Last Call

by Tim Powers

  “You wouldn’t know where to look for it, Ozzie; it might not be exactly where I think it is. I’ll be quick—no, listen to me, I’ll pad myself out to look fat and wear a wig or something, and I’ll go in a cab, so if somebody’s watching the place, they won’t be sure it’s me”—she was talking loudly over the old man’s shrill protests—“and then I’ll leave by the back door and hop the fence and walk out on Sun Avenue, catch another cab on Civic Center.”

  “I’ll tear the house up until I find it, Diana,” Ozzie shouted, “I—”

  “They’re after you, too, Oz,” she said. “If they’re there, they wouldn’t give you the time to find it. Ten o’clock, lobby of the Riviera. ‘Ozzie Smith’ means run for it.”

  She hung up in the middle of the old man’s pleadings.

  Ozzie had hung up, too, and immediately punched in 911. As soon as a woman had answered, he had begun talking fast, trying to find the words and delivery that would get police to Diana’s house most quickly.

  Sitting on the hotel bed now but leaning forward over the telephone cradle, Ozzie held the handset tightly in his lean, brown-spotted hand.

  “My name’s Oliver Crane,” he was saying shrilly, “and her name is Diana, uh, Ryan. I am calm. Fifteen fifteen Venus, in North Las Vegas. Her son was kidnapped and shot last night, you’ll have records of it…. No, I don’t know what this guy looks like; his name is Alfred Funo…. Your detective said today…. Trust me, she’s in danger!…What?…Yeah, there’ll be her idiot boyfriend there, his name is Hans…. No, I don’t know his last name…six foot, fat, scraggly beard. She’ll be coming in a cab…. Of course I don’t know what company! No, I won’t be here; I’m going over there right now…. No, I’m going, I have to be there. Listen, try to make it two units, okay?”

  Ozzie hung up the phone, and he had barely had time to put on his pants and a shirt before there was a knock at his hotel room door.

  He hobbled across the room and let the fat little boy in.

  “Where’s your mother?” Ozzie snapped, stepping out onto the hall carpet to peer up and down the corridor.

  Oliver shrugged. “She’s gone. She held the elevator until she saw your door open. She’ll be in a taxi before you can get your shoes on.” He walked to the window and pulled open the drapes.

  Ozzie winced at the white desert sunlight. “I’ll have my shoes on soon enough, sonny.” He glanced instinctively at his portable coffeepot. No time for that, he thought. He hesitated—No, he thought. I’ll need it—then walked quickly to the dressing table and with trembling fingers opened a Ziploc plastic bag and shook a lot of instant coffee into one of the hotel glasses.

  “Now listen,” he said as he carried the glass into the bathroom, “I’m going to leave you somewhere out in the children’s area here.” He turned on the hot-water tap in the sink. “And I want you to wait there for me, y’understand?” he shouted over the roar of the faucet. The water heated up quickly, and he ran some into the glass and stirred the foamy brown stuff with the handle of a Circus Circus souvenir toothbrush. “I’ll be gone for only an hour or so, I think, but if noon rolls around and I’m still gone, you call the police and tell them everything, and tell them you need to be hidden from the same people that shot your brother.”

  “Everybody’s ditching me,” said Oliver.

  Ozzie hurried back into the room and sat down on the bed near his shoes. “I’m sorry,” he told the boy. “It’s just that there’s trouble, and we don’t want you to get into it.” He drained the barely hot double-strength coffee in one fast series of gulps. “Jesus.” He shook his head. “Oh, and don’t call these Amino Acids friends of yours, okay? Do you promise?”

  The boy shuddered. “I’m grown up. I can decide who I talk to.”

  “Not in this kettle of fish, kid.” Ozzie tossed the empty cup aside and, with an effortful grunt, bent down and picked up his shoes and began levering them onto his bare feet. “This is stuff you don’t know about. Trust me, I’m your grandfather, and we’re doing this for your mother’s safety.”

  When the boy spoke again, his voice was pitched lower. “Call me Bitin Dog.”

  Ozzie closed his eyes. I can’t go, he thought. If I leave this kid alone, he’s going to call his evil friends, sure as I’m sitting here.

