Last Call (Last Call 1)

Within five minutes the gray Jaguar had pulled into the Chevron station, and the fat man hauled his startling bulk out of the driver's seat. He looked at the telephone, and then for several seconds looked around at the nearby cars and pedestrians. After a while he stumped over to the cashier window and talked to whoever was inside.

Funo's heart was thumping, and a twitchy grin bared his teeth. Pretty good, he thought. They could tell I was within earshot to the north. I wonder what they had for south—another car horn, in a different pitch or cadence? A barking dog? A realistic-looking street lunatic chanting about Jesus?

Through the tinted window Funo watched as the fat man got back into the idling Jaguar, and for several minutes just sat there behind the wheel; then the car moved off, turning left onto Third Street, back toward Crane's place.

The Jaguar had a Nevada license plate. Funo wrote down the number.

The Commerce Casino was the first one Crane saw, a gigantic cubical building that from the front looked like some ancient Mediterranean temple, with its arched entrance and gold pillars and expanses of windowless wall, and looked like a prison from around in the back lot, where they had to park. There was even a little guard tower back there. To the south side of the casino a dozen high-tension electrical cables hung from the skeletal silver shoulders of a line of tall towers that marched away to the north and south; on the long, narrow plot of land under the towers, as if nourished by the electromagnetic fields, knee-high pine trees grew in dense rows.

Ozzie stared back at the cables and the trees as he and Crane and Mavranos slowly walked toward the building, and he muttered something about evergreens under hydroelectric power.

Mavranos told him that land under power lines wasn't good for much, and that a lot of such stretches were used as Christmas tree farms. "Come back here on New Year's Day, you see nothing but dirt."

Ozzie nodded, frowning.

The inside of the casino was one vast room; when a person had walked in through one of the several glass doors, street level became just the level of a wide, raised, railed walkway that ran all the way around the acre of playing floor five steps below. Tables and chairs and couches lined the rails, and doors in the high walls opened onto a delicatessen, a bar, a banquet room, a gift shop, and even a hair salon. Mirrored pillars, square in cross-section, rose to the high mirrored ceiling.

Mavranos sat down to have a beer, and Crane and Ozzie split up.

Crane hopped down the nearest set of steps to the playing floor and then limped through the maze of tables.

The games were quick, the house dealers shuffling low to the table and then skimming the cards out across the green felt, the players checking and folding and betting so inconspicuously and rapidly that Crane several times found himself unable to tell whose bet it was, or what the amount. Some of the players had hamburgers—or even full dinners, with mashed potatoes and gravy—on little wheeled wooden carts beside them, and they found a calm second or two now and then in which to bend over the food and shovel some into their mouths without taking their eyes from the table.

Crowds of Asians stood around tables where some game was being played that involved dice in a brass cup as well as cards, and the chips being shoved back and forth in tall stacks were the black hundred-dollar ones. The hasty diners around these tables all seemed to be eating noodles with chopsticks.

Under the frequent loudspeaker announcements—"JT, One and Two-Stud," "DF for the one-three Hold 'Em"—were the constant click and rattle of chips.

Crane gave his initials to the floorman who was working the five- and ten-dollar Five-Card Draw chalkboard, and while he waited for his turn to get a seat at a table, he leaned against the rail and watched the nearest game.

It was as fast as the others he'd watched, with the white plastic disk that indicated the honorary dealer moving around the table at nearly the pace of a plate of food being passed at a Thanksgiving dinner, and he noticed that players had to chant, "Time … time … time," if they wanted to consider their next actions without risking being passed over.

For the first time since his teens, Crane felt intimidated by the idea of getting into a poker game with strangers. It's like some kind of fast, complicated folk-dance, he thought, that I'm not sure I know all the moves to.

"SC, five-ten Draw," said the floorman into his microphone.

Crane hopped down the steps and waved, and then walked to the indicated seat. The people at his table all seemed to have been there for at least hours, and seemed to have grown old in this room or others like it.