Last Call (Last Call 1)

"It's got to be just chance," she told him, "but let's unwrap some fresh dice from the factory and I'll mark them and we can just retire all the dice that are out there now." And this time I won't ask the tables any question, she thought.

Charlie looked disconcerted. "All the dice?"

"That last lot might have been funny. I like to err on the side of safety."

He shrugged. "You're the boss."

When he had gone to get the boxes, she stood up from the desk and stretched. She had applied for this job because the Tiara was perhaps the last casino in town that still had the shift managers initial the dice, and she was so closely aligned with the moon that, with her moon mark on the dice, she had several times been able to get answers from the little cubes.

This was the first time the answer had been so evident as to excite attention, though. I suppose, she thought, if I were to ask them anything next week, when the moon is full, every pair of dice in the place would come up identical, over and over again.

She stretched again, lifting her elbows and massaging her narrow shoulders. Four hours since I parked the cab and got out of the uniform, she thought, and I still feel like I'm bent behind a steering wheel. I'll be glad when dawn rolls around and I can get out of here, drive down to placid Henderson.

For a day job, she had found a little insurance office in Henderson that needed a bookkeeper. She was generally at her most lethargic when the sun was up, so the automatic-pilot work of adding numbers was ideal, and in the insurance office, eighteen miles south of Las Vegas, she was not likely to be recognized by any of the people who knew her from her night jobs.

Which was just as well—they'd wonder when she ever slept. She frowned, remembering how unconsciousness had nearly caught her yesterday.

Yesterday at exactly dawn she had almost fainted in the cashier's cage while she'd been putting away the drop boxes for the next shift manager, and when the blurry dizziness had passed, she had hurried out onto the floor to the nearest table, where a desultory two-dollar Blackjack game was going on.

For a couple of minutes, like the fading figures on a switched-off computer screen, she had seen the Jack and Queen of Hearts showing up more often than they had any statistical right to, and she had known that a powerful Jack and a powerful Queen had just passed very close to each other somewhere out there in the streets of the city.

Dinh was determined that she herself was the one who would be wearing Isis's crown come Easter, and she wondered now what she might have to do to prevent this mysteriously powerful Queen from beating her to it. She didn't want to kill anyone except her stepbrother.

The sound of a key turning in a lock.

In the moment of waking up, Funo thought his own motel room door had been opened, and he snatched the pistol off the bedside table. Then he realized that he was alone in the room; the sound had come though the earphones he'd been wearing while he slept.

"I bet she moved," came a man's voice, faintly. He must have been facing away from the wall between the two rooms. "I bet when she got Scott's call, it spooked her into just pulling up stakes and moving to Ohio or somewhere."

Funo put down the gun, then sat up and began pulling on his pants, carefully so as not to dislodge the earphones. He looked at the little electric clock—seven in the morning.

"I … don't think so," said another man, his amplified voice louder. "I keep getting … impressions that aren't my own, little whiffs of worry and humor, and tastes, like yesterday I tasted a wine that I hadn't drunk. I have the feeling she's nearby."

"Well, probably one of those stores we hit was the right place, and they lied. Supermarkets probably have a policy against telling strangers the names of their employees. Especially strangers who look like they've been sleeping in their clothes."

"Nah," came the voice of a third man, who sounded much older, "we've met three wrong Dianas, haven't we? We'll find the right one yet. She didn't have the sense to at least work in one of the North Las Vegas places, so she must be in one of the ones down by the Strip. There can't be more than a couple. We'll find her tonight."

Funo zipped up his pants and, leaning as far as he could against the slack of the headphones wire, managed to grab a clean shirt from his bag.

"What if she's changed her name, then, Ozzie?" the first man's voice went on. "I bet she would have, from the things you told her about this town."

"Then we'll probably see her," said the old man in the next room. "And yes, I will be able to recognize her, even after a dozen years."

"You don't have to come, Arky," said the second man, who Funo guessed was Scott Crane. "I mean, we can take cabs. You've been looking tired, and cash ain't our problem."