Last Call

You know, my Friends, how long since in my House

For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:

Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,

And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

—The Rubdiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward J. Fitzgerald Translation

"Stetson!

"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"

—T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land

I watched her fly away for Vegas, sure,

I waved the plane out of sight,

Then I tried to drive home without stopping at a bar, but I

Didn't make it, quite.

And sitting with those blue-jeaned shadows there, that had

Been there all night,

I found myself shivering over my chilly drink,

Half dead of fright.

—William Ashbless

CHAPTER 4: A Real Clear Flash

Crane recoiled out of sleep, instantly grateful that the sun was shining outside.

His heart thudded in his chest like a pile driver breaking up old pavement. He knew he'd been dreaming about the game on the lake again, and that something in the real world had awakened him.

The nights were still chilly in March, and though the sun was now well up—it must have been nine or ten o'clock, at least—the can of Budweiser on the floor beside his bed was still cool. Crane popped the tab and drank half of it in one continuous series of gulps, then absently wiped a trickle of beer from the gray stubble on his chin.

The can had left a pale ring on the hardwood floor. Susan never criticized his drinking, but she didn't seem to like it in the bedroom; she'd pick up the can as casually as if it were a magazine or an ashtray and carry it out to the living room. After he noticed the habit, he had purposely set his Budweiser on the bedside table a few times, but her patient persistence had made him feel mean, and now he did it only accidentally.

The doorbell bonged, and he assumed that it had rung a few moments before, too. He levered himself up out of his side of the queen-size bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, then plodded out into the living room. Still buttoning his shirt, he opened the door; he never bothered to look through the peephole anymore.

His next-door neighbor Arky Mavranos was standing on the porch. "Ahoy, Pogo!" Mavranos said, waving two cans of Coors. "What seeems to be the problem!"

All this was Mavranos's standard greeting, so Crane didn't reply but just stepped outside, sat down in one of the porch chairs and accepted a beer from him. "Ah," Crane recited dutifully as he popped the cold can open and held the foaming thing to his ear, "the sound of breakfast cooking."

"Breakfast?" said Mavranos, grinning through his unkempt brown mustache. "Noon's gone—this is lunch."

Crane squinted out past the porch rail at the tower of the Fidelity Federal Savings building, silhouetted against the gray sky half a mile north on Main Street, but he couldn't focus on the flashing letters and numbers on its rooftop sign. The Norm's parking lot had enough cars in it to indicate the lunch crowd, though, and the daytime crows had replaced morning's wild parrots on the telephone lines. Mavranos was probably right.

"I brought your mail," Mavranos added, pulling a couple of envelopes out of his back pocket and dropping them onto the battered table.

Crane glanced at them. One was the long gray Bank of America envelope with the waxed paper address window—probably his statement. It was never current; if he wanted to know how much he still had in his savings account, he could just look at the slip that was spit out of the Versatel machine when it gave him his card back next time. He tossed the unopened envelope into the plastic trash can.

The other envelope was addressed in Susan's mother's handwriting. He tossed it away even faster.

"Just junk!" he said with a broad grin, draining the beer and getting up. He opened the door and went inside, and a few moments later was back in the chair with the half can of Budweiser that he had, in spite of himself, again left on the bedroom floor. "Wife off shopping?" asked Arky. Off shopping, Crane thought.

Susan loved those discount stores that were as big as airplane hangars. She always came home from them with bags of things like shark-shaped plastic clips to hold your beach towel down, and comical ceramic dogs, and spring-loaded devices you screwed onto your instant coffee jar that would, when you worked a lever on top, dispense a precise teaspoonful of powdered coffee. Her purchases had become a sort of joke among the neighbors.

Crane took a deep breath and then drained the Budweiser. This looked like being another serious drinking day. "Yeah," he answered, exhaling. "Potting soil, tomato cages … Spring's on us, gotta get stuff in the ground."

"She was up early."

Crane lowered his chin and stared at his neighbor expressionlessly.

After a pause he said, "Oh?"

"Sure was. I saw her out here watering the plants before the sun was even up."

Crane got dizzily to his feet and looked at the dirt in the nearest flower pot. It did look damp; had he watered the plants himself, yesterday or the day before? He couldn't remember.

"Back in a sec," he said evenly.

He went into the house again, and walked quickly down the hall to the kitchen. The kitchen was uncomfortably warm, as it had been for thirteen weeks now; but he didn't look at the oven—just opened the refrigerator and took out a cold can of Budweiser.

His heart was pounding again. Whom had Archimedes seen on the porch? Susan, as Crane could admit if he had a fresh beer in his hand and the alcohol was beginning to blunt his thoughts, was dead. She had died of a sudden heart attack—fibrillation—thirteen weeks ago.

She had been dead before the hastily summoned paramedics had even come sirening and flashing and squealing up to the curb out front. The medics had clomped into the house with their metal suitcases and their smells of rubber and disinfectants and after-shave and car exhaust, and they had used some kind of electric paddles to try to shock her heart into working again, but it had been too late.

After they had taken her body away, he had noticed her cup of coffee, still hot, on the table in front of the couch she'd died on—and he had numbly realized that he would not be able to bear it if the coffee were eventually to cool off, if it were to wind up as passively tepid as some careless guest's forgotten half can of soda pop.

He had carefully carried the cup down the hall to the kitchen and put it in the stove and turned the broiler on low. And he had told the concerned neighbors that Susan had fainted, and later in the day he had explained that she was back, but resting.

She had covered for him often enough, calling his boss and saying he had the flu when all he really had was a touch of "inebriadiation sickness," as he had called hangovers.

In the ninety-one days since her death, he had been making excuses—"She's visiting her mother," "She's in the tub," "She's asleep," "Her boss called her in to work early today"—to explain each instance of her absence. He had been drinking instead of going to work for a while, and so by mid-afternoon or so he often half believed the excuses himself, and when he left the house, he'd often find himself pausing before he locked the front door behind him, unthinkingly waiting for her to catch up, imagining her fumbling with her purse or giving her hair a couple of final brush strokes.

He had not looked in the stove, for he knew he wouldn't be able to stand the sight of the cup cooked dry.

This was only his third beer for today, and it was already after noon, so he took a deep gulp.

Whom had Archimedes seen? "Before the sun was even up"—Crane had been asleep then, dreaming again about that long-ago game on the lake. Had the dream conjured up some frail ghost of Susan?

Or could the house itself generate some replica of her?

At this moment, as he stood swaying in the middle of the kitchen, it didn't strike him as completely impossible—or at least not inconceivable. Her personality was certainly imprinted on every room. Crane's foster father had quit-claimed the house to him in 1969, ten years before Susan had moved in, but neither the young Crane nor his foster father before that had seen a table as anything more than a thing to stack stuff on, nor any sort of sturdy chair as being preferable to another; pictures on the walls had just been snapshots or pages scissored from art books, thumbtacked to the dry wall.

Now there were curtains and carpets and unmottled walls and refinished bookcases that didn't look as though they'd been bought in thrift stores—though in fact most of them had been.

He sniffed the warm kitchen air, which still seemed to carry the scent of coffee. "Susan?" he whispered.

There was a faint rustling from down the hall, probably in the bedroom.

He jumped and lost his footing and sat down heavily on the floor, and cold beer splashed out onto the tiles. "Nothing," he said softly, not daring to believe that he was talking to anyone besides himself. "I'm cleaning it up." He bent forward and wiped up the foamy drops with his flannel-sleeved forearm.

He knew ghosts were impossible—but lately a lot of impossible things had seemed to happen to him.

On a rainy midnight recently he had been sitting in his chair in the living-room corner—he could never sleep on rainy nights—and he'd been absently staring across the room at the dead philodendron hanging limp over the rim of its pot; and suddenly he had lost all sense of depth and scale—or, more precisely, he had seen that distance and size were illusions. Behind the apparent diversities that distinguished plant tendrils from things like river deltas and veins and electric arcs, there were, dimly perceptible in the fog of true randomness, shapes that stood constant, shapes that made up the invisible and impalpable skeleton of the universe.

He had been holding a glass of scotch, and he took a deep gulp—and the whisky seemed to become a whirlpool in him, sucking him down into some kind of well that was no more physical than the abstractable shape of the philodendron had been; and then the scope widened and his individuality was gone, and he knew, because knowing was part of being in this place, that this was the level everyone shared, the very deep and broad pool—the common water table—that extended beneath all the individual wells that were human minds.

There were universal, animating shapes down here, too, far away in the deepest regions—vast figures as eternal-but-alive as Satan entombed in the ice in Dante's Inferno, and they were ritualistically changing their relationships to one another, like planets moving around the sun, in a dance that had been old long before the early hominids had found things to fear in the patterns of stars and the moon in the night sky.

And then Crane was nothing but a wave of horror rushing away, toward the comfort of close boundaries, up toward the bright, active glow that was consciousness.

And somehow when he surfaced, he had found himself in a blue-lit restaurant, a forkful of fettucine Alfredo halfway to his mouth. Smells of garlic and wine rode the coldly air-conditioned breeze, and someone was languidly playing "The Way We Were" on a piano. Something was wrong with the set of his body—he looked down and saw that he had female breasts.

He felt his mouth open and say, in an old woman's voice, "Wow, one of them's ripe—I'm getting a real clear flash from him."

I came up through the wrong well, he thought, and forced himself away, back down into the blackness—and when he was once more aware of his surroundings, he was in his own living room again, with the rain thumping against the dark window and scotch spilled all down his shirt.

And only a few days ago he had been sitting on the front porch with Mavranos, and Arky had waved his beer can at all the Hondas and Toyotas driving busily up Main Street. "Suits," Arky had said, "going to offices. Ain't you glad we don't have to wake up to alarm clocks and scoot off to shuffle papers all day?"

Crane had nodded drunkenly. "Dei bene fecerunt inopis me pusilli," he had said, "quodque fecerunt animi."

Mavranos had stared at him. "What seeems to be the problem?"

"Hmm?"

"What did you say, just then?"

"Uh … I said, 'The gods did well when they made me lacking in ideas and in spirit.' "

"I didn't know you spoke Latin. That was Latin, wasn't it?"

Crane had taken a deep sip of beer to quell a moment of panic. "Oh. Sure. A little. You know, Catholic schools and all."

Actually he had never been a Catholic, and knew no Latin beyond legal terms picked up from mystery novels. And what he'd said didn't sound like any part of the Catholic Mass he'd ever heard about.

Sitting on the kitchen floor now, he put the beer down and wondered if he was simply going insane—and if it made any difference.

He thought about going into the bedroom.

What if there's some form of her in there, lying on the bed?

The thought both frightened and excited him. Not yet, he decided—that might be like opening an oven door before a soufflé is done. The house probably needs time to exude all of her accumulated essence. Fossils need time to form.

He struggled wearily to his feet and brushed the gray hair back from his forehead. And if it's not quite her, he thought, I won't mind. Just so it's close enough to fool a drunk.

On the oven-hot sidewalk of Las Vegas Boulevard, just across the highway from the fountains and broad colonnade of Caesars Palace, Betsy Reculver paused and sniffed the desert air. The wrinkles in her cheeks and temples deepened as she narrowed her eyes.

The very old man walking beside her kept hobbling along, and she reached out and caught his sleeve. "Halt your ass a sec, Doctor," she said loudly. Several brightly dressed tourist women stared at her as they walked rapidly past.

The old man who was known as Doctor Leaky had apparently not heard. For a couple of seconds he tried to continue walking, then seemed to grasp the fact that he was being impeded by something. His bald, spotty head slowly turned around on his corded neck, and his eyes widened as if in vast astonishment when he saw that Betsy had taken hold of his sleeve. "Hah?" he said hoarsely. "Hah?" He was wearing an expensive gray suit, but somehow he always tugged the pants up too high. Right now the silver belt buckle was up around his solar plexus. And of course he could never manage to lift his slack lower jaw and close his mouth.

"Can't you smell it anymore, you worthless old jug? Sniff." sShe inhaled deeply.

"It's them!" exclaimed Doctor Leaky in his shrill, birdy voice.

She looked at him hopefully, but he was pointing at several life-size painted statues of men in togas under the Caesars Palace sign across the street. A tourist had wedged a Bic lighter into the outstretched hand of one of them and was having his picture taken leaning close to it with a cigarette in his mouth.

"No, it's not them." Betsy shook her head. "Come on." A few steps further up the sidewalk, when they were passing the west-facing Mississippi-showboat facade of the Holiday Casino, Doctor Leaky again became excited. "It's them!" he squeaked, pointing.

Statues in nineteenth-century dress stood on the deck of the boatlike structure, and in the fenced-off lagoon between the sidewalk and the building floated a moored raft with two Huck Finn-like statues on it. A red sign on the coping read: DANGEROUS CHEMICALS—KEEP OUT OF WATER.

"You moron," Betsy said.

Doctor Leaky giggled. Betsy noticed that a dark stain was spreading across the crotch of his suit pants.

"Oh, fine," she said. "God, why do I even keep you around?" In the middle of the sidewalk crowd she raised her hand, and a gray Jaguar XJ-6 pulled up and double-parked in the street.

She led the old man over the curb and across the pavement to the rear door. The driver, an obese bald man in a woolen Armani suit, had got out and was holding the door open. "My corpse pissed its pants, Vaughan," she told the fat man. "I guess we're going home."

"Okay, Betsy." The fat man took Doctor Leaky's forearm impersonally.

"It's them!" Doctor Leaky piped again.

Betsy sniffed the air again. The resonance was still on the hot breeze. "Who, Doctor?" she asked with weary patience and still a little hope.

"The people in Doom Town—the lady in the car, and the lady in the shelter in the basement, and all the rest of them. Those kids."

She realized that he was talking about the simulated town that had been built in the desert near Yucca Flats when the government had been testing the atom bomb in the early fifties, and false suns had seemed to rise instantly in the night sky beyond the Horseshoe Club and the Golden Nugget. To make it all more realistic, the Army had put mannequins in the houses and in the cars at the test site. Betsy could remember having gone out and looked at the fake city, which had been known to the locals as Doom Town.

"No, Doctor, get in the car, it's not them. Those were all fake people."

Doctor Leaky laboriously lifted one foot into the car. "I know that," he said, nodding with ponderous dignity. "The problem is that they weren't a realistic enough …"

"Unlike the plaster boys in front of Caesars, sure. Get in the car."

"As an offering, a sacrifice, they weren't realistic enough," the old man quavered. "The cards weren't fooled."

Vaughan leaned forward to help Doctor Leaky get the rest of the way into the car. For a moment Betsy could see the SIG 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol Vaughan wore in a shoulder holster under his coat.

Before getting into the car herself, she lifted her face into the breeze. Yes, at least one of the fish was grown to nearly keeping size out there.

Maybe it was the fellow who had swum up into her mind at the Dunes the other night. I wonder, she thought, who drink is to him.

The cycle took twenty years, but they did eventually ripen. Somebody's out there having a bad time right now.

Come Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, there would be another resurrection.

CHAPTER 5: Chasing the White Line

Crane got to his feet and carried a fresh beer out onto the porch. "What?" he said.

"I don't mean to be readin' your mail, Pogo," said Mavranos, "but you're gonna lose your house if you don't pay these people." He was holding out an unfolded sheet of paper with typing and numbers on it. The long gray envelope lay torn open on the table.

"Who's that? The bank?"

"Right. They're talkin' foreclosure." Mavranos was frowning. "You'd better pay 'em. I don't want to take my chances on a new neighbor who might object to a beery bum living next door." He leaned forward, and Crane could tell he was serious, for he used his Christian name. "Scott," Mavranos said clearly, "this is no joke. Get a lawyer, homestead the place, file chapter thirteen bankruptcy—but you gotta do something!"

Scott Crane held the paper up to his good eye and tried to make sense of it. He couldn't let himself lose the house, not now that it seemed Susan's ghost was here.

"I guess I've got to get back in business," he mumbled.

Arky blinked at him. "Are you still working at the restaurant?"

"I don't think so. They've called me a few times, but I haven't been in there … in weeks. No, I think that's gone. I've got to … get back into my old business."

"Which is what? It better get you a paycheck quick—and a big one."

"If it works, it does that. I quit doing it … eight, nine years ago. When I, when I married Susan, and started at the Villa. She never said anything, but I could tell it was time to get into something else. Yeah, that'll work, that'll work."

"So what is it? These people want their money yesterday."

Scott Crane had spilled some beer on his pants, and he rubbed at it ineffectually. "Oh, I—didn't I ever tell you?—I used to be a Poker player."

"You should have seen 'em tonight," he had told Susan at three o'clock one morning as he pulled wads of twenty-dollar bills from his pants pocket. "They were all quiet and grouchy, 'cause they didn't have any crank, and they kept looking up, real wide-eyed, every time they heard a car door slam, 'cause a friend who drives a tow truck had said he'd bring some by if he got a call to anywhere near the game. I could bluff 'em out any time with a five-dollar raise—they were having a terrible time, asking the guy whose house it was if he was sure he didn't have any old mirrors to lick, and even thinking about grinding up some of my No Doz and snorting that. Finally their friend did knock on the door and gave 'em a bindle, this little bitty folded bit of paper with about a quarter teaspoon of crystal meth in it, and then they were all happy and laughing and tapping the powder out on a mirror and scraping it into lines with a razor blade and then snorting it up through a little metal tube. Sudden cheer, yukking it up, you know? And suddenly they'd stay with any hand, and call any raise, and not give a damn if they lost. It was great. But then one of 'em's eyes go wide, you know, like this—and he gets up and runs for the bathroom. And a minute later all the rest of 'em are bowleggedying around in the hall like Quasimodo, banging on the bathroom door and cussing the guy in there. It turns out the crank was cut with some kind of baby laxative." Susan laughed, but was sitting up in bed and frowning as he took off his pants and shirt. "I don't mean to be critical, Scott," she said, "but these people sound like idiots."

"They are idiots, honey," he said, pulling back the covers and getting into his side of the bed. "It's not profitable to play Poker with geniuses." He reached up and turned out the light.

"But these are the people you … look for, and hang around with when you've found them," she said quietly in the darkness. "These are the people who you, what, do your life's work with … or at least who you do it to, or upon. You know what I'm saying? Aren't there any Poker players you admire?"

"Sure there are—but I'm not good enough to play with them and win, and I've got a living to make. And I admired my foster dad, but since he took off, I haven't found anybody to partner up with."

"It must be weird to look for people dumber than you, and avoid people as smart or smarter."

"Keeps you and me in groceries," he had said shortly.

Crane left Mavranos on the porch and went back inside.

For a couple of hours he managed to lose himself in the recipes and advice columns and personality quizzes in a stack of old issues of Woman's World and Better Homes and Gardens, and he drank his beers slowly and set his cans down only on coasters. Then he watched television.

When the house had darkened enough so that he had to get up and turn on the lights, he reluctantly made coffee, then went into the bathroom to shave and take a shower. The shades in the living room were down, so a few minutes later he walked right from the shower to the chair by the telephone.

Today was Thursday. That was good; one of the most enduring mid-level red-spot games he had ever instituted had been an L.A. area Thursday night game. He pulled out the Orange County and Los Angeles white pages phone books and tried to remember the names of some of the people who had been the steadiest players a decade ago.

He found a name: Budge, Ed Budge, still living on Beverly in Whittier. Must be sixty by now. He dialed the number. "Hello?"

"Ed, this is Scott Smith. Scarecrow Smith, remember?"

"Jesus, Scarecrow Smith! What have you been doing? How's Ozzie?"

"I don't know, man, I haven't seen him in twenty years. I—"

"And he had another kid he used to talk about. What was her name?"

"Diana. I don't know, I last talked to her in '75 or so, just briefly on the phone. I dreamed—I mean, I heard she got married." Crane took a sip of his third consecutive cup of coffee and wished he would sober up faster.

