Last Call (Last Call 1)

Trying to seem relaxed, he looked around at the shack's interior. A box in one corner was covered with a flannelly-looking cloth, and, startled by it, he looked up at the skylight. It was stained glass, though now it shone only in a spectrum of grays. He had dreamed of this place yesterday. In the dream there had been a cup and a lance head on the cloth-draped box.

"Yup," said Snayheever, nodding jerkily. "Yesterday I was caretaker. On Holy Saturday you all get to fight over who gets to hold them during the next cycle."

Snayheever was shaking and frowning. Crane mentally rehearsed pulling out the .357 and aiming it and firing it.

"This is your fault, this shaking," Snayheever said. "Tardive dyskinesia, from too much Thorazine they gave me." He pointed the wobbling gun at the boy in the chair. "Mother's here now, and I don't really need any brothers. In my head sometimes my eyes roll up with this, and then Aristarchus would get loose and kill me, so not to share the mother."

The boy in the chair was wide-eyed now, humming shrilly behind the tape and tugging his bound wrists against the chair legs.

Crane couldn't shoot Snayheever now, not with the gun pointed at Scat; the shock of a bullet's impact would probably make Snayheever pull the trigger.

The blood was singing in Crane's ears as he opened his mouth and spoke. "Look what I brought," he said softly.

Snayheever swung the gun toward him, and Crane reached up and yanked the .357 out of his belt.

The little automatic went off, and as Crane fired his own gun he felt that hot punch in his side, above the point of his hip-bone; cocking the revolver for another shot, he jumped sideways and knocked the chair over and went to his knees beside it, blocking Scat from any more shots.

His ears were ringing from the blast of the .357, and he'd nearly been blinded by the muzzle flash, but he could see Snayheever groping for the automatic, which was spinning now on a moonlit patch of the floor.

Crane swung the revolver back over his shoulder and then slammed it down, hard, onto the back of Snayheever's head.

The revolver nearly sprained Crane's unbraced wrist when it fired again, and as he tumbled forward across Snayheever's body, he was showered with gleaming shards of broken glass.

Crane sat up, grabbed Snayheever's gun with his left hand, and flung it up through the shot-out skylight. Then he climbed to his feet, bracing himself on the altar box.

Snayheever was apparently unconscious. Crane tucked the hot revolver back into his belt and, shivering violently, dug his hand into his pocket to get out his jackknife.

The Suburban was already parked right behind the Mustang when Crane and the boy crested the top of the hill, and Mavranos was halfway up from the highway side, running in a low crouch with his .38 glinting in his hand. Ozzie was hugging Diana, perhaps holding her back, beside the Mustang.

"It's okay!" Crane yelled hoarsely. He swayed, his right hand pressed against his side. "It's me, with the kid!"

Then Mavranos had sprinted the rest of the way up the hill and was beside him, panting.

"Damn, Pogo," Mavranos gasped, "are you shot?"

"Yes," said Crane through clenched teeth. "Let's get out of here before we deal with it. The nut's back there in a shed, knocked out. I don't think we have to go back and kill him, do you?"

"Nah, nah, let's just get out of here like you say. Diana and her kids can be in Provo or somewhere by dawn. You okay, kid?"

Scat just nodded.

"Your mom's down there, go say hi."

The boy peered down the hill, then saw Diana's Mustang and took off at a run.

"Carefully, kid!" Mavranos yelled after him. He bent and pulled Crane's blood-sopping shirt away from his side. "Aw, this ain't so bad, man. Just grooved you, didn't even touch the muscle layer, and the bleeding's no more than what you'd get from a good cut, no arterial spurting. I can bandage this; it's nothing compared to what you did to your leg."

Crane let his shoulders slump. "Good. You do that, when we get away from here." During the hasty, agonizing walk from the box to the hill crest he had been imagining passing out from loss of blood, and then at best waking up in a hospital bed, his body picadored with drains and IV tubes and a colostomy bag.

"Arky," he said weakly, "when we get down there, I'm going to drink one of your beers, very fast, and then another one very slow."

Mavranos laughed. "I'll join you. And if old Ozzie objects, I'll sit on him."

Mavranos had his arm under Crane's shoulders and was taking his weight as they shuffled down the dirt road. Crane could see Diana break away from Ozzie and come running across the gas station lot, past the wrecked cinder-block wall.

"Here comes Diana," Crane said, for the moment too happy to take a deep breath. "I saved her son."

"And got a battle wound," agreed Mavranos. "Maybe I should let her patch you up."