crookedly at Crane. "Weird sort of sacrament."

Nardie picked up Diana's glass of soda water. "And then when we finally got into the lake," she said softly, "before we got out to where we could duck under, the water was fizzing around Diana's feet, like this!" She swirled Diana's glass, and bubbles whirled up in it, hissing. "And for just a second, before the wind blew it out, there were—you could hardly see it in the sunlight, okay?—flames around her ankles!"

"Sounds like electrolysis," said Mavranos. He was looking into his beer, and Crane guessed that he had somehow been directly responsible for the death of Nardie's half brother out there at the dam and now didn't want to look her in the eye. "You were busting apart the H₂ and the O, Diana. I remember ol' Ozzie saying Lake Mead was tamed water; maybe you untamed it."

"I did," Diana said. "With help from all of you. The bubbling kept up nearly the whole time I was in the water, and I could … feel, or hear or see, ride the whole wild extent of it. I could feel the houseboat spinning north of me, and I felt the shaking at the dam."

Nardie had drained her beer and waved the empty glass at the bartender. "So," she said to Mavranos in a conversational tone, "did you kill my brother?"

Mavranos let go of his beer glass, and Crane thought it was because he was afraid he might crush it in his fist. Mavranos's eyes were closed, and he nodded. "I did," he said. "I—in effect I pushed him off the downstream wall of the dam. Snayheever, too—I killed both of them."

Crane was looking at Nardie now, and for an instant had seen her eyes widen and her mouth sag. Then she put on a battered smile, and she tapped the back of one of Mavranos's scarred hands.

"Each of us has killed someone," she said, a little huskily, "in this. Why'd you ever think you'd be special?"

Crane realized that was true: himself, Vaughan Trumbill; Nardie, that woman in the whorehouse outside Tonopah; Diana, probably Al Funo. And now Mavranos had broken a part of himself in the same way.

"Doctor, my eye," Crane sang softly, pushing his chair back and standing up. "I've got to go irrigate the cavity."

Mavranos got up, too, awkwardly. "I gotta call Wendy," he said. "Home tomorrow?"

"You'll probably be home by lunchtime," said Crane.

Nardie reached out and caught Mavranos's flannel sleeve. "Arky," she said, "I'd have had to do it myself, if you hadn't. And it would have hurt me more than it's hurting you. Thank you."

Mavranos nodded and patted her hand, still not looking at her. "I appreciate that, Nardie," he said gruffly, "but don't thank me."

He and Crane walked away toward the rest rooms and the telephones, and Nardie and Diana silently sipped their different drinks.

EPILOGUE: I'll Still Have You

Mosca: Are not you he that have to-day in court

Profess'd the disinheriting of your son?

Perjured yourself? Go home, and die, and stink.

—Ben Johnson, Volpone

But were I joined with her,

Then might we live together as one life,

And reigning with one will in everything

Have power on this dark land to lighten it,

And power on this dead world to make it live.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

Dawn would be soon, and had already paled the blue sky behind the mountains ahead of them, but out the back windows of the roaring and rattling truck the sky was still a dark purple.

Nardie was in the front seat next to Mavranos, and Diana and young Oliver were in the back seat, and Crane, once again wearing his beat Adidas and a pair of jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, was half lying down in the truck bed among the scattered books and empty beer cans and crescent-wrench sets. His eye hurt. The truck smelled as though Mavranos used old french-fry grease in the engine.