He remembered the call from Diana. He had been scuba diving in Morro Bay and had managed to fire his three-barbed spear into his own ankle, and the telephone had been ringing when he got home from Hoag Memorial Hospital the next day. She had refused to tell him where she was, or where Ozzie was, but she had been upset, and relieved to hear that he was all right. She couldn't have been more than fifteen then. Three years later he had dreamed of her in a wedding.

There had been no contact since. Apparently neither of them had been seriously hurt, physically at least, in the last fifteen years—or else their psychic link had withered away.

"So," Crane said now, "is the game still going?" "I don't know, Scott, I quit playing a few years ago. One day I figured out I was bleeding away ten grand a year in that damn game."

Crane suppressed a sigh. If Crane had still been the motivating force of the game, Ed would never have quit. Crane knew how to baby valuable losers along—flatter their winning plays, never take full advantage of their weaknesses, make the game seem more social than financial—so that they kept coming back; just as he knew how to repel good, winning players by criticizing their Poker etiquette and refusing to lend them money and trying to upset them, and encouraging the other players to do the same.

"Oh," Crane said. "Well, do you keep in touch with any of the guys?"

"Keep in touch? Outside the game? Scott, do you remember the plain old breakfasts?"

This time Crane did sigh. Sometimes the game had gone on for eighteen hours or more, and the players had taken a break to eat at some local coffee shop at dawn; and the fractured, desultory table-talk had made it stiflingly clear that none of them had anything in common with one another besides the game.

"Okay, Ed. Have a nice life."

He hung up and looked through the phone books for another name. This was a solid game, he thought. It has to be still spinning out there. Old Ozzie taught me how to build 'em to last.

His foster father had been Oliver Crane. Using the name Ozzie Smith, the old man had been one of the country's respectable mid-level Poker players, from the 1930s through the 1960s. He had never quite been up there with the superstars like Moss and Brunson and "Amarillo Slim" Preston, but he had known them and played with them.

Ozzie had explained to Scott Crane that a good Poker game can have a life of its own, like a slow-motion hurricane, and he had shown him how to start them and vitalize them, all around the country, so that, like reserve bank accounts, they'd be there if you should someday need one of them. "They're like that great red spot on the planet Jupiter," the old man had said. "Just a lot of whirling gas, but always there."

If Ozzie were even still alive, he'd be … eighty-two now. Crane had no way of getting in touch with him. Ozzie had made sure of that.

Jube Kelley was in the book, living in Hawthorne now. Crane dialed the number.

"Jube? This is Scott Smith, Scarecrow Smith. Listen, is the game still going?"

"Hey, Scott! The game? Sure, you can't kill a game like that. I only go once in a while now, but they're doing it at Chick's house now. This is Thursday, right? They'll be there tonight."

"Chick's house. That's on Washington, in Venice?"

"Right," said Sam. "Between the old canals and the Marina Del Rey basins."

Crane was frowning, and he wondered why he was uneasy … He realized that he wasn't looking forward to being that close to, that surrounded by, the ocean; and going so far west seemed … mildly difficult, like pressing the positive poles of two magnets together. Why couldn't they have moved the game east?

"You still there, Scarecrow?"

"Yeah. What stakes are they playing these days?"

"Ten and twenty, last I heard."

Perfect. "Well, I gotta run, Jube. Thanks."

Crane hung up and walked slowly into the bedroom. The cool evening wind sighed in at the window, and he saw no ghost.

He relaxed and let out an unwittingly held breath, not sure whether he was disappointed or not.

He was still damp from the shower, but he got dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and old sneakers and another flannel shirt. He tucked a lighter and three unopened packs of Marlboros into his pockets and picked up the Versatel card; he could draw three hundred with it, and he had another forty or so on the bookshelf. Not lavish, but he ought to be able to make it do. Play the first hand noticeably loose, then tighten up for a while.

And the car keys are in the living room, he thought as he started out the bedroom door—and then he paused.

If you bring a machine, you'll never need it, Ozzie had always told him. Like a fire extinguisher in a car. The day you don't bring it is the day you'll need it.

Not, Crane thought now, not in a ten and twenty game at Chick's! He laughed self-consciously and stepped into the hall, then stopped again.

He shrugged and went back to the dresser by the bed. This isn't the time to ignore the old man's advice, he thought. He pulled open the top drawer and dug behind the socks and old envelopes full of photographs until he found the blocky stainless steel Smith & Wesson .357 revolver.

What the hell, he thought, at least you're fairly sober.

He flipped out the cylinder. All six chambers were still loaded, and he pushed up the ejection-rod to get one out. One hundred twenty-five-grain hollow-point cartridges, as he remembered. He let it fall back in and snapped the gun shut again and tucked it into his belt, hearing the cartridges rattle faintly in the chambers.

When he opened the front door, he paused.

"I might be a little late," he called to the empty house.

He stopped at a nearby 7-Eleven store for hero sandwiches, a couple of twelve-packs of beer, a box of No Doz and a dozen decks of cards, and then he got on the freeway.

Back to chasing the white line, he thought as the lane markings of the 5 Freeway flew past like fireflies under the tires of his old Ford. I can remember a hundred, a thousand nights like this, driving with Ozzie along the 66 and the 20 and the 40, through Arizona and New Mexico and Texas and Oklahoma. Always a game behind us and a game ahead of us.

It had been what Ozzie called a semi-retired life. They traveled and played during the three months of spring, and then lived off their winnings in the Santa Ana house during the other three seasons.

Scott had been five years old when Ozzie had found him, in the back of a boat on a trailer in a Los Angeles parking lot. Apparently he had been a messed-up little kid—one eye split open and dried blood all over his face. Ozzie had talked to him for a few minutes and had then driven him in his old truck to a doctor who owed Ozzie a lot of money.

Old Dr. Malk had fitted up young Scott with his first glass eye. The eyes were still real glass in the forties, and for kids they were round, like big marbles, to fill the orbit and make sure the skull grew correctly. The next day Ozzie had taken the boy home to the house in Santa Ana, and had told the neighbors that Scott was his cousin's illegitimate child and that he was adopting him.

Ozzie had been about forty then, in '48. He had quickly begun teaching Scott all about Poker, but he had never let the boy play with anyone else, and never for real money, until the summer of '59, when Scott was sixteen, and they went off on one of the annual trips together.

"You never play for money at home," Ozzie had said. "You don't want the cards to know where you live."

Scott had become known as Scarecrow Smith, because before about 1980 doctors couldn't effectively attach glass eyes to eye muscles, and so it was more natural-looking for him to turn his whole head to look at something than to have only one eye move to the side; to some players this had made his eyes seem painted on and his neck appear unnaturally loose. And "Scarecrow" had fitted with his adopted father's nickname: whenever Oliver Crane was asked where he lived, he had always just said, "Oz."

In fact, Ozzie had not let anyone in the Poker world know where he lived. He used the name Smith when he played and insisted that Scott do the same, and he always kept his car registered to a post office box.

"You don't want to take a chance on your work following you home," he'd said. To make that even less likely, he had always bought new tires and had his Studebaker tuned up before setting out, and he never went to a game without a full tank of gas. And there was always a twelve-gauge pump shotgun under a blanket on the back seat to supplement the pistol in his belt.

And he had made sure Scott understood when it was that you had to fold out of a game.

That had been the advice Scott had ignored in the game on the lake in '69.

"If the drink in your glass starts to sit at an angle that ain't quite level, or if the cigarette smoke starts to crowd in over the cards and fall there, or if plants in the room suddenly start to wilt, or if the air is suddenly dry and hot in your throat, smelling like sun-hot rock, fold out. You don't know what you might be buying or selling come the showdown."

By the end of the spring of 1969 Ozzie had been sixty or so, and Scott had been twenty-six.

Both of them had been wanting to get back home to Santa Ana—Scott had a girl friend whom he hadn't seen in three months, and Ozzie missed his other foster child, Diana, who was nine years old and staying with a neighbor woman—but they had decided to hit Las Vegas before once again burning on home across the Mojave to southern California.

They had got in on a Five-Stud game that started in the Horseshoe on Fremont Street in the evening, and at dawn they had moved it upstairs to one of the rooms, and in the middle of the afternoon, when all but Ozzie and Scott and a pudgy businessman called Newt had been eliminated, they had declared a sleep-and-food break.

"You know," Newt had said slowly, almost reluctantly, as he finally unknotted his tie, "there's a game on a houseboat on Lake Mead tonight." Newt had lost more than ten thousand dollars.

Ozzie had shaken his head. "I never gamble on water." He tucked a wad of bills into his jacket pocket. He had increased his roll from about twelve to about twenty-four thousand in the past twenty hours. "Even when they had the boats out there in the ocean, three miles off Santa Monica, I never went."

Scott Crane was down. He had had ten thousand when they'd driven into Las Vegas, and he had about seven and a half now, and he knew Ozzie was ready to declare the season finished and start for home.

"What kind of game?" Scott had asked.

"Well, it's odd." Newt stood up and walked to the window. "This guy's name is Ricky Leroy, and ordinarily he's one of the best Poker players in town." The stout young businessman kept his back to them as he talked. "But for the last two or three days he's been playing this game he calls Assumption—weird game with a weird deck, all pictures—and he's losing. And he doesn't seem to mind."

"Assumption," said Ozzie thoughtfully. "Twenty years ago a guy was hosting a game of that out on a boat on Lake Mead. Different guy—George something. He lost a lot, too, I heard."

"My luck's gone here," Newt said, turning around to face them. "I'm going to drive out there tonight. If you want to come, I'll be standing under the million-dollar-display Horseshoe at eight."

"You may as well just go," Ozzie told him. "This was our last game of the season; we're going to sleep twelve hours and then drive home."

Newt had shrugged. "Well, I'll be there just in case."

Back in their own room at the Mint Hotel, Ozzie had at first been unable to believe that Scott wasn't kidding when he said he wanted to go meet Newt and get into the game on the lake.

The old man had kicked off his polished black shoes and lay down on one of the beds, and he was laughing with his eyes closed. "Sure, Scott—on water, tamed water, with a guy that always pays for hands, and playing with what obviously is a Tarot deck, for God's sake. Shit, you'd win a few signifying hands, and a month later you'd find out you've got cancer and you're getting arrested for crimes you never heard of and you can't get it up anymore. And then one day you'd walk out to the mailbox and find your goddamn head in there."

Scott was holding a glass of beer he'd picked up on the way to the elevator, and now he took a long sip of it.

Most Poker players had superstitions, and he had always conformed to Ozzie's, out of respect for the old man, even when it had meant folding a cinch hand just because some cigarette smoke was moving in ways the old man didn't like or someone had kicked the table and the drinks were wobbling.

Ozzie had folded some good hands, too, of course—hundreds, probably, in his forty years of professional play. But Ozzie could afford to: He had made a lot of money over the years, and though he rarely played the very-high-stakes games, he was regarded as an equal by the best players in the country.

And right now he had twenty-four thousand dollars rolled up tight in the hollow handles of his shaving brush and shoehorn and coffeepot.

Scott had less than eight thousand, and he was going home to car payments and a girl friend who liked steak and lobster and first-growth Bordeaux wines.

And he had heard that next year Benny Binion, the owner of the Horseshoe, was going to host a World Series of Poker, with all the best Poker players converging there to determine who was the very best. Scott could remember having met old Binion once, at a restaurant called Louigi's on Las Vegas Boulevard. Scott had been only three or four, staying out late with his long-lost real father, but he remembered now that Binion had ordered the house's best steak and had then shaken ketchup onto it.

He was sure he could win this competition … if he could come into town with enough money to spread a good-size net.

"I've got to go, Oz. My roll's short, and the season's over."

"Your roll?" The grin was fading from Ozzie's face as he raised his head to look at Scott. "What you've got in your pocket is a hair less than twenty-five percent of our roll, yours and mine and Diana's. We've got thirty-one and a half, and if that ain't lavish to live a year on, I don't—"

"I've got to go, Oz."

Ozzie now wearily forced himself back up onto his feet. His gray hair was disarranged, and he needed a shave. "Scott, it's on water. It's Tarot cards. You want to play, take our money to any of the hundred games in town here. But you can't go play there."

You can't go play there, thought Scott, as the beer amplified his own massive fatigue. That's what you say to a kid who wants to ride his tricycle to a park where there might be bad boys.

I'm twenty-six, and I'm a damn good player on my own—not just as Ozzie's kid.

The cross-cut wooden grip of his .38 revolver was poking up out of the dirty shirts in the open suitcase on the bed. He pulled the gun free and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

"I'm going," he said, and went to the door and pulled it open and strode rapidly down the hall toward the door to the stairwell.

And he was crying by the time he stepped out of the cool darkness of the casino into the brassy afternoon sunlight, because for at least several floors he had heard Ozzie shuffling in his stocking feet down the stairs behind him, calling and pleading weakly in his frail voice as he forced his exhausted old body to try to catch up with his adopted son.

CHAPTER 6: We're Now Thirteen

"Assumption," Newt said.

He was talking quickly, hunched over the steering wheel of his Cadillac as the hot dark desert swept past on either side. "This guy Leroy won't play it unless there are twelve other people at the table with him. A hundred dollars ante. Everybody's dealt two down cards and one up card, and then there's a round of betting, two hundred a bet, and then one more up card and another round at two hundred."

Scott popped the cap off a fresh bottle of beer. "That's fifty-two cards," he said blurrily. "You're out of cards, except maybe for a Joker."

"Nah, he won't play it with a Joker, and actually there's four more cards left, 'cause there's an extra face card in each suit, the Knight. And the suits are different, they're Sticks and Cups and Coins and Swords. But anyway, no more cards are dealt."

The lights of the bars and brothels of Formyle swept past. The Cadillac was now four miles out of Las Vegas and must, Scott thought, be doing a hundred by now.

"What happens then," Newt went on, "is that each four-card hand in turn goes up for bid. The term is 'the mating.' Say you've got two Kings down and a Three and something up, and you see a hand with a King and a Three showing; well, you'd want to bid on that hand, 'cause if you got it, you'd have a Full Boat in your eight-card hand—or, if one of his down cards turned out to be the [case] King, you'd find yourself with four Kings, get it? When you put the two hands together, yours and the one you bought, they say that the resulting eight-card hand has been conceived, rather than completed or something. With the bidding you usually wind up paying a guy, for his hand, a hundred or so more than what he's got in the pot. A lot of guys never mean to stay for the showdown, they just want to sell their hands at the bid, at the mating. And when it gets down to the last three guys who haven't bought a hand or sold theirs, the competition gets hot 'cause nobody wants to be left out in the cold holding an unsold and unplayable—unconceivable—four-card hand."

Scott nodded, staring out through the dusty windshield at the dim bulk of the McCullough Range denting the dark sky ahead. "So there might be as many as … six guys in at the showdown."

"Right. And even if you're out of the hand, you're still watching 'cause you've still got an investment in the hand you sold your four cards into. You're called a parent of the hand, and if it wins, you get ten percent of the pot. That's another reason a lot of guys just want to sell their hands and get out: they can clear a fair profit at the mating and then still have a one-in-six chance of getting a tenth of a pretty sizable pot."

Scott Crane drained his beer and pitched the bottle out the open window into the gathering night. "So have you played it yet?"

"Sure I've played it," said Newt, apparently angry. "Would I bring guys to it if I hadn't played it? And I've played Poker with Leroy a lot."

Scott was suddenly sure that Newt had lost a lot, too, to Leroy, and owed him at least money. For just a moment he considered making Newt pull over to the shoulder and getting out of the car and hitchhiking back to the Mint.

Lightning made silent jagged patterns over the mountains, like the momentarily incandescing roots of some vast tree that carried the stars as buds.

"And then there's the Assumption option," said Newt as he leaned over the big wheel and tugged it back and forth, sounding as tired as Scott felt. "If you're the absentee parent of the winning hand, you're free to put up an amount of your own money equal to the amount in the pot, and then have the deck shuffled, and cut the cards for the whole thing."

Scott frowned, trying to make his sluggish mind work. "But you'd already be getting a tenth of the pot. Why risk … fifty-five percent to win forty five, on a fifty-fifty chance?"

Scott couldn't tell if Newt sighed or if the whisper was just the tires on the Boulder Highway pavement. "I don't know, man, but Leroy is a sucker for that bet."

There were a lot of cars parked in the Boulder Basin marina lot, and the white houseboat at the dock was big and wide, and lit brightly enough to dim the emerging stars. The moon was dark—a day short of the newest sliver.

Gravel crunched underfoot as they walked from the car toward the lake and the boat, and the wind from up the distant twistings of the Colorado River fluttered Scott's sweat-spiky hair.

A figure who could only be their host stood on the lighted deck. He was a big, tanned man in a white silk suit; by his lined face Scott guessed him to be around forty, but his hair was brown and full with not a thread of gray, and at least in this light it didn't look like a toupee. A big gold sun disk hung on a chain around his neck.

"Here's a young man wanting to play, Mr. Leroy," said Newt as he led Scott up the ramp to the teakwood deck. "Scarecrow Smith, this is Ricky Leroy."

When Leroy smiled at Scott, it was absently, with the politeness of a distracted host, but Scott opened his mouth to ask the man How've-you-been?, for he was unthinkingly sure that he had once known him well. Leroy caught Scott's look of recognition and raised one eyebrow curiously. Scott realized that he couldn't remember where he knew Leroy from, and at the same moment he became aware of the open port beyond the tall white figure. Never talk about anything important in front of the cards, he thought. "Uh, beautiful boat you've got," he said lamely.

"Thank you, Mr.—I'm sorry?"

"Smith."

"Mr. Smith. I hope you get a few beautiful boats yourself!" Newt led Scott across a couple of yards of deck and through the broad double doors. Their steps were suddenly muffled in thick red carpet. "You know him already?"

"I don't know," Scott mumbled, looking around, ignoring for the moment the crowd of people standing by the bar in the corner or sitting around the long green felt table.

He guessed that a wall or two had been knocked out to make the central lounge so big; the room was at least twenty feet by forty feet, and the dark rosewood paneling gleamed in the yellow light of the many electric lamps hanging on the walls.

Newt was whispering to himself and bouncing a finger this way and that. "Just made it," he said quietly. "We're now thirteen. Grab a seat."

The engines started, and the boat shook.

"I want another beer first."

The boat surged forward as he was walking toward the bar, and he almost sat down on the carpet. The person who caught his arm and steadied him was Ricky Leroy. "Can't have you down yet!" said the big man jovially. "Smith, you said your name was? No relation to Ozzie, I suppose?"

"Actually," Scott said, taking another step forward and leaning on the bar, "yes. He's my dad. A Miller, please," he added to the obese bartender.

"He couldn't make it tonight?"

"Thanks," Scott said, accepting a tall glass from the fat man. "Hmm? Oh, no—he doesn't like to gamble on water."

Leroy chuckled indulgently. "I guess he's old enough to have picked up a lot of superstitions."

When Leroy fanned the deck out face up across the green felt, Scott stopped breathing.

The vivid gold and red and blue images on the oversize cards seemed to intrude forcefully into his brain through the retina of his one eye, and to blow away all the memories and opinions and convictions that were the scaffolding of his adulthood, so that the cards' images could settle into perfect-fit indentations laid down long before.

The smells of hot metal and perfume clogged his nose, and it seemed to him suddenly that it was raining outside, and that someone had just been singing "Sonny Boy." And he remembered for a moment the grinning face of the Joker staring at him, somehow, from out of a plate of lobster stew.

Something in him was now unlocked—not opened yet, but unlocked—and he thought fleetingly of a night nine years earlier, and the infant girl he had held in his arms for eight hours as Ozzie drove them homeward across the Mojave Desert.

