Last Call (Last Call 1)

"Why should he be awake? Do you know what time it is?"

"I think you should step into his head and look around from there."

"What's wrong?" she demanded loudly. "I'm not going into his head! I'm not even going to think about him! Has he had a breakdown? Are you trying to trap me in something like this?" She slapped Doctor Leaky, who just giggled and farted loudly.

Trumbill hoped the old lady would last the two weeks until Easter. He rolled down his window. "You're not thinking clearly right now," he said. "You're upset. Anybody would be. And you're tired, from handling everything by yourself. But right now is when you've got to be extra alert, and the Art Hanari body is calm and well rested. And wouldn't it be a relief to be a man again for a little while?"

"Hmmph."

Trumbill turned right onto the dark emptiness of Sands Avenue, driving now between houses and apartments, the Mirage a glowing golden monolith visible over the low buildings ahead. He wondered whether Betsy Reculver had taken his advice or was simply not speaking to him. He sighed.

A skinny man.

Trumbill was sixty years old now, and he didn't want to lose his position. With Reculver he had his garden and his tropical fish and the arrangements for how his body was to be disposed of when he should eventually die. Among strangers none of those things would be assured, especially that most important last item. Isaac Newton would be able to get at him after all, with his damned Second Law of Thermodynamics, and—and uniformize him, grind off the serial numbers and scavenge away all the customizations, the extra mirrors and fog lamps and seat covers, as it were. Then there'd be just the equivalent of a stripped frame in a fenced-in lot stacked full of other stripped frames.

All indistinguishable from one another.

Any differences that can be taken away, he thought with a shudder, could never have been real differences to begin with. He flexed his massive forearms, knowing that the tattoos were rippling under the cloth.

The cellular telephone buzzed, and he picked it up. "Hello."

"Vaughan, this is me, in the Hanari. Of course that was all nonsense, all that stuff I was saying. Listen, have I been bathing enough?"

It had never quite ceased to startle Trumbill when the boss did the body switch, apparently as effortlessly as someone shifting in a chair so as to look out a different window.

"Bathing," said Trumbill. "Sure."

"Well, watch me. I read that old ladies sometimes forget about cleanliness. Listen, we're not going to find them tonight. Let's head back to the house."

"Back to the house," Trumbill repeated.

Doctor Leaky yawned. "But at my back from time to time I hear," he said, "The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring."

Trumbill heard the Art Hanari body's flat ha-ha-ha laugh. Reculver had once told him that laughing that way didn't produce wrinkles. And then the Hanari voice began singing:

"O the moon shines bright on Mrs. Porter

And on the daughter

Of Mrs. Porter.

They wash their feet in soda water

And so they oughter

To keep them clean."

Trumbill hung up the phone and drove with both chubby hands on the wheel.

The moon had gone down by the time the woman walked out of the bright entrance of the Smith Market on Maryland Parkway, and the sky behind the Muddy Mountains was pale blue. She shuffled tiredly out across the parking lot to a tan Mustang, got in, started it up, and drove out of the lot, turning north on Maryland.

North of Bonanza she passed a dark blue Suburban heading south; she didn't glance at it, and the three men in it were oblivious of her.

But the high walls and the parking lots of the city echoed briefly to a faint, harsh shout, a grating exclamation that coughed out of the plaster throats of the Roman and Egyptian statues in front of Caesars Palace, and the southern belles and ship's officers on the deck of the Holiday Casino, and the Arabs on the stone camels in front of the Sahara, and the miner crouched over a panful of gold-colored light bulbs on the roof of the Western Village souvenir store, and from the plywood necks of the two smiling figures in front of the dealer's school on Charleston, and from the steel crossbeam in the neck of Vegas Vic, the five-story-tall man-shaped structure that towered over the roof of the Pioneer; and the neon-lit paddle wheels on the riverboat facades of the Holiday Casino and the Showboat and the Paddlewheel shivered for a moment in the still air of pre-dawn, shaking dust down into the blue shadows, as if about to begin to move.

CHAPTER 18: Fool's Day