Last Call

But there was heard among the holy hymns

A voice as of the waters, for she dwells

Down in a deep; calm, whatsoever storms

May shake the world, and when the surface rolls,

Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

All in a hot and copper sky,

The bloody Sun, at noon,

Right up above the mast did stand,

No bigger than the Moon.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

NANO: Now prithee, sweet soul, in all thy variation

Which body would'st thou choose, to keep up thy station?

ANDROGYNO: Troth, this I am in: even here would I tarry.

NANO: 'Cause here the delight of each sex thou canst vary?

ANDROGYNO: Alas, those pleasures be stale and forsaken.

—Ben Jonson, The Fox

Hopes die, and their tombs are for token

That the grief as the joy of them ends

Ere time that breaks all men has broken

The faith between friends.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dedication

CHAPTER 28: Bedtime at Last

Though he hadn't been to Las Vegas for twenty years before this trip, Ozzie knew this sort of off-the-Strip bar. In the early evening it would have been full of husky construction workers downing their after-work beers. Now the clientele was stage hands and theater people, and cold white wine was the most commonly poured drink. After midnight the prostitutes would drift in for whatever it was that they favored.

For Ozzie this was the eye of the storm, the period of calm between the first fight and the last.

Ozzie peeled open the pack of Chesterfields he'd bought from the cigarette machine in the corner and shook one out. He had quit smoking in 1966, but he had never quite forgotten the sometimes profound satisfaction of lighting up and hauling smoke deep into his lungs.

The bartender tossed a book of matches onto the bar beside Ozzie's mug of beer.

Ozzie gave him a tired smile. "Thanks." He struck a match and puffed the cigarette alight.

Before he put them away, he took a last look at the other choices.

A message in the personals column of the Sun or the Review-Journal, he thought. No, Scott won't be reading papers.

And maybe, he thought then, I've done enough by leaving the message at the Circus Circus desk: I've left young Oliver with a woman named Helen Sully in Searchlight. She's in the book. Diana's dying wish was that you take care of her two sons. It's what you can do—do it. Love, Ozzie.

But Scott might not go back to the Circus Circus.

Ozzie sipped the cold beer and frowned, remembering how the fat little boy had begged him to stay with him.

"You're not too old to be our dad," Oliver had said tearfully as Ozzie had driven Diana's Mustang south on the 95 this afternoon, toward Searchlight. "Scat and I need a dad." The boy had still been subdued and trembling, all the arrogance knocked out of him by the explosion of his home, the death of his mother.

"I'm going to try to get you a dad, Oliver," Ozzie had said. "Sorry—do you mind me calling you Oliver?"

"It's your name," the boy had said, "I don't mind it. Don't ever call me … that other name, that I used to want. That was the—I don't even know. I broke that off and chased it away."

The Sully woman lived in a big ranch-style house just outside the city limits of Searchlight. She had worked with Diana at a pizza parlor four years ago, and had liked her and kept up the friendship, and she had six boys of her own; she cheerfully agreed to take care of either or both of Diana's boys until their uncle would get around to showing up.

I broke that off and chased it away.

Ozzie now took a deep drag on the cigarette, and he didn't cough. His lungs remembered smoke, had evidently wondered what had become of it. And the kid wasn't speaking figuratively, he thought as he sipped some more of the beer. I saw the Bitin Dog personality walk away, in front of that blown-up apartment.

No, Scott might not get the message at the hotel, and an ad in the paper won't work. He finished the beer and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray.

He caught the bartender's eye. "Have you got a deck of cards around?" Ozzie asked.

"Think so." The bartender dug around among the litter by the cash register, then tossed a box onto the bar in front of Ozzie. There was a color photo of a smiling naked woman on the front of the box, and when Ozzie opened it and tipped the worn cards out, he saw that the backs of the cards were all the same picture.

"Hot stuff," he said dryly.

"You bet. You know any card tricks?"

"No." Ozzie wondered why he had not ever learned to do anything with the cards besides make a cautious living. "I was always too scared of them," he said. He looked up at the bartender, noticing that though the man was middle-aged and his apron was tight over an ample belly, he was younger than Scott, and incalculably younger than Ozzie himself. No time to spare, he thought. "Can I buy these from you?" he asked, tapping the sad, worn deck.

The bartender's look of puzzlement became half-concealed contempt. "You can keep 'em, Gramps," he said, turning away and staring at the television set on a shelf up under the ceiling.

Ozzie smiled sourly to himself. He thinks I'm going to go back to some hotel room and … and turn some card tricks, he thought, with this pathetic, repetitive paper harem. Oh well. One bartender's opinion of me is a pretty small factor in all this.

But he could feel that he was reddening, and he touched the carefully tied knot of his tie self-consciously.

North, he remembered, was to his left. He shuffled the deck quickly seven times, then laid out four cards in a cross. The Jack of Hearts was the card at the north end of the cross.

North it is, he thought, levering himself up off the barstool with his aluminum cane and then digging in his pocket for money to pay for the beer. As always, he left a precisely calculated fifteen percent tip.

Crane shifted in his chair and watched the bet go around the green felt table.

He was in the cardroom of Binion's Horseshoe, right next to the doorway that had been opened in the wall when the Horseshoe had taken over the Mint next door. From the paneled cardroom walls looked down framed photographs of members of the Poker Hall of Fame—Wild Bill Hickock, Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson—and as Crane sipped his newest bourbon on the rocks, he wondered what the old masters thought of his playing.

He had opened under the gun—the first player to the dealer's left—with three Jacks. Tonight, no matter where he played, he couldn't seem to get any bad hands—and now three other players were calling his fifty-dollar bet. That was good; he'd draw two to his Jacks, and the other players would probably figure he was so drunk that he might well be drawing to a pair and a kicker—or even to a three Flush, or nothing but dreams—instead of high Trips.

It was true that he was drunk. The field of his vision seemed to be shifting up all the time, like a television with bad vertical control, so that he constantly had to be bringing his gaze down to focus on anything.

And whenever he looked at his cards, he had to close his false right eye, or else through it he would see his hand as consisting of Tarot cards. Not his real father's lethal deck, thank God, nor even the one that poor Joshua had tried to read for him, but a deck he had dreamed of—the deck in which the Two of Batons was a cherub's head speared through by two metal rods.

"Cards?" said the house dealer loudly.

Crane realized that the man was talking to him, and was probably saying it for the second time. Crane raised two fingers and tossed out the Four and Nine of Hearts. The cards he got in exchange were the Nine and Two of Spades, no help.

The two players to his left just rapped the table; they were standing pat, at least pretending to have unimprovable hands.

And, Crane thought sadly, they had both been playing tight all along, not staying with low Two Pairs or trying for gut-shot Straights or three Flushes and apparently never bluffing. They probably did have pat hands. Certainly at least one of them did.

So much for three Jacks.

He checked instead of betting, and when one of them did bet, and the other one raised, and the "cold" raise came around to him, he slid two of his Jacks under his chips and threw the other three cards away. When he would be asked to show his openers, he would show the pair, which was the minimum a player could have in order to open; and opening with just a pair of Jacks under the gun was a foolish move. Seeming to have done it would confirm him in the eyes of the other players as a money-careless drunk.

He had been playing Poker all over town for about sixteen hours, starting in the Flamingo's cardroom right after the first phone call from the ghost of Susan. She had called several times since, ringing pay phones he had happened to be standing near; her voice was hoarse, and she didn't talk for any longer than it took for her to tell him that she forgave him and loved him. He knew she'd be waiting for him in the bed of whatever motel room he would eventually wind up in, but like a nervous bridegroom on his wedding night, he wanted just a couple more drinks before … retiring.

Twice among a thousand snatches of desultory conversation, once at the Sands and once from a cabdriver who had asked him what line of work he was in, he had heard of a series of Poker games that was to be played on a Lake Mead houseboat next week, starting Wednesday night and continuing through Good Friday.

He tried not to think about that now.

He reached for his drink, then hesitated and glanced to his right—but of course there was not a woman standing there. All day he had been catching these glimpses out of the corner of his false eye. Somehow it didn't worry him that he was able to see through the painted plastic hemisphere; somehow he had always known that his father could give back what his father had taken away.

Fifty feet away Richard Leroy and Vaughan Trumbill stood watching the Poker game over the tops of two video Poker slot machines; the Horseshoe was crowded, even this late on a Wednesday night, and to maintain their places, the two men kept feeding quarters into the machines and inattentively pushing the buttons.

"Beany's going to need more buy-in money," said Trumbill, staring impassively at the game.

"Hmm?" said Richard, following the fat man's gaze. "Oh, right."

His face went blank, and at the Poker table a white-haired little man with an asthma inhaler on the table beside him pulled a billfold from his jacket pocket and separated out twenty hundred-dollar bills; he tossed them across the green felt to the dealer, who slid several stacks of green-colored chips across to him.

A moment later animation returned to Leroy's face. "There," he said. "Hey, did you see our fish open with Jacks under the gun? He must be ready to just fall out of the tree, he's so ripe."

"He showed two Jacks, Betsy," Trumbill said. "Sorry, I mean Richard. He might have folded Two Pair or even Trips. I'm not convinced he's as cut free as you think."

In the Betsy Reculver body the old man might have gone into a snit, but now in the Richard one he just laughed. "The way he's been soaking himself in alcohol today? He's as cut free as a blood clot traveling up an artery."

Trumbill just shrugged, but he was uneasy, and he didn't like the old man's metaphor. Several men driving cars with Nevada plates had been to the motel Crane had been staying at, asking questions about a Scott "Scarecrow" Smith, and Trumbill was afraid some jack might be on Crane's trail, out to eliminate one of Georges Leon's about-to-be-assumed bodies, his precious fish, and somehow the assassination this morning was bothering him—maybe because explosions generally tore the bodies to bits and flung the bits away to dry on rooftops and tree branches; and Trumbill's stomach was uncomfortably weighted down with LaShane. This afternoon, naked except for the splendor of his thousand tattoos, he had dragged the dead dog out into the backyard and eaten a good half of it raw. Richard had hosed him off afterward.

A young man in a sweat shirt sidled up to Trumbill now and whispered. "One of the cars that was at the motel just parked in the lot by the liquor store around the corner on First. Three guys, flipping coins, angling this way."

Trumbill nodded. "Keep your people on them," he said quietly, and the young man nodded and hurried away.

Richard was looking at him with raised eyebrows.

"We're not the only ones that sensed him playing," Trumbill said. "Three guys, gotta be working for one of the jacks, coming this way. Can you work the fish yet?" Trumbill asked.

"No, not till day before Easter."

"Why don't you try? If we've got to run, it would help if he was cooperating."

Richard hesitated, then nodded and stared hard at Crane.

Crane was lifting his glass to his mouth—and suddenly his arm jerked and the rim of the glass hit him in the nose and bourbon stung his eyes. His mouth sprang open, and he made a loud, prolonged hooting sound.

Then he blinked rapidly, feeling his face reddening with drunken embarrassment, and he carefully lowered the emptied glass to the paper napkin on the green felt.

"Uh," he said to the house dealer, who was staring at him in some surprise, "just waking myself up."

"Maybe it's bedtime," the dealer suggested.

Crane pictured a motel bed, dimly and whitely lit by a streetlight beyond a curtained window, and he imagined a figure in the bed, reaching out white arms for him. "No, not yet. I've still got some money!"

"Sure, le' 'im ply," said the well-dressed businessman, apparently English, who had won the pot Crane had opened. His graying hairline was damp, and his play so far had been very tight, very conservative; Crane guessed he was uncomfortable in a high-stakes game and appreciated having a moronic drunk at the table. The man now grinned nervously at Crane. "Iss a free country, roit?"

Crane nodded carefully. "Sure is."

"Grite country, too, I my sigh," the man went on eagerly, "though you have goat a lot of goons."

The dealer shrugged and began skimming cards across the table to the players. The button that indicated the token dealer was in front of Crane now, so the first card was dealt to the man on Crane's left, the Englishman.

"Got a lot of what?" asked Crane.

"Goons," the man told him. "Goons everywha you look."

The dealer was quick; each of the eight players now had five cards face down in front of him.

Crane nodded, mystified. "I suppose."

"No use," said Richard Leroy, resting his elbows on his slot machine. Absently he thumbed a quarter into the slot and pushed the deal button, and the front of his suit coat flickered with color as the cards appeared on the screen.

"Not unless you want to have him throw a fit," Trumbill agreed.

Crane mopped his chin with his shirt sleeve, and when the cocktail waitress walked by, he waved his empty glass at her.

Twitches and animal noises now, he thought blurrily. Well, at least I'm developing a terrific table image. I just hope I don't vomit or lose control of my bowels or anything.

The Englishman had opened under the gun, in first position, and Crane knew the man must have a pair of Aces at the very least. None of the other players called the fifty-dollar opening bet, and when it came around to Crane, he belatedly remembered to curl up the edges of his cards and peer down at them with his right eye closed. He had the Kings of Spades and Clubs and the Deuces of Spades and Diamonds and the Seven of Hearts. A very nice Two Pair. He let the cards fall back flat and slid forward one black hundred-dollar chip.

"I raise," he said clearly.

The Englishman called the bet and then asked for one card. Crane didn't think the man had the nerve to be chasing a Flush or a Straight against a raise; probably he was drawing to a Two Pair, which was unlikely to be better than Crane's Kings Up.

Crane considered rapping pat to scare him off, then decided that the man would assume he was bluffing, or even so drunk that he saw a Flush where there wasn't one. He decided instead to toss the Seven and try for the eleven-to-one chance of getting another King or Two and having a Full Boat.

But when he tugged at the Seven, the Two of Diamonds came with it, as if the two cards were glued together.

Surprised, he lifted the cards off the table and opened his right eye. Then he closed his left one.

Viewed through Crane's false eye, the King of Clubs was a King holding a metal rod and sitting on a lion-carved throne; the King of Spades was a weird King of Swords—just a crowned head poking up out of the surface of a body of water and an arm raised out of the water holding a sword; and the Two of Clubs was the by-now-familiar Two of Staves—the severed cherub head transfixed with two metal rods.

All three faces were toward him, and their painted eyes seemed to be looking into his false one with urgency.

Dully Crane wished this would all end. Where the hell was his new drink?

But, obediently, he threw the other two cards away, keeping the Kings and the cherub.

He closed his right eye and opened his real, left eye. All this squinting and winking, right after the splash of bourbon, was making his eyes leak tears. "Two," he told the house dealer. In spite of the tears running down his cheeks, he was perfectly calm, and his voice was level.

Seen through his good left eye, the three cards he held were again just the Kings of Spades and Clubs and the Two of Clubs. Breaking up the Two Pair and keeping a Two for a kicker was not a move any Poker expert would approve, but the two cards the dealer spun to him proved to be the Kings of Hearts and Diamonds. He now had four Kings, almost certainly better than whatever the Englishman had.

His lone opponent now slid four twenty-five-dollar chips into the pot, and Crane raised with eight of his own, and the Englishman reraised, and so did Crane, and they alternated at raising each other's raises—pausing just long enough for Crane to drain his newly arrived drink and ask for another—until Crane's entire stack of twelve hundred and some dollars in chips was tumbled into the pile in the center of the table. There was cash in his pockets, and he wished the rules permitted him to buy more chips during the course of a hand.

He blinked curiously at the Englishman, who almost looked ready to fling a drink into his own face and then hoot. The man was trembling, and his lips were white.

"Well?" he said in a scratchy voice.

Crane laid down his hand, face up. "Four Kings," he said.

The Englishman blinked at him; his whole face had gone white, but he was smiling and shaking his head. Then he lunged forward out of his seat to stare hard at Crane's cards.

His lips moved silently, as if he were counting the Kings—and then he shuddered violently and rolled over backward, knocking over his chair and tumbling to the carpeted floor.

The house dealer stood up and waved, and in seconds two security guards had loped up, taken in the situation, and were crouched over the fallen Englishman.

"Looks like heart," said one of them quickly. "Yeah, fingernails already dark." He began thumping the Englishman's chest, hard, with a fist while the other guard unholstered his radio and spoke quickly into it.

In spite of what Crane had heard about the single-mindedness of Las Vegas gamblers, a number of people abandoned slot machines or even Poker hands to come over and peer at the man on the floor. As they speculated in whispers about the man's chances, Crane was glad they couldn't know that it was he who had felled the harmless Englishman. Again he cuffed tears out of his eyes. I could have just thrown all five cards away, he thought. But how could I have known? It wasn't my fault. What was he playing for, if he couldn't afford to lose?

The house dealer leaned forward across the table—the twin tails of his tie dangling under his chin, each with HORSESHOE lettered down it in silver—and with thoughtful deliberation turned over the Englishman's cards.

An Eight and four Queens. The man had certainly suffered a bad beat.

Crane closed his left eye and looked out at his own laid-down cards. The Kings and the speared cherub head were smiling triumphantly now.

"Get somebody over here with some racks for my chips," Crane told the dealer harshly. "I want to cash out."

The dealer gave him a blank look. "Bedtime at last."

When Trumbill saw Crane stand up from the table, he turned and waved to the young man in the sweat shirt, who was mechanically working a slot machine three rows back; the young man nodded and made a hand signal to someone further back.

"I'll take him as soon as we're outside," Trumbill told Leroy. "He's never seen me, and fat men are reassuring."

"If they smile," said Leroy tensely as he watched Crane laying the stacks of his chips into a wooden rack. "Can you smile?" He glanced at Trumbill.

Trumbill's cheeks tensed upward, and his lower lip pouched away from his teeth, and his eyes became glittering slits. "Ho-ho-ho," he said.

"Forget it," said Leroy. Crane had picked up the rack and started weaving through the crowd toward the cashier's cage, and Leroy strode after him, flanked by Trumbill. "Act sad, like you lost your life savings," Leroy said as they elbowed their way through the phalanxes of gamblers. "A sad, fat man is probably good enough."

Ahead of them Crane had lifted the rack onto the cashier counter, and the woman in the cage had slid it inside.

"Jesus, cash again," said Trumbill a few moments later, watching Crane take a roll of bills and fold it and stuff it into his pocket. "With his scores at the Dunes and the Mirage, he must have twenty grand on him."

"You can have it when we've taken him. He's heading for the door—Moynihan's boys will have a van out there at the curb somewhere. Get him into it."

"Right."

"Baaad luck!"

The picketers were still marching up and down the Fremont Street sidewalk, and the short-haired young woman was using her electric megaphone again.

"Baaad luck at the 'Shoe!" droned her flat, amplified voice on the hot air as Crane lurched out into the glaringly lit night of downtown Las Vegas. "Come on out, losers!"

I'm coming, thought Crane as he slapped his pockets for his cigarettes; luckily for the environment, I'm sociodegradable. He found a pack of Arky's Camels, fumbled one out, and tucked it between his dry lips. Now did he have a match? Again he slapped his pockets.

His good eye was stinging with smoke and exhaustion, so he let it close and peered around through his plastic eye. The street and the casinos were hallucinatorily exotic viewed through it, impossible Samarkand-scapes of glowing crenellated palaces and broad boulevards peopled with robed Kings and Queens.

He smiled and breathed deeply, feeling the liquor humming in his veins.

Then it all started to change. The metallic clank-clank-clank of the slot machines was the fast, hammering background of a savage music that could be played only by an orchestra of honking cars and pavement-clicking heels and drunken shouts.

"Time to go home, looooozers!" quacked the striker in jarring counterpoint.

The people on the sidewalks were moving jerkily; apparently they were unwilling participants in some degradingly mechanical dance.

Suddenly Crane was near panic, and he opened both eyes wide and breathed deeply. He smelled exhaust fumes, and sweat, and the eternal hot desert wind.

He was on Fremont Street, and the people around him were just random tourists, and he was just drunk.

The cigarette still hung from his lower lip, and he thought that if he could get it lit, he would feel better, would sober up a little.

"Need a light?" asked someone next to him.

With a relieved smile Crane turned—then froze at the double exposure with which he found himself face-to-face.

Through his left eye he saw the fat man who had ransacked his apartment, the fat man who had had on the seat of the gray Jaguar the envelope with the URGENTLY FOLD note about Diana, the fat man who had eaten the leaves from the ginger plant across the street from his house in Santa Ana.

And through his right eye Crane saw a man-size black sphere, with a black, warty head and stubby, bristly black arms; away from the boundaries of it, excluded by it, boiled away a Kirlian aura of green tendrils and teal carapaces and green fishtails and red arteries.

Handlebar! thought Crane—no, the Mandelbrot Man—and then Crane was running away, ignoring the blazing pain in his cut leg, blundering through the crowds and hearing only the whimpering in his own head.

Some traffic light must have been green under the blue-white neon suns of the Horseshoe, for the crowd stretched entirely across Fremont Street, and he found himself on the opposite sidewalk before he had even realized that he had stepped off the curb.

The crowd was sparser to his left, and he ran that way, his shoes flopping on the stained pavement. A street opened to his right and he spun around the corner, nearly losing his footing when his left knee refused to flex, and half hopped and half jogged toward the blue and red beer signs of a liquor store ahead.

This street, disorientingly, was nearly empty; a cab idled at the curb ahead of him, and a solitary man in overalls was trudging along the opposite sidewalk under the high shoulder of a parking garage. Crane ran for the cab … but out of the corner of his good eye he saw the man in overalls look alertly toward Fremont Street and then point at Crane.

"Yes!" yelled somebody from behind Crane.

The man in overalls was suddenly facing Crane, crouching and holding his clasped fists toward him.

Bam.

An instant's smear of white light had obscured the man's fists, and concrete chips were hammered out of the wall at Crane's back.

Without thinking, almost as if something else were acting through him, Crane unzipped his jacket and hoisted out the .357; another shot exploded the edge of the curb in front of him, but he raised the revolver in both hands and pointed it at the man across the street and pulled the trigger.

He was deafened and dazzled by the explosion, and the recoil seemed to shatter the bones in his sprained wrist; he stepped back and sat down heavily on the sidewalk.

Two sharp bangs echoed down from Fremont Street. Crane looked in that direction, blinking against the red glare-blot floating in his vision, and he saw the thing that was both the fat man and the black sphere; it was growing in size, waving its misshapen arms as it rushed toward him.

He stood up and cocked the pistol, dreading the thought of what another recoil would do to his wrist. Then out of the corner of his false eye he caught a glimpse of a woman standing beside him, and once again he involuntarily turned to look.

This time she was there: a short Asian woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties; she was wearing a cabdriver's uniform, and she grabbed his arm.

"Shoot 'em from the cab," she said quickly, "as we're driving away. Hurry, get in!"

Crane's thumb lowered the revolver's hammer as he scrambled into the passenger side of the cab; the young woman had already got in behind the wheel, and sudden acceleration pushed Crane hard into the seat as he pulled the door closed.

CHAPTER 29: Mr. Apollo Junior Himself

Crane tucked the revolver back into his belt. Lights out, the cab made a squealing left turn onto Bridger, gunned past the dark courthouse, and caught green lights right across the Strip and into the dark tracts beyond.

"Did I hit that guy," panted Crane as he gripped the armrest and stared ahead at the rushing asphalt, "the one … I shot at?"

"No," said the driver. "But the fat man following you did. Two shots, both hits—knocked Mr. Overalls right down. Who was the fat man?"

Crane frowned, drunkenly trying to imagine a reason for the fat man to save him.

He gave up on it. "I don't know, actually," he said. "Who are you?"

"Bernardette Dinh," she said. She had turned right on Maryland Parkway and was now driving at a normal speed through a neighborhood of trees and streetlights and old houses.

There were two baseball caps on the seat between them, and she picked one up and with a practiced motion pulled it on from the back of her head so that her long black hair was caught up under it. "Call me Nardie. And put on that other cap."

"What," Crane asked as he put on the hat, "are you, in all this?"

"In a minute. Open the glove box; the thing in there that looks like a mouse skin is a fake mustache, okay? Put it on."

Crane opened the glove box. The mustache looked more like a strip of horsehide, and when he stuck the adhesive side of it onto his unshaven upper lip, the bristles hung down over his mouth. He thought he must look like Mavranos.

He slouched down in the seat so that the cylinder of the .357 wouldn't poke him in the hip-bone.

A lot of guns on Fremont Street tonight, he thought.

The thought raised an echo in his head, and then he was laughing, softly and unhappily, for he realized that that must have been what the doomed Englishman had meant by a lot of goons.

"We'll circle the block around the Flamingo windshield," said Nardie, "to make sure they don't sense you."

Crane wiped his eyes on his shirt cuff. "The Flamingo windshield?"

"Circle the place windshieldwise," she said. "The old term is 'widdershins,' means counterclockwise. Opposite of 'diesel,' clockwise."

Crane remembered Ozzie's having used those terms when he'd had him and Arky reverse the tires on the Suburban. So that's what the old man had been talking about. Useless bullshit. He sighed and sat back in the rattily upholstered seat.

"You reek of liquor," said Nardie, sounding surprised. "Hard liquor! Are you drunk?"

He thought about it. "Soberer than I was in the casino," he said, "but yes, I'm definitely drunk."

"And the dice still led me to you," she said wonderingly. "You must be the biological son, all right. Any mere … ambitious contender, like my half brother, would be disqualified forever by just a sip of beer. I've never tasted alcohol."

"Don't start," said Crane. The streetlights swept past overhead in bright monotony, and he was getting sleepy. "It's not for amateurs." He saw the lights of Smith Food and Drug ahead, where Diana had worked, but mercifully Nardie turned right onto Sahara Avenue.

"I'm not an amateur, buddy," she said, and her voice was so fierce that he looked over at the lean profile against the passing lights. "Okay?"

"Okay," he said. "What are you?"

"I'm a contender. Look, I know you just met the front-runner Queen of Hearts. I … felt it when you and she touched for the first time, Monday night. And yet here you are tonight acting against your better interests—getting drunk, letting Neal Obstadt's guys nearly kill you."

"She's dead," Crane said remotely. "Somebody killed her, the Queen of Hearts, this morning."

Nardie Dinh gave him a sharp look. "This morning?"

"Early."

She blinked, and then opened her mouth and shut it again. "Okay," she said. "Okay, she's out of the picture, then, right? Now look, you're—" She looked over at him. "You do know what's going on, don't you? What you are?"

Crane was slumped down in the seat, and his eyes were nearly shut. "I'm the bad King's son," he recited. "Hey, could we stop for a drink somewhere?"

"No. Don't you know that alcohol weakens you, puts you at the mercy of the King and all the jacks? You've got a good shot at unseating your father, if you don't blow it." She rubbed one hand over her face and exhaled. "There's one thing, though, that you haven't got."

"A diploma," said Crane dreamily, thinking of The Wizard of Oz movie. "A medal. A testimonial."

"A Queen," said Nardie impatiently. "It's like Hold 'Em, okay? You gotta come in with a pair of cards. A King and a Queen, in this case."

Crane remembered that she had said she was a contender. He sat up straighter and looked hard at her with both eyes, though the vision through the false one had nearly dimmed out.

Through the left eye she was certainly a slim Asian young woman, cute in her little uniform in spite of the hard set of her mouth; was there something different about her, viewed through his false eye? A hint of a glow, the shadow of a crescent at the front of her cap?

"Are you, uh … volunteering?" he asked, awkwardly.

"With the moon's daughter dead, I'm the best there is," she said. "I've been exposed to the pictures. I've got to assume you know what pictures I mean—"

Crane sighed. Where was a drink? Susan was waiting for him. "Yeah, I know the goddamn pictures." Out the passenger side window he saw a sign—ART'S PLACE, LOUNGE AND RESTAURANT—GRAVEYARD SPECIALS. Those are the only specials this town seems to have, he thought.

"And for years I haven't eaten red meat or anything cooked in an iron pan, and"—she glared at him—"and I'm a virgin."

Jesus. "That's good—your name was what? I'm sorry."

"Nardie Dinh."

"That's good, Nardie. Listen, you seem like a nice girl, so I'm going to give you some really, really good advice, okay? Get out of Las Vegas and forget all this. Go to New York, go to Paris, go far away, and never play cards. You'll only get killed if you get involved with this stuff. My God, you saw a guy get shot just a few minutes ago, doesn't that—"

"Shut," she said, "the—fuck—up."

Her hands were clenched on the wheel, and her breath was whistling through her flared nostrils. She was half his age, but Crane found himself cringing away from her, his face reddening under her evident rage.

"Osiris!" she spat. "Adonis, Tammuz, Mr. Apollo Junior himself—not just a broken-winded old drunk, but a—a blind, fatuous idiot, too! Christ, you make my brother look good, I swear."

The cab was stopped now, idling in the left-turn lane facing the Strip intersection. "Look," said Crane stiffly, yanking the door lever, "I'll get out here—"

She stomped the gas pedal and lashed the cab out into the Strip traffic, tugging the wheel around to make the left turn in the jiggling glare of oncoming headlights. The opened passenger-side door swung out on its hinges, and Crane braced himself with his feet and his left hand on the dashboard to keep from tumbling right out onto the rushing pavement; horns honked and tires screeched, and Crane heard at least one bang behind them as she straightened the wheel and sped down the fortunately open southbound lanes.

Crane relaxed a little, and when the head wind blew the opened door back in line, he grabbed the handle and pulled it closed so hard that the handle broke off in his hand.

A car's a lethal weapon, he thought, and I don't want to die any soberer than I have to. Humor this lunatic.

"What I meant—" he began, in a grotesquely light, conversational tone, but she interrupted him.

"Oh, no," she said in a mock-bright voice, "do let me finish my thought, dear." She was driving fast, passing other cars as the hideous pink and white giant clown in front of the Circus Circus swept by on Crane's side. "Let's see. First off, I'm not a girl, okay? I don't think I ever was. And I'm not nice—I knifed an old woman in a house near Tonopah on New Year's Eve, and I really hope that my brother is the only one I'm going to have to kill between now and Easter. But I won't hesitate to … If your Queen of Hearts wasn't dead, I wouldn't have hesitated to kill her, if she'd got in my way." She seemed to have talked away her anger, and now she shook her head almost bewilderedly. "If I was a nice girl, I couldn't save your life."

Crane had relaxed back into the seat again and was consciously having to flex his eyelid muscles to keep them open. "I don't think you can anyway, Nardie," he said. "My father's got his hooks into me pretty deep. I don't think there's been any hope for me since '69, when I played Assumption on his houseboat."

Nardie made an abrupt right turn into the parking lot of Caesars Palace, sped up the driveway, and parked in the line at the cabstand.

She shifted around on the seat to face him. Her eyes were wide. "You played Assumption?"

Crane nodded heavily. "And … won, so to speak. I took money for my conceived hand."

"But … no, why would he do that? You were already his son."

"He didn't know that. I didn't know that."

"How the hell did you wind up there, on his boat? Were you drawn to it or something?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. I was a professional Poker player, like my foster-father. It was a Poker game."

"Get out of the car."

Crane held up the broken-off handle. "You'll have to let me out."

In a moment she had opened her door and run around the front bumper and had pulled open his door.

He got out and stood up and stretched in the hot, dry air.

"Some good advice?" said Nardie, looking up at him with an unreadable stare.

Crane smiled. "I guess it is your turn."

"No offense, but I really think the best thing you can do, at this point, is kill yourself."

"I'll take it under advisement."

She walked back around to the open driver's-side door and got in. As the car was shifted into gear, Crane noticed a sticker on the rear bumper:

ONE NUCLEAR FAMILY CAN RUIN YOUR WHOLE DAY.

After she had driven away, he stared for a while across Las Vegas Boulevard at the enormous surging neon pyre that was the Flamingo.

When it began to loom larger in his sight, he realized that he was walking toward it. They'll have a room available on a Wednesday night, he thought.

CHAPTER 30: Work Up to Playing with Trash

Susan had, of course, been waiting for him—hungrily. He had quickly got out of his clothes and crawled into bed with her, and they had made desperate love for hours.

Crane hadn't even been aware of the point when his consciousness had finally been pounded away into the oblivion of sleep—there had been a full bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon in the hotel room, and he had pulled his mouth free from Susan's hot wetness whenever she began to deflate under him, and he had each time taken yet another slug from the bottle to restore her sweaty, demanding solidity—but when he woke up, hours later, it was with an almost audible crash.

He was lying naked on the carpet in a patch of sunlight, and for several minutes he didn't move at all beyond working his lungs; the abused machinery of his strength was entirely occupied with trying to hold back the pains that were drawn tight through his body and seemed to have stitched him to the floor. His head and groin were the unthinkably stained, dried-out husks of run-over animals by the side of some savage highway.

Eventually one thought made its way through his mind like a man climbing through the roofless, wreckage-choked hallway of a bombed-out house: If that was sex, I am ready to gladly embrace Death.

From where he lay he could see the Wild Turkey bottle, empty and lying on its side on the rug. He realized dully that he was completely blind in his false eye again.

For a while he had no further thoughts. He climbed up onto his knees—noting dizzily that the disarranged bed, though stained with blood and bourbon, was empty—and then got all the way up onto his feet. He swayed perilously as he tottered to the uncurtained window.

He must have been on about the tenth floor. Below him was a big swimming pool in the shape of an oval with its ends dented in, and framing the pool on the east side like a parenthesis was the scabrous roof of a building he recognized at once, despite seeing it from above for the first time.

It was the original three- and four-story Flamingo building, dwarfed and diminished by the mirror-glass high-rise towers that now surrounded it on three sides and hid it from the Strip, and he was obscurely depressed to see that concrete, and pink chaise lounges with tanned bodies on them, covered the spot where Ben Siegel's rose garden had stood.

He lurched away from the window and shakily picked up his pants. If thine eye offendeth thee, pluck it out, he thought; and if thine alertness offendeth thee, go out and find something to drown it with.

There was a liquor store on Flamingo Road just behind the hotel's multi-story parking structure, and after walking up and down its narrow aisles for a while, he fumbled a hundred-dollar bill loose from one of the wads in his pocket and paid for two six-packs of Budweiser and—it seemed important—a cheap leather Jughead-style crown-cap with silver-painted plastic animals hung all over it and LAS VEGAS printed in gold across the front. The clerk had no trouble making change for a hundred.

Crane put the cap on his head and tucked the bagged six-packs under his arm and started walking back toward the Flamingo. After a few steps in the hot sun he dug one of the cans out of the paper bag and popped it open. Legal to drink on the street in this town, he told himself.

He took a sip of the cold, foamy stuff and smiled as it cooled the overheated machinery of him. And malt does more than Milton can, he thought, quoting A. E. Housman, To justify God's ways to man.

He was walking more slowly now, enjoying the dry sun-heat of the morning on his face, and he began to sing:

"Makin' breakfast of a … pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop … six-pack,

I fought the dri-ink and the … drink won,

I fought the dri-ink and the … drink won."

He laughed, took another deep sip, and started another song:

"I'm back on the sauce again,

Gonna take up … that old True Cross again

Gonna welcome that loss again,

Remembering nothing, woe woe, remembering nothing."

Half a dozen men were sitting in a circle next to a Dumpster behind the liquor store, and Crane turned his wavering steps toward them.

When he approached to within a few yards of the Dumpster, they looked up warily, and he saw that they were playing some card game. Five of the men were in their twenties or thirties, but the sixth looked as if he were about a hundred years old; he was wearing a lime green polyester leisure suit, and his bony hands and bald head were stippled with brown spots.

One of the younger men gave Crane an unfriendly look. "You got a problem, Sluggo?"

Crane grinned, remembering that he had left his gun up in his room somewhere. "A problem?" he said. "Yeah, I got a problem. I got a bunch of beer here, and I can't find anybody who'll drink it with me."

The man relaxed and smiled, though he was still frowning. "Around here we help out strangers. Sit down."

Crane sat down on the asphalt with his back against the hot metal of the Dumpster. They were playing Lowball Poker, in which the worst hand wins, for quarters—though when a raise came around, he saw that the very old man was betting with the brown ovals of flattened pennies.

"Doctor Leaky gets to play with junk 'cause he buys the liquor," explained the one who had challenged Crane; his name seemed to be Wiz-Ding. "If you keep up the good work, maybe you can work up to playing with trash, too."

Crane managed to find a couple of dollars' worth of quarters in his pockets, and he played a few hands, but, like yesterday, he kept getting pat high Trips and Full Boats, which were loser hands in Lowball.

"You guys play here a lot?" asked Crane after a while.

The ancient man called Doctor Leaky answered him. "I been playing back here forever," he said. "I used to play around the trash cans behind the Flamingo—there were … bungalow-type buildings back there, then—with Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner." He chuckled absently. "That girl had a mouth on her; I never heard such language."

Wiz-Ding was sucking on a short dog, a bottle of cheap fortified wine, between slugs of beer, and he was steadily losing quarters.

He gave Crane a baleful look. "Since you sat down, I pair up every time I draw even one card."

Even with the beer starting to hit him, Crane knew it was time to leave. "I been getting hands that make me wish we were playing High Draw," he said placatingly, "and now you guys've taken all my quarters." He put his hands flat on the asphalt to lever himself up. "I'll come back after I've cashed in my IRA."

Wiz-Ding hit Crane while he was off-balance, and he fell over sideways with his feet waving in the air, disoriented by the hot pain in his left eye socket. When he managed to roll over and struggle up to his feet, two of the others had grabbed Wiz-Ding and were holding him back.

"Take off," one of them told Crane.

Doctor Leaky was goggling around uncomprehendingly. "His eye?" he mumbled. "What happened to his eye?"

Crane picked up his cap and put it back on his head and stood up. He knew better than to make any parting remarks or to try to retrieve the remaining beers. He just nodded and turned back toward the liquor store.

Another and another cup to drown, he thought, quoting Omar Khayyam this time, the memory of this impertinence.

But after he had gone inside and made his way to the beer cooler and carried two more six-packs to the counter, the clerk looked at Crane's swelling left eye and shook his head.

Crane sighed and walked out empty-handed onto the hot Flamingo Road sidewalk.

When he saw the blue Camaro convertible idling at the curb, he remembered that he had been expecting it. Behind the wheel Susan looked entirely solid; her lean, pale face reflected the sunlight as creditably as anyone's would, and her smile was radiant.

After a ten-second pause he shambled over and opened the passenger-side door. There was a freshly popped can of Budweiser standing up on the front seat, and he let that decide for him.

This is legal too, he thought as he lifted the can to his lips and sat down and pulled the door closed with his free hand. Just so the driver doesn't have any.

"What happened to your eye, darling?" asked Susan as she pulled out into traffic and got into the left-turn lane.

"Somebody named Wiz-Ding," he said. His left eye was swollen nearly shut, but luckily he found that he could again see through his false eye. So far things looked normal through it—the blue sky, the red facade of the Barbary Coast Casino to his right, the tall Dunes sign ahead with the rippling of its lights still faintly visible even in the hard daylight.

"That guy." She laughed, and Crane realized that whatever this woman-shaped thing was, it was intimate with all suicidal drinkers.

The thought made him jealous.

"Not pink elephants for him," she said. "What do you think would be appropriate?"

Crane's body still felt as though it had been worked over with baseball bats. "How about one of those big white beetles? Ninos de la tierra?"

She laughed again as she made the left turn onto the Strip. "You can't still be mad at me about that. A woman scorned, you know? I'd been holding the DTs back from you, and then you asked for me, and I came, and you changed your mind and offered me to your friend." She turned her silvery eyes on him for a moment. "I could have given you much worse than a rat and a bug on the other side of the room."

Crane imagined having a few of the big, thick-legged children of the earth in the bed with him, for example, and he shuddered in the hot sun. "Bygones," he said with an airy wave. "Where are we going?"

"Your memory is nearly gone," noted Susan approvingly. "We're going for a walk in the desert. Visit a ruined chapel that will be there for us. Very spiritually beneficial, help you get ready to … become the King."

Or vice versa, thought Crane distantly. Help the King get ready to become me. The can in his hand was empty.

"We'll stop at a liquor store for provisions," said Susan, who of course had noted the problem. She giggled. "You know, when I told you to buy a hat, I think I meant something more …"

Crane cocked a lordly eyebrow at her. "You have some … criticism of my choice in gentlemen's headwear?"

"I guess it's a blackish canary," she conceded. Her sentence rocked him, even through the tranquilizing alcohol haze. It was a line from one of the books he and Susan—the real, dead Susan—had loved, Hope Mirlees's Lud in the Mist: the book's protagonist, reproved for absentmindedly putting on canary yellow clothing while in mourning, had protested weakly that it was a blackish canary.

Was this thing driving the car the real Susan, in some sense? And if she meant to imply that he should be in mourning, was it supposed to be for Diana? Or the dead Susan? Himself, conceivably?

South of the Aladdin, in sight of the garish multicolored towers of the Excalibur, she pulled in to the parking lot of a little liquor store; the 1950s-style sign above the door read LIQUOR HEAVEN.

"I'll wait out here," she said when she had switched off the engine.

Crane nodded and got out of the car. He blinked at the place's glass door, thinking that he had just glimpsed a bent little boy walking in—but the door was motionless, and might not have been opened for hours, or days. He shrugged and stepped forward.

The place was dim inside, after the brightness of the desert sun, and for him the shelves seemed to be full of canned vegetables with faded labels. Under a high shelf that was crowded with dusty ceramic Elvis collector decanters huddled the register and counter and, not visible at first glance, an ancient woman with a star tattooed right onto her face, from ear to ear and chin to forehead.

He nodded to her and walked to the back of the store. There didn't seem to be anyone else in the place.

There was a cooler in the back wall, but on the shelves inside were nothing but short dogs—twelve-ounce bottles of fortified wines like Thunderbird and Gallo white port and Night Train. Oh, well, he thought with a smile as he studied them—any port in a storm.

Posters were taped on the inside of the glass, advertising a wine called Bitin Dog. "Just Say Woof!" advised the ads.

The brand name reminded him of something—something that one hurt boy could apparently manage to lose, and another hurt boy could pick up and find comforting—but he could see no profit in chasing down any memories at this point. He opened the door, took two bottles by the neck in each hand, and started back toward the register.

Ozzie had driven Diana's tan Mustang right past the liquor store lot when the Camaro turned in to park, but he had seen the gray Jaguar stop at the Strip curb behind him, and he realized dully that it must be the fat man driving it. He had been forlornly hoping, while he followed the Camaro from the liquor store by the Flamingo, that it was just another Las Vegas Jaguar.

He drove Diana's car into the parking lot of a travel agency and turned it around, to be ready to drive out again when the other two cars got moving.

The old deck of cards with the naked women on the backs was scattered across the passenger side of the seat. It depressed him to look at them, even though they had eventually led him to Scott, and he gathered them up, tamped them square, and put them in his breast pocket.

Dirty cards in my pocket, he thought. He felt his chin and wished he had found an opportunity at least to shave.

Through the dusty windshield he stared at the baking highway and the dry weed lot beyond it. In Las Vegas, he thought—where the spiritual water table is as exhausted as the literal one, where the suicide rate is the highest in the world, where this Strip area is called Paradise not because of any Eden-like qualities but just because there was once a club here called the Pair O' Dice.

This isn't the place I'd have chosen. But I can't say I didn't know what was … in the cards. I bought this hand on Sunday morning, when I stayed to that showdown at the two- and four-dollar Seven-Stud table in the Commerce Casino back in L.A.

The Two of Spades had signified departure, saying good-bye to loved ones; the Three of Clubs had been a second marriage for one or both of those loved ones; the Five of Diamonds had been a wedding present, promising prosperity and happiness in that marriage or those marriages; the Nine of Hearts, the "wish card," was another wedding present, happy fulfillment of ambitions.

Those had been for Scott and Diana. The three cards that had been face down were what he had had to buy for himself in order to try to buy lives for them. The Four of Hearts was the "old bachelor" card, to identify himself; the Eight of Diamonds was an old person traveling far from home; and of course, the Ace of Spades was, simply, Death.

A whiff of Diana's perfume drifted past his nostrils now as he shifted on the seat.

Time, he thought. Time … time … time.

But he patted his coat pocket and was bleakly reassured to feel the bulky weight of his little .22 revolver, loaded with hollow-point magnums.

You've had three days, he told himself. That's enough time.

CHAPTER 31: Did You Meet Your Father at the Train Station?

South of town Susan turned onto the I-15. The red cones of road construction narrowed the highway to one lane for a while, but traffic was light enough so that she didn't ever have to slow below forty miles an hour, and when the construction was behind them, she sped up to a steady seventy or eighty. Out on the face of the desert the little widely separated houses or ranches seemed to Crane to look defensive, like forts.

South of Las Vegas, with the towers and streets left behind, the landscape broadened out; the vast plain around them was not perfectly flat but swept up at the distant edges to meet the mountains. Crane imagined that a car way out there without its emergency brake on would roll right back down to this highway—though from here he wouldn't even be able to see that car.

The breeze that fluttered his gray hair was hot, and in the roofless car the sun was a weight on his arms and legs, so he unscrewed the cap from one of the chilly bottles of Bitin Dog and took a long sip.

The dark wine, much harsher than beer, seemed to generate inside him a fire to repel the desert heat. It woke him up, too, stripped away the foggy blanket of inattention, but he found to his satisfaction that he no longer needed the blanket; he was indifferent now to Diana's death and the problems of Ozzie and Arky. This, he thought, finally, is real, cold adulthood, with not even a scrap of any need for a father.

"You want some of this?" he asked Susan, holding the bottle toward her.

"I am it, darling," she said without taking her eyes off the road. "How are you feeling?"

Crane took a moment to think of an honest answer. "Disattached," he said.

"That's good."

Some kind of wrecked old stone structure was visible now beside the highway ahead, on the right, and Crane leaned forward as he felt the convertible's brake drums take hold.

Crane peered at the place that was apparently their destination. Mirages made it hard to judge the outlines of the structure: Its broken gray stone walls seemed at one instant to stretch far back from the highway, and in the next instant looked like nothing but the narrow remains of an abandoned church.

Through the razory optimism of the morning's drunkenness he felt a flicker of uneasy reluctance. "Who," he asked carefully, "are we going to meet here?"

" 'Did you meet your father at the train station?' " Susan said in a quacking voice, quoting a joke his real, dead wife had once told him. " 'No, I've known him for years!' "

She swung the wheel and pulled off onto the gravelly shoulder. When she turned off the engine, the silence crowded right up to the car, then receded for the faint hiss of the wind in the sparse brush around the uneven stone walls.

As he got out of the car, carrying his bagged bottles and the one he was working on, Crane noticed that a gray Jaguar had pulled off a hundred yards behind them; and a moment later a tan Mustang drove on past, swirling up a faint wake of dust.

He knew he could remember both cars if he cared to, but he didn't care to. He was edgily confident that he had left his emotions behind, with the cast-off shell of his youth.

Susan had taken three steps out into the sand away from the highway, toward the doorway that held up a weathered stone lintel like a segment of Stonehenge. She looked back at him. "Let's walk."

He tipped up the open bottle for another slug of cold Bitin Dog. "Why not?"

The doorway led into a round, roofless area that was floored now only by rippling bone-colored sand. Dead cacti stood like randomly placed crucifixes across the uneven expanse. Crane blinked and rubbed his plastic eye, but he could not estimate the distance to the far wall.