He took several deep breaths, then with trembling fingers lit a cigarette and took a sip of beer.

He looked at the other players around the table. They all seemed shaken, and one man was holding a handkerchief across his eyes.

Leroy gathered the cards together, flipped them facedown, and began shuffling them. "The ante is a hundred dollars, gentlemen," he said.

Scott drove the old thoughts out of his head and dug into his pocket.

Assumption was a game that promoted action. Nobody seemed to want to fold before the mating and thus lose the chance to sell his four cards or buy another advantageous four.

By the time the first hand's mating came up there were ninety-one hundred dollars in the pot. That was a fifth again as much as Scott had walked in with, and he was in for only seven hundred.

He had a Knight of Cups and a Six of Swords down, and was showing a Knight of Swords and a Six of Sticks. When his four-card hand came up for auction, the bidding went up to eight hundred, but another hand out there was showing a Knight, and he decided to wait and bid on it. Sail out of this hand aboard a Full Boat, he thought.

But the man holding the Knight bought a hand before the bidding came around to him. The man's hand was now "conceived" and no longer for sale.

There were five hands left to be auctioned, but none of them held any obvious help for Scott, and he wondered if he should have taken the eight hundred when he'd had the chance.

And then he waited too long, until his was one of only three unconceived hands.

"I'm willing to sell now," he told the other two players.

They both looked at him and at his two showing cards. "I'll give you two hundred," said one, a thin man in a cowboy hat.

The other player smiled at the one who'd bid. "I'll give you three for yours."

The man in the cowboy hat seemed to be considering the offer, and

Scott said quickly, "I'll take one."

The old cowboy gave him a hundred-dollar bill in exchange for his hand, and Scott picked up his empty glass and made his way to the bar.

Scott was leaning on the bar and sipping his new beer when Leroy walked up and tossed a stack of bills onto the wet wood next to the beer glass.

"Congratulations!" Leroy said heartily. "You're a parent."

Scott reached forward and fanned the bills. There were ten hundreds and three twenties.

"The pot went up to ten thousand six hundred," said Leroy, "and the old cowboy had a Straight Flush. Not all that uncommon in this game. Do you want to match that and cut the deck for Assumption?"

"Uh, no," Scott said, picking up his beer. "No, thanks, I'll keep this. The next hand's about to start then?"

Leroy waved him forward. "Your throne awaits."

At the mating in the next hand Scott had a Two and a Six down and two Kings showing, and when his hand went up for bid, two players, each of whom showed a King, bid the price of it up to $2,000 before one of them finally dropped out.

Scott pocketed his $2,000 and went back to the bar. He was already ahead by $1,860—his roll was now $9,360—and this had only been the second hand. And he hadn't even won yet!

But it was on the third hand that he really tied on to it.

As Ozzie had taught him, he quickly scanned every one of the other twelve players' up cards and then tried to watch as each of them peeked at his down cards. One man blushed slightly and began breathing a little faster, and another quickly looked away and began riffling his chips.

They both scored, Scott thought.

The first had a Queen showing; he almost certainly had a Queen and an Ace down, since two other Queens and three Kings were exposed on the board. The other man was showing an Ace; he probably had one of the other two Aces down.

Finally Scott looked at his own cards. He had a Six and a Five down and a Seven showing. Unsuited. Hope for a Straight.

He stayed, along with everyone else, through a bet and two raises. There was now ninety-one hundred in the pot.

The room was layered with cigarette smoke, but it seemed to be thicker over the pot.

The second up cards were dealt, but though he watched the players' faces, he wasn't able to glean any readable tells. He looked down at his own—a Six.

The man to his left was white-suited Ricky Leroy, who showed a Six and a Five, and Scott decided to buy Leroy's hand and hope for a Full Boat and not just a low Two Pair.

The round of betting showered another twenty-six hundred-dollar bills into the pot.

Leroy proved willing to let the hand go to Scott for twelve hundred dollars—and when the four cards were flipped to him, all face up as the rules demanded, Scott made sure that he only blinked sluggishly, as if he were too tired and drunk to have focused on them yet.

The four cards were the Six and the Five that had been showing and a Deuce and a Six. Crane now had four Sixes.

With a steady hand he lifted his glass and took a sip. So Leroy's houseboat lists a little, he told himself when he noticed the tilted surface of the beer; so what?

The rest of the mating seemed to take hours, but at last there were six players still in the game with eight cards each, two down and six up. Leroy had walked away to the bar.

"Three Sixes bet," said the man who was dealing.

"Uh," said Scott, peeking again at his down cards, "check."

The man to his left bet two hundred, the next man folded, the next two called, and the last man raised it another two hundred. The stack of bills in the middle of the table looked like a pile of green leaves that some gardener would eventually bag up and haul away.

"That's four hundred to the three Sixes," said the dealer.

"See the four," said Scott, peeling six bills off his roll, "and raise it two."

"A check-raise from the Sixes," noted the dealer.

Everyone folded but the man who had raised. He stared at Scott for a long time. He was showing two Knights and two Tens and two worthless cards. "And two," he said finally.

He thinks that the three Sixes are all I've got, Scott thought, or that at best I've got a low Boat. He's got a high Boat, probably Knights over Tens, and he knows the Aces and Queens and Kings are effectively gone.

"And two," Scott said, throwing the bills out onto the table.

The other player didn't move, but a glow seemed to go out of him. "Call," he said, pushing two more hundreds across the felt.

Scott flipped over his two down cards, and the other player bowed his head and tossed his hand into the discards.

"The Four of a Kind beats the Boat," pronounced the dealer.

Scott started to reach out with both arms for the pile of money, but Leroy, who had left the table after selling his hand to Scott, had returned and now stepped forward.

"Maybe not the houseboat." He grinned, showing big, even white teeth. "There's thirteen thousand six fifty in there, I believe." He took a leather billfold from inside his jacket and carefully separated out of it thirteen one-thousand-dollar bills and six hundreds and a fifty. He leaned forward and pressed them down onto the heaped money.

Hot, dry desert air sighed in through the open portholes, and Scott's throat burned with the smell of hot stone.

"I'm claiming the Assumption," Leroy said.

CHAPTER 7: It's All Yours

Scott sat back, put his hands on the edge of the table and grinned curiously up at this new opponent. Somehow he had forgotten Newt's telling him that Leroy liked this bet.

Scott had sunk $3,050 into this pot, counting the $1,200 he had paid for Leroy's hand. If he lost the cut, it would take him down from the more than $25,000 he had thought he had before Leroy had spoken—about three times what he'd walked aboard with—to less than $12,000. But if he won it, he'd be sitting on nearly $38,000. And at least the odds were in Scott's favor.

The dealer shrugged, gathered in the cards and shuffled them several times, handed them to another player to cut, and then slid the deck, solid as a brick, to the patch of felt in front of Scott.

The cigarette smoke was a narrow, upright funnel in the middle of the table now, like a tiny slow-motion tornado.

Still grinning, Scott slid his fingers halfway down the card-edges and lifted off the top half and showed the exposed card to the company—getting in return some looks of sympathy—and then he looked at it himself.

It was the Three of Cups. There were only four cards in the deck lower than that, the Deuces, and only three that would tie it. Seven cards out of fifty-five. One chance in about eight and a half.

Still holding the card up, Scott finished his beer, proud that his hand didn't shake in this almost certain defeat. He didn't have to tip the glass back very far at all.

He laid the top half back down on the deck and pushed it across to the dealer, who reshuffled and passed it for the cut and then slid it to the place where Leroy had been sitting.

Leroy leaned forward and curled his brown hand down over the cards; for a moment he seemed to be kneading them gently, and Scott was dully sure that the man was cheating, feeling for a crimp or an unshaved edge. Ozzie had taught him long ago that cheaters were to be either used or avoided, but never challenged, especially in a game with strangers.

Then Leroy had raised a segment of the deck, and the exposed card was the Deuce of Sticks.

There were sighs and low whistles from the other players, but Scott's ears were buzzing with the realization that he had won after all.

He reached out and began raking in and stacking the bills, glad of the revolver pressing against his hip-bone under his sweater.

Leroy sat down in the chair beside him. Scott glanced at the man and said, "Thanks."

Leroy's pupils were wider than normal, and the pulse in his neck was fast. "Yeah," he said levelly, shaking his head, "I don't know when I'm going to learn that that's not a smart bet."

Scott paused in his gathering and stacking. Those are tells, he thought; Leroy is faking dismay.

"You're taking the money for the hand," Leroy observed.

"Uh … yes." Again Scott was aware of the bulk of metal against his hip.

"You sold the hand."

"I guess you could put it that way."

"And I've bought it," Leroy said. "I've assumed it." He held out his right hand.

Puzzled, Scott put down some bills and reached across and shook hands with the big brown man in the white suit. "It's all yours," Scott said.

It's all yours.

Now, twenty-one years later, driving his old Ford Torino north up the dark 5 Freeway toward the 10 and Venice, Scott Crane remembered Ozzie's advice about games in which the smoke and the drink levels behaved strangely: Fold out. You don't know what you might be buying or selling come the showdown.

He had not ever seen Ozzie again after the game on the lake.

The old man had checked out of the Mint by the time Scott got back, and after Scott had rented a car and driven west across the desert to Orange County and Santa Ana, he had found the house unoccupied, with an envelope tacked to the front door frame.

It had contained a conformed copy of a quit-claim deed giving the house to Scott.

He had talked to his foster sister Diana on the telephone a few times in the years since, most recently in '75, after spearing his own ankle, but he had not seen her again either. And he had not any idea where she or Ozzie might now be living.

Crane missed Diana even more than he missed old Ozzie.

Crane had been seventeen when he and Ozzie had driven out to Las Vegas to pick up Diana in 1960. The game on the lake had still been nine years in the future.

He and Ozzie had been driving home from a movie—Psycho, as Scott recalled—and the radio was playing Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight," when Ozzie had pulled the Studebaker over to the Harbor Boulevard curb.

"What's the moon look like to you?" Ozzie had asked.

Scott had looked at the old man, wondering if this was a riddle. "The moon?"

"Look at it."

Scott leaned down over the dashboard to look up at the sky; and after a few seconds he had opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk to see more clearly.

The spots and gray patches on the moon made it look like a groaning skull. The bright dot of Venus was very close to it—about where the moon's collar-bone would be.

He heard dogs howling … and though there were no clouds that he could see, rain began pattering down and making dark dots on the sidewalk. He got back in the car and pulled the door closed.

"Well, it looks like a skull," he admitted. He was already wary of Ozzie's tendency to read portents into mundane occurrences, and he hoped the old man wouldn't insist that they go swimming in the ocean now, or drive to the peak of Mount Wilson, as he had occasionally done at times like this in the past.

"A suffering one," Ozzie agreed. "Is there a deck of cards in the car?"

"It's November!" Scott protested. Ozzie's policy was to have nothing to do with cards except in the spring.

"Yeah, better not to look through that window anyway," the old man mused. "Something might look back at you. How about silver coins? Uh … three of them. With women on them."

The glove compartment was full of old auto registrations and broken cigarettes and dollar chips from a dozen casinos, and among this litter Scott found three silver dollars.

"And there's a roll of Scotch tape in there," Ozzie said. "Tape pennies onto the tails side of the cartwheels. Copper is Venus's metal, I heard from a witchy woman one time."

Envying his friends in high school who didn't have fathers who made them do this kind of thing, Scott found the tape and attached pennies to the silver dollars.

"And we need a box to put 'em in," Ozzie went on. "There's an unopened box of vanilla wafers in the backseat. Dump the cookies out in the street—not now. Do it when we're crossing Chapman; it'll be better in an intersection, a crossroads." Ozzie clanked the car back into gear and drove forward.

Scott opened the box and dumped the cookies out as the car surged through the intersection, and then he dropped the silver dollars into the box.

"Shake 'em around, like dice," Ozzie said, "and tell me what they say, heads and tails."

Scott shook the box, then had to dig in the glove compartment again for a flashlight. "Uh … two tails and a heads," he said, holding the flashlight beside his ear and peering into the box.

"And we're going south," said Ozzie. "I'm going to make some turns. Keep shaking them and reading them and let me know when they come up all heads."

It was when Ozzie turned east onto Westminster Boulevard that Scott looked into the box and saw three heads—three profiles of a woman in silver bas-relief. In spite of himself, he shivered.

"Now they're all heads," he said.

"East it is," said Ozzie, speeding up.

The coins had led them out of the Los Angeles area, through San Bernardino and Victorville, before Scott worked up the nerve to ask Ozzie where they were going. Scott had hoped to spend the evening finishing the Edgar Rice Burroughs book he'd been reading.

"I'm not certain," the old man replied tensely, "but it sure looks like Las Vegas."

So much for The Monster Men, Scott thought. "Why are we going there?" he asked, keeping most of the impatience out of his voice.

"You saw the moon," Ozzie said.

Scott made himself count to ten slowly before speaking again. "What's going to be different about the moon when we're in Vegas than it was when we were home?"

"Somebody's killing the moon, the goddess; some woman has apparently taken on the—what would the word be—goddess-hood and somebody's killing her. I think it's too late for her, and I don't know the circumstances, but she's got a child, a little girl. An infant, in fact, to judge by how close Venus was to the moon when we saw it."

Here I am, Scott thought, holding a vanilla wafers box with three crumb-covered silver dollars in it with pennies taped to them, driving to Las Vegas and not reading Edgar Rice Burroughs—because Venus was close to the moon tonight. Venus is probably close to the moon all the time.

"Dad," said the seventeen-year-old Scott, "I don't mean to be disrespectful, but—but this is nuts. For one thing, there may be a lady being killed in Las Vegas tonight, but you don't know about it from looking at the moon, and if she's got a baby, it's got nothing to do with Venus. I'm sorry, I don't mean to … and even if there was, what are we supposed to do? How is it the job of two guys in California and not the job of somebody in Vegas?"

Ozzie laughed without looking away from the highway rushing up at them beyond the windshield. "You think your old man's nuts, eh? Well, a lot of people in Vegas would like it to be their job, I can tell you. This baby is a daughter of the goddess, and so she's a T-H-R-E-A-T to them, you bet. A big threat. She could bounce the King, if she grows up, which … certain persons … would like her not to do. And there's other people who want her to grow up but would want to, what, be her manager, you know? Boss her, use her. Climb into the tower by means of her Rapunzel hair, yes, sir. Right into that tower."

Scott sighed and shifted on the seat. "Okay, look, if we don't find a baby, will you agree—"

"We'll find her. I found you, didn't I?"

Scott blinked. "Me? Is this how you found me?"

"Yep."

After half a minute of silence Scott said, "You shook coins in a cookie box?"

"Hah! Sarcasm!" Ozzie glanced at him and winked. "You think your old man's nuts, don't you? Hey, I was swimming down in Laguna late one afternoon in '48, and the surf was full of fish. You know how it is when they're bumping into you under the water? And you gotta get out 'cause you know it's gonna attract barracudas? That's how it was, and the sky was full of those cirrus clouds, like they were spelling something out in a language nobody's got a Rosetta stone for. And Saturn was shining in the sky that evening like a match head, and I know that if I'd had a telescope I'd have seen all his moons disappearing behind him, being devoured like the myths say Saturn devoured his children. There's a Goya painting of that, scare the crap out of you."

The signs along the side of the highway were beginning to refer to Barstow, but Scott didn't ask his foster father to stop for dinner.

"So I got me a deck of cards," Ozzie went on, "and I started shuffling and drawing them to see where to go, and it led me straight to Lakewood, where I found you in that boat. And I walked across the parking lot to that boat slow, with my hand on my old .45 that I had in those days, because I knew I wasn't the only one who'd be tracking you. There's always some King Herod around. And I drove to Dr. Malk's in a highly circuitous fashion."

Scott shook his head, not wanting to believe these weird and morbid things. "So am I the son of some goddess?"

"You're the son of a King, a bad one, an honorary Saturn. I grabbed you for the same reason we're going to grab this little girl tonight—so that you could grow up outside of the net and then decide what you want to do, once you're old enough to know the rules of the game."

When they'd got to Las Vegas at about midnight, Ozzie had made Scott shake the box and peek into it continuously as Ozzie steered the car through the brightly lit streets. The flashlight's battery was getting weak when they rounded a corner and saw the whirling red lights of police cars by one of the side entrances of the Stardust.

They parked and joined the crowd on the sidewalk around the police cars. The night air was hot, with a dry wind from the stony mountains to the west.

"Somebody shot some lady," said a man in answer to Ozzie's What's up?

"It was that Lady Issit, the one who's been kicking everybody's ass at the Poker tables," another man added. "I heard tell a big fat guy shot her right in the face, two or three shots."

Ozzie had walked away, shaking the coins in the vanilla wafers box. Scott followed him.

"She ditched the baby, or Venus would have been behind the moon," Ozzie said. "And the moon's still up and Venus is down, so the kid's still around somewhere, alive."

For an hour, while Scott grew more and more impatient and embarrassed, the two of them walked up and down Las Vegas Boulevard as Ozzie kept shaking the box and looking into it.

And to his own chagrin Scott was not surprised when they heard an infant's sobbing from behind a row of bushes on the south side of the Sands.

"Careful," Ozzie said instantly. The old man's hand was inside his jacket, and Scott knew he was holding the butt of the Smith & Wesson .38.

"Here." Ozzie turned to Scott and passed the gun to him. "Keep it out of sight unless you see somebody coming at me."

It was only a few steps to the bushes, and Ozzie came back with a baby, wrapped in a light-colored blanket, in his arms.

"Back to the car," Ozzie said tensely, "and don't watch us, look around."

The baby had stopped crying and was sucking on one of the old man's fingers. Scott walked behind Ozzie, swinging his head from side to side and occasionally walking backward to monitor all 360 degrees. He wasn't doubting his foster father now.

It took only five minutes to get back to the car. Ozzie opened the passenger-side door and took the gun, and then Scott got in and Ozzie handed him the baby—

—and for a moment Scott not only could feel the baby in his arms but could also feel the pale blanket surrounding him, and could feel protective arms sheltering him. Something in his mind or his soul had for years been unconnected, flapping loose in the psychic breezes, and was now finally connected, and Scott was sharing the baby's sensations—and he knew she was sharing his.

In his mind he could feel a personality that consisted of nothing but fright and bewilderment. You're all right now, he thought. We'll take care of you now; we're taking you home.

The link he shared with the infant was fading, but he did catch a faint surge of relief and hope and gratitude.

Ozzie was behind the wheel, starting the car. "You okay?" he asked, glancing at Scott.

"Uh," Scott said dizzily. The link was gone now, or had receded below the level at which he could sense it, but he was still so shaken by it that he wasn't sure he would not start crying, or laughing, or trembling uncontrollably. "Sure," he managed to say. "I just … never held a newborn baby before."

The old man stared at him for another moment before clanking the car into gear and steering out onto the street. "I hadn't thought of that," he said, alternately looking ahead and peering at the rearview mirror. "That's … something I hadn't … considered." He gave Scott a brief, worried glance. "You going to be okay?"

Ask her, Scott thought. "Sure," he said.

On the long drive home Ozzie had alternately driven very fast and very slow, all the while asking Scott what headlights he could see behind them. When they got back to the familiar streets of Santa Ana, the old man wasted a full hour driving around in circles, lights off and lights on, before at last pulling up to the curb in front of the house.

Diana had been passed off as another illegitimate child of Ozzie's cousin's. The nonexistent cousin was getting quite a reputation.

Now Scott Crane parked the Torino in front of Chick Hurzer's bungalow on Washington Street, and after he turned off the engine and lights, he just sat in the dark car for a few minutes. For the first time in thirteen weeks he was thinking about a different loss than the loss of his wife.

Ozzie and Diana and Scott.

