Last Call (Last Call 1)

The other man obediently rubbed at the spot with the sleeve of his nylon jacket, and when the glass was cleaner, he turned the flashlight on Crane's face.

Crane was blinded by the glare, but he could feel the leader staring at him, and he just blinked and tried to keep his face expressionless.

After half a minute the light was gone, and the leader was at Mavranos's opened window. "The man in the back there," the leader said. "What's the matter with him?"

"Oh, shit, you name it," Mavranos said.

"Is he … mentally retarded?"

"Clinically," said Mavranos, nodding. It was one of Mavranos's favorite words to give a statement authority. "He's clinically mentally retarded. Aren't you, Jizzbo?"

Crane was sweating, and his heart was pounding with real fear, for he could tell that his tension was close to breaking out in hysterical giggling. He bit his tongue very hard.

"You're not helping when you talk to him like that," said Ozzie.

Crane could no longer contain himself—the best he could do was to emit his hysteria as a sort of harsh, choked quacking. He coughed blood from his bitten tongue out through his nose, then snorted and leaned forward, gagging loudly.

"Jesus," said Max.

"Okay," the tall man said. "You can go."

Mavranos rolled the window back up, then put the car into gear and steered back onto the road and stepped on the gas.

He and Ozzie both broke out in wild laughter, and after Crane had blown his nose on one of Mavranos's old shirts, he was laughing, too, rolling around helplessly on the litter and making sure he didn't bump the cocked shotgun and wishing, desperately, that he had a drink.

CHAPTER 17: The Sound of Horns and Motors

When the laughter subsided, Ozzie wiped his eyes and turned around to face Crane. "You didn't drink anything back there at Dirty Dick's, did you?"

"Just the Coke you saw." Crane was glad he was lying in darkness, for Ozzie had always been hard to bluff.

The old man nodded and frowned in thought, and it occurred to Crane that in the old days Ozzie would have gone on to ask, Really? Crane's apparent maturity, and the obvious importance of what they were trying to do, clearly led the old man to trust him.

"And of course you didn't play cards there."

"Sure didn't," Crane agreed, trying not to think of the video Poker. He sat up and lifted the shotgun back into the gun case.

"Then it's my fault," Ozzie said quietly, "for letting you play in that damned Go Fish game. That's the only other thing that could have alerted them." He closed his eyes and shook his head. "I wonder if I'm really … quick enough for this. Mentally."

"Jeez, you're fine, man," said Crane hastily. "Those guys probably didn't have anything to do with us; they were looking for a bus or something."

"They were after us all right; the bus business proves that. Which reminds me—pull over as soon as you can, Archimedes, we've got to take down our camouflage."

"I don't like stopping, not with those guys slamming around out here," Mavranos said.

"They'll catch us again if we don't—and then that jack with the hair and the voice will wonder why this vehicle keeps looking like a crowded bus to him. What's wrong with right here?"

"Nothin' we can't adapt to, I'm sure," said Mavranos wearily, turning the wheel toward the shoulder again and tromping the brake.

"Why did we look like a bus?" asked Crane.

"Moving, we're a very busy, agitated wave form," said Ozzie. "Those little plastic deer whistles make a complication of ultrasonic sound waves, all interfering and amplifying and damping each other, and the blood-spotted flags are a lot of organic motion, a lot of pieces of protoplasm, all elbow to elbow with each other, changing their positions all agitatedly. And then the main thing is the cards on the wheels, which are whizzing past the cards on the fenders, so you every second get a dozen new combinations of cards. Configurations. The card configurations aren't personalities, but of course they're descriptions of personalities, so all in all, at a hasty glance, a psychic would tend to assume that there are a lot of people traveling in one vehicle."

"And when we stopped, it all stopped," Crane said. "The whistles, the flags, the cards on the wheels …"

"Right. His bus evaporated, and we were standing there. Happen twice, he'll know we are the bus, and that the guy he's after—which is you—is aboard this car, this truck."

The truck was stopped, and Mavranos had got out and was tearing cards off the left front tire. The desert breeze unfolded the car's stale interior air and threw it away into the night sky; now the car smelled of cooling stone.

"Why did he think I was retarded?"

"I don't know. I guess you're a blur to him, being one of the King's victims on the one hand and a son of the King's on the other. To a psychic you must look like a nighttime and daytime double exposure. Either way you're somebody an ambitious jack would want to kill."