Susan took the bag and held his freed hand. As the two of them plodded over the sand, her hand in his eventually became dry and pebble-knuckled; he drank some of the wine to restore her suppleness, and then before long had to do it again.

The sun was a chunk of magnesium burning whitely in the dome of the sky. Crane could feel its dry heat diminishing him.

The very stones underfoot seemed frailed by rot, honeycombed by some internal erosion; and he saw scuttling snakes and scorpions that were inorganic, made of jewels and polished stones; and dry shells of birds whirled past overhead, making sounds like glass breaking.

He knew that if he could open his swollen-shut left eye he would be seeing a different landscape than the one his false eye was showing him.

When he had first stepped out of the car, he had seen spots of green, and white and red and orange flowers, brought out by Tuesday night's rain—but after he had entered the ruined chapel and walked awhile across this vast floor, he could see only stone and sand and the brown-dried cacti, which, he saw when he and Susan passed the first of them, were split open to show hardened lacy cores like the marrows of dry bones.

His own hands had begun to dry out and crack, so he dropped his now-empty bottle and took another one from the bag Susan was carrying and twisted the top off it, and he sucked at it more frequently than he had at the last one, for he was drinking to maintain both of them now. Astringent sweat stung his forehead under the brim of his Jughead cap.

The wind was singing in the uneven ridges of the broken walls, a monotonous chorus that seemed to Crane to issue from the dry throat of the idiot desert itself, all message lost in a profound, malignant senility.

Ozzie had turned the Mustang around on the shoulder and driven back northward, back toward the desolated building—which he knew had no sane business being here—and he slowed the car and angled over toward the east edge of the highway after he had seen the fat man and a white-haired man walk through the stone doorway into the vast ruin. A third man, younger and wearing a tan security guard uniform, had also got out of the gray Jaguar, but he stood now on the shoulder, watching Ozzie park on the opposite side.

Ozzie noted the holster on the young man's belt. Well, he thought as he switched off the Mustang's engine, I'm armed, too. I'll just have to deal with this fellow, and not let myself forget who he works for.

He buttoned his coat with trembling fingers, then opened the door to the desert heat and began the task of angling his aluminum cane out from the passenger side of the seat.

Behind him he could hear the security guard's street shoes knocking on the pavement of the highway, coming closer. Ignoring the horrified, despairing wail in his head, Ozzie slipped his hand into his suit coat pocket.

During his long life he had four times had to hold a gun on a man, and even that had each time made him tremble with nausea. He had never actually shot anyone.

The man had called something to him.

Ozzie looked over his shoulder at the young security guard, who was right behind him now. "What?"

The guard's brown hand was on the checked wooden grip of the holstered .38 revolver. "I said get the fuck away from the car." He drew the gun and pointed it at Ozzie's knees. "You're not wearing feathers, so you must be the real old guy. Your name's, uh, Doctor Leaky?"

Call it, Ozzie thought. "That's right, sonny."

"Okay, Mr. Leroy said you might show up. You're to stay outside. I'm instructed to kill you if you try to follow them in, and I will."

"Can I sit in the Jag and run the air?"

The young man was still pointing the gun in the direction of Ozzie's knees and staring hard into his face. For a too-brief moment he glanced across the highway at the Jaguar. "I guess so."

"Could you get my cane out of the car? I can't bend over so good."

The man stared at Ozzie in exasperation, clearly wondering if he was worth the trouble of frisking. "Oh, hell," he said finally, and holstered his gun and stepped toward the Mustang.

God forgive me, Ozzie thought. Don't forget who he works for; he's a soldier in their army. He stood back from the open car door.

When the guard leaned in, Ozzie pulled the little .22 from his coat pocket and reached in and touched the muzzle to the curly hair at the back of the man's head.

And feeling his soul wither in his breast, he squeezed the trigger.

The man dived forward across the seat, and his legs flexed and then stood straight out of the car for a moment as he thrashed and huffed and grunted inside; after a moment he went limp, and through tear-blurred eyes Ozzie looked up and down the empty highway.

The bang, muffled inside the car, had hardly been more than a loud snap, and Ozzie knew the wind had carried it away unheard.

He thought about folding the dead man's legs in under the steering wheel. And then he thought about retrieving his cane from under the body.

At last he just leaned in over the man's broad back, resolutely looking at the holster and not at the blood, hooked out the revolver, and turned away to limp, unaided, across the highway and into the perilous chapel in the wasteland.

CHAPTER 32: Get In Close

Like the floor of the ruined Colosseum, the surface across which Crane and Susan walked was hatched with trenches, as if corridors in some vast cellar had collapsed long ago. Walking in the trenches kept the wind-blown sand out of their eyes, though it did nothing to protect them from the weight of the sun.

Every time the two of them climbed a sand slope back up to floor level, Crane could see that the far wall had drawn a little closer.

The wound in his thigh, which had been healing, had begun to bleed again, making a black, shiny spot on his jeans.

At last he climbed up and saw only flat sand between himself and the wall, and he could see an ancient architectural gap in it, blocked now by a tumble weed.

Crane turned to look back and see if he could gauge how far they'd come, but a thing hanging on one of the nearest cacti made him jump and swear.

It was a dried human body, hung upside down. One ankle was tied to the top of the cactus, and the other leg, though obviously as stiff as driftwood now, had once bent at the knee under gravity and was now bent that way forever. Desiccation had given the face an expression of composure.

And then the eyes opened, their whites glaring against the brown leather of the face, and Crane screamed and scrambled back away from the autistic malice that shone in the bright black pupils.

From behind, Susan touched Crane's arm. "You remember him. Come on and meet the others."

Numbly Crane let her turn him toward the doorway.

The tumble weed that blocked it was as big as a stove, and even as he focused his eye on it, the round dry bush exploded into twigs; a flat, hollow boom shook the super-heated air, and Crane realized that somebody had fired a shotgun at the tumble weed.

He stopped walking and stared at the blown-open bush.

When he heard the two harsh, metallic lisps of the shotgun being re-chambered, he turned around.

A few yards behind him the fat man was stepping carefully over the uneven ground, wearing a business suit and carrying a shotgun slung under his arm, pointed at the ground. Crane was vaguely glad that the fat man wasn't appearing as the warty sphere today. A few steps further back was another man, on whom Crane couldn't get his false eye to focus. Apparently they had been pacing Crane and Susan in one of the parallel trenches.

Susan's bony fingers were still on Crane's arm. "Come on," she said. "Meet me."

Crane let her push him through the broken stone doorway. He took a few steps out across the floor of the next wide, roofless expanse of sand, and then he turned and looked back at her.

His head was suddenly singing with shock, but he just stepped back.

Susan had apparently taken off all her clothes since the last time he had focused his eye on her. If he had noticed it, he would have warned her about what would happen, what had in fact happened—she had dried out completely, and her nakedness was horrible now.

She was a skeleton covered tight with thin, sun-shrunken leather; her breasts were empty flaps, and her groin was a hole torn open in a sawdust-stuffed doll; her eyes and mouth were pulled so wide open that she couldn't shut them, and steam was wafting out of the holes as her tongue and eyeballs withered away.

But she was smiling, and with a bony brown foot she kicked a big puffball loose from its mooring in the sand, and then she strode long-legged to another and kicked it loose, too.

There were a lot of the ball things poking up out of the sand, he noticed now, and when he made his eye focus on them, he saw that they were the blinking, grimacing heads of people buried up to their necks in the desert. There were arms sticking up, too, holding fanned-out playing cards.

Susan was bounding lightly from place to place, waving her long, thin brown arms over her head like a monkey, pausing before each next leap only long enough to kick another head loose from the stem of its neck.

The senile chorus of the wind in the broken stones was louder here, and Crane was suddenly desperate for a drink.

The bottle he was carrying only had an inch of warming wine sloshing in it, and he tipped it up to his lips—then choked and lowered his head and filled the bottle with vomited blood. He threw it away, and the blood that sprayed from the neck dried to dust in mid-air.

And Susan had gone prancing away across the desert with the other two bottles. Perhaps she would slow down for him.

Through the rheumy eyes of Richard Leroy, Georges Leon watched Crane go stumbling away after the capering figure of Death, and Leroy's mouth smiled with Leon's satisfaction.

There was no problem here. He had accompanied Trumbill on this particular initiation only because there had been something about Scott Crane that had murkily upset him when he had been in the Betsy Reculver body.

He sighed to think of Reculver, whose body Trumbill had buried—intact, as Leon had insisted—in the backyard of the house on Renaissance Drive.

Betsy Reculver had been nineteen when he first saw her—at the first game on the lake, in 1949. She had had a long-legged, coltish grace then, with her brown bangs falling over her eyes as she squinted at her cards, grinning mischievously every time she raised; and when he had cut the deck for the Assumption and won her body, he had been sourly aware of his scarred and featureless crotch, and had wished for a moment that he could have made her his literal Queen rather than one of his honorary children.

And it had been right here, twenty years later in 1969, in this magically conjured ruined chapel, that he had last seen the person who she had been.

Of course, by that time drink and bad dreams had long since pounded the elfin charm out of her, but at thirty-nine she had still been a strikingly good-looking woman. And she had held her chin up as she had followed Dionysus-and-Death, which Leon recalled had taken for her the form of her father, out into the broken chapel of the barren land.

It was generally the image of a family member that they projected onto the destroying face of Dionysus. With Crane, for a while lately, it had seemed to be a wizened fragment of a little boy, but now, at the end, here, it had again been the image of his dead wife—until it had cast off all images and stood naked and undeniable before him.

But, true to form, he was still chasing it.

Leon looked back the way they'd come, at the jagged walls that hid the highway. He couldn't sense any human personalities out there, not even the security guard. Perhaps the man was asleep and not dreaming.

He wondered if his original body, ninety-one years old now, was going to follow them out here. Leon knew he should keep better track of the damned old thing, which, if nothing else, was the reservoir of Leon's original DNA. If the cloning of human bodies should one day become a reality, that old, senile jug of blood could be used to make another copy of his real body, complete with genitalia, and Leon could assume it in a game and be back where he'd been before that disastrous shotgun blast in 1948.

Leon spat into the sand at his feet and watched the spit sizzle. But Doctor Leaky was such a humiliating caricature. And Leon had made sure that samples of the blood were preserved in any number of blood banks throughout the world.

Let the old son of a bitch walk out in front of a bus some day, Leon thought. I won't be responsible; in no sense will I have killed anything that could be called me.

Leon looked at Trumbill, sweating beside him and chewing up another celery stick. The fat man was digging snacks out of his pockets more quickly now that the figure of Death was undisguised.

"I'll follow along with him through one more of the Major Arcana," Leon said.

Trumbill nodded, his mouth full and working, and the two of them started forward again.

Ozzie had been hunching along slowly outside the broken wall, panting and blinking sweat out of his eyes and grinding his teeth with the shoulder ache of constantly holding five playing cards up in front of him—face out, so that every time he glanced up, he was staring at five images of the naked woman's smiling face on the backs of the cards. He kept being reminded of Macduff's soldiers in Macbeth, sneaking up on Dunsinane Castle and holding up clusters of branches as disguise.

Every hundred feet or so he had paused and walked windshield, in a tight counterclockwise circle, as he flexed his cramping fingers and then fumbled through the cards and selected another five for fresh cover. Always he had selected five that were full of contradictions, like impotence and promiscuity, or infancy and senility, or hysteria and cunning; such combinations constituted null sets that indicated no human mind behind them, and at the same time were somehow portraits of this place, and so served as a kind of psychic camouflage.

The massive gray stones of the wall were rippled and eroded as if by centuries of harsh weather, but he could sometimes see figures that had at one time been etched so deeply that they were still visible in the harsh sunlight as faint scratches. He saw angular suns and moons, and writing that looked like bus route maps, all long lines with cross-hatchings at different angles, and at one place a crude picture of fish attacking the underbelly of a stag.

And some of the stones were cold when he braced himself against them, and some were dark as if in shadow though the cobalt sky was cloudless, and two were wet with water that tasted like salty brine on Ozzie's fingertip. This ruined cathedral, or whatever it was, was clearly not entirely in this place—perhaps not even entirely in any one time.

He'd been careful never to shuffle the cards; God knew what forceful old portraits the deck would assume, or what attention it would bring.

Whenever the wall was broken down low enough to see over, he peeked carefully. Crane and the woman he was walking with had taken so long climbing into and out of the long, interrupted trench that he had been able to keep up with them even at this halting pace, and of course the fat man and his white-haired companion were only pacing Crane.

The four figures inside had hesitated in front of the second doorway, and Ozzie had been able to crouch and watch them over a belt-high section of the wall. The fat man had fired his shotgun, and Ozzie had been standing up straight in an instant, sighting down the gleaming stainless steel barrel of the guard's .38 at the center of the fat man's back, before he realized that the shot had been aimed at a tumble weed.

He had lowered the hammer shakily. It would have been too long a shot, and the white-haired man would have dived for cover and begun firing back at him, and it was only the white-haired man that Ozzie really wanted, anyway.

That would be the body that Crane's real father, who had probably arranged Diana's death, was currently occupying. There was even a chance, just a chance, that it was the only body that the old psychic cannibal had left.

It's time, Ozzie thought, to quit all this tiptoeing around and get in close.

But can I shoot another person from behind, with no warning?

Shooting the security guard in the back of the head had been, and still was, too enormous and appalling a thing for him to encompass, like staring straight into the noon sun.

Find out when you get there, he told himself.

He tucked the revolver into his belt and, awkwardly and painfully, climbed over the cold, wet wall in the hot sun.

Crane had stumbled only a dozen yards after his terrible bride when his wounded thigh seized up on him, and he thudded heavily to the hot sand. Ants like curled copper shavings crawled busily over the backs of his hands.

Footsteps crunched behind him, and he looked back. The fat man and his indistinct companion stood now on the sand just a few steps this side of the last doorway. Seen through Crane's false eye, the face of the companion was a bright, flickering blur, as if in some sense he were whirling very fast.

And now there was a third old man, standing in the half shadow of the broken doorway behind the other two, and after a moment Crane recognized him—it was his foster father, Ozzie. Ozzie was carrying a net bag with three gold cups in it, and he was holding out a fourth cup in his right hand.

Crane was only impatient, certain that his old foster-father couldn't have anything important to say or do here, but he closed his right eye and reached up to pry open his swollen-shut left eye.

Now he saw that Ozzie was holding a big steel revolver, pointing it steadily at the backs of the two other old men. He seemed to be hesitating; then, "Freeze," Ozzie said loudly.

The two men spun toward the sudden voice, and even as they began to scramble and the fat man grabbed the barrel of the shotgun to raise it, Ozzie's gun boomed twice.

Blood sprayed across Crane as the fat man's indistinct-faced companion nodded violently and then rebounded over backward and hit the sand with his shoulders and the blown-out back of his head—and the fat man staggered.

But he managed to raise the shotgun and fire it.

Ozzie's white shirt exploded in a red spray as the buckshot punched him off his feet.

All of Crane's dry maturity was blown away in the hard explosion of that shot, and his mouth was open in a wordless scream of denial as he started forward.

The fat man spun awkwardly, wincing as he pulled the shotgun's slide back and shoved it forward again, the gun's machinery silent in the shocked, ringing air.

The barrel was pointed at Crane's knee, and he skidded to a halt.

The fat man's face was pale as milk, and bright blood was spilling over his right eyebrow and down his neck from the gash Ozzie's bullet had torn across his temple over his ear. He was slowly saying something, but Crane's ears weren't working. Then the fat man stared at the corpse of his companion.

Crane felt hollowed and stricken, as if the blast of shot had hit him in the chest; he couldn't look at Ozzie, so for a moment he just followed the fat man's gaze.

The blurringly fast changes in the holed face were slowing down, and Crane could see the face from moment to moment as that of an old man with a crown, and of a vital, tanned, dark-haired man, and of a little boy. The dark-haired man was of course the Ricky Leroy who had hosted the Assumption game on the lake in '69 … but it was when he recognized the little-boy face that Crane fell to his knees with shock.

It was the face of his nearly forgotten older brother, Richard, who had been the infant Scott's playmate in the days before the older brother lost all personality and took up his position as lookout on the roof of the Bridger Avenue bungalow.

The shifting faces were replacing each other more and more slowly, and finally it was the old man who lay on the stony ground, the crown no longer visible.

Crane braced himself in the sand with one hand and hesitantly touched the blood-spattered white hair with the other, but this had been a corpse for a long time, since at least 1949.

At last Crane lifted his head and began crawling on his hands and knees to where Ozzie lay sprawled and bloody and motionless on the gravelly dirt.

Peripherally he was aware that the fat man had bent to pick up the revolver and was now plodding slowly away, back through the doorway toward where the highway and the parked Jaguar waited; and then Crane noticed the figure that was now crouched over Ozzie's body.

It was the dried-out Susan, her starvation smile turned on Crane like a bright light through a poisoned fish tank. Her mad leaping had shredded the leathery skin from her, and now she was a sexless skeleton draped only with the most tenuous shreds of organic stuff.

Crane realized that this was no longer drink, Dionysus. This was indifferent Death. This was nobody's ally.

And it had taken Ozzie. Crane couldn't look at the old man's devastated chest; he stared instead at the old, wrinkled hands that had held and discarded and drawn so many cards and now held nothing at all.

Death slowly reached out and touched Ozzie's forehead with a skeletal finger—and Ozzie's body collapsed into gray dust, leaving only the crumpled, pitiful old-man's-suit, and an instant later a hot gust of wind blinded Crane with sand and whirled the clothing and the dust away, over the ruined walls and across the desert's miles-wide face.

The sudden wind had rolled Crane over onto his back, and after it had gone scouring away toward the mountains, he sat up and blinked sand out of his eyes. The animated skeleton was gone, and except for the corpse of Richard Leroy, Crane was alone in the desolate ruins.

The sun was hot on his head; his ludicrous cap had been blown away. He got laboriously to his feet and looked around at the broken walls.

You think your old man's nuts, don't you? he remembered Ozzie saying, on that night in 1960 when they had driven out here to find Diana; and he remembered Ozzie scuffling desperately after him down the stairwell of the Mint Hotel, crying and pleading, when Crane had left to play on the lake in 1969; and he remembered how fragile and dapper the old man had looked on Sunday morning—only four days ago!—when he and Arky had met him on Balboa Island.

Go back to your Louis L'Amour novels and your Kaywoodie pipes, Crane had told him yesterday. But the old man had not, after all, been willing to go gentle into that good night, to roll with the dying of the light.

Was Crane willing to, now?

He looked at some dark spots spattered on the stone wall. They were probably Ozzie's blood.

No, not now. He started limping back toward the highway.

CHAPTER 33: I've Got a Present for Scott, Too

Diana strode along the railed second-floor cement walkway in the gold light of early evening, looking at the numbers on the apartment doors she passed. There was a pool in the courtyard below, and the air smelled of chlorine.

She had alternately dozed and worried for most of the day on a grassy hill at Clark County Community College, using the balled-up old baby blanket as a pillow. Often in the past she had thought it would be nice to get some time away from Scat and Oliver, but now that she had it she could hardly make herself think of anything but them. Had Ozzie got Oliver to Helen Sully's house in Searchlight? Diana had called Helen's number, but there was no answer there. Had Funo or somebody followed Ozzie and killed him and her son? Had some player in this terrible mess gone to the hospital and killed Scat since her last call?

Ever since the explosion she had been insisting to herself that the boys were safer away from her—but the very sight of bright sunlight on green trees made her nauseous with guilt, and she simply couldn't permit herself to think about Scat waking up alone in the hospital, or dying alone in the hospital, or about Oliver alone among strangers and supposing that she was dead.

She stopped in front of apartment 27 now, and she made herself breathe deeply and remember her purpose. She had been here only once before, at night, and didn't remember the layout very well, but according to the mailbox downstairs this was Michael Stikeleather's place.

She knocked, and after a few moments she saw the light through the peep-hole darken; then she heard the chain rattle out of its channel and the door was pulled open.

Aging surfer boy, she thought when Mike grinned at her in pleased surprise, in the middle of the desert.

Stikeleather was wearing sky blue slacks and a white shirt open halfway down to show his curly blond chest hair. The shirt was untucked—to conceal a potbelly, she assumed.

"I know who it is!" he said happily, holding up one hand. "It's …" His face suddenly fell as he visibly remembered, and he frowned responsibly. "You're Hans's girl friend. I was sorry to read about that. He was good people, Hans was. Hey, come on in."

Diana walked into the living room, which was lit by modernistic track lights. Aluminum-framed pastels of pretty women and tigers hung on the tan walls, and a black, glass-doored stereo stood in the far corner by a low tan couch.

"Your name was …?" said Mike.

"Doreen," Diana told him.

"Right, right, Doreen. Doreeen. Can I get you a drink?"

"Sure, anything cold."

Mike winked and nodded and stepped into the fluorescent-lit kitchen alcove. Diana could hear him open the freezer and bang an ice tray against a counter. "Do you feel able to talk about it?" he called.

Diana sat down on the couch. "Sure," she said loudly. Six copies of Penthouse magazine were fanned out on the glass-topped coffee table.

Mike walked back into the room with two tall glasses. "Seven and Seven," he said, handing one to her and joining her on the couch. "In the papers the police said it was a bomb."

Diana took a long sip of the drink. "I don't think so," she said. "He was trying to make PCP in the back room, had a lot of … ether and stuff. I think he blew himself up with it."

Mike's arm was lying along the back of the couch behind her shoulders, and now he patted her head. "Ah, that's a goddamn shame. I guess the police figure a bomb is better for the tourist business than a dope factory, hah?" He laughed, then remembered to frown. "Shit, angel dust—he should have told me, I could have got him all he wanted."

"He always said you were reliable." Diana made herself look into Mike's blue eyes. "He said if I ever needed help, I should come to you."

Clearly this was going the way Mike had hoped it would. His hand was kneading the point of her shoulder now, and his round, tanned face was closer to hers. His breath smelled sharply of Binaca; he must have had one of the little bottles stashed in the kitchen.

"I understand, Doreen. You need a place to stay?"

She stared down into her drink. "That, yeah—and I want somebody to go to his funeral with me tomorrow morning."

Specifically a dope dealer, she thought, if things work out the way I hope they will.

"You got it," he said softly.

He might have been about to kiss her, but she smiled and leaned back, away from him. "And can I use your phone to call my kid? He's staying with a friend; it's here in Nevada, a local call."

"Oh, sure, Doreen, phone's on the kitchen counter there." Diana stood up and crossed to the telephone. As she punched in Helen Sully's number, she noted that Stikeleather didn't leave the room.

The line rang six times, and her heart had begun to thud heavily in her chest when finally there was a click and she heard Helen's voice say, "Hello?"

Diana exhaled sharply, and she leaned her weight against the counter. "Helen," she said, "it's … me. Is Ollie with you?"

"Jesus!" exclaimed Helen at the other end. "Diana? Oliver and that old guy told us you were dead! Is this Diana? God, I—"

"Yes, it's me. That was a mistake. Obviously, right? Listen, is Ollie there? Can I talk to him?"

"Sure, honey, maybe you can get him to say two words or look somebody in the eye. How long are we gonna have—I mean, when are you—"

"Easter, I'll have picked him up by Easter—" Or else I'll be dead, Diana thought. And what will become of my boys if I'm dead? Ah, Christ. "Helen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate this—I owe you—"

"Oh hell, Diana, a week and a half, what's one more kid around the house? I—yeah, it's your mom—"

There was a clatter at the other end of the line, and then Oliver was gasping into the phone: "Mom? Is it you, Mom?"

"Yes, Ollie, it's me, darling, I'm okay. I'm fine."

"I saw the house blow up!"

"You did? God, I'm sorry about that, you must have thought—never mind, I'm absolutely unhurt. Okay? And I'll be—"

"Mom, I'm sorry!"

"For what, you didn't—"

"For getting Scat killed and for getting the house blown up, I—"

"You didn't do either one! Honey, they were like lightning hitting people, you didn't do it! And Scat's gonna be fine, the doctors say—" She pretended to be coughing as she fought back sobs. "Scat's going to be out of there in no time, really, good as new. And I'll be picking you up on Easter or before, week and a half at worst." She covered the mouthpiece and took a couple of deep breaths. "So—how is it at Helen's? The food all right?" She instantly regretted the words, remembering how she had tried to restrict his diet, even when he had only wanted an apple or some pickles.

"Well, we haven't actually eaten anything yet. I guess we're gonna have hot dogs for dinner. How soon can you come and get me? You—you know what, Mom?"

"I—what, Ollie?"

"Uh … actually, I love you. I just wanted to say."

Diana's heart seemed to stop. He had never said that to her before; perhaps she had never said it to him either. "God, I love you, too, Oliver. I'll come and get you—"

She looked across the carpeted room at Mike Stikeleather.

"I'll come and get you," she said, "as soon as I get a thing or two done here, okay?"

Both Oliver and Stikeleather said, "Okay."

Vacuum cleaners hummed between the tables, and men in uniforms were moving up and down the rows between the slot machines, turning keys in keyholes in the sides of the machines and dumping the change into plastic buckets while bored security guards looked on.

Archimedes Mavranos leaned on the padded edge of a Craps table and wished he hadn't thought about eating the fish in his pocket.

An hour ago he had decided that the sun must be nearly up in the real world outside, and he had made himself go to the coffee shop of whatever casino this was and force down some scrambled eggs and toast, but he had got dizzy and had to run to the bathroom and vomit it all back up. The cashier had been waiting for him outside the men's room door for her money.

But he was still hungry somehow, and a moment ago, after wondering if the goldfish in the water-filled Baggie in his pocket could still be alive, he had momentarily considered eating it.

He forced down his nausea and stared at his bet. There were two black hundred-dollar chips on the Pass Line now, instead of the one he had put there, and three now stood outside the line where he had taken the free odds. His bet had won while he hadn't been paying attention, and the dice were rolling again, so he was now involuntarily letting the Pass bet ride. He pulled in the three chips outside the line, ready to put a couple back again as soon as the shooter got a point.

The dealer moved the white disk to the four at the top of the green felt layout. This was the sixth consecutive time the current shooter had got four as his point, and the boxman, a dour old fellow in a string tie that seemed to be choking him, made a show of picking up the dice and examining them closely.

Mavranos remembered to put two black chips outside the Pass Line for the free odds, and a moment later the shooter rolled another four.

The boxman was staring coldly at Mavranos now, clearly wondering if he was a partner in some sort of cheating here. Mavranos couldn't blame him; what must the odds be against making a hard point like four six times in a row? Especially with a sick-looking bum following the run with black chips and letting the last bet ride?

Mavranos had made nearly two thousand dollars just off this one shooter, who had only been betting his own luck with orange ten-dollar chips; but Mavranos was dizzy and sick, and he couldn't help touching the handkerchief tied around his neck, feeling the lump under his ear. It was definitely bigger now than when he and Scott and the old man had driven out from California. He was losing weight, losing his very substance; no wonder eating even the goldfish had fleetingly seemed like a good idea.

And he was seeing strange things in gambling, but nothing that he could get a useful handle on.

He wondered how Scott and Ozzie and Diana were doing with their own hopeless quests, and he wondered if the boy in the hospital was getting better. Mavranos shuddered at the memory of the boy's head torn open by the bullet.

For a moment he felt bad about having moved out of the Circus Circus without leaving them any way to get in touch with him.

He shook his head. Let them hire a chauffeur. Mavranos had problems of his own.

He scooped up his chips in both hands and walked away from the table. No use attracting attention. At some casino tonight—last night, if it was daytime outside—he had won so much at the Blackjack table, raising and lowering his bets to try to conform to the almost reggae pattern of the slot machine bells, that the personnel had assumed he was an accomplished card counter, and two men had demanded to see his ID and then told him that if he ever came into that casino again, he'd be arrested for trespassing.

He frowned worriedly now as he dumped his pile of chips onto the counter of the cashier cage; he couldn't remember which casino that had been. He might go back there by accident …

"Jesus," said someone behind him. Mavranos turned around and saw a man staring at him with amused contempt. "What's the matter, sport, your luck was running too good to duck to the men's room?"

Mavranos followed the man's gaze downward and saw that the left leg of his faded jeans was dark with wetness. For one horrified moment he thought that the man must be right, that in his exhaustion he had wet his pants without noticing it. Then he remembered the fish, and his trembling hand darted into the pocket of his denim jacket.

The Baggie was limp; he must have popped it with his elbow when he was carrying the chips to the cage. The goldfish, which he had been carrying around as a "seed crystal" because he had read that they never died of natural causes, was certainly dead or dying now.

He hadn't slept for twenty-four hours, and somehow the thought of the little goldfish dying in his pocket struck him as unbearably sad; so did the idea that his daughters' father was standing in a casino at dawn seeming to have wet his pants.

Tears were blurring his vision, and he was breathing unevenly as he pushed out through the front doors into the oven heat of the morning.

The passenger-side door of Mike Stikeleather's Nissan truck had a rear-view mirror bolted to it, and after the brief and sparsely attended funeral service had broken up and they had walked back out to the parking lot, Diana had twisted the mirror so that she could watch the traffic behind—and she was tensely pleased now to see that the white Dodge was following them.

Last night Mike had taken her to an Italian restaurant near the Flamingo, and when they got back to his apartment, he had tried to kiss her. She had fended him off, but with a wistful smile, saying that it was too soon after Hans's death; Mike had taken that pretty well, and had let her sleep on his water bed alone, while he took the couch—albeit with a just-for-this-first-night manner.

At the first light of dawn, listening carefully to Mike's snores from the living room, she had got up and searched his bedroom, and in the closet she had found a briefcase. She had memorized its position, how it leaned against a pair of ski boots, and had then taken it out and opened it. The white powder in a well-filled Ziploc bag had had the numbing taste of cocaine, and the bundles of twenty-dollar bills added up to more than twenty thousand dollars. She had put it all back the way it had been and got back into bed. Later, while making coffee, she had managed to slide a stout steak knife into her purse, though it was no part of her plan to have to use it.

So far so good.

And at the funeral a few hours later she had said a thankful prayer to her mother, for one of the mourners was Alfred Funo himself.

She had hoped he would show up there. It was the only way she could think of for him to find her, and it would fit in with his weirdly sociable approach to assassination.

And there he had been, standing behind Hans's parents under the canvas pavilion on the grass, smiling sadly at her across the shiny fiberglass casket. She had smiled back at him and nodded and winked, helpless to imagine how he could suppose she wanted to see him, but understanding from his answering wink that he did suppose it.

The car he had got into afterward was a far cry from the Porsche he had been driving when she'd seen him Monday night—the Porsche from which he had shot Scat—but he was at least managing to stay behind Mike's Nissan.

When Mike pulled in to the curb in front of his apartment building, the white Dodge parked a hundred feet behind them.

Diana got out of the truck and waited for Mike by the front bumper.

"Don't turn around," she said quietly, "but a friend of Hans's followed us back from the funeral. I think he wants to talk to me."

Mike frowned worriedly but didn't look around. "Followed us here? I don't like that—"

"I don't either. He's a dealer himself, and Hans never trusted him. Listen, let me have the keys, and I'll follow him when he leaves."

"Follow him? Why? I've got to get to work—"

"I just want to make sure he leaves the area. I'll be back in ten minutes at the most."

"Well, okay." Mike began sliding a key off his ring. "For you, Doreen," he added with a smile.

She pocketed the key and blew him a kiss and then started walking back toward the white Dodge.

Walk upstairs, Mike, she thought as the soles of her shoes knocked slowly along the sunny sidewalk and her purse swung at her side. Don't spook this guy by hanging around and watching.

She didn't look back, but apparently Mike had not done anything to alarm Funo. When she walked up to his car, he reached across and unlocked the passenger-side door.

She opened it and sat down on the seat, leaving the door open.

Funo was smiling at her, but he looked pale and exhausted. His white shirt and tan slacks looked new, though, and his laced-up white Reeboks shone, she thought, like the bellies of albino lobsters.

"My mystery man," Diana said.

"Hey, Diana," he said earnestly, "I'm sorry we got off on the wrong foot the other night. I didn't realize you were worried about your children."

She forced her shy smile to stay in place—but how could this man say that to her? After shooting one of her children?

"The doctors say the boy is going to be fine," she said, wondering if Funo might have called the hospital and found out that that was not true. She thought it probably wouldn't matter; she sensed that this was some kind of tea party charade, in which statements were only expected to be pleasant.

"Hey, that's great," he said. He snapped his fingers. "I've got something for you."

She tensed, ready to snatch the steak knife out of her purse, but what he pulled out from under the seat was a long black jewelry box.

When she opened it and saw the gold chain on the red velvet inside, she knew enough to show only pleasure, not astonishment.

"It's beautiful," she said, making her voice soft and breathy. "You shouldn't have—my God, I don't even know your name."

"Al Funo. I've got a present for Scott, too. Will you tell him?"

I'll tell him when I meet him in hell one day, she thought. "Of course. I know he'll want to thank you."

"I already gave him a gold Dunhill lighter," Funo said.

She nodded, yearning for the normal daytime street outside the car windows and wondering how long she could continue to do this fantasy dialogue correctly. "I'm sure he's grateful to have such a generous friend," she ventured.

"Oh," said Funo off-handedly, "I do what I can. My Porsche's in the shop; this is a loaner."

"Ah." She nodded. "Can we take you out to dinner some time?"

"That'd be fun," he said seriously.

"Do you—is there a number we can reach you at?"

He grinned and winked at her. "I'll find you."

The audience seemed to be over. "Okay," she said cautiously, shifting her weight onto her right foot, which was on the curb. "We'll wait to hear from you."

He started the car. "Rightie-o."

She ducked out of the car and stood up on the curb. He reached across and pulled the door shut, and then he was driving away.

Diana made herself walk slowly back toward the Nissan truck until the Dodge turned right at the corner; then she ran to it.

Traffic was light on Bonanza Road this morning, and she had to keep the truck well behind the Dodge in order to let other cars get between them; twice she feared she had lost him, but then well ahead of her she saw the Dodge turn right into a Marie Callender's parking lot. She drove on past, then looped back, taking her time, and drove into the lot herself.

The Dodge was parked, empty, in front of a windowless section of the restaurant.

Perfect.

She paused only long enough to memorize the license number, and then drove out of the lot again and sped back toward Mike's apartment.

Mike was pacing in the kitchen when she opened the apartment door. "Well," he said impatiently, "where did he go?"

"I don't know, he drove away down Bonanza. Listen, I got his license number, 'cause when I talked to him, he asked if you were Hans's friend Mike, and he knows you're a dealer. I guess Hans must have told him."

"Hans told him that? Hans is lucky he's dead." Diana thought Mike looked both angry and ready to cry. "I don't need this kind of bullshit!"

Diana crossed to where he stood and patted his spray-stiffened blond hair. "He doesn't know your last name," she told him, "and he doesn't know which apartment is yours."

"Still, I should tell my—the guy I—oh, hell, he'd make me move out of here."

"You've got to be getting to work." She smiled at him. "Tonight I'll see if I can't … distract you from your worries."

Mike brightened at that. "You're on," he said. "Gimme my key."

She handed it over, and after he had left and she heard his truck start up and drive away, she went to the telephone and called for a cab.

Then she hurried into the bedroom, looped a wire coat hanger around her wrist, and hauled out the briefcase. The bundles of cash she stuffed into her purse, and the Baggie of cocaine she emptied into the toilet, which she patiently flushed three times.

The toilet tank was hissingly refilling when she carried the empty briefcase out onto the walkway and locked the door behind her.

The Dodge was still parked in the Marie Calender's lot. She was glad Funo wasn't a man to rush through breakfast.

Now, she thought after she had paid the cab, you've got to work on sheer nerve for a few minutes.

Forcing herself not to hurry, she strolled over to Funo's car, pulling the coat hanger off her wrist and untwisting the double helix of its neck. She straightened it out and bent the loop into a sharper angle, and when she got to the car, she worked the loop in between the driver's side window and the window frame.

Her hands were shaking, but on the other side of the glass the loop was steady, and she managed on the first try to get it around the knob of the interior door lock button. She pulled upward, and the button came up with a muffled clank.

She looked around nervously, but no one was watching her, and Funo was not leaving the restaurant yet.

She opened the door and slid the emptied briefcase under the seat.

After she had relocked the door, she stepped around to the front of the car and popped the hood release. The hood squeaked when she raised it, but she made herself reach out calmly to the oil filler cap on the manifold of the slant-six engine and twist it off. Then she dug a handful of change out of her purse and tipped it all into the filler hole, hearing the dimes and quarters and pennies clatter among the valve springs within.

A moment later she had replaced the filler cap and lowered the hood and was walking away across the parking lot, breathing more easily as each step took her further away from the doomed man's car.

She had saved a quarter with which to call another cab.

CHAPTER 34: Ray-Joe Active

The ducks in the pond turned out to like cheese even more than they had liked the bread, and soon the entirety of Nardie Dinh's meager lunch had gone into the pond.

She sat back in the shade of a cottonwood tree and looked past the duck pond, across the grassy hills of the park toward the office building where she worked during the day. Soon her lunch hour would be over, and she'd be walking back there, without having eaten anything.

Again.

She hadn't eaten anything at all since a salad early Wednesday evening, nearly forty-eight hours ago, just before going to rescue Scott Crane from Neal Obstadt's assassins.

And of course she hadn't slept—except, briefly, twice during this last week—since the beginning of the year.

She had celebrated Tet in Las Vegas, among the clang and honk and neon of the Fremont Street and Strip casinos, instead of the flower markets and firecrackers and tea-and-candied-fruit booths of remembered Hanoi, and the festive people all around her had been in cars rather than on bicycles, but in both places there had been the same sense of festivity in the shadow of disaster. Sunk into the sidewalks of Hanoi, every forty feet, had been little round air-raid shelters to climb into when the American planes were thirty kilometers away and alarm two sounded, and in Las Vegas she had her amphetamines to gulp whenever her wakefulness-spells began to weaken.

She was fasting just because the sight of any food, and particularly the prospect of putting it into her mouth and chewing it up and swallowing it and assimilating it, now revolted her; it wasn't a consciously adopted measure, as the wakefulness was; but she was uncomfortably aware of a mythological parallel. In an English translation of the thirteenth-century French Morte Artu, the Maid of Astolat, who became the Lady of Shalott in the Tennyson poem, offers herself to Lancelot and then, when he refuses her, kills herself by refusing to eat or sleep. Her body is put in a barge and rowed down the Thames.

On Wednesday night she had offered herself to Scott Crane, and they had more or less refused each other. Could this involuntary starvation be a consequence of that?

With a sudden splashing and clatter of wings, the ducks all took to the air. Startled, she looked up at them in alarm to see which way they would fly, but they just scattered away into the empty blue sky in all directions, and in a few seconds she was alone beside the choppy water.

She stood up lithely. He's here, she thought, realizing that her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. Ray-Joe Pogue is here somewhere. He found me, way out here in Henderson.

Her gaze darted around the green hills visible from where she stood, but there was no one in sight.

I should run, she thought, but in which direction? And if he sees me, he'll be able to outrun me, weakened as I am from hunger.

I should run, I should run, I should run! I'm wasting seconds!

The sky seemed to be bulging down at her, and she was afraid that just the sight of her half brother—tall and slim and pale, dressed like Elvis Presley, another King who was not allowed to be dead, striding over the crest of one of these hills—would rob her of the ability even to move at all.

Her back was against the rough bark of the cottonwood tree, and abruptly she turned around and hugged it—she had not realized that she meant to climb it until she found that she had shinnied several yards up the gray trunk, probably ruining her wool jacket and skirt.

The tree's foliage was a dense mass of round yellow-green leaves, and she hoped that if she could get up onto one of the nearly vertical branches, she would be hidden. Hot, fast breath abraded her throat, and rainbow sparkles swam in her vision, but she didn't faint, though she was afraid that even picturing any face card right now would land her back on the grass, unconscious and ready for him.

She got her scraped hands into the crotch of the lowest branch, and then she swung a leg up, tearing out the seam of her skirt, and got her ankle in beside her left hand, and with an effort that wrung a groan out of her she pulled herself up into the tight saddle. She didn't rest until she had stood up and braced her back against the trunk and her feet high up against the branch, and then she held still and worked savagely on slowing her harsh panting.

At last, though she still had to breathe through her mouth, she was breathing silently. She could hear the whisper of traffic on McEvoy Street, sounding to her now like nothing so much as suitcases dragging around the coping of a luggage carousel at an airport, and the leaves that surrounded her rattled faintly like a lot of very distant castanets. Through a wedge of space between the leaves she could see the yellow square of a Kraft Slice rocking gently on the surface of the pond.

She tried to believe that she had been mistaken, that he wasn't here, but she couldn't. And when she heard feet swishing through the long green grass, she only closed her eyes for a moment.

"Bernardette," he said softly below her, and she had to bite her lip to keep from answering, from shouting at him the way a child in a hide-and-seek game might yell to end the terrible suspense when It was so close.

"No ham," he said now. His words had been clear, she hadn't misunderstood him, but the nonsensical statement made her want even more strongly than before to cry out. Surely he knew where she was hiding, and was only torturing her!

"Cheese," he said. "And bread. That's good, you're still staying away from the meat, that's my girl. Still hanging in there as Mrs. Porter's daughter."

Nardie remembered Ray-Joe telling her once about a very old song that still survived today—though in the current version "Persephone" had been phonetically debased to "Mrs. Porter."

She looked down—and felt her earring fall out of her pierced earlobe. In the same instant she pressed her elbow against the tree trunk, catching the little ball of gold awkwardly between the trunk and the fabric of her jacket. She could feel it pressing into the flesh above the point of her elbow, and, almost objectively, she wondered how long it would be before the muscles of her arm would begin to shake.

"Then up he rose, and donned his clothes," he said happily,

"And dupped the chamber door;

Let in the maid, that out a maid

Never departed more."

He was reciting some of Ophelia's insane singing from Hamlet. He had read the play to her frequently during her imprisonment in the shabby parlor house called DuLac's. In her head, rather than aloud, she recited a following couplet:

Young men will do 't, if they come to 't;

By cock, they are to blame.

She wondered if she would even be able to try to fight him off, if he were to see her up here.

He laughed. "Ray-Joe active!" he said to himself in a pep-talk tone. "Ray-Joe Free Vegas!"

Nardie Dinh could see him now, below her, his duck-tail haircut gleaming over the big rhinestone-studded collar of his white leather jacket. He was holding an air pistol, and she knew what kind of dart it was loaded with, a syringe-tipped tranquilizer dart with the CAP-CHURE charge like the one that had brought her down on that December morning in the Tonopah desert, the bright red fletching of the tailpiece standing out like an eccentric decoration on the sleeve of her blouse.

Her arm, the same arm that had taken the dart, had now started to shake. Soon it would lose its awkward grip on the earring, and the earring would fall. Looking down, she estimated that it would land by his left foot. He would hear it, look down and see it, and then look up.

"I wonder if you can hear me, somehow," he said quietly, "in your head. I wonder if you'll come back here to this tree, if I wait. We both know you want to. You met him Wednesday night, didn't you? The King's son, the prince, the genetic Jack of Hearts. And you became trackable. And I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be trackable if you'd screwed him. What does that tell you?"

That I'm saving myself for you? she thought. Is that what you imagine?

Her shoulder was aching powerfully. Am I saving myself for him? she wondered. Has all this—stabbing Madame DuLac, running to Las Vegas, using the powers he gave me to avoid sleeping—been nothing but a show of defiance, a gesture, a sop to my self-respect before allowing myself to sink into the secure zombie-Queen role he has planned for me? Maybe I was afraid that Scott Crane could still defeat his father, and I just seized a plausible excuse to run away from him.

Maybe I do want to give in to Ray-Joe Pogue.

No, she thought. No, not even if it's true. Even if I've been living a pretense for the last three months, I hereby declare the pretense real.

She forced her elbow even harder against the tree, wishing she could press the earring right into her flesh.

A noise had risen from the traffic background—someone was driving a car nearby.

Below her she saw Pogue look sharply across the park, and she realized that the car must be driving right over the grass. Then she realized that it was more than one car.

"Shit," Pogue said softly. He took a quick step away from the tree, and then she could only hear him walking quickly away through the grass. She raised her arm and let the earring fall, wondering, even as she did it, if she was doing it too soon, if she had meant to do it too soon.

She could hear car tires tearing up the grass, and she turned around, away from the pond, and pushed aside a cluster of leaves. For an instant she glimpsed a white car flash across the grass; it had been one of those sort of pickup trucks, what were they called? El Caminos. Then she saw another one, identical to the first. Had they followed Pogue here?

She didn't hear any shooting or yelling … and then after several minutes she heard police sirens approaching. The sound of the cars on the grass diminished away in some direction.

When she heard the unmistakable sound of a police car engine approach and then stop and shift out of gear and begin to idle and heard the loopy sounds of a close police radio, she relaxed and began to climb down.

When those cars started tearing across the grass, she mentally rehearsed, I just went straight up the tree, Officer. Bernardette Dinh, sir, I work for the insurance office right over there.

Got lucky this time.

Diana saw Mike's truck pull up and park on the twilit street, and she reflected that she wouldn't have to fake being scared. She only hoped that she was guessing correctly about what he would do.

Hours ago she had eased the sliding glass pane out of the apartment's living-room window, and then she had gone into his bedroom and dumped out all the drawers and dragged all the boxes out of the closet and dumped them, too. She wished she had noticed a brand of cigarettes that Funo smoked so that she could have lit one and stomped it out on the tan rug.

The apartment door was open, and she could hear Mike's heavy tread approaching along the second-floor walkway.

And here he was, smiling and patting his sprayed hair and reeking of Binaca even across two yards of evening air.

"What's the matter, darlin'?" he asked, giving her what she thought of as a there-there-baby-doll look.

"The place was burglarized today while I was at the store," she said tensely.

Mike's smile was gone, though his mouth was still open.

"I didn't know if you'd want to call the cops," Diana went on, "so I've just been waiting here. I can't see that anything's gone, but maybe you can. They hit the bedroom pretty hard."

"Jesus," he said in a whispered wail as he started for the bedroom doorway, "you goddamn bitch, the bedroom, Jesus, make it not be true, make it not be true."

She followed him and watched him shuffle straight to the closet. He stared at the unobstructed ski boots and then peered around at the floor.

"Jesus," he was saying absently, "I'm dead, I'm dead. This was your friend that did this, Hans's friend, that stuff didn't belong to me, you're going to have to tell Flores that it was your fault—no. No, I can't say I let you stay here, a woman who—who led another dealer here. God damn you, you've got to get out of here and never come back, take any shit you brought with you." His face when he turned toward her was so pale and scraped with fear that she stepped back. "That license plate number," he said urgently, "I'll kill you right now if you don't remember that license!"

She recited it to him. "A white Dodge," she added, "roughly 1970 model. His name's Al Funo, F-U-N-O." Remembering to stay in character, she gave him a heartbroken look and said, "I'm sorry, Mike. Can't I stay here? I was hoping—"

He was walking slowly toward the telephone. "Go find a pimp; you're out of my life."

Diana had already shoved the little yellow blanket into her purse, and on the way out of the apartment she picked up the purse and slung it over her shoulder.

