Last Call (Last Call 1)

They got off the ferry at the island dock and walked east along the broad waterfront walk, between expensive, yardless houses to the left and a short, sloping beach fretted with private docks to the right. Crane was limping along steadily, though his face was sweaty and pale.

Dark clouds were moving in again from the north and west, contrasting vividly with the patches of blue sky. Crane looked up and saw high-circling sea gulls lit white by the slanting sun against a backdrop of black cumulus.

At the southern end of Marine Street a thick pipe protruded from the sand slope and extended a few yards out into the water. DANGER, said a sign above it, END OF STORM DRAIN.

More water, thought Crane, and dangerous. "It's to the left here," he said nervously. "There's a market up ahead. Vegetables, bread—that's where we used to get the doughnuts. Old place, been there since the twenties. You wait here."

"I might be able to help."

"You look like Genghis Khan. Trust me, wait here."

"Okay, Pogo, but if the old guy's there, remember everything he says."

"Hey, I'm sober today, remember?"

Crane limped away up the street, still in sunlight but walking toward the darkness that was tucked in under the northern clouds. Narrow houses crowded up to the sidewalks; the only people he saw were women kneeling in tiny gardens and men doing incomprehensible work with shrill, handheld power tools in open garages on this Saturday morning.

The market was called Hershey's Market now, not the Arden's Milk Market Spot as he remembered, and what used to be a drugstore across the street was currently a real estate office; but the shapes of the buildings were the same, and he began trying to walk faster.

"Freeze, Scott."

The remembered voice was still authoritative, and Crane obeyed automatically. Hesitantly he looked to the side and saw a tall, thin figure in the shadow under the awning of the old Village Inn restaurant, twenty feet away across the puddled street.

"Oz?"

"I've got a gun, cocked, hollow-point slugs, pointed straight at my own heart," said the old man tensely. "Who's your friend down by the water?"

"He's a neighbor of mine, he's in the same sort of trouble I'm in. I—"

"What the hell kind of truck is that to drive around in?"

"Truck …? The one we came in? It's his, it's a Suburban; he buys cars from an impound yard—"

"Never mind. What book were you reading when we went to get Diana?"

"Goddamn, Oz, you've got no right to expect me to remember that, but it was The Monster Men, by Edgar Rice—"

"Okay, he hasn't had the next game yet. Probably be this Easter, though." The old man stepped out of the shadows, leaning on an aluminum ortho cane with a quadripod base. His hair was thin and cottony white over his pink scalp, and he was wearing a baggy dark gray suit with a white shirt and blue tie. His free hand stayed in the right side pocket of his coat as he walked slowly across the wet pavement to Crane. "What do you want from me?"

Tears blurred Crane's eyes. "How about How've you been? Christ, I made a mistake, I was a stupid kid; how many kids aren't? Aren't you going to forgive me even now, twenty years later? This thing looks like killing me, and you're acting like—"

"You look like hell," the old man said harshly. "You drink way too much, don't you? And now, when it's too late, you're driving around with some bum in a joke truck trying to figure out how to stop the rain. Shit." He let his cane stand by itself and stepped forward and threw his free arm around Crane. "I love you, boy, but you're a dead man," he said muffledly into Crane's collar.

"Christ, Oz, I love you," Crane said, clasping the old man's narrow shoulders. "And even if I am dead, it's good to see you one more time. But listen, tell me what happened. How did I kill myself by playing in that—that God damned game?"

Ozzie stood back and again gripped the rubber handle of his standing cane, and Crane could see how the years had withered the once-strong face, extinguished the evidence of all emotions except for anxiety and—maybe still—some of the old humor.

"Assumption," Ozzie said. "That guy, that Ricky Leroy, assumed you, put a lien on your body. A sort of balloon lien. Shit, son, I read up on this, and asked around, after I lost you to it—and I had known a good deal about the dangers of cards even before, all that stuff you thought was like step-on-a-crack-break-your-mother's-back."

A car was making its way down the narrow street, and Crane and Ozzie stepped up onto the curb.