Last Call (Last Call 1)

He didn't look at her. "You're—" he began, then stopped, unable to say "dead." He knelt on the bed and crawled toward the window. "You're not her," he said unsteadily.

"I'm becoming her. Soon I'll be her." The room was suddenly full of the smell of hot coffee. "I'll fill the cavity."

"I've … got to go," he said, clinging to the ordinariness of the phrase.

He carefully swung his cut leg out the window first, then followed it with the other and gripped the sides of the window frame. The night air was cold.

There was a quiet but violent thumping and whining in the closet—apparently she was having some kind of fit. He boosted himself down to the dry grass and limped away across the dark yard toward the gap in the fence.

CHAPTER 11: How Did I Kill Myself?

Crane squinted against the glitter of the morning sun on the rushing freeway pavement.

Rain had been clattering in the roof gutters and hissing in the trees when he and Mavranos had furtively left Mavranos's apartment by the back door, a couple of hours before dawn; but after they'd eaten breakfast in a coffee shop on the other side of town and had walked back out to the parking lot, Mavranos sucking on a toothpick, the sun had been shining in a cleared blue sky, and only the chill of the door handle and the window crank had reminded Crane that it was not yet summer.

They were driving in a panel truck Mavranos had bought from some impound yard last fall, a big boxy 1972 Suburban with a cracked windshield and oversize tires and an old coat of desert-abraded blue paint. The truck shook and squeaked as it barreled along down the Newport Freeway, but Mavranos drove it easily with one hand on the big steering wheel and the other holding a can of Coors wrapped in what he called a "deceptor"—a rectangle of supple plastic with the Coca-Cola logo printed on it.

In the passenger seat, with his knees up because of the litter of books and socket wrench sets and old clothes on the floorboards, Crane sipped lukewarm coffee from a styrofoam cup and tried to brace himself against the vehicle's shaking. Mavranos had bandaged his gashed thigh with the easy competence of an old Boy Scout and had assured Crane that it wouldn't fester, but the leg ached and throbbed, and the one time Crane had bumped it against a chair arm the world had gone colorless and he had had to look at the floor and breathe deeply to keep from fainting.

He was wearing a pair of Mavranos's old jeans, rolled up at the ankles like a kid's because they were too long in the legs.

Leaning his hot forehead now against the cold window glass, he realized that it must have been a long time since he had last traveled on this freeway. He remembered broad, irrigated fields of string beans and strawberries stretching away on either side, but now there were "Auto Malls," and gigantic buildings of bronze-colored glass with names like UNISYS and WANG on them, and clusters of shiny new banks and condominiums and hotels around the double-level marble-and-skylights-and-ferns shopping mall called South Coast Plaza.

It was an Orange County with no orange trees anymore, a region conquered by developers, who had made it sterile even as they had made it fabulously valuable, and the moneyed complacency of the area seemed by definition to exclude people like him and Arky as surely as it had come to exclude the farmers.

"Suits," growled Mavranos after a glance away from the traffic ahead. He paused to sip his beer. "They … replicate. The freeways are dead stopped half the time, you can't exercise in this air and you can't eat fish you catch in the bay, and nobody who'd speak to you or me can afford a house even though the suits have terraced all the old hills and canyons with the damn things … and have you noticed that these people don't do anything? They're all middlemen—they sell stuff or broker stuff or package stuff or advertise stuff or speculate in stuff."

Crane grinned weakly against the window glass. "Some of 'em must do things, Arky."

"I suppose—but any such'll soon be crowded out. The suits I'm talking about are growing, replicating, at the expense of everything else, even the plain old goddamn dirt and water."

A new BMW passed them at high speed on the right.

"Susan's dead," Crane said suddenly. "My wife."

Mavranos turned to stare at him for a moment, and his foot was off the accelerator. "When?" he barked. "How? When did you hear this?"

"It happened thirteen weeks ago. Remember when the paramedics came, and I said she fainted?" Crane finished the coffee and tossed the Styrofoam cup into the back of the truck. "Actually she died. Fibrillation. Heart attack."

"Bullshit thirteen weeks, I—"

"That's not her, what you saw and talked to. That's … I don't know what it is, some kind of ghost. I'd have told you about it before, but it was only last night that I … figured out it must have something to do with this cards stuff."