Last Call

… if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth …

—Matthew 24:26

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers …

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

For good ye are and bad, and like to coins,

Some true, some light, but every one of you

Stamp'd with the image of the King …

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls Of The King

Mistigris.—Poker with the joker added.

—Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911

CHAPTER 14: Toward the Terminal Response

Southeast of the Sierra Nevada range, the Mojave Desert stretches across more than a hundred miles of vast, bleak wilderness before finally rising into the rugged peaks that corrugate California's easternmost edge, peaks with names like Devils Playground and the Old Woman Mountains. The desert is bordered in the south by the San Bernardino Mountains, beyond which lie the Coachella and Imperial valleys, broad quilts whose different-colored squares are fields of carrots and lettuce and cantaloupe and date palms. The water for their irrigation travels west in canals that cut horizon-spanning lines of silver through the Sonora Desert from the Colorado River, tamed now by the Hoover and Davis and Parker dams.

But the river can still be rebellious—in 1905 it flooded and broke through the man-made headgates near Yuma, cutting itself a new channel through the farmlands and towns all the way out to a low plain of salt-frosted desert that had been known as the Salton Pan. The Southern Pacific Railroad managed after two years to block the new flow and force the river back into its original channel—but the Salton Pan had become, and remains still, the Salton Sea, a thirty-five-mile body of water that grows so increasingly salty as its water evaporates that red tides frequently stain the betrayed water like blood, and water-skiers have to avoid sargassos of dead, floating corbina fish.

The river has been harnessed to make the Coachella and Imperial valleys bloom, but the Salton Sea, desolate with wind and sand and salt, sits between them like the patient eye of the wasteland.

In Laughlin, Nevada, fifty miles south of Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, a stiff wind from the jagged Dead Mountains was raising whitecaps on the high, sun-glittering water.

A man in a tuxedo stood on the ferry pier and pulled handfuls of brightly colored casino chips from his pockets and flung them out over the choppy water. Tourists asked him what he was doing, and he replied that he worked for one of the casinos and was disposing of worn chips in the routine way; but he closely watched the patterns the chips took as they flew, and he seemed to be whispering to himself, and when he had scattered the last handful, he stood looking at the water for half an hour before bowing to the river and then walking to a car and driving away, very fast, north.

Fifty miles south of that, at Lake Havasu City, the river flowed high around the massive pilings of London Bridge, the same arching granite structure that until twenty years ago had straddled the Thames. The river's border was green, but the desert was close beyond the bright new hotels and restaurants, and because of the clarity of the air the desiccated mountains seemed nearer than they actually were.

A white-bearded man in a dusty old pickup truck drove over the curb of the parklike area near the bridge; he tromped the accelerator until he was doing about thirty—tourists were yelling and running—and then he yanked the wheel hard to the right, and the old truck spun like a compass needle across the sprinkled grass.

When the vehicle came to a squeaking, rocking halt, it was pointing north. He restarted the stalled engine and drove off in that direction.

And far out in the sagebrush reaches of the desert, in cinder-block houses and trailers and shacks in Kelso and Joshua Tree and Inyokern, isolated people were sniffing the dry air, and then, one by one, slapping their pockets for car keys or searching shelves for bus schedules.

And, in Baker, Dondi Snayheever left his box forever to go find his mother.

Travelers know Baker as just the brief string of gas stations and car repair garages and burgers-and-fries restaurants on I-15 in the middle of the vast desert between Barstow and the California-Nevada border—and in fact, it's not much more. West of Baker's main street is nothing but a few short, powdery dirt roads and a couple of clusters of old mobile homes behind tall pine windbreaks, and at the west edge of town—out past the wide grassless yards and the forlorn swing sets and the old barbecues and dressers and half-stripped cars and the occasional satellite dish, all baking in the purely savage sun glaring out of the empty sky—the fenced-in grounds of the ECI minimum-security prison mark the town's west boundary. Beyond the prison's farthest fence is nothing but the desert, stretching away toward the astronomically remote Avawatz Mountains, the flat sand plain studded in the middle distance with huge jagged rocks that look like pieces of a long-ago-shattered planet half-buried in the sand.

A month ago Dondi Snayheever had walked away from his job in an upholstery shop in Barstow. He hadn't been sleeping well, and voices in his head kept saying things in a tone that was urgent but too soft to be understood, and so he had returned to the place he'd grown up in, a big plywood box behind the abandoned house where his father had lived. It was a long mile outside Baker on a dirt road, but somehow every time Snayheever went back, he found empty liquor bottles and used condoms on the carpeted floor of his box. The door couldn't be locked anymore.

It was hot and dim inside the box, and cramped because of the stacks of maps, but his attention was drawn to the oversize playing cards that his father had tacked up on every available section of wall and ceiling.

His father had built the box in 1966, when Dondi had been a year old, and Dondi had spent nearly every hour of his life in the box until 1981, when his father had driven away to Las Vegas, supposedly just for a weekend, and had never come back.

His father had built other boxes for him to stay in when they occasionally went traveling together—one in the woods west of Reno, one in an empty warehouse in Carson City, and one in the desert outside Las Vegas. The Las Vegas box had even had a stained glass window, an inexplicable pieta of the Virgin Mary mourning over the dead body of Christ.

Dondi never knew his mother, though sometimes he would stare at some of his tracings and he'd imagine he could see her.

When Dondi was about twelve, his father had explained to the boy that the plywood structure he lived in was a Skinner box. It was an "environment" engineered to produce a "terminal response."

It was based on his father's understanding of the teachings of a psychologist named Skinner, who had apparently taught pigeons to bowl with little miniature balls and pins. The theory held that desirable qualities in an adult human could be defined, and then a procedure could be set up, a pattern of education that would help shape a child toward the terminal response, the desired state.

Dondi's father had wanted to produce the ultimate Poker player. The attempt had been a failure. His father had wound up making something else.

In previous years the box had been filled with Poker books, and hundreds of decks of cards, and a television that showed nothing but films of real Poker games. His father would come out of the house and crawl into the box and play a hundred hands a day with him, criticizing ("extinguishing") inappropriate play, and rewarding—with bags of M&M's candies—play that could be shaped toward the terminal response.

Now the only things left in the box from those days were the big cards on the walls … but Dondi Snayheever stared hard at them, knowing that it would be through them, even more than through the maps, that he would be able to find his mother.

Besides, he already knew what she looked like from studying his tracings.

She was beautiful, like the Queen of Hearts.

"Baker for an early dinner, I nominate," said Crane. "And a full tank of gas, too. After Baker there's nothing but straight lines through lunar landscapes till at least the Nevada border."

"Right," said Ozzie.

"Gotcha," said Mavranos. "Pop me another beer, will you, Pogo?"

Crane hooked up a Coors from the cold water in the ice chest, opened it, and handed it to the driver. Mavranos seemed to drain half of it in one swallow, then tucked the can between his thighs. The windows were open, and the hot wind battered at Crane's ears and had blown his gray hair into a tangle of spikes and curls.

They'd been driving for three hours northeast along I-15. Ever since they'd driven through Victorville, the roadside brush and the shoulder of the highway had been consistently glittering with broken bottles, contrasting with long black strips of retread thrown from truck tires. Mirages and the broken glass gave Crane a spurious sense of being surrounded by water, an illusion strengthened by the boats being towed along on trailers behind many of the other cars they saw and by Ozzie's remark that this all used to be sea bed, and that you could find primeval sea shells out there in the cross sections of broken rock.

Crane had frequently thought about his own first trip across this desert forty-two years ago, when he had crouched for five hours in the scuppers of a boat, under the inert echo sounder, instinctively hiding from the stars in the high black sky.

Now, in spite of the chain-link fence along the side of the highway and the sand and the twisted Joshua pines beyond it, the desert crossing seemed—even more than it had then—to be a journey over water.

And Crane noticed geometry everywhere, straight lines: mirages out on the flat desert, and the long and nearly horizontal slopes that led away from the low mountains and seemed to stretch halfway across the world, and the line of the highway itself. Sometimes the whole, world-spanning horizon was tilted, and he'd find himself leaning with it.

Mavranos's truck was a contrast to the eternal regularity and hugeness of the desert.

The boxy blue vehicle, dusty and plain only this morning, now looked like a truck strayed from the caravan of a modest circus. Ozzie had bought several dozen Cobbs Airflow Activated Deer Warning whistles and glued the little black plastic things all over the hood and roof of the truck, some of them aimed diagonally instead of straight ahead, and some lined up so that the exhaust of one was the intake of the next, "like Newton's prisms"; and he had made Crane and Mavranos cut their fingers to dot bloodstains on each one of a bagful of pennants and banners, all of which he subsequently hung from the antenna and bumpers and luggage rack; and he had glued playing cards onto the walls of the tires, all the way around, and on the fenders, too.

As Ozzie had worked on the wheels, Crane had heard the old man mutter something about diesel and the windshield, but Crane, embarrassed by his foster father's eccentric precautions and by Mavranos's deadpan acceptance of them, didn't want to speak and perhaps provoke some further equipping of the Suburban.

At last they had got moving and had taken the Pomona Freeway out of Los Angeles, and it was only now, after three hours of uninterrupted traveling, that Crane's impatience and unease had relaxed enough to let him think of stopping.

Baker's legendary Bun Boy restaurant proved to have burned down, so after pulling off the highway, they stopped at a diner called the Mad Greek.

It was a little place, blue and white with outside tables and a low white picket fence, and Ozzie sat down at a table in the shade while Crane and Mavranos went inside to order.

The menu was self-consciously Greek, with things like souvlaki plates and Kefte-K-Bobs and Onassis Sandwiches, but they just ordered cheeseburgers. Mavranos got beers for himself and Ozzie, and Crane made do with a cup of some cold drink called Tamarindo.

They didn't talk much as they ate. Mavranos insisted, over Ozzie's snorting derision, that hibernating sea monkeys crawled out of the floors of the dry lakes when the spring rains came, and Crane just sipped his Tamarindo and stared at the two plastic cups of beer and thought about the pay phone he had picked up in the Commerce Casino.

The three of them were about to leave—Ozzie had unhooked his cane from the edge of the table, and Crane had thrown down enough money to cover the dinners and the tip—when a skinny hand darted in and snatched up the ceramic bowl full of wrapped sugar cubes.

The young man who stood by the table had the bowl in one hand and his other hand inside his undersize, slept-in-looking brown corduroy jacket. A sudden spasm of giggling made his teeth seem big, and his eyes were feverishly bright.

For a moment Crane and Ozzie and Mavranos just stared up at him.

"Oh, well, I guess I got a gun!" said the intruder, shaking stringy hair off his forehead. "It's the only shape drill-press buttons really taste like, did you hear me say that?" He smelled, Crane noticed, like air freshener and old sweat.

Mavranos smiled and spread his hands as if to say We don't want any trouble, and Crane saw him brace his feet under the table.

"If a person's mother was the moon," the young man said earnestly, "he could find her by where she—where she—"

Ozzie shook his head sharply at Mavranos, who lowered his hands.

