Last Call (Last Call 1)

Oliver sat close to his mother. She had talked to him on the telephone several times since he had seen their house blow up and thought that she was in it, but it seemed he hadn't really believed she was alive until she had hugged him in Helen Sully's yard in Searchlight yesterday afternoon, and even now he had to keep checking.

Mavranos made the left turn off Highway 93 onto the narrower Lake Shore Road, past the still-dark Visitor Center building.

He lit a cigarette, and Nardie rolled down her window. The morning air was chilly and fresh. "Maybe he'll have taken the cards and just gone off somewhere," said Mavranos, sounding almost hopeful.

"No," Nardie told him. "To take the bodies, to in effect give multiple birth to himself, he needs a token mother, and the lake's that. He'll still be on the boat."

"I don't think the lake's just a token anymore," Mavranos said.

Crane shuddered, dreading confronting his father. He could feel the bulk of the Lombardy Zeroth deck in the inside pocket of his Levi's jacket.

Diana hiked around on the seat and looked back at him. "How's the eye?" she asked softly.

"Won't be any different an hour from now, when I can be in an emergency room." He didn't tell her that when he had squirted the saline solution into the socket yesterday he had felt the painful bulge of some sort of tumor in there.

He clutched his elbows to stop shaking. Diana looked twenty years old now, and almost inhumanly beautiful with the blond hair blowing around the smooth lines of her jaw and throat. It would be too horrible to win her and then have some doctor give him a death sentence. For the first time he thought he understood what Mavranos must have been feeling during these past months.

"I can see the lake," said Oliver softly, pointing.

Mavranos stopped the truck in the parking lot of an all-night Denny's restaurant by the marina, and everyone climbed out to stretch in the chilly predawn air.

"Nardie and Diana and Oliver can wait inside the restaurant here while Scott and I go to the boat," Mavranos said quietly as he walked around to the back of the truck and unlocked the lift-gate and swung it up; the ratchety click-click-click of the struts was loud in the empty parking lot. "If we're not back in—what do you think?"

Crane shrugged, still shivering. "An hour," he said.

"Call it an hour and a half," said Mavranos. "If we're not back by then, just go away. Leave a message for us at the Circus Circus desk." He looked around the nearly empty parking lot. "And if Crane comes back alone …"

"Call the police or something," Crane bleakly finished for him. He touched his still-bleeding side. "My father might have assumed this body after all, and it'd be him, not me."

"And Oliver," Mavranos went on sternly, "no funny phone calls, right?"

Oliver pressed his lips together and shook his head and mumbled something.

Mavranos leaned toward him. "What?"

Nardie shrugged at him. "He, uh, says he isn't going to steal any more of your beers, either."

"Huh. Well—okay." Standing so as to block the view from the yellow-lit restaurant windows, Mavranos passed Crane the .357. Then he wrapped the short-barrel pistol-grip shotgun in a nylon windbreaker and laid it on the asphalt.

He pushed the lift-gate up and let it slam shut, then turned the key in its lock and opened his mouth as if to say something—

—But Crane had gasped involuntarily and pressed the fingers of one hand against his right cheek and forehead. The pain in the eye socket had suddenly become a bright, razoring heat, and he hastily pried out the hemisphere of intrusive plastic and let it fall to the asphalt.

"He's being assumed!" yelled Oliver fearfully, scrambling back away from the truck.

Diana caught Crane by his free elbow, and over the pain in his head he realized she must think he was about to fall.

Embolism, Crane thought in fright as the expanding, bulging pressure in the socket drove a shrill moan up against his clenched teeth. A stroke, I'm having a stroke.

"Scott," Diana yelled, catching his other arm, too, and shaking him, "you're in no shape to do this!"

He was hunched over, his chin on his chest and his knees shaking.

Then, abruptly, the pain backed off. Tears, and perhaps blood, were running out of the eye, but he blinked in sudden astonishment down at his knees and his shoes and the pavement.

He was seeing them as three dimensional.

He blinked both his eyes and realized, too numbed with shock even to be glad, that he had two eyes.

The new eye stung, and was involuntarily blinking in the unaccustomed light, but the savage pain had evaporated.

"What did you say?" he asked hoarsely.

Diana was still holding his arms tightly. "I said you're in no shape for this!"

He took a deep breath, then straightened up and squinted at her. "Actually … I think I … finally am in shape for this."

All four of his companions stared at him in uncomprehending alarm.