Last Call (Last Call 1)

Then Leroy had raised a segment of the deck, and the exposed card was the Deuce of Sticks.

There were sighs and low whistles from the other players, but Scott's ears were buzzing with the realization that he had won after all.

He reached out and began raking in and stacking the bills, glad of the revolver pressing against his hip-bone under his sweater.

Leroy sat down in the chair beside him. Scott glanced at the man and said, "Thanks."

Leroy's pupils were wider than normal, and the pulse in his neck was fast. "Yeah," he said levelly, shaking his head, "I don't know when I'm going to learn that that's not a smart bet."

Scott paused in his gathering and stacking. Those are tells, he thought; Leroy is faking dismay.

"You're taking the money for the hand," Leroy observed.

"Uh … yes." Again Scott was aware of the bulk of metal against his hip.

"You sold the hand."

"I guess you could put it that way."

"And I've bought it," Leroy said. "I've assumed it." He held out his right hand.

Puzzled, Scott put down some bills and reached across and shook hands with the big brown man in the white suit. "It's all yours," Scott said.

It's all yours.

Now, twenty-one years later, driving his old Ford Torino north up the dark 5 Freeway toward the 10 and Venice, Scott Crane remembered Ozzie's advice about games in which the smoke and the drink levels behaved strangely: Fold out. You don't know what you might be buying or selling come the showdown.

He had not ever seen Ozzie again after the game on the lake.

The old man had checked out of the Mint by the time Scott got back, and after Scott had rented a car and driven west across the desert to Orange County and Santa Ana, he had found the house unoccupied, with an envelope tacked to the front door frame.

It had contained a conformed copy of a quit-claim deed giving the house to Scott.

He had talked to his foster sister Diana on the telephone a few times in the years since, most recently in '75, after spearing his own ankle, but he had not seen her again either. And he had not any idea where she or Ozzie might now be living.

Crane missed Diana even more than he missed old Ozzie.

Crane had been seventeen when he and Ozzie had driven out to Las Vegas to pick up Diana in 1960. The game on the lake had still been nine years in the future.

He and Ozzie had been driving home from a movie—Psycho, as Scott recalled—and the radio was playing Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight," when Ozzie had pulled the Studebaker over to the Harbor Boulevard curb.

"What's the moon look like to you?" Ozzie had asked.

Scott had looked at the old man, wondering if this was a riddle. "The moon?"

"Look at it."

Scott leaned down over the dashboard to look up at the sky; and after a few seconds he had opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk to see more clearly.

The spots and gray patches on the moon made it look like a groaning skull. The bright dot of Venus was very close to it—about where the moon's collar-bone would be.

He heard dogs howling … and though there were no clouds that he could see, rain began pattering down and making dark dots on the sidewalk. He got back in the car and pulled the door closed.

"Well, it looks like a skull," he admitted. He was already wary of Ozzie's tendency to read portents into mundane occurrences, and he hoped the old man wouldn't insist that they go swimming in the ocean now, or drive to the peak of Mount Wilson, as he had occasionally done at times like this in the past.

"A suffering one," Ozzie agreed. "Is there a deck of cards in the car?"

"It's November!" Scott protested. Ozzie's policy was to have nothing to do with cards except in the spring.

"Yeah, better not to look through that window anyway," the old man mused. "Something might look back at you. How about silver coins? Uh … three of them. With women on them."

The glove compartment was full of old auto registrations and broken cigarettes and dollar chips from a dozen casinos, and among this litter Scott found three silver dollars.

"And there's a roll of Scotch tape in there," Ozzie said. "Tape pennies onto the tails side of the cartwheels. Copper is Venus's metal, I heard from a witchy woman one time."

Envying his friends in high school who didn't have fathers who made them do this kind of thing, Scott found the tape and attached pennies to the silver dollars.

"And we need a box to put 'em in," Ozzie went on. "There's an unopened box of vanilla wafers in the backseat. Dump the cookies out in the street—not now. Do it when we're crossing Chapman; it'll be better in an intersection, a crossroads." Ozzie clanked the car back into gear and drove forward.

Scott opened the box and dumped the cookies out as the car surged through the intersection, and then he dropped the silver dollars into the box.

"Shake 'em around, like dice," Ozzie said, "and tell me what they say, heads and tails."