As she walked down the cement stairs toward the sidewalk and the street, she thought of Scat about to spend his fifth night in the hospital, wired to ventilators and catheters, and she hoped that what she had done would succeed in avenging the boy.

Just as the croupier had said, the little white plastic ball lay in the green double zero slot on the Roulette wheel. The man now reached out with a rake and slid the last of the blue chips off the mystical periodic table of the layout.

Archimedes Mavranos had now lost all the money he had won during his three days of gambling. It had taken him even less time to lose it than it had taken to win it. He reached into his coat pocket, and the croupier looked at him expectantly, apparently thinking he was going to buy more chips, but Mavranos was only palpating the plastic Baggie. The water was still cool; this current goldfish was probably still alive.

But Mavranos had not found the sort of phase-change that he hoped might slap the insurgent cells of his lymphatic system back into line.

He had found other things: the old women who played as obsessively as he did and who wore gardening gloves as they pulled the slot machine handles to fertilize a cold and stingy soil; he had seen players dazed by predawn winning who tipped the dealers nothing after hours of play and thousands of dollars won, or who absently toked cocktail waitresses hundreds for a glass of soda water; he had seen players so obese or deformed that their mere presence would elicit involuntary shouts of wonder in any town but this one, in which the facts of action made physical appearance genuinely irrelevant; and players who with no surprise had "got broke," as the phrase was locally, and were scrambling to raise another stake, which they knew in advance, which they almost placidly knew in advance, would soon be lost—one of these players had confided to Mavranos that the next best thing to gambling and winning was gambling.

In all of it he still seemed to see, sometimes, the outlines of his own salvation. Or he tried to believe that he did.

He reminded himself of Arthur Winfree, who had broken the circadian rhythm of a cageful of mosquitoes with a precisely timed burst of light, so that they slept and buzzed in no time pattern at all, and could be restored to their usual up-at-dusk, down-at-dawn pattern only with another flash. Winfree had apparently found the vulnerable point, the geometrical singularity, by studying the shape of the data on mosquitoes rather than the actual numbers that made up that shape.

People in Las Vegas had the shocked, out-of-step patterns of Winfree's mosquitoes. There were of course no clocks or windows in the casinos, and the man next to you at lunch might be an insomniac who had sneaked down from his room for a "midnight" snack. Mavranos wondered if one of the night-time atomic bomb tests in the 1950s had happened to throw its bright flash across the city at an instant that was a singularity.

He managed a sour smile at the thought that his best hope for a cancer cure might be the nearby detonation of another atomic bomb.

The wheel was spinning again. Roulette was the only casino game in which chips had no fixed denomination, and each player was simply given a different color; Mavranos moved away from the table so that somebody else could play with the blue chips.

He still had about fifty dollars in cash out in the truck, folded into one of crazy Dondi Snayheever's maps, and—and he didn't know what he would do with it. He could try again to eat something, though that was beginning to seem like a pointless, humiliating exercise, or he could use it as a buy-in for some game. What hadn't he tried? Keno … the Wheel of Fortune …

When he pushed his way out against the spring-resistance of the glass doors, he saw that it was night—God knew what the hour was—and that he had been in the Sahara Casino.

As he plodded dizzily along the walk toward the parking lot, he tried to figure out what it was that he really wanted, and he saw himself working on some old car in the garage, with his wife stirring something on the stove inside, and his two girls sitting on the living-room couch he had reupholstered, watching television. If I use the fifty dollars for gas, he thought, I could be there tomorrow morning, and have … a month or so, maybe, of that life.

Before I got so sick that I had to go into the hospital.

He had health insurance, a policy that cost a hard couple of hundred a month and stated that he had to pay the first two thousand dollars of medical costs in any one year—after that the company paid 80 percent or something—but even if dying were to cost nothing, he would still be leaving Wendy and the girls with just a couple of IRAs and no income. Wendy would have to get a job as a waitress again somewhere.

He paused in the white glow of an overhead light, and he looked at his hands. They were scarred and calloused from years of gripping tool handles, and some of the scars on the knuckles were from youthful collisions with jawbones and cheekbones. He used to be able to get things done with these hands.

He shoved them in his pockets and resumed walking.

CHAPTER 35: The Partition of Poland—1939

Mavranos paused when he was a few yards away from his parked truck. In the dim parking lot shadows he could see a figure hunched over the hood.

What the hell's this, he thought nervously, a thief? There's two guns in there, as well as my remaining money. But why's he leaning on the hood? Maybe it's just a drunk, pausing here to puke on my truck.

"Move it, buddy," he said loudly. "I'm driving the truck out of here."

The figure looked up. "Arky, you gotta help me."

Though the voice was weak, Mavranos recognized it. This was Scott Crane.

Mavranos walked around to the driver's side, unlocked the door, and swung it open. The dome light lit Crane's face through the windshield in dim chiaroscuro, and Mavranos flinched at the black eye and the hollow cheeks and the stringy hair.

"Ahoy, Pogo," Mavranos said softly. "What … seeeems to be the problem?"

Mavranos got in and reached across to open the passenger side door. "Come in and tell me about it," he called.

Crane shambled around the door and climbed up onto the seat, then laid his head back with his eyes closed and just breathed for a while through his open mouth. His breath smelled like a cat box.

Mavranos lit a Camel. "Who hit you?"

"Some drunk bum." Crane opened his eyes and sat up. "I hope Susan gives him a lot of big bugs."

Mavranos felt the ready tears of exhaustion rise hot in his eyes. His friend—his closest friend, these days, these bad days—was broken. Clearly Crane was not succeeding in freeing himself from his troubles.

But neither am I, Mavranos thought. I've got to go home while I still can; I've got to spend what time I have left with my family. I can't waste any of that time trying to help a doomed man, even if he is—was—my friend.

Womb to tomb, he found himself thinking. Birth to earth.

Shut up.

"Ozzie's dead," Crane was saying now. "The fat man shot him. Ozzie died saving me; he knocked me loose from them for a little while, at least. He saved my life, gave it back to me."

"I can't—" Mavranos began, but Crane interrupted him. "He always used to put … a banana in my lunch bag, when I was in grade school," Crane said, his face twisted into what might have been a smile. "Who wants a mushy old warm banana at noon, you know? But I couldn't bear to throw it out—I always ate it—because—he had gone to the trouble—see?—to put it in there. And now he's gone to the trouble—Jesus, it's killed him—to give me my life."

"Scott," Mavranos said tightly, "I'm not—"

"And then I got a note he'd left for me, saying I should take care of Diana's kids. Diana's dead, too, they blew her up, but her kids are still alive." He exhaled, and Mavranos rolled down the window. "We've got to save them."

Mavranos shook his head unhappily and squeezed Crane's shoulder. Very little of this was making any sense to him—bugs and bananas and whatnot—and he was afraid most of it was hallucinatory nonsense. "You go save them, Pogo," he said softly. "I'm too sick to be any use, and I've got a wife and kids who ought to see me before I die."

"You can—" Crane took a deep breath. "You can pull a trigger. You can see well enough to drive in day glare. When it gets light, I've got to go see a guy who lives in a trailer outside town. I tried to make it yesterday, but I"—he laughed—"but I got so damn depressed. I had the DTs real bad, sat and cried in Diana's car most of the day, in a parking lot. Bugs were crawling out of holes in my face—imagine that! But now I've got some food in me, and I think I'm all right."

You can still eat, at least, thought Mavranos angrily. "Then go," he said harshly. "Where's her car now?"

"Parked down the row here. I've driven through every casino lot in town, looking for this here truck. The Circus Circus said you'd checked out with no messages or anything."

"I don't owe you any messages, none of you. Goddammit, Scott, I've got my own life, what little is left of it. What the hell do you imagine I could do! Who is it you want me to—to pull a trigger on, anyway?"

"Oh, I don't know … me, maybe." Crane was blinking around, and he picked up Snayheever's maps. "If I become Bitin Dog again, for instance. At least I can make sure that my real father doesn't have this body to fuck people over with."

A car rushed by fast, and the reflection of its red taillights flashed through the cracks in the Suburban's windshield like the streak of a tossed-out cigarette butt.

"You want me to make sure of it, you mean," Mavranos said, "and probably go die in the Clark County Jail instead of with my family. I'm really sorry, man, but—"

He paused. Crane had unfolded a map of California, and, ignoring the twenty-dollar bill that fell out of it, was staring once again at the lines Snayheever had drawn on the state's uneven eastern boundary.

"These aren't route lines," Crane said absently. "They're outlines. See? Lake Havasu, where the original London Bridge is now, is the bridge of the nose, and Blythe is the chin, and the 10 highway is the jaw-line. And I can recognize the portrait now—it's Diana." There was no expression on his face, but tears were running down his cheeks.

In spite of himself, Mavranos peered at the map. The pencil lines were a woman's face in profile, he could see now, turned away and with the visible eye closed. He supposed it might be a portrait of that Diana woman.

Crane unfolded the map of "The Partition of Poland—1939," and this time Mavranos could see that the heavy pencil lines traced a fat, robed person of indeterminate sex daintily dancing with a goat-legged devil. Bleakly he imagined that this, too, might have to do with Crane's problems.

"I can't help you, Scott," he said. "I don't even have any extra money. I can drop you off somewhere right now, if it's on the way out of town, south."

Crane seemed to be calm, and Mavranos hoped he would ask to be driven to the Flamingo or somewhere, so that Mavranos could seem to be doing him at least some last, paltry favor.

"Not now," said Crane quietly. "When the sun's up. And I'll want to try for a couple of hours of sleep."

Mavranos shook his head, squinting and baring his teeth and trying not to remember the many afternoons he'd spent drinking beer on Crane's front porch.

Womb to tomb. Birth to earth.

He made himself say, "No. I'm leaving now."

Crane nodded and pushed the door open. "I'll wait for you—dawn, in the parking lot of the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel." He stepped down to the pavement. "Oh, here," he added, digging in the pocket of his jeans. He tossed a thick roll of twenty-dollar bills onto the seat. "If you're short."

"Don't!" Mavranos called, his voice tight. "I won't be there. You can't—you can't ask this of me!"

Crane didn't answer, and Mavranos watched the lean figure of his friend disappear into the darkness. After a while he heard a car start and drive away.

Mavranos slapped his pocket for change, then got out of the truck and began plodding back toward the casino. He needed to hear his wife's voice right away.

There was a bank of pay phones off the Sahara's lobby; one of the phones was just ringing steadily, and he fumbled a quarter into the slot of the one farthest from the noise and punched in his home number.

Through the tinny diaphragm he heard Wendy's voice, blurry with sleep. "Hello?" she said. "Arky?"

"Yeah, Wendy, it's me, sorry to call you at this hour—"

"Thank God, we've been so worried—"

"Listen, Wendy, I can't talk long, but I'm coming home." He covered his free ear and mentally damned whoever was making the other phone ring for so long.

"Did you …"

"No. No, I'm still sick, but I want to … be with you and the girls." To be and not to be, he thought bitterly.

There was a long pause during which he helplessly counted the rings of the phone at the far end of the row, and then he heard Wendy say, "I understand, honey. The girls will want to see you. One way or another, they have a father they can be proud of."

"I should be back before lunchtime. I love you, Wendy."

He could hear the tears in her voice when she said, "I love you, Arky."

He hung up the telephone and started toward the door, but he stopped irritably in front of the still-ringing phone and picked up the receiver. "What?" he yelled into it.

The harsh laughter of a woman grated in his ear. "I love you, Arky," the woman said. "Tell Scott I said I love him, will you?"

Mavranos was shaking, but he spoke softly. "Good-bye, Susan." He hung up that phone, too, and walked out of the casino.

Back in the truck he started the engine—and then just sat there in the dark cab, staring at the money Crane had tossed onto the seat.

A father they can be proud of, he thought. What does that mean? It should mean a father who doesn't abandon them. A father they can be proud of. What's wrong with just a father they can love for a few weeks? What the hell is so terrible about that?

Wendy had said, I love you, Arky. Well, who did she mean by that? Who was it that she loved? The man who had proudly gone off to find his health and who kept faith with his friends? They wore that guy out, honey, he doesn't exist anymore.

He picked up the money and put it in his pocket, knowing he and Wendy would be needing it.

Goddammit, he thought, can you really prefer a dead man that you can be proud of to a—a broken man you can at least hug? Can't we just pretend I never met Scott Crane?

At dawn the broad lanes of the Strip were a little less crowded—mostly with Cadillacs heading back to hotels after a night of heavy gambling, beat station wagons out for the forty-nine-cent breakfasts—and Crane was glad to park the Mustang in the Troy and Cress lot and walk away from it. The police might well be watching for the car, and though they shouldn't have any particular reason to hold him, he vividly remembered Lieutenant Frits's telling him that he could be thrown in jail.

Crane walked quietly past the closed multicolor doors of the honeymoon motel units. A frail smile kinked his face as he passed them. Have nice lives, you newlyweds, he thought. Put those HITCHED license plates on your cars, treasure those photos and videos, take home the Marriage Creed plaques and put them up on the walls of your bright new homes.

At the curb he leaned against a light post and stared up and down the Strip, looking for the blue truck. The dry air was still, poised between the chill of the night and the furnace heat of the coming day. His hands weren't trembling, and he liked the idea of stopping for breakfast on the way out to Spider Joe's trailer, but he was afraid that Mavranos, if he showed up at all, wouldn't want to eat. Last night he didn't look as if he'd been eating much lately.

Mavranos might be driving through Barstow right now, heading back toward the tangle of the Orange County freeways. Crane hoped not.

The top of Vegas World across the street glowed yellow with the first sunlight, and looking back toward the east, Crane could see the tower of the Landmark Hotel silhouetted against the glare of the coming sun.

He looked up and down the broad street. No blue truck.

He sighed, suddenly feeling a lot older as he turned back toward the Troy and Cress parking lot. Take the car? he wondered. How long could Frits hold me for? I could call a taxi, but would the driver wait outside Spider Joe's trailer? Probably not, if things started flying around like they did at poor Joshua's card-reading parlor on Wednesday.

He got into Diana's car and started the engine. Find a car dealership and just buy yourself one, he thought. You've certainly got the cash.

But he didn't put it into gear yet. He looked around at the interior of the car, at Diana's country-and-western cassettes and an old hairbrush and a pack of Chesterfields on the console. Did Diana smoke them? Chesterfields had been Ozzie's brand, before he quit. Had the old man bought a pack, suspecting that it didn't matter anymore?

A shotgun blast, out in the desert—and then dust scattered across the sterile sand. Crane leaned his head against the rim of the steering wheel and, in the midst of the anonymous sleeping newlyweds, he finally cried for the killed foster-father who had found him so long ago and taken him in and made him his son.

After a while he became aware of the muttering racket of a big, badly muffled engine behind him, drowning the steady burr of the Mustang's V-8.

He looked up at the rearview mirror and smiled through his tears to see the blue bulk of the Suburban, with Mavranos's lean face glowering at him from behind the wheel.

He switched off the engine and got out of the car, and Mavranos opened the truck's passenger side door.

"That was eight hundred bucks you gave me last night," Mavranos said belligerently as Crane climbed in and pulled the door closed. "You got a lot more?"

"Yeah, Arky, I got"—Crane sniffed and wiped his eyes—"I don't know, twenty or thirty thousand, I think." He slapped his jacket pocket. "What I gave you was just my twenties. I can't lose lately, except at Lowball."

"Okay." Mavranos drove forward and then clanked the shift into reverse. "For helping you out here, I want all of it except for what we need for expenses. My family's gonna need it."

"Sure." Crane shrugged, "When we get a couple of hours free, I'll make a lot more for you."

Mavranos backed into a parking space and then shifted back to drive and spun the wheel to head out of the parking lot. "We likely to get killed on this errand today?"

Crane frowned. "Not likely to, I don't think. As soon as I mess with the cards, the fat man will know where I am, but we ought to be long gone by the time he'd get there, even if he's not in a hospital—and anyway, he apparently works for my father. He wants to keep me alive." He looked over his shoulder at the piled junk in the back of the truck. "You still got your .38 and the shotgun?"

"Yeah."

"I hope we do run into the fat man."

"Great. Well listen, before we drive out there, I want to stop by a Western Union, and send Wendy a big bundle."

"Oh, sure, man." Crane glanced at him. "Have you, uh, talked to her?"

"Yeah, last night—and I called her again just before I left to come here," Mavranos said. "Told her I wasn't gonna … quit, on anything I shouldn't quit on. She understood." His tired face was expressionless. "I believe she's proud of me."

"Well," said Crane, mystified, "that's good. Hey, take it quiet past these rooms; it's all newlyweds sleeping off their wedding night champagne."

Then he just winced and closed his eyes, for Mavranos swore harshly and leaned on the horn all the way out onto the street.

CHAPTER 36: Some Kind of Catholic Priest?

"That's the place," Crane said two hours later, leaning forward and pointing at the big rusty Two of Spades sign rippling in the heat waves ahead.

"Shit," said Mavranos. He tipped up his current can of Coors, and when it was empty, he tossed it over his shoulder into the back of the truck. "I thought you said you have a lot of money."

Crane had to agree that the trailer-and-shacks structure standing alone by the side of the desert highway didn't look affluent. "I don't think this guy's in it for the bucks," he said. He held out his palm with two shiny silver dollars on it. "This was all I was told to bring."

"Huh."

The two of them had hardly spoken during the drive out from town. Crane had spent most of the drive watching the traffic behind them, but he had not seen any gray Jaguar. Perhaps the fat man had died of a concussion from his gunshot wound, or couldn't track him when he was … avoiding Susan.

Mavranos slowed the truck now and signaled for a turn off the highway, and Crane peered at the odd little settlement that was their destination. A big old house trailer—shored up with wooden frameworks and patched and haphazardly painted several faded shades of green—seemed to be the original core of it, but a lot of corrugated iron-roofed sheds had been added onto the back, and there seemed to be pens and chicken coops attached to the side. Two pickup trucks from about 1957 sat in rusty ruin in the unpaved yard between the trailer and the highway, with a newer-looking Volkswagen van behind them. The whole place had clearly been baked and warped by decades of merciless sun.

"Chez Spider Joe," said Crane with false cheer.

"That guy was hosin' you," Mavranos said as he slowed almost to a halt and turned onto the dirt yard. "The one who told you about this place." The truck shook, and the tires made popping and grinding sounds as they revolved. "Hosin' you."

At last he switched the engine off, and Crane waited until the worst of the kicked-up dust had blown away and then levered the door open. The breeze was hot, but it cooled the sweat on his face.

Aside from the ticking of the engine and the slow chuff-chuff of their steps as he and Mavranos plodded toward the front porch, the only sound was the rackety whir of an air conditioner. Crane could feel attention being paid to them, and he realized that he had been feeling it for the last mile or so.

He stepped up and rapped on the screen door, beyond which yawned the dimness of some unlit room with a couch and a table visible in it.

"Hello?" he called nervously. "Uh … anybody home?"

He could see the blue-jeaned legs of someone sitting at a chair inside now, but a fast scraping sound from around the western corner of the trailer made him look in that direction.

And then from out of the trailer's shadow strode a thing that for one heart-freezing moment seemed to Crane to be a giant walking spider.

He and Mavranos both jumped down off the porch, but when Crane peered more closely at the figure that was now stopped in front of them, he saw that it was a man, with dozens of long metal antennas sprouting and bobbing from his belt, all the way around; they were all bent into different arcs, some brushing against the side of the trailer and some tracing lines in the dirt.

"Jesus!" said Mavranos, his hand on his chest. "Curb feelers! What are you, Mister, worried about scraping your fancy hubcaps when you park your skateboard?"

Crane had seen that the man's gray-bearded head was tilted back toward the sky, and that he was wearing sunglasses. "Take it easy, Arky," Crane said quietly, catching Mavranos's arm, "I think he's blind."

"Blind?" Mavranos yelled, obviously still angry at having been scared. "You had me drive you all the way out here to consult a blind card reader?"

Crane remembered the other person inside. "I don't think this is the guy," he said. "Excuse me, sir," he went on more loudly, his own heart still pounding from the fright of the man's sudden, bug-leggedy appearance, "we're—"

"I'm Spider Joe," the man said, talking loudly over Mavranos's building laughter. "And I am blind."

Above the unkempt beard the man's face was sun-darkened and deeply furrowed, and his dirty overalls gave him the look of a down-and-out car mechanic.

"I," said Crane helplessly, "was told that you could … uh, read Tarot cards."

Mavranos was shaking with laughter now, bent over and holding his knees. "Hosin' you, Pogo!" he choked.

"I do read Tarot cards," the man said calmly, "when I feel I have to. Come inside."

Joshua did know something about all this card stuff, Crane reminded himself as he shrugged and stepped forward, and his fright that day was genuine. "Come on, Arky," he said.

Spider Joe waved one lean arm toward the door. "I'll follow you."

Mavranos was still snickering, though it sounded a little forced now as he and Crane stepped back up onto the porch and pulled open the screen door. The place smelled like old book paper and cumin seed.

The person sitting in the chair was a little old woman who smiled and bobbed her head at them, and she nodded toward a couch against the far wall. Crane and Mavranos shuffled around a low wooden table to it, Crane wobbling as he felt the carpeted floor sag under them, and they sat down.

Spider Joe's silhouette appeared in the doorway, and, with a loud scraping and scratching and flexing of the stiff wires, he forced his way inside. Crane saw that the faded wallpaper of the little room was scored and torn, and the couch cover was burry with snags, and the shelves were all hung up high to be out of the way of Spider Joe's antennas.

"Booger," said Spider Joe.

Crane stared at him.

"Maybe," Spider Joe went on, "you could fix some coffee for these two fellas."

The old woman nodded, got up, and, still smiling, hurried out of the room. Crane realized that her name must be Booger; and, in spite of everything, he didn't dare glance at Mavranos for fear that they'd both succumb to nervous hysteria and fall off the couch laughing.

"Uh," he said, forcing his voice to stay level, "Mr …?"

"Spider Joe's what I'm called," said the gray-bearded man, standing in the middle of the room with his arms folded. "Why, did you want to write me a check? I don't take checks. I hope you brought two silver dollars."

"Sure, I just—"

"She and I used to have different names. We ditched them a long time ago. These names we have now are only what the people in Indian Springs call us, when we go there to shop."

"Funny sort of names," observed Mavranos.

"They're a humiliation," said Spider Joe. He seemed to be just stating a fact, not complaining.

"I was wondering," Crane pressed on, "if you're blind, how you read cards."

"Nobody who isn't blind should ever read Tarot cards," said Spider Joe. "A surgeon doesn't use a scalpel with two blades on it, one for the handle, does he? Shit."

He turned noisily and reached one brown hand up to a shelf. A number of wooden boxes were ranked on it like books, and he ran his fingers over the facing edges of them and selected one.

He sat down cross-legged in front of the table, his antennas bobbing and twanging as they snagged the nap of the worn carpet, and set the box on the table.

"This is the deck I mostly use," he said, lifting off the lid and unfolding the cloth that wrapped the cards. "There is some danger involved in using any Tarot deck, and this is a particularly potent configuration. But I can sense that you fellas are already pretty much fucked, so what the hell."

Crane glanced around at the room, noting the food stains on the carpet and the stack of battered issues of Woman's World on a far table, and he remembered Joshua's tastefully mood-conducive parlor. Maybe, Crane thought, if you've got the real high-octane stuff, you don't need to dress it up.

The blind man spilled the cards out of the box face down and put the box aside. With a practiced one-two sweep of his hands he flopped the cards face up and spread them.

Crane relaxed when he saw that it was not the deck his real father had used. But even in this dim light Crane recognized the morbid, fleshy style of the finely crosshatched engravings.

"I've seen this deck," he said. "Or parts of it."

Spider Joe sat back, and two of his antennas sprang loose from the carpet and waved in the air. "Really? Where?"

"Well—" Crane laughed uneasily. Most recently in a Five-Draw game at the Horseshoe, he thought. "The Two of Cups is a cherub's face with two metal rods stuck through it, right?"

Spider Joe exhaled sharply. "Are you a … some kind of Catholic priest?"

Mavranos attempted a laugh, but stopped quickly.

"No," Crane said. "If I'm any thing, I'm a Poker player. We're dealing with weird crap here, so I'll tell you the truth—I've only hallucinated these cards, and seen them in dreams."

"What you're talking about," said Spider Joe thoughtfully, "is a variation of the Sola Busca deck, one that even I've barely heard about. I've never seen it; the only known example is supposed to be in a locked vault in the Vatican. Not even qualified scholars can get permission to see it, and it's only known of at all because of a letter from one Paulinus da Castelletto, written in 1512."

With a clanking of cups and spoons, the old woman known as Booger came back into the room carrying a tray. She crouched and carefully set it down on the carpet next to the table.

"Milk or sugar?" asked Spider Joe.

"Black," said Mavranos, and Crane nodded, and Booger handed steaming cups to them; she then stirred three sugar cubes into each of the other two cups and handed one to Spider Joe.

"My deck here," said Spider Joe, "is just the standard Sola Busca deck. Sorry. But it'll do. It's a reproduction of a set owned by a Milanese family called Sola Busca—the name means 'the only hunting party,' by the way—which set they permitted to be photographed in 1934. That family and those cards have since disappeared."

Mavranos sipped his coffee and leaned forward, reaching out to touch the margin of one of the cards. "They're marked!" he said. "Brailled, I guess I should say."

Crane looked down at the cards and noticed that each of them had at least one hole poked through the margin of it somewhere, as if they had been tacked up again and again, in all sorts of positions on a succession of walls.

"Yeah, that's how I read them," Spider Joe said. "But also it's a kind of safety measure, that every card in any heavy Tarot deck have at least one tack hole in it. All the serious decks from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have tack-holes in the cards."

"Ahoy," said Mavranos, "that sounds like stakes through a vampire's heart, or silver bullets for a werewolf."

Spider Joe smiled for the first time. "I like that. Yeah, I suppose it works like that, but only in the—the head of the beholder. If there's nobody, no human being, looking at these things, they're just rectangles of cardboard. It's what they become when they enter your head through your eyes that's potent, and a few tack holes are enough of a topographical violation to step-down their power. It's like the smog equipment on modern car engines." He rocked where he sat, and his antennas bobbed in the air. "Both of you touch the silver dollars to your eyes now, and then pass 'em across."

Crane lifted the two coins to his eyes, and let the silver edge of the right one tap against the plastic surface of his false eye just for luck. He handed them to Mavranos, who touched them to his own closed eyes and then clicked them down onto the Formica surface of the table.

Spider Joe found them and tucked them behind the lenses of his sunglasses. He squared up the deck of cards and pushed them across to Crane face down. "Shuffle."

Crane did, seven times, though each time it was hard to slide the cards into a block, with the edges of the holes sticking up and catching on the card edges.

Spider Joe reached out and felt for the deck, then pulled it to his side of the table. "What's your name?"

"Scott Crane."

"And what, exactly, is your question?"

Crane spread his hands wearily, then realized that his host couldn't see the gesture. "How do I take over my father's job?" he said.

Spider Joe swiveled his head back and forth as though he were looking around the shabby living room of his trailer. "Uh, you do know you're in some trouble, right? Having to do with a game you must have played on Lake Mead twenty years ago?" He grinned, exposing uneven yellow teeth. "I mean, that's your question? Something about your dad?"

Crane grinned pointlessly back. "Yep."

Booger hummed something in the back of her throat, and Crane guessed belatedly that she was a mute.

"Look," said Spider Joe, his voice angry, "I'm here to help you. I'm not here to do anything else. I think you're probably a dead man, an evicted man, but there might be something you can do. Ask the cards about that, not about some damn job."

"He's my father," said Crane. "I want his job. See what the cards say."

"Check it out," Mavranos said to Spider Joe, "deal the cards. If everybody's not happy with what you get, we'll go back to town for another two bucks."

For several seconds Spider Joe just rocked on the carpet, his haggard brown face expressionless. "Okay," he said, and picked up the deck.

CHAPTER 37: A Dead Guy Who You Don't Know Who He Is

The first card flipped out face up onto the table was the Page of Cups, an engraving of a young man in Renaissance costume gazing at a lamp on a pedestal.

Crane found that he was bracing himself on the shabby couch in the dim trailer living room—for rain, or for the sound of cars crashing out on the highway, or for the cards all to jump into his face. But though the sunlight slanting in through the Venetian blinds seemed to have taken on a glassy quality, like light through clear gelatin, and the thwick of the card slapping the tabletop had been particularly liquid and distinct, the only physical change in the room was the buzzing, looping intrusion of a couple of houseflies from the kitchen.

The next card was a picture of a man in armor in front of a globe cut into three sections; the title was NABVCHODENASOR, presumably an attempt to spell Nebuchadnezzar.

Crane noted that these cards didn't show any tendency to fly around in any psychic breeze, and irrationally he remembered Spider Joe's saying that it was a heavy deck.

More flies had come into the room, and they were all buzzing around the cards as if the pictures were aromatic food.

Spider Joe's fingers traced the puncture-holes in the margins of the two cards, and he grunted sharply, and then he opened his mouth and began to speak.

"Hagioplasty one-two-three," he said harshly, the words seeming to be coughed out resentfully like blood clots, "gumby gumby, pudding and pineal, and Bob's your uncle and the moon's my mother. I could press charges but larges and barges and rivers and fishers, he's fishing all the time there, it's how you say pescador."

The nonsense words had been echoing loudly in Crane's head, and then he thought they were forming there first and only being repeated by Spider Joe. A stricture seemed to be loosening from around his brain, and he was aware of an invitation to set his thoughts free, like birds, questing out in all directions. It seemed important that the blind man shut up, not say all this in front of the flies.

All sorts of things were important. He knew that he ought to be outside, reading what the clouds would be trying to convey to him.

Beside him Mavranos was leaning forward on the couch, his mouth open. The flies were buzzing loudly—there must have been a hundred of them whirling around in the space over the table now—and Crane wondered if Mavranos meant to eat them and thus learn what they knew. Flies probably knew a lot. The old woman had stood up and was dancing slowly and awkwardly on the carpet, her arms extended, coffee spilling out of the cup she was still holding.

"The father," Spider Joe was saying, "playing Lowball for trash, after the one-eyed Jack."

"No," choked Mavranos. With a trembling hand he struck the two cards off the table, and then he stood up and knocked the rest of the deck out of Spider Joe's hand. "No," he repeated loudly, "I don't want this."

Spider Joe abruptly sagged on the floor, silent, his jaw slack now as the insane jabbering fit let go of him, and only his arched antennas seemed to be holding him upright. The flies dispersed out across the room.

"You don't want it either," Mavranos told Crane shakily.

Crane took a deep breath and herded his thoughts back together. "No," he agreed in a whisper, waving flies away from his eye.

Spider Joe's mouth shut with a click, and he stood up lithely, the stiff wires waving among the randomly circling flies. "None of us do," he said. He pulled the silver dollars out from behind the lenses of his sunglasses and tossed them onto the table. "Let's go outside. One of you bring Booger."

The old woman had stopped dancing, and Mavranos caught her elbow and led her after Spider Joe, who blundered twangingly out the door and down the wooden steps. Crane followed them outside, being careful not to glance at the cards on the carpet.

Crane squinted against the sun glare on the desert and the highway, and the sudden heat was a weight on his head, but the broad, flat landscape was a relief after the claustrophobic trailer.

Spider Joe strode out across the yard until his antennas scraped against the fender of the nearest pickup truck, and then he turned around and walked halfway back.

"I'm still a channel for them," he said. "And they sometimes take possession of me like that, like the voodoo loas do to those Haitians. It's never been the Fool before."

Or Dondi Snayheever, I bet, thought Crane.

"Your father's job," Spider Joe went on. He shook his head. "You should have told me who you are. I think I would have done this over the phone, or through the mail."

"I'm not—" Crane began.

"Shut up."

Mavranos and Booger had sat down on the steps, leaving Crane and Spider Joe standing facing each other. "Booger and I used to work for your father." He rubbed his face. "I don't ever talk about this, so listen. I was a miniaturist painter, trained in Italy since I was a kid to be one of the painters of the heaviest Tarot deck, the absolute goddamn hydrogen bomb of Tarot decks—the one known as the Lombardy Zeroth deck."

He pointed at Crane. "You've seen one of mine, when you played Assumption." He shook his head, and the hot breeze twitched at his gray beard. "There's never more than a couple of guys in the world who can paint it, and even if you're young and of sound mind and body, it takes a good year to paint a set. Or a bad year. And then you need a long vacation. Pretty well name your own price, believe me."

He walked in a quick counterclockwise circle, as, it seemed to Crane, a Catholic might cross himself.

"Booger," Spider Joe went on, "was a remora fish, doing errands for him in exchange for the elegantest sort of high life Vegas could provide, which even in the forties and fifties could be pretty elegant. There was a woman who was a threat to him, in 1960—Booger got close to her, became her friend, and … talked her into meeting her at the Sahara one night. Then Booger stayed away, and Vaughan Trumbill showed up instead, and he killed the woman. Her newborn baby daughter got away, but Booger had set it up for the baby to die, too."

Involuntarily Crane glanced at the old woman. Her face was expressionless.

"I made him a deck," said Spider Joe, "he had to have it for the spring of '69. He used it. And then one day Booger and I were having a meeting with him." Spider Joe's fists were clenched, but he kept his voice even. "He was in one of the bodies he had just assumed after the game, a woman called Betsy, and while we were listening to him, she—he'd only been in the body for like a day or two—she came back up to the surface for a few seconds, the Betsy woman did, and it was her looking out of the eyes."

Again Crane looked back at Booger. Her face still showed no emotion, but there were tears now on her wrinkled cheeks.

"She was crying," said Spider Joe softly, "and begging us to—to hold her up, to do something to keep her from sinking away forever back down into the dark pool where the Archetypes move and individual minds just dissolve, way down in the depths." He took a deep breath and let it out. "And then it was just him again. She was gone, back down into the darkness, and we—we found that we knew more about Death than we had before. Booger and I took our orders and walked out and walked right away from the world—away from our cars and houses and gourmet food and fine clothes, even our names—and never went back. Booger bit out her tongue, and I cut out my eyes."

Crane heard Mavranos mutter, "Jesus!" behind him.

For a couple of seconds Crane just didn't believe it. Then he stared at Spider Joe's deeply furrowed cheeks, and remembered the psychic trauma of viewing the Lombardy Zeroth cards—and he tried to imagine the horror of learning, firsthand, that dead people don't always just go away to oblivion but can come back, suffering, to confront you; and he thought that it might, after all, be true that this woman would choose to make herself mute rather than ever again be able to arrange a death with her lies, or that this man would make himself blind rather than ever again be able to paint another of those decks.

Spider Joe shrugged. "Your father's job," he said again. "Your father has almost got you, I have to tell you that. He's already had you perform a human sacrifice, and—"

"When?" Crane shook his head. "I've never killed anybody!"

Except Susan, he thought. One of the random illnesses. Caused by me. And did I kill Diana, too?

"You may not have known you were doing it," Spider Joe said, almost kindly, "but he handed you the knife, sonny, and you used it. Even in that brief reading it was as clear in your character profile as a birthmark. As I say, you might not have been aware. It would have been sometime this last week—certainly at night, and probably involving playing cards, and probably the victim was from someplace separated from here by untamed water—from over the sea."

"Aah, God," Crane wailed softly. "The Englishman." A lot of goons in this country, the man had said. He was right, Crane thought now. A lot of goons that don't even know they're goons. He blinked rapidly and forced away the memory of the man's weak, cheerful face.

"Your father's job," Spider Joe was saying yet again. "He is your father, so theoretically you could take it. I don't know how. You need to consult an old King."

"Who?"

"I don't know."

"Where would I find him?"

"I don't know. A cemetery, probably—old Kings are nearly always dead Kings."

"But how do I—"

"That's it," Spider Joe said. "The reading is over. Get out of here. I probably should kill you—I could—and I certainly will if you ever come back here again."

The sparse, dry brush along the highway shoulder hissed in the breeze.

Mavranos had stood up and was walking toward the Suburban. "You have a nice day, too," he drawled. "Come on, Scott."

Crane blinked and shook his head, then found that he was plodding after his friend.

"Oh, there was one more thing," called Spider Joe.

Crane halted and turned.

"You met your father the other day—his old, discarded body, anyway. When the Fool was in possession of me, I saw it. The body was playing Lowball Poker, for trash." He turned back toward the trailer and walked toward Booger, his antennas cutting lines in the dirt.

"Well," said Mavranos as he straightened the wheel and tromped on the accelerator, "that clears it all up, hah?" His window was rolled down, and as the gathering head wind began to toss his black hair around, he tilted up a new can of Coors and had a long sip. "All you gotta do is go ask some dead guy some questions. A dead guy who you don't know who he is or where he's buried. Shit, we could have this wrapped up by dinnertime."

Crane was squinting out at the scattered low bushes and broken rocks that became a blur in the middle distance, fading out to the hard edge of the distant horizon against the blue sky.

"I thought he looked a hundred," he said quietly. "Actually he'd be … ninety-one this year. What was it they were calling him? Not Colonel Bleep. Doctor Leaky."

Mavranos gave him an uneasy smile. "Who's this? Your dead King?"

"In a way. No, my real father's body. It's senile now, and I guess he doesn't use it anymore, lets it wander around on its own. I remember him … taking me boating on Lake Mead, showing me how to bait hooks, and on my last day with him, when I was five, he took me to the Flamingo for breakfast and to the Moulin Rouge for lunch. It burned down in the sixties, I think."

He shook his head and wished he could have one of Mavranos's beers. A really cold beer, he thought, drunk fast and then uncoiling icily in your stomach … no. Not now that there was something to be done.

"He blinded my right eye, that evening. Threw a deck of those Lombardy Zeroth cards at me, and the edge of one split the eye. No wonder the Bitin Dog personality fit me—a broken-off piece of a hurt and abandoned little boy, cauterized to feel nothing."

"Pogo, I'm really willing to try to believe you're not crazy, but you gotta help me a little, you know?"

Crane wasn't listening to Mavranos. "Actually, I think if I'd known then, two days ago, who that was, that decrepit old man, I'd have … I don't know, wanted to hug him, maybe, or even ask him to forgive me for doing whatever it was I did to make him mad at me. I think I still loved him, I think the bit of me that's still a five-year-old kid did." He shook one of Mavranos's Camels out of a pack and struck a match, cupping the flame against the wind. "But that was before he had his fat man kill Ozzie." He blew out the match and tucked it into the ashtray. "Now I think I'd like to cave in his blinking old head with a tire iron."

Mavranos was clearly bewildered by all this, but he nodded. "That's the spirit."

Crane resumed watching the highway in both directions for the gray Jaguar.

He paid no attention to the big tan Winnebago RV with a bicycle-laden luggage rack on top and a GOOD SAM CLUB sticker on the back window. They passed it, and then it just chugged laboriously along in their dusty wake, never quite receding out of sight.

They stopped at a Burger King for lunch, and Crane ate two cheeseburgers while Mavranos managed to drink most of a vanilla shake. Crane thought Mavranos seemed to be having trouble swallowing.

They got a room for cash in a little motel on Maryland Parkway, and while Mavranos slept, in preparation for going to a pet store for a goldfish and then setting out on yet another night of chasing his statistical phase-change, Crane bought a succession of Cokes from the machine in the motel office, and for two hours he paced around the pool, staring into the water and trying to figure out where he might find a dead King.

When Arky came reeling back to the room at midnight, Crane was sitting up in the sleeping bag on the floor, doodling on a pad.

"Lights out, Pogo," said Mavranos, his voice harsh with exhaustion, as he fell fully clothed across the bed.

Crane got up and turned out the light and got back into the sleeping bag, but for a long time he lay awake and stared at the ceiling in the darkness.

The moon was two days short of being full, and as Georges Leon carefully hung up the telephone, it irritated him that out here east of Paradise the moonlight shone in through the window of the big Winnebago more strongly than any artificial lights did. He didn't like natural light, especially moonlight.

He wasn't going to let himself get angry at the things Moynihan had said on the phone, or the kind of money Moynihan had demanded.

He could hear Trumbill clunking around in the little bathtub, and even with the air conditioner turned all the way up the chilled air smelled of celery and blood and liver and olive oil. Leon would wait for Trumbill to come out; he didn't want to go in there and see the gross, tattooed naked body kneeling on the floor, the head and arms buried and rooting away in the appalling salad that the man had flung together in the tub.

Leon was in the bandy-legged old Benet body now—he'd have to make sure no one went on calling it Beany—and he dreaded trying to give harsh orders, convey authority, with it. The face was too round and red, the cheeks and eyes were too deeply etched with the fatuous grin Leon had let the thing assume when he had left it to its automatic-pilot job as a Poker shill at several casinos. He looked like Mickey Rooney. Even the voice, as he had helplessly noticed on the phone just now, kept trying to be squeaky.

Of course the beautiful Art Hanari body still rested in physical perfection in a bed at La Maison Dieu, but he did very much want to debut that body Wednesday night, at the first of the Holy Week games on the lake.

Well, that was only four days away. He could work out of Benet for that long.

And then on Holy Saturday he could begin assuming the bodies he had defined and paid for in 1969.

High damn time. This had been a long twenty-one years. It would be good to get into some fresh hosts. That Scott Crane looked all right—Leon glanced out the window to make sure Crane's motel room was still dark—and several of the ones Trumbill had already captured and sedated looked damn good. People took better care of themselves these days.

He could hear water running now, and Trumbill grunting as he toweled himself off. The RV rocked a little on its shocks.

A few minutes later Vaughan Trumbill came stumping into the narrow room, his voluminous pants cuffs billowing around his bare blue and red feet, buttoning a sail-like shirt around his enormous belly. The bandage above his ear had begun to blot red again. The man's blood pressure must be like the penstocks in Hoover Dam, Leon thought.

"They coming?" Trumbill asked.

"Not until tomorrow, he said. And it's got to be away from crowds, and all he'd agree to do was haul away an unconscious body. I don't think his guys will even be armed."

The bandage wobbled as Trumbill's eyebrows went up.

"Moynihan doesn't know me," Leon went on, keeping his voice level. "I said I was Betsy Reculver's business partner, and he said I should have her call him, or at least Richard Leroy. I told Moynihan he should ask you about it all, and he just said he heard you'd been shot. How's your arm and leg?"

Trumbill rolled his massive left shoulder. "Just feels strained now, like I've been digging ditches. Not numbed anymore. And I've been eating stuff to restore all the lost blood." He glanced out the window at the dark motel room. "I hate head wounds."

"You were lucky. Richard and the guard both took it square." Leon touched the forehead he had now. "Twice in a week I've been shot right out of a body."

Trumbill turned away from the window and stared at him impassively. "A drag, right?"

Leon grinned, then stopped when he remembered how the expression looked on this clown face. "At dawn I'll call the garage," he said "and have them send the Camaro over here. This thing can follow, but it can't chase."

" 'Kay. And I've got the tranky gun loaded up."

Leon sat down and shifted the chair to face the window. "I'll take the first shift watching," he said. "I'll get you up at"—he glanced at the clock on the plywood wall paneling—"four."

" 'Kay." Trumbill shuffled sideways into the back of the RV, where the bunk was. "Bathroom might be a little high by morning."

"As soon as we've got Crane in a cage, we'll sell this thing as is."

The sun was up and the air was already hot when Crane, still disheveled from sleep, walked back from the motel office and kicked the room door. When Mavranos opened it, blinking in the daylight, Crane handed him one of the cold cans of Coke.

"They don't have coffee," Crane said, stepping inside and closing the door. "This'll do; it's caffeine at least."

"Christ." Mavranos popped the top, took a sip, and shuddered.

Crane leaned against the battered dressing table. "Listen, Arky," he said, "did you ever do any scuba diving?"

"I was a city boy."

"Damn. Well, you can wait in the boat."

"That's what I'll do, all right. I'll wait in the boat. Your dead King's underwater somewhere?"

"I think he's in Lake Mead," said Crane. "I think his head is, anyway."

Mavranos took another sip of the Coke, then put it down and stalked outside. Crane heard the truck door clunk, and when Mavranos came back in, he was carrying a dripping Coors can.

"I did see the flies buzzing around the cards," Mavranos said slowly, after he'd taken a deep sip, "and I heard that guy Snayheever's words coming out of Buggy Joe's mouth. And those things were weird. And I'm willing to admit that there's a lot of weird shit going on. But how the hell are you going to have a conversation with a cut-off head, underwater?" He laughed, though not happily. "And with a scuba gadget in your mouth?"

"Oh," said Crane, slapping the air carelessly with the back of his hand, "as to that—I don't know."

Mavranos sighed and sat down on the bed. "Why do you think he's in the lake?" he asked quietly.

"When Snayheever was on the phone to Diana, he said somebody tried to sink a head in Lake Mead." Crane was pacing up and down the room now, talking rapidly. "Snayheever's aware of a lot of this stuff, even if he is nuts, so maybe sinking severed heads in the lake is something people involved in this kind of shit do. And he made it sound like the lake didn't take it and that it was foolish of the guy to have even tried, like the lake already has a head in it, see? And couldn't hold another, not that kind anyway. Tamed water Lake Mead is, remember Ozzie saying that? Maybe it tames any stuff in it, too, so that'd be a good place to put an old King's head, if you're the new King and want to keep an old one down. And I don't think it was my real father, the current King, who had me … shit, kill some poor Englishman at a Poker table at the Horseshoe. I think it was the king in the lake that did it, that made me do it, I think it was him that was grinning at me out of the Two of Wands card, with his head cut off and two metal rods through his head."

Crane grinned wildly at Mavranos. "You with me so far?"

"You poor fucked-up son of a bitch."

"And along with the severed-head Two of Wands, I had a strange King of Swords; it was an arm, with the hand holding a sword, poking up out of a body of water, like a weapon was being offered by somebody below the surface."

Mavranos just looked puzzled and irritated—and terribly tired. "And …?"

"And when I've dreamed about playing Assumption on Lake Mead, I see the Fool dancing on a cliff edge, but I also see—sense, really—a giant deep in the lake, and even though I can't see him, I know that he has only one eye."

"Orpheus, in Greek myths—they cut his head off, and it kept talking for a while, making prophecies and such stuff." Mavranos stood up. "Okay, okay. You've done scuba diving before?"

"Oh, sure. Last time I went, I shot a spear through my ankle." He was smiling when he said it, but a moment later he winced, remembering that fifteen-year-old Diana had called him then, as soon as he'd got home from the hospital.

"May as well go right now, I guess," Mavranos said. "I'm getting nowhere with my mystimatical cure."

Crane opened the door. " 'Maybe what you're waitin' for'll be twitchin' at the dance tonight!' " he said, quoting something Riff had said to Tony in West Side Story.

Mavranos smiled sourly as he slapped his jacket pocket for his keys. "You remember it killed Riff and Tony."

When he drove the Camaro under the 93 overpass, Vaughan Trumbill picked up the cellular telephone and punched redial.

Even with the seat levered all the way back, his belly kept getting brushed by the steering wheel, and the car still smelled of Betsy Reculver's flowery old-lady's perfume.