"Where she left her—her face! Or the raven's face, the eye of the raven!" The young man put the bowl down and wiped his own face with his sleeve. "Queen of Hearts," he said, more quietly, "and the Jack going to find her." He dragged up a chair from an empty table nearby and sat down. Keeping his right hand under his jacket, with his left he dug a box of blue Bicycle brand playing cards out of his pocket and tossed it onto the table. "We gonna play?"

A waitress inside had been staring out the window at their unsavory visitor; but Ozzie smiled at her and waved, and she seemed satisfied.

Ozzie was facing their visitor again, frowning at him, obviously trying to figure out how this madman might fit into the structure they were dealing with and how it would affect things if they were to play with him.

"What … stakes?" asked Ozzie.

"M&M's," the young man said, "against your sugars." He pointed at the bowl he'd snatched up earlier and then pulled two packs of regular M&M's out of his pocket. "Candy. And sugar, too. It's bad for your teeth if you let it." He swatted ineffectually at one of the circling flies. "And flies like it," he added. "The word for 'fly' is mosca in Spain." He chuckled and shook his head.

"Uh," said Ozzie, "do you know where the moon … 'left her face'?"

"My name's Dondi Snayheever. Yeah, I got some—some maps, in the car. It's very difficult to say, as you would say, maps in the car."

Ozzie nodded. "Let's play for a map or two. We'll fade 'em with cash."

"Letters and lockets and lesson plans, you can't do otherthing but keep them, because they—they—they're the leadages candlewise to the father and mother." He looked hard at Ozzie. "You can't see any of my maps, sir."

"What's the game?" asked Crane cautiously. "That we're going to play here."

Snayheever blinked at him in evident surprise. "Go Fish."

"Of course," said Ozzie. The old man met Crane's eyes and made a sort of over there twitch with one white eyebrow.

You want me to go find his car and steal a map or two, thought Crane. Okay. But if I've got to do it, I'm by God going to award myself a prize. That's my ruling.

"I bet the engine's cooled enough for me to pop the cap off the radiator," Crane said, getting to his feet. "I'll go check." He looked at Mavranos. "Keys?"

"Keys?" echoed Snayheever. "Your radiator is inside the car?"

Mavranos had pulled out his key ring and tossed it to Crane. "Locking hood," Mavranos said easily. "Where we come from they'll steal your battery soon as blow their nose."

"Where do you come from?" Snayheever asked.

"Oz," said Ozzie testily, his voice sounding very old and reedy. "Shall we cut for the deal?"

Crane got up and walked out to the asphalt, and as he rounded the bushes toward where the cars were parked, he heard Snayheever say, "No, for this I've got to deal."

He's probably a cheat, Crane thought with a weary grin. We'll wind up with no sugar cubes at all.

Crane wondered how he was supposed to recognize Snayheever's car … until he walked past Mavrano's Suburban and saw the weird little vehicle parked on the other side of it.

It looked like a 1950s English version of a Volkswagen—it had the same bulbous fenders and arching roof—but the body flared out into a slight skirt around the sides. It was impossible to guess the little vehicle's original color; it seemed to have been dipped in oil decades ago and been driven relentlessly on remote desert roads ever since.

Crane walked forward, feeling as though he were pushing against the hot air and leaving it curling in slow turbulence behind him, like the wake of a ship.

He read the rusty emblem on the front of the car's hood: Morris.

Crane peered in through the dusty passenger-side window. The car was a mess: The upholstery was all split, stacks of newspapers filled the back seat, and the glove compartment had no door.

A number of ragged-edged folded maps protruded from the open compartment. The passenger door was not locked; Crane opened it, leaned in and pried free a couple of maps from the center of the pile, and then closed the door and walked over to the Suburban, fumbling with Mavranos's keys.

He got into the truck and stared at Mavrano's ice chest.

"Go fish," he whispered, and then slowly reached out and lifted a can of Coors from the cold water. One won't hurt, he thought. This desert air will dry me out like a dead rat in no time.

He popped the tab. The beer foamed up but didn't run over the rim of the can.

He looked behind him, but there was no one else in the truck.

Tired of alertness, he drained the beer in one long, gulping series of swallows. It stung his throat and brought tears to his eyes, and he could feel his tense muscles relaxing.

The air inside the Suburban was hotter than the air outside, and smelled of spilled beer and old laundry. Crane tossed the can into the back, where it would not stand out. He hid Snayheever's maps under an old nylon windbreaker and then got out, locked the door, and trudged back around the bushes to the table.

Ozzie and Mavranos looked up as Crane walked up; young Snayheever was staring at the cards in his hands and moving his lips silently,

"Should we go?" asked Ozzie.

Meaning, thought Crane, will the nut be able to see that I robbed him, in which case we should be gone before he goes to his car. "No," said Crane, resuming his seat and draining the ice-diluted Tamarindo in his glass, "nothing looks different. Uh … it could do with a little more cooling off."

" 'Kay. Here, I gotta hit the men's room. You take my cards, Scott."

Ozzie got laboriously up out of his chair and then hobbled to the nearby rest room door, leaning heavily on his cane.

Crane picked up the old man's cards. "My turn? To Mr. Snayheever? Okay. Uh … do you have any Nines?"

Snayheever grinned and jiggled in his chair. "Go fish!"

Mavranos pointed at the undealt stack of cards, and Crane picked up the top card. It was the Jack of Hearts.

"How about—" he began.

"Gotta bet!" Snayheever said excitedly. His dirty hair was down in his eyes.

"Oh. Uh, I'll … what's the limit?"

"Two."

Crane grinned lopsidedly and added two more sugar cubes to the pile of M&M's and sugar cubes in the middle of the table. "Have you got any Jacks?" A big semi truck drove by on the highway, gunning its engine and rattling the windows at Crane's back.

"Go fish!" said Snayheever.

Crane took the top card. It was the Ace of Spades, and a second after Crane picked it up Ozzie was somehow standing right behind him. "We're leaving," the old man said tightly. "The game will go unfinished. Throw down your hand."

Crane shrugged and obeyed. When the cards hit the tabletop, the Ace of Spades lay nearly covering two other cards he'd been holding, the Ace and Queen of Hearts.

"We're leaving now," said Ozzie shakily. "This minute."

"Fine!" said Snayheever as his long, trembling fingers gathered in the cards. "Fine! Just go then! I don't need you!"

Mavranos took Ozzie's elbow as they walked away from the table, for the old man was trembling and breathing fast; Crane walked out of the patio backward, watching Snayheever and wondering if the young man really did have a gun—but Snayheever, having apparently forgotten about the three of them, was thoughtfully folding a card around an M&M and a sugar cube. Just before Crane stepped around the bushes into the hot breeze, he saw the young man lift the strange burrito to his mouth and effortfully gnaw a bite out of it.

The breeze was from the reddening west, throwing veils of dust and stinging sand across the parking lot and making the lot and the whole town of Baker seem like the architecture of a temporary outpost, due soon to be abandoned to the elements. Crane watched Ozzie hobble along ahead of him, frail in his wind-fluttering old-man's suit, and for a moment he thought that Ozzie belonged here, a tiny, exhausted figure in a vast, exhausted landscape.

And if they just drove away without the old man, Crane could have as much beer as he wanted. The beer he'd drunk a few minutes ago shifted coldly and pleasantly in his abdomen.

But he forced himself to remember Ozzie as he had been when they'd been father and son—and to remember Diana, and how Ozzie had found her and made her his daughter, Crane's sister—as he helped Mavranos boost the shaking old man up into the rear seat of the car.

When the old man had sat down, Mavranos slammed the door. "Keys?"

Crane dug them out of his pocket and dropped them into Mavranos's palm.

"Think he'll be all right?"

Crane shrugged. "He wants to go."

Mavranos nodded, squinting off at the point where the highway disappeared into the eastern horizon. Then he looked down at his shadow on the asphalt, stretching away for yards in that direction. When he spoke, it was so quietly that Crane could barely hear him over the wind: " '… I will show you something different from either/ Your shadow at morning striding behind you/ Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/ I will show you fear in a handful of dust.' "

Crane knew he was quoting Eliot again.

Crane climbed into the passenger seat and pulled the door closed as Mavranos started the truck and clanked it into gear. Crane looked back at Ozzie. The old man's head was leaned back against the top of the seat. His eyes were closed, and he was breathing through his mouth.

CHAPTER 15: What Would Your Husband Say to That?

"Cannibal burger," said Al Funo, smiling at the woman. "Very rare, with raw onions." He took a bite of it and nodded in approval.

"I never could eat rare meat," she said. "I always like my steaks very well done."

Funo swallowed and wiped his mouth. "That's probably because you grew up in the Depression," he said. "In those days it didn't pay to eat rare meat. Nowadays they say you can even eat pork rare."

"I did not grow up in the Depression," she said. "How old do you think I am?"

"I like women who are older than myself," Funo said, frowning and nodding. "Ben Franklin felt the same way I do. I say you leave your car here and ride to Vegas with me, in my Porsche. What would your husband say to that?"

She simpered. Evidently she'd forgiven him for the Depression remark. "My God, me pull up to the motel in a Porsche with a … sexy young man? It'd be World War Three all over again."

She was eating some kind of big salad. Probably she was worried about her weight. Funo could see that she was a little heavy, but he thought she looked good.

He smiled and winked at her. She blushed.

They were sitting at a table in the Harvey House restaurant in Barstow. Funo had stopped for a hot meal, and he'd noticed this middle-aged woman sitting by herself at one of the tables by the big windows that overlooked the early-evening desert, and he had carried his plate over and asked her if he could join her. He preferred not to eat alone—he enjoyed good talk with good people over good food.

"And what are you going to be doing in Vegas?" she asked.

"I'm going to look up a friend of mine," he said. "I think he may be injured."

"A close friend?"

Funo was still smiling. "Let's just say I recently gave him a Dunhill lighter. A gold one."

"Oh," she said vaguely.

He took another bite of his cannibal burger and chewed thoughtfully.

He's alive, but you're off this one, Al, Obstadt's man had told him when he'd called in earlier today. We'll let the guys in Vegas take it.

Vegas, eh? Funo had thought. And there were Nevada plates on that gray Jag.

Well, Funo wasn't about to leave his friend to some damn strangers. He had taken one last assignment—one of the ones he called auto-assignments—and then had got right into his Porsche and taken off for Vegas.

That last assignment had been an older woman, like this one. He had followed her to a 7-Eleven store and struck up a conversation with her about Danielle Steel's novels. Funo could converse plausibly about anything, even things he knew nothing about. It was a gift. Out of sight of the checker he had given her an incapacitating electric shock with a black plastic stun gun, and then, after lowering her unconscious body to a sitting position on a stack of newspapers by the video games, he had taken a sharpened ice pick out of his jacket pocket and carefully stabbed her through the heart. He had left unhurriedly.

An auto-assignment.

Funo really did like older women. He wasn't ashamed to admit that his mother had been the finest person he'd ever known, and he was convinced that years of experience, years of life, were what made a woman attractive. Younger women, he'd found, tended to be shallow. Al Funo had no time for shallow people.

"I'd better be going," his new friend said, getting to her feet. "Hours yet to Vegas, and Stu will be worried if I'm too late."

"I'll walk you out," said Funo quickly, pushing his own chair back.

