Last Call (Last Call 1)

Crane stared at the Flamingo. The entrance doors and broad driveway sat in under a rippling red and gold and orange upsweep of lights that made the place seem to be on fire. He remembered seeing it twenty years ago, when there had only been a modest tower at the north end and a freestanding neon sign out front; and he dimly remembered the long, low structure it had been, set back from the highway by a broad lawn, when he had gone there with his real father in the late forties.

Siegel's place, Crane thought. Later—maybe still—my father's.

Even at midnight Fremont Street's three broad one-way lanes shone in the white glare of the lights that sheathed Binion's Horseshoe, and the tourists getting out of the cab were blinking around and grinning selfconsciously. The fare was eleven dollars and some change, and when one of the tourists handed Bernardette Dinh a twenty, she looked at him with no expression and said, "Are we okay?"

As she'd hoped, he took it as meaning something like Is this downtown enough for you? and he nodded emphatically. She nodded, too, pocketed the twenty, and unhooked the microphone as though about to call for another fare. Too embarrassed now to ask for his change, the tourist closed the door and joined his companions, who were huddled uncomfortably in the sidewalk limelight.

Stage fright, she thought. They think everybody's looking at them, and they're afraid they don't know the moves and the lines.

Strikers from the culinary and bartenders unions were walking back and forth carrying signs in front of the Horseshoe, and one of them, a young woman with very short hair, had a megaphone.

"Baaad luck," the striker was chanting in an eerie, flat voice. "Baad luck at the 'Shoe! Come on oouut, losers!"

God, Dinh thought. Maybe I'd have stage fright, too.

Every Thanksgiving Binion's gave a turkey to each cabdriver, and Dinh, known as Nardie to all the night people of Las Vegas, had always dropped off her downtown fares in front of the place. She wondered if she'd soon have to start unloading them back by the Four Queens.

A couple of police cars were parked across the street in front of the Golden Nugget, but the officers were just leaning against the cars and watching the strikers; the tourists on this Saturday-night-or-Sunday-morning were plentiful, ambling along the sidewalks and drifting from one side of the street to the other, lured by the racket of coins being spat into the payout wells of the slot machines, a rapid-fire clank-clank-clank that was always audible behind the car horns and the shouting of drunks and the droning blare of the striker's megaphone. Nardie Dinh decided to wait for another fare right where she was.

Down here between these high-shouldered incandescent buildings she couldn't see the sky—she could hardly make out the traffic signals in the sea of more insistent artificial light—but she knew that it was a just-about-half-moon that hung somewhere out over the desert. Dinh knew she was working at half power—for the next few days she'd still be able to handle pennies without darkening them, to touch ivy and not wither it, wear purple without fading it and linen without blackening it.

But she was vulnerable, too, and would be all week—only able to really see through the patterns of the initialed dice at her other job, and able to defend herself only with her wits and her agility and the little ten-ounce Beretta .25 automatic under her shirt in her waistband.

In nine days the moon would be full—and by then she would have beaten both her brother and the reigning King … or she would not. If she hadn't, she would probably be dead.

A bearded man in a leather jacket was walking, apparently drunk, toward her cab. She watched him speculatively, thinking of some big losers who had in the past decided that this short, slim young Asian woman would be an easy target for robbery or rape.

But when he opened the rear passenger door and leaned in, he said, hesitantly, "Could you take me to a—a wedding chapel?"

Should have guessed, she thought. "Sure," she said. The man's face was pudgy and uncertain behind the bushy beard, and she knew she didn't need to call in his ID and destination; and he looked prosperous and out of shape—no need to get a ten in advance; he wasn't the runout type.

He got in, and she put the car in gear and pulled out into traffic. The chapels, of course, didn't pay kickbacks on solo fares, so she decided to take him to one of the ones down below Charleston.

She stopped at a red light two blocks up, at Main, in front of the Union Plaza Hotel, and she suppressed a grin, for the hundreds of little white light bulbs over the hotel's broad circular driveway shone in the polish on the unloading cars, making them seem to be luminously decorated for a Fremont Street wedding procession.

Weddings.