"Yeah, Vaughan," came Benet's squeaky voice over the phone.

"Bets—, uh, Benet—"

"From here on in just call me Georges."

Trumbill realized that he never had called him that, in any of the man's bodies. When Trumbill had first started to work for him, he was already in the Richard Leroy.

"Okay, Georges. They're heading out Fremont. Either they're going back to where that kid got shot, or they're going right on out Boulder Highway to the lake."

"Where the kid got shot." For some reason Georges's voice, even coming out of the Benet vocal cords, sounded stony. "Yeah, I remember that place. Some damned woman destroyed a nice Chevrolet of mine right there." For a moment the phone Trumbill held to his ear was silent, and all he could hear was the muffled roar of the Camaro's engine. "Okay," Georges went on, "if they stop there, take 'em when they get out away from the truck, it's good and private, and I don't see why they'd take guns out with them. You still got Moynihan's guys?"

Trumbill glanced at the rearview mirror. The florist's van was still there, a couple of cars behind him.

"Yes."

"Right, well, kill the mustache and dart Crane. But if they go on past there, toward the lake—Why would they be going to the lake? Rhetorical question, I don't need your guesses. I don't like it if that's where they're going." He sighed. "Catch them somewhere in the desert north of Henderson. Shoot a tire out or something and then just confront them."

"In the desert." Trumbill forced his mind away from the recollection of having only three days ago seen Death itself, the obscene skeleton under the skimpy dress of dried skin, capering in the desert south of town.

Confront them, he thought as he gunned the Camaro through the Desert Inn Road intersection and watched the dusty blue truck barrel steadily along on the bright highway ahead of him. I'm valuable to the old man, he thought, but when it gets down to the bone, I'm an expendable piece in his equation.

As I've always known I was.

He sighed heavily. "If they kill me out there," he said into the phone that was wedged under his pendulous jowl, "you won't forget your part of our old bargain."

He heard Georges sigh, too. "Packed tight in the center of a big cement cube within an hour of your death, Vaughan, don't worry. But I hardly think these guys will take you. Blood pressure, a sledge-hammer of a stroke, is what's going to take you out, my friend."

Trumbill smiled, his cold eyes still on the truck ahead. "Okay. I'll call you after."

He hung up the phone and returned his full attention to the blue truck.

CHAPTER 38: Not the Skinny Man

Neither Crane nor Mavranos spoke as the abandoned gas station swept past on their right.

That's where it all really started to go wrong, Crane thought. To think that we could have just killed Snayheever or broken his arms or something in Baker, if we'd known, if the goddamn cards had told Ozzie about it in the Los Angeles Poker casino. But instead here we are, Scat probably dead by now in the hospital, Oliver in some state home for orphans, Diana and Ozzie certainly dead, Arky and I not looking good at all—why couldn't Ozzie have seen it in the cards?

He hiked around in his seat and looked back. No Jaguar, he thought, but that green Camaro has been hanging around behind us for a while. Probably just tourists wanting to go see the dam—but if he doesn't pass us before long, I'll tell Arky to pull over and let him go on past.

Crane looked out at the scrubby, baking dirt receding away to the distant mountains under the cloudless sky, and he remembered driving along this highway on that early evening in '69, in a Cadillac convertible with—what had his name been? Newt—with Newt at the wheel, nervously explaining to Crane the rules of Assumption Poker. By that time Ozzie had probably already checked out of the Mint and had been gunning for home, to move Diana and all their stuff out of the house and tack the quit-claim up on the front door. It occurred to Crane now, for the first time, that Ozzie must have had the quit-claim ready in case the fact of Crane's terrible father ever became a threat to young Diana. Well, it hadn't become a threat, as it happened, Crane had made it a threat. Crane had almost certainly led the fat man to her.

He looked over his shoulder again. The Camaro was still several car lengths behind them, its chrome trim winking in the sun. And behind it was a van that, it seemed to him now, had been in that position for a while.

He popped open his seat belt and turned around, kneeling on the seat, to rummage in the back.

"Change your mind about the beer?" said Mavranos.

"I'm probably imagining things," said Crane as he found his .357 and Mavranos's .38 and wrapped them in a shirt, "but why don't you pull over and let that Camaro and that van pass us, if they want to." He sat back down in his seat and unwrapped the guns.

Mavranos's eyebrows went up when he looked at the items in Crane's lap. "Pull over where? This shoulder's just gravel. By the time I slowed up enough to pull off, they'd have either passed us already or come right up our tailpipe."

Crane was silent for a while, staring ahead; then he pointed. "There's a slant-in cutoff for a dirt road up there, see it? You could turn in to it without slowing down much, if we hang on. And then if they're bad guys, we should be able to leave them behind on the dirt road. Neither of them's sprung as high as this thing."

"Shit," said Mavranos, "I wish we'd sent Wendy another five grand." He reached over and picked up his revolver and tucked it into his belt.

The truck bucked when the big tires hit the unpaved track, and the jack and spare tire and toolbox all banged back down onto the bed after having been flung into the air, and Crane pitched forward against the dashboard, grabbing his bouncing .357 and squeezing the trigger nearly hard enough to fire it. The truck was shaking violently back and forth, and Mavranos was squinting furiously ahead and shouting curses.

Crane held on to the back of the seat and looked back at the whirling dust cloud the truck had kicked up, and for a moment he thought the two vehicles had gone on past down the highway, and he opened his mouth to tell Mavranos to slow down; then he saw the nose of the Camaro plunging along after them through the dust.

Again he almost spasmodically fired his revolver.

"They're after us!" He shouted to be heard over the cacophony of squeaking and banging. "Go!"

Mavranos nodded and held on tight to the steering wheel. They were onto the dirt road now, some surveyor's track, probably, and booming straight out into the desert at what seemed like breakneck speed.

Crane glanced back again. The Camaro was falling back a little, its suspension not made for this kind of hummocky road. The van had left the highway too, he noticed, and was wallowing along farther back. A tall, three-legged plume of dust was streaming away to the south.

A particularly rough bump threw Crane against the door, and he blinked ahead through the cracked windshield at the road. A gully paralleled the road on the left, with a low slope rising to the right. The road still stretched straight as a pencil line ahead, and he wondered if it could possibly go all the way to the I-15. He and Mavranos would certainly have left their pursuers behind long before that, assuming this truck didn't blow a tire or break an axle.

Even over the racket inside the truck, he heard the hard boom of a gunshot.

"Faster!" he yelled. He grabbed the window handle and started to crank it down, thinking to shoot back at the Camaro, but he could hardly brace himself well enough on the jumping seat to turn the handle, and it occurred to him that he would have little chance of hitting the car, shooting from such a shaky position, and he might need every bullet if the truck were to be stopped.

And the next boom was simultaneous with an echoing slam from the rear of the truck—and then the truck, still thundering forward, was sliding around to the left, kicking and jumping on the sandy road, and Crane grabbed the dashboard with his free hand and braced his feet against the floor, thinking the vehicle was going to roll over on his side. Mavranos was fighting the wheel, trying to wrestle it to the right and turn out of the skid.

"Shot out the left rear tire," Mavranos gasped as he finally got the back end in line and then stomped on the brake, bringing the truck to a clanging, thudding halt turned sideways across the road, pointed up the slope and away from the gully.

Mavranos threw the gearshift lever into park, and then he and Crane were out the doors.

Crane didn't know where Mavranos was, but he crouched up the slope by the front bumper, coughing in the stinging dust cloud, and squinted over the barrel of the cocked .357 as he swung it from side to side over the hot hood.

Instead of the two recent shots, it was a shotgun blast from three days ago that was echoing in his mind. Bring me the fat man, God, he prayed, and you can have me.

"Freeze!" came a harsh, choked shout from out of the dust fog. "Police, Lieutenant Frits! Crane and Mavranos, step away from the truck with your hands on your heads!"

The wind was thinning the dust, and Crane could see Mavranos now—he was plodding slowly toward the gully, away from the back bumper, his empty hands raised.

Crane had lowered his own gun and straightened.

A vague silhouette was visible ahead, against the bulk of the Camaro. "Crane!" came the voice again. "Away from the truck, now!"

Uncertainly Crane stepped around the front of the truck and took two steps along the slope. His gun was still in his hand, but by his side, pointed at the ground.

A gust of wind cleared the air. The fat man, Vaughan Trumbill, stood in front of the Camaro, both arms extended forward, his left hand pointing an automatic at Mavranos and his right pointing a rifle at Crane. A white bandage bobbed on his spherical bald head, but his hands were steady.

"Not really," said Trumbill. "Drop it, Crane."

The van was rocking up into position behind the Camaro. Its windshield was opaqued with dust, and Crane could only wonder how many guns might be leveled at himself and Mavranos behind it.

Right, Crane thought dully. Frits would have had sirens or a light, even in an unmarked car.

Crane looked across the road at Mavranos. Mavranos's eyes squinted at him almost humorously over the dusty mustache.

"I'm okay," Mavranos called. "I liked Ozzie too."

Trumbill was striding toward Mavranos, his tie and the tails of his suit coat flapping like banners on a ship. "Drop it or I kill your buddy, Crane, he shouted, his pouchy eyes staring hard into Crane's face.

"Hah!" yelled Mavranos, stomping one foot in the dust. Trumbill's head whipped around toward him, his automatic up—

—And Crane, as aware of the imagined guns behind the van's windshield as he would have been of a scorpion on his face, was grateful to his friend for making this easy—

—as he snapped his revolver up into line and touched the cocked trigger.

The full-throated bam rocked his head back and he let the recoil spin him around to fall onto his knees with the gun aimed at the windshield of the van.

The van must already have been in reverse gear, for even as Crane was falling to his knees, its front end had dipped and it had begun to back away at full throttle, its front tires throwing up sand in two churning clouds.

Crane swiveled his gunsight toward the rear of the truck, but Mavranos was standing alone in the road, his back to Crane, looking away from the receding van now to peer down into the gully.

After one more tense, hard-breathing moment Crane raised the barrel and stood up.

The van, which Crane could now see had a florist's logo on its side, had reached a wide spot and backed around broadside; now it moved forward, turning back toward the highway, and drove away faster.

Crane plodded down the slope and across the road, and he stopped at the lip of the gully a few yards away from Mavranos.

Trumbill lay sprawled on his back in the sandy bed of the wash a few yards below them. His coat was open, and the white shirt over his belly was reddening fast. The rifle he had been carrying lay on the roadside near Mavranos, and the automatic rested upright against a stone halfway down the slope of the gully.

"Good shootin', Pogo," said Mavranos.

Crane looked at him. His friend hadn't been shot, but he was weaving on his feet and looked pale and sick.

"Thanks," said Crane. He supposed he must look the same way.

"Camaro," said Trumbill loudly. "Take it to … telephone." Speaking the words seemed to cost him a lot, but his voice was strong. "Medevac."

No, thought Crane. "No," he said.

I've got to kill him, he thought in sick amazement, finish him off. I can't take prisoners here. Would the police jail him? For what? Ozzie's body is gone, and even if the fat man left enough evidence to be charged with Diana's murder—which isn't likely—he would certainly be freed on bail. Of course he'd be in a hospital for a long time, but couldn't he work for my father from a hospital? He wouldn't let Scat and Oliver slip through his fingers, as he did with the infant Diana.

And I'd be in jail, at least for a while. Maybe a long time. What the hell kind of story could I tell the police?

I've got to kill him. Right here. Right now.

"Mavranos," Trumbill called now. "I can cure your cancer. You can … go back to your family … a healthy man. Decades." He inhaled loudly enough for the men up on the bank to hear. "Trank darts—in rifle. Shoot Crane."

Crane turned and looked at the rifle that lay a yard from Mavranos's feet, and then he looked up and met Mavranos's gaze.

Crane didn't think Mavranos could get the rifle up before he could raise the revolver and shoot him—but he realized that he was physically incapable of shooting Arky. He slowly opened his hand and let the revolver clank to the dirt.

"Do what you gotta do, Arky," he said.

Mavranos nodded slowly. "I'm thinking of Wendy, and the girls," he said.

Slowly he stepped over to where the rifle lay on the ground, and then he kicked it away, toward the truck's front tire.

"Wendy saved you."

Crane exhaled and nodded, then turned back to Trumbill and swallowed hard as he crouched down to retrieve the revolver.

"Okay," moaned Trumbill. His face was pale and gleaming with sweat in the harsh sunlight, and his pudgy hands were fists. "Last request! Call this number … tell him where my … body is. Three-eight-two—"

"No," said Crane, shakily raising the mirror-bright gun. "I don't know what kind of magic he could do with your corpse." He blinked tears out of his eyes but spoke steadily. "Best you rot out here, feed the birds and the bugs."

"No-o-o-o-o!" Somehow in spite of his terrible wound, Trumbill was roaring down there, and the fearful, jarring noise seemed to fill the desert and shake the remote sky. "Not the skinny man, not the skinny man, not the—"

Crane thought of Ozzie and of Diana, both killed by this man.

And he pulled the trigger.

Bam.

"—Skinny ma-a-a-a-an—"

Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.

Click.

The hot air of the flat desert gave back no echoes from the shots. Crane lowered the emptied gun and stared, astonished, at the red-spattered body sprawled motionless in the sand of the dry stream bed.

Then the dirt surface of the road was under Crane's face, between his spread hands, and he was spasmodically vomiting up the dregs of the Coke he'd had for breakfast.

When he was able to roll away to the side, spitting and gasping, he saw through his tears that Mavranos had opened the back of the truck and was lugging the jack to the flat tire.

"I can do this, Pogo," Mavranos called. "Why don't you see if you can't push that Camaro into the wash. I've got a couple of tarps we can throw over it and weight down with rocks. No harm if this goes undetected for a while, and I don't think the boys in that van are gonna make any calls."

Crane nodded and got wearily to his feet.

Fifteen minutes later they were driving slowly back along the dirt road toward the highway, Mavranos absently cursing the damage that he imagined had been done to the truck's suspension. Crane rocked in the passenger seat and stared out at the broken stones of the desert, trying to feel a grim satisfaction at having avenged Ozzie, or to feel pride in having competently shot the fat man, or to feel anything besides the remembered horror of pulling that sweat-slick trigger again and again and again.

After they had got back onto the highway and were again rolling south toward the lake, he looked at his right hand, and for a moment he hoped that his father would succeed in taking this body away from him.

CHAPTER 39: Combination of the Two

"This don't look much like Vegas," Mavranos said as he steered the shaky, dusty truck through the quiet streets of Boulder City. Somehow the radio was playing what Crane thought was the best rock song ever recorded, Big Brother and the Holding Company's "Combination of the Two."

Today Crane felt as though he'd lost the right, the ability, to participate in it.

He blinked and looked around at the complacent Spanish-style houses and the green lawns. "Hmm? Oh—no, it's not anything like it." His voice sounded oddly flat in his head. He was making an effort to talk normally, to talk as he would have if he had not just … killed a man. "This is the only place in Nevada where gambling's not legal," he went on doggedly. "In fact, hard liquor only became legal here in '69."

"No gambling at all?"

"Nope." He grinned stiffly and shook his head. " 'Cept for a—a certain Poker game on a houseboat once every twenty years or so."

And that starts up tomorrow night, he thought. And when this latest series of games is done, come Holy Saturday, he'll assume this old body of mine, unless I've stopped him somehow.

On the radio Janis Joplin was wailing, but not for him.

"Huh," said Mavranos. "Nothing to do me any good. Maybe I can get in a game of penny-lagging."

Crane glanced at Mavranos, feeling oppressed now about him, too. Mavranos was definitely thinner and paler than he had been when they'd driven out from Los Angeles, and now he was never without the bandanna tied up tight around his throat. I wonder, Crane thought, if Trumbill could, possibly, have cured Arky's cancer. Surely that was just a desperate bluff.

"Left up ahead there, on Lakeshore Road," Crane said.

"We're not going to the dam?"

"No. The nearest marinas and beaches are up the west shore of the lake. That's where we can rent scuba gear and a boat. At the dam all you can do is look."

"I wanted to see the dam."

"We'll go see it later, okay?" said Crane shortly. "Later in the week. You can buy a T-shirt and everything."

"It's one of the seven man-made wonders of the world."

"Yeah? What are the others?"

"I don't know. Montezooma's Revenge at Knott's Berry Farm's one, I think."

"We'll get you a T-shirt there, too, on the way home."

Their laughter was brief and tense. Mavranos finished his beer and popped another. Poor dead Janis Joplin howled on out of the speakers that were hung on adhesive tape from the roof struts behind the front seat.

At a dive shop near the Government Dock Crane rented a new outfit of U.S. Divers scuba gear and a full wet suit with hood and boots and a gear bag to carry it all in. They rented a speedboat at the Lake Mead Resort Circle, and by noon they were gunning out across the blue face of the lake under the empty blue sky.

After a few minutes they had left behind the water-skiers and had got out to where the wind was raising random choppy waves, and Crane pulled back on the Morris throttle, reversing the engine and bringing the boat to an uneven, rocking halt. Mavranos had been hanging on to the dashboard bar during the bouncy, spray-flinging ride, and now he took off his Greek fisherman's cap, whacked it against his knee, and put it on again.

"You through shakin' us up?" he asked in the sudden quiet. "I'm gonna step back to the ice chest, but not if you're gonna bounce me right out."

"Yeah, I'll take it easy."

They were alone out on the water under the arching, cloudless sky, but Crane had to focus his eye to stop seeing the fat man's body jumping and bursting as the bullets hit, and he yawned so that his ears would pop and he would blessedly hear only the wind and the idling engine.

Well, he thought, here I am. What do I do now, just jump in?

A little red fishing boat rocked on the water a hundred yards away, and the man in it seemed to be looking at them. Crane wondered if their crashing arrival out here had scared off all the fish.

Mavranos came back and sat down in the bucket seat, a fresh beer foaming in his fist. "Ride did the beer a lot of good," he growled, wiping foam off his mustache. "Where's the head?"

"You gotta just piss over the side, man," said Crane. "No, I know what you meant." He brushed the wind-disordered hair back from his forehead and looked around at the vast face of the lake. "I, uh, don't know, exactly. It's probably in this section of the lake, the Boulder Basin; there's also the Overton Arm and the Temple Basin and Gregg Basin, miles away over those mountains, but this is certainly the most accessible part."

There should be a hand holding a sword, he thought helplessly, sticking up out of the water.

He unfolded the map the boat rental clerk had given him. "Let's see what we got," he said, tracing his finger along the outline of the Boulder Basin. "I don't know, here's Moon Cove; that sounds possible. And Deadman's Island; I like that."

Mavranos leaned over and breathed beer fumes at him. "Roadrunner Cove," he read. "I like that. Beep-beep."

Crane looked back at the gear bag, wondering if he would even get into the wet suit today.

"Let's just go," he said finally. "I'll take it slower, but hang on."

He drove the boat along at a steady twenty miles an hour northward, paralleling the west coastline up toward Moon Cove.

Blank your mind, he told himself. Maybe the dead King is ready to guide you, but the static racket of your thoughts is keeping him from getting through.

He tried, but he wasn't able to make himself really relax into it. Blanking his mind in these circumstances seemed too much like leaving one's car running and unlocked in a bad neighborhood.

After only a few minutes they had rounded the cove's north point. Crane consulted the map and learned that the inlet ahead of them was called Pumphouse Cove. A houseboat with bright blue awnings was moored there, and he could see a family and a dog around a picnic table on the shore.

This didn't feel like the right place. The sun was hot on his head, and he envied Mavranos his cap and his beer.

He swung the boat around and headed back south, angling further out away from the shore, heading for the string of islands poking up above the water like a dead god's vertebrae in the southern reaches of the basin.

"What kind of fish they got in here?" Mavranos called over the burbling roar of the engine.

"Big catfish, I hear," said Crane loudly, squinting in the breeze. "And carp. Bass."

"Carp," repeated Mavranos. "That's goldfish grown up, you know; they don't die of natural causes, I heard. And they survive winters frozen solid in pond ice. The molecules in their cells just refuse to take the shape of crystallization."

Crane was glad that the breeze and the motor roar made it natural not to reply. His search for a sunken severed head almost seemed rational compared with Arky's notions about math and science: anti-carcinogenic beer, phase-changes in the sports betting at Caesars Palace, goldfish that couldn't be killed …

Deadman's Island, hardly more than a bumpy good-size boulder with a narrow beach around it, was the closest of the islands. He squinted at it, and then stared at the red fishing boat that stood on the water very close to the east shore of it.

Mavranos had brought his battered Tasco 8 x 40 binoculars from the truck, and Crane let off on the gas and took them out of their box.

He stood up on the fiber glass floorboard and leaned on the top of the windshield to steady the binoculars, and then he got the fishing boat in his view and twisted the center focus wheel.

The little fishing boat sprang into clarity, seeming now to be only a dozen yards away. The fisherman was a slim man in his thirties with dark hair slickly combed back, and he was staring straight at Crane, smiling. He bobbed his fishing pole as if in greeting.

"Arky," said Crane slowly, "is that the same guy there, fishing, that we saw when we first stopped? 'Cause I don't see how he could have got here so fast from—"

"Fishing where?" Mavranos interrupted.

Still staring straight at the man through the lenses, Crane pointed out over the bow of the boat. "There, by the island."

"I don't see anybody. There's some water skiers way off."

Crane lowered the binoculars and glanced at Mavranos. Was he blind drunk?

"Arky," he said patiently, "right there, by the—"

He stopped talking. The fishing boat was no longer there. And it could not have moved around the island out of sight in less than several minutes—certainly not in the second and a half that he'd looked away.

He exclaimed, "It's gone!" even though it seemed like a stupid thing to say.

Mavranos was staring at him impassively. "Okay."

Crane exhaled, and realized that his heart was thudding in his chest and that his palms were damp.

"Well," he said, "I guess I know where to dive."

He sat back down and cautiously stepped on the gas pedal.

The level of the lake was down, and the lower stretch of the Deadman's Island shore was a morass of once-drowned and now reexposed manzanitas, their short branches hung with strings of algae—like, Crane thought, Spanish moss strung on cypresses in a bayou. Here and there, too, were algae-covered angularities that must have been long-lost fishing poles. The rocks were just slick-looking humps with no definition under the blanket of green algae, and the breeze near the island was tainted with the wet, fermenting smell of the stuff.

"It's a real soup you're gonna be divin' into," observed Mavranos as Crane sat on the gunwale and worked his arm through a wet suit sleeve.

"Cold, too," said Crane morosely. "And rented wet suits never fit snug. There's a special kind of headache I get when I'm under cold water for too long."

He had tugged and coaxed the wet suit on and had pulled the Buoyancy Control Device, looking like a deflated life preserver vest, over his head.

"Should have got a dry suit," said Mavranos helpfully. "Or a diving bell."

"Or scheduled this meeting somewhere else," Crane said. He adjusted the straps of the backpack harness and then had Mavranos hold up the tank while he snaked his arms through the straps. He bent forward with the weight on his back to adjust them, and he made sure that the waistband release was clear and that it opened to the left. In spite of his reluctance to enter the cold, murky water, he was pleased to see that he still remembered how to suit up.

He hoped he still remembered how to breathe through a regulator. His old diving instructor had always insisted that the most dangerous thing about diving was the way gases behaved under pressure.

Dressed at last, with his weight belt on over everything and its quick-release buckle situated well clear of the BCD, he stood up and stretched. The wet suit was tight enough that it took effort to straighten both arms, but he thought it could be snugger across the front.

Oh well, he thought. A long, hot shower at whatever motel we wind up at.

His mask was up on his forehead, and the regulator mouthpiece swung by his elbow, and he turned to Mavranos before fitting it all on.

"If … say, forty-five minutes goes by," he said, "and I'm not back here, go ahead and split. The money's in a sock in my pants there."

Mavranos nodded stolidly. " 'Kay."

Crane pulled the mask away from his forehead and settled it down over his face, and then he tucked the regulator mouthpiece between his teeth, breathed through it a few times and pushed the purge button to check the lever spring, and finally put one foot up on the gunwale.

Dimly under the mask strap and the foam neoprene of the hood, he heard Mavranos say, "Hey, Pogo."

Crane turned. Mavranos was holding out his right hand, and Crane clasped it with his own.

"Don't fuck up," said Mavranos.

Crane made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, then stepped up over the gunwale and jumped into the water with his feet together, his right hand behind his head holding the tank down.

He splashed in, hearing the crackle of the bubbles muffled through his wet suit hood.

The water was cold, about sixty degrees, and as always, it invaded his crotch first. He hooted through the regulator, blowing a cloud of bubbles up past the face plate.

He swallowed and wiggled his jaw, feeling his ears pop as the pressure was equalized, and then he began breathing. Slow and deep, he told himself as he stretched his feet out through the bottomless water. Careful the cold doesn't get you breathing fast and shallow.

He was sinking slowly, and he relaxed and let himself go down. Visibility was terrible—a dust of brown-green algae hung in suspension in the darkening water, and shreds like puffy cornflakes swirled up around him.

About six feet down he passed through one of the planes of temperature difference called thermoclines, and again he hooted at the suddenly colder water. He spread his hands and kicked, halting his descent.

Dimly he could see the slope of the island through the fog of algae. The cobblestone-size rocks were all fuzzed with the yellow-brown muck, and he wondered how he could identify any of the shaggy lumps as a severed head.

But the fisherman had been a little further out anyway. Crane began swimming away through the murk, kicking with long strokes and feeling the pull in the tendons of his insteps.

Very soon his left leg began to ache where he had stabbed it eight days ago.

The repetitive routines of breathing and kicking began almost to hypnotize him. He was remembering dives off Catalina after spring rains, when the visibility was a hundred feet of crystal blue and the boundary plane between the fresher top layer and the saltier one below was a rippling refraction, like heat waves over a highway; and he remembered climbing deep down in tide pools off La Jolla, picking up tiny octopuses and touching twitchy rainbow-colored anemones, and having to patiently untangle himself from long rubbery strands of kelp, and one time accidentally elbowing the release buckle of his weight belt and watching it plummet away into oblivion through the glassy clear water.

All he could hear was the metallic echo of his breathing in the steel air tank, and the air that he sucked in long pulses through the regulator valve was cold and tasted of metal, and as always somehow had a gritty feel in his mouth.

Several times he had glanced at his watch and the pressure gauge, but he had not looked at either one for a while when he began to hear, faintly, something more than his own breathing.

It was a high and rhythmic sound, and scratchy, but too slow to be echoes of any boat engine. In the algae fog he couldn't tell if he was rising or descending, so he was careful to breathe continuously, remembering that holding one's breath in a scuba ascent of nearly any distance could rupture a lung with no warning at all.

It was music, the sound he was hearing. Some kind of old forties-style swing, with a lot of brass.

He arched his back up and spread his arms forward, stopping in the dim brown opaque water.

Was this it? Was something about to happen here? He had once seen a siren device that was supposed to be lowered into water to call divers back on charter boats, and he'd heard of terribly expensive underwater speakers, and he'd read about submarines being tracked by music played in bunk rooms …

But he had not ever heard music underwater.

The sound was clearer now. The tune was "Begin the Beguine," and he could hear a background clatter that was unmistakably laughter and talking.

An old, dead King, he thought with a shiver that was not all dismay, and he kicked forward again.

A knobby, pyramidical stone pillar formed in silhouette in the smoky twilight ahead of him. He sat up in the water again, letting the half-inflated BCD hold him at neutral buoyancy, and he sculled with his hands to approach the submerged tower slowly.

The air that hissed into the regulator when he inhaled was warmer now, and carried the scents of cigarette smoke and gin and paper money.

As he got to within a yard of it, he could see that the lump at the top of the rough spire was a head, a skull draped with algae instead of flesh.

The cheekbones and sockets had turned into coral, and in the left socket gleamed a big pearl.

Crane understood that this sea change was a repairing of damage, a kind of posthumous healing, and he thought of the cherub head on the Two of Wands with the two metal rods transfixing the face.

The music was loud now, and he could almost make out words among the background voices and laughter. Very clearly he smelled charbroiled steak and Bearnaise sauce.

He reached out slowly through the dirty water, and with the tip of his bare forefinger he touched the pearl that was the head's eye.

CHAPTER 40: La Mosca

And he jumped violently, blowing out a burst of air in an involuntary shout of surprise.

He was sitting in a chair, across a table from the man he had seen fishing, and they were in a long, low-ceilinged room with a pair of broad windows behind the fisherman opening out onto a bright blue sky.

Crane held very still.

The regulator mouthpiece was still between his teeth, but he was no longer wearing a diving mask, yet he was able to see clearly; therefore he was out of the water.

Slowly he reached up and took the regulator out of his mouth.

His mouth instantly filled with lake water, and he put the regulator back in his mouth and blew the water out through the exhaust valve.

Okay, he thought, nodding to himself as he tried to hold back his ready panic, you're still underwater; this is a vision, a hallucination.

This man must be the famous dead King.

Not wanting to meet his host's gaze quite yet, Crane rocked his head around to look at the room. A broad cement beam ran down the center of the ceiling, with wooden beams crossing through it at right angles; pictures of landscapes were framed on the cream walls, and low couches and chairs and tables were arranged casually across the broad expanse of pale tan carpet. Through the open windows behind his host he could hear laughter and the splash of someone diving into a swimming pool.

That was disorienting.

The air in his mouth tasted faintly of chlorine, and more immediately of leather and after-shave lotion.

At last he looked at the man across the table.

Again the man seemed to be in his thirties, with slicked-back brown hair and heavy-lidded, long-lashed eyes that made his faint smile secretive. A tailored pinstripe suit jacket was open over a white silk shirt with six-inch collar points.

On the polished surface of the table between them rested a pair of wrapped sugar cubes, a can of Flit insecticide, a golden cup like a chalice, and a haftless, rusted blade six inches long.

Crane remembered that Cups was his own suit in the Tarot deck, and he reached out a hand—he noted with no particular surprise that he seemed to be wearing a silk shirt, too, with onyx cuff links—and pointed at the cup.

Apparently pleased, the man smiled and stood up. Crane now saw that he was wearing high-waisted pinstripe trousers to match the jacket, and expensive-looking leather shoes with pointed toes.

"You're you, still," the man said. Crane noticed that the voice was not perfectly synchronized with the movement of the lips. "I was afraid you might not be." From inside his jacket he pulled a shiny automatic pistol. Crane tensed, ready to jump at him, but the man took the gun by the barrel and laid it on the table in front of Crane. "Take it. Safety's off, and it's chambered. All you gotta do is pull back the hammer and pull the trigger."

Crane picked it up. It was heavy Springfield Arms .45 with wooden grips. He paused, wondering if the man wanted him to do anything with it; then his host turned away, and Crane shrugged and tucked the gun into the belt of the gray slacks that had replaced the black wet-suit pants.

The man walked to an open sliding glass door at one corner of the pool-facing side of the room, and looked back and beckoned with a manicured hand.

Crane got to his feet, noting that he was wearing shoes instead of rubber fins and that he didn't seem to have the weight or bulk of the scuba tank on his back, and he walked across the carpet and followed his host out onto a small square terrace.

Below them a green lawn dotted with palm trees stretched out to the concrete apron of the pool, and beyond the pool was the casino, painted pistachio green. On the far side of the casino, past the narrow highway, the desert stretched away to the horizon, and Crane had to lean over the terrace coping and look to his right to see the nearest building, a low, rambling structure on the highway's far side half a mile north.

He recognized it. He'd been there many times as a little boy.

That was the Last Frontier, a sort of dude ranch casino and motel with western decor and a short "street" of transplanted ghost town buildings behind it to entertain children.

It was later sold, reopened in 1955 as the New Frontier, and then was torn down in '65. The Frontier Casino in which he had been playing Poker last week was built in '67 on the same spot.

And of course he knew where he was. He looked down, and shivered to see the remembered rose garden.

He was on the penthouse terrace of the Flamingo Hotel as the place had been in early '47, before the murder of Benjamin Siegel—popularly known as "Bugsy," though the man had seldom been called that to his face. This was how the Flamingo had looked when it was still the only elegant casino-hotel in Las Vegas. With its fourth-floor penthouse, it was the tallest building within seven miles.

Crane straightened and looked at the flashily dressed man standing beside him. He tried to say, "Mr. Siegel," but only succeeded in blowing air out of the regulator.

"You know what place this is," said Siegel. Crane caught a trace of a New York accent, and he saw that the sound was now synchronized with the mouth.

Crane nodded.

"My castle," Siegel said as he turned and walked back into the long living room. "Your father probably took you here, after he shot me up."

He paused at a narrow bookcase that was built into the wall; the lower section was enclosed, and he winked at Crane and lifted away the knee-level bottom shelf, spilling books onto the floor. Under the shelf, instead of the narrow box of a cupboard, was a rectangular shaft that receded away into darkness below, with a wooden ladder mounted against the far wall of it.

"Bolt-hole and hidey-hole," Siegel said.

He tossed the shelf aside and strode back to the table and resumed his chair.

"Sit down," Siegel said.

Crane walked back across the carpet and perched himself on the edge of the opposite chair, aware of the hard bulk of the gun under his belt. He reminded himself to breathe steadily and not hold his breath; back in the real, 1990 world, he might be rising or sinking right now, or even floating on the surface.

"John Scarne showed me a gimmick for a proposition bet one time," said Siegel, peeling off the paper wrappers from the sugar cubes. He put the bared white cubes out on the table and then unscrewed the cap of the can of Flit. "It's called la mosca. That means 'the fly' in Spanish."

From below the table he lifted an intercom microphone. "Hey, chef?" he said into it. "This is Benny. Jack's here, and we need one live fly." He let go of the microphone, and it dissolved into smoke.

Siegel dipped a finger into the can and then lightly touched the top face of each sugar cube. "I won ten grand off Willie Moretti with this, once, right here in this room. The idea is, you bet on which sugar cube the fly will land on. It looks like an even-up bet, right? But what you do, you turn the cubes so the one your man picked has the DDT face up, and the other is DDT down. The fly always goes for the unpoisoned face, and you win your bet."

A quiet knock sounded on a hallway door behind Crane, and Siegel called, "Come in!"

Crane heard a door open, and then a figure in a tuxedo had walked up from behind and stopped beside his chair. Siegel pointed at the tabletop.

Crane was able to keep from shouting through the regulator, but he did twitch back in his seat when he saw the room service waiter's hand.

It was the hand of a skeleton, the bones furred and strung with wet brown algae. The long fingers daintily set down a cardboard box with holes punched in the lid. A loud buzzing sounded from inside it.

One of Siegel's eyes was blank white now, with the sheen of pearl, but he smiled at Crane and turned one of the sugar cubes upside down, and then he lifted the lid off the box.

The fly was a buzzing insect that seemed to be the size of a plum, and it was up and out and flying around the table in an instant, its jointed legs dangling loosely under its swooping body.

Crane flinched away from it, but it was circling the sugar cubes now.

"Say you'd bet five grand he'd land on that one," Siegel said cheerfully, pointing at the one with the DDT face still up.

The fly landed on the other one, its long legs seeming to hug the cube, its face working at the surface.

The light through the windows was dimming; Siegel waved a brown hand, and several lamps came on, casting a yellow glow over the table. The motion had startled the fly away from the sugar, and while it was looping heavily through the air again, he picked up the cube the insect had spurned and tossed it over his shoulder, out the window.

"That was for betting," Siegel said. His voice was raspy now, and Crane looked up at him. The tan skin of Siegel's cheek was peeling, exposing rough blue coral. "This is for … illustration."

Again the fly landed on the cube and began gnawing at it. Crane could hear a tiny grinding.

"It knows there's a poison one," wheezed Siegel, "but it doesn't realize this is the one. It sees the sweet edible face and doesn't know it hides the same poison."

In the dimming light, dots seemed to be flickering on the cube, as if it were a white die; then the flickering marks seemed to be card suits. The fly was tossing aside fragments of sugar in its haste to devour the cube, and its bristly head was buried in a hole it had eaten into the thing.

Then the fly shuddered and tumbled off. It lay on its back, its long legs working in the air and a muddy liquid running out of its face.

"Too late," said Siegel huskily, "it realizes its mistake."

The windows behind him were closed now, and behind the glass rectangles, as if they were panels of an aquarium, churned the algae-fogged water of Lake Mead.

The walls and furniture were dissolving, and the light was going fast.

Siegel's head hung in the smoky dimness in front of Crane. The hair was gone, and the skin was a mossy smoothness except where the coral showed through. "He killed me," grated the head, "shot out my eye, cut off my head in the mortuary, and threw it in the lake! In memory of me, too, do this."

The rubber rim of the diving mask was suction-cupping Crane's face again, and its sides blocked his peripheral vision, and he could feel the slick layer of water between his skin and the neoprene wet suit. When he kicked himself away from the head that sat on top of the spire, his fins propelled him well back, so that the head was now just the bumpy top of the column in the murky water.

Breathing fast through the regulator, he thrashed spasmodically away through the dirty cold water.

Okay, he thought nervously, think. What did I get out of that? I learned that my father killed Bugsy Siegel, who was apparently King before him. But what do I do now? Am I supposed to … what, put poisoned sugar in my father's coffee or something?

Whatever had happened here today, it was clearly over, and he turned and started to swim back the way he'd come. His left leg was feeling tight-strung, and every time he breathed now he could hear a ringing metallic broong in the tank, a sure sign that he was low on air.

He arched his back upward, ready to ascend to the surface—and saw the silhouettes of two divers above him. Both carried spear guns.

And both had obviously just now become aware of him; they curled downward in the water, extending the guns at him.

Crane jerked in horrified surprise and started to thrash around, hoping to kick his way fast down to the deeper, darker water, but an instant later the spears punched him.

One wrenched his head around as it tore off his mask, and the other had hit the buckle and heavy web fabric of his weight belt; he could feel that that one had cut him.

Its barbs had caught in the skin of his torn wet suit, and he could feel it being tugged upward; if it tore free, the man would yank the tethered spear back, reload, and fire again. The other diver was probably already pulling in his own spear, perhaps had already retrieved it and reloaded.

Crane fumbled at his belt and the shaft of the snagged spear, and then he found the spear's tether and pulled at it, dragging himself up toward the diver.

Crane's eyes were open, but his mask was gone. He could see nothing in the murky water, and had to exhale through his nose like a novice. Over his panic he was peripherally aware of the music again, "Begin the Beguine," and of laughter and loud talking.

Then, even without a mask, Crane saw the blurry bulk of the diver above him, and at the same moment the tether went slack in his hands; the man had let go of the spear gun and would now probably come in close with a knife to finish Crane off.

The man was close—only a couple of yards away.

Without thinking, Crane dragged his hand back down through the water and grabbed again at his belt—and Siegel's .45 was there. He pulled it free, thumbing back the hammer as he thrust it up through the water and pointed it at the looming figure whose agitation of the water he could now feel, and he pulled the trigger.

The gun actually fired, though Crane saw no flash, and the underwater shot sounded like a loud, hoarse shout.

Blurrily he saw the body above him convulse in the water.

Christ, I've hurt him, maybe killed him, Crane thought dizzily. How could I have known a .45 would shoot underwater?

He heard a muted crack then, and the mask strap tugged at his throat—the other diver had fired his spear again, and had again hit Crane's mask, which was now broken and swinging loosely below his right ear.

With his free hand Crane reached up and gripped the shaft of the spear. With his other hand he raised the automatically recocked .45.

His eyes were straining through the cloudy water as the fast bubbles from his nose churned in front of his face—and all at once he was again seeing through his false right eye.

From against a black background that might have been the night sky, a whitely luminous figure was moving toward him. Like a double-exposure photograph, it was a scuba diver with mask and fins but was also a robed, bearded King, and the object it held out before itself was at once a spear gun and a scepter.

Crane raised his right arm, seeing it draped in a baggy sleeve as well as cased in black neoprene, and though he felt the grip of a .45 automatic, he seemed to be holding out a golden chalice.

His tank was ringing with each breath—broong, broong—and it was taking effort now to pull air into his lungs through the regulator.

You have to shoot, he told himself over the shrill, despairing wail in his head. You have to squeeze the trigger and kill another man—and maybe the gun won't shoot a second time underwater anyway.

The double-exposure figure was almost upon him. If the gun did fire, Crane could not possibly miss.

He pulled the trigger, and again the water shook to the short, hard shout of the report—and abruptly he could see only the blur of cloudy water in front of his left eye.

He kicked away, pulling the spear along with him; the only drag on the spear was the inertia of an unencumbered spear gun, and he felt safe in tucking the .45 back into his torn weight belt.

His air was just about entirely gone, and the rented tank had a simple K-valve, with no reserve-air mechanism. He needed to get up right now.

He looked up and extended the spear over his head and began to kick upward. Without the mask he couldn't see how fast his bubbles were rising, and he had no idea how deep he might be, so against the urgency of his laboring lungs he made himself kick slowly.

If there was any air at all left in the tank now, his lungs didn't have the strength to suck it out—but he kept the regulator clamped in his teeth to help resist the increasing spasmodic urge to inhale lake water.

He was exhaling steadily through his nose, but there wasn't much air left in his lungs. Surely I can hold my breath now, he thought desperately. If the goddamn tank's empty, there's no pressure to pop a lung!

But he remembered seeing a diver surface once with a ruptured lung, the face mask opaque with bloody froth, and he kept on exhaling.

I'm going downward, he thought in sudden, pure panic. I've been kicking myself straight down. It's the bottom I'm going to hit, not the surface.

He paused, his heart pounding, and he stared down past his fins to see if the water was brighter in that direction—and suddenly his ears were out of the water.

He yanked his head back, spat out the regulator mouthpiece, and for half a minute just hung at the surface and stared into the blue sky and gasped huge lungfuls of hot dry air. If there's bad guys on a boat nearby, he thought, let 'em shoot me. At least I'll die with oxygen in my blood.

Nobody shot at him. After a while he fished up the BCD mouthpiece and inflated the thing enough so that he could float without using his hands or feet to tread water.

When he reached up and peeled off the wet suit hood, he heard his name being shouted across the water. He turned around. There was Deadman's Island, and there, perhaps a hundred yards away, was the speedboat, with Mavranos standing up behind the windshield.

Crane waved his free hand. "Arky!" he yelled hoarsely.

The boat roared, turned its bow toward him, and began to increase in size, rising and falling and throwing spray out to the sides.

He hoped Mavranos could handle the boat well enough not to run him down—especially since Mavranos was looking off to the starboard and pointing at something.

Crane blinked water out of his eye and looked more closely. Mavranos was pointing his revolver at something.

Crane twisted his head around in that direction and saw another boat, further away, with a couple of figures standing up in it.

Then Mavranos had arrived and had spun the boat out in a spray-flinging halt, blocking Crane's view of the other boat.

"In, Pogo!"

Mavranos had flung an end of rope over the side, and Crane grabbed it and pulled and kicked, and at the expense of all his remaining strength he managed to clamber aboard even with his tank and weight belt still on.

"You take the gun," Mavranos said, shoving the revolver into Crane's shaking, dripping hand. "I'm getting us out of here."

Crane obediently tried to hold the gun up and aimed at the men in the distant boat. "Who," he gasped, "are they?"

"I don't know." Mavranos sat down in the pilot seat and shoved the throttle forward. "Their boss and another guy went in the water with spear guns a little after you went in," he shouted over the roar of the engine, "and I looked at them and they looked at me, but neither of us had any real excuse to mess with the other—but they got real agitated just now when one of them, their boss, I guess, came back up."

He took one hand off the wheel to point, and Crane let himself glance away from the other boat long enough to see the hooded and masked head bobbing inertly on the surface of the water behind them. Mavranos's wake rippled under the head just then, and it rocked as loosely as a floating basketball.

"They don't know if he's dead," called Mavranos. "We want to be well away before they make up their minds what to do."

The distant boat seemed to be moving now, but Mavranos had a good head start, and the men in the other boat would probably stop to pull the floating body aboard.

Crane let his quivering arm lower the gun, and after just sitting and panting for a dozen bouncing jumps over the waves, he got up on his knees and popped open the release buckle of the weight belt … and then, though he could feel hot blood leaking across his skin under the torn wet suit, he stared for several seconds at the rough object the belt had been holding against him.

It was recognizably a semiautomatic pistol, but the wooden grips were gone, and the slide was rusted solid with the frame, and crusty brown corrosion had narrowed the muzzle to a rough-edged little bore that a .22 round wouldn't fit through.

He put it down carefully on the pebbled white plastic deck and after a moment remembered his cut side and reached for the backpack harness release buckle.

Under the neoprene skin, blood had blotted down his leg nearly as far as the knee and had gorily soaked his crotch, but the cut itself, though long and ragged, wasn't deep; when he tied the sleeves of his shirt around his waist, balling up the bulk of the shirt over the cut, the cloth didn't seem to be absorbing much blood.

He picked up the decayed gun and then dizzily groped his way forward and collapsed into the seat beside Mavranos. The lake breeze was wonderfully cool on his sweaty chest and in his wet hair.

"That's—that was their boss, all right," he said loudly, "and I believe he is dead. The lake won't contain a dead would-be King's head. If I'd died down there, my head'd be poking out."

Mavranos glanced at him with one eyebrow raised over a squint. "You kill the other guy, too?"

"I—yeah, I think so." Crane was shivering now.

"With what? Your knife?"

"Uh … with this."

Mavranos glanced down at the rusted chunk of metal on Crane's lap, and his eyes widened. "That's a gun, isn't it? What did you do, hit 'em with it?"

Crane was pressing his side above the bump of his pelvis. His cut was starting to ache, and he wondered if Lake Mead water was particularly infectious. "I ought to try to eat something," he said. "I'll tell you all about it, over dinner back in Vegas. Right now let's return this boat and get the hell out of these mountains. The wet suit's too full of blood to turn back in to the shop, and the weight belt's got a spear tear in it—I'll tie the whole lot of gear together and sink it before we get in. The dive shop can put it on my Visa."

Mavranos shook his head and spat over the side. "The way this goddamn royal family throws money around."

As Mavranos backed the Suburban out of the marina parking space and clanked it into drive, he paused, then pointed ahead through the cracked, dusty windshield.

"Look at that, Pogo," he said.

Crane shifted on the seat and stared at the opposite row of parked cars baking in the sun. Three were white El Camino pickups.

"You wanna go see if the El C is busted off their emblems?"

"No," Crane said, wearing a souvenir Lake Mead sweat shirt now but still feeling shaky. "No, let's just get out of here."

"I don't think we need to check, at that," said Mavranos. He drove forward and rocked the truck down the ramp to the road. A sign said that Lakeshore Road was to the right, and he spun the wheel that way. "I think you killed the King of the Amino Acids."

In the parking lot of the Fashion Show Mall across the Strip from the Desert Inn, the raggedy man watched the parked camper and tugged at the forefinger of his left hand and wondered when he would get something to eat today.

He couldn't get the free shrimp cocktails anymore at the Lady Luck up on Third Street by the Continental Trailways bus depot—a waiter there had given him five dollars and told him they'd call the cops if he ever showed up again, looking the way he did and smelling so bad—but Dondi Snayheever could still get plenty of free popcorn at the Slots of Fun on the Strip.