"No, really, thank you," she said, picking up her purse.

"I can check your oil and water," he said, standing up. "Out on that desert you don't want to—"

"Honestly, I'm fine."

Was she … worried? Suspicious of him? "I'll walk you out," he repeated, perhaps a tad harshly.

She was walking away, her head down. When she paid her bill at the register, the cashier girl looked over at him, not smiling. What had the old bitch said?

Well, that put the kibosh on making her an auto-assignment. He didn't need any kind of brouhaha. The thing about auto-assignments—the ones you took on all by yourself, for nothing more than the satisfaction of being important to strangers—was that they had to be done even more carefully than the business assignments because you wouldn't be getting any protection. And of course, you wouldn't be getting paid.

He looked away from the cashier, forcing himself to breathe deeply and relax.

He stared at the painting on the high wall above the kitchen. It was of a stagecoach leaving a little western town, but some trick of perspective made the stagecoach appear to be as big as a mountain, or else the town a miniature toy. The scale was impossible to judge.

It didn't upset him. Scales, the sizes of things, didn't matter—people were people. There had been the woman in the 7-Eleven earlier today, and soon enough there would be Scott Crane.

Al Funo just wanted to be important to people.

The highway was a straight line in the twilight, a tenuous link between the dark horizon so far ahead and the red horizon so far behind. The old Suburban barreled along steadily, squeaking and rocking but showing a low temperature and a full tank of gas in the green radiance of its gauges. On either side of the highway the desert was pale sand, studded as far out as the eye could see with widely spaced low markers that looked like, but couldn't have been, sprinkler heads.

The ember of Mavranos's Camel glowed as he inhaled, and half an inch of ash fell onto his already gray-dusted jeans. He exhaled, and smoke curled against the inside of the cracked windshield. "So what's it like," he asked quietly, "Vegas?"

Crane inhaled deeply on his own cigarette. This section of desert was far bleaker and more humbling than the stretch before Baker had been, without even any broken glass along the shoulder, and the small smells and sounds and glows inside the truck were precious. "I haven't been in twenty years."

"What you remember."

"It's … pure," Crane said. "It's self-indulgence with no … no marbling."

"Sounds like a lean steak, no marbling."

Crane leaned forward to tap off his ash, but it fell to the floor. He leaned back. "Yeah. Yeah, did you ever read about that chicken heart that scientists took out of a—a chicken, and kept alive? The heart's been alive for like fifty years now, and it's grown to the size of a couch. Las Vegas is self-indulgence with every other part of life trimmed away, and it's grown to a size that's freakish. Not just grown like a city, you know, buildings and suburbs and all, but … grown to fill all the space, psychically. And what you get, the result—probably like the chicken heart—is—is blandness, with a kind of burnt aftertaste."

"How do they treat you? The casino people."

"Oh, everybody's real cheerful, real helpful. The cops see you walking down the sidewalk with a drink in your hand, they just smile and nod. Everybody's that way around the casinos, which is to say downtown around Fremont Street and out on the Strip. They don't have to say 'screw you' because they already are screwing you, in more ways than you know, and in more orifices than you knew you had."

Mavranos took a gulp from the can of beer that had been catching ashes between his thighs. "Sounds like fun."

For a while Crane watched the monotonous pavement rushing at them and tumbling away under the humming wheels. "It is, actually."

Ozzie had begun wheezing in the back seat, but now he coughed and shifted on the seat and resumed breathing normally.

"Bother you," Mavranos asked Crane quietly, "me drinking beer?"

"Nah. I'm full of that damned tamarind stuff—couldn't think of drinking anything."

"How you think you're gonna do, being on the wagon?" Crane thought of the beer he'd chugged in Baker. "I don't think it'll be any hassle. It's just a habit I've got into, like coffee in the morning, or parting your hair on the left. I'll probably just replace it with … I don't know, Ovaltine, or Bazooka gum, or crossword puzzles." He yawned. His cigarette had burned down to the filter, and he poked it into the ashtray and dug another one out of the pack.

"You don't figure you're an alcoholic."

"I don't know. What's the definition of 'alcoholic'?"

Mavranos shrugged, staring at the highway ahead. "Can't stop."

"Well, look at me. I stopped … hours ago, and I'm fine."

"Settles that," said Mavranos, nodding. A big Harley-Davidson full-dress bike roared past them, its wide, light-studded rear end looking like the transom of a receding speedboat; in a few moments it was just a spot of red light in the darkness ahead, and its engine was a distant whine.

Crane hadn't slept for about forty hours, and he was very tired—he was thinking of curling up against the door and napping for a few dozen miles—and Mavranos's truck had a constant background noise of rattles and slidings and clanks and squeaks, so he was sure that the voice he seemed to be hearing from the back was imaginary.

… it all anyway, and if they want to borrow it, ask them what happened to the weed whip thing, or our forks, and you remember what Steve said about that plant he had in his front area by the door and they stepped on it …

"What are we doing out here?" he asked sleepily.

"We're off to see the Wizard," said Mavranos. In a piping voice he said, "Do you think the Wizard can cure my cancer?"

"I don't see why not," said Crane in an exhausted soprano. "We're going to see him about saving my foster sister from getting shot in the face like her mom, and maybe even to see if I can keep my real dad from stealing my body."

"Hey, Pogo," Mavranos said suddenly, holding his right hand out from the steering wheel, "like the Three Musketeers, let's form a partnership—one for all and all for one, you know? Birth to earth?"

Crane shook his hand. He remembered the movie West Side Story, too, so he added, "Womb to tomb."

"The thing that'll save me is statistics," said Mavranos, grinning as he put his hand back on the wheel. "I say I'm trying to find its castle, so I'm personifying it, right? I'm looking for the vizard of odds."

"That's mighty funny," said Crane. He yawned so widely that tears ran down his cheeks. "I'm crowding fifty years old. How come I'm not … what time is it? … I guess it's too dark to be playing basketball with a kid of mine. I should be turning the burgers on the hibachi, and … Christ, if I had a kid, he could be twenty or thirty. He'd be home playing ball with his kid. Well, I should be …"

Cooking spaghetti for Susan and me, he thought; she'd be in the spare room playing some Queen tapes, or some of her Styx or Cheap Trick, and I'd be sautéing onions and garlic and bell peppers, taking a swig every now and then from the cold Budweiser on the sill of the open window. There'd be no coffee cup in the stove …

Coffee in the morning, said the faint voice that seemed to come from the back of the truck, or combing your hair on the left. Ovaltine, Bazooka gum, crossword puzzles. Why do you run me down to your friends all the time?

Abruptly wide-awake, Crane turned around and looked past Ozzie's sleeping form to the piles of litter in the dimness of the back of the truck. His forehead was cold with a dew of sudden sweat.

"What's up?" asked Mavranos. "Hear something?"

Crane forced himself not to breathe fast. "No," he said levelly. "Nothing."

Nothing, echoed the voice. I'm good enough for a quickie in the truck while your friends are inside, but when they're around I'm nothing.

Ozzie's head came up. He looked around quickly, frowning and wiping drool from his chin. "Who are you and where are you taking me?" he demanded.

"Oz, it's me, Scott, remember?" Fright made Crane speak too loudly; in a quieter tone he went on, "We're going to Las Vegas to find Diana. She's—what was it?—flying in the grass."

The old man sagged, all his imperiousness gone. "Oh, yeah," he said faintly, and then he shivered and pulled his suit coat more tightly around his narrow shoulders. "Oh, yeah."

"Be across the border into Nevada soon," said Mavranos without taking his eyes off the highway.

Ozzie wiped his eyes and blinked out the window. "I'd like to have seen more of California," he mumbled. In a firmer voice he said, "Over the border we'll be on their turf, his turf. Play tight."

Mavranos lifted a fresh can of beer from the ice chest and swirled his hand in the water, bumping a few cans together. "How much longer?"

"To Vegas?" Crane said. "Another hour or so."

Ozzie shifted awkwardly on the seat. "I've heard that there's a casino just over the border now. Dirty Dick's or something. Let's stop there for a bit. I think I'm going to throw up my Baker cheeseburger, and then I should eat something like a—a tuna fish sandwich, maybe, or a bowl of soup." His knobby hands found the rubber grip of his aluminum cane and held it tightly.

"I wouldn't mind a bite myself," said Mavranos. "Something with some onions and salsa."

Ozzie shut his eyes and clenched his jaw.

Are you going to leave me in the car again? Why don't you take me inside with you? You used to love me. You used to—

"What was it," asked Crane loudly, "that you didn't like about the cards I threw down, when I was playing with the nut back there, I think it was the Ace and Queen of Hearts and the Ace of Spades?" The disembodied voice seemed to have stopped, so he let himself stop jabbering.

Both Ozzie and Mavranos were looking at him with expressions of puzzled uneasiness.

"Well," Crane went on in a more normal tone, "you didn't look as though they were good news, Ozzie. I thought of it just now and wanted to ask before I forgot." He knew his hands would shake if he gestured with them, so he clasped them in his lap.

"Oh," said Ozzie. "Huh. Well, it may not have counted for anything, playing for sugar and candy like that. And I didn't notice any funny business with smoke or drink levels."

"I read somewhere voodoo gods like candy," put in Mavranos.

"Or sea monkeys," said Crane impatiently. "But what was it?" he asked Ozzie.

The old man rubbed his face. "Well, as I told you, Hearts is the suit of the—the King and Queen. The sun King and the moon Queen, you know. And the Ace of Hearts is the combination of them, like yin and yang. Your father doesn't want any such combination, though, or at least not one that's not contained in himself. And the Queen of Hearts is probably still Diana's card in some sense, since she's the daughter of that Lady Issit, who was the goddess."

Crane remembered the card that had covered the Ace and Queen of Hearts. "And what's the Ace of Spades?" he asked.

Ozzie waved one spotted old hand. "Death."

That reminded Crane of something, but before he could catch the memory, Mavranos was speaking.

"I think this place up ahead here is what you were talking about—Whiskey Pete's it's called," Mavranos said, and a moment later there was the click-click, click-click of the turn indicator as he signaled for a lane change, and the sound continued as, moments later, he slanted off the highway onto the exit ramp and began to press the brake pedal.

"How many maps did you get?" Ozzie asked suddenly.

"Maps," echoed Crane without comprehension. It alarmed him that he didn't know what Ozzie was talking about, and he clasped his hands together even tighter.

"From the nut," Mavranos said. "When you went out to his car."

"Oh, right. I don't know—three or four. They're under Arky's wind-breaker there."

Whiskey Pete's was a tan-colored, spotlighted and neon-lit castle, with turrets and towers and arches, and crenellations along the tops of the walls as if for the emplacement of only momentarily absent archers. The caricature figure of a gold prospector sat on the highest wall, above the giant CASINO sign, and at the far ends of the lower wall were two figures of Parisian-looking dancing girls. Behind the glowing edifice the hills of the desert were black humps against the purple sky.

"Jesus," said Mavranos as he drove across the vast parking lot toward the spectacle. "It looks like something that aliens would catch people in and then fold up just before dawn and fly back to Mars with."

"Does your dome light work, Archimedes?" asked Ozzie.

"You bet."

