Last Call Page 10

  Oddly, this seemed to shake Scott. “I bet,” he said finally. “See you mañana.”

  “Okay, Pogo.”

  After Scott had gone inside, Mavranos sipped his Coors thoughtfully. He’s it, all right, he thought. Scott Crane is definitely my connection to the place where math and statistics and randomness border on magic.

  And magic is what I need, he thought, fingering the lump under his ear.

  Again Scott Crane dreamed of the game on the lake.

  And as always, the dream-game progressed just as the real game had happened in 1969…until he won the cut, and was raking in the pile of money.

  “You’re taking the money for the hand,” said Ricky Leroy softly. Already tension was filling the big room, like a subsonic tone that Scott could feel in his teeth and his belly.

  “Uh…yes.”

  “You’re selling it.”

  Scott looked around. Something profound was moving or changing somewhere, but the green table and the other players and the paneled walls looked the same. “I guess you could put it that way.”

  “And I’ve bought it. I’ve assumed it.” Leroy held out his right hand.

  Scott reached across and shook hands. “It’s all yours.”

  And then Scott was outside his own body, floating above the table in the whirling smoke; perhaps he had become the smoke. The scale of everything was changing: the table below him was an enormous green plain, and the other players were giants, expressionless, all trace of humanity left behind in the tininess of comprehensible distances. The walls were gone, Lake Mead was as vast as the night sky, and three of the dam’s intake towers were gone; the remaining tower in the water soared away above and seemed to threaten the moon, which in the dream was full and bright.

  There was motion out in the night. A figure was dancing on one of the remote cliffs; it seemed to be as far away as the stars, but with the clear vision of nightmare Scott could see that the person carried a long stick and that a dog was leaping around its ankles. The dancing figure was smiling up into the dark sky, apparently careless of the wavy-edged precipice at its feet.

  And though Scott couldn’t see him, he knew that there was another giant out there, in the lake, under the black water, and that like Scott he had only one eye.

  Seized with vertigo, Scott looked down. His own body, and Leroy’s, were looking up at him, their faces broad as clouds and absolutely identical. One of the faces—he couldn’t any longer tell which—opened the canyon of its mouth and inhaled, and the smoky wisp that was Scott’s consciousness spiraled rapidly down toward the black chasm.

  “Scott,” Susan was saying. “Scott, you’re just dreaming, I’m here. This is me, you’re in your own bedroom.”

  “Oh, Sue,” he gasped. He tried to hold her, but she slid away across her side of the mattress.

  “Not yet, Scott,” she said with a yearning tone in her voice. “Soon, but not quite now. Go have a beer, you’ll feel better.”

  Scott climbed out of bed on his side. He noticed that he had slept in his clothes, and his Poker winnings were still a bulk in his pants pocket. Even his shoes were still on. “Coffee right now,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

  He blundered down the hall to the dark, stove-warmed kitchen and put a coffee cup full of tap water into the microwave oven and punched full power for two minutes. Then he went to the window and wiped out a clear patch in the condensation.

  Main Street was quiet. Only a few cars and trucks murmured past under the streetlights, and the solitary figure walking across the parking lot had an air of virtuous purpose, as if he were going to the early shift at Norm’s and not away from the scene of some shabby crime. Dawn was still an hour or so away, but already some birds were cheeping in the big old carob trees along the sidewalk.

  Susan’s not really in there, he thought dully. She’s dead. I know that.

  I’m forty-seven.

  I never should have lived this long.

  It’s like sitting in the jungle, changing your bandages and eating canned C-rations or whatever soldiers eat, and watching the skies: There should have been choppers by now.

  Or like riding a bicycle with your feet wired to the pedals. You can do it, for a very long time, but eventually you start to wonder when somebody’s going to come along and stop the bike and clip your feet loose so you can get off.

  Am I supposed to just keep on doing this?

  He thought he could hear someone breathing softly in the bed.

  No good could come of thinking about it.

