Last Call (Last Call 1)

When Ozzie finally reappeared, taking the steps up from the playing floor slowly and bracing himself on his aluminum cane, he had made back what he'd lost earlier and four hundred dollars besides.

"You guys ready to go?" he asked.

"Truck awaits," said Mavranos, standing up and finishing his beer. "Where to?"

"Some store, like a Target or a K Mart, for supplies," said Ozzie. "And then …" He looked around blankly. "On to Las Vegas."

The air was suddenly dry, and as he got up, Crane thought he heard the pay telephone ringing again, over the constant rattling of the chips

"Let's drive fast," he said.

BOOK TWO: Mistigris

… if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth …

—Matthew 24:26

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers …

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

For good ye are and bad, and like to coins,

Some true, some light, but every one of you

Stamp'd with the image of the King …

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls Of The King

Mistigris.—Poker with the joker added.

—Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911

CHAPTER 14: Toward the Terminal Response

Southeast of the Sierra Nevada range, the Mojave Desert stretches across more than a hundred miles of vast, bleak wilderness before finally rising into the rugged peaks that corrugate California's easternmost edge, peaks with names like Devils Playground and the Old Woman Mountains. The desert is bordered in the south by the San Bernardino Mountains, beyond which lie the Coachella and Imperial valleys, broad quilts whose different-colored squares are fields of carrots and lettuce and cantaloupe and date palms. The water for their irrigation travels west in canals that cut horizon-spanning lines of silver through the Sonora Desert from the Colorado River, tamed now by the Hoover and Davis and Parker dams.

But the river can still be rebellious—in 1905 it flooded and broke through the man-made headgates near Yuma, cutting itself a new channel through the farmlands and towns all the way out to a low plain of salt-frosted desert that had been known as the Salton Pan. The Southern Pacific Railroad managed after two years to block the new flow and force the river back into its original channel—but the Salton Pan had become, and remains still, the Salton Sea, a thirty-five-mile body of water that grows so increasingly salty as its water evaporates that red tides frequently stain the betrayed water like blood, and water-skiers have to avoid sargassos of dead, floating corbina fish.

The river has been harnessed to make the Coachella and Imperial valleys bloom, but the Salton Sea, desolate with wind and sand and salt, sits between them like the patient eye of the wasteland.

In Laughlin, Nevada, fifty miles south of Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, a stiff wind from the jagged Dead Mountains was raising whitecaps on the high, sun-glittering water.

A man in a tuxedo stood on the ferry pier and pulled handfuls of brightly colored casino chips from his pockets and flung them out over the choppy water. Tourists asked him what he was doing, and he replied that he worked for one of the casinos and was disposing of worn chips in the routine way; but he closely watched the patterns the chips took as they flew, and he seemed to be whispering to himself, and when he had scattered the last handful, he stood looking at the water for half an hour before bowing to the river and then walking to a car and driving away, very fast, north.

Fifty miles south of that, at Lake Havasu City, the river flowed high around the massive pilings of London Bridge, the same arching granite structure that until twenty years ago had straddled the Thames. The river's border was green, but the desert was close beyond the bright new hotels and restaurants, and because of the clarity of the air the desiccated mountains seemed nearer than they actually were.

A white-bearded man in a dusty old pickup truck drove over the curb of the parklike area near the bridge; he tromped the accelerator until he was doing about thirty—tourists were yelling and running—and then he yanked the wheel hard to the right, and the old truck spun like a compass needle across the sprinkled grass.