Last Call (Last Call 1)

Thought fragments flickered like deepwater fish in the mind residue that occupied Doctor Leaky's head, frail sparks of luminescence darting about on unknowable errands in darkness. Ninety-one, ninety-one, ninety-one, ran the unspoken, scarcely connected words. Not a hundred. Born in '99, born in … that was a Jack. That was a hell of a Jack, west of here … don't smell roses, that's good … don't smell nothing … well, piss …

Art Hanari finally let himself be coaxed into lying back down on the padded table. The masseur had stopped asking him what he'd meant by the remark about a Jack, and now resumed rubbing a lanolin solution into his taut pectorals and deltoids.

The masseur ignored Hanari's perpetual erection. Curious about it at first, he had looked up Hanari' s file, and had found that a "penile implant," a silicone rod, had been surgically inserted into the organ as a drastic cure for primary impotence; it seemed a waste of time, for Hanari saw no women except for a couple of the nurses and physiotherapists, and he showed no interest in them—or in anyone. He nearly never spoke, and he'd had no visitors for at least eight years.

But the masseur had not been surprised to read of the implant operation. Patients at La Maison Dieu could afford anything, and he'd seen much more extravagant cosmetic surgeries.

What had surprised him was Hanari's birth date: 1914. The man was seventy-six … but his pale skin was smooth and firm, and his hair appeared to be genuinely dark brown, and his face was that of a placid thirty-year-old.

Finished, the masseur straightened and wiped his hands on a towel. He looked at the man on the table, who had apparently gone back to sleep, and he shook his head. "God, there's a jack-off, you mean," he muttered, then turned to the door.

"Twenty to the Sixes," said the dealer patiently. Old Stuart Benet always needed to be reminded. Right now Benet was snorting at an asthma inhaler.

" 'At's you, Beanie," said the player to Benet's left.

"Oh!" The fat old man put down the inhaler, lifted the corner of his seventh and last card, and squinted down past his white beard at it.

"Beanie, you just said it was a Jack," said another player impatiently. "And if it is, you got Two Pair, and I got somp'n better anyway."

Benet smiled and pushed four orange chips forward.

The remaining players called, and at the showdown Benet proved to have only the pair that was showing in his up cards.

"Hey, Beanie," said the winner as he gathered in the chips, "what happened to that Jack you were shouting about?"

The dealer suppressed a frown as he collected the cards and began to shuffle. Benet was employed as a shill to fill out sparse tables in the Poker room, and even though the casino had hired him as a favor to a valued business associate, he was good at the work—always cheerful, and happy to stay and call and lose money. But shills weren't supposed to bluff or raise, and that God, there's a Jack yell had been a kind of bluff.

The dealer made a mental note to ask Miss Reculver to remind Benet of the rules. The old man never seemed to listen to anyone else.

The reference desk at the UNLV library always got busy around six in the evening. The students who worked during the day all seemed to come in at once, always shuffling hesitantly up to the desk and beginning in one of two ways: "Where would I look for …" or, even more often, "I have a quick question …" Old Richard Leroy would listen patiently to their intricate descriptions of what they wanted and then, almost invariably, either lead them to the business desk or show them where the psych indexes and abstracts were. Right now he was methodically replacing an armful of books to their proper places on the shelves.

A few of the students were still glancing at him warily, but he had forgotten having yelled, and was back in the state his co-workers called "Ricky's ticky-tocky."

And Betsy Reculver, the one who had voluntarily spoken the simultaneously chorused sentence, walked slowly along the broad, brightly lit and always crowded sidewalk in front of the Flamingo Hilton.

For a while she stared up at the procession of stylized flamingos, illuminated by what must have been a million light bulbs, that strutted along in front of mirrored panels above the windows of the new front of the casino. Behind the casino, hidden from the traffic on the Strip, was a long swimming pool, and on the far side of that, dwarfed now by the glass high-rise buildings that were the modern sections of the hotel, stood the original Flamingo building, the place Ben Siegel had built to be his castle in 1946.

Now it was her castle, though the Hilton people would not ever know it.