Last Call (Last Call 1)

"You're Scott Crane," said Leon in a tone of cold satisfaction. He was holding a big-caliber automatic down by his thigh. "You seem to know something about all this, about what you and I did in the '69 game. And you went and killed this guy's candidate for King?" He was laughing now. "Well, thanks for saving me the trouble. Why have you … come here?"

Crane was glad nobody recognized him as the poor Flying Nun. He glanced past Leon at the lake, where he had killed the Amino Acids' King with a magical .45, and he remembered the place that was the physical totem of the King.

"I'm going to assume the Flamingo," Crane said.

Now Leon was laughing harshly. "Oh, really. You're a fish, sonny, not a jack." Abruptly his inflamed face went blank, and he glanced to the still-dark west; then his pistol was up and pointed squarely at the middle of Crane's torso. "Stevie!" Leon barked. "Go up to him and look at his eyes!"

Stevie hesitated, then shambled across the deck to Crane and peered into his face. "Uh," he said, "they're blue … his eyes, right? … They're bloodshot—"

"Bloodshot's good," said Leon cautiously. "Hold a lighter flame up to each of them—don't burn him—and tell me what his pupils do."

Crane's new eye was dazzled by the flame when Stevie held it up in front of him, but he managed to keep both eyes at least squintingly open.

"Pupils both went narrow fast," Stevie said.

Leon relaxed and started laughing again, clearly with relief. "Sorry, Mr. Crane," he said, "it's just that I once … knew someone else with your first name. An old friend of mine named Betsy used to worry about it, but she was getting paranoid." He waved his pistol at Mavranos. "That guy's got a rifle or something in the cloth there, Stevie. Would you take it from him?"

Mavranos looked at Crane, who nodded, and he let Stevie take the shotgun.

"Now," said Leon, "Crane, you come aboard, you can be the first—you wrecked my beautiful Hanari. Your friend can wait out here on the dock. You'll probably have some things to talk to him about when you leave."

Crane walked up the dock to the section of the deck where the rail had been folded back on a hinge, and he stepped across the gap easily now that he was wearing sneakers.

The cards were spread out face up on the otherwise-empty green felt table, and in spite of the dawn light outside, the wall lamps threw a late-evening glow across the long room. Doctor Leaky was belted into his wheelchair again, but he was mercifully wearing a different leisure suit. Another armed Amino Acid stood alertly in front of the bar, puffing a cigarette.

The air conditioner hummed, and there were no smells in the cool air.

The Art Hanari body was still carrying the gun, and Leon faced Crane from the other side of the room, glaring out of the inflamed Hanari eyes.

"Why did you come here? I really don't think you know what happens now," he said.

You take what you bought, Crane thought. May it please be the right one. "I assume the Flamingo."

Again the declaration seemed to jar his father. "You sold the hand," Leon said, his voice flat but louder, "you'll become the King the way … the way his food does! I don't have time for—"

"Why do you keep a wrecked old clown like that around?" Crane interrupted, nodding toward Doctor Leaky and blinking tears out of his new eye. "Hey, Doctor," he called, "how's your love life these days?"

Doctor Leaky began giggling and making fart sounds with his mouth. "Beam me up, Scotty!" he said.

The Amino Acid tossed his cigarette toward an ashtray and started forward.

Leon's already purpled face went darker, and he stared hard into Crane's eyes—lifted one hand—and then closed his eyes and inhaled.

And Crane was falling away into the darkness of his own mind, aware of the ancient, shifting gods so far below.

His last articulated thought was: It didn't work. He won.

Like galaxies, the things turned beneath him, and though there was no light, he could see them by the images they rang into vibrant compulsion in his mind.

There was the Fool, dancing on the precipice, and the sphinxes that pulled the splendid Chariot, and Judgment calling human forms out of opening graves, and the Moon, with luminous rain falling into a pool, and, somehow closer, the hermaphroditic figure that was the World; and then he was able to look at himself.

His own form was the robed and powerful body of the Emperor, and he held in his right hand the looped Egyptian cross, the ankh.

He rose, and the other entities seemed to bow in repectful greeting, and he heard a chorus of singing and weeping and shouting that evoked, for all the bass roars of horror and rage that abraded the pure high voices, triumph and hope.

He continued to rise, up through the ringing, glittering blackness.

And vision came back to his eyes, and he was standing on the red carpet in the lounge of his father's houseboat.

The Amino Acid's cigarette hit the ashtray, and he took another step forward.