"Let's look at these maps right here in the car. I don't like the idea of looking at them inside that place."

Mavranos parked and turned off the engine and the headlights, then switched on the dome light as Ozzie carefully pulled the folded maps out from under Mavranos's windbreaker. He began unfolding the top one.

In the anonymous darkness and swooping headlight glare of the highway, the dusty little Morris droned right on past the Whiskey Pete's exit ramp, heading east, toward Las Vegas.

CHAPTER 16: God, There's a Jack!

"Poland?" said Crane, staring at one of the maps. "She couldn't be flying in the grass in Poland, could she? And shit, look at the caption: 'Partition of Poland, 1939.' " He laid the map over the back of the front seat so the other two could see it.

"Look, though," said Mavranos, squinting through cigarette smoke, "he's marked half a dozen routes, from somewhere to somewhere." With a calloused finger he traced one of several heavy pencil lines that meandered across the map.

"This one's California and Nevada," said Ozzie tensely, looking at a map he'd just unfolded. "More routes marked."

The old man held it up, and Crane tried to make sense of the map lines that had been emphasized in heavy pencil. The Colorado River was traced from about Laughlin down to Elythe, and then the line moved inland to some town called Desert Center; the 62 Highway was marked from the Nevada border west to the 177 junction; one line just followed the California border from the I-15 to the river, though there was no road or river along the route, only the imaginary straight line; and heavy pencil strokes had crossed out two names; in the glove compartment Crane found a pencil with an eraser and rubbed out the shiny black patches and then just stared, as puzzled as before, at the names "Big Maria Mts." and "Sacramento Mts." revealed underneath.

"It looks like a big round trip," said Crane, "from Riverside to the border, down the length of the border to Blythe, and then back up to the 40 on unpaved roads, and back to Riverside."

"With a lot of side trips," said Ozzie. "Notice the fainter pencil lines along these dirt roads out around the 95."

"Gentlemen," said Mavranos ponderously, "the man was nuts."

But Ozzie was shaking his head doubtfully. "The moon, the Jack and Queen of Hearts … He was plugged in somehow. Don't throw these away."

There were two other maps, one of Michigan and one of Italy, both deeply scored with pencil lines.

"I wonder if he'll miss them," said Crane.

"Yeah," said Mavranos unsympathetically, "next time he's in Poland he'll be up Shit Creek without a you-know-what, as my mom used to say. We ready to go inside, or what?"

"You okay for walking?" Crane asked Ozzie as he opened the door and climbed down to the pavement.

"There's nothing wrong with me," said Ozzie peevishly.

Ozzie hurried away in the direction of the men's room, while Crane and Mavranos stood in the entry and blinked around in the glare-punctuated dimness.

Just inside the bank of glass doors, isolated on the red-carpeted floor by a circle of velvet ropes hung from brass poles, was a 1920s-vintage car, its body riddled with big-caliber bullet holes. A nearby sign announced that this was the very car in which Bonnie and Clyde had been shot to death. Welcome to Nevada, Crane thought.

After a few minutes Ozzie came back, white-faced, red-eyed, and leaning on his cane.

"And Ozzie makes three," said Crane, pretending to notice nothing out of the ordinary.

This was the first time he'd been in a Nevada casino in more than fifteen years, but as he led the way through the ranks of clattering slot machines to the restaurant in the back, he felt as though no more than a week had passed since he'd last been in this ubiquitous, rackety hall, doors into which could be found in hundreds of places across the breadth of Nevada. Whether you walked in through a door in Tahoe or Reno or Laughlin, or across a littered pavement in the Glitter Gulch area of downtown Las Vegas or up a polished marble stair on the Strip, it always seemed to be the same big, noisy dark room that you found yourself in. It was carpeted, and it smelled of gin and paper money and tobacco and air conditioning, and a disquieting number of the people at the tables and the slot machines were crippled or deformed or startlingly obese.

Mavranos was blinking around in apparent bewilderment. "Where the hell are all these people when they're not here?" he asked Crane quietly.

"I think they only look like people in this light," said Ozzie with a tired grin. "Before they spun in through the doors at sundown they were dust devils and tumbleweeds and cast-off snakeskins, and their money was warpy bits of busted mirage; and at dawn they'll all leave, and if you were watching, you'd see 'em puff away, back to their real forms."

Crane grinned, reassured to note that Ozzie could still spin his whimsical fantasies, but he noticed that Mavranos only looked more apprehensive.

"He's kidding," Crane said.

Mavranos shrugged irritably. "I know that."

Without speaking, the three of them began filing down the aisles between the slot machines.

In the restaurant Ozzie had a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coors, and Mavranos had a bowl of chili and a Coors, and Crane just had a Coke and ate Mavranos's crackers.

Mavranos had begun to tell Ozzie about the Mandelbrot fat man, and Crane stood up and said he was going to go hit the men's room himself.

He paused on the way to thumb a quarter into one of the slot machines, and after he'd pulled the handle, not even watching the machine's window, twenty quarters were banged one by one into the payout well.

He scooped them out in two handfuls and dumped them into the pockets of his jacket, then touched the machine's handle. "Thanks," he said.

He pretended that the thing said, You're welcome. Then he found himself pretending that the thing had said, Give her one good-bye kiss, at least.

"I … can't," Crane whispered.

Doesn't she deserve at least that? the machine seemed to ask him. Are you afraid to look her in the face one last time?

I don't know, Crane thought. I'll have to get back to you on that.

Slowly he limped away from the machine, to the bar, and he dumped a fistful of quarters onto the polished surface.

"A shot of Wild Turkey and two Budweisers, please," he told the bartender. Just one last kiss, he thought. I'm no good to my friends if I'm shaky and forgetful.

The glass screen of a video Poker game was inset flush with the surface of the bar, and Crane dropped a quarter into the slot and pushed the deal button. The images of patterned card backs in the flat glass screen blinked and became face up, and then he was looking at a garbage hand, unsuited and with no Hearts.

At that instant, about forty miles to the east of where Crane stood, five mouths opened and exclaimed, "God, there's a Jack!"

The other people on the bus stared at the old man who had shouted.

"What'd he say?" one person asked.

"There's a Jack," someone else answered.

"What's he looking at so hard out the window?"

"Trying to find a rest room, I bet—look, he's wet his pants!"

"Jeez, what's he doing running around loose? He's a hundred if he's a day."

Thought fragments flickered like deepwater fish in the mind residue that occupied Doctor Leaky's head, frail sparks of luminescence darting about on unknowable errands in darkness. Ninety-one, ninety-one, ninety-one, ran the unspoken, scarcely connected words. Not a hundred. Born in '99, born in … that was a Jack. That was a hell of a Jack, west of here … don't smell roses, that's good … don't smell nothing … well, piss …

Art Hanari finally let himself be coaxed into lying back down on the padded table. The masseur had stopped asking him what he'd meant by the remark about a Jack, and now resumed rubbing a lanolin solution into his taut pectorals and deltoids.

The masseur ignored Hanari's perpetual erection. Curious about it at first, he had looked up Hanari' s file, and had found that a "penile implant," a silicone rod, had been surgically inserted into the organ as a drastic cure for primary impotence; it seemed a waste of time, for Hanari saw no women except for a couple of the nurses and physiotherapists, and he showed no interest in them—or in anyone. He nearly never spoke, and he'd had no visitors for at least eight years.

But the masseur had not been surprised to read of the implant operation. Patients at La Maison Dieu could afford anything, and he'd seen much more extravagant cosmetic surgeries.

What had surprised him was Hanari's birth date: 1914. The man was seventy-six … but his pale skin was smooth and firm, and his hair appeared to be genuinely dark brown, and his face was that of a placid thirty-year-old.

Finished, the masseur straightened and wiped his hands on a towel. He looked at the man on the table, who had apparently gone back to sleep, and he shook his head. "God, there's a jack-off, you mean," he muttered, then turned to the door.

"Twenty to the Sixes," said the dealer patiently. Old Stuart Benet always needed to be reminded. Right now Benet was snorting at an asthma inhaler.

" 'At's you, Beanie," said the player to Benet's left.

"Oh!" The fat old man put down the inhaler, lifted the corner of his seventh and last card, and squinted down past his white beard at it.

"Beanie, you just said it was a Jack," said another player impatiently. "And if it is, you got Two Pair, and I got somp'n better anyway."

Benet smiled and pushed four orange chips forward.

The remaining players called, and at the showdown Benet proved to have only the pair that was showing in his up cards.

"Hey, Beanie," said the winner as he gathered in the chips, "what happened to that Jack you were shouting about?"

The dealer suppressed a frown as he collected the cards and began to shuffle. Benet was employed as a shill to fill out sparse tables in the Poker room, and even though the casino had hired him as a favor to a valued business associate, he was good at the work—always cheerful, and happy to stay and call and lose money. But shills weren't supposed to bluff or raise, and that God, there's a Jack yell had been a kind of bluff.

The dealer made a mental note to ask Miss Reculver to remind Benet of the rules. The old man never seemed to listen to anyone else.

The reference desk at the UNLV library always got busy around six in the evening. The students who worked during the day all seemed to come in at once, always shuffling hesitantly up to the desk and beginning in one of two ways: "Where would I look for …" or, even more often, "I have a quick question …" Old Richard Leroy would listen patiently to their intricate descriptions of what they wanted and then, almost invariably, either lead them to the business desk or show them where the psych indexes and abstracts were. Right now he was methodically replacing an armful of books to their proper places on the shelves.

A few of the students were still glancing at him warily, but he had forgotten having yelled, and was back in the state his co-workers called "Ricky's ticky-tocky."

And Betsy Reculver, the one who had voluntarily spoken the simultaneously chorused sentence, walked slowly along the broad, brightly lit and always crowded sidewalk in front of the Flamingo Hilton.

For a while she stared up at the procession of stylized flamingos, illuminated by what must have been a million light bulbs, that strutted along in front of mirrored panels above the windows of the new front of the casino. Behind the casino, hidden from the traffic on the Strip, was a long swimming pool, and on the far side of that, dwarfed now by the glass high-rise buildings that were the modern sections of the hotel, stood the original Flamingo building, the place Ben Siegel had built to be his castle in 1946.

Now it was her castle, though the Hilton people would not ever know it.

Some other people knew it, though—the magically savvy would-be usurpers called jacks—and they would like to take it away from her. This new jack, for example, whoever it might be. I've got to gather in my fish, she thought, and avoid the jacks while I do it.

She turned and looked across the street, past the towering gold-lit fountains and pillars of Caesars Palace, past the blue-lit geometrical abstraction of its sixteen hundred hotel rooms, to the still faintly pale western sky.

A jack from the West.

The phrase bothered her, for reasons she didn't want to think about, but in spite of herself, for just a moment she thought of an eye split by a Tarot card, and the bang and devastating punch of a .410 shot shell, and blood-slick hands clutching a ruined groin. And a casino called the Moulin Rouge, which hadn't got around to appearing until 1955. Sonny Boy, she thought.

She thrust the memories away, fleetingly resentful that they had followed her from the old body.

It doesn't matter who this jack may be, she told herself. Whoever it is, I've defeated better men before this, and women, too: Siegel, Lady Issit, and dozens more. I can do it again.