  He thought about the six or eight beers in the refrigerator. He had laid them out on the cold rack before he went to bed, like an artilleryman laying out the shells that would be needed for tomorrow’s siege.

  The microwave binged softly five times, and he opened its door and took out the cup and stirred a spoonful of instant coffee into the heated water, then cooled it with a dribble of water from the tap.

  Back at the window with the coffee, he abruptly remembered singing a snatch of “Sonny Boy” in front of Arky. What else had he done or said? He couldn’t remember. He never worried about anything he said or did when sober, but he had not been sober last night. Or any night recently.

  He walked to the back door and looked through the window at Mavranos’s apartment across the alley. The lights were all out. Arky would probably sleep past noon, as always. God knew how the man made a living.

  Scott’s .357 revolver was lying on the shelf that held all the cookbooks. He remembered laying it there a couple of hours ago when he had had to bend over to pick up the half-full carton of beers.

  Rebar. Arky had noticed the shot-out windshield. And Scott remembered that Ozzie had always registered his car with a P.O. box address, in case someone took down his license plate number.

  Scott had stopped bothering with that in ’80, when he quit Poker and married Susan. His current registration listed this address.

  He put the coffee down.

  Suddenly he was certain that the gunman had written down his license plate number and had found the address and was now waiting outside in the Porsche, or in another car, watching this house. Perhaps he had planted a bomb under the foundations. That would be the easiest way.

  The death panic of his dream was all at once back on him, and he grabbed the gun, thankful that he had not turned on the kitchen light. He took a few deep breaths—and then slowly, silently, with trembling fingers unhooked the chain and carefully forced the warped old door open.

  The night air was cold on his sweaty face and scalp. He quickly scanned the dark yard over the extended barrel of the gun, then with his free hand pressed the door closed behind him and stole down the steps. For several seconds he just stood and breathed through his open mouth, listening; then he picked his way slowly through the unmowed grass toward the loose boards in the fence. Beyond that lay the alley, the secret city capillary that led to a hundred dark and solitary streets.

  One of the jacks found him first and killed him, thought Vaughan Trumbill when the Jaguar’s headlights swept across the parking lot on Second Street and made a glittering snowfield of the Torino’s holed rear window. Her Easter wardrobe is gonna be slim if this keeps up.

  He drove on past, turning his big head rapidly from side to side to see if the killer or killers might still be nearby, but all the parked cars he could see were empty and dark.

  Could be anywhere, he thought, on a dark porch, on a roof, but they probably wouldn’t hang around.

  He drove quickly around the block and then pulled in to the parking lot and stopped next to the Torino.

  For several moments he just sat in the idling car. The small trout in the tank on the seat next to him—the poisson sympathique—was just bumping around randomly. That might mean that Trumbill’s quarry was dead, or that the damned fish was just dizzy from motion.

  Trumbill got ponderously out of the car and walked to the driver’s side of the Torino—and he allowed himself a sigh of relief when he saw that there was no bod
y in the car, nor even any evidence of blood on the upholstery or the billion-faceted windshield.

  They only tried, he thought as he got back into his own car and backed out of the parking lot. He noted the license plate number of the Torino when his headlights were on the car, and after he had parked on the street, he used his car phone to call for the data on the registration. His source promised to call him back in a few minutes.

  Then he called for back-up—a clean van and a couple of guys to help.

  Finally Trumbill sat back in the leather seat and opened a Ziploc plastic bag full of celery and carrot sticks.

  It had been a long drive from Lake Mead. The damned trout had first led him to Las Vegas, and then for half an hour had sent him circling counterclockwise around the Flamingo Hilton—Flamingo Road to Paradise to Sands to the Strip to Flamingo again—but had finally settled down and faced southwest. It had stayed pointed that way while Trumbill drove across the midnight desert on the straight dark line that was 1-15 to Baker, and then down to Barstow into, eventually, the maze of Orange County. At that point freeways proved to be too fast for the fish to be reliable, and Trumbill had had to exit and negotiate surface streets, slowly enough so that the trout would have time to shift around in its tank on the seat.