And at the many cheap buffets and breakfasts all over town he had run into specimens that looked far worse than he did.

He was good at begging, too, it turned out. The shadowy, mechanically moving people would often, if briefly, become real Persons when they approached him; and then it would be Strength with her humbled lion, or the Hermit, or the naked hermaphrodite that was the World, or the Lovers, if it was a couple, who dropped gold coins into the palm of his hot, lean right hand. The Persons quickly disappeared after that, leaving in their places the little shadow people, who even with their dim, papery faces managed to express vague puzzlement and distaste and surprise at what they'd done, and the gold coins turned into mere quarters and chips, but he could spend the stuff. Probably more easily than he could spend real gold coins.

He knew what cliff face it was that he was destined to dance on soon, on this coming Friday, Good Friday—he had seen a picture of it, a postcard in a rack in a souvenir store—but he still had to find his mother.

And kill his treacherous father.

That last was going to be hard, since his father could change bodies now. Snayheever had been watching the little figures on the trapezes in Circus Circus yesterday, and he had suddenly been talking to his father—gumby gumby, pudding and pineal—but the guards there had made him leave, and he hadn't stayed in contact long enough to work out where his father actually, physically was.

The fingers of his right hand were still in under the dirty bandage that wrapped his left hand, wiggling the cold left forefinger.

He had seen a man leave the camper this morning, and he was pretty sure that it was his father. The man had been dressed in a white leather jacket with sequins on it, and high white boots, and his hair had been shellacked into an impressive pompadour, but before Snayheever had been able to come shuffling across the parking lot to him, he had got into a cab and left. And now he must be aware of Snayheever's presence here, for he was staying away.

He won't come back until I leave, Snayheever reasoned. He thinks he can drive away then, and ditch me again. But I'll put a homing device on his truck, so I can always know where he is.

The finger popped free at last, with no pain at all but with a bit of a smell. He pulled it out of the bandage and looked at it, and saw that it was black. Perhaps I'm becoming a Negro, he thought.

He shuffled over to the truck, cleaving his way through the thick air by making swimming motions with his hands, and he crouched by the rear bumper and wedged the finger tightly in behind the license plate.

Free to leave now, he began swimming away across the parking lot in the direction of Slots of Fun.

CHAPTER 41: Bolt-Hole and Hidey-Hole

On Monday morning Crane sat in a motel room off Paradise and stared at the telephone. He shivered in the breeze from the rackety air conditioner, and he pressed the bandage over his hip-bone, wondering if he should change it again.

Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since the spear had cut his side, but the wound was still bleeding—not a lot, but every time he untucked his shirt and peeled back the bandage, he saw fresh red blood on the gauze.

And his scalp and his scarred ankle itched, and his right eye socket throbbed—but while the muscles of his arms and legs should have been aching from yesterday's exertions in the lake, instead he felt altogether stronger, springier, than he had in years.

Mavranos was sitting in a chair by the window, rubbing a finger over the flimsy paper one of the Sausage McMuffins with Eggs had been wrapped in, and then he licked the re-coagulating cheese off his finger. He swallowed, though he apparently had to rotate his head to do it.

"Back of my throat feels like it's dry, no matter how much I swallow," he said irritably. "Even drinking water doesn't help." He looked at Crane, who was still pressing his side. "Cut still bleeding?"

"Probably," Crane said.

"Well, it's right where Snayheever's bullet tore you. Place ain't gettin' a chance to heal."

Crane sipped his coffee. Mavranos of course had brought in the ice chest and was working on a beer. "The Fisher King's supposed to be wounded," Crane said. "Maybe this is a good sign."

"That's a healthy attitude. If it ever does heal up, you can stab your leg again." Mavranos looked at the clock radio on the nightstand. "Your man probably just wanted to get rid of you."

Since midafternoon yesterday Crane had been calling local Tarot readers and New Age occultist shops, and finally this morning he had been referred to a bookseller in San Francisco who specialized in antique Tarot decks.

The man had at first tried to interest Crane in some of the decks that had been reprinted in Europe in 1977, which apparently had been declared the honorary six hundredth anniversary of playing cards, but when Crane repeated the name of the deck he was interested in, and told the man some of the things Spider Joe had said, the bookseller had paused for so long that Crane had wondered if he had hung up. He had then got Crane's phone number and promised to call him back.

"Maybe," Crane said now. "Hosin' me, maybe." He wondered if the man had given the motel room's phone number to some terrible Tarot Secret Police, and if shortly there would be a hard knock at the door.

The phone rang instead, and Crane picked it up.

"Is this," said the bookseller's voice, "the gentleman who was asking about an old Tarot deck?"

"Yes," Crane said.

"Very good. Sorry for the delay—I had to wait for one of the employees to get back from her break, and I didn't want to discuss this over the store phone. I'm in a phone booth right now. Uh—yes, I know what deck you're talking about. It didn't ring a bell at first because it's not sought by collectors and isn't even considered an antique deck. No versions of it that survive are older than the 1930s, though the designs do seem to go way back, possibly antedating, as the name would imply, the recently rediscovered twenty-three cards known as the Lombardy I cards, the owner of which chooses to remain anonymous. Mostly these cards are used now by a few avant-garde psychoanalysts, who don't wish that fact to be known. Not exactly sanctioned by the AMA, hmm?"

"Psychoanalysts?"

"So I am given to understand. Powerful symbols, you know, effective in reviving catatonics and so forth. Equivalent of electroshock therapy in some cases."

Over the phone Crane heard the booming rattle of a truck driving past the man's phone booth.

"Uh," the man said when he could again be heard, "I gather you are not yourself a psychoanalyst, but that you know something about this deck, these so-called Lombardy Zeroth cards. Did you know that there is no one, right now, painting them? At one time there was a sort of guild of a few men who … could paint them, but since the war it has been a capital crime in several European countries even to own a deck. Nothing on the law books, you understand, but a capital crime nonetheless. Yes indeed. But I do happen to know of a source. You realize this would involve … a good deal of money."

"Yes," Crane said.

"Of course, of course. Well, if you could bring a deposit of half what I estimate it will cost, I can approach the owner—an elderly widowed woman in Manhattan, who keeps the cards in a"—he chuckled uncomfortably—"a lead box in a safe-deposit vault. I'd need … say, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, preferably in cash. She owns twenty cards, from a deck painted in Marseilles in 1933, and—"

"No," said Crane into the phone, "I need a full deck." And by this Wednesday, he thought.

"My dear sir, there simply aren't any. Even in the Visconti and Visconti-Sforza collections, for instance, there are no surviving examples of the Devil or the Tower cards. The … shock treatment was too severe, I suppose. I can say with confidence that if any complete Lombardy Zeroth decks are in existence anywhere, they would be in the hands of old families in Europe, and not for sale, or even acknowledgment, under any circumstances."

"Bullshit," said Crane, "I've seen two different complete decks, one in 1948 and one in 1969. And I've talked to the man who painted one of them."

There was a long silence from the other end of the line. Finally the man said, quietly, "Was he all right?"

"Well, he was blind." Crane was silent now for a few seconds. "He, uh, cut out his eyes twenty years ago."

"Did he indeed. And you've seen the cards, a full deck. Are you all right?"

Crane pressed his side and enviously watched Mavranos sip beer. "No."

"Trust me," said the voice on the telephone, "it won't help you to look at those things again. Absorb yourself with crossword puzzles and daytime soap operas. Actually, obtaining a lobotomy might be your wisest course."

The line clicked and went dead.

"No luck," Mavranos observed as Crane hung up the phone.

"No," Crane said. "He said he might be able to get me part of a deck for half a million dollars. And then he told me I should get a lobotomy."

Mavranos laughed and stood up, then braced himself on the wall and felt the bandanna around his throat. He looked angrily at his beer can. "These things just aren't working, Pogo."

"Maybe you're not drinking them quite fast enough."

"Possible." Mavranos tottered to the ice chest and crouched to lift out another. "Your dad's got a deck."

"Sure, but even if I could find them, he couldn't use them if I had them, could he?"

Mavranos blinked. "Guess not. Can't have archaic and eat it, too—har-har-har." He popped open the fresh beer. "But he had another deck once."

"The deck he cut out my eye with, yeah. He probably didn't use it again, not with my blood on it."

"You figure he threw it out?"

"Well, no. I wonder if you'd even dare burn a deck of those things. I suppose he …"

Crane stood up and crossed to the window. Outside, palm trees waved in the breeze over the morning traffic.

"I suppose he hid it," he said softly, "with the other things that might otherwise be used to hurt him."

"Yeah? Where would he hide such stuff?"

Crane remembered the last day he had spent with his father, in April of 1948. They had had breakfast at the Flamingo, but before they had gone inside, his father had put something into a hole he'd knocked into the stucco under the side of the casino's front steps. Crane could still remember the rayed suns and stick figures scratched into the stucco around the hole.

But that old casino wasn't there anymore. That whole building, and the Champagne Tower at its south end, had been knocked down sometime in the 60s. A big glass and steel high-rise stood there now, with the present-day casino, much bigger, as the ground floor.

Still, it was his father's place, the old man's castle in the wasteland—his tower.

Crane shrugged. "Let's go look around the Flamingo."

Al Funo tapped his finger against the cab windshield. "That blue truck," he told the driver. "Follow it—I'll make it worth your while, even if you've got to follow it back to L.A."

The Glock 9-millimeter, fully loaded with eighteen rounds of Remington 147-grain subsonics, hung in his shoulder holster, and the oblong jewelry box was in his jacket pocket. Time to settle Scott Crane's hash, he thought. Give him the good news—he patted his jacket pocket—and the bad news—and he touched the lump under his armpit.

"I can't go outside the city limits," said the cabdriver.

"Then you just better hope they don't go outside the city limits," Funo said in a hard voice.

"Shit," said the driver derisively.

Funo frowned, but forced himself to relax and watch the truck ahead. He would take a bus home to Los Angeles this afternoon. The Dodge he'd been sleeping in was no good.

Saturday morning, when he'd started the car in the Marie Callender's parking lot, the engine had made the most horrible clattering din he'd ever heard; it had quieted down, though, and he'd been able to drive it until last night—when he went over a speed bump in the parking lot of the Lucky supermarket on Flamingo Road, and the terrible noise chattered out from under the hood again, and the engine had simply stopped for all time. He had managed to push the old Dodge into a parking space, and he spent the night in it right there.

And then this morning, while he'd been away for breakfast, somebody had broken into the car, had popped the lock right out of the driver's side door! Nothing had proved to be missing. To judge from the scattering of dust bunnies, the intruders had groped around under the front seat, but Funo hadn't been keeping anything there.

Funo was bobbing slightly on the cab seat now, staring at the blue truck ahead. Settle his hash, he thought tensely, pop a cap, drop the hammer, sell him the farm, hand him his ass, feed him his shorts.

Mavranos parked the truck in the multi-story parking structure behind the old Flamingo buildings, and he and Crane got out and took the elevator down to street level and then walked around to the Strip side face of what was now the vast Flamingo Hilton Casino Hotel.

North of the wide casino doors a new front was being added onto the casino building, and a chain-link fence separated the Strip traffic from the dusty raw dirt under the new glass facade, over the top of which marched a procession of two-dimensional pink glass flamingos, some still with the manufacturer's stickers on them. Men in hard hats were hammering up wooden forms for concrete across the dirt, and Crane and Mavranos stood on the sidewalk outside the fence and leaned against the chain-link to let the streams of tourists walk past.

"Where was it your daddy hid his secrets?" Mavranos asked. A fat woman sweating in an orange sunsuit stared at him as she swung past.

"About where that guy's setting up rebar," said Crane. "But the ground's been planed off. There's nothing left from the old days."

Mavranos yawned a couple of times, frowning as if the yawns weren't catching. "Well, it ain't likely that any of the reconstruction would have caught him by surprise. Where would he have moved his hidey-hole to?"

Hidey-hole, Crane thought.

Bolt-hole and hidey-hole.

He stepped back from the fence. "To some place that hasn't changed since the old days. Let's go look at the original Flamingo building—what they call the Oregon Building now."

They retraced their steps to the front entrance and went inside and threaded their way through the cold, dark, clanging casino, between the banks of slot machines and the closely spaced tables—Mavranos craning his neck to see cards on the Blackjack layouts and no doubt wishing he'd brought along some kind of goldfish—and out the back doors into the hot glare of sun on splashing water and bone white deck and oiled, tanned bodies.

And there, across the glittering pool and framed by the curved trunks of palm trees, stood the long, low building that Crane viscerally remembered as the Flamingo.

It was painted pale tan now instead of pistachio green, and little wrought-iron false balconies had been bolted across the lower halves of the windows, and the narrow terrace on which he had seemed to stand with Benjamin Siegel yesterday was walled in now—though he thought he could still see its outline—and to the right the sky was blocked by another high-rise wing of the Flamingo Hilton, and to the left loomed a tall crane and beyond that the pagoda-roofed towers of the Imperial Palace; but this neglected building down here at the feet of the giants was the heart of the Flamingo, the heart of the Strip, the heart of Las Vegas.

"Your place, Dad," he said softly, stepping down to the concrete deck and starting around the right side of the pool.

He and Mavranos pushed open the narrow glass doors of the Oregon Building and wandered around in the quiet green-carpeted rotunda. Crane rapped on a wall, noting the cold silence of marble under the wallpaper. Siegel had built his castle solidly.

They took the elevator to the fourth floor, but one of the double doors to Siegel's penthouse suite had a brass plaque on it that read "Presidential Suite," and Crane decided that whatever high roller was renting the place wouldn't let a couple of bums come in and start prying shelves out of bookcases.

Back down the elevator they went, and out through the back doors to a sloping lawn with a pink metal flamingo standing on it. Crane remembered a parking lot back here, and a couple of bungalows with nothing but desert beyond, but now there was a driveway and the Arizona Building, with the new parking structure peeping up over its roof.

"Dig under that there flamingo?" suggested Mavranos.

Crane was looking back up at Siegel's penthouse. "In the … vision, or hallucination, he had a ladder hidden behind a bookcase," he said thoughtfully, "leading down. That would wind up in the basement, I guess." He pointed at a driveway off to the left that led down to an underground delivery and service entrance. "Let's go in there."

"Hope they aren't rough on trespassers in this town," Mavranos growled as they trudged forward.

"Act drunk, and tell 'em you were looking for the men's room."

"I think I am drunk. And I wouldn't mind finding a men's room."

Mavranos shook a Camel out of a pack and lit it, walking backward to shield the match flame. Then he waved the pack at Crane.

"No, thanks," Crane said.

"You haven't had a cigarette since you climbed out of the lake," Mavranos observed. "You on that wagon, too?"

Crane shrugged. "Just haven't wanted one. I'm getting healthy, I think."

The descending driveway ramp led them out of the sunlight to a dock area set back in under the building. A broad conveyor belt ran up to the surface of the dock, and big boxes of Soft Blend bathroom tissue were stacked on the extended forks of a little parked power-lift truck.

Up on the dock level a green wooden counter window opened in the far wall, with a no solicitation sign posted on the inner wall. No one was at the counter, so Crane stepped around a plastic mop bucket and hurried up the three steps. Mavranos was right behind him, cursing under his breath.

They were at the south end of a long corridor with a lot of wheeled blue bins parked along the wall. White-painted pipes were hung under the ceiling, making the corridor seem to Crane to be roofed with bamboo.

"The ladder would have come down … somewhere this way," he said, starting down the hall and trying to keep the shape and size of the building in his head.

Every door they passed had "NO EXIT" stenciled on it in red, but at one of them Crane paused, and then tried the knob. The door opened, and they stepped into a high-ceilinged room in which thrummed an enormous water heater. Pipes and gauges made it necessary to duck, in order to walk around, but Crane hunched and sidestepped his way to the very back of the room—and for several seconds he just stared at the wooden ladder that was bolted to the concrete wall and disappeared into a dark shaft above.

Crane was certain that it led all the way up to the bookshelf in Siegel's suite.

It genuinely wasn't a hallucination, he thought. I really did talk with the ghost of Bugsy Siegel yesterday.

At last he tore his gaze away from the ladder and looked around the room. "This here is all too new," he called quietly to Mavranos, who was still standing by the door. "But I swear we're on the right track."

Mavranos squinted at the plywood and concrete and throbbing machinery and sniffed the disinfectant-scented air. "If you say so. Let's get out of here, okay?"

Crane climbed out from behind all the machinery and pushed the door open and peeked around it, but there was no one in sight. He stepped out, followed by Mavranos, and they walked further down the corridor.

The hall was more blockily shadowed now and had narrowed almost to a tunnel, with pipes running along the walls as well as overhead, and the green linoleum floor was cracked and water-stained, but at the same time Crane sensed that these walls and ceiling were older and more solidly built. As if to confirm it, he noticed that the big dark green cans stacked on an ankle-high shelf along the western wall were labeled as Civil Defense-certified-safe drinking water. Apparently this older section was stout enough to have been designated an official bomb shelter.

He remembered the marble walls behind the wallpaper overhead.

"Siegel had this tunnel built," he said softly as he shuffled along, bracing himself against the pipes and watching by the broken light of occasional caged bulbs to avoid clanking his head against any of the down-hanging valves. "I believe we're in the onetime King's emergency escape route."

Bolt-hole and hidey-hole, he thought.

And then it was Mavranos who saw it.

A red jackknife handle stood out of the wall ahead of them, and Mavranos pointed at it. "I guess this is where he practiced knife throwing," he said.

The knife handle protruded from a foot-wide circular patch of newer cement, and Crane shivered when he saw the scratched figures in the old bricks around it: suns and crescent moons and stick figures carrying swords.

Mavranos had idly taken hold of the knife's handle and was pulling at it, but it didn't budge. He swore and tugged harder, even bracing his leg against the wall, and finally had to let go and wipe his hand on his jeans.

"That's in there solid," he said breathlessly.

Feeling as if he were taking part in an old, old ritual, Crane stepped forward and closed his right hand around the now-sweaty plastic handle. It seemed to be a Swiss army knife.

He tugged, and the jackknife came out of the cement patch so easily that he rang a water can against the far wall with the butt of the knife.

"I loosened it," said Mavranos.

Crane kept his right eye firmly closed. He didn't want to see the jackknife as some kind of medieval sword.

He was already hearing things.

With his good eye he looked up and down the hall, but there was no one in sight besides himself and Mavranos, so he ignored the sound of the Andrews Sisters singing "Rum and Coca-Cola," and the rattle of chips and laughter, that seemed to echo from just around some unimaginable corner.

He swung the knife back to the east wall and pressed the point against the newer cement. The blade cut through as easily as it would cut cardboard, and after a few moments of sawing—while Mavranos stared—Crane had cut the disk of cement free and pushed it inside.

"Do you happen to hear … music?" Crane asked.

"I hear nothin' but my heart, and I don't want to have to start worrying about it. Why? Do you hear music?"

Crane didn't answer but peered into the hole.

The space inside the wall was about a cubic yard in volume. Dimly he could see a very old and fragile-looking Tarot card, the Tower, tacked to the far wall of the little chamber. The card was upside down.

He closed the knife and put it into his pocket, smiled nervously at Mavranos, and then reached into the hole.

He groped around carefully in the cavity and found a little cloth bag that proved to be full of teeth and a small cracked mirror in a tortoiseshell frame—what must it one time have reflected, or failed to reflect?—and in a bottom corner there were three little hard lumps that might have been pomegranate seeds; and finally his groping fingers found, under everything, wedged flat against the floor of the space, the wooden box he remembered.

He pried it free, lifted it out of the hole, and opened it, and he shuddered to see again the innocent-looking plaid backs of the cards.

He turned over the first one. It was the Page of Cups, a young man standing on a rippled cliff edge holding a cup, and the corner was lightly stained. Hesitantly Crane licked that corner of the card, and he thought he faintly tasted salt and iron.

The Andrews Sisters started on "Sonny Boy:"

"Whe-e-en there are gray skies

I don't mind the gray skies …"

"We're out of here," Crane told Mavranos hoarsely. He left everything inside the hole but the wooden box, which he tucked inside his Levi's jacket.

A tall brown man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a white pith helmet and Sony Walkman earphones was smiling broadly and sweeping the lens of a video camera across the back lawn of the Oregon Building. Gleaming sunglasses hid his eyes.

"The basement service entrance, under the building on the south side," he said, still grinning, into the video camera's microphone. "Now's the time."

"Gotcha," came a voice over the earphones.

The tall man swung the camera toward the dock area under the building, catching in its focus a young man in a dark suit who was standing uncertainly by the stack of bathroom tissue boxes. The young man held something dark and oblong in his right hand, and the man with the camera instinctively felt for the bulk of the automatic in its holster on his right hip, under the untucked shirttail. He was showing a lot of white teeth in his smile now.

"Now's the time," he repeated.

Two men in unspecific tan uniforms were pushing a Dumpster down the paved ramp, and a station wagon with Montana license plates was weaving along the driveway between the Oregon and Arizona buildings.

One of the men with the Dumpster let go of it to approach the young man in the suit. Their conversation was brief, and the smiling man with the camera heard none of it, but a moment later the man in the suit was doubled over, his chin by his knees, and the two uniformed men grabbed him, took a gun away from him, and tossed him into the Dumpster and began pushing it back up the ramp.

The station wagon had stopped. Its tailgate was down, and the man in the suit was quickly bundled out of the Dumpster and into the car. The uniformed men climbed into the back with him and pulled the tailgate shut.

The smiling man had tucked the video camera under his arm and strolled across the grass to the car. He took off his white pith helmet and got in on the passenger side, still smiling.

The station wagon started forward again, turned east past the parking structure and around west onto Flamingo Road, signaling for every turn and proceeding at an inconspicuous speed.

They had thrown a blanket over Al Funo's head, and he could feel the bite of a narrow nylon tie-wrap drawn tight around his wrists behind his back; his ankles were bound together, too, doubtless with another tie-wrap.

His heart was thumping, but he could breathe again, and he was grinning toughly against the scraped metal bed of the station wagon. You've always lived by your wits, old son, he told himself, and you'll find some way to talk or fight or run your way out of this. Who are these guys anyway? Friends of Reculver and the fat man? Damn, and I almost had Scott Crane at last. I wonder if these guys mean to keep Crane's gold chain. They've got another think coming, if they do.

One of his captors spoke. "We got time for lunch before Flores comes in from Salt Lake. I never got breakfast."

"Sure," said another one from the front seat. "Where do you figure?"

"Let's go to Margarita's," said the first speaker.

Funo didn't appreciate being ignored. "The Dumpster and the uniforms was good," he said from under the blanket, proud of the ironic humor in his voice. "Like having a pencil behind your ear and carrying a clipboard—hey-presto, you're invisible."

"Shut up, Fucko," said the man in the front seat. "That's in the Frontier," he went on.

"So?" said the man sitting over Funo. "It happens to have the best chimichangas in town."

"Bullshit," said somebody else.

"There's a guy back there in the Flamingo basement," said Funo with a chuckle, "who ought to buy you guys lunch. You saved his life. I was gonna give him that gold chain and then drop the hammer on his ass."

"Shut up, Fucko."

Funo was glad the blanket was over him, for suddenly he could feel his face reddening. Good God, he'd said he wanted to give Crane a gold chain, and then he'd said something about "the hammer," and "his ass." What if these men thought he wanted to sodomize Crane?

"I—I went to bed with the guy's wife—" Funo began desperately.

"Shut up, Fucko." Someone knocked him stingingly on the back of the head with a finger knuckle. "And they make their own tortillas right there, you can see the guy making them."

"I just want a burger somewhere," said the man in the front seat.

By the steady roar of the engine and the smoothness of the ride, Funo could tell that they were on a highway; he couldn't tell which one, but all highways in Las Vegas lead quickly out into desert.

One of these men might be the person who he had all along known was out there in the world somewhere, the person who would one day kill him, become the most important person in Al Funo's life.

And now—now!—they wouldn't even talk to him!

Every time he tried to initiate a dialogue, sincerely and with no judgmental attitude, they rapped him on the head and called him Fucko. It was a worse thing to be called than fucker. At least fucker implied that you had had sex. Fucko sounded like the name of a clown.

At last the car was slowing, and soon Funo heard gravel grinding under the tires.

He braced himself. When the car came to a stop, he would lash upward and back with his head, hoping to hit the face of the man over him; with the blanket off his head he might be able to grab the man's gun and then pull his bound hands far enough around one side of his body to be able to shoot.

The car rocked to a halt, and he used the rebound of the shock absorbers to get more force into his move—

But the man who had been above him had apparently shifted over against the back door since last speaking, and Funo's head just brushed the car's ceiling before he tumbled back down onto his face again.

The men might not even have noticed the action. Funo heard the tailgate swung down, and even under the blanket he smelled the spice of the dry desert air, as workmanlike hands took hold of his ankles and dragged him out; other hands gripped his upper arms, and then he was lowered onto the sand, and the blanket was snatched off his head.

He twisted his face up from the sand and blinked around in the sudden glare. The men had stepped back. One of the uniformed fellows was squinting away, apparently watching the road. The tall man in the Hawaiian shirt had his pith helmet on and was smiling with all his white teeth as he jacked a round into Funo's own gun.

"There's something you should probably know about me," Funo began in a confident tone, but the man in the pith helmet just kept smiling and aimed the muzzle into Funo's face, and Funo realized that the man was about to simply kill him, with no discussion at all.

"For what, f-f-for wh-what?" Funo choked, thrashing on the dry dirt. "My n-name's Alfred F-F-Funo, tell me your name at least, we're imp-p-p-portant to each other, at least t-t-tell me your n-n-n-name!"

The hard boom of the gunshot rolled away over the bright desert, startling tiny lizards into brief, short darts across the sand.

"Puddin' Tame," said the cocaine dealer, wiping off the gun with a handkerchief and then tossing it down beside the bound body. "Ask me again and I'll tell you the same."

CHAPTER 42: Beam Me Up, Scotty

On Tuesday morning Mavranos dropped Crane off in front of the liquor store on Flamingo Road and then drove around the block to park the truck in the back lot and just sit and watch.

Inside the liquor store Crane noticed that the clerk at the register wasn't the same one who had been working last Thursday, and anyway, Crane's black eye had by now faded to the faintest yellow tinge. He was able to buy two six-packs of Budweiser without getting a second glance.

The pay phone on the back wall rang as he reached out to push open the parking lot door, and it occurred to him that, for plausibility, he ought to be carrying an opened beer when he approached the Dumpster in the back lot.

He reached into the paper bag as he stepped out into the heat, and tugged a can free and popped it open. Chilly foam burst up around his forefinger.

His hand was halfway up to his mouth, the wet finger extended, before he remembered his new resolves, and remembered, too, the ringing pay phone—and he lowered his hand and wiped the beer foam off on his shirt.

The Lowballers were again hunkered down in a circle in front of the Dumpster, but Crane didn't see the very old man they had called Doctor Leaky.

He didn't recognize any of them as Wiz-Ding, the young man who had given him the black eye, either.

"It's just me, the beer man," he said with forced cheer when a couple of the ragged young men looked up at his approach.

" 'Bout time," commented one of the players, holding out his free hand without looking away from his cards.

Crane pulled another beer loose and put it in the hand, then set the bag down on the hot pavement. "Where's my old pal Wiz-Ding?" he asked.

The man who had spoken looked up at him now. "That's right, you're the guy he hit last week, aren't you? What'd you do, put a Gypsy curse on him?"

Again Crane thought about the ringing pay phone. "No, why?"

"He got the horrors real bad that night, ran out into traffic and dived under a bus."

"Jesus." Crane tipped his opened can up to his mouth, making certain to do no more than wet his lips. "Uh," he said as if it were an afterthought or a tactful change of subject, "how about that real old guy? Doctor Leaky?"

The player's attention had returned to his cards. "Hah. You're hoping to score a big pot of flat pennies, right? He ain't here today."

Crane didn't want his next question to seem important, so he sat down lithely, scratching his hot scalp and wishing he hadn't lost his Jughead cap. "Deal me in the next hand," he said. "Does old Doctor Leaky play here steady?"

"Most days, I s'pose. Buy-in's ten bucks."

Resigning himself—and Mavranos—to an hour of wasted time, Crane suppressed a sigh and dug in his pocket.

The full moon hung in the sky to the east like the print of an ash-dusted penny on indigo velvet.

Finally the full moon, thought Diana as she glanced at it through the windshield. And our monthly cycles are matched, for whatever archaic, repulsive value that might have. Hold my hand, Mother.

The blocks around Shadow Lane and Charleston Boulevard, north of the Strip and south of Fremont Street, all seemed to be taken up with hospitals, and Diana wasted ten minutes in circling before finding a parking space in the University Medical Center parking lot. She locked the rented Ford, pushed her sunglasses up on her nose, and walked swiftly toward the gray buildings on the far side of the lot. She was wearing a loose shirt—not linen—and jeans and sneakers, in case she might have to run, and she wondered why she had not borrowed a gun from Ozzie and Scott, or even Mike Stikeleather, when she had had the chance.

Her steps were light on the radiant asphalt in her new white Nikes, and she spread out her hands in front of herself, as if surrendering to something, and tossed aside the cloud of her blond hair to look at her knuckles and wrists.

All the old scars were gone: the crescent of a dog bite, the hard line where a jackknife had unexpectedly closed, all the tiny pale graffiti of the years. This morning, rousing from yet another motel pillow wrapped in the old yellow baby blanket, her forehead had been itching, and in the bathroom mirror she had seen smooth skin where the boy in fourth grade had hit her over the left eye with a rock.

And of course she had been dreaming, for the sixth night in a row, about her mother's island, where owls hooted in the tossing, bending trees and water clattered over rocks and dogs bayed out in the darkness.

Like her skin, her memory was growing younger. On Sunday she had decided to visit Hans's grave, but after getting into a taxi, she'd discovered that she couldn't remember where he had been buried, nor even what he had looked like; and as she had sheepishly improvised some destination for the driver to take her to, she had realized with no alarm that the faces of all her long-ago lovers were likewise gone; and yesterday, after she had felt the death of the man who had been called Alfred Funo, it had occurred to her that she no longer knew anything about her onetime husband except his last name, and knew that only because it was the name on her driver's license.

But her son Scat was somewhere inside this building ahead of her, pierced through with drains and hoses, and her son Oliver was at Helen Sully's place in Searchlight, and she could remember both of them perfectly, their faces and voices and personalities; and her abandonment of them, though she had had to do it to protect the boys, had bulked constantly in her consciousness like an infected splinter. She had talked to Oliver several times on the telephone, and though Scat hadn't regained consciousness, she had called the doctor every day and had sent a cashier's check to cover Scat's treatment.

And she could remember Scott Crane. He had been with her on her mother's island in several of the dreams.

She blushed now and frowned behind her sunglasses and quickened her steps.

Three agitated old men sat at a table in the hospital cafeteria. They had been sitting there for an hour. Two of them had had to go to the men's room, and the other was wearing diapers under his high-waisted polyester pants.

Through the merry eyes of the Benet body, Georges Leon squinted sideways at his companions. Newt looked nervous, and Doctor Leaky, with his jaw of course foolishly hanging open, looked as if he'd just heard of some appalling impending threat.

Dr. Bandholtz had called at dawn, his voice both resentful and scared, and told Leon that Diana Ryan had called the hospital once again and that this time she had asked what time today she could meet with Bandholtz and actually visit her son in person.

Bandholtz was to meet her in the lobby sometime between ten and noon and, after Leon had reasoned with him, had reluctantly agreed to stop in the cafeteria first and then bring one very old man along with him when he went to see her.

Leon stared at Doctor Leaky now and thought, Vaughan, where are you when I need you?

Vaughan Trumbill had simply never come back from his last trip to go fetch Scott Crane. Leon had called Moynihan late Sunday night, but the piping voice of the Benet body had not been authoritative enough to get any information out of that damned Irish hoodlum. Moynihan had denied even ever having spoken to Benet before, and had just laughed and hung up the telephone when asked about Trumbill's whereabouts. Subsequent calls to Moynihan had gone unanswered or unreturned.

If only that Funo person had not killed the Betsy Reculver body!

Leon lifted his styrofoam cup and puckered his lips at the coffee, but it was still too hot. He put it down and sucked in a deep breath through his tension-narrowed bronchial tubes. He tugged his inhaler out of his vest pocket and took two puffs of Ventolin. It seemed to help.

The time was nearly 11:00 A.M. by the cafeteria clock. Dr. Bandholtz should be arriving before too long.

Leon hoped the police would somehow kill Doctor Leaky when they arrested him. The old body had a lot of sorcerous protections, but a hot .38 round would probably get through them.

Newt had finished his own coffee and was shakily tearing shreds of styrofoam from the edge of the cup. "He won't be able to do it," he whispered, "any more than I can fly. I'll bet you he's forgotten again. And I ain't gonna do it, Beany."

"Call me Leon, damn you." Leon leaned toward the horrible old, emasculated body that was sitting and drooling next to him. "What is it that you're going to do?" he asked once again, speaking very quietly.

This time Doctor Leaky remembered. "Kill her!" he yelled shrilly, fumbling at the high waistband of his lime green pants for the little Walther .380 automatic.

Leon jabbed his elbow into the belly of the old body that had once been his own. "Shut up, you imbecile." Then, for the benefit of anyone who might have been looking over at them, he smiled and patted Doctor Leaky's bald head.

"It's them!" Doctor Leaky choked, blinking around tearfully at the nurses and visitors. "The people in Doom Town!"

Leon gave up any hope of being inconspicuous and began to play to the audience, shape what the eventual testimonies might be. "Stop it!" he said, speaking loudly. "Your wife shot you in 1948—it's all over, she's dead—you've got to stop brooding on it!"

"My—my dingus!" Doctor Leaky exclaimed. "She shot my cock off!"

From somewhere deep in Benet's brain, not from Leon's mind at all, came the thought that these people listening would assume she had shot some man of Scottish-Russian ancestry: Dingus McCockov.

"Yes, yes," Leon said, angrily suppressing the accompanying smile and hoping that his tone sounded soothing. "It was a long time ago."

"That was real enough," Doctor Leaky went on, finally speaking at just a conversational volume. "But the cards aren't fooled by any of the rest of it. The people in Doom Town, and all the human-sacrifice statues around town. All your Fijis that died, too, they haven't changed anything." He smiled sadly. "It's still just me."

Newt's wrinkled old eyes were closed. "Beam me up, Scotty," he said softly.

The innocent cliché angered Leon. "Shut up," he said through clenched teeth. "Just shut up."

Ray-Joe Pogue carefully backed his camper-laden pickup truck into one of the spaces in the hospital parking lot, then shoved the gearshift into park, turned the engine off and tapped an inch of ash off his cigar.

The ash didn't hit the upholstery. As before, it shattered to dust in midair and swirled into the three-dimensional outline of a small fat person sitting on the passenger side of the seat.

Bloated and black and fermented, came the voice in Pogue's head, ripped to bits by coyotes and covered with sand flies. What's left of my belly looks like cooked bacon. The tattoos are a wreck, like a vandalized painting.

"You already told me your body's screwed up," said Pogue nervously.

He lied to me; he broke his promise.

"A real bastard," Pogue agreed.

He had first met the ghost this morning; it had taken the form of popcorn and cigarette butts on the asphalt outside his camper door at dawn, its voice haltingly sounding in his head, and later it had tried, unsuccessfully, to animate a sheet of the Las Vegas Sun. After about ten minutes they had settled on cigar ash as the easiest medium for its physical appearance.

I don't care if my mom's dead, said the voice in Ray-Joe Pogue's head now, just so they don't call me Ollie like Hardy.

Pogue held the door lever and stared uneasily at the churning fat person silhouette-in-ash. "I thought your name was Vaughan."

You can call me that. Or you can call me Bitin Dog. Our bodies were left in the desert. Our name is Legion.

"Like in the Bible, huh?" said Pogue. "But anyway the King is here, at this hospital?"

He is.

Pogue had a gun under his jacket, but he hoped he wouldn't need it. He took the brown plastic bottle out of the pocket of his white sequined denim jacket. "Inderal," he read off the label. "I've known musicians who take this stuff—athletes, too—to keep from getting the shakes and jitters when they have to perform. You sure it'll do, and not just mellow him out?"

He's asthmatic. It'll close his bronchial tubes.

"Asthmatic, right. Okay, you're the doctor."

Your camouflage.

"Don't worry, I didn't forget."

Before stepping out of the truck, Pogue obediently put on his Polaroid sunglasses and took off his shoes to tuck the newly bought water-filled plastic sole-liners inside.

"And I'll walk counterclockwise all the way to him," Pogue told the dim gray ghost as he put his unwieldy shoes back on, "like what you said, a windshield." Last he put on a baseball cap from the Tiara Casino, the logo of which was the best hand in Kansas City Lowball, 7-5-4-3-2 unsuited.

Inside him, said the voice in Pogue's head, there's a—a skinny man waiting to get out.

"Skinny man on deck," agreed Pogue nervously as he opened the truck door and felt the heat.

The ghost became just a pinch of grainy powder in his ear when he stepped through the doors of the hospital, and Pogue had to resist the impulse to scratch it. He hoped none of it had got into his long sideburns, where it would look like dandruff.

The ghost's voice was a buzz now, directing him down this hallway and that—and making him pause frequently to walk in a tight counterclockwise circle on the carpet—and when Pogue pushed open the cafeteria doors the ghost said, There. The man on the left at that table over there.

"Are you sure?" Pogue murmured.

The man on the left, repeated the voice.

Pogue sighed, with both tension and disappointment. He had known that the King might be in any sort of body, but it offended him that this body was so short and round and red-faced and jolly-looking. Damn me, he thought, with a beard he could pass for Santa Claus! And that's a cheap suit.

An abandoned newspaper lay on a table near the three old men, and Pogue sat down and began reading it. The cafeteria smelled like macaroni and cheese. He could simply wait until the King left and then shoot him in the parking lot, but he didn't know if he dared wait for that. The man hadn't glanced at him yet, but Pogue was afraid that if the King were to focus his eyes on him, he would see him, see him, in spite of the fact that Pogue was in effect standing on water, and had neutralized any electromagnetic emanations from his eyes behind the Polaroid lenses, and wore a disguising poker hand on his hat.

In his pocket he broke the cap off the medicine bottle and palmed one of the capsules.

Just shoot him, said the voice in his head.

Out of the corner of his eye Pogue saw the King look up, as though he'd heard the voice. Pogue's face went cold, and he felt a drop of sweat run down his ribs. He watched for any sudden movement at the King's table; if any of the three old men seemed to be going for a gun, Pogue would roll to the floor and draw his own gun. Come up shooting, and worry about getting away afterward.

"Shut—up," he murmured.

No. Shoot him now.

The King pushed back his plastic chair and stood up on ridiculous little bow-legs. He looked around the room, but his gaze swept over Pogue without stopping. Pogue's hand, still palming the capsule, was sweaty on the grip of his gun.

The King said something to his companions, and they got to their feet, too, and the three of them walked to the cafeteria doorway. They stood there, looking up and down the hall.

Pogue's back tingled with anticipation of a bullet as he stood up himself, still holding a section of the paper in his left hand, and strolled past the table the King had been sitting at.

As he passed it, his right hand broke the capsule like a little egg and shook the tiny grains into the King's coffee.

He kept walking. The only exit in front of him was the twin metal doors that led to the kitchen, so he pushed them open and walked into the steamy clatter beyond.

Go back and sit down, Your Majesty, he thought as he blundered between steam tables and people in white aprons, looking for another door out. Nothing's wrong. Sit down and finish your coffee.

Diana sat restlessly on the hospital lobby couch, and finally she put down the magazine she'd been trying to read.

Scat had been transferred to this hospital last Wednesday, and though this was the first time she had come here, she knew what room he was in. This was where she was supposed to meet Dr. Bandholtz … who was probably the only person who knew that she was alive.

Would he have sold that information? Or, more likely, would someone have learned from the police that only one person had died in the bombed apartment on Venus Avenue and then have exerted leverage on Bandholtz, who would be the likeliest to hear from her?

Her heart suddenly beating fast, she stood up and looked around the lobby. The receptionist was writing in a file, and a young couple was talking intently to a very old woman on another couch, and the young Asian woman by the door was probably just blinking at Diana because she had stood up so abruptly.

Still, she was not going to wait here obediently for Bandholtz and whatever companions he might arrive with.

She walked quickly to the elevator and tapped the up button.

Nardie Dinh waited until the elevator door had closed, then went to the one next to it and pushed its up button.

She was blinking back tears. I can do it, she told herself firmly, and I will do it. In a way it'll be self-defense, for if I'm not the Queen, I'm not anything at all. I wasn't born for it, but my damned half brother carved me into it. It'll be his fault, not mine.

In the last few days she had managed to eat several meals—mostly spinach and beans and rice, with olive oil—and had drunk several cartons of milk. She hoped she would have the strength for what she'd have to do here.

The doors slid open, and she patted the bulge under her jacket and stepped resolutely inside.

And someone was right behind her. She turned, and as the doors sighed closed she recognized Ray-Joe Pogue grinning down at her.

"I've got you!" he exclaimed joyfully. "You knew I was here? And I forgive you. Listen, Nardie, I just killed one of the King's bodies! I just heard a nurse say that an old guy who was drinking coffee in the cafeteria stopped breathing and then died of a big heart attack, ventricular fibrillation, before they could do anything with him!" He touched her shoulder. "I'm going to win, Nardie. Saturday you and I can get married."

The elevator had started moving up. She could feel her weight increase.

Nardie knew he had a gun. Well, so did she. But she doubted if either of them could draw a gun in here without being jumped by the other before the gun could be freed. And in a hand-to-hand fight he'd beat her.

He doesn't know why I'm here, she thought, where I'm going. Pretend to be giving in to him.

So she sighed and nodded, looking at his feet. "I had to fight," she said. "For my self-respect."

"And you fought well," he said, laughing. "Once or twice I thought you were going to evade me and ruin us both." He was brushing some kind of dust out of his ear.

The doors opened on the second floor, and an old woman pushing an aluminum walker hobbled in.

"I'm glad you found me," Nardie said in a small voice.

"I wasn't looking for you," the old woman snapped.

Nardie glanced up and caught her half brother's gaze. Both of them grinned—

And Nardie realized that they were sharing a joke, and that she wanted to kill Diana now, and then leave with this man, whom, after everything, she apparently still loved. She opened her mouth to tell him why she was here and ask for his help—

And only when her knuckles cracked hard into his nose and she fell back against the closing doors did she note that she did still have some willpower—in her spine, perhaps, if not in her brain.

The old woman was screaming shrilly. Pogue had tumbled into the corner, and bright red blood was spilling out from between the fingers of the hand that was clasped to his face. His eyes were still blank with pain and surprise, and Nardie turned around, forced the doors open and hurried away down the hall.

She would take the stairs up to the room where Diana Ryan's son was. She patted her hidden gun again and wondered if she had broken her knuckles. Even if she hadn't, the recoil was going to hurt. It was going to hurt badly.

She wondered if she would ever recover from it.

"You certainly don't look like you've been too sick to visit him," the nurse said coldly, standing in an almost protective posture beside Scat's bed. "You look like you've been at some kind of health resort." She looked Diana squarely in the eye then, and must have sensed her real agony, for after a moment her expression softened. "Well, he's better. You can see he's breathing on his own now. He's being fed through the nasal gastric tube; the IV is mainly just for hydrating and antibiotics and to keep a line open for anything we want to get into his veins fast." She waved toward the monitor over the bed. "His vital signs are stable. He's"—she shrugged—"just very deeply asleep."

Diana nodded. "Could I be alone with him?" she said softly.

"Sure."

The nurse had started toward the door, and Diana added, "I'm supposed to be meeting Dr. Bandholtz in the lobby in a few minutes. Could you not tell him I'm here yet? I'll be down soon."

"Okay."

Diana looked down at her son in the tilted-up hospital bed, and she bit her knuckle. The green nasal gastric tube dented his blond curls on the right side of his head; the left side was bandaged, but she could see that his scalp had been shaved on that side. His eyes and mouth were closed, but he was breathing gently, and the monitor over him beeped regularly and showed a regularly bouncing green line on its black screen.

Even if I'd been here every day, she told herself earnestly, he wouldn't have known. He's probably dreamed of me, and that's been more immediate than my physical presence would have been.

Until today. Today, with the full moon overhead, I might make a difference by being here.

She reached out toward the little limp hand that was bound to the rail of the bed by a strip of plastic.

And then she stopped, for she had heard the solid click-and-snap of an automatic pistol being chambered behind her.

For three heartbeats she just stood there with her arm extended; then she lowered her arm and turned around.

It was the young Asian woman she'd seen in the lobby downstairs. The barrel of the gun she held was lengthened with a fat metal cylinder—a silencer, Diana was sure.

"Do you mean to kill me?" Diana asked. Her voice was calm, though her heart thudded and her fingertips were tingling. "Or him? Or both of us?"

"You. My name is Bernardette Dinh."

"Diana Ryan. Uh—why?" Dinh was too far away across the carpet for Diana to be able to kick the gun, and there was nothing she could hope to grab and throw. She could dive behind the bed, but if Dinh shot at her the bullet would probably hit Scat.

"To be Queen. Do you have any change in your pockets? Bring it out slow, and if you throw it, I'll shoot."

Mystified but glad of any delay, Diana slid her hand into the pocket of her jeans, then took it out and held it forward in her palm.

The quarters and dimes still shone silver, but the pennies were all black.

With her free hand Dinh reached into her own pocket and took out a penny. It was shiny red-brown.

"See?" she said. "And if you've tried to wear linen during the last few days, you'll have noticed it goes black, too, just like the pennies." She was talking fast, licking her lips nervously between phrases. "And purple cloth bleaches if you touch it. And if you should happen to approach a beehive, the bees will all leave the hive. All this year those things have happened to me at my time, at the full moon."

"You want to become the Queen," said Diana. "Why?"

"I didn't really come here to talk. Why? To … for the power of it. For the family of it, to be a—a mother, in the profoundest way."

"I already am a mother."

Dinh glanced past Diana toward Scat. "Biologically, I guess. Maybe you sent a lot of get-well cards."

Diana felt her face reddening, but she made herself smile. "And you'd kill me to get that? You'd make a ten-year-old boy an orphan to get that?"

"I'll—I'll adopt him. I'm going to have a very big family."

"But I'm the Queen's daughter."

"Damn it, that's why I've got to. With you gone, I'm the most natural successor." Dinh sighed unsteadily. "There's lots of deaths in this, you know that. Death waits in the desert and in the hot sky, for any of us. I don't know how many times I've thought of suicide."

"Is it important?"

"Suicide?"

"No, how many times you've thought about it. Is this gonna hold us up? Couldn't we say, like, a hundred, and be okay?"

Dinh blinked, and her mouth worked and then kinked in a narrow smile.

Diana reached slowly out to the side, bending her knees to lower herself, and touched Scat's hand. Dinh gasped, looking at the boy, so Diana felt safe in looking, too.

Scat's eyes were open.

His blue eyes swung blankly from his mother to Dinh and then back again, and then the irises shifted slightly as he focused.

His mouth opened, and he started to speak, then coughed hoarsely. "Mom," he croaked finally.