Suddenly in her mind she tasted liquor—and then a flood of cold beer. She was still facing west, and she could tell that the impression was coming from that direction.

And there's one of the fish, she thought with cautious satisfaction. Probably a male one since he's drinking boilermakers. Across the border now, driving into Nevada, onto my turf, following the irresistible impulse to flee the ocean and seek the desert, to abandon everything and make his way here—or maybe tied up in the trunk of Trumbill's Jaguar, if it was that particular fish and if we're lucky.

If he's not with Trumbill, I hope that jack out there doesn't find him. I can't afford to be losing my future vehicles, my customized garments—the selves I'm going to have to rely on for the next twenty years.

It didn't occur to her that the jack and the fish might be the same person.

She smiled when the walk signal at Flamingo Road turned green just as she reached the curb. And, ignoring the curious stares of the tourists crowding past in their colorful shorts and printed T-shirts and foolish hats, she quoted aloud four lines from Eliot's The Waste Land:

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea …

She turned her smile on the purple western sky. Come home, she thought.

Come home.

Crane drank off the last inch of his second Budweiser and tucked his last quarter into the slot in the bar. He tapped the deal button and watched as his cards appeared. A pair of Twos, a Four, a Queen, and the one-eyed Jack of Hearts.

He pushed the hold buttons under the Twos, then hit the draw button. The other cards blinked away and were replaced by a Four and a King and a Two. Three of a Kind. Three quarters clattered into the well.

He stood up and scooped out the coins. They were warm, almost hot; and for a moment he remembered shiny copper ovals that had been pennies before the L.A. train thundered over them, and he remembered his real father juggling the hot, defaced coins into his hat to cool off.

He limped back onto the gaming floor, and as he was passing the slot machine that had paid for his drinks and the video Poker, he noticed a cellophane-wrapped peppermint in the payout well.

"Thanks," he told the machine as he took the mint and unwrapped it. "One-armed bandit," he said thoughtfully, popping the mint into his mouth, "but on my side, right? One-armed. You're … maimed, aren't you, like so many of these people? I'm maimed, too." He touched the surface of his right eye. "Fake, see?"

A man who seemed to have had his entire lower jaw taken out shambled up to the machine and managed to convey a question.

"No, I'm not playing this machine," said Crane. "I was just conversing with it."

Come home.

It was time to be moving on, eastward. He walked back to the restaurant, where Mavranos and Ozzie were sitting over their empty plates and still talking about the imaginary fat man.

Ozzie squinted up at Crane with exhausted eyes. "What kept you?"

"That Baker cheeseburger didn't sit right with me either," Crane said cheerfully. "Between us you and I must have grossed out half the guys here tonight."

Ozzie didn't seem to have heard. "From what you remembered of Diana's statements to you on the phone last night, I believe she works at a supermarket, a late-evening shift. When we get to Las Vegas, we can start checking all the markets."

Back on the highway, Ozzie fell asleep in the back seat again, and Mavranos was whistling tunelessly as he frowned at the pavement rushing by under the glow of the headlights.

Crane had stretched out his bad leg and was drifting in and out of a doze, lulled by exhaustion and roused by Arky's occasional random high notes.

He kept promising himself that he would complain soon, and had finally reached the point of keeping himself awake, waiting for the next high note—when Mavranos stopped whistling.

"Speeder behind us," Mavranos said.

Crane hunched himself around and looked out through the dusty back window. A pair of bright headlights was coming up on them quickly.

"How fast are we going?"

"Seventy."

A red light came on above the approaching headlights, making a pink field of the Suburban's back window.

"Wake up the old man," said Mavranos, "and get in the back and unlock the gun case. Do it," he added as Crane opened his mouth to protest.

"But it's cops!" Crane protested as he nevertheless scrambled over the top of the front seat, accidentally hitting Ozzie's arm with his knee.

"It looked like a pickup truck before the red light came on," said Mavranos.

Ozzie was awake, blinking forward and to the sides and then twisting his head around to look back. "You're not slowing down," he said.

"I think it's a truck," Mavranos said. "Would people want to stop us bad enough to fake being cops?"

"Sure," said the old man harshly. "I've still got my gun in my pocket. Where's yours?"

"In the box. Got it open?"

"Yeah," quavered Crane, "you want yours?"

"Pass it over subtle."

Crane knelt on the litter of books and clothes to block the view as he passed the gun to Mavranos's upheld hand.

Ozzie was panting. "I think you've got to pull over. If they're not cops, don't get out of the car. And—and if they've got guns … I don't know. If they raise the guns, point them at us, I think we've got to kill them. God help us. God help us."

The Suburban shifted when Mavranos hit the brakes, and Crane braced himself as he lifted out the short black shotgun and with trembling fingers tucked five shells into the magazine tube. Then he clicked off the safety and racked the slide back and forward, chambering the first shell, and tucked one more shell into the tube.

He slid the gun under Ozzie's seat, then picked up his .357, loaded it, and shoved it down inside the waist of his jeans and pulled his jacket closed and zipped it an inch.

"They're right behind us," he heard Mavranos say. Crane had his hand on the shotgun's plastic pistol-grip, and though his breath was fast and his heart was pounding, in his mind he was rehearsing how he would pull the gun out from under the seat and swing the barrel in line and fire it with his trigger hand down by the point of his hip-bone. All six as fast as you can pump them out, he told himself tensely, right through the windows, and then grab the revolver in both hands for accurate aiming. Christ.

The Suburban grated to a stop on the sandy shoulder, and a moment later Crane could hear a car door open and close, and then he could see flashlight beams highlight the dust on the side windows and gleam on Ozzie's scalp.

"Shit," came a voice from outside, "there's only three people in it."

"Two of 'em," said Mavranos softly. "One right here and one hanging back."

There was a rap on the driver's side window, and Crane heard the crank squeak six times, and a moment later he smelled the dry, cooling desert.

"Step out of the car," said the voice outside, clearer now.

"No," said Mavranos.

"We could drag you out, asshole."

Crane could see a corner of Mavranos's grin. "I pity de fool," Mavranos said cheerfully, in a bad imitation of Mr. T.

The man outside laughed shortly. "We've got guns." Ozzie leaned forward, and his old voice was steady. "You open with checks like that, son, in a no-limit game like this, you might see some powerful raises."

The man stepped back, and a flashlight beam danced across the litter in the back of Mavranos's truck. "Three's it, all right," he called to his companion. "They could maybe be hidin' a dog or a baby somewhere, but there ain't no more adults."

Against the headlights of the pickup truck Crane could see the tall silhouette of the other man, who now walked slowly to Mavranos's truck. Crane saw a sculpted-looking profile and wavy, styled hair.

"No," said the newcomer, "this vehicle no longer seems to be the one that contains a lot of people. The one we want is very close, though." He turned to Mavranos and, in his carefully modulated baritone, asked, "Have you seen a bus, or an RV, or a big van, driving along this highway during the last half hour?"

"I don't know about the last half hour," drawled Mavranos, "but since dark we've probably passed more buses and such than regular cars. Las Vegas, you know," he added, gesturing ahead helpfully.

"I know."

The man turned toward the back of the Suburban and spat on the glass. He turned to his companion. "Would you clean the glass, Max?" he asked.

The other man obediently rubbed at the spot with the sleeve of his nylon jacket, and when the glass was cleaner, he turned the flashlight on Crane's face.

Crane was blinded by the glare, but he could feel the leader staring at him, and he just blinked and tried to keep his face expressionless.

After half a minute the light was gone, and the leader was at Mavranos's opened window. "The man in the back there," the leader said. "What's the matter with him?"

"Oh, shit, you name it," Mavranos said.

"Is he … mentally retarded?"

"Clinically," said Mavranos, nodding. It was one of Mavranos's favorite words to give a statement authority. "He's clinically mentally retarded. Aren't you, Jizzbo?"

Crane was sweating, and his heart was pounding with real fear, for he could tell that his tension was close to breaking out in hysterical giggling. He bit his tongue very hard.

"You're not helping when you talk to him like that," said Ozzie.

Crane could no longer contain himself—the best he could do was to emit his hysteria as a sort of harsh, choked quacking. He coughed blood from his bitten tongue out through his nose, then snorted and leaned forward, gagging loudly.

"Jesus," said Max.

"Okay," the tall man said. "You can go."

Mavranos rolled the window back up, then put the car into gear and steered back onto the road and stepped on the gas.

He and Ozzie both broke out in wild laughter, and after Crane had blown his nose on one of Mavranos's old shirts, he was laughing, too, rolling around helplessly on the litter and making sure he didn't bump the cocked shotgun and wishing, desperately, that he had a drink.

CHAPTER 17: The Sound of Horns and Motors

When the laughter subsided, Ozzie wiped his eyes and turned around to face Crane. "You didn't drink anything back there at Dirty Dick's, did you?"

"Just the Coke you saw." Crane was glad he was lying in darkness, for Ozzie had always been hard to bluff.

The old man nodded and frowned in thought, and it occurred to Crane that in the old days Ozzie would have gone on to ask, Really? Crane's apparent maturity, and the obvious importance of what they were trying to do, clearly led the old man to trust him.

"And of course you didn't play cards there."

"Sure didn't," Crane agreed, trying not to think of the video Poker. He sat up and lifted the shotgun back into the gun case.

"Then it's my fault," Ozzie said quietly, "for letting you play in that damned Go Fish game. That's the only other thing that could have alerted them." He closed his eyes and shook his head. "I wonder if I'm really … quick enough for this. Mentally."

"Jeez, you're fine, man," said Crane hastily. "Those guys probably didn't have anything to do with us; they were looking for a bus or something."

"They were after us all right; the bus business proves that. Which reminds me—pull over as soon as you can, Archimedes, we've got to take down our camouflage."

"I don't like stopping, not with those guys slamming around out here," Mavranos said.

"They'll catch us again if we don't—and then that jack with the hair and the voice will wonder why this vehicle keeps looking like a crowded bus to him. What's wrong with right here?"

"Nothin' we can't adapt to, I'm sure," said Mavranos wearily, turning the wheel toward the shoulder again and tromping the brake.

"Why did we look like a bus?" asked Crane.

"Moving, we're a very busy, agitated wave form," said Ozzie. "Those little plastic deer whistles make a complication of ultrasonic sound waves, all interfering and amplifying and damping each other, and the blood-spotted flags are a lot of organic motion, a lot of pieces of protoplasm, all elbow to elbow with each other, changing their positions all agitatedly. And then the main thing is the cards on the wheels, which are whizzing past the cards on the fenders, so you every second get a dozen new combinations of cards. Configurations. The card configurations aren't personalities, but of course they're descriptions of personalities, so all in all, at a hasty glance, a psychic would tend to assume that there are a lot of people traveling in one vehicle."

"And when we stopped, it all stopped," Crane said. "The whistles, the flags, the cards on the wheels …"

"Right. His bus evaporated, and we were standing there. Happen twice, he'll know we are the bus, and that the guy he's after—which is you—is aboard this car, this truck."

The truck was stopped, and Mavranos had got out and was tearing cards off the left front tire. The desert breeze unfolded the car's stale interior air and threw it away into the night sky; now the car smelled of cooling stone.

