Last Call (Last Call 1)

"There's nothing wrong with me," said Ozzie peevishly.

Ozzie hurried away in the direction of the men's room, while Crane and Mavranos stood in the entry and blinked around in the glare-punctuated dimness.

Just inside the bank of glass doors, isolated on the red-carpeted floor by a circle of velvet ropes hung from brass poles, was a 1920s-vintage car, its body riddled with big-caliber bullet holes. A nearby sign announced that this was the very car in which Bonnie and Clyde had been shot to death. Welcome to Nevada, Crane thought.

After a few minutes Ozzie came back, white-faced, red-eyed, and leaning on his cane.

"And Ozzie makes three," said Crane, pretending to notice nothing out of the ordinary.

This was the first time he'd been in a Nevada casino in more than fifteen years, but as he led the way through the ranks of clattering slot machines to the restaurant in the back, he felt as though no more than a week had passed since he'd last been in this ubiquitous, rackety hall, doors into which could be found in hundreds of places across the breadth of Nevada. Whether you walked in through a door in Tahoe or Reno or Laughlin, or across a littered pavement in the Glitter Gulch area of downtown Las Vegas or up a polished marble stair on the Strip, it always seemed to be the same big, noisy dark room that you found yourself in. It was carpeted, and it smelled of gin and paper money and tobacco and air conditioning, and a disquieting number of the people at the tables and the slot machines were crippled or deformed or startlingly obese.

Mavranos was blinking around in apparent bewilderment. "Where the hell are all these people when they're not here?" he asked Crane quietly.

"I think they only look like people in this light," said Ozzie with a tired grin. "Before they spun in through the doors at sundown they were dust devils and tumbleweeds and cast-off snakeskins, and their money was warpy bits of busted mirage; and at dawn they'll all leave, and if you were watching, you'd see 'em puff away, back to their real forms."

Crane grinned, reassured to note that Ozzie could still spin his whimsical fantasies, but he noticed that Mavranos only looked more apprehensive.

"He's kidding," Crane said.

Mavranos shrugged irritably. "I know that."

Without speaking, the three of them began filing down the aisles between the slot machines.

In the restaurant Ozzie had a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coors, and Mavranos had a bowl of chili and a Coors, and Crane just had a Coke and ate Mavranos's crackers.

Mavranos had begun to tell Ozzie about the Mandelbrot fat man, and Crane stood up and said he was going to go hit the men's room himself.

He paused on the way to thumb a quarter into one of the slot machines, and after he'd pulled the handle, not even watching the machine's window, twenty quarters were banged one by one into the payout well.

He scooped them out in two handfuls and dumped them into the pockets of his jacket, then touched the machine's handle. "Thanks," he said.

He pretended that the thing said, You're welcome. Then he found himself pretending that the thing had said, Give her one good-bye kiss, at least.

"I … can't," Crane whispered.

Doesn't she deserve at least that? the machine seemed to ask him. Are you afraid to look her in the face one last time?

I don't know, Crane thought. I'll have to get back to you on that.

Slowly he limped away from the machine, to the bar, and he dumped a fistful of quarters onto the polished surface.

"A shot of Wild Turkey and two Budweisers, please," he told the bartender. Just one last kiss, he thought. I'm no good to my friends if I'm shaky and forgetful.

The glass screen of a video Poker game was inset flush with the surface of the bar, and Crane dropped a quarter into the slot and pushed the deal button. The images of patterned card backs in the flat glass screen blinked and became face up, and then he was looking at a garbage hand, unsuited and with no Hearts.

At that instant, about forty miles to the east of where Crane stood, five mouths opened and exclaimed, "God, there's a Jack!"

The other people on the bus stared at the old man who had shouted.

"What'd he say?" one person asked.

"There's a Jack," someone else answered.

"What's he looking at so hard out the window?"

"Trying to find a rest room, I bet—look, he's wet his pants!"

"Jeez, what's he doing running around loose? He's a hundred if he's a day."