They'd been a family, his family, in that old house. Scott had fed Diana, had helped teach her to read, had admired the crayon drawings she had brought home from first and second grades. She had done a drawing of him as a Christmas present in 1968. Once she had broken her arm falling off the jungle gym on the playground, and once some neighborhood kid had thrown a rock at her forehead, and she'd got a concussion; both times he had been miles away but had known about it, and had gone looking for her.

I never should have gone to the game on the lake, he thought as he impatiently blinked back tears—and Ozzie never should have left me.

He opened the door and got out. Clear your mind for the cards, he told himself.

CHAPTER 8: Just Back from the Dead

Two hundred and seventy-two miles to the northeast, Vaughan Trumbill and Ricky Leroy sat panting on a couch in the houseboat lounge. The two men stared at the scrawny, wet, naked body of Doctor Leaky, which they'd just dragged out of the bathroom.

Trumbill, whose bulk took up more than a third of the couch, wiped his huge bald head with a silk handkerchief. He had taken off his shirt, and his gross, pear-shaped torso was a coiled rainbow of tattoos. "The bathroom light and the fan and the water pump," he said, speaking loudly to be heard over the roar of the generator. "I think he died about the same time the battery did."

"Be glad he didn't drown," said Leroy. "You'd have to empty his lungs again, like out at Temple Basin two years ago." He stood up and stretched. "He'll probably be up at around the same time the battery is. I'm already in a cab from the airport. Half hour, say."

The body on the carpet twitched.

"See?" said Leroy, getting to his feet. "He senses me already." He fetched a towel from the bathroom and tossed it over the old man's scarred, featureless pelvis; then he crouched and prodded Doctor Leaky's cheek and brow. "I hope he didn't fall on the same side of his face as last time. They rebuilt his skull with coral."

Trumbill's eyebrows were raised. "Coral? Like—like seashells, coral reefs, sort of coral?"

"Right. I hear they've got some kind of porous ceramic they use now. Nah, the old jug doesn't seem to have any chips floating loose." He stood up.

"I wish you'd stay away long enough sometime for him to die for good."

"It'd take a while; there're some good protections on that body. And—"

"I know, cryogenics and cloning."

"They're getting closer every day … and this … jug of my own personal DNA is still unbroken."

The naked old body yawned, rubbed its eyes, and sat up. The towel fell away.

"Looking like shit, though," observed Trumbill.

"Welcome back, Doctor," said Leroy wearily.

"They get in all right?" asked Doctor Leaky.

"Everybody's fine, Doctor."

"Good kid," said the naked old man. He peered at the two men on the couch and scratched the white hair on his sunken chest. "One time on the lake—this must have been, oh, 'forty-seven, I hadn't got the Buick yet—or—no, right, 'forty-seven—he got a hook in his finger, and—" He gave each of them a piercing stare. "Do you think he cried?" He waved off any replies they might have had. "Not a bit! Even when I had to push the—the part that, the barb, the barb, not even when I pushed it through so I could clip it off. Clip it off." He squeezed imaginary clippers in the air, and then he stared from Trumbill to Leroy. "Didn't … even … cry."

Leroy was frowning in embarrassment. "Go to your room, you old fool. And put your towel back on. I don't need to be reminded."

Crane got out of the car and carried his plastic 7-Eleven bag across the sidewalk and up the stepping-stones to Chick Hurzer's front door. The lawn and shrubbery looked cared for. That was good; Chick's car dealership must at least be making enough money for him to hire gardeners.

There was garrulous shouting from inside when he rang the doorbell, and then Chick opened the door.

"I'll be goddamned," Chick said, "Scarecrow Smith! Good to have you back; this game needs a good loser."

Crane grinned. He had always avoided being any evening's conspicuous winner. "Got room in your fridge for some beer?" "Sure, come on in."

In the bright hallway he could see that Chick had had a prosperous decade. He was heavier, his face puffy and threaded with broken veins, and his trademark gold jewelry was bigger and chunkier.

In the living room five men sat around a card table on which a game of Seven-Stud was already in progress.

"Got us a live one here, Chick?" one of them asked. "Deal me in next hand," Crane said cheerfully. He leaned against the wall and watched as they finished out the hand. They were playing with cash now—Crane had always insisted on chips, which tended to make the betting more liberal—and they were apparently playing straight Seven-Stud, no High-Low or twists or wild cards, and the betting seemed to be limited and three raises only.

Crane wondered if he'd be able to do anything about all this tonight. He had set up this game a quarter of a century ago, out of the remains of a Tuesday night game that had begun to draw too many genuinely good players to be profitable, and he had fine-tuned it to seem loose and sociable to the good losers while actually producing a steady income for himself.

The hand ended, and one of the men gathered in the pot.

"Sit down, Scott," said Chick. "Guys, this is Scott Smith, known as Scarecrow. This next hand is … Five-Draw."

Crane sat down and, after the deal, watched the other players around the table look at their cards. This would be his first hand of Poker in eleven years.

At last, having noted some mannerisms that might, as he got to know the play of these men better, prove to be valuable tells, he curled up the corners of his five cards and looked at his hand.

Doctor Leaky had managed to tie the towel around himself, but halfway to his room he halted and sniffed the night breeze wafting in off the lake through the open porthole.

"There's one," he said.

Trumbill had stood up and started toward the old man, but Leroy waved at him to stop. "Just back from the dead," said Leroy, "he might sense something. What is it, Doctor?"

"On the hook," said Doctor Leaky.

"Oh, hell, you already told us about the hook. Will you—"

"One of 'em's on the hook, just now bit it, cards in his hands, blood in the water. The jacks will smell him. But now he's on the hook, you can smell him, too. You've got to find him before they do, and you've got to put him safe in the fishbowl."

Leroy stared at the old man, who was blinking and gaping around in imbecilic fright as if he expected enemies to swim up out of the depths of the lake. As a matter of fact, there was an enemy deep in the lake—the head of one, anyway.

After several seconds Leroy turned to Trumbill. "Maybe you'd better do as he says."

One of the players had asked to be left out of the hand so that he could call his wife, and he stood now at the telephone in the open kitchen, holding the receiver tightly. He could clearly hear the voices of the players around the table behind him.

After a dozen rings a man's voice answered by repeating the number he'd dialed.

"Hi, honey," the player said nervously, "I'm gonna be late, I'm playing Poker."

"Hi, sweetie," said the voice in a mock-gay tone. "Poker, eh?" There came the clicking of an electric keyboard. "Got a lot in that list. You got any cross-references? A name?"

"Hey, come on, honey, I can't get mushy; this is the only phone here; these guys can hear me."

"Got you. Give me a category or something then, unless you want to listen to about a hundred names."

"That's your dad all over," said the player with a forced laugh. "Goes fishing all the time but doesn't catch anything."

"Fishing and poker," said the voice. "To me that sounds like that poker champ in Gardena who goes sports fishing all the time in Acapulco; matter of fact, I've heard he can't catch anything." There were several measured clicks on the keyboard. "I'll know it when I see it … here we go, the guy's name is Obstadt, Neal."

"That's it, dear, and it's worth fifty thousand dollars." He glanced toward the game room and added, "The equity in that place, you know, after I added on that guest room and all—"

"And the aluminum siding and all the goddamn painted lawn squirrels, I know." There was more clicking. "There's only one under Obstadt for that kind of money—a poker player, last seen in '80, name of Scott 'Scarecrow' Smith, son of Ozzie Smith, last seen in '69. I see Obstadt has been distributing pictures throughout L.A. and San Diego and Berdoo and Vegas since January of '87. That's your basis?"

"Not really, it's an old picture. Mainly it was the name."

"He's playing as Scarecrow Smith?"

"Right."

"That looks like a score for you, honey. Build: tall … medium …"

"Uh-huh."

"Medium build. Weight: fat … average …"

"Okay."

"I hope the clothes are distinctive. Hair: black … brown … blond … gray …"

"Yup."

"Jacket—"

"No."

"Saves us time. Shirt: plaid …"

"Right. For this weather."

"Gotcha, flannel. Jeans with that?"

"Yeah. And what you'd figure."

"Say if it ain't sneakers. Okay. Is that enough?"

The player turned toward the table and looked at the other men. "It's enough. Listen, hon, you don't have to worry about that. We're at Chick Hurzer's house, on Washington in Venice."

"Was gonna be my next question." Clickety-clickety click.

"Okay, he's in the book; I don't need the house address. What's your code number?"

"Four-six-double-three-two-oh."

The voice repeated it slowly, saying "zero" instead of "oh." "That's correct?"

"Yeah, that's it."

The player could hear rapid clicking now. "I got you in," the voice said. "Call the payment number a week from now. If it checks out to be the right guy, you got forty-five thousand bucks coming."

The game went well for Crane. The extra dozen decks of cards encouraged players to call for a new deck after a loss, a good start toward getting some superstition back into the game, and the sandwiches, when he brought them out at midnight, were a good enough diversion to produce a couple of instances of positively idiotic play. And there were a couple of doctors at the table, and doctors always had a lot of money and played loose, staying in with just about every hand; and nobody was completely sober, and Scott was apparently the only one who had any concerns about money, and by the time the game broke up at two in the morning he had won more than two thousand dollars. That was two payments on the mortgage right there, and he could certainly find another game somewhere within the next couple of days.

Chick Hurzer had been a bigger winner and was now drinking scotch. "So where have you been, Scarecrow?" he asked jovially as people were standing up and stretching and one man turned on the television. "You've got time for a drink, don't you?"

"Sure," said Scott, taking a shot glass. "Oh, here and there. Honest work for a few years."

Everybody laughed—one of the players a little tensely.

Obstadt's man had been apologetic on the telephone about its being short notice, but Al Funo had laughed and assured him that it was no inconvenience; and when the man had started to discuss payment, Funo had protested that old friends didn't argue about money.

Sitting in his white Porsche 924 now, waiting for Scott Smith to emerge from this Chick Hurzer person's house, Funo tilted down his rearview mirror and ran a comb through his hair. He liked to make a good impression on everyone he met.

He had removed the Porsche's back window, but with the heater on the car was warm enough, and it idled so quietly and smokelessly that a pedestrian walking past it might not even know the engine was running.

He was looking forward to meeting this Smith character. Funo was a "people person," proud of the number of people he could call his friends.

He watched alertly as half a dozen men ambled out through the front door of Hurzer's house now into the glare of the streetlight, and he was quick to pick out the gray-haired figure in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. Other people were shaking Smith's hand, and Funo wished he could have joined in the camaraderie of the game.

He got out of his car and began sauntering along the sidewalk, smiling, not minding the waterfront chill in the salty air. Ahead of him the men had separated, heading for their cars.

Smith seemed to be aware of Funo when he was still some yards off along the sidewalk; he had his hand by his belt buckle, as if about to tuck in his loose shirttail. A gun? Funo smiled more broadly.

"Hey, pal," Funo said when he was close enough for an easy, conversational tone to be heard, "have you got a cigarette?"

Smith stared at him for a moment, then said, "Sure," and hooked a pack of Marlboros out of his pocket. "There's only three or four in there," Smith said. "Go ahead and keep the pack."

Funo was touched. Look at the car this guy's driving, he thought, a beat old Torino covered with dust, and he gives me his last cigarettes!

"Hey, thanks, man," he said. "These days it's damn rare to meet someone who's possessed of genuine generosity." He blushed, wondering if the two gen's in his last phrase had made him seem careless in his choice of words. "Here," he said hastily, digging in the pocket of his Nordstrom slacks, "I want you to have my lighter."

"No, I don't need a—"

"Please," Funo said, "I have a hundred of them, and you're the first gen—the first, uh, considerate person I've met in twenty years in this damn town." Actually Funo was only twenty-eight and had moved to Los Angeles five years ago, but he had found that it sometimes helped to lie a little bit when making new friends. He realized he was sweating.

"Please."

"Sure, man, thanks," said Smith.

Was he uncomfortable about it? "Two hundred of them I've got."

"Fine, thanks. Jesus! This is a gold Dunhill! I can't—"

"Don't insult me."

Smith seemed to recoil a little. Had Funo spoken harshly? Well, how could someone spurn a sincerely offered gift?

"Thanks," Smith said. "Thanks a lot. Well—I've got to go. Getting late."

"You're telling me!" Funo said eagerly. "We'll be lucky to be in our beds before dawn, hey?"

"Lucky," Smith agreed, starting toward his pitiful car.

Only when he noticed the Porsche for the third time did Crane remember another piece of Ozzie's advice—Three-sixty at all times—they can be in front just as easy as behind.

Driving east on the Santa Monica Freeway in the pre-dawn darkness, the moon long since set and the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles standing up off to his left like the smoldering posts of some god's burned-down house, Crane had been seized with the idea of just staying eastbound on this freeway; cruising right on past where it became called the Pomona Freeway, and all the way out past Ontario and Mira Loma to where it joined with the 15 in one of those weird, dusty semi-desert suburbs with names like Norco and Loma Linda, and then straight on up to Las Vegas.

Be in Vegas in time for a late breakfast, he had found himself thinking. And you've got two grand in your pocket.

He had known he didn't want to go anywhere besides home, much less to Las Vegas, but still he had had to fight the compulsion and concentrate on turning south onto the Santa Ana Freeway.

And then he had seen the Porsche for the third time.

There were only a few cars on the freeway at this hour, and he'd been able to swoop through the long dark curves with just three fingertips swinging the bottom of the steering wheel, but now he snapped the seat belt across himself and took the wheel firmly in both hands.

The Porsche was ahead of him now, as the two cars drove past the Long Beach Freeway junction. It seemed to Crane that it had been behind him or ahead of flanking for at least ten minutes. If Ozzie had been driving right now, he would have sped up and got in the fast lane and then done a squealing three-lane change to get off at Atlantic, and then taken some long way home.

But Crane was exhausted. "No, Ozzie," he said aloud. "I can't be spooking at every car making the same trip I am." He sighed. "But tell you what, I'll watch him, okay?"

The swooping overhead lights gleamed on the Porsche's body but not on its rear window. Frowning with the effort of focusing, Crane realized that the Porsche didn't have a rear window.

Cold night and a well-kept Porsche, he thought, but no back window?

He imagined Ozzie sitting beside him. Heads up, the old man would have said. "Right, Ozzie," Crane replied, and peered at the car ahead.

And so he saw the driver twist around and extend his arm out across the back of the seat, and he saw a gleam of metal in the hand.

Crane flung himself sideways across the seat as the windshield imploded with an ear-stunning bang. Tiny cubes of windshield glass sprayed across him, and the headwind was a cold, battering gale in the car as he pulled the wheel strongly to the right. He braced his feet and sat up, then just winced and held on.

The Torino hit the shoulder hard, tearing up ice plant as the old shocks clanked shut and the car dug in for an instant and then sprang up with the impetus of its own weight. As soon as the heavy old vehicle slewed to a stop, he shoved the shift lever into reverse and tromped on the accelerator and wove the lumbering machine down off the slope and back along the blessedly empty slow lane to the last off ramp.

Back in drive, he sped down Atlantic Boulevard, squinting in the headwind. After tracing a maze path through the dark streets, he pulled into the parking lot of a closed gas station and turned off the lights. He pulled the revolver out of his belt and watched the street.

His heart was thudding in his chest, and his hands were trembling wildly. There was a half-finished pint of Wild Turkey in the glove compartment, and after a minute or two he fumbled it out and twisted off the cap and took a deep gulp.

Jesus, he thought. It has not ever been closer. It has not ever been closer.

Eventually he put the car back into gear and drove south all the way to Pacific Coast Highway and then took Brookhurst up to Westminster. The car leaned perceptibly to the right now, and he wondered what he had done to the suspension and alignment.

"What seeems to be the problem?" whispered Archimedes Mavranos.

He sat on Scott Crane's porch in the darkness and listened to his own heart. He had read in an Isaac Asimov article that humans averagely got two billion heartbeats, and he calculated that he had used up only one billion.

It wasn't fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn't delivered like the mail.

He reached down and took hold of his current can of Coors. He had read that Coors was anti-carcinogenic—it had no nitrosamines, or something—and so he drank it constantly.

God knew why Crane drank Budweiser constantly. Mavranos hadn't heard anything about Budweiser.

Spit in the palm of your hand and then whack it with your other fist, he thought, and watch which way the spit flies. Then you know which way to go.

Mavranos had dropped out of high school when his fiancée had got pregnant, and for nearly twenty years he had made a pretty good living by buying cars from the Huntington Beach police impound yard and fixing them up and selling them for a profit. Only last April had he started studying science and math and myth.

April is the cruellest month, he thought.

Last April he had gone to a doctor because he was getting tired all the time, and had no appetite anymore, and had a lump under his left ear.

"What seems to be the problem?" the doctor had asked cheerfully.

What had turned out to be the problem was lymphoma, cancer of the lymphatic system.

The doctor had explained it to some extent, and Mavranos had done a lot of reading on his own. He had learned about the random nature of cancer cells, and had then studied randomness—and he had begun to discern the patterns that underlay true randomness: the branchings, the repeating patterns, the fat man in the complex plane.

A car turned down Main from Seventeenth, but it wasn't Crane's Torino.

If you were to decide to measure the coastline of California, it would be of little use simply to lay a ruler across a page of an atlas and then determine the length of the roughly ten degrees of longitude it spanned. But it would be of even less value to walk the length of the coastline with a one-inch stick, taking into account every open tide pool and shoe-size peninsula; if you measured too finely, in fact, your answer could approach infinity. Every little pool, if you measured finely enough, had a virtually infinite coastline.

You had to approach such things differently.

You had to back off just far enough.

Turbulence in a water pipe or disorder in the signals to the nerves of the heart—or the cellular hysteria called cancer—were effects of randomness. And if you could … find the patterns in randomness, maybe you could manipulate them. Change them, restore the order.

Spit in the palm of your hand and whack it, he thought.

And he had found this neighborhood, this house, Scott Crane.

Crane never washed his Torino, and Mavranos had noticed patterns in the dew-streaked dust and the splashing of bird shit on the car body—circles, and straight lines and right angles on a sloping surface, and once a spatter of little wailing faces like that Munch picture—and once, when Crane had been standing on the porch, blearily going through his pocket change for a quarter to buy a newspaper, he had dropped a handful of dimes and quarters and pennies—Mavranos had helped pick them up, and had noticed that every coin had landed heads side up; and any watch Crane wore would run too fast.

And animals died around this house. Mavranos had once noticed dead ants in a line that pointed to a forgotten third of a cheeseburger on the porch, and a neighbor's cat that frequently used to sleep on Crane's roof had died; Mavranos had gone over to the woman's house, ostensibly to commiserate, and had learned that the veterinarian had diagnosed cancer as the cause of death.

And throughout the whole block fruit juices fermented abnormally fast, as though some god of wine visited this Santa Ana street and breathed on the houses, very late at night when he'd be seen by no one but the furtive youths out to steal car stereos and batteries.

Since it was randomness that was out to kill him, Archimedes Mavranos had decided to find out where it lived, find its castle, its perilous chapel. And so a year ago he had withdrawn five thousand dollars in twenties and put it in his pocket, told his wife and two daughters that he would be back when he had retaken his health, and had walked away down the street. At the corner he had spit in his hand and punched it with his fist, and then started away in the indicated direction.

He had walked for two full days, eating beef jerky he bought in liquor stores and pissing behind bushes and not shaving or changing his clothes or sleeping at all. Eventually he had found himself circling this block, and when he saw a house for rent, he had called the number on the sign out front and given the landlord fifteen hundred dollars in cash. And then he had devoted his efforts to fine-tuning.