"Hi, Scatto," said Diana. "I think you'll be coming home soon." She looked hard back at Dinh, trying to convey through her gaze, Go ahead. Stake your claim to being the earthly Queen of the mother goddess by murdering a mother right in front of the eyes of her wounded son.

Dinh's face was white, and she lowered the gun.

"But what can I do?" she whispered. She blinked at Diana. "Why am I asking you, eh?" Her gun arm bent up sharply at the elbow.

And Diana lunged forward and knocked the blunt silencer out from under Dinh's jaw in the instant before it jerked.

The shot sounded like a bed sheet being instantaneously ripped in half. Dinh fell to her hands and knees on the carpet, but her head was up, and Diana could see no blood in the black hair. Diana looked up and saw the neat hole punched in the acoustic tile of the ceiling.

Diana got down on her knees and lifted Dinh by the shoulders. "You're asking me because I can answer you," she said urgently. "I'm in danger, and I have two children who are in danger." Dinh was staring into her face, and Diana bared her teeth in a cold smile. "I'm going to need help."

Dinh tucked the gun away in her belt, wincing. "You expect me to—"

"No. No, I hope you will. Will help me. Don't answer now, I won't listen to you now with your ears still ringing. But if you will help me, help the Queen instead of be the Queen, if that's something you can do, then meet me tomorrow at dawn, at the—at the Flamingo pool."

Dinh stood up. "I … won't kill you," she said quietly, "I guess. It looks like. But I won't be there."

"I will," said Diana, still on her knees and looking up.

Dinh turned and strode out of the room. Diana got up and walked back to her son's bed.

Scat was weakly flexing his bound hands, and his feet were moving under the blanket. He was moaning weakly; the nasal tube seemed to bother him.

Diana pushed the nurse-summon button and stepped toward the door, but a doctor was just hurrying in. Obviously Dinh had paused on the way out to tell the staff that the boy had awakened.

CHAPTER 43: Pot's Not Right

The dew that was misted and beaded on the pink plastic chaise lounges around the pool seemed brave and forlorn to Diana—fugitive moisture, briefly condensed by the cool dawn air but doomed to be evaporated again as soon as the morning sun cleared the low bulk of the Oregon Building. In the seat of the nearest recliner some of the drops had run down to combine and form a little puddle, but she knew that wouldn't help them.

The moon, hidden now behind the Flamingo's south high rise, was already past full by the tiniest shaving, but her near-clairvoyance would last, she knew, through Easter, four days from now. She stared uneasily at the long, low bulk of the Oregon Building, aware that it was the Tower of the King, and that Scott Crane had been inside it recently.

Nobody was in the pool yet, but the casino doors on the opposite side of the pool were swung open every few minutes to let a burst of the clatter and clang of the perpetual games come shaking out into the quiet dawn air. Though she was still looking up at the dark penthouse of the Oregon Building, Diana knew it when the doors opened to let out Nardie Dinh.

Diana didn't turn around. She heard Nardie's footsteps scuff slowly down the steps and around the pool past the presently closed outdoor bar.

Nardie stopped behind her.

"You saved my life yesterday," Nardie said quietly, her voice not seeming even to reach the dark shrubbery around the building. "I'll try to see to it that it wasn't a big mistake."

Diana turned around. Nardie was wearing a cabdriver's uniform and cap. "How will you do that?"

"By leaving. I've got money—maybe I'll go back to Hanoi. If I stayed here, I'd probably try again to kill you, and that'd be lousy thanks."

"I want you to stay," Diana said. "I've got a lot to do before Easter, and I'm going to need help."

Nardie shook her head. "I might not kill you," she said, "I might let the—the queenhood go, but I'd never help you get it … for yourself."

Diana smiled. "Why not? You've worked hard in this. If you just take off, you're abandoning everything. You won't even know if there'll be a Queen this time; there hasn't been one since 1960—1947, really. At least if you work with me, you're still working with what you hold valuable. Is the Queen thing only good and worth working for if it's you that's being it?"

"You go be valuable without me."

"Huh." Diana walked to the coping of the glassy-smooth pool and back. "Did you ever hear of Nick the Greek?" she asked. "A Poker player, my father knew him. He was in the first heavy Poker game at Binion's, in 1949, and it was just him and Johnny Moss playing head-up, no limit. The game lasted five months, and the Greek lost about two million. Years later he was playing Five and Ten Draw in Gardena for a living, and somebody asked him if that wasn't a big step down, and he said, 'It's action, ain't it?' "

For a few moments the pool area was completely silent. The blue pagoda roofs of the Imperial Palace towers next door shone in the descending morning sunlight.

Then Nardie laughed harshly. "That's—that's the incentive you're offering?" Her voice, though still quiet, was shrill and incredulous. "I can be Nick the Greek to your Johnny Moss? Christ, girl, you make a lousy recruiter. I wouldn't—"

"You want the same thing I want," Diana overrode her. "To be a sister and daughter and mother, in a real family, not some fucked-up arrangement that looks like it was put together for … for cruel laughs. That family is still here, in potential at least, and wants you. Be a part of us."

Diana waited for an answer, wondering what her own answer would be if the situation were reversed.

Nardie looked sideways up at the sky and exhaled. Then she pushed her cap back and rubbed her eyes. "For now," she said, her voice muffled. "Provisionally." She lowered her hands and stared at Diana. "But if I wind up killing you—"

"Then I'll have misjudged you."

"Your judgment's been real good so far?"

Diana smiled, and the sun touched the highest mirrored windows of the Flamingo high rises. "I'm happy to say I can't remember."

This morning Crane saw the old man as soon as he carried his bagged six-packs out of the liquor store. Doctor Leaky was the only one of the players by the Dumpster who was wearing a hat—a wide straw thing with a yellow paper rose on it.

"Beer man," Crane said when he limped up to the ragged circle of players.

His left leg was stiff and his side ached under the perpetually wet bandage, but he felt young and strong. Today it required no willpower to only fake sipping the open beer can he held.

"All right," said one of the young men eagerly. "Sit thee doon, dude." He tugged one of the cans free of the top six-pack when Crane put the bag down. "What's your name, anyway?" he asked after popping the can and taking a deep morning-restorative swig.

Crane sat down and looked over at Doctor Leaky. "Scotto," he said.

The very old man frowned at him in huge puzzlement, his mouth of course hanging open. "Scotto?" he said.

"Right. And I don't know about you guys, but I'm a little sick of Lowball, hmm? So I got a suggestion." Crane was talking fast and cheerful, like a proposition bet hustler. "I've got a new game we can play, and since it's my idea, I'll fund all of you for the first few hands, how's that? Here." He pulled five rubber-banded bundles of one-dollar bills out of his jacket pocket and gave one to each of the players except his father's body. "There's fifty bucks for each of you. I figure nobody'll mind if Doctor Leaky keeps on playing with trash."

As if choreographed, each of the ragged players tore the rubber band off his bundle and riffled incredulously through the bills.

"On this basis," said the young man who had spoken, "you can call any game at all, dude." He stuck out a grimy hand. "I'm Dopey."

Crane decided that the young man meant it was his nickname. He shook his hand. "Glad to meet you." Crane had kept one of the bundles for himself, and he now peeled off a dollar and tossed it onto the asphalt in the middle of the circle. "Everybody ante a buck."

Doctor Leaky was blinking and shaking his head. "No," he said, on a rising note almost as if it were a question. "I'm not going to play with you." His trembling right hand scratched aimlessly at the empty crotch of his lime green pants.

All the others had tossed in their antes.

"Pot's not right," said Crane softly, "Dad."

The last word visibly jarred Doctor Leaky. He gaped at the bills on the parking lot pavement, and then down at his pile of flattened pennies and holed chips. Then, slowly, he reached down and pushed one of the chips forward. "Pot's right," he muttered.

"Okay," said Crane. He was tense, but he put easy assurance into his voice. "This game is sort of Eight-Card Stud, but you gotta make your hand by buying someone else's."

And as he took the fixed-up deck of Bicycle cards out of his pocket and shuffled them, he began, carefully and clearly, to explain the rules of Assumption.

Tonight it starts.

Tall and muscular and still genuinely dark-haired at the age of seventy-five, and immaculate now in a suit, the Art Hanari body stood in the sun by the curb in front of La Maison Dieu's front doors, waiting impatiently for the ordered limousine.

From behind the blue eyes in the unlined, sunlamp-tanned face, Georges Leon watched the big camouflage-painted trucks trundle past along Craig Road. La Maison Dieu, at the north end of North Las Vegas, was a discreet complex of green-lawned condominiums and medical facilities tucked between the Craig Ranch Golf Course and the Nellis Air Force Base Pumping Station, and most of the traffic out here was military vehicles.

Tonight the game starts, he thought.

Getting out of this glorified old folks' home had proved to be more difficult than he had anticipated. When, as Betsy Reculver, he had put this perfect body away here for safe-keeping, he had made sure that the contract stipulated that Hanari was free to leave at any time he might choose—but when he had tried to exercise that clause yesterday morning, the staff had tried to block him, had got the security men to tie him to his bed and refused to fetch his clothes.

In a way he couldn't blame them. After dying on the linoleum floor of the hospital cafeteria yesterday morning, strangling on his own closed bronchial tubes and then feeling his heart agonizingly seize up and stop in his chest, he had awakened in his bed here—in his only remaining body. When his heartbeat had slowed down and his breathing was under control, he had pushed the button that summoned his caretaker—but when the man had arrived, and Leon had opened the Hanari mouth to ask to be released, it had been the voice of a querulous old woman that had come out of him.

It had been the voice of Betsy Reculver, moaning about being abandoned in the desert and about to lose her body. And then he had heard Richard's voice resonating out past his helpless vocal cords and chattering teeth, droning on about sitting on a bungalow roof in the rain; and of course after that had come old Beany with Poker talk, chortling over rolled-up Trips that had become Aces-Full on Fifth Street.

When Leon had finally got control of the body and, in measured tones, asked to be released, the caretaker had at first dismissed the request entirely. When Leon had insisted, threatening legal action, they had tried to call Betsy Reculver or Vaughan Trumbill, and of course they had not succeeded.

Finally, this morning, they had decided to wash their hands of him, and had had him sign every sort of declaration and waiver. They had even videotaped him, to have evidence that he seemed to be in his right mind.

And at last they had let him get dressed and call a limousine and walk out. They'd been very friendly then, patting him on the back—something he hated—and telling him to be sure to come back for a visit sometime. His physical therapist had made some remark about finally getting some use out of the penile implant, and had winked, but Leon hadn't even wanted to stay long enough to file a complaint.

He had to find Doctor Leaky and then prepare for the game. He would have to call Newt and remind him to have thirteen players ready at the Lake Mead marina dock at sunset.

But he had to find Doctor Leaky first of all.

All day yesterday, when he was not arguing with the staff, Leon had been brooding, and then nearly panicking, about something old Doctor Leaky had said in the hospital cafeteria.

The cards aren't fooled by any of the rest of it, the wrecked old body had said at first. The people in Doom Town, and all the human-sacrifice statues around town.

Leon had suspected for years that the mannequins in the built-to-be-bombed houses out at Yucca Flats in the 1950s had been, unknown even to the technicians who had set them up, sacrifices to the gods of chaos that were about to be invoked by the detonation of the atomic bomb, and it had seemed to him, too, that the multitude of statues around Las Vegas, from the stone Arabs in front of the Sahara on the Strip to the towering figure of Vegas Vic over the Pioneer Club on Fremont Street, exposed constantly to the sun and the rain, were offerings to the random patterns of the weather, another manifestation of the chaos gods. Chaos and randomness, after all, in the form of gambling, were the patron saints of this city and had to be appeased.

If the cards, the personifications of randomness and chaos, weren't fooled by those tokens of human sacrifice, it didn't really bother Leon.

But the old body, his old body, had gone on to say, All your Fijis that died, too, they haven't changed anything. It's still just me.

Belatedly it had occurred to Leon that this might refer to the bodies he had inhabited that had died, Reculver and all the rest of them; perhaps Doctor Leaky had meant effigies, and that these token deaths that Leon had suffered were not fooling the cards.

It's still just me.

Maybe, in spite of all his body switching, Leon was still fated to die when the senile, emasculated Doctor Leaky body died.

The Hanari body shuddered, and Leon snapped its fingers in a passion of impatience.

He had taken such shabby, contemptuous care of the broken-brained old thing all these years! He had avoided death only by chance many times, if this guess was true. Yesterday he had even hoped that the police would kill it!

He had to assume that what it had said was true, and take measures. A week and a half ago, on the same night when he had sensed the big jack and the big fish crossing the Nevada border, a thought had come from nowhere into his head: the notion of a chicken heart, cut out of the chicken and kept artificially alive for many many times the normal lifetime of a chicken. Grown now to the size of a couch.

Right now, before starting the preparations for this new game on the lake, he had to find the Doctor Leaky body and put it somewhere safe. Afterward Leon would bribe or terrorize some doctor into cutting out the heart and keeping it pumping for decades, and then passing it on to other doctors so that it would keep beating for centuries, and grow no doubt to the size of a house.

The mind that was Georges Leon would still be immortal, still be King.

He could see the limousine sedately approaching up Craig Road now, moving past the grassy hills of the golf course.

Your next stop, Leon thought at the driver, who was invisible behind the tinted windshield, is that parking lot behind the liquor store where the old fool always plays cards with bums.

And you're going to move a good deal faster.

CHAPTER 44: The Hand Under the Gun

The sun was nearly overhead now, and Crane had twice had to give one of the players money to run back to the liquor store for more beer.

Now the deal had finally come back around to Crane—he was grateful that by common consent Doctor Leaky was not expected to deal—and he shuffled rapidly and thoroughly and spun the cards out to the players. Two each down, and then one up to bet on.

At first the players had objected to the four extra cards Crane had put into the deck, four Kings with the letters KN laundry-markered across the faces, but Crane had finally got them to agree to accept the cards as Knights, ranking between Jacks and Queens, and it had taken several hands before they caught on to the way the bidding worked and how a player could often make more money by selling the unconceived four-card hand than by buying somebody else's four and staying in for the showdown; but for the last several hands the game had gone smoothly. A couple of the players, including Dopey, had substantially increased their stacks, and Crane had had to give additional cash-rolls to two players and agree to do the same for the rest of them.

But Doctor Leaky had still not bought a hand, and seemed to be getting restless. He had wet his pants, and the smell of urine evaporating on the hot pavement seemed to bother him.

Crane had been hesitant to interfere with whatever natural processes might be at work here, but the game on the lake was supposed to start tonight, and Doctor Leaky looked as if he were ready to leave.

"You know," he said to the body of his father, "you can buy a hand from somebody."

From under the rose-decked straw hat Doctor Leaky gave him a glance behind which Crane almost imagined he could perceive a spark of intelligence. "You think I don't know the rules, Scotto?"

Staring into those well-remembered eyes, even though now they were pouched in dry, wrinkled skin, made Crane feel small and futile, and he found that his own gaze had dropped.

For relief he looked around the parking lot as the bet went around the circle. Mavranos's blue truck was parked at the far end of the lot, and a taxicab was idling not far away from it, and now a shiny black limousine was turning in from Flamingo Road.

"Your bet, Scotto," said one of the players.

Crane saw that Doctor Leaky had pushed three copper ovals into the pot, wincing as though they were painfully hot. Crane threw in three dollar bills and dealt everybody a second up card.

"Ace bets," he said, nodding to the player on his left.

Then he heard heavy tires grind to a halt close behind him, and he turned around in alarm.

The limousine had stopped a couple of yards away from where he sat, and a back door opened, and a man stepped out. He was tall and tanned and dark-haired—Crane had never seen him before, but he recognized the gold sun-disk on a chain around the man's neck. It was identical to the one Ricky Leroy had worn when he had hosted the game on the lake in '69.

This, Crane thought with a sudden hollowness in his chest, is really my father.

The front of the man's pants bulged, and Crane wondered bewilderedly what there might be about this scene to give him such a rampaging hard-on.

Crane got slowly to his feet, aware of the stiffness in his leg and the pain in his side but aware, too, of the bulk of the revolver in his jacket pocket.

His fingertips were ringing like struck tuning forks. I could shoot him right now, he thought. But what good would that do if he's got another couple of bodies he can switch into? And look at all these witnesses; even that taxi is moving forward.

"We're in the middle of a hand right now," Crane said, trying with some success not to let tension drive his voice up into the falsetto range. "But we can deal you in on the next one."

The tall man turned his calm, unlined face on the cards that lay on the pavement. "It's Razz you're playing now, no doubt," he said. "Always low end for you people. Well, Doctor Leaky is going to have to forfeit his hand, I'm afraid. I'll fade his investment in the pot." He reached into his coat and pulled out a leather billfold.

"The doctor will finish playing the hand," Crane said.

The eyes in the smooth brown face focused on Crane. "You're Scott Crane, aren't you?" The face didn't smile. "You do get around. Go play high-end for big money somewhere; you'll do better, take my word for it." He looked down at the old man in the wet pants. "Come along, Doctor," he said, "we've got to get you cleaned up."

Crane put his left hand on Doctor Leaky's bony shoulder, holding the old man down. "He's going to finish the hand."

Crane heard Dopey's voice from behind him: "Jesus, who cares? Let the old man go."

"Why don't you wait for him over there?" Crane said to the tall stranger who was his father. "This should only last another couple of minutes."

The man's eyebrows rose just enough to express puzzlement. "I said I'd cover his bets with cash." He shook his head. "Oh, very well, I'll wait." He started to turn back toward the limousine.

But then one of the players said, "Good, I want to buy the old guy's King and Knight."

And when the tall man turned back from the limousine, there was a snub-nosed revolver in his hand. "No," he shouted, "he is not to play Assumption!"

For a moment the man's eyes were on Doctor Leaky, and in one smooth motion Crane drew his own revolver and with all his strength cracked the butt of it into the tall man's face.

The tall body fell heavily against the side of the limousine and then clopped and thudded in a limp heap to the pavement, bright red blood already masking the face and spotting the gray asphalt.

Several of the players had started to get to their feet, but Crane turned the gun on them.

"Sit down. We're going to finish this hand."

The limousine was clanked into gear and drove away, the back door still open and swinging. Slowly and tensely the players sat back down.

"Ace bets," Crane said again. "Hurry." God, he thought, how long before the limo driver calls the police on the car phone he undoubtedly has?

The man with the Ace showing shakily put a dollar bill into the middle of the circle, staring at Crane's gun. All the players still in line to bet just folded except for Doctor Leaky, who smiled vacuously and rolled a punctured chip into the pot. Crane threw a dollar bill in.

He grinned with clenched teeth. "The hand, uh, under the gun is up for bid," he said.

Nobody moved or said anything.

Mavranos had the truck's engine running now. The taxi was still in the parking lot, stopped closer to the Flamingo Road entrance, its motor idling.

Crane could hear sirens—not out front yet, but not too many blocks away. He glanced at the body on the pavement. Dizzy with nausea, he wondered if it was dying, and what Lieutenant Frits would have to say to him about this.

"The hand is up for bid," he said, hearing the pleading tone in his voice.

Doctor Leaky blinked around. "I'll go two, Scotto," he said, laboriously pushing forward two flat pennies.

"And I don't bid," Crane yelled, "so it's yours!" He tucked the gun into his pocket and snatched up Doctor Leaky's hand and the four cards the old man had bought. Then he had scrambled to his feet, broad-jumped over the unconscious body, and was sprinting across the expanse of hot asphalt toward Mavranos's blue truck.

The police were right out front; he could hear the change in the echoes of the sirens and even the wheeze of the shock absorbers and thump of tires as they turned into the driveway.

The blue truck was rolling, turning to be able to leave through the side of the parking lot away from Flamingo Road, and Mavranos had opened the passenger side door.

Crane was running flat-out, his legs pumping furiously to stay under his full-tilt torso, but he knew the police cars would turn into the lot before he would reach the truck.

He heard a squeal of tires, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the taxi lunge forward and crash head-on into the first police car. He was aware that the taxi's doors were immediately flung open, but now he was level with the truck and had to scuff around, flailingly keeping his balance, to get to the open door.

He clawed his way in, crawling across the seat with his legs still kicking outside. "Out the back!" he yelled.

But Mavranos had pulled the steering wheel around the other way now, as if trying to make a figure-8. "Gotta pick up the girls," he said loudly over the battering racket of the engine.

Centrifugal force was pulling Crane out of the truck, and the playing cards crumpled in his hand as he dug his fingers into the upholstery. "Girls?" he shouted as his feet banged the swinging door, trying to get a purchase on anything.

Then, though the truck had not even slowed down, the back door was yanked open and a couple of people piled in back. Crane heard the gas pedal whomp down onto the floorboard, and the four-barrel carburetor kicked the truck hard forward.

As Crane's right foot finally found the door frame and pushed him inside, he was aware that Mavranos had made an abrupt U-turn into some kind of roofed entrance. When he sat up and pulled the door closed, he saw that they were in the Flamingo parking structure, driving slowly up the first ramp, hardly a hundred yards from where they had left the crashed police car.

"Oh, Arky," Crane whispered breathlessly, "this is a dangerous move."

Mavranos was frowning, and his face gleamed with sweat. "Shit, Pogo, tell me something I don't know. But if we tried to drive away on the Strip, they'd have radioed ahead and caught us within a block."

Mavranos swung the truck around the first bend, onto the second-floor ramp of the parking structure. Crane could hear sirens, but none of them were echoing as if they were in here too.

"Jesus, make it work," he whispered, clutching the dashboard with one sweaty hand. "Make them not think about looking in here."

"Turning in here was the best move," came a woman's voice from the back seat, and Crane turned around.

It was a young Asian woman in a cabdriver's uniform who had spoken; there was a branching pattern of blood running down her face from her forehead, but Crane was staring now at her companion.

And his heart was thumping harder now than it had when he'd been running. "Diana?"

Her nose was bleeding, and she was pinching it shut. "Yeah," she said thickly. "Hi, Scott. It's good to see you, Arky."

"Well, I'm lovin' life now," growled Mavranos.

To his own surprise, Crane felt even more frightened than he had a few moments ago. He had once played in a $500 buy-in Hold 'Em tournament—he had been too drunk to get all the rules straight before he started playing, and so he had not been expecting the option of being able to buy in again after going broke; and when he did go broke, and the re-buy was offered to him, he took it eagerly, happily paying out another $500. But the blinds and limits had been steadily increasing, and the minimum bet was now $150, and he realized belatedly that the expense of making the full investment again had only enabled him to play one more hand.

He couldn't remember now whether or not he had won that next hand.

"You two were in the cab that hit the cop car," Crane said.

"Right," said the Asian woman. "And I guess I'm surely committed to this," she said to Diana. "I left my cab there, and they saw us run. I can't claim you were holding a gun on me."

Mavranos had turned onto the third uphill ramp now. Still, there were no parking stalls empty, and the rumble of the exhaust filled the low-ceilinged space.

"Ozzie said you were dead," said Crane to Diana. "He said they blew you up."

"They nearly did. They did kill my poor boyfriend." Diana gave Crane a hard stare. "How is Ozzie?"

"I'm sorry. He's dead."

"Your fault?"

Crane thought about it bleakly. "Yes."

"Ah."

Her face was blank, but tears were running down her cheeks now to mix with the blood on her chin. Nobody spoke while Mavranos slowly turned the truck up onto the fourth level.

At last Crane recognized the young woman who had apparently been driving the cab. "I know you, don't I?" he said. "You drove me away from that shooting by Binion's. Your name was …?"

"Nardie Dinh." She was blotting her forehead with a handkerchief. "Incidentally I take back my advice that you kill yourself. You're everybody's best hope now, such as you are, and I find myself on your side."

Crane looked around at the three people who were in the laboring truck with him. "We're a side?" His voice sounded brittle and hollowly cheerful in his ears. "And I'm the leader, am I? What's your opinion of your leader, Diana?"

Her face was still blank. "I'm in a state of suspended admiration."

Mavranos turned the wheel and swung the truck into an empty stall, the tires echoingly squeaking on the glossy cement floor. "We're gonna have to get some paint up here," he said, "and paint this thing some other color." He turned off the engine. "What you got there, Scott? Something worth all that … furor?"

"Yeah." Crane opened his fist and straightened out the eight crumpled cards. "My father's real body."

CHAPTER 45: No Use Taking Half a Dose

Crane paid for two adjoining rooms in the Flamingo, and he bought two souvenir decks of playing cards in the gift shop before leading the way upstairs.

On one of the beds in the room that was to be his and Mavranos's, Crane broke the seals on the decks and scattered the cards face up across the bedspread.

Mavranos had carried the ice chest up, and Dinh called room service for six Cokes.

"What are you doing?" she asked Crane when she had hung up.

Crane was tentatively arranging the cards. "Trying to figure out how to stack a cold deck for a very complicated Poker game." He had separated out the eight cards that had been Doctor Leaky's hand: the Six and Eight of Hearts, the Knight of Clubs, and the Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, and King of Spades. "I wish my—my father's body had drawn a better hand. Consisted of a better hand. This has to win, and in thirteen-handed Assumption a King-high Flush isn't that great."

"Somebody's going to play with Flamingo cards?" Mavranos asked, sipping a Coors. Diana stood by the window, looking down at the pool.

"No," Crane said, "but I want to use these to set it up. Less wear and tear on my head. The actual game is going to be played with"—he sighed—"a Lombardy Zeroth deck."

Nardie glanced at him sharply. "My half-brother has a card from that deck," she said. "The Tower. He wants to use it to become King."

"Swell," said Crane. "I hope he looks at it cross-eyed and goes crazy."

"He already did," she said. "Are you … talking about the game on the lake?"

"Yes."

"You're not going to play in it, are you? Again?"

"Yes."

She shivered visibly. "You couldn't get me out on that boat."

Diana turned around. "When are you going to do this, Scott?"

He didn't look up from the cards. "The game's going to be played tonight and tomorrow night and during the day on Good Friday. I'll start tonight, and keep on playing until I get the trick done."

"Is that guy you conked gonna be there?" asked Mavranos.

"Yeah," said Crane. "In that body, if it's not dead or in a hospital. He's the host."

"He'll recognize you."

"He would, but I'll be disguised."

"How?"

There was a knock at the door then, and Diana walked across the room and let in the bellboy, who set the tray of Cokes on the table, and gave him some money.

"How are you going to disguise yourself?" Mavranos asked again when the bellboy had left.

Crane grinned worriedly at his friend and shook his head. "I don't know. Shave my head? Wear glasses? Dye my face and hands black?"

"None of those sound very good," said Diana.

"You could go in full clown makeup," Nardie said. "I think they do it for free at Circus Circus."

"Or you could go in an ape suit," said Mavranos. "There's gotta be a place in town that rents ape suits."

" 'Each one volunteered his own suggestions,' " quoted Crane with a forced smile. " 'His invaluable suggestions.' "

"That's Lewis Carroll," said Nardie.

Crane looked at her, and his smile became genuine. "Right." She and Diana had told him what her connection was to all this, but now he really paid attention to her for the first time, and he noticed her fine black hair and porcelain face. "I love that poem," he said. " 'Neither did he leave them slowly, with the—' "

"A woman," Diana interrupted harshly.

Mavranos raised his beer as if in a toast. "A woman!"

Crane frowned at her. "What?"

"Go as a woman. It's the only disguise that will work."

Crane laughed shortly—but saw that Mavranos and Nardie had raised their eyebrows as if considering the idea.

"No," he said. "This is going to be tough enough without showing up in drag, for Christ's sake. I'll shave my head and wear glasses. That'll—"

"No," said Nardie thoughtfully, "your face is too distinctive. I haven't seen you very often, but I'd recognize you bald and with glasses. I think drag is it—lots of makeup, lipstick, a striking wig—"

"Makes me hot," allowed Mavranos.

"It wouldn't work," said Crane in a confident, dismissing tone. "What about my voice?" He pitched his voice falsetto and said, "Do you want me to talk like this?"

"Just talk normally," said Diana. "They'll all just write you off as a brassy transvestite."

"Nobody's gonna look hard at a queer," Mavranos agreed. "If anybody starts to, just wink at 'em."

Somehow, dwarfing his fear that he would fail, and that Diana would be killed, and that he himself would lose his body on Holy Saturday when his father assumed the bodies he had bought during the 1969 games, Crane felt light-headed with panic at this new suggestion. I will not do it, he assured himself. Don't even worry about it.

Nardie touched his shoulder. "What if it's the only way?" she asked softly. "Do you remember Sir Lancelot?" Crane shook his head stubbornly, and she went on. "He was riding to rescue the Queen, Guinevere, and on the way he had to ride in a cart. It was a horrible disgrace to ride in a cart in those days; criminals were paraded up and down the streets in them, so that people could jeer and throw things, okay? Lancelot hesitated for just a moment before climbing in, and afterward, when he had rescued her, she wouldn't speak to him because of his brief hesitation, because for a couple of seconds he had put his personal dignity ahead of his duty to her. And he agreed that she was right."

"God." Crane stared down at the cards.

It would be the best disguise, he admitted to himself. And what do you care, really, if a bunch of strangers—and your father—think you're a drag queen? They won't know who it is. Is Diana's life worth less than your—your raddled dignity? Your dignity, the dignity of a trembly old bum only six days on the wagon? Six days on the wagon and at most three days on the cart.

He looked at Diana, and she didn't look away. "Let the record show," he said hoarsely, "that I hesitated no longer than Lancelot did." He turned to Dinh. "Did Guinevere forgive him?"

"That was in Chretien de Troyes's book, right?" said Mavranos. For a moment Dinh was clearly baffled by his barbarous pronunciation of the name, but then she blinked in comprehension and nodded, and Mavranos told Crane, "Yeah, she did eventually."

"Hear that, my lady?" Crane said to Diana.

As if to punish them all, he pulled his father's wooden box out of his pocket, opened it, and spilled the Lombardy Zeroth deck out on the bedspread. With a trembling hand he fanned them out.

"Ah," sighed Nardie, her voice suddenly wounded and sad.

Crane was staring at the horribly affecting, morbid old miniature paintings, but he was peripherally aware that Mavranos had stood up and Diana had stepped closer. Suddenly sorry, Crane reached out to hide the cards.

"No," whispered Diana, catching his hand tightly. "I need to … meet these things."

"It's done," said Mavranos gruffly. "No use taking half a dose." He bent down and spread the cards out more fully with steady, calloused fingers.

The Fool and the Lovers and the Moon and the Star and the Emperor and the Empress stared back up at the four of them, and Crane found that he was holding Diana's hand on one side and had clasped Mavranos's on the other. Mavranos was also holding Nardie's hand.

Though the cards on the bed didn't move or change, in his head their patterns shifted like the scales on an uncoiling diamondback rattlesnake, and though the sun shone in brightly through the window, he fell away into the well in the bottom of his mind, down into the subterranean pool all such wells shared.

He didn't know how much time passed before he began to float back up into his own consciousness.

Crane found himself focusing on the World card, a hermaphroditic figure pictured dancing within a wreath that was an oval with pointed ends. Gotta be male and female for this, he thought dazedly.

He found that he could sense the minds of his companions—Mavranos's bluff front covering profound fear, Diana's anxiety for her children and suppressed love for Crane, Nardie's cocksure despair—and he knew that they could sense, too, whatever his own character was.

At last he released their hands and picked up the wakeful-seeming cards. "I've got to arrange these," he said awkwardly. "While I'm doing that, maybe you girls could go downstairs and buy me some clothes and stuff."

"I think you'd be a size twelve," said Diana, moving away from the bed.

At no time during the taxi ride south to Lake Mead did Crane manage to forget the weight of the foundation and blush and powder on his face and the hair spray that was holding his eyebrows down smooth. To his own humiliation he had tried to speak in a falsetto voice when he told the driver where he wanted to go. It had been a failure; the man had started violently and then mumbled obscenities for the first few minutes of the ride, relapsing finally into outraged silence.

Crane spent the half-hour drive trying to read the prop Dinh had found for him, a copy of Poker for Women by Mike Caro. The advice in the book struck him as sound, but of course there was no chapter on Assumption.

The stacked Lombardy Zeroth deck bulked in his white patent-leather purse like a chambered automatic with the safety off.

When at last the cab pulled into the marina parking lot, Crane looked at his new gold chain-link watch; it was only four-thirty. He hoped Leon was letting players come aboard this early, for he didn't want to have to wander around. He could sit in a bar, but he shuddered at the thought that someone might try to pick him up.

"Fifty dollars, dearie," said the driver. Crane paid him without speaking again and got out.

He walked past the grocery store and the bait shop toward the docks, resisting the impulse to hold his arms out from his sides for balance; walking in high heels on pebbly asphalt was as awkward as walking with ice skates on, and he could feel stage fright sweat rolling down his ribs under his cotton dress. Diana and Nardie had also had to buy a linen dress because Diana handled it, but he hadn't been able to wear it because of the black marks where she'd touched it.

The long white houseboat was moored at the same slip it had occupied twenty-one years ago. Crane stood and stared at it, breathing through his open mouth.

Full circle, he thought. Back again, goes around comes around, dog to its vomit, criminal to the scene of the crime.

He flexed his chilly hands and breathed deeply.

Three grizzled old fishermen were carrying rods and tackle boxes up from the docks, and they stared at Crane as they walked past him.

"There's your date, Joey!" one of them muttered.

"What's the matter, Ed," put in another, "don't you say hi to your mom no more?"

Crane could hear them snorting with suppressed laughter behind him, and he started tottering forward on the clumsy shoes, his face burning under the makeup.

A white El Camino was backed up to the slip, and two young men were unloading open-topped boxes of liquor and soft drinks. Crane looked at the pickup's flank as he approached and was not surprised to see that the El and the capital C had been pried off. Looks like the Amino Acids have found a new King to serve, he thought.

One of them looked up and saw Crane. "Jeezzm," he said, almost respectfully. "Can I help you, Sweet-cheeks?"

Crane had always been good at doing a Brooklyn accent, and he put it on now. "I come to play Poker," he said, waving the Caro book.

"That's what this is all about," said the young man, "and you're in plenty of time. There's only six aboard so far. Just step through the detector."

Crane noticed the two upright plastic poles set up on the dock. "Is that a metal detector?" he asked.

"Sho' nuff."

Oh well, Crane thought, I'm not here to make a big bankroll that someone might want to hijack, and I can't let them go through my purse and find the Lombardy Zeroth deck. He reached into his purse and carefully pulled out his .357 by the barrel and held the Pachmayr grips toward the young man. "I suppose this would set it off."

"Goddamn." The Amino Acid took the gun from Crane. "Yeah, that would, sister. What were you planning to do, exactly?"

"Just self-protection," said Crane. "A girl can't be too careful in these parts."

"Well, you can have it back when you disembark. And if you come back again, leave it at home."

Crane stepped through the metal detector and set off no alarms, then crossed slowly to the edge of the dock and took hold of the boat rail—cringing at the sight of his red-painted nails—and managed to step across onto the stern deck.

Footsteps sounded to his right, and he looked up to see his host standing outside the lounge doorway. Both men flinched.

Georges Leon was still in the body Crane had hit this morning. A thick white bandage rode above the left eyebrow, disarranging the perfectly moussed brown hair, and the eye below it was a glittering sliver between swollen, pewter-colored lids. His slim, muscular-looking body was wearing a tailored white suit, and the gold sun disk still hung over his heart, and Crane could only imagine how much the man must resent the gross injury that ruined the elegant effect.

And he could only imagine what the man thought of this newly arrived player. Crane had resolutely looked at himself in the mirror after Diana and Nardie had got through with him, and he knew that the dress and makeup and socks-stuffed bra were an effective disguise but did not make him look much like a woman.

"My name is Art Hanari," said his host. His voice was a rich baritone.

Crane realized that he had not thought of a name for himself. "I'm Dichotomy Jones," he said at random.

Leon was nodding, not happily. "You've come to play?"

"Yessir! Something called Assumption, I heard?"

"Yes." Leon's distaste for the spectacle that was Crane was evident in the curl of his upper lip. "It's sort of Eight-Card Stud—"

"Somebody already explained it to me," interrupted Crane. "I'm ready to play."

"Go on in and sit down. Have a drink, if you like, and there'll be a buffet soon. We should have thirteen players before long, and then we'll get under way."

Crane got a glass of soda water and lime from the young man—no doubt another of the Amino Acids—who was tending the bar, and he took it to a chair in the corner away from the big round table.

Now that he was here, sober and prepared at least to the best of his abilities, he felt relaxed, almost contented. Some sleight of hand would be required when he got the deal and had to switch the cold deck in and do the pull-through shuffle and the table shift to negate the cut, and these cards were bigger than normal playing cards, but Ozzie had taught the young Scott how to do those moves smoothly before he was ten years old, and he had no doubt that his hands remembered the skills; Ozzie had never recommended cheating, but had believed that a good Poker player should know all the ways it's done.

The six other people in the lounge were younger than he was: a couple of out-of-town executive types in suits, several denim-clad men who might be professional players, and two young women sitting on a couch, watching the television set hung over the bar. Crane wondered what they thought of this battered old transvestite, and what they would think if they knew he was there, among other things, to save their lives.

He opened the Caro book and began absentmindedly reading about Five-Card Draw.

CHAPTER 46: We're Now Thirteen

Several more people arrived singly over the next hour, and then four came shuffling and mumbling aboard at once. Crane looked up, and recognized the one among the newcomers who was not young. The face was a hard couple of decades older, but was still recognizable … Newt, that was the name, the man he and Ozzie had played Five-Stud with at the Mint in 1969, the man who had then met Crane at the Horseshoe and driven him here on that terrible long-ago evening. Apparently Newt was a procurer for Leon.

Leon followed them in, and Crane heard the boat's engines start up.

"We're now thirteen," Leon said, sitting down at the table and reverently laying a wooden box down on it. "Let's play cards."

The boat surged as it moved out onto the face of the twilit lake.

The way Crane had stacked his Lombardy Zeroth deck required that he sit at Leon's right, and he got to that seat a second ahead of one of the young women. Leon gave Crane a cold look but let him sit there.

"Hundred-dollar ante," said Leon, "and then it's two hundred a bet, and then there's the mating, at which time you can bid for a hand or sell yours. After that there's another round of bets, still at two hundred."

Same stakes as twenty-one years ago, Crane thought as he pulled his roll of bills out of his purse, peeled off a hundred, and tossed it into the center of the table. Very damned high ante, so that you've got an investment before you even see your first card and then no sharp increases to chase anybody out.

His father opened the wooden box and fanned the Tarot cards out across the table's green felt surface.

Though they did still start up a ringing wail in his head, Crane was able to look at the cards without flinching now; it was as if the sight of them had broken his identity so many times that his identity had finally begun to conform to them. The Hanged Man and Death and the Two of Sticks now seemed to stare up at him as if at a peer.

Other players weren't so fortunate. One of the necktied executives bolted his drink and tremblingly crossed himself, and the two young women gagged, and no one at all looked happy. One man was suddenly crying, very softly. No one remarked on it.

Several people had cigarettes smoldering in ashtrays, and the smoke from all sides drifted in over the center of the table.

Leon separated out the twenty-two Major Arcana cards and put them aside. Then he flipped the remaining cards over, quickly shuffled them seven times, and began to deal out the first two face down cards.

Crane of course had to wait through twelve hands for the deal to come all the way around to him. During that time he never bought a hand, but managed five times to sell his own uncompleted four-card hands for a profit, and by the time it was his deal he had made a couple of hundred dollars. Several of the players seemed to be checking, and then either calling or folding, without subjecting themselves to the ordeal of actually looking at the cards they held.

When the deck was at last shoved across the green felt to Crane, he picked it up and said, with a little bit of urgency, "What time is it?"

During the moment when everybody was looking at a watch or craning to find a clock on the wall, under the cover of one spread hand he quickly spilled the deck into the open purse on his lap and flipped out the stacked deck.

"Eight and some change," called the Amino Acid bartender from the other end of the lounge.

"Thanks," said Crane. "I get luckier after eight." He split the switched-in deck and riffled the two blocks together, but then, while the interleaved blocks were still at right angles, he smoothly pulled them through each other as though he were separating two meshed combs; he did this rapidly several more times, seeming each time to shuffle the cards thoroughly but actually keeping them in the same order.

Finally he passed the deck to the man on his right for the cut. When the man had lifted off half of the deck and set it beside the remainder, Crane completed the cut but left a step in the two blocks of cards, Scarne's "infinitesimal terrace," so that when he lifted the deck in one hand, he was able to reverse the cut with his palm and the bases of his fingers.

Despite the apparent shufflings and cut, the cards were in the same order as they had been in his purse.

He was absorbed with the play now, and he had forgotten his ludicrous disguise. He spun the cards out across the green felt, two down and one up.

An Ace of Cups to the left of Leon brought in the bet for two hundred dollars, and it was called all the way around; the second up card paired one woman's Ten, and she bet two hundred, and again the bet was called by the whole table. Everybody was staying for the mating, as Crane had anticipated.

Crane had dealt himself half of the hand that Doctor Leaky had bought this morning, the Ten and Eight of Swords down and the Seven and Nine of Swords up; the other half of Doctor Leaky's hand was now Leon's hand, which was showing the Six and Eight of Cups, and since Leon was the player to Crane's left, his was the first hand to come up for bid.

"We got the Six and Eight of Cups for bid," said Crane lightly. "He's got five hundred in the pot."

At least one of the thirteen players would have to be frozen out when the mating cut the action down to six hands, and the man Crane had elected for that office, who was showing a Nine of Cups and a Two of Sticks, bid $550 for Leon's hand. Crane knew the man had the Two and Seven of Coins down and was hoping for a Straight.

Leon shook his head.

"Six hundred," said Crane.

Leon shrugged and nodded, and Crane looked to the other bidder to see if he would top that bid.

But the other bidder waved in defeat.

Leon flipped up his down cards and shoved all four across to Crane.

With a steady hand Crane slid them next to his own cards and separated out of his roll six hundred-dollar bills, tossing them onto the empty spot of green felt in front of Leon.

Crane was now holding the complete hand that Doctor Leaky had bought in the liquor store parking lot—a King-high Flush—and if the other players followed the courses he had prepared for them, he would win this hand at the showdown, and Leon could then exercise his Assumption option.

The Ace-King that had led off the premating betting was bought by one of the necktie-lads—to make, as Crane knew, an Ace-high Straight—and the next hand was reliably bought to make three Fours for one of the women.

But the next man, whose hand showed the Three of Cups and the Six of Coins, and who was supposed to sell his hand to the man showing the Nine and Five of Coins to make a Nine-high Flush, refused the expected bid.

Crane stared at the man with the Nine and Five. Offer him more, he thought, trying to project the order telepathically. You've got four of the Coins suit down, and he's showing one up; you'll have a Flush, you idiot! Buy it!

The man, though, shook his head; no one else bid on the hand, and the next hand in turn came up for auction.

Crane's carefully constructed sequence was broken.

He sat back and pressed his side, absently wondering if the steady bleeding would soak through the bandage and stain his dress. He tried to remember all the cards in all the hands, and to guess how the hand might turn out, now that it was out of his control. His King-high Flush might still win; he had been careful to give everybody cards that looked good but wouldn't add up to any killer hands.

But when the ninth hand, showing a Six and a Four, came up for bid, the man who had refused to sell the Three and the Six bought it.

You're one lucky moron, thought Crane bitterly as the cards and money were exchanged across the table. You paid for a low Straight, but I happen to know you bought a Full Boat, Threes over Sixes. Which beats me. And I can't hope to bluff you out at the showdown—my board doesn't even show a pair; I clearly can have nothing better than a Flush.

When the sixth hand was mated and conceived, and the raised bet came around to him, Crane smiled tightly and turned his cards face down.

"I'm out," he said.

The cigarette smoke just hung in flat layers under the paneled ceiling. Neither Crane nor Leon was involved in the hand any longer.

All Crane could do now was play for money and, of course, never buy a hand from Leon.

And twice he looked on, helplessly, as Leon became a parent of a winning hand, matched the pot, and lost the Assumption. Each time, the big brown man smiled under his bandage as he ran his fingers down the stack of cards, and his smile didn't falter when he failed to feel the crimped Two—he must have thought some player had straightened the card—and he picked the low card even without that help.

"You're taking money for the hand," Leon said each time as the player was happily raking in the enormous pot. "And I've bought it. I've assumed it."

Both players seemed puzzled by the ritual statement, but agreed. Neither one seemed to notice Leon's intense satisfaction.

Dawn had paled the sky behind the jagged mountains when the houseboat chugged back to its slip, and the twelve guests shambled out onto the deck, blinking and breathing deeply in the fresh and still-cool air as the Amino Acids tied up the lines.

Now that they were all fellow veterans of the long night's play, several of them tried to make small-talk with Crane where he stood at the rail, but he was already thinking about how he would stack the deck in his purse for tonight's game, and they drifted away to find somebody less taciturn.

A couple of them decided to get beds at the Lakeview Lodge, and Crane was able to catch a ride back to town in Newt's Cadillac; one of the players fell asleep in the back seat, and nobody talked much during the drive.

When Crane unlocked his hotel-room door and stepped into the air-conditioned chilliness, the connecting door was open, and Diana was sitting on one of the beds. The faded yellow baby blanket was spread out over one of the pillows, as if she'd been napping with her head on it.

"Are you up," he asked, "or still up?"

"Up," she said. "Everybody crashed out after an early dinner, and four A.M. seemed like morning."

Crane took off his wig and tossed it onto a chair. "Where are the kids?"

"Across the street at Caesars, checking the sports book for a cancer cure." She stood up and stretched, and in spite of his exhaustion, Crane found himself noticing her legs in the tight jeans and the way her breasts pressed out against the fabric of her white shirt.

"You didn't sell it to him, did you?" she said.

"No." Crane kicked off the high heels and padded into the bathroom. "Some guy bought the wrong hand," he called, "and now I've got to cook up another thirteen hands for tonight and try to make sure they'll link up right." He soaped and rinsed his face but saw smudges of tan makeup on the towel after he dried himself. "How the hell do you get this stuff off?"

He heard Diana giggle, and then she was in the bathroom with him. "Cold cream," she told him. "Here." She unscrewed the cap from a plastic jar and then massaged his face with the cold, slick stuff. He closed his eyes, and after a moment put his hands on her waist as if to steady himself. She didn't flinch or say anything, and her fingers kept pressing smoothly across his face. "You'll want to shave," she said as she picked up the towel and rubbed it down his forehead and nose and chin. "You must have looked like what-was-her-name, Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love—'the oldest and ugliest whore in the world.' "

"That's what I need to hear right now," he said, nodding.

His hands were still on her waist, and now he unhurriedly leaned down and kissed her on the mouth. Her lips opened, and in the moment before she stepped away from him he tasted the faint scent of recent minty mouth wash on her tongue.

"I'm sorry," he said, lowering his empty, trembling hands. "I shouldn't—"

She took his left hand in both of hers. "Shut up," she said quickly. "We were all in each other's minds yesterday, and I know you know how I feel about you. I … love you. But there's a bed in there, and a chain on the door, and we wouldn't stop after a good kiss, would we?"

