Last Call (Last Call 1)

He had called Abrams last. The man had sworn he'd be here within four minutes, with a couple of others who would be able to carry Leon to the car for the drive to the Southern Nevada Hospital, five miles west on Charleston Boulevard. Leon had for a moment considered calling for a ride to the hospital first, but a glance at his groin had left him no choice but to believe that his genitals were destroyed—and therefore it had been more crucial to recover Scotty, the last son he would ever beget.

You haven't lost everything.

His entire lower belly felt loose—hot and wet and broken—and now that he had hung up the telephone he had two free hands with which to clutch himself, hold himself in.

It's not everything, he told himself. You won't die of a mere shotgun wound, your blood is in Lake Mead and you're in Las Vegas and the Flamingo's still standing, out there on Highway 91 in the rain. You haven't lost everything.

The Moon and the Fool. He blinked away sweat and looked at the cards scattered on the floor around the bookcases and the doorway, and he thought about the card that had left the room, wedged—the thought made him numb—wedged in Scotty's eye.

My reign is not over.

He crossed his legs; it seemed to help against the pain.

He rolled his head back and sniffed, but there was no smell of roses in the room. He was getting dizzy and weak, but at least there was no smell of roses.

His face had been inches from a flourishing rose bush, he remembered dreamily, on the night he had killed Ben Siegel. The branches and twigs had been curled and coiled across the trellis like a diagram of veins or lightning or river deltas.

Leon had stalked Siegel for nearly ten years before killing him.

The East Coast gangster lords had seemed to sense the kind of kingship that nobody had yet taken in the United States. Joseph Doto had assumed the name Joe Adonis and took pains to maintain a youthful appearance, and Abner "Longy" Zwillman had shot a rival named Leo Kaplus in the testicles rather than through the heart, and in 1938 Tony Cornero had established a gambling ship that stayed outside the three-mile limit off the coast of Santa Monica; Cornero named the ship the Rex, Latin for "king," and Siegel had owned fifteen percent of it. Eventually the attorney general had organized a massive bust, and slot machines, Roulette wheels, dice tables, and Blackjack tables—with all their numbers that had so passionately concerned so many gamblers—were thrown into the nullifying sea.

One night a few weeks before the bust, Leon had taken one of the little motorboats, the water taxis, out to the ship, and he had walked over as much of the deck as the public was allowed access to; from one vantage point he was able to see a man way back on the stern holding a fishing pole out over the dark water below. Leon had asked a steward who the solitary nocturnal fisherman was, and the steward had explained that it was one of the owners, a Mr. Benjamin Siegel.

One of Leon's heels slid forward now on the blood-soaked carpet, and the first pains seized his abdomen like wires tightening, and he gritted his teeth and moaned.

The longer Abrams took getting here, the more horrible the jolting drive to the hospital would be. Where the hell are you, Abrams?

When the pain subsided a little, he thought for just one moment about the card that was not in the room. Then he pushed his thoughts back to his past victory, his taking of the western throne.

Leon had moved west from New York to Los Angeles in 1938, bringing with him his thirty-year-old wife and his eight-year-old son, Richard; and he soon learned that Siegel had preceded him in that westward pilgrimage. After the disquieting visit to the Rex, Leon joined the Hillcrest Country Club in Beverly Hills, and it was there that he finally met the man.

And though Siegel had been only thirty-two, he had fairly radiated the power. Like Joe Adonis, he was anxious to keep fit and young-looking, as the king would have to be, but Siegel had seemed to know that more than shed blood and virility and posing would be necessary.

They had met in the bar, and the man who introduced them noted that they were the only two people in the room who were drinking plain soda water.

The remark had seemed to focus Siegel's attention on Leon. "George, was it?" he asked, his half-closed eyes qualifying his smile. His brown hair was oiled and combed back from his high forehead.

"Close enough," Leon said.

"You ever play cards, George?" Siegel's Brooklyn accent made "cards" sound like "cods."

"Of course," Leon had said, lowering his head over his glass so that the quickened pulse in his throat wouldn't show. "Would you be up for a game of Poker sometime?"

Siegel had stared at him then for several seconds. "No, I don't think so," he said finally. "It only bores me when Jacks keep calling my Kings."

"Maybe I'll have the Kings."

Siegel laughed. "Not if I'm the dealer—and I always am."