  Well…

  Well, so I stay here, and don’t go over there to Venus Avenue. The cops will be there. What could one old man do for her that the cops couldn’t? Especially an old man whose guts are acting up and who wouldn’t have had time to properly go to the bathroom.

  “Well, Mr. Bitin Dog,” he said tiredly, “maybe you’ve got a point about everybody ditching you. Maybe you and I could…just go have breakfast somewhere—”

  “Somewhere where they serve beer,” the boy interrupted. “You order it, and then I can drink it when they’re not looking, okay?”

  “No, you can’t have any beer. My God, it’s not yet eight in the morning.” He was still holding the laces of his right shoe, and to his dull surprise he saw that his knobby old fingers were tying them. Socks, he told himself; if you’re not going to Venus, you’ve got time to put on socks.

  His fingers finished the knot and moved, apparently of their own volition, to the other shoe.

  “Oh, and you’re too young for beer anyway,” he said. “I was going to say, before you interrupted me, that you and I could go have breakfast somewhere after we go by your mom’s house to make sure she’s okay.” The shoes were tied, and he stood up, feeling frail. The coffee felt like a shovelful of road tar in his stomach. “You ready to go? We want to get there before she does. We’ll be hurrying and she won’t, and I hope she’ll have the sense to make her cabbie circle the block a time or two first, but she’s got a head start on us. Come on.”

  “What if I don’t want to go to—” the boy began, but he flinched back and stopped talking when the old man turned a hard glare on him.

  “Come on,” Ozzie repeated softly.

  Oliver stared at him for a moment; then he let his shoulders droop and he was just a little boy again, and he followed his grandfather out of the room.

  Hans was justifiably upset.

  The police had actually been pointing drawn revolvers at him when he had answered their urgent knocking—of all the John Wayne stunts!—but they had holstered them when he answered the door and blinked at them in sleepy astonishment, and now, as he tremblingly made coffee in the little kitchen, Hans was at least grateful that Diana’s crazy old foster-father had given them a description of him. Evidently if they hadn’t recognized him as Diana’s reported “boyfriend,” they’d have handcuffed him and thrown him on the floor!

  He looked over the counter at the two policemen standing on a patch of sunlit carpet by the front window. “You guys want coffee?”

  The older cop, Gould, gave him a blank look and shook his head. “No, thank you.”

  “Huh.” Hans watched the glass pot steam up as the hot coffee started to trickle into it. “Completely nuts,” he went on, trying not to talk too fast or sound ingratiating. “The old man—and Diana’s brother, too—think she’s this Egyptian goddess Isis.”

  “We’re not concerned with their religious beliefs, Mr. Ganci.”

  “Fine.” Hans shrugged and nodded virtuously. “I told them to go to the police last night.”

  “So you said.”

  Officer Gould nodded out the window. “I think Hamilton sees a cab.”

  Hans walked around the counter and peered with them out through the window. One of the officers standing by the second police car out at the curb was staring intently down the street toward Civic Center Drive. After a few seconds a yellow taxicab pulled up behind the police car, and a moment later a fat woman got out.

  Hans was about to tell them that it wasn’t Diana, but then he saw the woman’s face. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. It was Diana, but she had stuffed something into the rear end of her pants and the belly of her shirt, so that she looked both fat and pregnant. “Yeah,” he s
aid wonderingly, “that’s her.”

  The policeman outside, Hamilton, apparently, walked up to her as she was paying the driver, and then he was escorting her toward the apartment.

  As the cab drove away and Hamilton and Diana hurried up the walk toward the front door, Hans was annoyed to see that Diana didn’t look annoyed by the officious policemen. Attention from a man in uniform, he thought.

  The older officer pushed past Hans and opened the door. Diana and Hamilton walked inside, bringing the fresh smells of lawns and pavement into the musty dimness. Hans wished her foster-father had called to say that police would be coming over; he would have showered.

  “As Officer Hamilton probably told you, ma’am,” Gould said to Diana, “we got a phone call saying that your life was in danger. It was from an Oliver Crane, who we gather is your foster-father?”