  During the drive Trumbill had finished the hastily thrown-together bag of tropical fish and seaweed, and now the carrots and celery were gone. He eyed the leaves of the ginger plant in the lawn beyond the curb.

  Not yet, he told himself.

  He glanced around at the neighborhood. There was a 1930s-vintage duplex across the street—Spanish style, white stucco and clay tile roofs—and a similar house at the Main Street corner and a couple of featureless new five-story condominiums behind him. The Torino’s owner probably lived in one of the little duplex houses, which he or she probably rented.

  I need a snack now, he thought.

  Trumbill opened the door and walked across the sidewalk to the planter, and as he peeled off a few leaves, he wondered which of the last game’s winners this would turn out to be—and why he or she had refrained from playing cards again until this evening.

  He got back into the car and closed the door.

  There was no mystery about why the person was playing cards now, of course. Several of Betsy’s fish had started to play again last year, and Trumbill had managed to find and fetch two of them, and they were now safely sedated in a remote house outside Oatman, down the river near Lake Havasu, where London Bridge had been moved to. The start of the third big series of Assumption games was only a little more than a week away. This person tonight would be very eroded by now, obsessed by memories of the ’69 game, drunk and personifying the vice, and all in all getting very ripe, as Betsy Reculver would say. The tendency to move east, away from the abhorrent ocean, would soon be an overwhelming compulsion. Well, Trumbill would try to assist in that.

  Betsy would want the person, whoever it was, to be protected until after the game, when at last the twenty-one-year-old assumptions could be consummated, when her resurrections could take place.

  Git along, little dogie, he thought. It’s all your misfortune and none of my own.

  The telephone buzzed, and he picked it up and wrote down the data the voice gave him: Scott Crane, born 2/28/43, address 106 East Second Street, Santa Ana. That was the old house at the corner.

  He turned on the dome light and shuffled through the six manila envelopes. It was probably the young man who had used the name Scott “Scarecrow” Smith in the ’69 game.

  Trumbill opened the envelope and looked at the photographs of Scott Smith. In the twenty-one-year-old pictures he was a dark-haired, lean-faced young man, often in the company of an old man identified in ink on the margins as Ozzie Smith, evidently Scott’s father. Paper-clipped to the photographs was a copy of a bill from the Mint Hotel in Las Vegas; the bill had a Montebello, California, address for both Scott and Ozzie, and someone had written across it “Phony.”

  Montebello was one of those cities that were part of Los Angeles—close enough to Santa Ana. This Smith person had to be the fish Trumbill was looking for. The nearest of the other five lived in Sacramento.

  Also in the envelope was a photograph of a pregnant blond woman stepping out of a car; her face, caught turning toward someone out of the scene, was taut and strong.

  “Issit,” read the note taped to the back of the picture. “Born c. ’35. Folded 6/20/60. Daughter, born 6/19(?)/60, believed to be alive—‘Diana Smith’—possibly living with Ozzie Smith—address unknown—urgently FOLD.

  Trumbill looked at the woman’s face, absently remembering how the face had changed as he had fired three bullets through it, thirty years ago.

  Diana Smith. Trumbill looked at the dark bulk of 106 and wondered if she might be living there, too. That would be all right.

  He put the photographs back into the envelope and then pulled out his wallet and looked at his laminated FBI identification tag. It was the most recent version, with the gold band across the top, and nobody would believe that the obese Trumbill was a newly hired agent, but this Crane fellow wasn’t likely to know anything about FBI IDs.

  Better to leave the car here, he thought, in case any jacks are in the area who might be watching the place. Better to be a pedestrian.

  He opened the door, pocketed his wallet, patted the holstered SIG 9-millimeter automatic under his coat, and began ambling in an aimless fashion toward 106.

  Crane was breathing fast and shallow as he peered over the hood of one of Mavranos’s impound-yard cars. Goddammit, he thought, it’s not the guy in the Porsche, but it’s got to be somebody with him.

  Crane was shivering. Shit, he thought miserably.