He had come to suspect early on that Scott Crane was the major local signpost to the castle of randomness—but only tonight, when Crane had mentioned having been a professional Poker player, had he found any reason to be confident. Gambling was the place where statistics and profound human consequences met most nakedly, after all, and cards, even more than dice or the numbers on a roulette wheel, seemed able to define and perhaps even dictate a player's … luck.

Crane's living-room window was open behind the screen, and Mavranos now sensed someone standing inside, behind him. He shifted around in the chair.

"Scott?" came a whisper. "Come to bed."

"It's me, Susan, Arky," said Mavranos, embarrassed. "Scott's still off at his … whatever he's doing."

"Oh." Her whisper was weaker. "My eyes aren't very good yet. Don't … tell him I spoke to you, okay?"

She added something else, but it was too faint for him to hear.

"I'm sorry?"

He could hear her take a deep breath, like wind sighing through a leafless tree, but when she whispered again, he was only just able to hear it.

"Give him a drink," she said, and added some more words, all he caught of which were the syllables back us.

"Sure, Susan," Archimedes said uncomfortably. "You bet."

The next car to turn onto Main was Crane's Ford, and Mavranos stood up, for the windshield was just a white webbed skirt around a gaping hole on the driver's side.

CHAPTER 9: The Only Fat Man I Know About

"I just want to go to bed, man," Crane said. He had brought the pint bottle with him from the car. "Well, okay, one beer to chase this stuff with." He took a cold can and sat down heavily in one of the decrepit porch chairs.

Mavranos had been saying something. "What, now?" said Crane. "A fat man in the desert?"

Mavranos closed his eyes, then started again. "A song about a fat man who drives along the highways that cross the Mojave. The 40, the 15, even the one 27 out by Shoshone. A country-western song is how I've heard it, though I guess there's a rock one, too. This fat man's got a warty bald head, and his car has about a million rearview mirrors on it, like the mods in England used to hang on their scooters."

Scott Crane finished the bottle and put it down carefully on the table. "So the question is, have I heard about him?" He shook his head. "No. I haven't heard about him."

"Well, he's not real. He's a—a legend, you know? Like the Flying Dutchman or the Wandering Jew. His car is supposed to break down all the time, because the carburetor's just a wonder of extra hoses and valves and floats and clips and stuff."

Crane frowned and nodded, as if to show that he was understanding all this. "And you say he's green?"

"No, damn it. No. He used to be green, and just a big man, not fat, but that version stopped applying sometime. That image stopped being vital, and you see it now only in things like the Hulk, and the Jolly Green Giant who grows vegetables. Now he's not the Green Knight that Sir Gawain met anymore—because the water's sick and the land's barren, like in Second Kings—now he's real fat, and he's generally black or gray or even metallic. That little round robot Tik-Tok in the Wizard of Oz stories, that's him, a portrait of him." Mavranos looked at his sodden companion and wondered why he was even bothering to explain. "But you haven't heard of him."

"No. The only fat man I know about," said Crane, pausing in mid-sentence to take a long sip of the beer, "is the one that shot the moon in the face in 1960."

"Tell me about that."

Crane hesitated, then shook his head. "I'm kidding, it's just a—a John Prine song."

Some people shouted at each other in the Norm's parking lot, then got into cars; headlights came on, and they drove out onto Main and away into the night.

Mavranos stared at Crane. "Rebar, you said."

"Yeah, rebar. A goddamn iron pole. Fell off a truck. If I hadn't ducked to the side, it would have punched a hole right through my head. I should have got a name off the side of the truck; I could sue 'em."

"And you threw it away."

"Well, I couldn't drive, could I, with it stuck through my car?"

"This fat man," Mavranos went on after a pause, "like I said, he's not real, he's a symbol."

"Of course he is," Crane agreed vaguely; "of basketballs, or Saturn, or something."

"Why did you mention Saturn?"

"Jesus, Arky, I don't know. I'm exhausted. I'm drunk. Saturn's round, and so are fat men."

"He's the Mandelbrot man."

"Good. That's good to hear. I was afraid he was the Pillsbury doughboy. I've really got to—"

"Do you know what the Mandelbrot man is? No? I'll tell you." Mavranos took another sip of his own beer to ward away the cancer. "If you draw a cross on a piece of paper and call the crossing-point zero, and you mark one-two-three and so on to the right, and minus one, minus two, and all to the left, and one-times-the-square-root-of-minus-one and then two times that and then three times that upward from zero, and that times minus one, and minus two, and so forth, below the zero point, you wind up with a plane, and any point on it can be defined by two numbers, just like defining a place by latitude and longitude. And then—"

"Arky, what's this got to do with fat men?"

"Well, if you apply a certain equation to as many of the points on the plane as you can, apply it over and over again—you gotta have a powerful computer—some of them go flying off to infinity and some stay finite. And if you color the ones that stay finite black, they form the silhouette of a warty fat man. And if you color-code the other points by how quickly they want to go infinite, you find that the fat man is surrounded by all kinds of shapes, boiling off of him, that look like squid tentacles and seahorse-tails and ferns and rib-cages and stuff."

Crane seemed to be about to speak, but Mavranos went on.

"And you don't always need Mandelbrot's equation. The fat man shows up in a lot of other functions on the complex plane, as if the shape of him is a—a role that's just waiting for something to come along and assume it. He's a constant figure, along with other lobed and geometrical shapes that look like … well, case in point tonight, like Hearts and Clubs and Diamonds and Spades, often as not."

Crane squinted at him for several seconds. "And something about … the Wizard of Oz, you said. How'd you learn about all this?"

"It's become a—a hobby of mine, studying weird math."

"And this fat man's name is … Mandelbrot?"

"No, no more than Frankenstein's monster was named Frankenstein. The equation was developed by a guy named Mandelbrot, Benoit Mandelbrot. A Frenchman. He belonged to a group, a club in Paris, called Bourbaki, but he split from them because he began to understand randomness, and it didn't sit well with them. They were real prove-it-by-the-rules boys, and he was finding new rules."

"Bourbaki," said Scott drunkenly. "Ecole Polytechnique and the Bourbaki Club."

Mavranos forced himself to breathe slowly. Mandelbrot had gone to the Ecole Polytechnique. Crane did know something about this, or about something that had to do with this.

"You seem to take it pretty lightly, somebody shooting out your windows," Mavranos said carefully.

" 'When there are gray skies,' " Scott sang, " 'I don't mind the gray skies—you make them blue, Sonny Boy.' "

Mavranos blinked. "Do you have a son?"

"No, but I'm somebody's son."

Mavranos sensed that this was important, so he spoke casually. "Well, yeah, I suppose so. Whose son are you?"

"My foster father said I was a bad King's son."

As indifferently as he could, Mavranos asked, "Is that why you play Poker?"

Scott took a deep breath and then put on a grin in a way Mavranos could imagine someone putting on armor. "I don't play Poker anymore. Actually I went out for a job tonight. I think I'm going to be a rep for … Yoyodyne. They manufacture … stuff, locally. Maybe you've heard of them."

"Yeah," said Mavranos, backing down, "I think I have."

"I'd better be heading for bed," Scott said, elbowing himself up out of the chair. "I've got to meet with them again tomorrow."

"Sure. Susan's been wondering where you've been."

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 released a handful of bills and 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 body 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 I-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 seeems 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 put 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."

"I'll just leave 'em here. In fact, if I could just go to sleep on this couch—"

"Sleep later, and right now bring them into the kitchen. I am in this for my health."

Crane just stared at the note on the back of the photograph of Lady Issit while Mavranos shuffled the photographs from the other envelopes around on the kitchen table and read the notes attached to them.

"So who are these people?" he asked. He looked up, then snapped his fingers at Crane. "Hmm? What's this … category you're a part of?"

Crane blinked and looked up. "Oh, they're—a couple of 'em I recognize. Poker players. One of them was in a game with me in '69, in a houseboat on Lake Mead. He won a big pot, what in this game is called the Assumption. He—" Crane sighed. "He took money for the hand. So did I. These others were probably at one of the other lake games that week, and I bet they won some Assumptions, too."

Crane looked back at the note on the picture of Lady Issit. For the dozenth time he read, "Diana Smith—possibly living with Ozzie Smith—address unknown—urgently FOLD." He realized that his heart was pounding and his palms were damp. "I've, uh, got to get in touch with somebody," he said.

"You can use the phone."

"I don't know where she is. And I don't know anybody that would."

"I got no Ouija board, Pogo."

Urgently FOLD.

He thought of the awed care with which he had held her during the long drive back from Las Vegas in 1960, and of the portrait she'd done of him, and he tried to remember what each of them had said the last time they'd talked, when she'd called him after he'd put the fishing spear through his ankle. When she'd been fifteen.

He'd dreamed that she got married. He wondered if she had children. She'd be thirty now, so she probably did. Maybe her psychic link was with the children now, and no longer with him.

Mavranos had got up and slouched back into the living room; now Crane heard him say, quietly, "Blue van just pulled up, and three guys got out of it; they're heading for your place."

What's in the pot is gone, Ozzie had always said. It ain't yours anymore. You might win it, but until you do, you gotta regard it as spent, not chase it.

"Up on your porch now," Mavranos said.

Of course, when the antes or blinds have been high, so high that it's as much as you're worth to stay in a dozen hands, why then you gotta play looser.

"Lights on in your living room," Arky said. "Kitchen now. Spare bedroom. Real bedroom, too, probably, but I can't see it from here."

And if the antes have been so big that guys are staying just because of it, sometimes you can bet everything you've got and win with a damn poor hand.

Crane turned the photograph over and looked at the pregnant woman. Then he got up and walked into the living room and stood beside Mavranos. Crane watched the silhouettes moving in his house. One was obviously the fat man. He must have met the van somewhere nearby. "I've got to get in there," he said.

"No way tonight—and these guys'll probably watch the place for a couple of days. What's in there that we can't get somewhere else?"

"The phone."

"Shit, I told you you could use mine."

"It's gotta be that one."

"Yeah? Tell me why." He was still staring out the window. Crane looked at Mavranos's lean silhouette, the narrowed eyes glinting in reflected streetlight glow. The man looked like a pirate.

Can I trust him? Crane wondered. He's obviously got some sort of stake in this situation, but I'll swear he's a loner, not associated with any of these—these murky thrones and powers and assassins. We've been sociable neighbors for a while, and he always got along with Susan. And God, it would be wonderful to have an ally. "Okay," Crane said slowly. "If we both tell the other guy everything we know—I mean, that he knows—himself—about this stuff—"

Mavranos was grinning at him. "You mean we lay our cards on the table."

"That's it." Crane held out his right hand.

Mavranos enveloped it in his own calloused, scarred right hand and shook it firmly twice. "Okay."

Eighteen hours later Crane was crawling on his hands and knees across the floor of his own living room toward the telephone, his right eyelid stinging and his cheek saltily wet.

The intruders had turned off the lights when they had left, but the blinds were raised, and the traffic and neon signs and streetlights of Main Street gave the room a flickering twilight glow in the middle of this Friday night.

Ten minutes earlier Mavranos had driven his car up to the curb in front of Crane's house and had got out and walked up to the front door, to attract the attention of anyone who might be watching the place. After knocking and getting no response, he had gone back to his car, leaned in through the open window, and honked the horn three times—two shorts and one long.

Crane had been in the alley behind the house.

At the first of the short blasts Crane pushed his way through his dilapidated back fence; the second honk blared as he was sprinting across his dark, unkempt back lawn, and when the third began, he punched a leather-gloved hand through his bedroom window, brushed the glass splinters away from the bottom edge of the frame, and dived through and scrambled across the bed.

By the time the horn stopped he was standing beside the bed. The air was warm, almost hot; the heater had been running all night and all day and half the night again, and of course the stove was on.

He took off Arky's work glove and tossed it onto the floor.

The bedroom had been ransacked. The blankets and sheets had been torn off the bed, and the mattress had been slashed, and the bureau drawers had been dumped out on the floor.

He walked down the hall to the bathroom, stepping carefully in the darkness and bracing his hands on the walls, for the floor was an obstacle course of scattered magazines and books and clothes. The bathroom was completely dark, and he groped through the litter of boxes and bottles that had been spilled out of the medicine cabinet into the sink.

He hadn't been able to stop yawning, and his palms were damp.

Among the litter in the sink he had come across the rubber bulb and the bottle of saline solution, and he'd shrugged. As long as you're here, he thought.

Working by touch, he poured some of the solution into the coffee mug that was miraculously still on the sink. He reached a finger up to his face and pushed inward on the side of his right eye. With a sort of inner sploosh the plastic hemisphere came loose from the Teflon ring that was attached to two of the muscles in his eye socket. The medial rectus, he remembered, and the lateral rectus. He'd had the ring put in about 1980. Before that he'd had a glass eye, and once a month he'd had to go to the eye man to have it taken out and cleaned. Now it was a task to be done every day at home, like cleaning contact lenses.

He carefully put the artificial eye into the mug and then used the bulb to suck up some of the saline solution and begin squirting it into the cavity of his empty eye socket.

He hadn't done it this morning, so he squirted it out thoroughly. Irrigating the cavity, his doctor always called it.

Finally he couldn't pretend any longer that he hadn't finished. What had he come in here for?

Oh, he thought. Right. Rubbing alcohol and a sterile pad and a roll of sterile gauze bandage. He replaced his artificial eye, yawned again, then began groping through the darkness. He didn't seem able to take a deep breath.

I bet they cut it, he thought now, crawling across the living-room floor and blinking the excess solution out of his eye. I bet they did. He was dragging along the bandages and the bottle of rubbing alcohol, wrapped in a shirt from the laundry hamper.

He lifted the telephone down from the table and picked up the receiver and then took a deep breath and let it out slowly when he heard the dial tone. They had not cut the phone line. Well, he thought. He replaced the receiver carefully.

He ran trembling fingers through his hair and glanced around. All his telephone books, he saw, were gone—not only the ragged spiral-bound notebook with inked entries, but the big Pacific Bell white pages and yellow pages, too. I guess people write numbers in those as well, he thought, in the margins and back pages, and maybe draw asterisks by some of the printed ones, like to distinguish one particular Jones from among a column of them. I wonder what sort of calls all my old friends are going to get.

He peeled a couple of yards off the roll of sterile gauze and tucked the long strip under his leg.

He leaned back, and for nearly a minute he looked up through the window glass at the dark, shaggy head of the palm tree out front swaying in the night breeze. He didn't dare raise his head high enough to be seen from outside, but he could crouch here and watch the palm tree. It's outside the hole I'm in, he thought. All it has to do is suck up nutrients and get ready for tomorrow's photosynthesis session, like every other day.

At last he sighed and pulled Arky's Schrade lock-back knife out of his pocket and opened it. Smoke marks mottled the broad four-inch blade, from Arky's having held it over a lit burner on his stove, but Arky had said to use rubbing alcohol, too, if possible.

Crane twisted the cap off the plastic bottle and poured alcohol over both sides of the blade. The stuff reeked sharply, and it chilled his thigh when he shook a couple of liberal splashes of it onto the left leg of his jeans. He was shivering, and his heart was thudding coldly in his hollow chest.

He had to keep reminding himself that he had thought this out a hundred times during these last eighteen hours, and had not been able to see any other way out.

With his right hand he held the knife upright on his left thigh, the point pricking him an inch or two to the outside of where he figured the femur was; his left hand, open, hovered over his head as he gathered his courage.

He was panting, and after a few seconds his nose caught a new depth and mellowness in the alcohol reek. He glanced away from the knife—

—and then stared at the opened bottle of Laphroaig scotch that was standing on the carpet, with a half-full Old Fashioned glass beside it. They had certainly not been there when he had crawled across the floor three or four minutes ago.

"Scott," came Susan's voice softly from the shadows beyond the bottle. He looked up, and he thought he could see her. The diffuse, spotty light made camouflage of the patterns on her clothing, and her face was turned away, but he was sure he could see the fall of her black hair and the contour of one shoulder and leg.

"Don't, Scott," she said. "Why hurt yourself to get her when you can have a drink and get me?"

Crane's face was dewed with chilly sweat. "Is that what you are?" he asked tightly. "Drink? Delirium tremens? Did I bring that bottle out? Am I talking to myself here?"

"Scott, she's not worth this, have a drink and let me—"

No, he thought, this can't be a hallucination. Arky saw it twice yesterday, this figure, this creature.

"Come into the bedroom. Bring the bottle."

He could hear a chitinous rustling as the vague figure in the corner stood up. Would it go into the bedroom, or would it come toward him?

It's not Susan, he reminded himself nervously. Susan's dead. This thing has nothing to do with Susan, or nearly nothing. At most it's a psychic fossil of her, in her shape and with some of her memories but made of something else.

It was coming toward him. The light climbed the approaching figure—slim legs, hips, breasts. In a moment he would see its face, the face of his dead wife.

As if he were slamming a door against something dreadful, he slammed his hand down with all his strength onto the butt end of the upright knife.

Breath whistled in through his clenched teeth, and the room seemed to ring with a shrill, tinny whine. The pain in his stabbed leg was a scalding blackness, but he was cold, freezing, and the blood had come so fast that the knife hilt standing up from his thigh was slick with it, and his scrabbling hands slipped off the hot, wet wood of the grip. At last he got a good hold on it and pulled, but the muscles inside his leg seemed to be gripping the blade; it took all his strength to tug the thing up and out of himself, and he gagged as he felt, deep in his leg, the edge cutting more flesh as it was dragged free.

He squinted around at the dim room. The thing that had seemed to be Susan was gone.

His hands were heavy and clumsy as he laid the bandage on the cut in his sopping jeans—Should have took the pants off first, he thought dizzily—and then dragged up the length of gauze and tied it off around his leg, as tightly as he could, over the bandage.

His heart, which had been racing before he stabbed himself, seemed to have slowed and taken on a metallic clanking, sounding like a weary old man pitching horseshoes. He thought he could smell the kicked-up dry dust.

Shock, he told himself. Lean back, put your feet up on the couch, elevate the wound above the heart. Try to relax your rib-cage so you can breathe deep and slow.

Go ahead and hold the leg as tight as you like.

The refrigerator's compressor-motor turned on, then after a minute clicked off again. A siren howled by down Main Street, and he listened to it, vaguely hoping that it might stop somewhere nearby. It didn't.

Come on, he thought; call.

Blood was seeping out from under the bandage and running up his thigh and soaking the seat of his pants. The rug will be ruined, he thought; Susan will—

Stop it.

He looked at the glass of scotch. He could smell the smoky, welcoming warmth of it, of her—Stop it.

The ringing of the telephone jolted him awake. How long had it been ringing? He fumbled at it and managed to knock the receiver off.

"Wait!" he croaked, scrabbling at it with blood-sticky hands. "Don't hang up, wait!"

At last he got the fingers of one hand around it and pulled it across the wet rug and lifted its weight to his ear.

"Hello?"

He heard a woman's voice. "Scott! What happened? Are you all right? What happened? I'm calling paramedics if you don't say something!"

"Diana," he said. He took a deep breath and made himself think. "Are you at home?"

"No, Ozzie made me promise—it doesn't matter, what—"

"Good," he said, talking over her. "Listen to me, and don't hang up. I don't need paramedics. God—give me a minute and don't hang up."

"You sound terrible! I can't give you a minute—just tell me what happened to your leg."

"I stabbed myself, I—"

"How badly? Quick!"

"Not too bad, I think, I did it with a sterilized knife and made sure to hit the side away from that big artery—"

"You did it on purpose!" She sounded relieved and very angry. "I was at work, and I fell right over! The manager had to use my sign-off number on the register and make one of the box boys drive me home! Now I'm clocked out, and I don't get sick pay till I've been there a year! What was it, a game of Amputation Poker?"

He sighed deeply. "I needed to get in touch with you quickly."

