Last Call (Last Call 1)

"Me? What the hell do you mean by that? I ain't been tired. Nah, one more night. You guys might get into a fight, and you'd need me. I can track my odds today, and tonight mess with the slots in the market entrances while you guys go in and ask your question."

"One thing for sure," said Ozzie, "tomorrow we spring for a decent breakfast. One more of these dollar-ninety-nine specials is gonna burn its way right out through the front of my shirt. Boys, it's bedtime. You wanna talk, do it outside."

A loud bumping came over the phones now, and Funo realized that at least one of the men in the next room must intend to sleep on the floor. Funo glanced nervously at the wire that disappeared into the hole he'd drilled in the dry wall on his side, and he hoped whichever of them it was wouldn't notice the little hole on the other side.

After a few minutes he relaxed. All he could hear now was slow, even breathing.

He took off the earphones and stood up, buckling his belt, then took the telephone into the bathroom and punched in the number that went with the gray Jag.

The phone at the other end rang once, and then a tape-recorded voice recited the number back at him. Right after that came the beep.

"Uh," said Funo, rattled by the rudeness of it, "I know where the people you were looking for Saturday are in California. I mean, you were in California, looking for them. Scott Crane and Ozzie and Diana." He waited, but no one picked up the phone. "I'm going to call this number again in three hours, that's ten o'clock exactly, let's say, and then we can dicker about how much my services would be worth to you."

He hung up. That should do something.

As he went to the closet to select a shirt, he reflected that old Ozzie was right—a good breakfast was important. Maybe there was a Denny's nearby. He could buy a newspaper and sit at the counter and maybe get into a conversation with somebody.

Vaughan Trumbill had cleaned up the breakfast dishes and vacuumed the living room and hall, and now sat at the desk in his room, writing checks in Betsy's big old checkbook. At a quarter to ten he figured up the new balance and inked the number at the bottom of the current page; then he closed the book and put it in the drawer.

He crossed to the aquarium and allowed himself to net up a two-inch-long catfish; he held it carefully just behind the head and bit off the body. Chewing strongly, he lowered his hand into the water and uprooted an Amazon sword-plant, swirled it in the murky water to get the dirt off the roots, and then folded that into his mouth. The catfish head he wrapped in several sheets of Kleenex and tucked into the pocket of his white shirt as he continued to chew his snack.

Live snacks, though of necessity generally skimpy, were always the most satisfying.

The white walls of his room were uncluttered by any pictures, and his window looked out onto a flat expanse of gravel and a high gray cinder-block wall. As always, he stared around at the sterile simplicity before leaving the room, breathing the chilly, odorless air, imprinting it all in his mind—for the rest of Betsy Reculver's house was a clutter of bookcases and overstuffed furniture and framed photographs, and these days she used too much perfume.

LaShane came trotting up to him in the hall, and Trumbill absently patted the big Doberman on its narrow head. Before stepping into the living room, he automatically glanced at the television screens above the doorway to make sure that there was nobody in the back or side yards or the area around the front door.

Betsy Reculver was sitting on the couch in the living room, staring at her hands in her lap, and when he entered the room she glanced at him blankly. "Beany," she said, then went back to staring at her hands.

He nodded and sat down in the only chair in the room she would let him put his weight on. He dug the Kleenex-wrapped catfish head out of his pocket and unobtrusively dropped it into a nearby wastebasket. He didn't like having organic stuff in the wastebasket in his own room, even just for a little while.

He looked around the living room, remembering times when there'd been half a dozen men sitting around waiting for Betsy's orders. Trumbill had found her and started working for her in 1955, when he'd been twenty-six, newly home from having learned the truth about the world in Korea. Some of the men working for her—Abrams, Guillen—had been with her since before 1949, when she'd still been inhabiting the Georges Leon body.

That poor old Georges Leon body, which was now known as Doctor Leaky.

Eventually, during the sixties, when she'd been Ricky Leroy, she'd had to kill all of them.

Every one of them had eventually come to want the throne for himself, the immortality that could be had through assuming a succession of one's own children. Trumbill knew that she … he, it, Georges Leon, really … had considered killing him, too, before finally realizing the truth—that Trumbill was not interested in any life beyond the life of his own body.