Last Call (Last Call 1)

And if the antes have been so big that guys are staying just because of it, sometimes you can bet everything you've got and win with a damn poor hand.

Crane turned the photograph over and looked at the pregnant woman. Then he got up and walked into the living room and stood beside Mavranos. Crane watched the silhouettes moving in his house. One was obviously the fat man. He must have met the van somewhere nearby. "I've got to get in there," he said.

"No way tonight—and these guys'll probably watch the place for a couple of days. What's in there that we can't get somewhere else?"

"The phone."

"Shit, I told you you could use mine."

"It's gotta be that one."

"Yeah? Tell me why." He was still staring out the window. Crane looked at Mavranos's lean silhouette, the narrowed eyes glinting in reflected streetlight glow. The man looked like a pirate.

Can I trust him? Crane wondered. He's obviously got some sort of stake in this situation, but I'll swear he's a loner, not associated with any of these—these murky thrones and powers and assassins. We've been sociable neighbors for a while, and he always got along with Susan. And God, it would be wonderful to have an ally. "Okay," Crane said slowly. "If we both tell the other guy everything we know—I mean, that he knows—himself—about this stuff—"

Mavranos was grinning at him. "You mean we lay our cards on the table."

"That's it." Crane held out his right hand.

Mavranos enveloped it in his own calloused, scarred right hand and shook it firmly twice. "Okay."

Eighteen hours later Crane was crawling on his hands and knees across the floor of his own living room toward the telephone, his right eyelid stinging and his cheek saltily wet.

The intruders had turned off the lights when they had left, but the blinds were raised, and the traffic and neon signs and streetlights of Main Street gave the room a flickering twilight glow in the middle of this Friday night.

Ten minutes earlier Mavranos had driven his car up to the curb in front of Crane's house and had got out and walked up to the front door, to attract the attention of anyone who might be watching the place. After knocking and getting no response, he had gone back to his car, leaned in through the open window, and honked the horn three times—two shorts and one long.

Crane had been in the alley behind the house.

At the first of the short blasts Crane pushed his way through his dilapidated back fence; the second honk blared as he was sprinting across his dark, unkempt back lawn, and when the third began, he punched a leather-gloved hand through his bedroom window, brushed the glass splinters away from the bottom edge of the frame, and dived through and scrambled across the bed.

By the time the horn stopped he was standing beside the bed. The air was warm, almost hot; the heater had been running all night and all day and half the night again, and of course the stove was on.

He took off Arky's work glove and tossed it onto the floor.

The bedroom had been ransacked. The blankets and sheets had been torn off the bed, and the mattress had been slashed, and the bureau drawers had been dumped out on the floor.

He walked down the hall to the bathroom, stepping carefully in the darkness and bracing his hands on the walls, for the floor was an obstacle course of scattered magazines and books and clothes. The bathroom was completely dark, and he groped through the litter of boxes and bottles that had been spilled out of the medicine cabinet into the sink.

He hadn't been able to stop yawning, and his palms were damp.

Among the litter in the sink he had come across the rubber bulb and the bottle of saline solution, and he'd shrugged. As long as you're here, he thought.

Working by touch, he poured some of the solution into the coffee mug that was miraculously still on the sink. He reached a finger up to his face and pushed inward on the side of his right eye. With a sort of inner sploosh the plastic hemisphere came loose from the Teflon ring that was attached to two of the muscles in his eye socket. The medial rectus, he remembered, and the lateral rectus. He'd had the ring put in about 1980. Before that he'd had a glass eye, and once a month he'd had to go to the eye man to have it taken out and cleaned. Now it was a task to be done every day at home, like cleaning contact lenses.

He carefully put the artificial eye into the mug and then used the bulb to suck up some of the saline solution and begin squirting it into the cavity of his empty eye socket.

He hadn't done it this morning, so he squirted it out thoroughly. Irrigating the cavity, his doctor always called it.

Finally he couldn't pretend any longer that he hadn't finished. What had he come in here for?