"Why did he think I was retarded?"

"I don't know. I guess you're a blur to him, being one of the King's victims on the one hand and a son of the King's on the other. To a psychic you must look like a nighttime and daytime double exposure. Either way you're somebody an ambitious jack would want to kill."

"Hey," called Mavranos from outside, "you two don't mind if this takes me a little while?"

"I'm coming," Crane called as he opened the right rear door.

"Tell Archimedes to put a tire from one side onto the other side, with the cards still on that tire and fender, so the tire'll be moving diesel now if it was windshield before, or vice versa. And I don't care if they're radials."

"Tire from one side to the other," said Crane, nodding. "Don't care if they're radials."

As he stood under the million distant bright stars in the black sky and broke the little black whistles off the car and tore the spotted flags from the luggage rack, Crane wondered if he would ever dare to drink again, after this near-calamity; and, if not, how he could possibly keep from going crazy or killing himself; and he wondered what the old man meant by diesel and windshield; and he wondered if being the King's son meant that he was a jack himself, with a claim to whatever this mysterious throne in the wasteland was.

An anonymous sedan swept past on the highway, and in the instant that he noticed it he imagined that the woman in the passenger seat, who glanced his way for a moment, had been Susan. Now he stared after the car. The face had been expressionless, but at least had not seemed to be angry.

You did give her a nice kiss, he thought as he remembered the bourbon and beer.

When he and Mavranos had stripped all the camouflage from the Suburban, they got moving again. Mavranos kept the speedometer needle at around seventy, but they didn't catch up to the car in which Crane had possibly seen the ghost of Susan.

After a while they drove past the bright oasis of Nevada Landing, a casino built to look like two ornate east-facing Mississippi riverboats. The mock vessels had risen from the horizon ahead, and soon they sank below the horizon behind, and then the Suburban was driving in darkness again.

Maybe she stopped there, Crane thought, climbed aboard a boat. He looked back, wondering if she'd find him again.

"Two moons," said Mavranos around his cigarette.

Crane blinked and shifted on the rocking seat. "Hmm?" He had nearly been asleep again.

"Doesn't that look like any-second-now moonrise up ahead? But we got the moon behind us."

"The one ahead of us will be Las Vegas."

Mavranos grunted, and Crane knew he was thinking about the castle of randomness.

And, slowly, the ripplingly molten white and blue and orange towers climbed up out of that bright quarter of the horizon and dimmed out the stars.

They got off I-15 at last at Tropicana Avenue, then turned left onto Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip. Even down here at the south end it was glaringly lit, with the Tropicana and the Marina and the not-yet-opened Excalibur crowding back the night sky.

"Damn," said Crane, staring out the car window at the Excalibur's gigantic white towers and brightly colored conical roofs. "That looks like the grandest hole in God's own miniature golf course."

"Excalibur," said Mavranos thoughtfully. "Arthurian motif, I guess. I wonder if they've got a restaurant in there called Sir Gawain, or the Green Knight."

Ozzie was staring back at the place. "I read there's going to be an Italian restaurant in there called Lance-A-Lotta Pasta. Restraint and good taste all the way. But yeah, Las Vegas seems to be sort of subconsciously aware of—of what it is. What Siegel made it."

"Ben Siegel made it Arky's perilous chapel?" asked Crane.

"Well," said Ozzie, "I guess he didn't exactly make it here; he invoked it here. Before Siegel this place was just ripe for it."

"Keep on north?" Mavranos asked.

"Yeah," said Crane. "There ought to be a fair number of supermarkets on Charleston; that's the first big east-west street after the Sahara." Which, he thought, is where we found the infant Diana in '60. God knows where we'll find her now. "Left or right—play it by ear."

"And find us a coffee shop sometime," said Ozzie. "Or no, a liquor store, we can get some Cokes and ice and put 'em in this cooler. Diana's shift probably ends at about dawn, and we're gonna need some caffeine to keep our eyes open till then." He yawned. "After that we can find a cheap motel somewhere."

Mavranos glanced at Ozzie in the rearview mirror. "Tonight we hit the grocery stores," he said, "but tomorrow we hit the casinos, right? So I can start trackin' my … phase change."

"Sure," Ozzie said. "We can show you the ropes." He shifted on the seat and leaned against Mavranos's Coleman stove with his eyes closed. "Wake me up when you find a supermarket."

"Right," said Crane, staring blearily ahead.

After the grandeur of the Tropicana intersection the street dimmed to normal urban radiance until Aladdin's, and then Bally's and the Dunes and the Flamingo raised their towering fields of billions of synchronized light bulbs.

Crane stared at the Flamingo. The entrance doors and broad driveway sat in under a rippling red and gold and orange upsweep of lights that made the place seem to be on fire. He remembered seeing it twenty years ago, when there had only been a modest tower at the north end and a freestanding neon sign out front; and he dimly remembered the long, low structure it had been, set back from the highway by a broad lawn, when he had gone there with his real father in the late forties.

Siegel's place, Crane thought. Later—maybe still—my father's.

Even at midnight Fremont Street's three broad one-way lanes shone in the white glare of the lights that sheathed Binion's Horseshoe, and the tourists getting out of the cab were blinking around and grinning selfconsciously. The fare was eleven dollars and some change, and when one of the tourists handed Bernardette Dinh a twenty, she looked at him with no expression and said, "Are we okay?"

As she'd hoped, he took it as meaning something like Is this downtown enough for you? and he nodded emphatically. She nodded, too, pocketed the twenty, and unhooked the microphone as though about to call for another fare. Too embarrassed now to ask for his change, the tourist closed the door and joined his companions, who were huddled uncomfortably in the sidewalk limelight.

Stage fright, she thought. They think everybody's looking at them, and they're afraid they don't know the moves and the lines.

Strikers from the culinary and bartenders unions were walking back and forth carrying signs in front of the Horseshoe, and one of them, a young woman with very short hair, had a megaphone.

"Baaad luck," the striker was chanting in an eerie, flat voice. "Baad luck at the 'Shoe! Come on oouut, losers!"

God, Dinh thought. Maybe I'd have stage fright, too.

Every Thanksgiving Binion's gave a turkey to each cabdriver, and Dinh, known as Nardie to all the night people of Las Vegas, had always dropped off her downtown fares in front of the place. She wondered if she'd soon have to start unloading them back by the Four Queens.

A couple of police cars were parked across the street in front of the Golden Nugget, but the officers were just leaning against the cars and watching the strikers; the tourists on this Saturday-night-or-Sunday-morning were plentiful, ambling along the sidewalks and drifting from one side of the street to the other, lured by the racket of coins being spat into the payout wells of the slot machines, a rapid-fire clank-clank-clank that was always audible behind the car horns and the shouting of drunks and the droning blare of the striker's megaphone. Nardie Dinh decided to wait for another fare right where she was.

Down here between these high-shouldered incandescent buildings she couldn't see the sky—she could hardly make out the traffic signals in the sea of more insistent artificial light—but she knew that it was a just-about-half-moon that hung somewhere out over the desert. Dinh knew she was working at half power—for the next few days she'd still be able to handle pennies without darkening them, to touch ivy and not wither it, wear purple without fading it and linen without blackening it.

But she was vulnerable, too, and would be all week—only able to really see through the patterns of the initialed dice at her other job, and able to defend herself only with her wits and her agility and the little ten-ounce Beretta .25 automatic under her shirt in her waistband.

In nine days the moon would be full—and by then she would have beaten both her brother and the reigning King … or she would not. If she hadn't, she would probably be dead.

A bearded man in a leather jacket was walking, apparently drunk, toward her cab. She watched him speculatively, thinking of some big losers who had in the past decided that this short, slim young Asian woman would be an easy target for robbery or rape.

But when he opened the rear passenger door and leaned in, he said, hesitantly, "Could you take me to a—a wedding chapel?"

Should have guessed, she thought. "Sure," she said. The man's face was pudgy and uncertain behind the bushy beard, and she knew she didn't need to call in his ID and destination; and he looked prosperous and out of shape—no need to get a ten in advance; he wasn't the runout type.

He got in, and she put the car in gear and pulled out into traffic. The chapels, of course, didn't pay kickbacks on solo fares, so she decided to take him to one of the ones down below Charleston.

She stopped at a red light two blocks up, at Main, in front of the Union Plaza Hotel, and she suppressed a grin, for the hundreds of little white light bulbs over the hotel's broad circular driveway shone in the polish on the unloading cars, making them seem to be luminously decorated for a Fremont Street wedding procession.

Weddings.

Link the yin and yang, she thought, the yoni and the lingam. Other cabdrivers had told her she wasn't the only one getting a disproportionate number of solo fares to the chapels in the last two weeks. All sorts of people wanted to go to the places, and when they got there, they just stood around in the little offices, staring in a lost way at the ELOPED and HITCHED and WED 90 license plates on the walls and reading the laminated Marriage Creed plaques.

It was as if there were a slowly increasing vibration in the sky and the land, something that had to do with a combining of maleness and femaleness, and on some subconscious level these people felt it. No doubt the bar joints and parlor houses out along the 95 and the 93 and the 80 highways were also getting more visitors than usual.

But that thought brought back memories of DuLac's outside Tonopah, and of her brother, and of the room with twenty-two paintings on the walls—and she stomped the accelerator and made a left against the light, speeding down Main to Bridger.

"Jesus," said her fare, "I'm not in a hurry."

"Some of us are," she told him.

Only one side of Snayheever's license plate was screwed down, so it was easy to swing the plate aside and fit the head of the crank through the hole cast in the bumper.

He spread his feet on the pavement and whirled the crank, leaning into it. The engine didn't start, though the back seam of his old corduroy coat, the one he thought of as his James Dean coat, tore a little more. At least he didn't seem to be having any of his involuntary twitches; his tardive dyskinesia was quiet tonight.

Cars were honking behind him, and he knew that meant that the drivers were angry, but the people on the sidewalk seemed to be cheerful. "Lookit the guy with the wind up car!" yelled one. "Careful you don't break the spring!"

"I'd hate to wind up a car," said a woman with him, laughing.

On the second spin the car started. Snayheever got back in, clanked it into first gear, and drove across Sixth Street toward the El Cortez. He had been driving around the downtown area for nearly an hour before he stalled, and he still wasn't having any luck in tracking the place where the moon lived.

But the half-moon was still up, though low in the west, and he watched for clouds and paid attention to the wind and any debris it might carry.

Snayheever knew why he had not ever become a great Poker player. Great Poker players had a number of qualities: knowledge of the chances, stamina and patience, courage and "heart" … and, maybe most important of all, the ability to put themselves inside the heads of their opponents, to be able to tell when the opponent was chasing losses, or letting injured ego do the playing, or faking loose or tight play.

Snayheever couldn't put himself into their heads.

The men Snayheever had played with had all seemed to be … atoms. That is, indistinguishable from one another, and emitting things—atoms emitted photons, and players emitted … passes and checks and bets and raises—without any pattern or system or predictability. Sometimes, Snayheever thought as he drove across Freemont, atoms emitted beta particles, and sometimes players emitted all-in raises or turned up Straight Flushes. All you could do was retreat and lick your wounds.