He grinned at her ruefully. "Su-ure we would," he said. "Trust me."

"On Saturday," she said, "after this is all done, if we win—we'll get married. At one of these screwy chapels in town. You should hear Nardie's stories about the people she drives to them." Suddenly she gave him a stricken look. "My God! That is, if you want to marry me."

He squeezed her fingers. "You saw into my mind. You know I do." He was still leadenly tired, but excited, too, and embarrassed; he freed his hand and turned around. "Could you unzip me?"

He heard the buzz of the zipper being pulled down. "No funny business, now."

He turned back to face her again. "I'll be good. You know, it's a good thing we do want to get married. I don't think we would really have won, if we didn't do that."

"The King and Queen have got to be married," she agreed, "and have children." She touched his hair. "That's not Grecian Formula, is it?"

"No. I'm ungraying." He kissed her forehead. "And you've lost that scar. Blessings from the old killed King and Queen. I wonder how young we'll get."

She winked at him. "Not pre-puberty, I hope." Then she was out of the bathroom. "Shower and get some sleep," she called from the other room. "When do you want to be waked up?"

Waked up, he thought. Never. "Make it two, I guess."

"Okay."

He heard the connecting door close, and, his mind turbulent with joy and fear, he began to work on getting out of his dress.

Mavranos reached up in the dimness of the wide hall and patted Cleopatra's right breast.

The carved and painted female body he had touched was the figurehead of the big, mechanically rocking boat by the steps up to Cleopatra's Barge, one of the bars in Caesars Palace.

"Sure," he said with a weary smile to Diana and Dinh, "you girls go ahead and blow some chips. I've got to medicate my beer deficiency, and I'll be fine with Cleo here."

Diana took Nardie's elbow, and the two of them walked back down the carpeted hallway toward the playing floor. Diana's purse, bulky with the folded-up old baby blanket, swung between them.

"I gather," said Nardie, a little stiffly, "that he didn't sell the King the senile hand, and that you two are planning to get married on Saturday."

Diana glanced at her, concealing her surprise. "Right both ways. Okay with you, I hope."

"Failing with the King—no, that's not okay with me. I don't want to have hitched my cart to a horse that's a loser. My half-brother is a pretty good candidate, too, you know. I could have put my money on him. As to who you marry—that's none of my business."

"It is your business," said Diana, "if you're with us. I know you tried to seduce Scott yourself a week ago."

Nardie grimaced and seemed about to spit. "Seduce him? I ran from him. I told him he should go kill himself." She yanked her arm free from Diana's grasp. "I don't need you people, you know; I'm still a contender. Just because you—"

"Are you very tempted to go back to him? To your brother?"

Nardie's lips pulled back from her teeth, and she inhaled—and then her narrow shoulders slumped, and she just sighed. "Hell, yes. If I was with him, I wouldn't have to think all the time, be alert. Every time I'm near a pay phone that rings, I think it might be him, and I want to pick it up. Wouldn't you?"

They were among the banks of chugging and clanging slot machines; young men in the armor and helmets and skirts of Roman soldiers stood as still as statues on raised stone altars behind the slot machines, and a man dressed as Julius Caesar and a woman dressed as Cleopatra moved through the crowd, graciously welcoming everyone to Caesars Palace and urging people to have a good time. Doric pillars, and marble, and heavy purple curtains framed all the electrically flashing action, and Diana wondered what a genuine classical Roman, time-traveled to now and dropped here, would think of the place.

"Arky should have come with us," whispered Nardie, nudging Diana and tangling her hand in her purse strap. "I think we're about to get an audience with Cleopatra."

Sure enough, the woman in the gold-belted white skirt and Nefertiti hat was striding across the figured carpet toward them.

"She's going to ask us how come we're not playing," said Diana.

They both were touching the baby blanket that was stuffed into the purse, and it was warm, even hot.

Then Diana felt something shift, in the space around her and in the depths of her mind.

All at once most of the lights were snuffed out, and the laughter and ringing bells stopped, and the floor was tilted. Diana gasped and took a balance-catching step backward, and she could feel that she had stepped onto springy grass.

The cool breeze smelled of trees and the sea instead of paper money and new shoes, and the woman walking toward them was taller, incalculably tall, and wore a crown with a silver crescent moon over her high, pale forehead. Her eyes glowed in the shifting white light.

Nardie was still standing beside Diana and had tightly grasped her hand; but when the goddess stepped closer, she let go and hurried back, into the shadows under the tossing moonlit trees.

Diana strained her eyes, trying to keep the approaching woman in focus. The cold and inhumanly beautiful face was above Diana now, and seemed to be a feature of the night sky. Dogs or perhaps wolves were howling somewhere, and surf crashed on rocks. Fine salt spray dewed Diana's parted lips.

Her knees were suddenly cold, and she realized she had knelt on the wet grass.

When the goddess spoke, her voice was literally musical—like notes stroked from inorganic strings and ringing silver. This is my daughter, spoke the voice, who pleases me.

But Diana heard suddenly the rapid-fire clank-clank-clank of coins spat into the payout well of a slot machine, and for a moment it was the sound of spent shells, ejected from the hot, fast-jacking slide of a semi-automatic pistol, hitting the sidewalk pavement as a woman fell away with three holes punched through her head, and Diana turned and began frantically crawling across the dewy grass toward the trees in whose shadows Dinh was already hiding.

This is my death, Diana thought. I'm being invited to die.

Sometimes one risks death, spoke the goddess behind her, to save one's children.

Still facing the trees, Diana stopped; and she thought about the night when her mother had been killed, and she herself had survived and been found by Ozzie and Scott.

And she thought once again about Oliver and Scat.

She forced herself to breathe deeply and stop panting. "Did you do that?" she asked quietly. "Could you have … got away from that death, if you hadn't paused to put me somewhere safe, where I'd be found by strangers?"

There was no answer, and finally Diana turned around, still kneeling, and looked up.

She was shaking but didn't look away from the goddess's gaze.

Stand up, daughter, said the voice, and take my blessing.

Diana got to her feet, leaning a little against the strengthening offshore wind. Owls swept past overhead.

"My … friend," Diana ventured to say. "Can she be blessed too, Mother?"

I see no friend.

Diana pulled her attention from the face that was bending down over her in the sky and blinked into the waving shadows under the trees behind her.

"Nardie," she called. "Come out."

"I'll die."

Diana smiled tiredly. "Not right away."

"I'm not," sobbed Nardie from among the shadows, "in any way … dressed for this!"

"Nobody is. She'll overlook it. Come out—if you're not too afraid. I'll understand, if you are."

Nardie stepped hesitantly out onto the moonlit grass and then with visible effort walked up to stand beside Diana.

"I am too afraid," she said, looking down. "But I'm more afraid of what I'll be if I don't do this." She took a deep breath. "Okay?"

"Look up," said Diana.

Nardie obeyed, and in the moment before she, too, raised her eyes to the inhuman gaze overhead, Diana saw her friend's face glow with reflected light.

Be a true friend to my daughter, Bernardette Dinh.

"Yes," whispered Nardie. "I will."

An idea was conveyed then, something like bathe or cleanse or be baptized, and in Diana's head appeared a clear picture of a vast lake behind an enormous man-made dam.

The face leaned down closer and breathed on them, and the warm wind of it swept them off the ground. The dark island was gone, and they spun through vast golden halls whose pillars resonated to a triumphant chorus of deep, inhuman chords, as if the sea and all the mountains of the world had found voices to raise in a song that was older than mankind.

And the two of them were noticed, and remotely greeted.

Then they were ascending through darkness, and Diana's only anchor was Nardie's hand clasped tightly in her own. Lights began to wink at some indeterminate distance, and a choppy murmur grew in volume.

A whiff of cigarette smoke tickled Diana's nostrils—and a moment later the racket of chattering human voices and clicking chips crashed in on her ears, and she could see again.

She and Nardie were sitting on stools at another of the dim bars in Caesars Palace, and they released their hands and blinked dazedly at each other.

"How are you girls doing?" asked the bartender.

Diana picked up the glass in front of her and sniffed the inch of clear liquid in it; she could detect no smell at all. She cleared her throat. "Uh—what are we drinking?"

The bartender didn't quite roll his eyes. "Quinine water."

"Yeah, give us another round."

Diana's heart was still pounding, and she had no peripheral vision; to meet Nardie's gaze again, she had to look directly at her. The ashes in a nearby ashtray weren't shifting at all, but Diana thought she could still feel the hot wind of her mother's breath in her hair.

Nardie was clutching the edge of the bar. "Are we," she whispered, "going to stay here, do you think?"

"Yeah," said Diana, "I think we're in a landing pattern."

Somehow a live turtle, its shell as big as a dinner plate, was walking along the top of the bar toward them, pushing glasses out of its way with stumpy, leathery feet.

In its beak-like mouth was a Poker chip. Perhaps because of the artificial light, the turtle's shell and skin appeared to be gilded. Nobody else seemed to see the creature.

Diana forced herself not to close her eyes. "Um—turtle," she said levelly. "Coming up behind you."

Nardie pursed her lips and nodded, then sighed and turned to look.

The turtle was beside her drink now. It lowered its head and opened its jaws, and the chip clicked to the polished surface of the bar. Nardie slowly reached out and picked up the chip, and the turtle bowed again and—was gone.

Both women jumped at the abrupt, noiseless disappearance, and the bartender, stepping up with their drinks, spilled a splash of quinine water out of one of the glasses. "What?" he demanded irritably, looking around.

"Nothing," said Nardie. "Sorry."

When he turned away, shaking his head, she held the chip out toward Diana on her open palm.

The center of the clay disk was a grinning harlequin face, like that of the Joker in a deck of cards. Around the rim were imprinted the words "MOULIN ROUGE, LAS VEGAS."

"I thought that was in Paris," said Nardie.

"It was the name of a place here, too," said Diana. She picked up her drink. "I think it burned down in the 60s. It was the first casino to let blacks in. See the harlequin pattern, checkerboard black and white diamonds?"

" 'Ebony and i-vory,' " sang Nardie in a frail voice. "I get it." The rim of her glass chattered against her teeth. "Guess who the turtle was."

"Touche Turtle. I give up, who was he?"

"Well, I don't know. But I grew up in Hanoi, okay? And there's a lake in town there, where the post office is, called the Lake of the Restored Sword. In the fifteenth century a guy called Le Loi is supposed to have been out on it in a boat, and a golden turtle swam up and took back from him a sword that he'd been given to drive out Chinese invaders. Hey, excuse me," she said more loudly.

The bartender strode up to them again. "Can I help you, miss?"

"Can I get a hamburger here? Fried, rare?"

"Sure, if you like. Everything on that?"

"Doesn't matter. And a—a Budweiser, please." She turned back to Diana. "I can feel the air conditioning now, and see things to the side of me."

Diana darted her eyes around and shivered. "Me too. I guess we're all the way back." She could smell the quinine water in her glass.

"But when we were still circling in, the turtle gave me this." She rolled the chip end over end across the backs of her fingers and then tucked it into her shirt pocket. "I guess I'd better hang on to it."

"You might have to call a bet," Diana agreed.

Within a couple of minutes Diana was comfortable in the gin-scented coolness, but Nardie was still shaking. Diana asked her if anything in particular was wrong and if she wanted to leave, but each time Nardie just shook her head.

At last the bartender set the steaming hamburger and the frosty beer in front of Nardie, and she picked up the hamburger and took a bite of it. Diana looked away from the red-stained bun around the rare ground beef.

"There," said Dinh a few moments later, after taking a deep sip of the beer and clanking the glass back down on the bar. She was smiling, but tears shone in her eyes.

Diana stared at her. "There?" she said, mystified.

"You … raised me up, to your mother, to the goddess. You asked her to bless me, too, and she told us both to get cleansed in the lake. You're not the first person to make me more than I was, okay? But you're the first person to do it without standing to benefit from it—in fact, risking your own safety. I think I could have displaced you, after receiving that blessing."

"Okay," said Diana cautiously.

"But … damn, don't you see?" The tears overflowed her eyelids and ran down Nardie's cheeks. "I just now ate red meat, probably cooked on an iron grill, and I drank alcohol! I've unfitted myself for the queenhood! I've totally pledged my allegiance to you now; I'm of no use to my half brother anymore."

Then Diana did understand, and she leaned forward and hugged her friend, ignoring someone behind her who whispered, "Jeez, check out the dykes!"

"Thank you, Nardie," Diana said quietly. "And I swear, by our mother, that I won't leave you behind. I'll take you with me."

Nardie patted Diana's shoulder and then they both sat back, a little self-consciously. Nardie took another sip of her beer and sniffed. "Well, you'd better," she said. "Right now I'm an orphan, in a tiny boat, on a goddamn big ocean."

After they had walked back to the Flamingo and Diana had shaken Crane awake, he wearily got dressed and made coffee.

Then, in the afternoon sunlight that slanted in through the unopenable hotel window, he sat down on the carpet and began laying out face up the cards of his father's Lombardy Zeroth deck. Leon had taken out the twenty-two Major Arcana cards yesterday, and Crane tentatively began moving the remaining fifty-six cards around into four-card combinations.

It was like slowly turning a kaleidoscope in which living faces fell into new patterns and alignments in the barrel instead of colored glass chips, and he passively let the razory identities resonate through his mind.

Again he tried to arrange the cards so that he could plausibly buy his father's hand and so that, after all the purchases and sales of hands, his King-high Flush would win at the eventual showdown. Twice he sat back and sipped his lukewarm coffee, confident that he had a lock on the hand, only to notice a rogue buy that would give one of the other players a Full Boat or Four of a Kind, and he had to break it all up and start again.

In his mind, crystalline lattices of alien hatreds and fears and joys grew and were broken, over and over again, like ocean waves rising and then falling and shattering into spray.

At last he was satisfied with the layout, and he carefully picked up the cards in the order in which they would be dealt.

"Front!" he called as he tucked the stacked deck into his purse.

It was Nardie Dinh who appeared in the connecting doorway. "What am I," she asked, "a bellboy?"

"It was a joke," he said, standing up and running his fingers through his hair. "Sorry. Listen, could you do my makeup? Getting the dress on I think I can do by myself now."

"Sure, come in the bathroom," said Nardie, leading the way; then she stopped and turned around, smiling. "Hey, Scott, congratulations on your upcoming wedding! Diana told me about it."

"Thanks." His good eye was burning with fatigue already. "I hope we all live to be there. But right now I've got to get ready for … my bachelor party." He waved her on ahead. "I suppose most guys don't have their fathers along at their bachelor parties."

"Well," said Dinh judiciously, "most guys don't go in drag."

CHAPTER 47: The Flying Nun

An hour later Crane stood in his high-heeled shoes in front of the million-dollar display in Binion's Horseshoe Casino. Behind bullet-proof glass, a hundred ten-thousand-dollar bills were ranked together in five columns of twenty, framed inside the doorway-size arch of an enormous brass horseshoe. A pair of stout security guards were staring at Crane in sour disapproval.

"Must be rough," said someone by Crane's elbow. He looked down and saw old Newt, looking withered and old and jug-eared in a wide-lapel plaid suit.

Here the two of us are again, Crane thought, twenty-one years older and both looking pretty bad.

"Hi," he said to Newt. "Can I get a ride out with you?"

"Looks like," said the old man. "My other three haven't shown—down with the nightmarey shakes, I bet. That happens. Let's give 'em a few minutes for courtesy." He looked at Crane's purse. "No gun today, I hope. Throw it in the lake this time, and maybe you, too."

"No, not today. It looks like a peaceful bunch of players anyway." He looked down from the height of his heels into Newt's empty, bird-bright eyes. "What was it that you said 'must be rough'?"

"Shaving, with all that fruitcake makeup—sorry, pancake makeup. Jams up a blade, I bet, or the holes in an electric shaver."

"Well, I suppose it would, but I shave before I put the stuff on." Crane was tired, and forlornly wished for a beer, the way beer used to be for him, and a cigarette, the way they used to taste. And he was thinking of the ghost of Ben Siegel, who had gone to some trouble to let him know that a fly might be tricked into eating a poisoned sugar cube if the poison face was concealed and the fly saw only the harmless face. "It's a hassle," he said absently, "but I do it for the Lord."

The little old man's bushy white eyebrows were halfway up to where his hairline must once have been. "For the Lord, hey?"

"Sure." Crane blinked and made himself remember what he had been saying. "You don't think I choose to dress this way, do you? I'm a member of a religious order, is what this actually is all about. Lots of religious orders have to dress weird."

"Huh. They ain't gonna show, I guess. My other players, not your religious orders. Let's blow." Instantly he held up one wrinkled hand. "By which I don't mean—"

"Jeez," said Crane, following the little man through the casino dimness toward the bright patch that was the open door onto Fremont Street, "you're safe from me, Newt, honest."

"And no funny business in the car."

Everybody's cautioning me against funny business, Crane thought. "You have my word of honor."

They were in the noise of the slot machines, and Newt mumbled something that sounded like Like applying none.

Crane frowned. Applying none of what? Honor? Could this strange little man possibly have some intuition about Crane's plan to dethrone his own father? And he leaned down as they zigzagged their way through the crowd. "What did you say?"

"I said, 'Like the Flying Nun.' Religious order where you gotta dress weird. She could fly, remember?"

Crane was oddly relieved; apparently they weren't talking about honor after all. They were outside now, on the baking, sunlit sidewalk, and he had to shout, "Yeah, I remember!" to be heard over the droning of the picketer with the megaphone.

"I guess that made up for it," yelled Newt, "for having to wear that stuff all the time. At least she could fly."

"I guess."

Crane followed the little man across Fremont and down First Street toward the pay parking lot at the end of the block. This was where he had been shot at eight days ago and saved by a couple of shots from the gun of the fat man—whom he himself had killed four days later. He scuffed the toe of his ridiculous left shoe across the chipped curb, and rasped the painted nails of his right hand over the pockmark in the brick wall.

Crane would have the deal next.

The sky was dark behind the open ports, and the still-warm wind, smelling of distant cooling stone and sage, had raised the lake surface into choppy waves; the levels of the drinks on the green felt table were all rolling and uneven. The cigarette smoke was a mushroom cloud over the pot's scattered bills.

Newt sat to Crane's right and was flipping out the last of the second face-up cards. "… and a Duck to the Seven," Newt was chanting, "no apparent help, Seven gets a Seven, Sevens are cheap, the Flying Nun gets an Ace and a possible Flush draw, another Ten to the Ten of Sticks, pair looks good, and the Nine gets … an Eight toward a Straight." He sat back. "Tens are the power."

Not wanting to consistently sit next to Leon, Crane had this time stacked the deck with the requirement that he sit two places to his father's right, and he had succeeded in getting that seat. The man between Crane and his father held the pair of Tens, and he rapped the table to check. Leon bet two hundred, and everybody called it, and then the man with the Tens raised it another two hundred. All the other players called the sandbag raise.

Crane's hand was up for bid now, and he managed to sell it for the seven hundred he had in the pot. The man with the Tens refused a $700-bid for his own hand and then bought Leon's hand in turn for $750.

"All right," the man said as he gathered Leon's cards face up into his own board, now showing a Tens Up Two Pair, "I wanted that, thank you, Mr. Hanari. I figured I could buy it; I notice you always sell your hand, never wait and buy one."

Crane saw the Art Hanari face frown slightly under the bandage, and he realized that his father wasn't pleased to have his Assumption strategy noticed. Leon made the Hanari lips smile. "I'll have to start mixing up my play," he said.

Not quite yet, thought Crane, please.

The betting went around again, and at the showdown the man who had bought Leon's hand had a Full Boat, Tens Over, which lost to an Aces Over Boat.

The deal was now Crane's.

He gathered in the cards, and then, as he tossed into the center of the table the hundred-dollar bill that was his ante, he hit the edge of his glass of soda water and sent it rolling across the table, spilling the water out in a series of pulses like a sine wave.

It was a fine distraction, and Crane had the cards dumped into his open purse, and the stacked deck flipped up onto the table, while everybody was still in the first syllable of a surprised curse.

"Sorry, sorry," Crane muttered, reaching out to dab ineffectively at the stain with a paper napkin.

"Stevie!" called the Hanari body to the Amino Acid bartender, "a towel here, quick!" Crane's father gave him a wrathful glance out of his unswollen eye. "The Flying Nun doesn't seem to appreciate the fact that these are hand-painted cards and must not get wet!"

"I said I was sorry," said Crane.

The green felt in front of him was dry, and he began smoothly riffling the cards and doing the pull-through shuffle. The deck that was in his purse now was the one with the Jack of Cups card that had split his eye forty-two years earlier, and he wished for luck's sake that were the deck he would deal from tonight.

After seven riffles and false shuffles he passed the deck to Newt for the cut, and easily negated it when he recombined the cards under his fast-outswept hand. Everyone's attention was still on the mopping-up of the spilled water.

When the green felt had been blotted with a towel and then been painstakingly blown dry with a hair-dryer that one of the Amino Acids had had to fetch from the bathroom, and the game was finally allowed to proceed, Crane spun out the first three cards to each player, two down and one up.

The first round of betting added fifty-two hundred dollars to the pot, and then Crane dealt out the second up cards.

This time his father held the Ten and Eight of Swords down and the Knight of Clubs and the Six of Cups showing. Crane's cards were the remainder of the hand Doctor Leaky had bought in the parking lot game the day before, the Nine and King of Swords down and the Seven of Swords and the Eight of Cups showing. Crane could plausibly buy the "Art Hanari" hand now, seeming to be trying for the Six-Seven-Eight three-Straight.

"And," said Crane after the last bet had been called, "Mr. Hanari's hand is up for the mating. What is he bid?"

One man bid $500, and a woman raised it to $550, but Hanari just kept shaking his head.

"I'll go six hundred," said Crane. And, he thought, if the rest of you bastards will just have the simple card sense to buy the hands I've laid out for you, I'll win this with the King-high Swords Flush.

"Uh," said Leon through the lips of the Hanari body, "no."

"Six-fifty," said Crane, concealing his impatience. He could feel sweat starting out under the makeup on his forehead; it would begin to look odd if he had to bid too much more for an apparent middle-size three-Straight.

"No," said Leon, "I think I'll buy one this time."

He's chosen this hand to vary his play, thought Crane, because of what that son of a bitch said in the last hand.

"Seven hundred," said Crane, trying to conceal his desperation.

"No," said Leon, swallowing the word so that it sounded almost like the French non. "The bidding is closed on these cards."

Crane's heart was pounding, and he kept his chin lowered so that the pulse in his throat wouldn't be visible. "Okay," he said. "Then the next hand is up for auction." He allowed himself a slow sigh. "What is the bid?"

Crane had again lost the chance to buy Doctor Leaky's hand and then let Leon buy it from him at the Assumption.

Leon eventually bought the hand of a young man who had been playing very loose. Crane had to admire the tactic; if the conceived hand should happen to win, this was the one player aside from Leon himself who might choose to match the pot for the Assumption option.

But Leon's Two Pair lost to a Flush, and the cards were gathered and stacked and passed to the man on Crane's left to shuffle and deal out another hand.

Again Crane was left with nothing to do but play for mere money until dawn.

To his intense annoyance, his Flying Nun nickname was picked up by everyone else at the table. At one point the announcement of "A pair of Queens to the Flying Nun!" drew such laughter that the betting was delayed for a full minute.

When the sky had lightened, and everybody had stood up and put on his or her coat and the engines were gunning in reverse as the boat surged in toward the docks of the marina, Leon rang an empty glass with one long, manicured fingernail.

"Attention, gamesters," he said. He was smiling under the bandage, but there was a harshness in his voice that silenced all the idle, tired chat. "Tomorrow is Good Friday, and out of respect this game will end at three in the afternoon. Therefore, to get in at least a little bit of decent play, this boat will … set sail at noon. That's only about six hours from now, so you might want to get rooms at the Lakeview Lodge here, and arrange for wake-up calls."

Fatigue coursed through Crane's arteries like a powerful drug, but it struck him as odd that the game should end at three. When businesses had acknowledged Good Friday, he recalled, they were closed from noon until three.

If this was a gesture of respect, it was a strangely inverted one.

Dancing on the edge of the cliff.

Shuffling dizzily through the still-cool air along the Fremont Street sidewalk, Dondi Snayheever was momentarily eclipsed in the shadow of the towering steel and neon tubing cowboy over the Pioneer Casino. He paused to squint up at the slowly waving figure, and he wondered what personage it might be nearly the shape of.

His maimed hand jerked him forward, and he resumed pushing himself forward through the resistance of the morning air.

Shapes waiting, he thought, like the implicit whirlpool in a bathtub just waiting to come into existence when someone would pull the plug. As if when a cloud formation came to look very damn like some certain enormous bird that was waiting in potential, it would actually become that bird.

Birds. Eye of the crow was right last week, but Isis's temple was blown up now. Another bird now, according to the dreams, a pink one.

In a dream Snayheever had seen the fat man blow up the temple. The fat man had achieved a shape, too—had become the giant that had got stunted and round and lost his green color, had become the warty black ball in the math field, containing all the points that would never become infinite.

The fat man wasn't that anymore. He was dead, his boundary broken, and the points would soon be scattered across the desert, free to become infinite or not, as they pleased. Snayheever wondered how long he himself would continue to be the thing he had come authoritatively to resemble.

Dancing on the cliff edge, the dog snapping at his heels.

He could sense his missing finger; it was far away to the south, up high, ringing with the vibrations of tremendous hydroelectric power.

He had no choice but to go there; the personage whom he had become was going to be there, and of course would need its shape.

But first there was someone to say good-bye to, and someone to forgive.

CHAPTER 48: Last Call

When Crane unlocked the hotel room door and pushed it open, he smelled hot coffee. Diana and Dinh were standing by the window with cups in their hands, and they looked over at him anxiously.

"No," said Crane. He took off his wig and watched, to his own mild surprise, as his arm drew back and flung the cap of auburn hair against the mirror. "No, he didn't buy it. I've got to be back there before noon, and I've got to stack the deck again in the meantime. I won't have time to get any sleep."

Diana hurried over to him and touched his arm. He forced himself not to pull away. "Would you like some coffee?" she asked.

" 'Wood eye, wood eye?' " said Crane absently, quoting the next-to-last line of an old joke Susan had liked.

Diana gave him her cup, which was nearly full and still steaming. "Here," she said. "I'll make me another one."

Crane put it down on the bedside table. "I don't want any." The smell of coffee hung in the air like smoke, and he couldn't get out of his mind the image of a coffee cup on a stove set on low.

And paramedics, and an ambulance, and after that a bottle to keep him from remembering his dreams.

"That was a line from a joke," he said irritably. " 'Wood eye, wood eye.' " Diana stared at him blankly, apparently never having heard the joke herself. How could she not ever have heard it? " 'Hunchback, hunchback' is the last line," he snapped. "I've also heard it as 'Harelip, harelip.' "

Mavranos had walked in from the next room, and Crane saw him exchange a look with Dinh. That's right, Arky, he thought, I'm going crazy—talking about hunchbacks and harelips. Damn my soul, I would move heaven and earth for a—

The telephone rang on the bedside table, and everyone except Crane jumped. Dinh started toward it, but Crane was closer and snatched it up.

"Hello?" he said.

" 'Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,' " crooned the voice on the telephone, " 'Save Me, save only Me?' "

Crane recognized the lines. They were from Susan's favorite poem, Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven."

And of course he recognized the voice.

It's my wife, he thought.

I shouldn't talk to her.

Why not?

Because it's not my wife, he told himself. Remember? It's drink, or Death, or something that's both of those things. So I can't even talk to her. But what if it's her, a bit of the real Susan, too! Maybe it really is her ghost, and the bad stuff has been laminated onto her.

And even if it's not her at all, what if drink can do a convincing imitation of her? I'm probably going to die tomorrow, after I've failed to do this stupid card trick for the third time, after my father kicks me out of my body. Can't I at least talk to this thing for a couple of minutes, over the phone? What's the harm of just listening to what it has to say? And it might have some information we need. And it sounds so much like Susan, and I'm so tired, that I know I can make myself believe that it is Susan. If everyone would just leave me alone.

Finally he spoke. "Just a sec," he said into the phone, then put his palm over the mouthpiece. "This is private," he told the other three, "do you mind?"

"Jesus, Scott," said Mavranos, "that's not—"

"Do you mind?" Crane repeated.

"I mind," said Diana, her voice breaking. "Scott, for God's sake—"

"Well, if I can't even—all I'm—" He shook his head as if to clear it. "Damn it, go mind in the other room, would you?"

For several seconds Mavranos and Diana and Dinh stared at him; then Mavranos jerked his head toward the connecting doorway, and the three of them silently filed through it and closed the door.

"We're alone," Crane said into the mouthpiece.

"What do they say," Susan's voice asked, "in a bar, at ten to two, when it's your last chance to get a drink?"

"They say 'last call.' " Crane was trying to be calm, but his voice was shaky.

"This is last call," said Susan. "This is the last time I'll call you. After you hang up, I'm either gone forever or with you forever."

"You're—um, you're a ghost," said Crane. He wished he could think clearly. His false eye stung—he hadn't washed it or irrigated the cavity since Wednesday; he knew he was just asking for meningitis—and his leg ached and he could feel blood leaking out of the bandage below his right ribs. A wave of exhaustion made him close his eyes.

"So would you be, a ghost, if you'd come with me. Forever, whole again. Go to the card game, why not? Pretend you turned me down—go ahead and stack the deck again, if you want, but leave it in your purse. Who cares what hands go where? And have a drink …"

" 'And when you're mine,' " he said, quoting another poem Susan had liked, " 'I'll kiss you in my glass, fair goddess Wine.' "

"I'll kiss you back. 'It's even better when you help.' " Now she was quoting Lauren Bacall from To Have and Have Not. " 'Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad.' " That was from a ghost story. Well, this was a ghost story.

"I know how to whistle," he said dreamily. "Just put your lips to the bottle and suck." It warmed him to know that all this was making sense to her, as it would not to anyone outside the once-cozy bounds of their marriage. This had to be Susan's genuine ghost.

"And you can sled all the way down the hill, right out of the sunlight—on good old Rosebud," said Susan's voice. Susan had always loved Citizen Kane. "This Bud's for you."

The cup of coffee still steamed on the table. Crane touched it. The handle was as hot as if it had been sitting in an oven, but an instant later it was damply cold, and the cup had become a bottle of Budweiser.

He picked it up curiously. It seemed to be a real beer.

"It's the only way you can reach me now."

One sip never hurt anybody, he thought. He tipped up the bottle, but paused with it still short of his lips.

"Go ahead," said the voice in the telephone. "They'll see only a coffee cup. Diana won't know about us. Who cares what hands go where?"

A drink, he thought, and sleep, and Susan in my dreams.

"You'll have two eyes again," she said. "Your father won't have hurt you, won't have left you. I won't have left you."

Crane could remember how he had worshiped his father when he was five years old, and how he had loved Susan. Those had been good things; nobody could claim they had not.

There was a knock at the hallway door, and Crane jumped, splashing cold beer out onto his wrist.

"Quick," said Susan.

Whoever it was out in the hall was calling, "Heidi, Heidi."

"It's just one of my drunks," said Susan urgently. "I'll send him away. Drink me!"

The wetness of the beer was cold on Crane's wrist. He remembered old Ozzie fixing bottles of formula for the infant Diana. Crane's foster father had heated the bottles in a pan of hot water and tested the temperature by shaking out drops onto his wrist. He wouldn't have let her have it as cold as this.

I can't let her have it as cold as this, he thought. My love for my father, my love for Susan were good things, but Diana loves me now. I love her now.

He wondered if, in the next room, Diana was sensing his temptation to embrace the dead.

"No," he said, all at once shivering in his flimsy cotton dress in the chill of the air conditioning, his voice finally breaking. "No, I—I won't, not—not me, not your husband. If you are any part of—my real wife, then you can't want me to, at this cost." He put the beer down.

"You think you can help your sister?" asked Susan, her voice shrill over the phone. "You can't help her. Oh, please, Scott, it's your wife you can help, and yourself! And your real father, whose feelings you haven't thought of once."

"Heidi, Heidi!" came the call again from the hallway.

"Oh, go and die!" wailed Susan. Crane thought she was probably talking to the man in the hall, but he chose, despairingly, to take it as addressed to himself.

"I'll go," said Crane, "and if I die, at least I'll—" What, he thought. Be aware of it. Still be the man Diana loves. He took the receiver away from his ear and swept it toward the phone cradle—and his fingers went numb and dropped it.

He reached for the receiver on the floor with his other hand, and it, too, went numb; he was only able to brush the plastic crescent with limp fingers.

"You love me!" cried the voice out of the receiver.

Gasping for breath, almost sobbing, Crane got down on his hands and knees and picked the thing up in his teeth. Susan's pleading voice was a buzzing in his jaw-muscles now, vibrating through his head. His vision blurred, and he felt his very consciousness fading, but he bit down harder and got up on his knees.

Tears and saliva were beaded on the receiver when he had dropped it at last into the cradle, silencing the voice, and his teeth had cut dents into the plastic.

He flopped back against the side of the bed and blurrily saw that the connecting door was open again; Diana and Dinh were staring at him in uncomprehending alarm, and Mavranos crossed to the hallway door and pulled it open.

Dondi Snayheever walked in on tiptoes, jerking his filthy bandaged hand up and down and smiling crazily with all his teeth. "Heidi Heidi ho," he said.

Mavranos had moved quickly back to the bed and slipped his hand into the canvas bag in which he kept his .38.

Crane wiped his face on the bedspread and stood up. "What do you want?" he asked Snayheever unsteadily; though he was still panting, he wearily tried to put authority into his voice.

Snayheever had lost weight; his skull shone through his feverish skin, and Crane could faintly see a red aura flickering around the young man's angular body. The wounded arm was still twitching. Then Snayheever's bright eyes lit on Diana, and he grunted as though he'd been hit and fell to his knees. "Eye of the flamingo," he said, "not the crow. I've found you at last, Mother."

After a moment Diana walked over to him, ignoring Mavranos's bark of warning, and touched Snayheever's greasy hair. "Stand up," she said.

Snayheever got to his feet—awkwardly, for his left leg had started jerking. "The other one will find you and kill you," he said, "if I don't stop him. But I will. It's what I have left to do." He tugged at the lapels of his corduroy coat. "A coat I borrowed from James Dean, and I'll sing there for the two of you, like a bird, like a lovely little stork that wheels in circling flight, right? Hemingway said that. Flight makes right and he'll bite. You could say that. I've got my finger on the pulse, jammed behind the license plate, and it's at the penstocks and spillways and floodgates. And he wants to let the spinning wheel go circling around another twenty years, since he's got a busted nose now—a tweaked beak—and no Queen. He's gonna squawk on the wave band so nobody can hear anything until it's too late, and he'll dirty up the bath water so it's too screwed up for anyone else to use at all. Ray-Joe, it's a sad salvation."

"He's talking about my brother," said Nardie, "and it makes sense."

"Sure, he's got my vote," growled Mavranos, his hand obviously tight on the grip of the gun in the bag. "Diana, will you get away from him?"

Diana stepped back and stood beside Crane.

"He means that my brother is at Hoover Dam," said Nardie tensely, "and that Ray-Joe is going to try to postpone the succession, the coronation, the King's resurrection in the new bodies—let the cycle go around again, with no issue this time. It's what Ray-Joe would do; if I did break his nose, he can't become the King this time around. You've got to be physically perfect to do that, and he'll still have a couple of black eyes and be all puffy, okay? So he's going to … generate some kind of damping psychic noise, to drown out the King's signal, and then I think spiritually pollute the water, and everybody will have to wait another twenty years for all this to be ripe again. By then the old King will probably be dead, not having been able to get into any new bodies, and Ray-Joe will have had time to groom another Queen, probably right from birth—and he'll be able to just step right up to the throne and … sit right down."

"God," said Crane, trying to keep the eager relief out of his voice, "is that so bad? If your brother screws it up so that my father can't do his tricks this year, then I won't lose my body. And we can all just go home, can't we? And I'll have twenty years to think up what to do when finally his … hour comes round at last."

Nardie stared at him. "Yes, that's right," she said. "But you won't have a wife. Ray-Joe will have found Diana and killed her, like this guy says. Ray-Joe would never want somebody like her for his Queen, and just by being alive, she'd be a big problem, okay?"

"The phone is for calling room service," said Snayheever, pointing at the bitten telephone on the bedside table. "You order … foods, your various items from a menu, and you eat them. What you don't do is eat the telephone." He nodded emphatically. "He'll try to eat me, I shouldn't wonder. I always have a dog. For now he barks all night long at the end of his tether."

He looked up at Diana. "This son came here to, as you would say, because he wanted to say good-bye to his mother," he said softly. "We won't meet again."

Diana's eyes were wet as she again ignored Mavranos's shout and crossed to Snayheever and hugged him, and Crane knew she was thinking about Scat and Oliver.

"Good-bye," she said a moment later as she released him and stepped back.

"It's not an easy thing," Snayheever said, "being a son." He turned his hot gaze on Crane. "I forgive you, Dad."

Crane looked at the grimy, stained bandage at the end of the shaking arm, and he nodded, acknowledging that he was grateful to have the forgiveness.

Then Snayheever had turned and limped out into the hall.

Mavranos, his hand still in the canvas bag, crossed to the door and closed it. "Lotta fucked-up people wandering around," he said quietly. He turned to Nardie. "Your brother's at the dam, right? And if he disarms the old man's clock, he's gonna come looking for Diana."

"That's it."

Mavranos sighed and touched the bandanna around his neck. "One more day," he said. "I guess I'm going to the dam. Anybody need a ride south?"

Diana looked at him solemnly. "Thank you, Arky. I wish—"

Mavranos gave her a dismissing wave. "None of us exactly like doing what we're doing. I'll stop at a pet store on the way and get me a goldfish, just for luck. How about the ride?"

"Yes," said Diana. "Nardie and I have to go get baptized."

Crane plodded around the bed and picked up his purse. "Give me half an hour to stack my deck, and I'll go, too."

Nardie and Diana had bought a couple of big cans of red paint and some brushes the day before and had painted Mavranos's Suburban.

As he jiggled on the front seat of the barreling truck now, Crane tried to hold his head in a position at which the cracks in the windshield would not pick up the garish red of the hood. He didn't like to see what seemed to be a metallic red spider flickering on the horizon.

"Visions and dreams and a crazy man's talk," Mavranos said resentfully, squinting ahead and steering with the fingers of one hand. "We're probably all crazy, too—look what they've done to my truck, Ma." With his free hand he lifted his can of beer and took a foamy sip. "I knew a guy once who claimed he was a Martian. His TV set had told him he was. Makes just as much sense as any of this. Poor old Joe Serrano, I should apologize to him."

Diana stirred on the back seat. "That's not a Martian name," she said, "that's a Mexican name. Who was he trying to fool?"

Crane started laughing, and soon they all were, and Mavranos put his beer between his thighs to grip the wheel with both hands.

CHAPTER 49: Ahoy, Cinderella!

At Boulder Beach, still short of the marina, Mavranos pulled over and stopped on the shoulder to let Diana and Nardie climb out. The beach was only a hundred yards away, beyond the ranks of colorful campers and RVs with their awnings flapping, and the lake was blue against the distant jagged brown mountains of the far shore.

"By afternoon everything should be over," Diana said, standing on the roadside gravel and leaning in through Crane's rolled-down window. "Us girls will walk up to the marina after we've had our dip. There's a hotel there, Scott says, the Lakeview Lodge. Let's meet at the bar." She kissed Crane, and he curled his fingers in her blond hair and kissed her fiercely.

"And tomorrow," he said when he had finally let go of her, "we'll get married." His voice was hoarse.

"That's what we'll do," she said. "Arky, Scott—both of you watch it, hear? And we'll be careful, too. We need to have a bride and groom and maid of honor and best man. All four."

Mavranos nodded, then took his foot off the brake and gave the engine gas and in seconds had swung back onto the highway.

"Drop you off at the marina?" he said, loudly over the wind in the open windows.

"Sure, that's close enough. I'm getting better at walking in these shoes."

"Couldn't tell to watch you do it."

"I'd like to see you try it."

"I bet you would, Pogo." Mavranos took another sip of his beer. "On the phone—she tried to talk you into ditching Diana and going with her instead?"

"Yeah." Crane shivered in his dress. "I talked myself out of it."

"Jawed from the snatch of defeat."

"Yeah, right." He shifted around on the seat. "Arky, I—"

"Don't say it. You may be wearing a dress, but that don't mean you can kiss me, too."

Crane smiled, feeling the makeup in the creases of his face. "Okay. Be there this afternoon."

Mavranos made a right turn, toward the marina, and at a red light Crane climbed out of the truck and straightened his dress. He rapped on the red hood the way a Craps shooter might blow on dice, and then the light had changed and the blotchy truck boomed on across the intersection.

Crane walked slowly down the slope toward the gleaming white boats moored at the docks and slips, and he was not even aware now of derisive hoots from a passing car. He walked in the sunlight and the cool breeze and the smells of lake water and gasoline and sage, and he thought of all the people who were dead: Susan, and Ozzie, and the fat man, and probably Al Funo, too, considering the way Diana had said she'd set him up. And tomorrow night Crane and Arky and Diana and Nardie might be down in the black water themselves, down where the Archetypes lived. He wondered if in some dim way ghosts were able to talk among themselves, and, if so, what they would all talk about.

"Ahoy, Cinderella!" came a call from ahead of him. He looked up, and saw one of the Amino Acids waving at him from the deck of the houseboat. Crane quickened his pace.

"You wait till high noon," the young man said, "and you'll turn into a pumpkin left on the dock here. Skate your weird ass over, girl, and step into my metal detector, as the spider said to the fly. There're a dozen aboard now already, and you're number thirteen."

Diana stood in the hot sand in her Nikes and looked up and down the beach at the broad towels and beer coolers and scampering children.

"I guess it would be a mistake to go to jail over this," she muttered to Nardie.

"I think they're pretty conservative around here," agreed Nardie with a nervous giggle. "Even in our underwear we'd probably get arrested. Fully clothed it is."

"I'll ditch this, at least," Diana said, unbuttoning her denim jacket and tossing it onto the sand. "The walk back might not dry us out, and the bar's likely to be air-conditioned."

Dinh just hugged herself and shook her head. "I'm an as-is package."

Several tanned little boys were splashing each other in the shallows ahead of them, and after a few steps down the slope Diana stopped, staring at them.

The boys' faces were stiff, almost painted-looking, and their arms seemed to Diana to move as if they were hinged.

Dinh was ahead of her, looking back. "Hmm?"

"Let's … go farther down the beach," Diana said.

The first thing Crane noticed was that old Doctor Leaky was aboard the houseboat, sitting in a wheelchair in the corner under the television set. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with him, aside from the fact that he had wet the pants of his sky blue leisure suit, and he kept fumbling ineffectually at the belt that kept him in the chair.

"Pay no attention to the old man in the corner," said Leon in his booming baritone. Crane looked across the red-carpeted lounge to where the host was already seated at his place at the green table—and Crane made himself just smile and nod.

The Art Hanari body was looking bad. Red lines, apparently inflamed veins, curled and branched down the bad side of his face, and the high cheekbones and decisive shelf of the jaw were lost under puffy swelling. Crane imagined that Leon was yearning to flee into a new body as desperately as he himself had ever yearned for the escape of drink.

The engines shifted out of neutral, and the carpeted deck shifted as the boat got under way.

"Sit down, everyone," said Leon. "We've only got three hours, and we want to get as many hands bought and sold as we can, right?"

Right, Crane thought desperately. One hand in particular.

He squeezed his purse, feeling the bulk of the once again agonizingly stacked Lombardy Zeroth deck, as he hurried to the seat he had selected for himself, the first position to Leon's left this time.

He had thought about buying a pack of cigarettes so that he could at least have one smoldering beside him, even if he couldn't bear to puff on it; he'd forgotten to, but it didn't matter—Old Newt was tremblingly stubbing out a Pall Mall in an ashtray already crowded with butts, having just lit a fresh one.

Leon opened the wooden box and spread the terrible cards out across the green felt. A couple of yesterday's players had not returned and had been replaced by newcomers, and these now shivered and looked ill.

Leon turned the cards face down and began shuffling them. The cigarette smoke curled over the table, and it seemed to Crane that two almost inaudible sounds vibrated the levels of the drinks and made his teeth itch—one sound too low to hear and one too high—and he thought that the interference between them must be about to form words that would resonate unrecoverably deep in the minds of all present.

The brown Art Hanari hands were steady as Leon passed the deck to the man on his right for the cut.

Crane's bad eye stung, and he wiped at it with the lace-edged handkerchief the women had bought for him.

The children had walked with mechanical stiffness out of the lake shallows and onto the hot sand. Beyond them their parents waved and nodded, slowly, like the grasshopper heads of pumping oil wells.

Nardie and Diana hurried away, carrying their shoes now, toward the empty stretch of beach to their right. Diana tried to slant toward the water, but through some trick of perspective, every sliding footstep through the shifting sand took them further away from the lake.

It was in the bending of Nardie's knees that Diana first saw the stiffness start to appear here; then her belly went cold as she noticed that her own arms were swinging metronomically, and that the very birds and waves and stalks of shore grasses were all shifting their positions with angular rigidity.

"What's—exactly—happening," said Nardie, obviously struggling to make her voice come out as something besides a monotone quacking.

Mother, thought Diana in panic, what's happening here?

A concept appeared in her head, and the image of a sword.

Diana tried to put words to it. "Crystallization," she droned, unable to put a questioning lift at the end of the word. "Like—" She searched her mind for an image that would fit the idea. "Like pure silicon crystals—no good for—information transfer. Need—mix—doping of boron or—something. If it's just one pure thing, it's just a crystal—what this is." She inhaled and exhaled jerkily.

The image of a sword: Nardie had said that the turtle in the myth had taken back a sword. "Get out—your sword, your chip."

"Chip," intoned Nardie. "Dip, slip, crip. Chip like in—silicon." She reached up like a saluting robot, and her rigid hand hit her forehead. "Cannot—get it out."

"No," said Diana, wondering how much longer she would even be able to speak. The air was so still it seemed almost to have jelled. "Poker—Poker chip." Repeating the word was the only way she could convey emphasis. "Moulin Rouge."

Nardie nodded and then kept on nodding, but her spread fingers found the pocket of her jeans, and after some ungraceful wrenching she held out her hand.

On her palm was the black and white chip, with its androgynous jester face grinning under the diamond checkerboard pattern of the fool's cap.

The air rippled over it, and Nardie seemed to encounter resistance when she moved her hand—she had to cup her palm around the chip and push it through the air.

Diana sensed cracks spreading invisibly out from the space around Nardie; the field of rigidity was being broken up.

Then the air shifted and seemed to spring apart, and Diana nearly fell as her joints suddenly loosened.

"God," said Nardie, wobbling sinuously and twisting her feet in the rounded sand, her freed voice running up and down the scale, "what in hell was that!"

Diana sighed. "Opposition," she said. "Let's get into the water."

They turned toward the now-wide stretch of sand that separated them from the blue waves, then froze.

The air over the sand was no longer glassy clear.

