Last Call (Last Call 1)

But it didn't matter. It was too late. Leon had come vastly too far, pursuing the thing whose dim shape and potential he had begun to discover in his statistical calculations all the way back in his twenties in Paris. Too many people had died; too much of himself had been invested in this. In order to change now, he would have to start all over again, old and undefended and with the deck stacked against him.

" 'Friends may forsake me,' " he said, speaking the line rather than singing it. Let them all forsake me, he thought. I'll still have you, Sonny Boy.

He stood up and hoisted the boy easily onto his shoulders. "Enough of the song, Scott. You still got your money?" The boy rattled the worthless chips and pennies in his pocket. "Then let's go into the den."

"What for?" asked Donna, her hands hooked into the back pockets of her jeans.

"Man stuff," Leon told her. "Right, Scotto?"

Scott swayed happily on his father's shoulders. "Right!"

Leon crossed the room, pretended to be about to ram the boy's head into the door lintel, then at the last moment did a deep knee bend and stepped through. He did the same trick at the door to the den—provoking wild giggles from Scotty—and then lifted him down and plopped him into the leather chair that was Daddy's chair. The lamp flame flickered with the wind of it, throwing freakish shadows across the spines of the books that haphazardly filled the floor-to-ceiling shelves.

Scotty's blue eyes were wide, and Leon knew the boy was surprised to be allowed, for the first time, to sit in the chair with the cup and lance head and crown hanging on wires overhead.

"This is the King's chair," the boy whispered.

"That's right." Leon swallowed, and his voice was steadier when he went on: "And anybody who sits in it … becomes the King. Let's play a game of cards." He unlocked the desk and took from it a handful of gold coins and a polished wooden box the size of a Bible.

He dropped the coins onto the carpet. "Pot's not right."

Scotty dug the holed chips and flattened pennies out of his pocket and tossed them onto the floor in front of the chair. He grinned uncertainly at his father. "Pot's right."

Defaced currency against gold, Leon thought. The pot is indeed right.

Crouching in front of the boy now, Leon opened the box and spilled into his hands a deck of oversize cards. He spread them out on the carpet, covering their bets, and waved at them. "Look," he said softly. A smell like incense and hot metal filled the room.

Leon looked at the boy's face rather than at the Tarot cards. He remembered the night he had first seen a deck of this version, the suppressed Lombardy Zeroth version, in a candle-lit attic in Marseilles in 1925; and he remembered how profoundly disturbing the enigmatic pictures had been, and how his head had seemed to be full of voices, and how afterward he had forced himself not to sleep for nearly a week.

The boy's eyes narrowed, and he was breathing deeply and slowly. Awful wisdom seemed to be subtly aging the planes of his young face, and Leon tried to guess, from the changing set of his mouth, which card was under his gaze at which moment: the Fool, in this version without his characteristic dog, standing on a jigsaw-edged cliff with an expression of malevolent idiocy; Death, also standing at the wavy cliff edge, looking more like a vertically split mummy than a skeleton, and carrying a bizarrely reminiscent-of-Cupid bow; Judgment, with the King calling up naked people from a tomb; the various face cards of Cups, Wands, Swords, and Coins … and all with repugnantly innocent-seeming patterns of branches or flower vines or ivy in the foreground somewhere … and all done in the vividest golds and reds and oceanic blues …

Tears glistened in Scotty's eyes. Leon had blinked away his own before gathering in the deck and beginning to shuffle.

The boy's mind was opened now, and unconnected.

"Now," said Leon huskily, "you're going to choose eight c—"

"No," interrupted Donna from the doorway.

Leon looked up angrily, then relaxed his face into wooden impassivity when he saw the little gun she held with both fists.

Two barrels, big bore, .45 probably. A derringer.

In the instant Leon had seen the gun, there had been a faint booming overhead as Richard had scrambled across the tiles on the roof, but now there was no sound from up there.

"Not him too," Donna said. She was breathing fast, and the skin was tight over her cheekbones, and her lips were white. "This is loaded with .410 bird-shot shells. I know, I figured it out, what you did to Richard, okay? I figure that's, it's too late there for him." She took a deep breath and let it out. "But you can't have Scotty too."

Check and a big raise, Leon told himself. You were too involved in your own cinch hand to watch the eyes of all the other players.