  “Your loony dad,” put in Hans helpfully.

  “Shut up, Hans,” Diana said.

  “Why don’t you go sit down while we talk to her, Mr. Ganci?” said Gould, not very politely.

  Ozzie’s cab had rounded the Venus corner just in time for him to see the officer walk into the house with the ludicrously padded Diana, and he sighed and relaxed and sat back on the black vinyl seat.

  “It looks like your mom’s okay,” he said over his shoulder to Oliver, who was sitting in the back seat.

  “Smells like puke in here,” said the boy.

  The driver, who looked as though he might have been a boxer years ago, gave the boy an irritated glance in the rearview mirror. “You want me to stop?”

  “Uh…” Ozzie couldn’t take the boy into the house—gunfire or something still might erupt at any moment—but if he left him alone in the cab, he’d probably run away. “No, just park here. I want to see her leave with the cops.”

  “You got it.” The man pulled in to the curb a couple of buildings down from Diana’s duplex and put the engine into park.

  Hans had watched with interest when Hamilton had gone cautiously through the house to make sure no killers were crouched in any of the rooms, and he had been making mental notes so that he could incorporate a scene like this into his screenplay; there was nothing like firsthand observation.

  But when the officer said he’d check out the backyard, Hans could only sit down, as the man walked out the back door and down the two wooden steps, and hope no one was noticing how pale and sweaty he had suddenly become.

  The dope plants, he thought with astonished dismay. He’ll find the dope plants, and I’ll go to jail. I’ll claim I don’t know anything about them, I thought those were just weeds out there by the fence. Will they think I’m a dealer? Will they find out I’m a friend of Mike’s, who really is a dope dealer? I read in Hunter Thompson that you get…life in prison!…in Nevada if you’re convicted of being a dealer. That can’t still be true.

  He thought he might wet his pants, right here and now. God, he thought, make him not find them. Please, God! I’ll go to church, I’ll make the protagonist of the screenplay a Christian, I’ll marry Diana, just let him come back with no news so the world can go on being like it was.

  He was afraid to pick up his cup of coffee. His hands would shake, and these cops would notice; they were trained to see that kind of thing. Instead, he looked around at the apartment; every trivial object suddenly seemed precious and lost, like the bicycles and fishing poles in the backgrounds of old photographs. He looked at Diana and loved her as he had never managed to before.

  The back door creaked, and then boots clonked on the linoleum floor. Hans pretended to be studying the calendar over the telephone.

  “You’re the lady whose son was kidnapped and shot last night, aren’t you?” he heard Hamilton say. Diana must have nodded, for the man went on, “And this is your boyfriend? He lives here with you?” There was a pause. “Okay.” Hans heard him sigh. “I’m going to come back here in an hour or two, after I’ve looked up the shape of a certain sort of leaf in a book at the station, right?” There was another pause. “Right?”

  Hans looked up and realized that the officer was talking to him now. His face was instantly hot. “Right,” he said in a small voice.

  Gould had been talking on his portable radio, and now he tucked it back into his belt. “Frits says the old man is eighty-two years old and didn’t seem real clear about anything, even why he’s in town. And the 911 operator said it almost sounded like he’d dreamed up this emergency. I think he’s just upset and disoriented about his grandson.” He looked at Diana. “I think we can leave. But be careful about things like answering the door, Mrs. Ryan, and call us if you get any odd phone calls or visitors.”

  “I will,” Diana said, smiling. She shook hands with the cop. “Thanks for the help, even if it was a false alarm.”

  When the police finally left, and the door closed and Hans heard the engines start up and drive away, he picked up his coffee mug and threw it against the wall.

  Hot coffee splashed all over the kitchen, and ceramic fragments rattled and spun on the floor.

  “This is your goddamned family’s fault!” he shouted.

  Diana had hurried into the bedroom, and he stomped after her.

  “What’ll I do with those plants?” he demanded. “Bury them? I can’t carry them out to the trash; they’re waiting for me to do something like that!” She had thrown open the chest in which she kept old things like her high school annuals, and was tossing dolls and music boxes out onto the floor. “And they’ll be watching me now,” he went on, “anytime I drive down the street! How can I possibly go see Mike?” He punched the wall, leaving a dent in the drywall. “Thanks a million, Diana! I thought you were gone!”

