Last Call (Last Call 1)

Some other people knew it, though—the magically savvy would-be usurpers called jacks—and they would like to take it away from her. This new jack, for example, whoever it might be. I've got to gather in my fish, she thought, and avoid the jacks while I do it.

She turned and looked across the street, past the towering gold-lit fountains and pillars of Caesars Palace, past the blue-lit geometrical abstraction of its sixteen hundred hotel rooms, to the still faintly pale western sky.

A jack from the West.

The phrase bothered her, for reasons she didn't want to think about, but in spite of herself, for just a moment she thought of an eye split by a Tarot card, and the bang and devastating punch of a .410 shot shell, and blood-slick hands clutching a ruined groin. And a casino called the Moulin Rouge, which hadn't got around to appearing until 1955. Sonny Boy, she thought.

She thrust the memories away, fleetingly resentful that they had followed her from the old body.

It doesn't matter who this jack may be, she told herself. Whoever it is, I've defeated better men before this, and women, too: Siegel, Lady Issit, and dozens more. I can do it again.

Suddenly in her mind she tasted liquor—and then a flood of cold beer. She was still facing west, and she could tell that the impression was coming from that direction.

And there's one of the fish, she thought with cautious satisfaction. Probably a male one since he's drinking boilermakers. Across the border now, driving into Nevada, onto my turf, following the irresistible impulse to flee the ocean and seek the desert, to abandon everything and make his way here—or maybe tied up in the trunk of Trumbill's Jaguar, if it was that particular fish and if we're lucky.

If he's not with Trumbill, I hope that jack out there doesn't find him. I can't afford to be losing my future vehicles, my customized garments—the selves I'm going to have to rely on for the next twenty years.

It didn't occur to her that the jack and the fish might be the same person.

She smiled when the walk signal at Flamingo Road turned green just as she reached the curb. And, ignoring the curious stares of the tourists crowding past in their colorful shorts and printed T-shirts and foolish hats, she quoted aloud four lines from Eliot's The Waste Land:

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea …

She turned her smile on the purple western sky. Come home, she thought.

Come home.

Crane drank off the last inch of his second Budweiser and tucked his last quarter into the slot in the bar. He tapped the deal button and watched as his cards appeared. A pair of Twos, a Four, a Queen, and the one-eyed Jack of Hearts.

He pushed the hold buttons under the Twos, then hit the draw button. The other cards blinked away and were replaced by a Four and a King and a Two. Three of a Kind. Three quarters clattered into the well.

He stood up and scooped out the coins. They were warm, almost hot; and for a moment he remembered shiny copper ovals that had been pennies before the L.A. train thundered over them, and he remembered his real father juggling the hot, defaced coins into his hat to cool off.

He limped back onto the gaming floor, and as he was passing the slot machine that had paid for his drinks and the video Poker, he noticed a cellophane-wrapped peppermint in the payout well.

"Thanks," he told the machine as he took the mint and unwrapped it. "One-armed bandit," he said thoughtfully, popping the mint into his mouth, "but on my side, right? One-armed. You're … maimed, aren't you, like so many of these people? I'm maimed, too." He touched the surface of his right eye. "Fake, see?"

A man who seemed to have had his entire lower jaw taken out shambled up to the machine and managed to convey a question.

"No, I'm not playing this machine," said Crane. "I was just conversing with it."

Come home.

It was time to be moving on, eastward. He walked back to the restaurant, where Mavranos and Ozzie were sitting over their empty plates and still talking about the imaginary fat man.

Ozzie squinted up at Crane with exhausted eyes. "What kept you?"

"That Baker cheeseburger didn't sit right with me either," Crane said cheerfully. "Between us you and I must have grossed out half the guys here tonight."

Ozzie didn't seem to have heard. "From what you remembered of Diana's statements to you on the phone last night, I believe she works at a supermarket, a late-evening shift. When we get to Las Vegas, we can start checking all the markets."