She seemed to be coughing softly. Then; "You what! You must be crazy, I can't—"

"Goddamm it, listen to me!" he said harshly. "I may pass out here, and I probably won't be able to get to this phone again. You and Ozzie—and me—somebody wants to kill us all, and they've got the resources to find you and him the way they've found me. Is Ozzie still alive?"

She was quiet for a moment. "Yes," she said.

"I need to talk to him. This has to do with that game I played in on Lake Mead in '69. There was something Ozzie knew—"

"Jesus, it's been more than a minute. I'm out of here—stay by the phone—I'm crazy, but I'll call you from another booth."

He managed to juggle the receiver back onto the phone. Then he just lay on the floor and concentrated on breathing. Luckily the room was warm. A deep, throbbing ache was building in his leg behind the steady heat of the pain.

The phone rang, and he grabbed the receiver. "You?" he said.

"Right. Ozzie made me promise not to talk to you on a traceable phone, especially now, twenty years later. Talk."

"The people that killed your mother want to kill you. And me, and Ozzie. Don't know why. Ozzie knows why, or he wouldn't have ditched me. To save us all, I need to talk to him."

She inhaled. "You're doomed, Scott," she said, and there seemed to be tears in her voice. "If you are still Scott. What did I give you for your birthday in '68?"

"A crayon portrait of me."

"Shit!" she sobbed. "I wish you were already gone! No, I don't. Scotty, I love you. Good-bye."

There was a click in his ear, silence, the dial tone. He gently hung it up, then sat there for a while and stared at the telephone.

He was bleakly sure that he could stab himself again, in the other leg, or in the belly, and she wouldn't call again.

Tears of self-pity mingled with the sweat and saline solution on his face.

Forty-seven-year-old one-eyed gimp, he thought. He laughed through his tears. What made you imagine you could help anybody? She's smart to kiss you off. Any person would do the same. Any real person.

His leg seemed to have stopped actively bleeding, though it throbbed with pain, and the section of rug he was lying on was spongy and slick with cooling blood.

Eventually he reached out and picked up the glass of scotch.

For several minutes he just lay there and inhaled its heady fumes. If he was going to drink it, he was going to drink it, so there was no hurry. Anything that might be waiting in the bedroom could continue to wait. He'd probably have to get fairly drunk, anyway, to be fooled. To get the—the suspension of disbelief.

" 'And human love needs human meriting,' " he whispered, quoting Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven," which had been one of Susan's favorite poems. " 'How hast thou merited—Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?' " He laughed again, chokingly, and took a deep sniff of the smoky fumes. " 'Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, Save Me, save only Me?' " The speaker in the poem had been God, but he supposed gods were relative.

He stared into the glass.

The telephone rang, and he didn't move. It rang again, and then he shook his head sharply and poured the liquor over his bandage. He hissed at the new pain as he grabbed the receiver. "Ahhh—you?"

"Right." Diana sniffed. "The only reason I'm doing this is that I think he would, if you'd got him. Do you remember where he used to take us for—for bodonuts, a lot of Sunday mornings?"

"Sure, sure." This is urgent, he told himself; you're back in the fight, pay attention.

"I'll call him and tell him you want to meet him there tomorrow at noon. I've met him there once or twice; it's the only place he'll agree to talk. Okay? He probably won't come at all. And listen, if"—she was crying, and he could hear fright in her voice when she spoke again—"if he does, and you've got bad friends, tell them he doesn't know where I am or how to reach me, will you? Make them believe it, I swear on my children it's the truth."

"Okay, I'll be there." He rubbed his face. "Diana, you have kids? Are you married? How long—"

"Scott, this isn't a social call!"

"Diana, I love you, too. I swear I'll kill myself before I let anybody use me to get at you." He laughed hoarsely. "I'm good at stabbing myself, I discover. God, kid, this is your brother, Scott, please tell me, where are you?"

He could hear her sniffling. "Where I am is, I'm flying in the grass."

The phrase meant nothing to Crane.

Again there was the click of a broken connection.

He rolled over gingerly and then got up on his hands and knees, sweating and cursing and wincing as he involuntarily flexed the torn muscles in his leg.

I can't leave by the front door, he thought. Even the back door is probably being viewed through the cross-hairs of a riflescope, according to Arky.

It's got to be the bedroom window.

And I've got to crawl, at least as far as the hallway, so as not to be seen from outside.

He knew there was no one else in the house … no other human. What the hell was the Susan thing? It was real enough for Arky to have seen it—and even spoken to it!—and substantial enough to have carried a bottle and glass into the living room.

The chair in front of him—Susan, the real Susan, had re-upholstered it a couple of summers ago. And she had moved the leaning bookcase against the wall corner so that it stood up straight, and she had painted the floors. Yesterday he had wondered if her imprint was so distinct on the place that it could project a tangible image of her.

Yesterday, somehow, he had not found the notion horrible.

Now he was trembling at the thought of meeting the thing in the hall, perhaps also on its hands and knees, face to fake face.

He imagined the face white, with solid white eyeballs like an old Greek statue. What might it say? Would its smile resemble Susan's remembered smile?

He shivered and blinked tears out of his eyes. Susan, Susan, he thought, why did you die? Why did you leave me here? How much of you is in this thing?

He began crawling toward the dark hallway arch. Ozzie had never taught him or Diana any prayers, so he whispered the words of religious Christmas carols … until he found himself reciting the lyrics of "Sonny Boy," and he closed his throat.

In the hall he stood up, putting his weight on his good leg. Through the open bedroom door he could see the gray rectangle that was the broken-out window, past the dark bulk of the bed, and he made himself walk forward, into the room.

The door of the closet was open, and she was in there, crouched on the pile of clothes that had been yanked off of the hangers.

"Leaving me to go off with your friends," she whispered.

He didn't look at her. "You're—" he began, then stopped, unable to say "dead." He knelt on the bed and crawled toward the window. "You're not her," he said unsteadily.

"I'm becoming her. Soon I'll be her." The room was suddenly full of the smell of hot coffee. "I'll fill the cavity."

"I've … got to go," he said, clinging to the ordinariness of the phrase.

He carefully swung his cut leg out the window first, then followed it with the other and gripped the sides of the window frame. The night air was cold.

There was a quiet but violent thumping and whining in the closet—apparently she was having some kind of fit. He boosted himself down to the dry grass and limped away across the dark yard toward the gap in the fence.

CHAPTER 11: How Did I Kill Myself?

Crane squinted against the glitter of the morning sun on the rushing freeway pavement.

Rain had been clattering in the roof gutters and hissing in the trees when he and Mavranos had furtively left Mavranos's apartment by the back door, a couple of hours before dawn; but after they'd eaten breakfast in a coffee shop on the other side of town and had walked back out to the parking lot, Mavranos sucking on a toothpick, the sun had been shining in a cleared blue sky, and only the chill of the door handle and the window crank had reminded Crane that it was not yet summer.

They were driving in a panel truck Mavranos had bought from some impound yard last fall, a big boxy 1972 Suburban with a cracked windshield and oversize tires and an old coat of desert-abraded blue paint. The truck shook and squeaked as it barreled along down the Newport Freeway, but Mavranos drove it easily with one hand on the big steering wheel and the other holding a can of Coors wrapped in what he called a "deceptor"—a rectangle of supple plastic with the Coca-Cola logo printed on it.

In the passenger seat, with his knees up because of the litter of books and socket wrench sets and old clothes on the floorboards, Crane sipped lukewarm coffee from a styrofoam cup and tried to brace himself against the vehicle's shaking. Mavranos had bandaged his gashed thigh with the easy competence of an old Boy Scout and had assured Crane that it wouldn't fester, but the leg ached and throbbed, and the one time Crane had bumped it against a chair arm the world had gone colorless and he had had to look at the floor and breathe deeply to keep from fainting.

He was wearing a pair of Mavranos's old jeans, rolled up at the ankles like a kid's because they were too long in the legs.

Leaning his hot forehead now against the cold window glass, he realized that it must have been a long time since he had last traveled on this freeway. He remembered broad, irrigated fields of string beans and strawberries stretching away on either side, but now there were "Auto Malls," and gigantic buildings of bronze-colored glass with names like UNISYS and WANG on them, and clusters of shiny new banks and condominiums and hotels around the double-level marble-and-skylights-and-ferns shopping mall called South Coast Plaza.

It was an Orange County with no orange trees anymore, a region conquered by developers, who had made it sterile even as they had made it fabulously valuable, and the moneyed complacency of the area seemed by definition to exclude people like him and Arky as surely as it had come to exclude the farmers.

"Suits," growled Mavranos after a glance away from the traffic ahead. He paused to sip his beer. "They … replicate. The freeways are dead stopped half the time, you can't exercise in this air and you can't eat fish you catch in the bay, and nobody who'd speak to you or me can afford a house even though the suits have terraced all the old hills and canyons with the damn things … and have you noticed that these people don't do anything? They're all middlemen—they sell stuff or broker stuff or package stuff or advertise stuff or speculate in stuff."

Crane grinned weakly against the window glass. "Some of 'em must do things, Arky."

"I suppose—but any such'll soon be crowded out. The suits I'm talking about are growing, replicating, at the expense of everything else, even the plain old goddamn dirt and water."

A new BMW passed them at high speed on the right.

"Susan's dead," Crane said suddenly. "My wife."

Mavranos turned to stare at him for a moment, and his foot was off the accelerator. "When?" he barked. "How? When did you hear this?"

"It happened thirteen weeks ago. Remember when the paramedics came, and I said she fainted?" Crane finished the coffee and tossed the Styrofoam cup into the back of the truck. "Actually she died. Fibrillation. Heart attack."

"Bullshit thirteen weeks, I—"

"That's not her, what you saw and talked to. That's … I don't know what it is, some kind of ghost. I'd have told you about it before, but it was only last night that I … figured out it must have something to do with this cards stuff."

Mavranos shook his head, frowning fiercely. "Are—are you sure? That she's dead? You weren't drunk, maybe, and she left you or something?"

"Arky, I—" Crane spread his hands helplessly. "I'm sure."

"Goddammit." Mavranos was staring straight ahead at the traffic, but he was gulping, and his eyes were bright. "You better tell me about this shit, Pogo."

Crane took the beer can out of Arky's hand and took a deep sip. "She was drinking coffee one morning," he began.

They parked in a big lot just west of the Balboa pier and then walked away from the thunder and spume of the surf to the narrow, tree-shaded lane that was Main Street. Crane's leg ached and throbbed, and several times he called for a pause just to breathe deeply and stand with his weight on his good leg.

Balboa was quiet on this spring morning. Cars hissed past on the wet pavement of Balboa Boulevard, but there were empty parking places along the curbs, and the only people on the sidewalks seemed to be locals heading for the bakery, lured by the smell of hot coffee on the chilly breeze.

"Where'd you used to get these—these godonuts?" asked Mavranos, his hands in the pockets of his tattered khaki jacket.

"Bodonuts," Crane said. "My kid sister made up the word. It's Balboa doughnuts. Not here. Over on the island."

Over on the island. The phrase upset him somehow, and he didn't like the idea that even now there was a lot of water nearby—the channel ahead of them and the ocean behind.

" 'Fear death by water,' " said Mavranos.

Crane glanced at him sharply. "What?"

"That's from The Waste Land—you know, T. S. Eliot. At the beginning of the poem, when Madame Sosostris is reading the Tarot cards. 'And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,/ Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,/ Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find/ The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.' "

Crane stopped walking again, and stared at him. A sea gull was strutting along the sidewalk, and somewhere overhead another one called shrilly.

"You go around reading T. S. Eliot," Crane said.

Mavranos squinted belligerently. "I study. I may not have read all your Hemingway and Frowst and H. Salt Fitzgerald, but I find out a lot of stuff, from all sorts of books, that has to do with me finding a cure—and if you can't see that it also has to do with your troubles, then—"

"No, no, I do see it. You're going to have to tell me a lot more about The Waste Land and about Eliot. It's just that … it's rare to run across someone who just pops off with an Eliot quote, just like that."

"You evidently haven't noticed that I'm a rare person, Pogo."

Doing a kind of limping shuffle now, Crane led Mavranos down Main and past the dressy seafood restaurant to the far sidewalk, beyond the railing of which pleasure boats rocked at their moorings on the gray-green swell. The ferry dock was to their left, past the Fun Zone with its arcades and palm-readers and frozen-banana-on-a-stick stands, but even this narrow area had taken on an air of sophistication since the days when he used to come here with Ozzie and Diana.

It used to be all garishly painted shacky plywood buildings, with hippies and drunks slouching along the stained sidewalk, but now there were stairways with brass railings leading up to terrace restaurants with patio umbrellas, and video games flashing in the arcade, and a glossy merry-go-round that played a weirdly swing version of "Ain't We Got Fun."

Crane felt even more out of place here than he had on the freeway.

One ferry was at the dock, its iron gate swung up to let three cars move booming and creaking up the wooden ramp to the pavement; another ferry was receding away, now about halfway across the mile-wide channel. The ferries, with their worn red and white paint and weathered floorboards, seemed to be the only elements of the local scene that might date from Crane's time.

Crane stepped aboard, not liking the shifting of the deck. Fear death by water, he thought.

The wide wooden seats were puddled with rain water this morning, so after giving two quarters to the girl in the yellow rubber rain suit with the money changer on her canvas belt, Crane and Mavranos stood braced on the gray-painted tar paper deck as the engine gunned and the boat surged gently out onto the face of the water, and they watched the palm trees and boat masts and low buildings of Balboa Island draw closer.

Mavranos pushed back his ragged black hair and peered over the rail. "Jesus, look at all the fish—bass and mackerel, damn, and that's a sand shark. You could fire a shotgun into the water and kill a dozen of 'em."

Crane looked down into the water at the many vague forms under the surface. "I'll bet Saturn will be bright tonight," he said softly, "with all his moons moving behind him."

They got off the ferry at the island dock and walked east along the broad waterfront walk, between expensive, yardless houses to the left and a short, sloping beach fretted with private docks to the right. Crane was limping along steadily, though his face was sweaty and pale.

Dark clouds were moving in again from the north and west, contrasting vividly with the patches of blue sky. Crane looked up and saw high-circling sea gulls lit white by the slanting sun against a backdrop of black cumulus.

At the southern end of Marine Street a thick pipe protruded from the sand slope and extended a few yards out into the water. DANGER, said a sign above it, END OF STORM DRAIN.

More water, thought Crane, and dangerous. "It's to the left here," he said nervously. "There's a market up ahead. Vegetables, bread—that's where we used to get the doughnuts. Old place, been there since the twenties. You wait here."

"I might be able to help."

"You look like Genghis Khan. Trust me, wait here."

"Okay, Pogo, but if the old guy's there, remember everything he says."

"Hey, I'm sober today, remember?"

Crane limped away up the street, still in sunlight but walking toward the darkness that was tucked in under the northern clouds. Narrow houses crowded up to the sidewalks; the only people he saw were women kneeling in tiny gardens and men doing incomprehensible work with shrill, handheld power tools in open garages on this Saturday morning.

The market was called Hershey's Market now, not the Arden's Milk Market Spot as he remembered, and what used to be a drugstore across the street was currently a real estate office; but the shapes of the buildings were the same, and he began trying to walk faster.

"Freeze, Scott."

The remembered voice was still authoritative, and Crane obeyed automatically. Hesitantly he looked to the side and saw a tall, thin figure in the shadow under the awning of the old Village Inn restaurant, twenty feet away across the puddled street.

"Oz?"

"I've got a gun, cocked, hollow-point slugs, pointed straight at my own heart," said the old man tensely. "Who's your friend down by the water?"

"He's a neighbor of mine, he's in the same sort of trouble I'm in. I—"

"What the hell kind of truck is that to drive around in?"

"Truck …? The one we came in? It's his, it's a Suburban; he buys cars from an impound yard—"

"Never mind. What book were you reading when we went to get Diana?"

"Goddamn, Oz, you've got no right to expect me to remember that, but it was The Monster Men, by Edgar Rice—"

"Okay, he hasn't had the next game yet. Probably be this Easter, though." The old man stepped out of the shadows, leaning on an aluminum ortho cane with a quadripod base. His hair was thin and cottony white over his pink scalp, and he was wearing a baggy dark gray suit with a white shirt and blue tie. His free hand stayed in the right side pocket of his coat as he walked slowly across the wet pavement to Crane. "What do you want from me?"

Tears blurred Crane's eyes. "How about How've you been? Christ, I made a mistake, I was a stupid kid; how many kids aren't? Aren't you going to forgive me even now, twenty years later? This thing looks like killing me, and you're acting like—"

"You look like hell," the old man said harshly. "You drink way too much, don't you? And now, when it's too late, you're driving around with some bum in a joke truck trying to figure out how to stop the rain. Shit." He let his cane stand by itself and stepped forward and threw his free arm around Crane. "I love you, boy, but you're a dead man," he said muffledly into Crane's collar.

"Christ, Oz, I love you," Crane said, clasping the old man's narrow shoulders. "And even if I am dead, it's good to see you one more time. But listen, tell me what happened. How did I kill myself by playing in that—that God damned game?"

Ozzie stood back and again gripped the rubber handle of his standing cane, and Crane could see how the years had withered the once-strong face, extinguished the evidence of all emotions except for anxiety and—maybe still—some of the old humor.

"Assumption," Ozzie said. "That guy, that Ricky Leroy, assumed you, put a lien on your body. A sort of balloon lien. Shit, son, I read up on this, and asked around, after I lost you to it—and I had known a good deal about the dangers of cards even before, all that stuff you thought was like step-on-a-crack-break-your-mother's-back."

A car was making its way down the narrow street, and Crane and Ozzie stepped up onto the curb.

"You're still yourself now," Ozzie went on, "looking out of your eyes, but after the next game on the lake it'll be him, and he'll have everybody else, too, that took money for the assumed hands in that game in 'sixty-nine, that series of games. Leroy'll have you all like a collection of remote, mobile, closed-circuit TV sets. Don't start reading no real long books, son." The old man's eyes were wet as he shook his head. "And don't think it gives me any pleasure to tell you all this."

Crane clenched his fists, feeling the muscles in his palms with his tingling fingertips. "There's—isn't there anything I can do? Is it just over? Can't I go … I don't know, kill this guy?"

Ozzie shook his head sadly. "Let's go walk back to where your friend is. No, you can't kill him. You could kill one of the bodies he's in, or a couple even, but he'll have at least one stashed somewhere that you couldn't even hear of, much less get to. And besides, he's already started killing you, loosening your soul for the eviction. Dionysus has got his hand on your throat in the form of drink, and any family or pets you may have are going to start dying of the randomness illnesses: cancers, heart irregularities—"

Heart irregularities, Crane thought.

Heart irregularities.

He kept walking. "That would be … caused by me?" he said as evenly as he could.

Ozzie gave him a piercing look. "Shit, I'm sorry, that was damn thoughtless of me. Of course, it already has happened, hasn't it? Who?"

"My wife. She—" He was sitting on the curb suddenly. "Heart attack." His body felt hollowed out, and his hands moved vaguely in front of him as though he were groping in darkness for something he didn't know the shape of.

One of the randomness illnesses, he heard Ozzie's voice say in his memory. And then he heard his own voice: Caused by me?

"Get up, Scott." Ozzie reached down with his free hand and shook Crane's shoulder, and Crane got slowly to his feet, not even wincing when his bad leg took his weight. "It's—really, it's no more your fault than if you'd been driving and got in a crash, and she died. But your hippie friend might be smart to … continue his friendship with you over the phone," Ozzie said.

Crane was blinking around. Nothing had changed—the people who had been walking past the shops further up the street were still walking—but there seemed to be a ringing in the air and a quiver in the pavement, as if some thing had just happened.

Caused by me …

He and the old man resumed their labored progress down the sidewalk.