  The sky was graying behind him in the east. Crane had walked around a dozen blocks, and finally the cold and his weariness and the thought of his bed had convinced him that he must have been wrong about the man in the Porsche. It must have been one of those random freeway shootings, he’d told himself; probably I cut him off without knowing it, and he got mad and decided to kill me…A guy that would drive around with no rear window would probably do that kind of thing.

  But here was a serious-looking man checking out Crane’s car and talking on a cellular telephone and now walking toward his house. This was as true and horribly undeniable as a broken tooth or a hernia. Even if the man was a plainclothes policeman, something was going on, something that Crane didn’t want.

  He thought about the beers in his refrigerator. He’d been an idiot not to bring them along in a bag.

  The fat man must nearly be up to his porch; impulsively Crane sprinted across the street to the parked Jaguar. By the streetlight’s glow he could see some manila envelopes on the seat.

  He looked at his house. The man was up the steps and onto the porch now, and if he walked up to the door, he wouldn’t be able to see the Jaguar.

  The man went to the door and disappeared from view.

  Crane turned his back to the Jaguar and then drove his elbow hard at the driver’s window; it shattered inward with no more noise than a bottle breaking inside a paper bag, and he spun around, leaned in and snatched the envelopes, and then ran back across the street to the dark, recessed door of Mavranos’s half of the duplex. He banged on the door with his free fist.

  After a few seconds he banged on it again. Come on, Arky, he thought. I’ll tell you what seems to be the problem.

  He could hear footsteps inside the house.

  “Let me in, Arky,” he said in an urgent, low voice. “It’s me, it’s Scott!”

  He heard a chain slide through its channel and rattlingly fall, and then the door was pulled open and Crane had pushed his way inside. “Close it and lock it and don’t turn on the lights,” he gasped.

  “Okay,” Mavranos said. “What’re you, delivering mail now?” Mavranos was wearing a shirt and undershorts and socks.

  “Jesus, I hope you’ve got a beer.”

  “I’ve got enough for the disciples, too. Let me pu
t my pants on.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Irrigating the Cavity

  “Your fat man’s out there,” Crane said, with false and querulous bravado, after taking a solid slug of Coors in Mavranos’s dark living room. The place smelled like an animal’s cage. “He was messing with my car, and then he ate the goddamn bushes across the street, and now he’s gone to my house. What’s his name? Handlebar?”

  Crane was on the couch and Mavranos was standing by the window and peeking out through the blinds. “Mandelbrot is the name you’re trying to think of. He’s the guy that outlined him. All I see is a Jaguar with its window broke.”

  “I broke it. Fucker ate the bushes.”

  “What’re the envelopes?”

  “God, I don’t know. I took ’em out of his car. I can’t go home.”

  “Susan still up there?”

  “No, she—she went to her mother’s house, we had a fight, that’s how come I was out walking and saw this guy.”

  “You can stay here. But we gotta talk.”

  “Sure, sure, let’s talk.”

  “Is this the fat man that shot the moon in the face?”

  Scott Crane exhaled and tried to think clearly. “Great God. I don’t know. It might be. I didn’t see him, in ’60. We got there after.” He rubbed his good eye and then drank some more beer. “God, I hope it isn’t connected to all that crap. But it probably is. The first night I go play cards. The goddamn cards.”

  Mavranos was still standing by the window. “You ought to tell me about the cards, Pogo.”

  “I ought to fucking know about the cards, I don’t know shit about them; it’s like letting a kid play with blasting caps or something.”

  “Your fat man’s coming back.”

  “He’s your fat man.”

  “He just noticed his window; he’s looking around. I’m gonna hold the blinds just like they are.”

  “I’ve got a gun,” said Crane.

  “So do I, Pogo, but let’s hold our horses. He’s getting in the car. He’s starting it up. Nice car, no way it’s the original Jag engine in that. He’s moving off, but my guess is he ain’t going far.” Mavranos let the blinds fall and turned around. “Nobody’ll see a light in the kitchen; bring your envelopes there.”