Last Call (Last Call 1)

The air inside the Suburban was hotter than the air outside, and smelled of spilled beer and old laundry. Crane tossed the can into the back, where it would not stand out. He hid Snayheever's maps under an old nylon windbreaker and then got out, locked the door, and trudged back around the bushes to the table.

Ozzie and Mavranos looked up as Crane walked up; young Snayheever was staring at the cards in his hands and moving his lips silently,

"Should we go?" asked Ozzie.

Meaning, thought Crane, will the nut be able to see that I robbed him, in which case we should be gone before he goes to his car. "No," said Crane, resuming his seat and draining the ice-diluted Tamarindo in his glass, "nothing looks different. Uh … it could do with a little more cooling off."

" 'Kay. Here, I gotta hit the men's room. You take my cards, Scott."

Ozzie got laboriously up out of his chair and then hobbled to the nearby rest room door, leaning heavily on his cane.

Crane picked up the old man's cards. "My turn? To Mr. Snayheever? Okay. Uh … do you have any Nines?"

Snayheever grinned and jiggled in his chair. "Go fish!"

Mavranos pointed at the undealt stack of cards, and Crane picked up the top card. It was the Jack of Hearts.

"How about—" he began.

"Gotta bet!" Snayheever said excitedly. His dirty hair was down in his eyes.

"Oh. Uh, I'll … what's the limit?"

"Two."

Crane grinned lopsidedly and added two more sugar cubes to the pile of M&M's and sugar cubes in the middle of the table. "Have you got any Jacks?" A big semi truck drove by on the highway, gunning its engine and rattling the windows at Crane's back.

"Go fish!" said Snayheever.

Crane took the top card. It was the Ace of Spades, and a second after Crane picked it up Ozzie was somehow standing right behind him. "We're leaving," the old man said tightly. "The game will go unfinished. Throw down your hand."

Crane shrugged and obeyed. When the cards hit the tabletop, the Ace of Spades lay nearly covering two other cards he'd been holding, the Ace and Queen of Hearts.

"We're leaving now," said Ozzie shakily. "This minute."

"Fine!" said Snayheever as his long, trembling fingers gathered in the cards. "Fine! Just go then! I don't need you!"

Mavranos took Ozzie's elbow as they walked away from the table, for the old man was trembling and breathing fast; Crane walked out of the patio backward, watching Snayheever and wondering if the young man really did have a gun—but Snayheever, having apparently forgotten about the three of them, was thoughtfully folding a card around an M&M and a sugar cube. Just before Crane stepped around the bushes into the hot breeze, he saw the young man lift the strange burrito to his mouth and effortfully gnaw a bite out of it.

The breeze was from the reddening west, throwing veils of dust and stinging sand across the parking lot and making the lot and the whole town of Baker seem like the architecture of a temporary outpost, due soon to be abandoned to the elements. Crane watched Ozzie hobble along ahead of him, frail in his wind-fluttering old-man's suit, and for a moment he thought that Ozzie belonged here, a tiny, exhausted figure in a vast, exhausted landscape.

And if they just drove away without the old man, Crane could have as much beer as he wanted. The beer he'd drunk a few minutes ago shifted coldly and pleasantly in his abdomen.

But he forced himself to remember Ozzie as he had been when they'd been father and son—and to remember Diana, and how Ozzie had found her and made her his daughter, Crane's sister—as he helped Mavranos boost the shaking old man up into the rear seat of the car.

When the old man had sat down, Mavranos slammed the door. "Keys?"

Crane dug them out of his pocket and dropped them into Mavranos's palm.

"Think he'll be all right?"

Crane shrugged. "He wants to go."

Mavranos nodded, squinting off at the point where the highway disappeared into the eastern horizon. Then he looked down at his shadow on the asphalt, stretching away for yards in that direction. When he spoke, it was so quietly that Crane could barely hear him over the wind: " '… I will show you something different from either/ Your shadow at morning striding behind you/ Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/ I will show you fear in a handful of dust.' "

Crane knew he was quoting Eliot again.

Crane climbed into the passenger seat and pulled the door closed as Mavranos started the truck and clanked it into gear. Crane looked back at Ozzie. The old man's head was leaned back against the top of the seat. His eyes were closed, and he was breathing through his mouth.

CHAPTER 15: What Would Your Husband Say to That?

"Cannibal burger," said Al Funo, smiling at the woman. "Very rare, with raw onions." He took a bite of it and nodded in approval.

"I never could eat rare meat," she said. "I always like my steaks very well done."