Last Call (Last Call 1)

The driver of the other cab was standing by her front bumper. He had been cursing until he saw that the negligent driver was a pretty young Asian woman, and now he was just gruff.

"Just a minute," she told him. "I'll be back in a minute."

She hurried in through the open doors of the casino and blundered through the chilly tobacco-scented dimness until she found a Blackjack table. The dealer was using a multiple deck, and two of the hands on the red felt table showed a Jack of Hearts next to a Queen of Hearts.

"Shit," she whispered, really frightened for the first time since escaping from DuLac's.

Dondi Snayheever waited in his idling car in the parking lot of the abandoned gas station until there were no headlights very close in either direction, and then he switched off his own lights and drove very slowly off the cracked old concrete and up the dirt road.

His father had bought this land sometime in the early fifties, and might still own it. The old man had said that the place had strong vibrations, that it would be a good place for the boy to learn, that the cards would be livelier here.

His father. His father was coming to see him, for the first time in nine years. With his mother!

Snayheever didn't seem to be able to hold on to any one feeling about his father. Over the years since 1981 he had sometimes missed the old man so badly that he had returned to the Baker box, crawled inside, and then just shouted for him until he was hoarse, thinking that he might that way turn back time, so that his father would not have disappeared yet; at other times he wanted to kill him for having left his son to deal with an incomprehensible world all alone.

The little car lurched over the top of the low hill, and he could see his plywood box off to the left among a stand of yucca.

It occurred to him that young Aristarchus here was his brother. Snayheever was treating him a little harshly, for a brother. He'd have to lift the kid up and put a cushion on the chair under him.

Outside town the glow of the Mustang's headlights on the rushing highway ahead of them was the only light besides the faint silvery glow thrown by the half-moon.

I should have got the kids out of town, at least, Diana thought, as soon as I got off the phone with Scott on Friday night. Anything, like Moses' mother putting her baby son in a boat and just letting the river take him, rather than let them stay for this. That's what a good mother would have done. At least Oliver is with his grandfather in the truck a hundred yards back.

"Closed gas station up ahead," said Scott.

"I see it."

She slowed and signaled for a right turn—and then she saw something out of the corner of her eye, and gunned the engine and yanked the wheel around, and the car spun out in the roadside gravel and came to a halt on the shoulder, rocking on the abused shocks, pointing back the way they'd come. The engine was quiet—stalled.

"What is it?" Scott whispered urgently. His hand was under his shirt, on the grip of the revolver.

"A car—" Dust from the spinout swirled outside the windows of the rocking car, but she could see well enough to know that it had been a hallucination. "I must be going crazy. I thought I saw a car leave the road real fast and blow up—right over there." She pointed at a half-demolished cinder-block wall on the south end of the gas station lot.

Crane squinted in the direction she was pointing, and for just an instant he saw a blooming yellow fireball, curdling black at the edges, rising into the sky, in perfect silence—then it was gone, leaving nothing but a dark blur in his vision.

"I saw it too, for a second—" he began. Then he paused, his mouth still open.

He had seen it through his right eye. The plastic eye.

"What's the matter? What was it?"

"I don't know," he said, opening his door and stepping out onto the highway pavement. The broken cinder-block wall at the south end of the lot was weathered and cracked, surrounded by windblown trash, and didn't seem to have been even approached by anyone for decades.

Diana had got out, too, and was standing on the curb. The night wind blew the stirred-up dust away across the desert.

Crane looked at her and shrugged. "Maybe it was something that happened here a long time ago, and the Jack and Queen of Hearts arriving together stirred old images out of the ruins."

"Well, let's get back in the car, the dirt road is—"

The flat, hard pop of an outdoor gunshot interrupted her, and Crane heard the whine of a ricochet off the asphalt a dozen yards to his right.

He hurried around the car, grabbed Diana and pulled her back to the highway side, and forced her down into a crouch behind the fender.

"My father first!" came a call from the crest of a low hill behind the station. "My mother wait in the car, for just a minute. Everything's fine! Everything's fine!"

Well, I guess you got a gun, Crane thought, echoing what Snayheever had told them in Baker two days ago.