"My hippie friend," Crane said absently. He yawned. "It's, what, it's too late for my hippie friend, he's already got cancer. Had it before he ever found me." Crane felt very tired—he hadn't got any sleep last night—but his heart was pounding, and his forehead was cold with nausea.

"I'd hate to see him eat through that mustache." Ozzie was staring ahead; Crane followed his gaze and saw Mavranos sitting on a brick planter.

"Yeah, it is a sight," said Crane automatically. He waved, and Mavranos hiked himself off it and slouched forward.

"You say he found you," said Ozzie. "Why was he looking for you?"

It was an effort to speak. "He thinks I'll lead him to the place where randomness lives—" He paused to try and take a deep breath, "—and he'll be able to trick randomness into undoing his cancer."

Still frowning, Ozzie laughed softly. "That's not bad. Like raising to the limit and then throwing away all five cards for new ones. Stupid and hopeless, but I like the style." The old man's hand was still in the pocket of the windbreaker. "Why don't you go explain to him about my gun, hmm?"

CHAPTER 12: To the Chapel Perilous

All three of them sat on the coping of the brick planter. Ozzie was on the end, a couple of feet away from Crane, and he looked at his watch.

"I can give you boys ten minutes," the old man said, "and then I won't ever see either of you again in this world."

Looking away, the old man reached over and squeezed Crane's hand for a moment.

"After Diana called me last night," Ozzie said, "I got in touch with some friends, and they've been watching the cars that park, and the ferry, and they had you two down for doubtful as soon as you'd got out of your truck. If I don't walk away from you within half an hour of when I first spoke to you, Scott, a couple of them'll walk down here and escort me away. And if I go any farther than this here spot with you, they'll kill both of you. And of course, if anyone else should authoritatively join us—and even a helicopter would have a time getting in or out of here easy—we're probably all three dead instantly."

Mavranos stared past Crane at Ozzie for a moment, then laughed. "I like this old fart, Scott," he drawled.

Crane forced himself to think. "How did that game on the water, the game on Lake Mead, give Ricky Leroy a lien on my body?" he asked quickly.

Ozzie ran his free hand through his sparse white hair. "Fortune-telling by cards works sometimes. But it's prescriptive rather than descriptive. When it's working, if you take money for a hand, you've sold the hand, sold the lucky-in-finances or unlucky-with-girls or whatever the cards may happen to represent. If you pay money, you've bought it, bought those qualities, bought that luck. And a hand of Poker is a number of qualities. The sum of the five cards may mean that you're rich but impotent, or happy but gonna die young, or any other combination of factors. You buy or sell all five at once, or all seven if it's Seven-Stud. This much I told you years ago."

"Yeah, I—"

"Shut up. That's how you can buy or sell … consequences with cards; with bodies it's trickier. To buy a guy's body, you've got to become his parent first. I don't know how that works; it's got something to do with genes and cards both being quantized things, discrete things, and the fact that it's a random selection of 'em from two sources that defines the resulting individual. There was a hand that was a combination of two people's cards, and that hand defined you, and then you took money for it. It was you, it was the makeup of you, as surely as the pattern of your genes is the makeup of you, and you let Ricky Leroy assume it. Have it. Buy your body. He's let you run around with it for twenty years, but after this next game, when he'll buy another lot of idiots, he's gonna take possession of the ripe old ones." The old man had been staring hard at the pavement as he spoke, and now he pressed his lips together firmly.

"And there's nothing I can do even to … slow this down?"

Ozzie looked up and exhaled. "Oh, slow it down—sure. Don't drink alcohol. Dionysus isn't a nice guy these days—he's also known as Bacchus, the god of wine—and he's on Leroy's side. A case could probably be made that Leroy is Dionysus. Stay by water—on it, if you can—though you're gonna start hating the sight of water like a hydrophobic dog. Don't play cards; he can sense you if you do. But after Easter none of it will have made any difference." He shook his head. "I'm very goddamn sorry, son."

Crane took a deep breath of the chilly sea air. "I'm going to fight it," he said wonderingly, realizing that he meant it. "Fight him."

Ozzie shrugged and nodded. "It's good to have something to occupy your time."

Mavranos leaned forward. "Me ditching my cancer. Is there a chance of it?"

Ozzie smiled gently, and though it deepened his wrinkles, it made him look younger. "Sure. A worthless chance, but no worse than playing the lottery. If you can be in a … place, a focus, where a heavy recurrent statistical pattern turns random, or vice versa … something like when the pattern of a Craps table changes from hot to cold, if you could be at a sweaty high-stakes game when it shifts … it's practically got to be in Las Vegas, you need the odds swarming like flies around you real thick, a lot of games working … and they all of them at once shift from in-step to not-in-step, a phase change, with you participating, you could come out with your cells not remembering that they wanted to go cancerous."

"Like what Arthur Winfree did with mosquitoes," said Mavranos. Seeing Ozzie's blank look, he explained, "Mosquitoes eat and sleep in a regular cycle, and the—the timing gear is the sunlight coming and going every day. You can shorten or lengthen that cycle, readjust the timing, by keeping 'em indoors and changing the periods of light and dark; and the various possible patterns, if you chart 'em, contain a math thing called a singularity. If you hit the mosquitoes with a bright light at precisely the right instant, they lose the cycle, just sleep and fly and stand around with no sense or pattern at all. Another calculated flash will put 'em back into the cycle."

Ozzie stared at Mavranos. "Yes. Very good. That's a better example than my Craps table, though I still think you'll have to try it in Vegas. Freest possible flow of numbers and odds around you, and psychic factors, too, you better believe it. And it'd help to go in with a very conspicuously ordered thing or person or something, so that when the rearrangement wave collapsed, there'd be incentive for it all to fall out on the side of order. Like a seed crystal." The old man yawned and shrugged. "I think."

Crane shook himself and dug in his pocket. "And what can we do to save Diana?"

Ozzie was suddenly alert. "What does she need saving from?"

"Look at this," said Crane, passing the old man the photograph of Lady Issit. "I assume 'fold' means 'kill.' "

"Yes, it does," the old man said, reading the note on the back after having glanced at the picture. "She'll be all right, I'm pretty sure. They'd like to use her, some of them, or kill her, but she's not conspicuous—she never played any Assumption—and even if they captured you and me right now and shot us up with sodium pentothal, it wouldn't help, because neither of us knows where she is." He handed the photograph back. "No, son, the best thing we can do for her is leave her alone."

Ozzie looked at his watch and got down off the planter. "Time's up." With a sort of unhappy formality the old man held out his right hand, and Crane took it. "Now I'm going to go away and enjoy what's left of my life," Ozzie said, in the awkward tone of someone reciting a memorized speech, "and I suggest you … two … do the same. As it stands, I look like outliving, uh, the two of you, and I'm honestly sorry about that. Scott, it's good to have seen you again … and I'm glad to hear you were married. Sometimes I wish I'd got married. Archimedes, I wish you luck."

Crane got down, too. "Diana didn't say where she was living, but she said she was … what was it?"

"Flying in the grass," said Mavranos.

Ozzie's eyes lost their focus for a moment, and his head lowered slightly. Then he inhaled and exhaled, and he straightened up and pumped his fist three times in the air.

Somewhere up the street a car horn honked twice.

Ozzie gave Crane a tense look. "That means 'please confirm.' " Again he pumped his fist three times overhead.

The car honked again, and now a boat in the channel behind them hooted.

"Okay," Ozzie said, his voice shaky for the first time since Crane had met him, "You've bought an extension on your time. Tell me everything she said."

After Crane had recounted everything he could recall Diana's saying, with Mavranos reminding him of a couple of details he'd mentioned last night while he was getting his leg bandaged, Ozzie leaned against the planter and stared up at the blackening sky. After a minute or so Crane started to speak, but Ozzie waved him to silence.

Finally the old man lowered his head and looked at Crane. "You do want to save her," he said.

"It's … nearly all I've got left to want," Crane said.

"Then we're going to have to go back to your telephone, and you're going to have to stab yourself again, or something, shove your hand in the garbage disposal if that's what it takes, and when she calls, I'll tell her to get out of where she is. If she stays there, she's had it, she's dead or worse, especially since she's so naive about all this stuff, the cards and all. I thought she'd be safer that way, but look where the little idiot runs to. But I'll tell her to leave. And I'll tell her how. She'll listen to me. Okay?"

"Put my hand in the garbage disposal."

"Not literally, but whatever it takes. Okay?"

"… Sure, Oz." Crane tried to put some irony into it, but even in his own ears he sounded sick and scared and eager to please.

Mavranos was grinning. "Before you start making sausage out of yourself, Pogo—before we even go back home—let's call your number. No use even going there, much less chopping you up, if they've cut the lines or got somebody there."

"Good thought," said Crane, wishing he had a drink.

There was a pay telephone back up the street in the entry of the Village Inn, and Ozzie put a quarter in the slot and then tilted the receiver aside as he punched out the remembered number.

After two rings there was an answer. "Yeah," a young man's voice said earnestly, "this is Scott Crane's residence, he's—listen, could you hold a minute?"

"Sure," said Ozzie, nodding grimly at Mavranos.

They heard the clunk of the distant telephone being put down; a dog was barking somewhere in the relayed background, and a car alarm was hooting.

After a few moments the voice came back on. "Yeah, hello?"

"Could I speak to Scott Crane, please?"

"Jesus, Scott was in an accident," the voice said, "he—wait, I can see Jim's car pulling up, he was off visiting Scott at the hospital, Jim's a friend of his, claimed to be his brother to be able to get in to see him, you wanna hang on 'til Jim gets in here? He'll be able to tell you what's what."

"I'm just calling for the Orange County Register," Ozzie said, "to see if he wanted to subscribe. Sorry to have disturbed you at a bad time." He pressed down the hang-up lever.

"Wow," said Crane. "They've got a guy in my place."

"Don't talk for a minute," Ozzie said. He walked away from the telephone, staring out the window at the yellow-lit street under the black sky. "I could put an ad in the personals," he said softly. "But I couldn't even hope she'd see it or get it unless I used her name, and I don't dare do that … and I don't even know what her last name is now …" He shook his head, frowning and unhappy. "Let's go outside."

Crane and Mavranos followed the old man out onto the Marine Avenue sidewalk and matched his slow pace south, back toward the water. Shingled roofs steamed in the sunlight on the houses along the street, even as rain silently made spots on the pavement.

"I haven't held a hand of cards since that game in the Horseshoe in '69," Ozzie said. "I couldn't take the chance on being recognized, and word getting back to you. I was sixty-one years old, with a car and twenty-four thousand dollars and a nine-year-old foster daughter and no skill, no trade."

Crane had started to say something, and Ozzie waved him to silence. "You already said you're sorry," the old man went on, "and it was a long time ago. Anyway, she and I went somewhere a person can live cheap, and after a while I got a job—first time in my life—and Diana went to school. I made some good investments, and for these last … say, ten years … I've been comfortable. I know enough about how things work to get help like I had this morning, and if it's only once in a long while, I can even afford it."

Ozzie laughed. "You know what I do for work now? I make ashtrays and coffee mugs and pots, out of clay. I've got a kiln in my back yard. I sell 'em to these boutique-type shops, the kind of place that's mostly for tourists. I've always signed 'em with a fake name. Anytime the demand for 'em gets serious, I stop making 'em for a year or so, 'til people forget they wanted 'em. One time a local paper wanted to do an article on me; I quit making the damn things for about six years after that. Publicity I don't want."

The rain was coming down more steadily now, and the light was fading.

"You ever been in jail, either of you?" Ozzie asked.

Both men nodded.

"Tell you what I hate, that little toilet with no seat, and you got six guys who gotta use it. And I hate the idea of someday maybe living behind a dumpster, wearing four dirty shirts and three pairs of weird old pants at the same time … and the idea of getting seriously beat up, you know, where you can feel stuff breaking inside you and the guys won't stop kicking. And I hate the idea of being in a hospital with catheters and ventilators shoved into me every which way. Bedpans. Bedbaths. Bedsores."

He sighed. "What I like is my house, little old Spanish-style place I live in, all paid off, and my cats and my Louis L'Amour books and my Ballantine scotch and an old Kaywoodie pipe stuffed with Amphora Red cavendish. And I've got all the Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby on cassettes."

"That's what you like," said Mavranos softly.

"Right," Ozzie agreed, staring ahead at the water. "Diana I love." His wrinkled old face was wet with rain. "But I wonder … if I can even do anything. Of course, that's my cats and L'Amours and cassettes talking: There's nothing an eighty-two year-old man can do about it—so, sad as it is, stay home, with us."

"What's 'flying in the grass' mean?" asked Crane uncomfortably.

Ozzie blinked and looked over at him. "Hmm? Oh—it's an old pilots' term for flying very low, crowding the ground, to avoid showing up on radar screens. Scoot in around the hills and barely clear the power lines, and you're just one more bit of the base-fuzz that's the features of the terrain. You can be right under the enemy's nose, but you're keeping such a low profile that he doesn't even see you."

They were back to the storm drain warning sign, and Ozzie led them to the right along the waterfront walk, toward the ferry. Mavranos, evidently impatient with the slow pace of his companions, was walking backward in a zig-zag pattern ahead of them.

"What have you got in the way of travel necessities?" the old man asked. "I don't think it'd be smart to go anywhere near your place."

"Actually," said Crane, touching his pocket, "I've got about two grand on me."

"I've got some bucks, too," said Mavranos, "and Scott's got a .357 in the car, and I've got a .38 Special in the glove compartment, and I gather you've got a gun. A shotgun and ammo we can pick up on the way—and a locking box so we'll be legal when we cross the border."

Ozzie was nodding.

"Border?" repeated Crane. "Where are we going?"

"To where your foster sister is," said Mavranos impatiently, "to the Chapel Perilous in the Waste Land. Las Vegas."

Ozzie was shivering. "Yes. Back to Las Vegas." He began walking faster. "Let's step it up here, gentlemen," he said in a brittle, nearly cheerful tone. "Do you have a heater in your fool truck, Archimedes? I probably forgot to say that being cold is also one of the things I hate."

"Got a heater that'll hard-cook eggs in your shirt pockets," Mavranos assured him. "But I got no air conditioner; that'll be a factor when we're out in the nowhere middle of the Mojave Desert."

They filled the Suburban's gas tank and radiator and checked the tires, and then spent two hundred dollars at the Grant Boys on Newport Boulevard for a Mossberg shotgun and a box of number six shells. The shotgun was a pump-action twelve-gauge with a seventeen-inch barrel and no shoulder stock, just a hard black-plastic pistol-grip, and Crane winced at the thought of all that recoil slamming into the palm of his hand; Ozzie would probably shatter his old wrist if he were ever to shoot it. They also bought a four-foot-long gun-carrying case with an orange plastic finish molded to look like alligator hide; it had a piano-hinge down the long side away from the handle, and when it was opened out flat, the interior was two sheets of gray foam rubber knobbed with patterns of rounded pyramids. Mavranos said it looked like an electron microscope view of atoms in a crystal, and Ozzie said shortly that he had already gathered that Mavranos was smart, and didn't need to be reminded all the time.

Ozzie let the two younger men carry the purchases out to the truck—Scott moving slowly and favoring his bad leg—and then the old man climbed carefully into the back seat and got himself settled before Mavranos started the engine and turned right onto the boulevard.

The interior of the truck was steamy, and Crane cranked down his window to get relief from the smells of motor oil and old socks and crumpled takeout bags from Taco Bell.

Newport Boulevard had just broadened out into the Newport Freeway when Ozzie leaned forward from the back seat and tapped Mavranos on the shoulder. "Take the 405 north there, like you were going to the LAX airport."

Crane looked back over his shoulder at the old man. "I thought we were going to Vegas—straight up the 55 here to the 91 east."

"Do as I said, please, Archimedes," said Ozzie.

Mavranos shrugged and made the long turn northward onto the 405. He took a sip from a fresh can of Coors.

"Uh," said Crane. "Isn't this … the long way to Las Vegas?"

"You think your old man's nuts," said Ozzie tiredly, rocking on the back seat next to a battered tin Coleman stove. He sighed. "Listen, you wouldn't sail to … Catalina, even, would you, without checking reports on the weather and currents and tides? And there's nothing between here and Catalina that would particularly love to see you dead, and anyway, it's only twenty-six miles. Well, boy, right now you're aiming to drive more than two hundred miles, through all sorts of weather and tides you never even heard of, with a lot of bad guys watching for you." He shook his head. "You gotta clock the tides first, boy." He bared his yellow teeth in what might have been a grin. "We gotta check the weather, lick a finger and hold it up in the breeze, so we'll know what kind of rigging to use. We gotta go to Gardena."

Mavranos squinted into the rearview mirror. "Gardena?"

"There's legal Poker clubs in Gardena," Crane said, "and in a lot of the other areas of L. A. around there." He shifted around on the front seat. "But you always said not to play in those places."

"Not for money, no," said Ozzie, "paying for your seat and playing with people whose betting habits you don't know. But we're not after money today, are we? And the worst thing about trying to make money at these big Poker emporiums, with like fifty or a hundred tables working, is that the fortune-telling effect naturally happens that much more often, and when it starts at one table, a lot of times it'll spread."

"Like a seed crystal again," said Mavranos.

"Right. You'll find the savvy players always have cigarettes burning even if they don't smoke, so they can watch how the smoke behaves—it starts puddling above the middle of the table, they get out—and they'll have some drink, mostly just Coke or water, so they can keep an eye on the level of it, same reason. But I'm gonna want to see the … tides of fortune. And I'll get into some smoke-puddling games, and if the hands I get apply to us, I'll try to buy us good luck, or sell bad luck to somebody else."

"What do you want us to do?" asked Mavranos.

"You got cigarettes?" Ozzie asked.

"Half carton of desert dogs back there. Camels."

"Well, you two can play if you'll keep cigarettes lit and watch the smoke—and fold out when it acts funny. Now I think of it, Scott, it might be a good idea for you to play some; if they sense you, they'll put you in L. A., which you're not gonna be for much longer. Otherwise be railbirds—watch, have a sandwich, whatever." Ozzie was peering out ahead through the cracked windshield. "North on the 605 here—catch the 5 and take it north, that should take us into the middle of it, and being close to the L.A. River won't hurt, though it's always dry."

Even after twenty-one years Crane knew Ozzie's voice well enough to know that the old man was scared—taking risks he'd avoided even in the days of his prime, jumping out of his comfortable old man's routine with no time at all to prepare, without even spare clothes or personal possessions or books or any idea of where he would wind up sleeping tonight, or the night after—but Crane could sense, too, the disguised excitement.

The old man was chasing the white line again.

CHAPTER 13: Come Back Here on New Year's Day, You See Nothing but Dirt

Al Funo drove slowly past the old Spanish house that was 106 East Second Street. He had put the rear window back into the Porsche, and the heater was keeping him warm in spite of the chilly wind shaking the palm trees.

He drove on past the house, and when he saw the old green Torino with its shot windows in the parking lot beyond the duplexes, he smiled. This was the guy all right.

He had got the address from a friend who could run license plate numbers; it had taken more than twenty-four hours, but Scarecrow Smith—or, as his real name seemed to be, Scott Crane—apparently hadn't gone anywhere.

A blue van with tinted windows was parked on the other side of the street, and as Funo drove slowly past it, he noticed a faint, powdery white mark on the front side of the rear tire; that implied that a meter maid had chalked the vehicle recently, so recently that the driver had moved only a few yards before parking again. Was someone watching Crane's house? Obstadt's man had warned him that this assignment might be contested.

He looked more closely at the other cars parked along the street under the carob tree boughs, and noticed: an old pickup truck, empty; a Honda, empty; and a gray Jaguar, with a fat bald man sitting inside.