A crowd of translucent figures and tall structures like oil wells wavered, insubstantial as heat waves over highway pavement, on the expanse of sand between them and the water.

Diana looked closer, trying to see the misty forms in the glare of the sunlight, and she saw without comprehension that they were not living figures but were nearly-transparent moving statues, perhaps not standing at various distances but built to different scales. She strained her eyes to focus on the things and saw that several were dressed in Arab robes and headdresses, some in Roman togas, and a couple as cowboys or prospectors. One was a giant ape, though no more lifelike in its motions than the others.

Then she looked up, and saw that the two tall structures were the clown from the front of the Circus Circus and Vegas Vic, the cowboy who perpetually waved over the Pioneer Casino on Fremont Street.

For a long, stretched-out second she simply stared, her belly cold and her mind blank.

Then she choked off a despairing wail and tried to think above the thudding of her heart. "It's all the figures," she said unsteadily, "from town. Or their spirits, I guess."

"Their shapes." Nardie shook her head, now holding the chip tightly in her fist. "What do they care?"

"I guess Scott's father cares."

"Can they," asked Nardie shakily, "hurt us?"

"I doubt they're here to escort us to the water." The two women had stepped back. "This is his magic, the King's. Male only—he doesn't want a Queen." Diana put one hand on Nardie's narrow shoulder, and they stopped retreating across the loose sand. "My mother gave us the chip. It's yin and yang," said Diana tensely. "Mixed, linked opposites—the face on it is both male and female. His … things might not like it."

Nardie had been squeezing the chip, and now she gasped and opened her hand. There was blood on her palm.

"It's got an edge," she said wonderingly.

"It'd better have." Diana held out her own hand. "Cut me, too, and then see if it will cut them."

Five miles to the southeast, the canyon-spanning concrete shoulders of Hoover Dam held back the lake.

After Mavranos had parked his truck in the broad lot by the snack stand on the Arizona side of the dam, and begun the long walk through the heat back toward the arc of the dam where the tourists had been milling with their cameras when he had driven by, the first thing he became aware of over his own exhaustion was the crying children.

The Arizona Spillway was a vast, smoothly curving abyss to his right, big enough, he thought dizzily, for God to take a roomy bath in or for ten million skateboarders to fly away down to their doom; but it was the agitated line of humanity, dwarfed to insect scale by the immensity of the dam, that commanded his attention.

Everyone was hurrying past him, back toward the parking lot. Children wailed, and the wheels of rental baby carriages being pushed too fast rattled shrilly on the concrete, and the adults all seemed to be in shock; their faces were blank-eyed and twisted with rage and horror and idiot mirth. Their bright holiday clothes seemed to have been put on them by attendants who didn't care, and Mavranos wished he had seen ranks of buses back in the lot, ready to take all these people home to some unimaginable asylum. Nut day at the dam, he thought, trying to smile and not be afraid, half price if you can bibble-bibble your lips and cross your eyes.

He tried to walk toward the dam quickly, but he was soon sweating and panting, and he had to lean on one of the concrete stanchions of the rail.

He peered ahead, at the curve of the dam. It seemed too imposingly big to be so far away. He could see cars moving slowly along the highway that was its crest, and he could make out figures moving along the sidewalks and the bridges that led out to the intake towers on the water. From this distance, at least, he could see nothing to have caused all the panic.

But fear was in the wind like the smell of hot metal, like a vibration in the air, like a rat gnawing underground.

He wanted to get back in the truck and drive away on the Arizona side, keep driving until he ran out of gas and then walk further.

Instead he pushed away from the stanchion and walked on down the broad sidewalk, toward the cathedral arch of the dam.

Crane sold his first four-card hand to a middle-aged man in a necktie and sport coat and then watched as the bidding started up for the next hand. It didn't hold his attention; he was still a parent of the hand that would include the four cards he had sold, and thus he might still win a tenth of the pot, but he certainly wouldn't be matching the total and claiming the Assumption.

He glanced out one of the ports at the lake, dotted with scooting water-skiers, and he concentrated on breathing deeply. He had sat on Leon's left this time, and the next deal would be his.

The inaudible high and low vibration had receded away in both directions, and he couldn't sense it anymore, but he thought that some of the others still could. Leon shook his head sharply a couple of times, and Newt had fumbled his first hand and exposed one of his down cards, and the Amino Acid at the bar had broken a glass while getting one of the new players a third martini.

The loud crack of the glass had so enormously startled Doctor Leaky that the smell in the lounge shortly went from smelling faintly of urine to smelling a good deal worse.

A Straight Flush wound up beating a set of Trips. Neither Leon nor Crane was a parent of the winning hand, and after the winner had swept in the money with a nervous smile, Leon pushed the nearest folded hands to Crane.

"Your deal," growled the Hanari baritone. "Let's snap it up here."

"Uh," said the Amino Acid at the bar, "you want me to take the cap'n out on the deck, Mr. Hanari, and get his pants off him and hose him down?"

"He's not the captain," said Leon loudly. "I'm the captain. No, he's got an appointment with a surgeon on Sunday; this won't kill him before then." He waved irritably. "Open the ports, if you like—the breeze will be fresh, if not cool."

Crane thought that ordinarily most of the players would have objected to the smell and demanded that the bartender's suggestion be followed, but today even the toughest of them seemed cowed and uncertain.

The last of the cards were gingerly pushed across the green felt to Crane, who carefully stacked them and patted them square.

Everybody's looking at me, he thought, looking right at the cards. I can't switch in the cold deck right now.

He cut the deck that was in front of him and gave it a genuine riffle-shuffle. "Must be some nice-guy surgeon," he said, smiling at Leon, "to see a patient on a Sunday." With luck someone would agree, or disagree, and draw away the attention of the table.

"S'pose so," said Leon, staring at the cards. Nobody else spoke.

"Say, sonny," Crane called to the bartender as he gave the cards another shuffle, "what time you got?"

"Twelve-fifteen."

Nobody had looked away.

Crane shuffled the cards again. At the average rate of fifteen minutes per hand, the deal might not have time to come around to him again before the game was ended at three. He could wait, and hope, and try to hurry the game along, but at that rate he might well have to go meet his friends and tell them that he had not even got the stacked deck out of his purse.

And then, he thought helplessly, what? Kill myself, I suppose, to keep Leon from taking me?

"Let's go," said Newt.

Crane felt a drop of sweat run down from his armpit and soak into his bra.

Gotta just jump, he thought, and hope there's deep water.

He passed the shuffled deck to his father for the cut, and as soon as the Hanari body had taken off the top of the deck and laid the stack beside the bottom, Crane leaned back lazily and sang, " 'Whe-e-en there are gray skies …' "

" 'What don't you mind in the least?' " screamed Doctor Leaky in a grating falsetto.

Crane almost whipped his head around himself, along with everyone else at the table, so abrupt and loud was the interruption—but he kept his concentration and dumped the cut cards into his purse and flipped the stacked deck up onto the table.

"Damn," he said, not having to fake a nervous tone in his voice, "what's the matter with him?"

The Hanari head was twisted around to look hard at Crane through the unswollen eye. "Why did you start to sing that song?"

"I don't know," Crane said. "Is that what set him off? I've got a tape I was playing in the car—Al Jolson, you know? White guy that always wore blackface? It's a song he used to sing."

Leon seemed jarred, and shook his head. "Deal the cards," he muttered. "Get this over with."

Crane willed his hands to be steady as he skimmed the first cards across the table. Don't want to screw up here, he thought, and have them declare a misdeal.

Nobody really looked likely to, though. Get this over with was clearly the mood of the table.

The animated, nearly invisible statues on the lakeshore seemed to be angular ectoplasmic balloons—when Nardie swiped at them with the edge of the chip, they tore and blew away like cellophane dandelion seeds, releasing hot, dry air and a smell of long-desiccated organic stuff.

And though the nearly invisible substance of the things warped the glaring sunlight like rippling lenses when they all crowded in around the two women, forcing Diana to squint and bob her head to guess exactly in which direction the water lay, she was able to push the things aside as easily as if they had been big soft-skinned helium balloons.

Their yielding skins were cold to the touch, and Diana's hands were becoming achingly numb even as the sun beat down on her head and face.

At one point the giant transparency that was the Circus Circus clown dropped one ludicrously big foot right over her, and she had a moment of fishbowl vision and felt as though she had been bathed in a shower of menthol.

"Straight ahead, I think," she gasped when it had lifted and freed her. "This isn't so bad, you know?"

Dinh had been keeping the things away from herself with the sweeping edge of the chip. "They're getting tougher to cut, though," she gasped. A moment later she added, "Especially the ones you've touched."

Diana realized that she was tired—sweating and breathing through her slackly open mouth—even though she was hardly doing anything more strenuous than walking slowly across the hot sand; and when she glanced around her at the crystal shapes she had pushed out of her way, it seemed to her that those ones were more substantial and were visibly tinted pink, faintly filtering the colors of the sand and the distant water.

Every one of the figures, in fact, looked solider.

Suddenly she was cold all over again, but from fear now, and she crowded in close to Nardie's back. "God, Nardie," she said tightly, "I think they've been draining me here, somehow, when I was pushing them out of the way, like eating me. Keep 'em off with the chip; I'm not touching them anymore."

"We got to get to the water."

Diana ducked and scampered away from a dwarfish crystal cowboy with long, flailing arms. "Soon," she panted in agreement. The air was sour with a smell like broken old bones.

"How come they would"—Nardie swiped at a grinning transparent Arab—"want to eat you, eat us?"

"Maybe so we'd—take their shapes. Absorb us before we get to the water, while we're still not—unpalatable, inedible."

Diana was sure she could see some of her own lost substance in the phantoms; their arms whistled through the air now, and their feet made indentations in the sand.

They had weight now.

Twice the giant Circus Circus clown had nearly stomped them before Nardie had danced in and cut its ankle; one towering leg was now emptied and gone, but the clown was hopping from one dune to another on its remaining leg, substantial enough to kick up real, stinging clouds of sand, and it seemed more likely than before to land a Volkswagen-size foot on them. And it looked as if it would be a pile driver blow now, not a menthol shower.

The glassy pink figures were crowding up from the lakeside. Diana and Nardie were being slowly driven back, toward the highway.

And now suddenly the figures had something like fingernails; twice Diana had narrowly ducked away from one of them, and her upflung arm had been raked by something that stung and raised blisters.

Worse even than the very real possibility of physical death was Diana's conviction that the things were capable of more, that they could somehow consume her and Nardie, render the two of them down into some basic psychic stuff that would fill their multitudinous, presently empty shapes.

And then Nardie and Diana would be no more than unaware ghosts in the mannequins and effigies scattered all over the city, no longer any kind of threat to the King—just semi-sentient sacrifices to unknowable chaotic gods.

Diana kept one hand on Dinh's shoulder, and together they darted and retreated and advanced, step by step diagonally closer to the water, moving toward it in a slant to keep the two giants hedged back by the more normal-size figures.

Nardie's hand snaked out again, and a grinning two-dimensional figure in the apron of a dealer tore apart silently into translucent splinters.

"Good," said Diana tensely, "we're nearly there."

"But it's using up our chip," panted Nardie as she cut one of the Caesars Palace Romans. "Look." In the instant before Dinh swung the edge again toward one of the legs of the giant clown, making the shimmering figure hop mindlessly back, Diana had seen that the Moulin Rouge chip was thinned down to no more than coin-thickness now and was white as a bone.

"The sword the turtle gave us," Nardie said through clenched teeth, "is wearing out."

The wind was strong on the highway on top of the dam. Mavranos thought he could hear weeping and laughter on the wind but then realized that the sounds were in his head, resonating from the minds of the tourists who were rushing in all directions to get away from the induced madness.

A man in a white leather jacket was leaning over the lakeside rail not far from Mavranos, waving one hand out over the long drop to the water. Mavranos saw blood on the man's hand and realized that this must be Ray-Joe Pogue.

Security guards were out on the highway directing traffic, having to shout over the wind at the drivers, who were simply intent on getting away. Even as Mavranos watched, one of the guards tossed his hat away and began running down the middle of the highway toward the distant Nevada side of the dam.

Mavranos wanted to get back down out of these mountains to the plains. This was much too high up—the sun, which was glinting so blindingly in the chrome of the rushing cars, seemed too close overhead, and the gunning of the engines didn't seem as loud as it should have, as if the air up here were less able to carry sound.

Pogue is doing this, he told himself, having to think loudly over the shouting and weeping in his head. He's shaking his blood into the lake, and somehow he's got a psychic chain reaction going here—all the minds of these people are echoing and reechoing insanity.

If I can knock him out …

He could feel a whimper starting up in his throat, and he wondered how long he could hold on to his purpose in the battering of the induced passions.

Or kill him, he thought.

Veils of pink fog spun in the wind. Mavranos stepped to the rail and looked down toward the water, and he saw that the wisps of fog were bursting into existence in the air below where Pogue leaned out over the parapet. The drops of his blood were apparently exploding into steam before they reached the water.

He hadn't yet succeeded in poisoning the lake.

Mavranos summoned all his remaining strength in order to take the last few strides along the walk and approach Pogue. He tried to smile like someone about to ask for directions or a match, and he shoved one hand in his jeans pocket to keep his untucked shirttail from flipping up in the breeze and exposing the walnut grip of the .38 tucked into his belt.

Pogue's jacket was blindingly white, and glittering rhinestones on the high collar sent needles of rainbow light into Mavranos's squinting eyes. Pogue was wearing a red baseball cap on the sculptured perfection of his pompadour, and when he turned toward Mavranos, glaring out of two blackened eyes past the white bandage on his nose, Mavranos saw the oversize card tucked into the band.

It was the Tower card from a Lombardy Zeroth Tarot deck, and the picture of the lightning striking the Babel-like tower and the two men falling struck Mavranos's mind like a blow.

He staggered back and looked away, forcing himself not to simply surrender to the violation of his mind by the potent symbol. This must have been what was causing the mental racket—every tourist who had looked squarely at the card, breathing the steam of Pogue's blood, would have got the psychic equivalent of a shock treatment, and even the ones who couldn't have seen it were nevertheless in the fog and picking up the signal and stepping it up and re-broadcasting it.

He clenched his fist and turned back to where Pogue stood—but the man wasn't there anymore. He was farther away, though he hadn't changed his rail-clutching posture. Mavranos wondered if his apparent nearness a moment before had been some kind of optical illusion in this thin, treacherous air.

Mavranos locked the fingers of his right hand on the grips of the .38 and started forward. But even as he watched, Pogue became, without moving, farther away.

It's some kind of magic he's doing, thought Mavranos. Playing with space and distance and scale. What the hell can I do against that? It doesn't look like I can get to him, and I don't dare shoot at him, not knowing where he really is. I might hit anything, anybody.

A lean hand grabbed his shoulder and shoved him aside, and Mavranos saw the twitching figure of Dondi Snayheever limp past him and out onto the surface of the highway.

Snayheever rocked free on the windy pavement, then raised his skinny arms, too long for his tattered corduroy coat, and opened his mouth. "I'm blind!" he roared up into the sky. "Blind as a bat!"

Mavranos felt an echo of the words in his own chest and realized that his vocal cords were helplessly working in sync with Snayheever's; and he'd heard Pogue barking out the words, too; and Mavranos's vision darkened as if at the suggestion of the words.

"Blind as a bat!" Snayheever boomed again. "Can't fly with no hat, simple as that!"—and the chorusing volume of his voice was for Mavranos the worst thing about this whole top-of-the-world scene, as his own lungs ached with the stress of matching Snayheever's bellowing.

Mavranos found that he had sat down on the curb, the cold gun butt jabbing into his ribs. People were getting out of their cars now, not even bothering to turn off the engines or put the gearshifts into park, to flee this terribly amplified voice that had burst out of their own throats; abandoned cars rolled forward into the bumpers of others and, to judge by the screams, crushed the legs of a few suggestion-blinded pedestrians.

Pogue was yelling now, though his voice sounded squeaky and shallow after Snayheever's. "I've got to get my head into the water," Pogue screamed. "An imperfect King's head! I've got to stop the action!" He seemed to be addressing no one but himself, trying to order Snayheever's forcefully obscuring nonsense out of his head. "As soon as the fucking blood stops boiling away!" He was shaking his hand furiously, and gusts of steam whirled up around him.

Snayheever led Mavranos and Pogue in a dizzying hum.

"How you say," Snayheever went on, "feet like Antaeus can't get off the pavement no way you can climb over and fly down to the water."

Mavranos remembered how Snayheever's voice had come booming out of blind Spider Joe in the living room of that dusty trailer, and how compelling the imposed madness had been, and he realized that Snayheever was keeping Pogue from jumping.

Good, Mavranos thought. Better you than me, Dondi. He sighed deeply against the jabbing resistance of the revolver and dared hope that he might not have to use it.

He looked up when he heard a clatter and scuffling. Pogue had reeled away from the coping and stumbled off the curb, apparently blind but lurching toward Snayheever's voice.

And behind and above him the vault of the blue sky was stippled with fluttering spots of darkness.

Noon was not far gone, but the sky was full of bats.

The houseboat seemed to be listing, and the tired players leaned more often counterclockwise than not in their chairs, as though the boat were spinning in some unphysical clockwise whirlpool.

So far the pattern of cards that lay on the table had not yet deviated from the one that Crane had set up.

All the hands except for Crane's and Leon's and one other man's had been mated, had been conceived, and now Leon's hand was finally up for auction.

"Mr. Hanari's hand is up for bid," Crane said hoarsely, "and the dealer will presume to make the first bid of five hundred and fifty dollars." It was how much Leon had put into this pot so far.

"I'll go six," said the pale young man whose hand was the other still-unmated one, but he seemed to be speaking automatically, with no eagerness. Since the incomprehensible syllables of the great voice had come booming across the lake like some lament from distantly shifting rock strata, the boat had seemed smaller, and the players had been stating their checks and calls and raises and passes more often with gestures than with statements, as if fearful of being overheard by something in the lake or in the sky.

Leon was pale. His hands were trembling, but he gripped the cards as if they were a lifeline and he were drowning.

The hot breeze through the ports was cold on Crane's sweaty forehead, and he remotely wondered what his mascara must look like. "Seven," he said stolidly.

Doctor Leaky was not speaking anymore, but shifted furiously in his fouled clothes against the restraint of the safety belt.

"Yours," said the pale young man, pushing his chair back from the table and getting up to go to the bar.

Leon flipped up the Six and Eight of Cups next to his showing Knight of Sticks and Seven of Swords and pushed the four cards over to Crane.

"Deliver our child healthy, Mother," said Leon as he, too, stood up and reeled away across the tilted red carpet, toward the wheelchair-bound figure of Doctor Leaky. Leon could be heard muttering in an urgently soothing tone to the very old man.

Crane hoped he would be able to deliver the healthy child in question. Two of the players had bought the wrong hands, and now one of them, Crane knew, held an Ace-high Flush in Coins, which would beat Crane's own King-high Flush in Swords if they both stayed in to the showdown.

Crane pointed at that player, who was showing two Aces. "Aces are the power," Crane said flatly.

The player, a haggard young man with a two-day beard, blinked when Crane spoke to him and then fumbled in his stack of bills.

"Aces are worth two," he said, tossing out two hundred-dollar bills.

Diana hopped back away from a pair of life-size faceless mannequins, and she lost her footing in the loose sand and sat down heavily; before she could scramble back up to her feet and limp to where Nardie was slashing right and left with the chip, the two figures had managed to burningly claw her shoulder and side.

The pair of mannequins were moving awkwardly, like newborn mechanical colts, and the eyeless fronts of their heads swept back and forth metronomically.

Diana clutched the back of Nardie's shirt and tried to take deep breaths of the stale, hot air and hold back the glittery haze of unconsciousness.

There was no way she and Nardie were going to be able to fight their way through these things down to the lake.

She wondered if they could even make it back to the highway now—the increasingly solid angular transparencies were crowding around on that side, too, so that the passing cars on the far side were just flickering blobs of refracted color in the incalculable distance—and she wondered bleakly if getting all the way back to that solid asphalt pavement would, in fact, help at all. What if the drivers of the cars proved to be just more hinged zombies?

From the corner of her eye she glimpsed a couple of figures.

"Behind you!" Diana yelled as the same two faceless mannequins came scissor-stepping across the sand.

But they weren't faceless anymore; their faces, though expressionless, were solid, and they were recognizably the faces of Nardie and Diana themselves.

Nardie flinched back from the things, and Diana had to skip aside to keep from being knocked down.

And Nardie hopped forward in a spasmodic lunge, sweeping the edge of the diminishing chip across the space where the mimic faces had been an instant before.

The Diana-thing and the Nardie-thing had gone flailing and scuffling away backward.

Then Nardie had turned her back on them and was slashing madly, gasping, and cutting a path through the phantasms as if the Moulin Rouge chip were a machete. She was crowding up, sliding her feet forward through the sand to claim every slack yard or foot or inch, away from the two figures and perhaps toward the water, and Diana limped along after her.

"They've started to … digest us," panted Diana.

An idea intruded itself into her mind, and she moaned hopelessly.

"We've got to do more," she said in a voice that shook with exhaustion.

"Like what?" panted Nardie.

"The goddamn chip is what they can't digest, what repels them," Diana called. "We've got to do more than just cut ourselves with it." She had to lash out and hit one of the Huck Finn boys from the riverboat facade of the Holiday Casino, and she shouted in pain as the grinning boy's teeth scored her wrist, but the figure did fall back. "Cutting our hands with the chip was a token, a gesture," she sobbed, shaking her burned hand. "This isn't about tokens. Look at the chip now."

Nardie feinted furiously, and then, in the bought second of the figures' retreat, she held up what was left of the Moulin Rouge chip. It was a flimsy white disk now, seeming as thin as paper.

"Break it," said Diana, "and we'll eat it." The gummy air whistled in her throat as she tried to take a vivifying breath. "Then, when the chip is part of each of us, it'll be us that they can't digest."

The giant ape, transparent as cellophane, made a rush at them across the sand and Diana and Nardie scrambled several yards back before a swipe of the disk drove the thing back. "It will kill us," Nardie said.

Nardie's words hung in the heat that surrounded them.

Will it kill us, Mother? thought Diana. Is it your will that your daughter, and her friend that you blessed, die by their own hands rather than at the hands of these things?

She sensed no answer.

"Give me half," she said despairingly.

"Christ." After a moment of hesitation Nardie broke the chip and reached over to hand half of it to Diana.

Again the big voice from across the lake boomed a couple of incomprehensible syllables.

The towering Vegas Vic cowboy from the roof of the Pioneer Casino, grinning with a mouth made of ghostly neon tubes under his giant phantasmagorical cowboy hat, bent down and swatted Diana with his open palm.

She tumbled away across the hot sand, but she held on to the half of the chip, and when she rolled to a stop, she put it into her mouth. It had sharp edges and cut her tongue and the roof of her mouth as she made her throat work and swallow it.

But suddenly she sensed something in her that partook of Scott and Oliver and Scat and Ozzie, and of something in the lake itself, and even of poor Hans, and she was sure that she was not too exhausted to stand up again.

Mavranos was certain he was going to have a stroke and cheat cancer.

He was tasting blood as he limped across the street, not knowing if the blood was his own or Pogue's, and his throat burned from having shouted, Eat me! in helpless tandem with Snayheever's ground-shaking voice a few moments ago.

And now, in a fast halo of swirling, fluttering bats, Snayheever had climbed up and was dancing on the coping of the far wall.

—The wall that fell away at a very steep slope for six hundred feet of empty air to the cement roof of the power plant on the downstream side of the dam.

Pogue was in the street, blundering among the stopped cars, and at one moment he seemed to be close enough for Mavranos to lunge to him and at the next seemed hundreds of feet away.

Mavranos was afraid that Pogue would knock Snayheever down into those yawning half-natural and half-engineered canyon depths and then, freed from Snayheever's induced insanity and blindness, make his way back across the street and dive into the lake, stopping the clock and ruining the water. If Pogue tried to do that, Mavranos probably would have to try shooting at him.

The air was hard to breathe—it was suddenly cloudy with hot, steamy, sticky mist, but it didn't seem to be Pogue's blood anymore; when Mavranos brushed his hand across his mouth, he felt his mustache slicked with something that smelled like algae. He tugged the .38 free of his belt and held it out in front of him as he bumped and stumbled among the cars after Pogue.

And though he was still half blinded by Snayheever's demanding pronouncements, he was sure that some of the things that he saw darting in circles around Snayheever's capering form were fish: bass, and carp, and catfish with sweeping tentacles. Some of the finny shapes seemed to be so tiny as to be circling in front of Mavranos's face, and others seemed to be huge, and moving around with astronomic speed somewhere as far away as the orbit of the moon.

The pavement under his boots was shifting, and when he looked down, he saw cracks in the concrete rapidly expanding and narrowing like pulsing arteries—was the dam breaking up?—and then he seemed to be hanging far above the earth, himself way out there in the moon's orbit, and what had seemed to be cracks or arteries below him were great river deltas changing in the violet-shifted radiation of unnaturally quick-passing centuries.

He made himself look up, and he saw the bats scatter away from Snayheever in ribby, fluttering clouds, for the crazy man had started roaring again: "King and Queen of Caledon, how many miles to Babylon?"

Snayheever was prancing along on the precipitous edge of the chest-high coping, kicking up his feet and tossing his arms, the tails of his threadbare coat flying in the wet wind. He seemed to Mavranos to be taller; in fact, it seemed for a moment that he towered over the mountains on either side of the dam, his joyfully upturned idiot face the closest thing to the sky.

"Threescore miles and ten," he sang harshly, his voice mirrored in the quaking of the bats and the flying fish. "Can I get there by moonlight? Yes, and back again."

The sky was dark, as if with a sudden overcast, but the full moon shone clearly over the mountains. The dam shook with turbulence and disorder in the penstocks and turbines that were its heart.

"I guess I make it more," said Crane as he tossed another couple of bills into the pot, trying to put a faint tone of theatrical reluctance in the statement, as would someone who holds a cinch hand and is trying to look weak to get a call.

Crane had promptly raised the original two-hundred-dollar bet, but the young man, after some thought, had raised it back to Crane.

He felt as though this hand had been in play for at least an hour.

The houseboat seemed to be turning in the water, and Crane had to force himself not to grip the edges of the table as several of the other players were doing.

Now the young man was facing another two-hundred-dollar raise, and he rubbed his stubbly chin dazedly and stared at Crane's six showing cards: the Six and Eight of Cups, the Knight of Clubs, and the Seven, Eight, and Nine of Swords.

Crane knew that his opponent held an Ace-high Flush in Coins; the young man was clearly wondering whether or not Crane's Seven, Eight, and Nine of Swords could possibly be part of a Straight Flush, which would beat him.

Crane saw the young man's pupils dilate and knew that his opponent was about to call the raise and end the betting for the showdown.

Crane was about to lose. And he had one urgent thought: Ozzie, what can I do here?

Got it.

"What's your name, boy?" Crane said abruptly, flashing a wide and no doubt lipstick-stained toothy grin, and he prayed that his opponent had a one-syllable name.

"Uh," the young man muttered distractedly, moving his hand toward his stack of bills, "Bob."

"He called!" Crane shouted instantly, flipping over his two hole cards, which were the Ten and the King of Swords, but keeping his palm over the name printed at the bottom of the King, so that only the end of a sword could be seen on the card. "And I've got a Jack-high Straight Flush!"

"I didn't call!" yelled young Bob. "I just said 'Bob'! You all heard me!"

Crane instantly flipped the King back over, and then intentionally fumbled in turning over the Ten so that everyone could see it before it was again hidden.

Crane looked up then, trying to put a look of tight outrage on his made-up face. "I say he said, 'Call.' "

"You freak," said Newt, wiping his sweating old face. "He said, 'Bob.' "

The other players all nodded and mumbled assent.

Leon was staring at Crane. "You're awfully eager to get one more bet," he said, frowning in puzzlement. "But the boy said, clearly, 'Bob.' " Leon turned his unswollen eye on Crane's young opponent. "Do you want to call?"

"Against a Straight Flush? No, thank you." Young Bob turned his cards over and tossed them aside. "The Flying Nun can take a flying leap."

Crane shrugged in faked chagrin and reached out to rake in the pile of bills. Thank you, Ozzie, he thought.

"Ah ah!" said Leon, holding up one smooth brown hand. "I am a parent of that hand, remember." He turned on Crane a smile that was terrible under the bandage and behind the gray and purple swelling and the inflamed veins. "I'm claiming the Assumption." He pulled a billfold out of his white jacket and began fanning out hundred-dollar bills. "Newt, count the pot, would you?" Leon smiled at Crane again. "I'll make the last call—for everything."

Crane spread his hands and kept his head down to conceal the fast pulse in his throat. It was dark outside, and Crane was afraid to look out the ports; he thought he'd see solid brown lake water at each one, as if the boat had turned upside down and it were only some kind of centrifugal force that held the players in their chairs.

"Okay," Crane whispered, "though you—you know you've got a little bit of me anyway."

"If your heels be nimble and light," roared Snayheever, his voice shaking dust down from the mountainous slopes, "you may get there by candlelight!"

Ray-Joe Pogue was still trying to cross the street; one old woman had seen his hat and begun screaming, and he was blindly trying to grope his way around her. There were only a few other people, apparently injured, still visible along the top of the dam—everyone else seemed to have fled away on foot.

Mavranos had zig-zagged through the stalled and crashed cars, up over the curb to the sidewalk on the afterbay side of the highway, and he flung his arms over the coping a few yards from where Snayheever danced and for a breath-catching moment stared down past his .38, through the volumes of foggy air at the galleries of the power station far below, with the churning water of the disordered spillway overflow dimly visible below and beyond that—and then he straightened up hastily and stared at the cement coping he was leaning on and ran the calloused palm of his free hand along the edge of it.

It was as wavy and rippled as if a jigsaw had been working on it, as if it were meant to be a theatrical exaggeration of an eroded cliff face, and he remembered the Fool card in the Lombardy Zeroth deck: The Fool had been dancing on a cliff edge that had been scalloped like this.

And when he looked up again at Snayheever, Mavranos saw that the mad young man's coat was longer and looser, and belted with a rope, and that he wore a headdress of feathers.

He was terribly tall.

Pogue finally stepped up to the curb now, seeming to be only a few yards from Mavranos. The card was still in his hat-band like a lamp on a miner's helmet, and he blindly raised a little automatic pistol through the wet wind toward Snayheever.

Still leaning on the coping, Mavranos swung the barrel of his .38 into line, aimed at Pogue's chest, feeling the brass shells of the plastic-tipped Glaser rounds click back in the cylinder—and with his finger on the grooved metal of the trigger he froze, suddenly certain that he could not kill anyone.

Pogue's gun banged, jerking his hand up, but Snayheever's mad dancing didn't falter. Pogue's first shot had flown wide in the shattered, rainy air.

I'm still a damn good shot, though, thought Mavranos, sighting instead on the shimmering target of Pogue's outstretched gun hand. Maybe I won't have to kill him.

He pulled the trigger through the double-action cycle without the sights wavering at all, and when the hard bang punched his eardrums and the barrel flew up in recoil, he saw Pogue go spinning away.

But he had seen dust spring away from the wall and the sidewalk, and he wondered if the Glaser round had come apart, like a shot shell, before hitting Pogue's hand. If so, he might have killed Pogue, in spite of his careful aim.

Pogue was getting back up on his feet, though, and his hand was a splintered white and red ruin, jetting arterial blood; clearly Mavranos's shot had gone as aimed. The sight of the ruined hand drove a column of hot vomit up Mavranos's throat, and he resolutely clenched his jaw and swallowed … but for a moment he wondered if his gun had somehow shot several bullets, or rather several likelihoods of bullets.

Pogue was howling now in the green seaweed-tasting rain, and he lunged at Snayheever's ankles.

Mavranos raised his .38 again, but the two figures were together, and the pavement was shaking over the laboring heart of the dam, and he didn't dare shoot. Pogue had climbed up on the coping and was sitting straddling it beside Snayheever, and he had clasped his one good arm around Snayheever's legs. His hat had come off and gone spinning away down the afterbay wall, and his pompadour was broken into wet strands plastered across his forehead.

Snayheever was just standing there on the coping surface now, but still smiling into the dark sky and waving his arms. "Blind as a bat!" he roared, with Pogue and Mavranos moaning it in synchronization.

"Is there anyone that can hear me?" Pogue shouted over the hiss of the hot rain. His darkly swollen eyes were screwed shut, and the bandage taped over his nose was blotting with blood.

Mavranos waved his gun helplessly. "I can hear you, man," he called.

"Help me, please," Pogue sobbed. "I'm turned around, and I'm blind, but I've got to sink my head right now. I can't wait for the blood to behave! Am I on the lake side of the highway? Is it the lake below us here?"

If I say yes, Mavranos thought, he'll let go of Snayheever and jump, and I can yank Snayheever down from there.

But I'll be killing Pogue, as surely as if I'd shot him through the face.

If I say no, he'll throw Snayheever off and then cross the highway unimpeded. I won't be able to reach him, stop him, with his optical illusion magic going full strength again. He'll jump off the lake-side edge, and Diana will be doomed.

And if I say nothing at all …?

Okay then, he thought despairingly, I'll go to hell.

"That's the lake below you," he said loudly, feeling the words brand burns into his soul. "You're on the railing at the north side."

Pogue's lean face split into a white grin under the straggling wet hair and the bandage—

—And he snapped his head forward, buried his teeth in Snayheever's calf and swung his highway-side leg up and kicked Snayheever's knee.

Then Snayheever had tipped, and Mavranos swore and started forward in horror. He couldn't tell whether the flailing of Snayheever's arms was a useless attempt to keep his balance or still part of the crazy dance; Snayheever disappeared over the side, and Pogue, his arm still around his legs and his teeth still in his flesh, rolled off the coping after him.

Mavranos slammed into the cement wall and peered over the edge.

For several seconds the locked-together figure that was Snayheever and Pogue spun free in the mist above the dizzying abyss, rapidly diminishing in apparent size. Then they touched the steep slope and bounced and tumbled away apart, arms and legs flailing horribly loose, and they cartwheeled and sprang all the way down to the cement power station roof, where they briefly shook in what must have been prodigious bounces, and were two tiny, still forms.

Then the resounding air was stilled, like a struck piano wire when the foot pedal is tromped on, and the dam under Mavranos's feet became again as solid as the mountains, and the flow of water through the mighty penstocks and giant turbines must abruptly have been restored to a full, even flow, for the face of the river below the dam quickly became as smooth as a plate of glass.

The rain of lake water stopped, and the wind was steady, and the bats and fish were gone. Clouds blocked the sun intermittently, and the edges of cloud shadow on the pavement were as sharp as if they had been razored out of black cardboard.

And Mavranos stood away from the gradual geometric curve of the coping, which stretched in an unrippled arc from one mountain to the other. He uncocked his revolver and put it back in his belt and pulled his shirttail over it. He took a deep breath, then swallowed, and swallowed again.

He tapped his jacket pocket, then fished out the Baggie. It had burst at some point during the last several minutes, but the little goldfish was still flopping in the wet plastic bag.

He walked quickly out onto the highway, between the cars and across to the lake-facing railing. He held the Baggie out over the abyss and the lake water below, and he shook the fish out, then leaned over and watched it tumble away until he couldn't see it anymore.

His exhaustion was gone. He sprinted away over the drying pavement, down the center of the long, curving highway, running with his knees well up, swerving effortlessly around the abandoned cars, toward the parking lot where he had left the truck.

And twenty-five miles away to the northwest in Las Vegas, every pair of dice on every Craps table had come up snake-eyes in the instant of Snayheever's death, and every roulette ball rocked to a solid halt in the OO slot, and every car in town that had its key turned in the ignition at that moment started up instantly.

The sky over the west shore of the lake was still almost as dark as night, and though the moon should have been three days past its full phase, it hung overhead as perfectly round as the worn white disk Diana and Nardie had shared.

The two of them were alone on their section of beach; Nardie, empty-handed now, was still in a defensive crouch, and Diana was swaying on her feet and clutching her throat. A hundred yards away to their left, the children and parents were hesitantly but at least loose-jointedly wandering back up the beach toward their towels and umbrellas, clearly puzzled and ill at ease and wondering about imminent rain.

Shapes seemed to rush through the sky on the rising wind, fluttering and sighing, but Diana sensed no threat in whatever the things might be; and the waves were high, as if giants under the water were shifting uneasily in sleep, but she thought that any such giants would not harm her.

She spat on the sand. "I'm bleeding." The inside of her mouth was cut, but the half disk had apparently broken up before reaching her throat. She spat again. "Kind of a lot."

Nardie straightened up lithely and laughed, coughing in the midst of it. "Me too. But I guess we won't die of it after all."

Diana took a step toward the water, hitching and wincing and wondering how many of her ribs might be cracked. "Let's get in the water."

CHAPTER 50: Raising Blind

Crane allowed himself to hang on to the edge of the table for a moment. The sky was brightening again outside the ports, and the yellow light cast by the lamps on the paneled walls began to look sickly.

"Dizzy," he said as Newt finished counting the bills in the middle of the table.

The Amino Acid bartender had pulled the ports closed again shortly after the huge voice had begun to roll its syllables across the lake from the direction of the Black Mountains and the dam, and the air in the cabin was stifling with the smell of Doctor Leaky and cigarette smoke. Crane thought his dizziness now might be as much from nausea as from the illusion of spinning … spinning diesel, as Ozzie would have said.

"Seventy-nine hundred," croaked Newt finally.

Leon separated out of his billfold a thick bundle of thousands and hundreds, and his good eye burned into Crane's good eye as he tossed the bills onto the stack Newt had counted.

The socket of Crane's false eye throbbed, and he wasn't quite able to close the eyelid. Good joke, he thought, if I succeed here but die later of meningitis. Gingerly he touched the corner of his eye. It hurt, and his fingertip was smudged with mascara.

"Cut for high card," said Leon.

Crane looked across the room at Doctor Leaky. Once again alertness seemed to glitter in the old man's gaze, and Crane looked away in case his father's body might guess something, say something that would warn Leon.

But the senile old body couldn't have been alert and guessed Crane's purpose, for it didn't say anything at all.

Crane flexed his right hand, noticing for the first time that he had chewed the painted nails down to the quicks, and he lowered his fingers over the deck and lifted half of it off.

He showed the card to the other players, then looked at it himself.

The Page of Cups. His card, Ozzie had said; soon to be replaced by the King? He quickly lowered the cards back down onto the deck, fearing that Leon might notice the card's faintly stained corner.

Leon was smiling, and panting. "A tough one to beat!" he said.

Newt leaned forward, slid the deck to himself, and shuffled it again, then pushed it to a spot in front of the shivering Hanari body.

With a trembling hand Georges Leon lifted off the top half of the deck, and he hesitated even as he raised the cards.

Crane's heart seemed to have stopped. He missed the crimped card, Crane thought. He's going to come up with an Ace—

But the card Leon showed was the Ten of Swords. Crane's heart was beating again, and he laughed weakly and rapped the table with a fist. "Yes!" he said, letting his hot burst of triumph show, for everyone would assume he was just pleased at having won the doubled pot. "Gotcha!"

"Aw, bad beat," said one of the other players to Leon.

Leon grimaced and shrugged. "You win," he told Crane. "I don't know when I'm going to learn that that's not a smart bet."

"Thanks," said Crane hoarsely.

"You're taking the money," said Leon.

Crane thought of Ozzie, and stared coldly into the unswollen eye. "Looks like it."

"You're selling the hand. I've bought it, I'm assuming it."

"It's all yours, believe me."

Crane tamped the stacks of bills and slid them in between his spread elbows, leaving one hundred out on the table as his ante for the next hand.

He had done it.

He had sold Leon the hand that Doctor Leaky had conceived in the informal Assumption game by the Dumpster behind the liquor store on Wednesday.

Crane had no idea what might happen now. This scheme might not work, and he might lose his body tomorrow, but he had done all he could.

"That's two hundred to you."

Crane looked up from his gnawed fingernails. Leon had been speaking to him.

"Oh," said Crane. "Sorry." He lifted four hundreds from one of his stacks and tossed them into the pot. "I make it four," he said.

"You haven't looked at your down cards!" said Newt petulantly. "You're raising blind?"

"Raising blind," Crane agreed.

Station wagons with luggage belted onto the rooftop racks jammed the marina streets on this Friday afternoon, and tanned young men and women in scanty swimsuits thronged the sidewalks and drank beer from dewy cans or drove puttering scooters between the slow, smoky lanes of traffic.

Easter break, thought Crane as he walked slowly up the street, carrying his high-heeled shoes under his arm and feeling the hot pavement abrade the soles of his nylons. We could all do with an Easter break.

"Ahoy, Pogo!" came a shout from among the horns-and-laughter-and-chatter background noise.

Crane smiled tiredly as he looked back and shaded his eyes.

Arky Mavranos was striding toward him at his old gangly pace, and though he was pale, he seemed solemnly happy, too.

"You look like a real piece of the old shit today," said Mavranos quietly when he reached Crane. They began walking on toward the Lakeview Lodge, Mavranos ostentatiously walking a yard or two to the side of Crane and letting an occasional pedestrian pass between them.

"You did it," said Mavranos.

"Sold it to him," Crane agreed, "bought and paid for."

"Good."

"How did it go with you?" asked Crane, in a moment when they were alone in a sunny crosswalk.

"They're both dead," Mavranos said softly. "Snayheever and Pogue. Pogue didn't get to screw things up. I'll … tell you about it, tell all three of you … sometime later." He coughed and spat. "Maybe not today, all right?"

Crane could see that whatever had happened had cost Mavranos. "Okay, Arky." He reached out and squeezed Mavranos's elbow.

Mavranos stepped away from him. "None of your fag tricks."

"Seriously, Arky, thank you."

"Don't … thank me." Mavranos unknotted his bandanna and tossed it into a planter they were walking past. "Pogue's magic was a—a randomness thing, disorder, chaos—and when he … died, the dam snapped back into order. It was a phase-change like what would have set Winfree's mosquitoes all doing the chorale from Beethoven's Ninth, with Busby Berkeley dance steps."

Crane blinked at his friend and wondered if he was too tired to be understanding what Mavranos was saying. "You mean you think …?"

Mavranos touched the lump under his ear. "I swear it's smaller already, perceptibly smaller, than it was on the drive down here."

Crane was laughing and blinking rapidly and shaking Mavranos's hand. "That's terrific, man! Goddamn, I can't tell you—"

And then they were hugging in the middle of the sidewalk, and even Mavranos ignored the hoots and catcalls.

With their arms around each other's shoulders they stepped up to the lobby doors of the Lakeview Lodge and shoved through and hurried breathlessly into the dark bar.

Diana and Nardie pushed away from the table at which they'd been waiting, and though they winced and limped like people who have recently had too much exercise, they were laughing when they hobbled over and hugged Crane and Mavranos.

They all sat down, and Mavranos ordered a Coors—and then made that two, one for Nardie. Crane and Diana both ordered soda water.

"You sold it to him," Diana said to Crane when the cocktail waitress had walked off toward the bar.

"Yes, finally." Crane rubbed his hands down his face, not caring what his makeup looked like. His right eye socket stung. "And I think my arachnoid is infected."

"Spider," said Mavranos, translating the word. "Spiderlike. What, something about Spider Joe?"

"It's a part of the brain," said Crane through his hands. "It gets infected when you've got, uh, meningitis. The socket of my missing eye is just … on fire." He lowered his hands and leaned back in the booth. "I've got the saline solution and rubber bulb in my purse. As soon as we trade news, I'll go to the head and rinse out the socket."

Diana has seized his shoulder. "No," she said now, urgently, "you're going to a doctor, are you crazy? My God, meningitis? I'm going to drive out to Searchlight in a couple of minutes to finally get poor Oliver. I can drop you off at a hospital—"

"Tomorrow," he said, "I'll see a doctor. I've got to be back here at the lake at dawn. My father will want to start assuming bodies as soon as the sun's up, and I've got to see the end. And I want to disarm and ditch the two decks of cards, if I can, if the … poisoned sugar cube gets him." He blinked at her through his good eye. "Tomorrow," he repeated. "Not before."

The drinks arrived then, and Crane took a deep gulp of the cold but comfortless soda water. He inhaled. "So," he said, "did you ladies get your bath?"

Diana let go of Crane's shoulder and sat back, still frowning.

Nardie drank a third of her beer. "Eventually," she said with a shiver.

She described the phantom statues that had tried to stop them and how she and Diana had fought them and then finally dispelled them by actually eating the yin-yang Moulin Rouge chip.

Mavranos brushed beer out of his mustache and smiled crookedly at Crane. "Weird sort of sacrament."

Nardie picked up Diana's glass of soda water. "And then when we finally got into the lake," she said softly, "before we got out to where we could duck under, the water was fizzing around Diana's feet, like this!" She swirled Diana's glass, and bubbles whirled up in it, hissing. "And for just a second, before the wind blew it out, there were—you could hardly see it in the sunlight, okay?—flames around her ankles!"

"Sounds like electrolysis," said Mavranos. He was looking into his beer, and Crane guessed that he had somehow been directly responsible for the death of Nardie's half brother out there at the dam and now didn't want to look her in the eye. "You were busting apart the H₂ and the O, Diana. I remember ol' Ozzie saying Lake Mead was tamed water; maybe you untamed it."

"I did," Diana said. "With help from all of you. The bubbling kept up nearly the whole time I was in the water, and I could … feel, or hear or see, ride the whole wild extent of it. I could feel the houseboat spinning north of me, and I felt the shaking at the dam."

Nardie had drained her beer and waved the empty glass at the bartender. "So," she said to Mavranos in a conversational tone, "did you kill my brother?"

Mavranos let go of his beer glass, and Crane thought it was because he was afraid he might crush it in his fist. Mavranos's eyes were closed, and he nodded. "I did," he said. "I—in effect I pushed him off the downstream wall of the dam. Snayheever, too—I killed both of them."

Crane was looking at Nardie now, and for an instant had seen her eyes widen and her mouth sag. Then she put on a battered smile, and she tapped the back of one of Mavranos's scarred hands.

"Each of us has killed someone," she said, a little huskily, "in this. Why'd you ever think you'd be special?"

Crane realized that was true: himself, Vaughan Trumbill; Nardie, that woman in the whorehouse outside Tonopah; Diana, probably Al Funo. And now Mavranos had broken a part of himself in the same way.

"Doctor, my eye," Crane sang softly, pushing his chair back and standing up. "I've got to go irrigate the cavity."

Mavranos got up, too, awkwardly. "I gotta call Wendy," he said. "Home tomorrow?"

"You'll probably be home by lunchtime," said Crane.

Nardie reached out and caught Mavranos's flannel sleeve. "Arky," she said, "I'd have had to do it myself, if you hadn't. And it would have hurt me more than it's hurting you. Thank you."

Mavranos nodded and patted her hand, still not looking at her. "I appreciate that, Nardie," he said gruffly, "but don't thank me."

He and Crane walked away toward the rest rooms and the telephones, and Nardie and Diana silently sipped their different drinks.