Last Call (Last Call 1)

Biting back bewildered sobs, he yanked the box back in to shore with one hand while shielding his face from the bats with the other, and then, with the shiny dripping box dangling from his fist, he blundered back down the beach and splashed out to the boat.

When he had tossed the box onto the seat, climbed in himself and in neutral gear deafeningly gunned the big car engine under the Plexiglas hood behind him, the bats seemed to circle higher; and when he spun the wheel and slammed the shift into gear and goosed the boat out across the water straight away from the island, they didn't follow, but broke away and dispersed across the sky.

He let the engine fall back to idle then, and sat panting and shaking in the suddenly becalmed boat as he watched the creatures scatter away, back to the mountain caves in which, on any sane day, they'd have lingered until sunset.

For the first time since the day in the school library when he had figured out the nature of this mystical western kingship, he wished he could break the regimen and drink—get really, thoroughly drunk.

Eventually he got the boat moving, as slowly as the erratic throttle would allow, back toward the marinas of the Lake Mead Resort. Tears and sweat slicked his classically handsome face.

I killed Max for nothing, he thought dully. The sacrifice was rejected, like Cain's.

How could that have happened? Did I disqualify myself by killing Max? No, worse things were done by the old kings. Should I have waited, or done it sooner? Is there already a king's head in Lake Mead, and there isn't psychic room for another?

By the time he got back to the rental dock he had shaken off the passion of loss and hopelessness.

I can still become the king, he told himself as he pulsed the engine and nudged the boat in toward the crowded dock. But I've got to find my damned half-sister—I've got to find Nardie Dinh.

The westering sun was intensifying the orange color of the motel curtains as Crane shuffled the flimsy little deck and dealt out onto the bed five cards each to himself and Ozzie and Mavranos. It was too early to start searching the supermarkets again, and Ozzie had forbidden fooling around with real cards, so Mavranos had fetched from the Suburban a kids' Crazy Eights deck he'd got at a Carl's Jr. hamburger restaurant.

Every card had a cheery, stylized picture of an animal on it, and as the game progressed and cards were discarded face up, Mavranos was amused by the selection of colorful, grinning birds and beasts tossed out across the motel bedspread.

"You know why nobody could play cards aboard the Ark, don't you?" he asked.

Crane rolled his eyes, but Ozzie looked up suspiciously. "No," the old man said, "why?"

Mavranos took a sip of beer. " 'Cause Noah was sitting on the deck." Dry summer thunder boomed, out over the McCullough Range to the south.

Oh, come on, thought Crane, it wasn't that funny.

CHAPTER 19: A Skinny Man Trying to Get Out

The micrometer looked like a monkey wrench for some insanely fastidious mechanic, and its gleaming precision seemed out of place amid the chip racks and adding machines and cigarette-burned desks of the cluttered casino office. Nardie Dinh dutifully held the tool up in the fluorescent light and read the number on the round metal sleeve.

"This one's right on, too," she told the frowning floorman as she loosened the ratchet knob at the base and freed the second of the pair of dice he had brought to her.

She held the translucent red cube close to her face and looked at the faint, tiny initials she had scratched into the one-dot face of the cube, and then she flipped it over and found the microscopic moon symbol she had delicately etched on the six-dot face. Both marks were, of course, exactly as she had scratched them in at midnight, when her shift as night manager of the Tiara Casino dice pit had begun.

She put down the red cube and the micrometer and absently wiped her hands. "They're good," she told the floorman shortly. "He's not switching in his own dice."

"How can he be rolling so many snake eyes then? The boxman says he's been rolling them the right way, bouncing them off the table's far wall every time."

Because, Dinh thought, tonight when I put my mark on the dice, I asked the Craps tables if I would succeed in my purpose, and snake eyes means Yes, if no others are involved.

"I don't know, Charlie," she said. Her latest coffee was still too hot to drink, so she held up the Styrofoam cup and inhaled the vivifying steam. "Is he betting the proposition two, or the Any Craps?"

Charlie the floorman shook his head. "No, he's losing, playing the Pass Line with dollar chips. But other people are starting to play those bets, and one of 'em could be a partner."