Last Call (Last Call 1)

Betsy Reculver was sitting back there beside the old man. "I think he said south," she said, her voice scratchy.

"Okay," said Trumbill. He spun the wheel and turned the Jaguar right, from Sahara onto Paradise, east of the Strip. For a while they drove between wide, empty dirt lots under electric lights.

The woman had wanted to get him to join some diet program. Clients, he gathered, were given little bags of dried foods to boil. The idea was to lose weight and not regain it.

I just know that somewhere inside you is a skinny man waiting to get out.

She had said it with a laugh, and a crinkling of the eyes, and a hand on his forearm—to show affection, or sympathy, or caring.

Reculver was now sniffing irritably. "I forget what you said. Is that—that Diana person coming here?"

"I have no reason to think so," Trumbill said patiently. "The man on the telephone said he knew her, and I got the impression that she lived locally, there, in southern California. Our people have been monitoring Crane's house since early Friday, and his telephone since Saturday dawn. I'll hear if they've made any progress at locating her, and she'll be killed if we can find her."

Reculver shifted in the back seat, and Trumbill heard the click as she bit one of her nails. "She's still there, then. In California. With the game coming up again I'm real sensitive—I'd have felt her cross the Nevada line like I was passing a kidney stone."

Trumbill nodded, still thinking about the young woman at the party.

He had made himself smile, and had said, Would you come with me, please? He had taken her by the arm then and led her out of the lounge to the hall, where a couple of the casino security guards stood. They had recognized him. These men will see that you get home, Trumbill had told her. She had gaped at him, taking a moment to realize that he was evicting her from the party, and then she had started to protest; but at Trumbill's nod the guards had taken her out toward the cab stand. Of course she hadn't meant any harm, but Trumbill wasn't going to let even an unknowing idiot thrust that particular card at him.

"That jack, and that fish, are over the line, though," Reculver said. "I felt them both, at nearly the same time. I wonder if the fish is this Crane fella, coming on his own."

"It's possible," said Trumbill stolidly, ready to parry any suggestions that it was his fault that Crane hadn't been captured.

But for a while they drove in silence.

"My nerves are bad tonight," said Reculver, softly from the back seat. She was apparently talking to the old body next to her. "Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? I never know what you are thinking. Think."

Old Doctor Leaky shifted and giggled. Trumbill couldn't imagine what the two of them got out of this game, this shared reciting of T. S. Eliot poetry.

"I think we are in rats' alley," the old man said in his sexless voice, "Where the dead men lost their bones."

A skinny man trying to get out. Trumbill honked the car horn in a jarring da-daaaaaa-dat at an inoffensive Volkswagen.

"Do you know nothing?" Reculver was apparently still reciting, but her voice was genuinely petulant, uneasy. "Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?"

Trumbill glanced in the rearview mirror. Doctor Leaky was sitting upright with his hands on his knees, expressionless. "I remember," the old man said, "Those are pearls that were his eyes."

Reculver sighed. "Are you alive, or not?" she asked softly, and Trumbill, not knowing any poems at all, couldn't tell if she was still reciting or just talking … nor, if she was talking, to whom. "Is there nothing in your head?"

"And we shall play a game of chess," said the old body, "pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door."

Paradise Road was dark here, south of the neon red-streaked tower of the Landmark, and most of the traffic was southbound taxis heading for the big casinos and avoiding the Strip traffic.

"I … don't sense them now," said Reculver. "They might both of them be in town now, and other fish and jacks, too, and I wouldn't know. Too close, like blades of grass right in front of your binocular lenses. Did you meet anyone, Vaughan? Did you make any—any deals you haven't told me about?"

"No, Betsy," said Trumbill. She had told him what to say to her when she got like this. "Remember what you read about paranoia in elderly women," he said. All of us in this car are just reciting things tonight, he thought. "And about fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. It's like RAM and ROM in computers. Young people got the one; old people got the other. Think about it."

"I can't think. I'm all alone. I have to do everything myself, and—and the Jacks could be anywhere."

On to phase two, thought Trumbill. "Is Hanari awake?"