It was different when he was dealing with things—river and highway patterns, and the arrangement of mismatched jigsaw puzzle pieces, and the postures and motions of clouds. He was sure he'd be able to read tea leaves if he were ever faced with a cup of them, and he felt he understood the Greeks—or whoever it had been—who had foretold the future by looking at animal entrails.

Sometimes the people he met seemed like the recorded ladies who spoke to him on the telephone when he needed to know what time it was. But things had a real voice, albeit a far and faint one, like what comes through a telephone if someone has unscrewed the earpiece and taken out the diaphragm disk.

There was someone at home behind the constantly shifting arrangements of things. And who else could his mother be?

He hoped that reincarnation was true, and that after he died as an unconnected human, he might come back as one of the infinity of connected things. He thought of what the woman on the sidewalk had said when he'd been cranking the car's motor: I'd hate to wind up a car.

You could, he thought now as he turned left to zigzag through the downtown section again, do a lot worse than to wind up a car.

Half a mile southwest of Snayheever, the gray Jaguar was tooling east on Sahara Avenue.

Skinny man waiting to get out.

Vaughan Trumbill's mouth turned down at the pouchy corners as he remembered the remark. The young woman had had something to do with physical fitness; she guided people in exercises, he believed.

In the back seat of the Jaguar the old Doctor Leaky body mumbled something.

Betsy Reculver was sitting back there beside the old man. "I think he said south," she said, her voice scratchy.

"Okay," said Trumbill. He spun the wheel and turned the Jaguar right, from Sahara onto Paradise, east of the Strip. For a while they drove between wide, empty dirt lots under electric lights.

The woman had wanted to get him to join some diet program. Clients, he gathered, were given little bags of dried foods to boil. The idea was to lose weight and not regain it.

I just know that somewhere inside you is a skinny man waiting to get out.

She had said it with a laugh, and a crinkling of the eyes, and a hand on his forearm—to show affection, or sympathy, or caring.

Reculver was now sniffing irritably. "I forget what you said. Is that—that Diana person coming here?"

"I have no reason to think so," Trumbill said patiently. "The man on the telephone said he knew her, and I got the impression that she lived locally, there, in southern California. Our people have been monitoring Crane's house since early Friday, and his telephone since Saturday dawn. I'll hear if they've made any progress at locating her, and she'll be killed if we can find her."

Reculver shifted in the back seat, and Trumbill heard the click as she bit one of her nails. "She's still there, then. In California. With the game coming up again I'm real sensitive—I'd have felt her cross the Nevada line like I was passing a kidney stone."

Trumbill nodded, still thinking about the young woman at the party.

He had made himself smile, and had said, Would you come with me, please? He had taken her by the arm then and led her out of the lounge to the hall, where a couple of the casino security guards stood. They had recognized him. These men will see that you get home, Trumbill had told her. She had gaped at him, taking a moment to realize that he was evicting her from the party, and then she had started to protest; but at Trumbill's nod the guards had taken her out toward the cab stand. Of course she hadn't meant any harm, but Trumbill wasn't going to let even an unknowing idiot thrust that particular card at him.

"That jack, and that fish, are over the line, though," Reculver said. "I felt them both, at nearly the same time. I wonder if the fish is this Crane fella, coming on his own."

"It's possible," said Trumbill stolidly, ready to parry any suggestions that it was his fault that Crane hadn't been captured.

But for a while they drove in silence.

"My nerves are bad tonight," said Reculver, softly from the back seat. She was apparently talking to the old body next to her. "Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? I never know what you are thinking. Think."

Old Doctor Leaky shifted and giggled. Trumbill couldn't imagine what the two of them got out of this game, this shared reciting of T. S. Eliot poetry.

"I think we are in rats' alley," the old man said in his sexless voice, "Where the dead men lost their bones."

A skinny man trying to get out. Trumbill honked the car horn in a jarring da-daaaaaa-dat at an inoffensive Volkswagen.

"Do you know nothing?" Reculver was apparently still reciting, but her voice was genuinely petulant, uneasy. "Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?"

Trumbill glanced in the rearview mirror. Doctor Leaky was sitting upright with his hands on his knees, expressionless. "I remember," the old man said, "Those are pearls that were his eyes."

Reculver sighed. "Are you alive, or not?" she asked softly, and Trumbill, not knowing any poems at all, couldn't tell if she was still reciting or just talking … nor, if she was talking, to whom. "Is there nothing in your head?"

"And we shall play a game of chess," said the old body, "pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door."

Paradise Road was dark here, south of the neon red-streaked tower of the Landmark, and most of the traffic was southbound taxis heading for the big casinos and avoiding the Strip traffic.

"I … don't sense them now," said Reculver. "They might both of them be in town now, and other fish and jacks, too, and I wouldn't know. Too close, like blades of grass right in front of your binocular lenses. Did you meet anyone, Vaughan? Did you make any—any deals you haven't told me about?"

"No, Betsy," said Trumbill. She had told him what to say to her when she got like this. "Remember what you read about paranoia in elderly women," he said. All of us in this car are just reciting things tonight, he thought. "And about fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. It's like RAM and ROM in computers. Young people got the one; old people got the other. Think about it."

"I can't think. I'm all alone. I have to do everything myself, and—and the Jacks could be anywhere."

On to phase two, thought Trumbill. "Is Hanari awake?"

"Why should he be awake? Do you know what time it is?"

"I think you should step into his head and look around from there."

"What's wrong?" she demanded loudly. "I'm not going into his head! I'm not even going to think about him! Has he had a breakdown? Are you trying to trap me in something like this?" She slapped Doctor Leaky, who just giggled and farted loudly.

Trumbill hoped the old lady would last the two weeks until Easter. He rolled down his window. "You're not thinking clearly right now," he said. "You're upset. Anybody would be. And you're tired, from handling everything by yourself. But right now is when you've got to be extra alert, and the Art Hanari body is calm and well rested. And wouldn't it be a relief to be a man again for a little while?"

"Hmmph."

Trumbill turned right onto the dark emptiness of Sands Avenue, driving now between houses and apartments, the Mirage a glowing golden monolith visible over the low buildings ahead. He wondered whether Betsy Reculver had taken his advice or was simply not speaking to him. He sighed.

A skinny man.

Trumbill was sixty years old now, and he didn't want to lose his position. With Reculver he had his garden and his tropical fish and the arrangements for how his body was to be disposed of when he should eventually die. Among strangers none of those things would be assured, especially that most important last item. Isaac Newton would be able to get at him after all, with his damned Second Law of Thermodynamics, and—and uniformize him, grind off the serial numbers and scavenge away all the customizations, the extra mirrors and fog lamps and seat covers, as it were. Then there'd be just the equivalent of a stripped frame in a fenced-in lot stacked full of other stripped frames.

All indistinguishable from one another.

Any differences that can be taken away, he thought with a shudder, could never have been real differences to begin with. He flexed his massive forearms, knowing that the tattoos were rippling under the cloth.

The cellular telephone buzzed, and he picked it up. "Hello."

"Vaughan, this is me, in the Hanari. Of course that was all nonsense, all that stuff I was saying. Listen, have I been bathing enough?"

It had never quite ceased to startle Trumbill when the boss did the body switch, apparently as effortlessly as someone shifting in a chair so as to look out a different window.

"Bathing," said Trumbill. "Sure."

"Well, watch me. I read that old ladies sometimes forget about cleanliness. Listen, we're not going to find them tonight. Let's head back to the house."

"Back to the house," Trumbill repeated.

Doctor Leaky yawned. "But at my back from time to time I hear," he said, "The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring."

Trumbill heard the Art Hanari body's flat ha-ha-ha laugh. Reculver had once told him that laughing that way didn't produce wrinkles. And then the Hanari voice began singing:

"O the moon shines bright on Mrs. Porter

And on the daughter

Of Mrs. Porter.

They wash their feet in soda water

And so they oughter

To keep them clean."

Trumbill hung up the phone and drove with both chubby hands on the wheel.

The moon had gone down by the time the woman walked out of the bright entrance of the Smith Market on Maryland Parkway, and the sky behind the Muddy Mountains was pale blue. She shuffled tiredly out across the parking lot to a tan Mustang, got in, started it up, and drove out of the lot, turning north on Maryland.

North of Bonanza she passed a dark blue Suburban heading south; she didn't glance at it, and the three men in it were oblivious of her.

But the high walls and the parking lots of the city echoed briefly to a faint, harsh shout, a grating exclamation that coughed out of the plaster throats of the Roman and Egyptian statues in front of Caesars Palace, and the southern belles and ship's officers on the deck of the Holiday Casino, and the Arabs on the stone camels in front of the Sahara, and the miner crouched over a panful of gold-colored light bulbs on the roof of the Western Village souvenir store, and from the plywood necks of the two smiling figures in front of the dealer's school on Charleston, and from the steel crossbeam in the neck of Vegas Vic, the five-story-tall man-shaped structure that towered over the roof of the Pioneer; and the neon-lit paddle wheels on the riverboat facades of the Holiday Casino and the Showboat and the Paddlewheel shivered for a moment in the still air of pre-dawn, shaking dust down into the blue shadows, as if about to begin to move.

CHAPTER 18: Fool's Day

And thirty miles to the southeast, beside the curl of the U.S. 93 Highway just short of the arching crest of Hoover Dam, the two thirty-foot-high Hansen bronzes flexed their upswept wings and shifted slightly on their black diorite bases. The star chart inlaid in the terrazzo pavement at their feet vibrated faintly as it reflected the depths of the dawn sky.

From Lost City Cove and the Little Bitter Wash at the north end of the Overton Arm, through the broad basin named for and dominated by the giant square monolith known as the Temple, and out to the farthest reaches of Grand Wash to the east and Boulder Basin to the west, the vast surface of Lake Mead shivered with a thousand tiny random tides, rousing for a moment sleeping vacationers aboard the countless rented houseboats.

And in the mountainside below the Arizona Spillway, the water in the dam's steel penstocks shook with momentary turbulence, and the technicians in the big control room noted the momentary irregularity in the hydroelectric power through the step-up transformers below the dam, as the blades and stay-vanes of the electric generators hesitated for a moment before resuming normal rotation of the turbines.

On the broad concrete gallery below the dam an engineer felt a tremor and glanced up at the seven-hundred-foot-tall afterbay face of the dam and had to look twice to dispel the illusion that the face was rippled like a natural cliff, and that there was a figure on the wall way up at the top, dancing.

Diana Ryan had changed out of her red Smith Market uniform into a green sweat suit, and now she was sipping a glass of cold Chardonnay and reading the Las Vegas Review-Journal. She would try the old man's number again in a little while. It was Sunday morning, and if he was home, there'd be no harm in letting him get a little more sleep.

She heard the master bedroom door open, and then water running in the bathroom, and then Hans shambled into the kitchen, blinking in the sunlight slanting through the window. His beard was pushed up into an odd curl on one side.

"You're up early," she said. Now she wished she had tried the call as soon as she had got home.

"It's later than it looks," Hans said. "Daylight savings is sleep time losings, in the spring." He plugged in the coffee machine and then sat down in the vinyl-covered chair across from her. She had finished with the Metro section of the paper, and he slid it to his side and stared at it.

