Last Call (Last Call 1)

Driving east on the Santa Monica Freeway in the pre-dawn darkness, the moon long since set and the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles standing up off to his left like the smoldering posts of some god's burned-down house, Crane had been seized with the idea of just staying eastbound on this freeway; cruising right on past where it became called the Pomona Freeway, and all the way out past Ontario and Mira Loma to where it joined with the 15 in one of those weird, dusty semi-desert suburbs with names like Norco and Loma Linda, and then straight on up to Las Vegas.

Be in Vegas in time for a late breakfast, he had found himself thinking. And you've got two grand in your pocket.

He had known he didn't want to go anywhere besides home, much less to Las Vegas, but still he had had to fight the compulsion and concentrate on turning south onto the Santa Ana Freeway.

And then he had seen the Porsche for the third time.

There were only a few cars on the freeway at this hour, and he'd been able to swoop through the long dark curves with just three fingertips swinging the bottom of the steering wheel, but now he snapped the seat belt across himself and took the wheel firmly in both hands.

The Porsche was ahead of him now, as the two cars drove past the Long Beach Freeway junction. It seemed to Crane that it had been behind him or ahead of flanking for at least ten minutes. If Ozzie had been driving right now, he would have sped up and got in the fast lane and then done a squealing three-lane change to get off at Atlantic, and then taken some long way home.

But Crane was exhausted. "No, Ozzie," he said aloud. "I can't be spooking at every car making the same trip I am." He sighed. "But tell you what, I'll watch him, okay?"

The swooping overhead lights gleamed on the Porsche's body but not on its rear window. Frowning with the effort of focusing, Crane realized that the Porsche didn't have a rear window.

Cold night and a well-kept Porsche, he thought, but no back window?

He imagined Ozzie sitting beside him. Heads up, the old man would have said. "Right, Ozzie," Crane replied, and peered at the car ahead.

And so he saw the driver twist around and extend his arm out across the back of the seat, and he saw a gleam of metal in the hand.

Crane flung himself sideways across the seat as the windshield imploded with an ear-stunning bang. Tiny cubes of windshield glass sprayed across him, and the headwind was a cold, battering gale in the car as he pulled the wheel strongly to the right. He braced his feet and sat up, then just winced and held on.

The Torino hit the shoulder hard, tearing up ice plant as the old shocks clanked shut and the car dug in for an instant and then sprang up with the impetus of its own weight. As soon as the heavy old vehicle slewed to a stop, he shoved the shift lever into reverse and tromped on the accelerator and wove the lumbering machine down off the slope and back along the blessedly empty slow lane to the last off ramp.

Back in drive, he sped down Atlantic Boulevard, squinting in the headwind. After tracing a maze path through the dark streets, he pulled into the parking lot of a closed gas station and turned off the lights. He pulled the revolver out of his belt and watched the street.

His heart was thudding in his chest, and his hands were trembling wildly. There was a half-finished pint of Wild Turkey in the glove compartment, and after a minute or two he fumbled it out and twisted off the cap and took a deep gulp.

Jesus, he thought. It has not ever been closer. It has not ever been closer.

Eventually he put the car back into gear and drove south all the way to Pacific Coast Highway and then took Brookhurst up to Westminster. The car leaned perceptibly to the right now, and he wondered what he had done to the suspension and alignment.

"What seeems to be the problem?" whispered Archimedes Mavranos.

He sat on Scott Crane's porch in the darkness and listened to his own heart. He had read in an Isaac Asimov article that humans averagely got two billion heartbeats, and he calculated that he had used up only one billion.

It wasn't fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn't delivered like the mail.

He reached down and took hold of his current can of Coors. He had read that Coors was anti-carcinogenic—it had no nitrosamines, or something—and so he drank it constantly.

God knew why Crane drank Budweiser constantly. Mavranos hadn't heard anything about Budweiser.

Spit in the palm of your hand and then whack it with your other fist, he thought, and watch which way the spit flies. Then you know which way to go.