Last Call (Last Call 1)

"I've got enough for the disciples, too. Let me put my pants on."

CHAPTER 10: Irrigating the Cavity

"Your fat man's out there," Crane said, with false and querulous bravado, after taking a solid slug of Coors in Mavranos's dark living room. The place smelled like an animal's cage. "He was messing with my car, and then he ate the goddamn bushes across the street, and now he's gone to my house. What's his name? Handlebar?"

Crane was on the couch and Mavranos was standing by the window and peeking out through the blinds. "Mandelbrot is the name you're trying to think of. He's the guy that outlined him. All I see is a Jaguar with its window broke."

"I broke it. Fucker ate the bushes."

"What're the envelopes?"

"God, I don't know. I took 'em out of his car. I can't go home."

"Susan still up there?"

"No, she—she went to her mother's house, we had a fight, that's how come I was out walking and saw this guy."

"You can stay here. But we gotta talk."

"Sure, sure, let's talk."

"Is this the fat man that shot the moon in the face?"

Scott Crane exhaled and tried to think clearly. "Great God. I don't know. It might be. I didn't see him, in '60. We got there after." He rubbed his good eye and then drank some more beer. "God, I hope it isn't connected to all that crap. But it probably is. The first night I go play cards. The goddamn cards."

Mavranos was still standing by the window. "You ought to tell me about the cards, Pogo."

"I ought to fucking know about the cards, I don't know shit about them; it's like letting a kid play with blasting caps or something."

"Your fat man's coming back."

"He's your fat man."

"He just noticed his window; he's looking around. I'm gonna hold the blinds just like they are."

"I've got a gun," said Crane.

"So do I, Pogo, but let's hold our horses. He's getting in the car. He's starting it up. Nice car, no way it's the original Jag engine in that. He's moving off, but my guess is he ain't going far." Mavranos let the blinds fall and turned around. "Nobody'll see a light in the kitchen; bring your envelopes there."

"I'll just leave 'em here. In fact, if I could just go to sleep on this couch—"

"Sleep later, and right now bring them into the kitchen. I am in this for my health."

Crane just stared at the note on the back of the photograph of Lady Issit while Mavranos shuffled the photographs from the other envelopes around on the kitchen table and read the notes attached to them.

"So who are these people?" he asked. He looked up, then snapped his fingers at Crane. "Hmm? What's this … category you're a part of?"

Crane blinked and looked up. "Oh, they're—a couple of 'em I recognize. Poker players. One of them was in a game with me in '69, in a houseboat on Lake Mead. He won a big pot, what in this game is called the Assumption. He—" Crane sighed. "He took money for the hand. So did I. These others were probably at one of the other lake games that week, and I bet they won some Assumptions, too."

Crane looked back at the note on the picture of Lady Issit. For the dozenth time he read, "Diana Smith—possibly living with Ozzie Smith—address unknown—urgently FOLD." He realized that his heart was pounding and his palms were damp. "I've, uh, got to get in touch with somebody," he said.

"You can use the phone."

"I don't know where she is. And I don't know anybody that would."

"I got no Ouija board, Pogo."

Urgently FOLD.

He thought of the awed care with which he had held her during the long drive back from Las Vegas in 1960, and of the portrait she'd done of him, and he tried to remember what each of them had said the last time they'd talked, when she'd called him after he'd put the fishing spear through his ankle. When she'd been fifteen.

He'd dreamed that she got married. He wondered if she had children. She'd be thirty now, so she probably did. Maybe her psychic link was with the children now, and no longer with him.

Mavranos had got up and slouched back into the living room; now Crane heard him say, quietly, "Blue van just pulled up, and three guys got out of it; they're heading for your place."

What's in the pot is gone, Ozzie had always said. It ain't yours anymore. You might win it, but until you do, you gotta regard it as spent, not chase it.

"Up on your porch now," Mavranos said.

Of course, when the antes or blinds have been high, so high that it's as much as you're worth to stay in a dozen hands, why then you gotta play looser.

"Lights on in your living room," Arky said. "Kitchen now. Spare bedroom. Real bedroom, too, probably, but I can't see it from here."