Last Call (Last Call 1)

Funo swallowed and wiped his mouth. "That's probably because you grew up in the Depression," he said. "In those days it didn't pay to eat rare meat. Nowadays they say you can even eat pork rare."

"I did not grow up in the Depression," she said. "How old do you think I am?"

"I like women who are older than myself," Funo said, frowning and nodding. "Ben Franklin felt the same way I do. I say you leave your car here and ride to Vegas with me, in my Porsche. What would your husband say to that?"

She simpered. Evidently she'd forgiven him for the Depression remark. "My God, me pull up to the motel in a Porsche with a … sexy young man? It'd be World War Three all over again."

She was eating some kind of big salad. Probably she was worried about her weight. Funo could see that she was a little heavy, but he thought she looked good.

He smiled and winked at her. She blushed.

They were sitting at a table in the Harvey House restaurant in Barstow. Funo had stopped for a hot meal, and he'd noticed this middle-aged woman sitting by herself at one of the tables by the big windows that overlooked the early-evening desert, and he had carried his plate over and asked her if he could join her. He preferred not to eat alone—he enjoyed good talk with good people over good food.

"And what are you going to be doing in Vegas?" she asked.

"I'm going to look up a friend of mine," he said. "I think he may be injured."

"A close friend?"

Funo was still smiling. "Let's just say I recently gave him a Dunhill lighter. A gold one."

"Oh," she said vaguely.

He took another bite of his cannibal burger and chewed thoughtfully.

He's alive, but you're off this one, Al, Obstadt's man had told him when he'd called in earlier today. We'll let the guys in Vegas take it.

Vegas, eh? Funo had thought. And there were Nevada plates on that gray Jag.

Well, Funo wasn't about to leave his friend to some damn strangers. He had taken one last assignment—one of the ones he called auto-assignments—and then had got right into his Porsche and taken off for Vegas.

That last assignment had been an older woman, like this one. He had followed her to a 7-Eleven store and struck up a conversation with her about Danielle Steel's novels. Funo could converse plausibly about anything, even things he knew nothing about. It was a gift. Out of sight of the checker he had given her an incapacitating electric shock with a black plastic stun gun, and then, after lowering her unconscious body to a sitting position on a stack of newspapers by the video games, he had taken a sharpened ice pick out of his jacket pocket and carefully stabbed her through the heart. He had left unhurriedly.

An auto-assignment.

Funo really did like older women. He wasn't ashamed to admit that his mother had been the finest person he'd ever known, and he was convinced that years of experience, years of life, were what made a woman attractive. Younger women, he'd found, tended to be shallow. Al Funo had no time for shallow people.

"I'd better be going," his new friend said, getting to her feet. "Hours yet to Vegas, and Stu will be worried if I'm too late."

"I'll walk you out," said Funo quickly, pushing his own chair back.

"No, really, thank you," she said, picking up her purse.

"I can check your oil and water," he said, standing up. "Out on that desert you don't want to—"

"Honestly, I'm fine."

Was she … worried? Suspicious of him? "I'll walk you out," he repeated, perhaps a tad harshly.

She was walking away, her head down. When she paid her bill at the register, the cashier girl looked over at him, not smiling. What had the old bitch said?

Well, that put the kibosh on making her an auto-assignment. He didn't need any kind of brouhaha. The thing about auto-assignments—the ones you took on all by yourself, for nothing more than the satisfaction of being important to strangers—was that they had to be done even more carefully than the business assignments because you wouldn't be getting any protection. And of course, you wouldn't be getting paid.

He looked away from the cashier, forcing himself to breathe deeply and relax.

He stared at the painting on the high wall above the kitchen. It was of a stagecoach leaving a little western town, but some trick of perspective made the stagecoach appear to be as big as a mountain, or else the town a miniature toy. The scale was impossible to judge.

It didn't upset him. Scales, the sizes of things, didn't matter—people were people. There had been the woman in the 7-Eleven earlier today, and soon enough there would be Scott Crane.

Al Funo just wanted to be important to people.