Last Call (Last Call 1)

He spread his hands as if in alarmed acknowledgment of defeat … and then in one smooth motion he sprang sideways and swept the boy out of the chair and stood up, holding Scotty as a shield in front of his face and chest. And a devastating raise back at you, he thought. "And the kid," he said confidently. "To you."

"Call," she said, and lowered the stubby barrel and fired.

CHAPTER 2: No Smell of Roses

The blue-flaring blast deafened and dazzled her, but she saw the man and the boy fall violently forward, and the boy collided with her knees and knocked her backward against the bookcase. One of her numbed hands still clutched the little gun, and with the other she snatched Scotty up by his collar.

Leon had been hunched on his hands and knees on the blood-dappled carpet, but now he reared back, the cards a fan in his fist. His face was a colorless mask of effort, but when he spoke, it was loud.

"Look."

She looked, and he flung the cards at her.

Several hissed past her face and clattered into the book-spines behind her, but through her collar-clutching hand she felt Scotty shudder.

Then she had turned and was blundering down the hall, shouting words that she hoped conveyed the fact that she still had one shot left in the gun. By the kitchen door she snatched the car keys off the hook, and she was trying to think, trying to remember whether her Chevrolet had gas in the tank, when she heard Scotty's whimpering.

She looked down—and the ringing in her ears seemed to increase when she realized that the card attached edge-on to the boy's face was actually embedded in his right eye.

In the stretched-out second in which nothing else moved, her numbed hand tucked the gun into her pocket, reached down, and, with two fingers, tugged the card free and dropped it. It slapped the floor, face down on the linoleum.

She wrestled the door open and dragged the shock-stiffened little boy out across the chilly gravel yard to the car; she unlocked the driver's side door, muscled him in and then got in herself, pushing him along the seat. She twisted the key in the ignition at the same moment that she stomped the accelerator and yanked the wheel sideways.

The car started, and she slammed it into gear. She snapped the headlights on as the back end was whipping across the gravel, and when the gate to the road came around into the glare, she spun the wheel back to straighten the car out and then they had punched through and were on the street, having only caved in the driver's side against one of the gate's uprights.

"Okay, Scotty," she was mumbling inaudibly, "we're gonna get you help, kid, hang on …"

Where? she thought. Boulder, it's got to be Boulder. There's the old Six Companies Hospital out there. Anything in town here is too close, to easy for Georges to find.

She turned right onto Fremont.

"He is rich," she said, blinking but keeping her eyes on the lights of traffic amid the casino neon that made a glittering rainbow of the wet street. "I was thinking of you, I swear—Christ, he liked you, I know he did! Richard's gone, it was too late for Richard, and I never thought he'd decide he needed more than one."

She swerved around a slow-moving station wagon, and Scotty whimpered. His head was against the far doorjamb, and he was bracing himself against the handle with one hand and covering his ruined eye with the other.

"Sorry. Boulder in fifteen minutes, I promise you, as soon as we get clear of all this. He does have loads of money, though. He only works at the Club to keep in touch with the cards—and the waves, he says—keep in touch with the waves, as though he's living out on the coast, trying to track the tides or something."

"There are tides here, too," the boy said quietly as the car's motion rocked him on the seat. "And the cards are how you track 'em."

His mother glanced at him for the first time since turning south on Fremont. Jesus, she thought, you and he were very damn close, weren't you? Your daddy shared a lot with you. How could he then want to erase you? Erase you, not your little body, of course. Your body was supposed to wind up crouched on the roof with Richard's, I guess—one of you watching west, the other east, so Georges can sit in his den and have a sort of three-hundred-and-sixty-degree motion-picture stereopticon.

Ahead of the Chevrolet a Packard convertible with two people in it pulled out of Seventh Street onto Fremont. "Shit," Donna muttered absently. She took her foot off the accelerator and let the engine wind down—until she glanced in the rearview mirror and was immediately certain that the pair of headlights behind her had been there for the last several blocks, matching her every lane change. There were two people in it, too.

Her stomach was suddenly empty and cold, and she closed her throat against a despairing monotone wail.