  She stood up, holding some kind of little old ratty yellow blanket. “I am now,” she said.

  The telephone in the kitchen rang.

  “Don’t answer it!” she said urgently, so he ran back to the kitchen and triumphantly picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  She was right behind him, still holding the foolish little blanket. He was pleased to see that her I’ve-got-more-important-things-on-my-mind-than-you look was gone. She was just scared now. Good.

  “You say you want to talk to Diana?” he said, drawing out the pleasure of this moment.

  She was white, shaking her head at him with the most imploring look he’d ever seen on a human face. “No,” she whispered, “Hans, please!”

  For a moment he almost relented, almost said, No, she hasn’t been home since yesterday; her sister’s here if you want to talk to her. Diana had suffered enough in this last twenty-four hours—leaving behind all her possessions, her son near dead in the hospital…

  Through her own fault, and in the face of his sound advice. And now his dope plants were as good as gone, and he was a marked man in the eyes of the police.

  His smile was crooked with sweet malice. “Su-u-re,” he said, “she’s right here.”

  At the first word she had taken off running for the back door, shouting at him to follow her.

  He had even put the phone down and taken one step after her before he remembered his pride. I don’t need some damned hysterical woman, he told himself. I’m a writer—a creator all by myself.

  CHAPTER 27

  I Don’t Mind the Car, but Could We Go Now?

  With a last glance at the duplex across the street Trumbill laid the telephone receiver down on the table, picked up the little radio transmitter, and stood up. He had put on his pants and shirt and shoes when the police had arrived, and now he carried the transmitter around the corner into the hall, away from the glass of the front window.

  Diana sprinted between the trash cans and the gas barbecue and pounded across the scruffy grass toward the redwood fence at the back of the lot, and even as she wondered if she was just making a fool of herself, she leaped, caught the splintery tops of the boards, and vaulted over the fence into the next yard.

  A startled dog looked up at her, but before it could even bark she had crossed the yard
and scrambled over a chain-link gate and dashed down somebody’s driveway and was running across the empty expanse of Sun Avenue, the old yellow blanket flailing from her pumping fist.

  Ozzie had opened the cab door and swung his feet out onto the curb and had started to stand up—

  —when the hard bam punched the air and slammed the car door against him, knocking him over onto the curbside grass.

  The front of Diana’s apartment had exploded out across the street in a million spinning boards and chunks of masonry, and as Ozzie sat, stunned, on the grass, he watched a cloud of dirty smoke mushroom up into the blue sky. All he could hear was the loud ringing in his ears, but he could see pieces of brick and roof tile thudding into the lawn at his right and shattering on the suddenly smoke-fogged sidewalk, and his nose stung with a sharp chemical tang like ozone.

  Oliver was out of the back of the cab and running toward the destroyed apartment. The cabdriver was pulling Ozzie to his feet; the man was shouting something, but Ozzie shook him off and started after the boy.

  It was like walking in certain frustrating dreams he often had. The effort of dragging one leg, and then the other, through the thick soup of the air was so exhausting that he had to look down at the littered sidewalk to make sure that he was moving forward and not simply flexing and sweating in place.

  A two-foot length of metal pipe whacked the pavement in front of him and instantly sprang away to devastate a curbside bush, and he had dimly, distantly heard it ring when it hit. Perhaps he was not permanently deafened. He kept walking, though it was not getting any easier.

  The apartment was a hollowed-out shell, with three walls leaning outward and the roof entirely gone. A yard-long jet of flame fluttered where the kitchen had been. The apartment next door looked relatively whole, though there was no glass in any of the windows.

  Oliver was standing on the walkway with his arms spread wide, and then he fell to his knees and seemed to be stressfully vomiting or convulsing, and it seemed to Ozzie that the boy was forcing himself to do it—even though the spasms looked to be tearing his ribs apart—the way a person might cut his hand to bloody ribbons just to cut out of the flesh the unbearable foreignness of an intrusive splinter.