Funo turned left onto Bush Street and then right onto Third. He drove for a block and then pulled into a Chevron station that had a pay telephone at the edge of the asphalt apron, out by the self-serve air and water hoses. He got out of his car, got Crane's telephone number from information, and punched it in.

The phone rang twice at the other end, and then a young man's voice said, breathlessly, "Scott Crane's residence, can you hold a minute?"

"Sure, friend," said Funo easily, watching the sweep second-hand of his Rolex. He had at least three minutes before anybody could possibly trace the call, even if they'd managed to get Pacific Bell security to put a trap on the line.

"Sorry," said the voice after only ten seconds. "Scott was in an accident, he's in the hospital."

Nicked him after all, thought Funo. "Jesus," he said in a shocked tone, "what happened! I was playing Poker with him Tuesday night!"

"You were? Listen, he keeps asking for two people—he's semiconscious—two people named Ozzie and Diana. Do you by any chance know who they are?"

"Sure I know Ozzie and Diana!" said Funo instantly. "Listen, what hospital is he in? I'll bring them over."

A car alarm in the Norm's parking lot started up, monotonously honking beep … beep … beep as a couple of shabbily dressed men walked hastily away down the sidewalk. Stupid bums, Funo thought.

"It's," said the voice at the other end, "shit … I can't remember the name. Jim's the one who knows it, and he's on his way back … right now, matter of fact. Why don't you pick up Ozzie and Diana and bring them over to the house? Or just give me their numbers, sure. I—"

"I can't right now," said Funo. "How about if I call back soon, when Jim'll be home?" He spoke loudly, for he could hear the car alarm both directly and, more faintly, over the telephone.

"Could you give me their numbers?" asked the agitated young man. "Where do they live? Diana he 'specially needs to see."

"I don't know exactly, they're friends of friends. When can I call and catch Jim?"

"God, I don't know how long either of us is gonna be able to hang around here. Uh—are you at a number where Jim can get hold of you?"

Funo looked around at the gas station lot. "For the next half hour anyway, sure. Got a pencil?" He read off the number of the pay phone.

"Okay," said the voice on the other end, "got it. We'll get back to you quick."

"Thanks," said Funo. "I really appreciate it. I mean it."

He hung up the phone.

Something was bothering him, and he always paid attention to his hunches. What was it? That noise, the car horn honking on and on …

He'd heard it over the telephone as well as directly. Therefore, the young man at the other end had probably heard it both ways, too, and would know that Funo was calling from a nearby outdoor telephone.

Funo quickly folded himself into the Porsche and drove across Third and parked behind a Pioneer Chicken restaurant, then walked inside and sat at a table from which, through the tinted glass, he could watch the gas station. If nothing happened within half an hour, he would drive to another phone and call again.

Within five minutes the gray Jaguar had pulled into the Chevron station, and the fat man hauled his startling bulk out of the driver's seat. He looked at the telephone, and then for several seconds looked around at the nearby cars and pedestrians. After a while he stumped over to the cashier window and talked to whoever was inside.

Funo's heart was thumping, and a twitchy grin bared his teeth. Pretty good, he thought. They could tell I was within earshot to the north. I wonder what they had for south—another car horn, in a different pitch or cadence? A barking dog? A realistic-looking street lunatic chanting about Jesus?

Through the tinted window Funo watched as the fat man got back into the idling Jaguar, and for several minutes just sat there behind the wheel; then the car moved off, turning left onto Third Street, back toward Crane's place.

The Jaguar had a Nevada license plate. Funo wrote down the number.

The Commerce Casino was the first one Crane saw, a gigantic cubical building that from the front looked like some ancient Mediterranean temple, with its arched entrance and gold pillars and expanses of windowless wall, and looked like a prison from around in the back lot, where they had to park. There was even a little guard tower back there. To the south side of the casino a dozen high-tension electrical cables hung from the skeletal silver shoulders of a line of tall towers that marched away to the north and south; on the long, narrow plot of land under the towers, as if nourished by the electromagnetic fields, knee-high pine trees grew in dense rows.

Ozzie stared back at the cables and the trees as he and Crane and Mavranos slowly walked toward the building, and he muttered something about evergreens under hydroelectric power.

Mavranos told him that land under power lines wasn't good for much, and that a lot of such stretches were used as Christmas tree farms. "Come back here on New Year's Day, you see nothing but dirt."

Ozzie nodded, frowning.

The inside of the casino was one vast room; when a person had walked in through one of the several glass doors, street level became just the level of a wide, raised, railed walkway that ran all the way around the acre of playing floor five steps below. Tables and chairs and couches lined the rails, and doors in the high walls opened onto a delicatessen, a bar, a banquet room, a gift shop, and even a hair salon. Mirrored pillars, square in cross-section, rose to the high mirrored ceiling.

Mavranos sat down to have a beer, and Crane and Ozzie split up.

Crane hopped down the nearest set of steps to the playing floor and then limped through the maze of tables.

The games were quick, the house dealers shuffling low to the table and then skimming the cards out across the green felt, the players checking and folding and betting so inconspicuously and rapidly that Crane several times found himself unable to tell whose bet it was, or what the amount. Some of the players had hamburgers—or even full dinners, with mashed potatoes and gravy—on little wheeled wooden carts beside them, and they found a calm second or two now and then in which to bend over the food and shovel some into their mouths without taking their eyes from the table.

Crowds of Asians stood around tables where some game was being played that involved dice in a brass cup as well as cards, and the chips being shoved back and forth in tall stacks were the black hundred-dollar ones. The hasty diners around these tables all seemed to be eating noodles with chopsticks.

Under the frequent loudspeaker announcements—"JT, One and Two-Stud," "DF for the one-three Hold 'Em"—were the constant click and rattle of chips.

Crane gave his initials to the floorman who was working the five- and ten-dollar Five-Card Draw chalkboard, and while he waited for his turn to get a seat at a table, he leaned against the rail and watched the nearest game.

It was as fast as the others he'd watched, with the white plastic disk that indicated the honorary dealer moving around the table at nearly the pace of a plate of food being passed at a Thanksgiving dinner, and he noticed that players had to chant, "Time … time … time," if they wanted to consider their next actions without risking being passed over.

For the first time since his teens, Crane felt intimidated by the idea of getting into a poker game with strangers. It's like some kind of fast, complicated folk-dance, he thought, that I'm not sure I know all the moves to.

"SC, five-ten Draw," said the floorman into his microphone.

Crane hopped down the steps and waved, and then walked to the indicated seat. The people at his table all seemed to have been there for at least hours, and seemed to have grown old in this room or others like it.

Crane bought a couple of stacks of yellow five-dollar chips and waited for his first hand. The dealer, an expressionless woman in the house uniform, shuffled and whirled out the cards. Crane was the first person dealt to, and he belatedly noticed that the dealer button lay in front of the bearded man to his right. I'm under the gun, he thought.

Crane gathered in his cards and curled up the corners—and repressed a smile. In a textbook example of first-timer's luck, he had been dealt a pat Full Boat, Tens over Queens. He passed, and then raised when the bet came around to him after someone else had opened; and when the draw came, he tossed out the two Queens, face up. "I know I can fill this Flush!" he remarked cheerfully.

The irrational move got some raised eyebrows and muttering from the others at the table—but one of the two cards he was now dealt was the last Ten, giving him Four of a Kind. Five people besides him stayed, and two of them were still in for the showdown after three raises. There was complete silence at the table when he showed his hand and swept the stack of yellow and tan chips into his corner.

On the next hand he had a Two, Five, Seven, Nine, and Ten, unsuited. Someone opened, someone else raised, and Crane raised again, and then raised again when the bet came around one more time. At the draw he threw all five of his cards away and asked for five more.

This time a couple of players muttered angrily, as though Crane were making fun of the game.

His new cards were a Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, and Queen, again unsuited. When the bet came around to him, he shook his head and threw the cards down face up. "Almost caught the Straight that time," he said, frowning thoughtfully.

After this he played tight, staying only with a pair of Aces or better before the draw and only with a very high Two Pair or better after it, and the lunatic image he had established with the first two hands impelled at least one of the other players to call him every time he stayed.

He had won about $350 when, after an hour and a half of play, he glanced at the ashtray and saw the smoke from his current Camel beginning to swirl in toward the center of the table. He looked at his tepid glass of Coke: The level was off, dipping toward the table.

It was before the draw, and he was holding three Hearts, Jack high, and the Joker. He would have liked to stay and try for the Flush, but he put the cards down on the table and pushed them away from him.

He gathered up his chips, tossed four yellow ones to the dealer, and stood up. "Thanks, everybody," he said, and walked away between the tables and up the stairs to where Mavranos sat drinking a Coors at a table by the rail.

"Check out the smoke," Mavranos said after Crane pulled up another chair and sat down.

Crane could see it at the nearest table, where a five-and ten-dollar Hold 'Em game was in progress: A little cloud was gathering over the center of the table.

Mavranos lit up a Camel and puffed, and the smoke drifted away over the sunken floor of the playing area. "And my beer's crooked," he said.

"Where's Ozzie?"

"He's in that Seven-Card Stud to the right there."

Crane stood up and walked over to the section of brass rail nearest Ozzie's game.

The old man was looking at the cigarette in the tray by his chair, and the dealer had to remind him that it was his bet.

The players were about to be dealt the seventh card, and there were only two staying with Ozzie, for the old man had three Queens showing and the other two hands showed only low pairs.

Ozzie turned his three Queens over and pushed the cards toward the center of the table.

A cocktail waitress walked past Crane, and he was about to wave at her … but then he thought of Ozzie's three abandoned Queens. Gotta make sacrifices, he thought. He sighed and turned back to watch the table.

One of the remaining two players had won with a Full Boat, and as the man scooped in the chips, Crane idly wondered what sort of luck the man had sold.

Ozzie stayed in all the hands now, folding only after what Seven-Stud players called Sixth Street, the sixth card dealt. Even at the rail Crane could see that the old man's play was drawing the attention of the other players; at one point Ozzie folded showing a high Two Pair when nothing else at all showed on the board.

Crane drank three Cokes while he watched, and smoked half a pack of Camels. The smoke kept swirling out over the tables, and Ozzie kept folding before the showdown.

And so Crane was surprised when in one hand, finally, Ozzie hesitated at Sixth Street.

The old man was showing a Two of Spades, a Three of Clubs, a Five of Diamonds, and a Nine of Hearts.

One of his opponents showed four Hearts, and another showed Two Pair, black Kings and Tens. The Two Pair bet ten dollars, and the four Hearts raised it ten—strongly representing a Flush, thought Crane.

"Twenty to the Nine," said the dealer to Ozzie.

He looks a hundred years old, thought Crane anxiously as he stared at his foster father. The old man's eyes were down, looking at his cards.

"Time," said Ozzie, so quietly that Crane could deduce what he said only from the motion of his wrinkled lips. "Time … time … time …"

The smoke was a funnel over the table, and the constant undertone of clicking chips suddenly sounded shriller to Crane, like the whirling of a rattlesnake's tail. The air-conditioned breeze was as dry as the breath of the desert.

Ozzie was shaking his head. "Time!" he said again, loud enough this time now for even Mavranos to hear him and look up from his beer.

Ozzie's lip was curled now in something like defiance or resentment, and he looked up. "And ten," he said clearly, pushing forward three tan chips.

Crane saw the other players look curiously at this old contender, whose best hand could only be Two Pair, Nines and Fives. From their point of view he could only be hoping to fill a Full Boat, and the Kings and Tens looked like being a better one.

The man with the Kings and Tens raised, and so did the man with the probable Flush.

Ozzie pushed more chips out.

He sighed. "Call," he said.

The dealer spun another, face down, to each of the players.

The Kings and Tens bet, and the Flush raised.

"Call," said Ozzie clearly, pushing more chips forward.

It was the showdown now, and the players flipped their down cards face up.

The Kings were a Full Boat, Kings over Tens, which beat the Heart Flush Crane had expected. Ozzie's hand, which he exposed almost ceremonially, was the showing Two, Three, Five, and Nine, and, down, the Eight of Diamonds, the Ace of Spades, and the Four of Hearts.

Nothing at all. The other players must have thought he'd been trying to fill a Straight—which would have been beaten by either a Flush or a Boat, which the other hands had been, and had looked to be all along.

Ozzie pushed his remaining chips toward the dealer as a tip, then stood up and walked across the burgundy carpet toward the far stairs. Crane looked back to Mavranos and cocked his head after the old man. Mavranos nodded and stood up, bringing his beer with him as they walked around the sunken playing floor.

Ozzie was standing by an awning with PLAYERS CORNER scripted above it in neon. "I'm having a drink or two," he announced. "You," he said to Scott, "are sticking to coffee or Coke or something, right?"

Crane nodded, a little jerkily.

Slowly, but with his bony chin well up, the old man led Crane and Mavranos into the bar and to a tartan-patterned booth against the back wall.

The bar was nearly empty, though a wide oval of parquet in the middle of the floor and a mirrored disco ball turning unilluminated under the ceiling implied times of festivity here in the past. In spite of the Victorian flourishes on the dark wood pillars of the bar and the sporty prints framed on the walls and the heavy use of tartan, the band of mirror under the ceiling and the vertical mirrors that divided the walls every few yards made the walls look like free standing panels, subject to disassembly at any moment. A wide-screen television was mounted on the wall, showing some news program in black and white with no sound.

"What did you buy, in that last hand?" Crane asked.

"Luck," said Ozzie. "It's not too hard to speed-read the hands, get the gist of them, as they go by, like identifying creatures in an agitated tide pool—but if you're gonna reach in and grab one, you've gotta be sure you know exactly what it is. I had to wait for a hand that was—that would further us. That we could—that was acceptable. And it's hard to calculate seven cards and all their interactions when you've got a tableful of gamblers joggling your elbow." He rubbed his face with gnarled, spotty hands. "Took a long time for a—an acceptable hand to show up."

Mavranos slouched low in the seat and peered around at the decor with an air of disapproval. " 'Where fishmen lounge at noon,' " he said sarcastically, " 'where the walls/ Of Magnus Martyr hold/ Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold.' "

"More Eliot?" asked Crane.

Mavranos nodded. He waved at the nearest cocktail waitress and then turned to Ozzie. "So how's the weather?"

The old man shook his head. "Stormy. A lot of Spades, which is the modern version of the Swords suit in the old Tarot deck. Just about any Spade is bad news, and the Nine's the worst—I saw it a lot. A double Ballantine scotch on the rocks," he added to the cocktail waitress, who was now standing beside the table with her pad ready.

Coke, thought Crane. Soda water—maybe with bitters. Goddammit. V-eight. Seven-Up.

"Hi, darlin'," said Mavranos. " You've got to excuse our friend here—he doesn't like pretty girls. I'll have a Coors."

"Maybe he doesn't think I'm pretty," said the waitress.

Crane blinked up at her. She was slim, with dark hair and brown eyes, and she was smiling. "I think you're pretty," he said. "I'll have a soda water with a shake of Angostura."

"There's conviction for you," said Mavranos, grinning behind his unkempt mustache. "Passion."

"He didn't sound like he meant it," agreed the waitress.

"Jesus," said Crane, still distracted by sobriety and Ozzie's talk of bad weather, "you're half my age. Honest, ten years ago you'd have had to beat me off with a stick."

The waitress's eyes were wide. "Beat you off?"

"With a stick?" put in Mavranos.

"God," Crane said. "I meant—" But the waitress had walked away.

Ozzie didn't seem to have heard anything after he'd ordered his scotch. "The Hearts suit—that used to be Cups—seems to be allied with Spades, and that's bad. Hearts is supposed to be about family and domestic stuff, marriage and having children, but now it's in the service of—of ruin. The King and Queen of Hearts were showing up interchangeably in the same hands as the worst Spades." He looked at Crane. "Were you playing when the smoke shifted?"

"Yeah."

"You had the Jack of Hearts and the Joker in your hand, I'll bet."

Even though he had decided he believed all this, it made Crane uncomfortable to see evidence for it. "Yeah, I did."

"Those were your cards even in the old days, I remember—the one-eyed Jack and the Fool."

The drinks arrived then, and Ozzie paid the waitress. She left quickly.

Crane stared after her. It bothered him to realize that she was, in fact, pretty, for she held no more attraction for him than did the pattern in the rug. He could imagine her naked, but he couldn't imagine making love to her.

"So," said Mavranos after taking a deep sip of his Coors, "what does all this mean to us?"

Ozzie frowned at him. "Well … the Jack of Hearts is in exile, and the Hearts kingdom has sold out to the Swords; if the Jack's going back, he better do it disguised. And every water card I saw was bracketed by Hearts, meaning the water is tamed by the King and Queen. Since we're headed for Las Vegas, that means we should be leery of tamed water, which sounds to me like Lake Mead."

"Fear death by water," Crane said, grinning vaguely at Mavranos.

"And the," Ozzie went on, "the balance is way out of kilter, so your cancer cure looks a little less unlikely, Archimedes. It's like the ball's bouncing around crazy in the Roulette wheel, and it might not even fall into a slot but fly right out onto the floor. Anything's possible right now."

The old man turned to Crane. "Your situation is completely crazy. I told you the King and Queen of Hearts were acting as though they were the same person? As far as I can deduce, that's the person that's after you, and it's your parent, and is male and female at the same time."

"Ahoy," commented Mavranos. "A hermaphrodeet."

"My real, biological father … or even my mother … might still be alive," Crane said thoughtfully.

"This almost certainly is your biological father," Ozzie said irritably. "The bad King. He must not have recognized you at that damned game; he wouldn't have bothered to become your parent through the cards if he'd known he already was, genetically."

Crane's mouth was open. "How … no, how could Ricky Leroy have been my father? He was remembering the older man who had taken him fishing on Lake Mead so many times when he was four and five years old.

"It's a new body," said Mavranos.

"Right," Ozzie agreed. "He can do that, don't you listen? And maybe he's had a sex change operation since you saw him."

"Or maybe," Crane said, "he's got both male and female bodies he works out of."

Ozzie frowned. "Yes, of course. I should have thought of that—I hope I'm not too old for this." He sipped his scotch. "And I saw a whole lot of Nines and Tens of Diamonds together, and they mean, in effect, action now."

"I'm ready to go," Mavranos said.

Ozzie looked at Mavranos's cigarette—the smoke was rising more or less straight up—and then he held his glass up and stared at it. He hiked around on the seat to look at the television screen, which was now in color. "Don't you guys want lunch?"

"I could do with something," said Crane.

"I think the fortune-telling window has gone by," said Ozzie. "I'm gonna take this drink and go back to that table and kick some ass, now that they all think I'm the poster boy for Alzheimer's disease."

Crane and Mavranos walked around to the little delicatessen in the far corner of the hangar-size room and had roast beef sandwiches while Ozzie went back down to the playing floor.

At one point Crane got up and walked around the perimeter to the men's room. When he came out, one of the pay telephones in front of him was ringing, and he impulsively picked it up.

"Hello?"

There was no answer, but suddenly his heart was beating faster, and he felt dizzy. "Susan …?"

He heard only a click, and after a while the dial tone, but when he finally hung up, he had to admit that, his experience with the cocktail waitress notwithstanding, his sexual responses were working fine.

When Ozzie finally reappeared, taking the steps up from the playing floor slowly and bracing himself on his aluminum cane, he had made back what he'd lost earlier and four hundred dollars besides.

"You guys ready to go?" he asked.

"Truck awaits," said Mavranos, standing up and finishing his beer. "Where to?"

"Some store, like a Target or a K Mart, for supplies," said Ozzie. "And then …" He looked around blankly. "On to Las Vegas."

The air was suddenly dry, and as he got up, Crane thought he heard the pay telephone ringing again, over the constant rattling of the chips

"Let's drive fast," he said.