Last Call (Last Call 1)

The old man looked up at him, his eyes hopeless. "The kid's just the first of us," Ozzie said softly. "There's no way she can leave town now. By Easter all of us will be dead."

"S'pose you're right," Crane said numbly. He saw a coffeepot on a table below the muted flicker of a wall-mounted television. "Coffee in the meantime?"

"Sure, black."

When Crane came back with two steaming Styrofoam cups, Diana was sitting beside Ozzie; a magazine lay open on her lap, and she was staring at an article on how to build a backyard barbecue. Crane noticed for the first time that she was still wearing her Smith's uniform, red-striped black pants and a red and white shirt now redder with her son's blood.

"Coffee, Diana?" he ventured. She shook her head, and he sighed and put Ozzie's down on the table.

He had given up trying to talk to her.

On the high-speed drive to the hospital Ozzie had told them how much to tell the police, and Crane, his eyes on the lanes ahead and the cars they were passing, had stammeringly tried to shout back an apology to Diana, who was crouched in the back over her son, but after only a few syllables Ozzie had interrupted: "Son, she doesn't want to hear about it right now."

So now he just sat down and sipped his coffee and waited.

Random chance, Crane thought. It was only the randomest chance that made the bullet hit the kid. I knew there were people after us, but why do God's own luck-dictating dice seem determined to fuck us up? Susan's fibrillation, Arky's cancer—I'll have to ask Arky about his precious statistics.

Mavranos had taken Oliver away in the Mustang to wait for them by the carousel bar at the Circus Circus. Diana and Ozzie had agreed that nobody had better go back to her apartment. Crane wondered whether she had managed, in her brief phone call, to convince her "life-partner" to leave the place. Crane guessed not.

A couple of other people sat in chairs closer to the hallway—a young man in a sleeveless T-shirt clutched a blood-blotted rag to his forearm, and a woman muttered softly to a crying child on her lap—but the only voices Crane heard were the occasional laconic, coded calls on the public address system.

After a few minutes a police officer in a tan, short-sleeved uniform came in with the doctor who seemed to be in charge, and they stood talking by the cashier's window. The officer was carrying a clipboard, and Crane got to his feet—feeling hot interior tuggings in his leg and his side—and walked closer to them, hoping to hear something reassuring about Scat's condition.

The officer was filling out a hospitalization gunshot report, and Crane heard the doctor tell him that the shot had been long-range, the caliber anywhere from .32 to 9-millimeter; it had shattered the right eye orbit, entered the skull, and then exited beside the ear, outside the temporal lobe; the temporal lobe was injured, it was too early to say how badly, though the "posturing," the pulling in of the arms, was not a good sign; and no, the wound could not have been self-inflicted.

Eventually the officer walked past Crane and spoke to Diana, and then she stood up and followed him away down the carpeted hallway.

Crane walked back to where Ozzie sat. "She'll probably tell him it was some friend of mine that shot Scat."

Ozzie sighed and rubbed his brown-spotted forehead. "No, son. She understands that making it out to be an interstate thing would probably involve the FBI, and that that would just make for more delays in getting her and her kids away."

Crane sat down and sipped his coffee, holding the cup with both hands so that it wouldn't shake. "I wish we could let the FBI take it."

"Sure," Ozzie said. "Explain to them that this is all a battle to see who'll become the magical Fisher King, and that the nut found her by consulting cards and maps of Poland. And they'd never agree to the kind of protective custody and witness relocation that she needs."

When Crane finished the coffee, he picked up Diana's magazine and looked at the pictures of the do-it-yourself barbecue. He tried to imagine himself and Ozzie and Diana and the two boys cooking hamburgers, tossing a Frisbee around, ambling inside when it got dark to watch Big or something on the VCR—but it was like trying to imagine daily life in ancient Rome. Diana and the officer came back in and crossed to the couch, and Diana sat down.

The officer looked at Crane. "You're Scott Crane, the other gunshot victim?" He was younger than Crane, with a mustache that might have been invisible in a harsher light, but he was as relaxed as if he talked to mothers of shot children every night.

Crane started to point at his bandaged wound, conspicuous under his torn-open shirt, but his hand was trembling, and he let it fall into his lap. "Yes," he said.

"Could you come with me, please?"