Last Call (Last Call 1)

"There's conviction for you," said Mavranos, grinning behind his unkempt mustache. "Passion."

"He didn't sound like he meant it," agreed the waitress.

"Jesus," said Crane, still distracted by sobriety and Ozzie's talk of bad weather, "you're half my age. Honest, ten years ago you'd have had to beat me off with a stick."

The waitress's eyes were wide. "Beat you off?"

"With a stick?" put in Mavranos.

"God," Crane said. "I meant—" But the waitress had walked away.

Ozzie didn't seem to have heard anything after he'd ordered his scotch. "The Hearts suit—that used to be Cups—seems to be allied with Spades, and that's bad. Hearts is supposed to be about family and domestic stuff, marriage and having children, but now it's in the service of—of ruin. The King and Queen of Hearts were showing up interchangeably in the same hands as the worst Spades." He looked at Crane. "Were you playing when the smoke shifted?"

"Yeah."

"You had the Jack of Hearts and the Joker in your hand, I'll bet."

Even though he had decided he believed all this, it made Crane uncomfortable to see evidence for it. "Yeah, I did."

"Those were your cards even in the old days, I remember—the one-eyed Jack and the Fool."

The drinks arrived then, and Ozzie paid the waitress. She left quickly.

Crane stared after her. It bothered him to realize that she was, in fact, pretty, for she held no more attraction for him than did the pattern in the rug. He could imagine her naked, but he couldn't imagine making love to her.

"So," said Mavranos after taking a deep sip of his Coors, "what does all this mean to us?"

Ozzie frowned at him. "Well … the Jack of Hearts is in exile, and the Hearts kingdom has sold out to the Swords; if the Jack's going back, he better do it disguised. And every water card I saw was bracketed by Hearts, meaning the water is tamed by the King and Queen. Since we're headed for Las Vegas, that means we should be leery of tamed water, which sounds to me like Lake Mead."

"Fear death by water," Crane said, grinning vaguely at Mavranos.

"And the," Ozzie went on, "the balance is way out of kilter, so your cancer cure looks a little less unlikely, Archimedes. It's like the ball's bouncing around crazy in the Roulette wheel, and it might not even fall into a slot but fly right out onto the floor. Anything's possible right now."

The old man turned to Crane. "Your situation is completely crazy. I told you the King and Queen of Hearts were acting as though they were the same person? As far as I can deduce, that's the person that's after you, and it's your parent, and is male and female at the same time."

"Ahoy," commented Mavranos. "A hermaphrodeet."

"My real, biological father … or even my mother … might still be alive," Crane said thoughtfully.

"This almost certainly is your biological father," Ozzie said irritably. "The bad King. He must not have recognized you at that damned game; he wouldn't have bothered to become your parent through the cards if he'd known he already was, genetically."

Crane's mouth was open. "How … no, how could Ricky Leroy have been my father? He was remembering the older man who had taken him fishing on Lake Mead so many times when he was four and five years old.

"It's a new body," said Mavranos.

"Right," Ozzie agreed. "He can do that, don't you listen? And maybe he's had a sex change operation since you saw him."

"Or maybe," Crane said, "he's got both male and female bodies he works out of."

Ozzie frowned. "Yes, of course. I should have thought of that—I hope I'm not too old for this." He sipped his scotch. "And I saw a whole lot of Nines and Tens of Diamonds together, and they mean, in effect, action now."

"I'm ready to go," Mavranos said.

Ozzie looked at Mavranos's cigarette—the smoke was rising more or less straight up—and then he held his glass up and stared at it. He hiked around on the seat to look at the television screen, which was now in color. "Don't you guys want lunch?"

"I could do with something," said Crane.

"I think the fortune-telling window has gone by," said Ozzie. "I'm gonna take this drink and go back to that table and kick some ass, now that they all think I'm the poster boy for Alzheimer's disease."

Crane and Mavranos walked around to the little delicatessen in the far corner of the hangar-size room and had roast beef sandwiches while Ozzie went back down to the playing floor.

At one point Crane got up and walked around the perimeter to the men's room. When he came out, one of the pay telephones in front of him was ringing, and he impulsively picked it up.

"Hello?"

There was no answer, but suddenly his heart was beating faster, and he felt dizzy. "Susan …?"

He heard only a click, and after a while the dial tone, but when he finally hung up, he had to admit that, his experience with the cocktail waitress notwithstanding, his sexual responses were working fine.