Last Call (Last Call 1)

"Hey," called Mavranos from outside, "you two don't mind if this takes me a little while?"

"I'm coming," Crane called as he opened the right rear door.

"Tell Archimedes to put a tire from one side onto the other side, with the cards still on that tire and fender, so the tire'll be moving diesel now if it was windshield before, or vice versa. And I don't care if they're radials."

"Tire from one side to the other," said Crane, nodding. "Don't care if they're radials."

As he stood under the million distant bright stars in the black sky and broke the little black whistles off the car and tore the spotted flags from the luggage rack, Crane wondered if he would ever dare to drink again, after this near-calamity; and, if not, how he could possibly keep from going crazy or killing himself; and he wondered what the old man meant by diesel and windshield; and he wondered if being the King's son meant that he was a jack himself, with a claim to whatever this mysterious throne in the wasteland was.

An anonymous sedan swept past on the highway, and in the instant that he noticed it he imagined that the woman in the passenger seat, who glanced his way for a moment, had been Susan. Now he stared after the car. The face had been expressionless, but at least had not seemed to be angry.

You did give her a nice kiss, he thought as he remembered the bourbon and beer.

When he and Mavranos had stripped all the camouflage from the Suburban, they got moving again. Mavranos kept the speedometer needle at around seventy, but they didn't catch up to the car in which Crane had possibly seen the ghost of Susan.

After a while they drove past the bright oasis of Nevada Landing, a casino built to look like two ornate east-facing Mississippi riverboats. The mock vessels had risen from the horizon ahead, and soon they sank below the horizon behind, and then the Suburban was driving in darkness again.

Maybe she stopped there, Crane thought, climbed aboard a boat. He looked back, wondering if she'd find him again.

"Two moons," said Mavranos around his cigarette.

Crane blinked and shifted on the rocking seat. "Hmm?" He had nearly been asleep again.

"Doesn't that look like any-second-now moonrise up ahead? But we got the moon behind us."

"The one ahead of us will be Las Vegas."

Mavranos grunted, and Crane knew he was thinking about the castle of randomness.

And, slowly, the ripplingly molten white and blue and orange towers climbed up out of that bright quarter of the horizon and dimmed out the stars.

They got off I-15 at last at Tropicana Avenue, then turned left onto Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip. Even down here at the south end it was glaringly lit, with the Tropicana and the Marina and the not-yet-opened Excalibur crowding back the night sky.

"Damn," said Crane, staring out the car window at the Excalibur's gigantic white towers and brightly colored conical roofs. "That looks like the grandest hole in God's own miniature golf course."

"Excalibur," said Mavranos thoughtfully. "Arthurian motif, I guess. I wonder if they've got a restaurant in there called Sir Gawain, or the Green Knight."

Ozzie was staring back at the place. "I read there's going to be an Italian restaurant in there called Lance-A-Lotta Pasta. Restraint and good taste all the way. But yeah, Las Vegas seems to be sort of subconsciously aware of—of what it is. What Siegel made it."

"Ben Siegel made it Arky's perilous chapel?" asked Crane.

"Well," said Ozzie, "I guess he didn't exactly make it here; he invoked it here. Before Siegel this place was just ripe for it."

"Keep on north?" Mavranos asked.

"Yeah," said Crane. "There ought to be a fair number of supermarkets on Charleston; that's the first big east-west street after the Sahara." Which, he thought, is where we found the infant Diana in '60. God knows where we'll find her now. "Left or right—play it by ear."

"And find us a coffee shop sometime," said Ozzie. "Or no, a liquor store, we can get some Cokes and ice and put 'em in this cooler. Diana's shift probably ends at about dawn, and we're gonna need some caffeine to keep our eyes open till then." He yawned. "After that we can find a cheap motel somewhere."

Mavranos glanced at Ozzie in the rearview mirror. "Tonight we hit the grocery stores," he said, "but tomorrow we hit the casinos, right? So I can start trackin' my … phase change."

"Sure," Ozzie said. "We can show you the ropes." He shifted on the seat and leaned against Mavranos's Coleman stove with his eyes closed. "Wake me up when you find a supermarket."

"Right," said Crane, staring blearily ahead.

After the grandeur of the Tropicana intersection the street dimmed to normal urban radiance until Aladdin's, and then Bally's and the Dunes and the Flamingo raised their towering fields of billions of synchronized light bulbs.