Last Call (Last Call 1)

The night air was cold on his sweaty face and scalp. He quickly scanned the dark yard over the extended barrel of the gun, then with his free hand pressed the door closed behind him and stole down the steps. For several seconds he just stood and breathed through his open mouth, listening; then he picked his way slowly through the unmowed grass toward the loose boards in the fence. Beyond that lay the alley, the secret city capillary that led to a hundred dark and solitary streets.

One of the jacks found him first and killed him, thought Vaughan Trumbill when the Jaguar's headlights swept across the parking lot on Second Street and made a glittering snowfield of the Torino's holed rear window. Her Easter wardrobe is gonna be slim if this keeps up.

He drove on past, turning his big head rapidly from side to side to see if the killer or killers might still be nearby, but all the parked cars he could see were empty and dark.

Could be anywhere, he thought, on a dark porch, on a roof, but they probably wouldn't hang around.

He drove quickly around the block and then pulled in to the parking lot and stopped next to the Torino.

For several moments he just sat in the idling car. The small trout in the tank on the seat next to him—the poisson sympathique—was just bumping around randomly. That might mean that Trumbill's quarry was dead, or that the damned fish was just dizzy from motion.

Trumbill got ponderously out of the car and walked to the driver's side of the Torino—and he allowed himself a sigh of relief when he saw that there was no body in the car, nor even any evidence of blood on the upholstery or the billion-faceted windshield.

They only tried, he thought as he got back into his own car and backed out of the parking lot. He noted the license plate number of the Torino when his headlights were on the car, and after he had parked on the street, he used his car phone to call for the data on the registration. His source promised to call him back in a few minutes.

Then he called for back-up—a clean van and a couple of guys to help. Finally Trumbill sat back in the leather seat and opened a Ziploc plastic bag full of celery and carrot sticks.

It had been a long drive from Lake Mead. The damned trout had first led him to Las Vegas, and then for half an hour had sent him circling counterclockwise around the Flamingo Hilton—Flamingo Road to Paradise to Sands to the Strip to Flamingo again—but had finally settled down and faced southwest. It had stayed pointed that way while Trumbill drove across the midnight desert on the straight dark line that was I-15 to Baker, and then down to Barstow into, eventually, the maze of Orange County. At that point freeways proved to be too fast for the fish to be reliable, and Trumbill had had to exit and negotiate surface streets, slowly enough so that the trout would have time to shift around in its tank on the seat.

During the drive Trumbill had finished the hastily thrown-together bag of tropical fish and seaweed, and now the carrots and celery were gone. He eyed the leaves of the ginger plant in the lawn beyond the curb. Not yet, he told himself.

He glanced around at the neighborhood. There was a 1930s-vintage duplex across the street—Spanish style, white stucco and clay tile roofs—and a similar house at the Main Street corner and a couple of featureless new five-story condominiums behind him. The Torino's owner probably lived in one of the little duplex houses, which he or she probably rented. I need a snack now, he thought.

Trumbill opened the door and walked across the sidewalk to the planter, and as he peeled off a few leaves, he wondered which of the last game's winners this would turn out to be—and why he or she had refrained from playing cards again until this evening.

He got back into the car and closed the door.

There was no mystery about why the person was playing cards now, of course. Several of Betsy's fish had started to play again last year, and Trumbill had managed to find and fetch two of them, and they were now safely sedated in a remote house outside Oatman, down the river near Lake Havasu, where London Bridge had been moved to. The start of the third big series of Assumption games was only a little more than a week away. This person tonight would be very eroded by now, obsessed by memories of the '69 game, drunk and personifying the vice, and all in all getting very ripe, as Betsy Reculver would say. The tendency to move east, away from the abhorrent ocean, would soon be an overwhelming compulsion. Well, Trumbill would try to assist in that.

Betsy would want the person, whoever it was, to be protected until after the game, when at last the twenty-one-year-old assumptions could be consummated, when her resurrections could take place.