Diana waited for people-are-bloody-ignorant-apes. He had said he'd be working on his screenplay last night, and the glow of his late-night inspirations had always become resentment by morning.

She could hear Scat and Oliver moving around now, and she finished her wine and stood up to rinse the glass and put it away before they came out.

"Don't tell me how to raise my kids," she said to Hans, who had of course opened his mouth to speak. "And I know you didn't say a word."

Hans knew enough not to roll his eyes, but he sighed softly as he looked back down at the paper.

She crossed to the telephone and punched in the number again, impatiently brushing long strands of blond hair out of her face with her free hand. While she stood there listening to the distant phone ring, the boys came into the kitchen and hauled out boxes of cereal and a carton of milk.

She turned to look at them. Scat was wearing his Boston Red Sox T-shirt, and Oliver had on the camouflage undershirt that she thought emphasized his belly. Oliver gave her what she thought of as his sarcastic look, and she knew Hans must have rolled his eyes at the boy.

Hans is just not father material, she thought as the repetitive ringing went on in her ear. Where's … Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner? Even Homer Simpson.

Hans was shaking his head over some article. "People are bloody ignorant apes," he said. Diana believed it was a line from Waiting for Godot.

At last she hung up the phone.

"Grampa still not home?" asked Scat, looking up from his Rice Krispies.

"He's almost certainly just off with your brother," Hans told Diana. "You worry too much."

"Maybe they're gonna come here," said Scat. "Why don't they ever visit?"

"They prob'ly don't like little kids," said Oliver, who, at ten, was a year older than his brother.

"Your grandfather likes little kids," said Diana, going back to her seat. Probably Scott convinced Ozzie to leave, she thought, to move somewhere else. Ozzie'll get the same phone number tranferred to his new place. Probably the people who killed my mother didn't follow Scott and kidnap the two of them. Or hurt them. Or kill them.

"Okay we ride our bikes to Herbert Park?" asked Scat. "That's what everybody calls it," he added to Oliver, who predictably had started to remind him that it was called Hebert Park.

"Sure," Hans told the boy, and that annoyed her.

"Yes, you can," she said, hoping her tone made it clear that it was her permission that counted.

"I've got to have peace and quiet, get my treatment typed up today," said Hans. "Mike at the Golden Nugget knows a guy who knows Harvey Korman. If he can get him to read it, that's just about a sure fifty K."

Since the boys were in the room, Diana made herself smile and knock the underside of the table.

But after they'd finished their cereal and put the bowls in the sink and gone charging out of the apartment to get on their bikes, she turned to Hans.

"I thought you weren't hanging around with that Mike guy any more."

"Diana," said Hans, leaning forward over the newspaper, "this is biz. Harvey Korman!"

"How did you find out that he knows somebody who knows somebody? You must have been talking to him."

"I'm a writer. I have to talk to all sorts of people."

Diana was standing at the sink, rinsing the cereal bowls. "He's a dope dealer, Hans," she said, trying to speak in a reasonable tone and not seem to be nagging. "And the one time we went to his place he was all over me like a cheap suit. I'd think you'd … resent that."

He was giving her his lordly look now, and it looked particularly foolish with his snagged-up beard. "Writers can't be judgmental," he told her. "Besides, I trust you."

She sighed as she toweled her hands. "Just don't get into anything with him." She yawned. "I'm going to bed. I'll see you later."

He was making a show now of being absorbed by the newspaper, and he waved and nodded distractedly.

The sheets were still warm from him, and when she had pulled the covers up to her chin, she blinked around in the dimmed room and wondered if he would come back to bed when he was done with the paper.

She hoped he would and she hoped he wouldn't. In the springtime, around Easter, she was always … what? Hornier? That was a word Oliver would use, and if she rebuked him, Hans would say, in his most satirical tone, To me, sex is something beautiful shared by two people in love.

Over the buzz of the air conditioner she heard the kitchen chair squeak, and she smiled derisively at herself when she became aware that her heart was beating harder. A minute later, though, she heard the muted snap-snap-snap of the electric typewriter, and she rolled over and closed her eyes.

He's better than nothing, she thought. Is that what they all are, just better than nothing? Wally Ryan was a pretty sorry excuse for a husband, bringing home the clap because he had to go screw other women. He told all his friends that I was frigid, but I think any of them could see that he was just intimidated by being married to a woman, and having actual children. Women are safely two-dimensional, hardly more than magically animated animals from the pages of Penthouse, if you don't have to … live with one of 'em, deal with her, every day, as a actual 'nother human being.

She wondered how Scott had got along with his wife. Diana was pretty sure it had been the wife's death that had upset him so badly just before New Year's. It had been a strong, deeply personal emotion of loss. She had thought she ought to call him then, but after a week or so she had decided it would be awkward to call so late, and she had let it go. Still, his grief had kept her from sleeping well for a week or so.

Diana had always thought of Scott's wife as that slut, though she knew it wasn't fair; after all, she had never met the woman or spoken to her or even seen her.

Diana had tried to rationalize her strong disapproval by telling herself that her foster-brother was a drunken Poker-bum, and that any woman who would marry a man like that wasn't worthy of her brother, who was, after all, a good person at heart; but she knew that her real resentment stemmed from the shock she'd felt on that summer day in her eighteenth year when she'd realized he was in the process of getting married, was actually saying I do to some priest somewhere and staring into some woman's eyes.

By that time she hadn't seen him for nine years—but she had always somehow assumed that he would marry her. After all, they weren't blood-related.

She could admit now that she had married Wally Ryan a year later just as a kind of revenge on Scott, knowing that he would be aware of her wedding, too.

Wally had been big on fishing and hunting, and he was tanned and had a mustache, but he had been uncertain and blustering and mean behind his macho front. So were all the boyfriends she'd had since. She was just a sucker for broad shoulders and squinty, humorous eyes. But by the time of the inevitable breakup she had been sick of every one of them. When she'd learned from the divorce lawyer two years ago that Wally had died drunk in a car crash, she hadn't felt anything more than a faint sadness that had been mostly pity.

She had told the boys that their father was dead. Scat had cried and demanded to look at old photographs of Wally, but in a day or two his friends and school had distracted him from grieving over the father whom, after all, he hadn't even seen since he'd been six or so. Oliver, though, had seemed oddly satisfied with the news, as though this were what his father had deserved—for abandoning them? Probably, though the divorce had been Diana's doing. And Oliver's schoolwork, good until then, had become mediocre. And he had got fat.

She should marry again, give the boys a real father—not a succession of Hanses.

She shifted to her other side and punched the pillow into a more comfortable shape. She hoped Ozzie was all right. And she hoped Scott's stabbed leg was healing.

Some boys had made a ramp out of a log and a piece of plywood and were riding their bicycles over it—the braver ones yanking up on the handlebars as they flew off the end, so as to go unicycling for a few seconds up on the back wheel after they landed—and Scat watched for a while and then got on his bike and took a couple of jumps over it himself. On the last jump he stood up and really yanked the handlebars and wound up sitting down hard on the dirt and watching his bike go wobbling away upright across the grass. The other boys applauded.

Oliver, meanwhile, had climbed the chain link backstop and now sat up on the saggy top of it, pointing his plastic .45 automatic at each airborne rider in turn.

He was thinking about nicknames. When he and his brother had first moved to North Las Vegas, they had been known as the Boys from Venus, because they had moved into one half of a duplex on Venus Avenue. That hadn't been too bad—there had also been a couple of Boys from Mars, which was the street four blocks north—but while Scott had kept the same individual nickname he'd always had—Scat, which was all right—Oliver had soon become known as Hardy, because he was fat.

That wasn't all right. Even if they were just calling him that because they were scared of him.

Some of the parents were scared of him, or at least didn't like him. He liked to startle grown-ups by springing in front of them and shoving his toy gun in their faces. Since the gun wasn't real, they couldn't really object, especially when he laughed and yelled something like Pow, you're dead!

But this Hardy business wasn't any good.

Lately they'd begun calling him Bitin Dog, which was distinctly better. A dog belonging to one of the neighborhood boys had been found dead on the street a month ago, and the animal was generally assumed to have been poisoned. When someone had asked Oliver if he'd poisoned it, he had looked away and said, Well, it was a bitin' dog. As he'd hoped, everybody took that to mean that he had done it … though, in fact, he had not.

He had seen Scat take the spill jumping the ramp, and for an instant he had been scared—but when Scat had got up, grinning and dusting off the seat of his jeans, Oliver had relaxed.

The chain-link under him squeaked now as he shifted around to a more comfortable position. He wished he had the nerve to go over the ramp himself, but he was too aware of the bones in his arms and legs and the base of his spine. And he was heavier. He could do things like climb this backstop, but it didn't get much attention.

What the hell kind of a name was Oliver anyway? So what if it was his grandfather's name? Probably he hadn't liked it much either. And it wasn't like they ever saw the guy. It didn't seem fair that as the oldest he had had to get the joke name, while his younger brother got to be named after their uncle. Whom they likewise never saw.

Way up here off the ground he could admit to himself, but only very softly even so, that the name he wished he had been given was … Walter. He couldn't imagine how that had not happened; his father couldn't have been too ashamed of him right from birth to give his firstborn his own name, could he?

Suddenly there was a snap and sag as one of the wires tying the chain-link to the crossbar broke, and Oliver convulsively clawed his fingers into the lattice pattern. His face was dewed with sudden sweat, but as soon as he was sure he wasn't going to fall, he looked toward the ramp. Luckily none of the boys had noticed. The fat-boy-Hardy-breaking-the-backstop jokes would have lasted for weeks. Shakily he tucked his gun into his belt and began inching his way back to the vertical section of the fence.

When he was back on solid ground, he sighed and pulled his damp shirt away from his chest and belly. School tomorrow, he thought.

He wished something would happen. He wanted to stop living the life of an obviously worthless little kid.

Sometimes he watched the gold and red clouds terraced across the still-blue sky at sunset, and he pretended that he might see a horse-drawn chariot, tiny in the immense distance, racing along the cloud ridges. If he were ever to see such a thing, and if the chariot were to sweep down and land in this field, like for a breather before taking off again for the cloud kingdoms, he knew he would race across the grass and jump aboard.

He played Mario Brothers a lot on the Nintendo set on the TV at home, and as he walked across the grass now, he thought of the invisible bricks that hung unsupported in the air of the Mario world. If a player didn't know about one of them, he would have the little Mario man run right on by, but a savvy player would know to have the little guy jump up at just the right spot—and bump his head on what had looked like empty air a moment before but was now a brick with one of the glowing mushrooms on it. Catch the mushroom and suddenly you were big. And if it was a lily instead of a mushroom, and you caught that, you could spit fireballs. He jumped now. Nothing. Empty air.

As he drove around on the Strip in the dusty Morris—even as he walked along the morning sidewalks downtown, under the shadow of the Binion's Horseshoe Casino—Snayheever's cheap feathered Indian headdress had not excited much attention. He had bought it for five dollars at the Bonanza souvenir shop at dawn, and had worn it out of the store and not taken it off since, but it was only now, driving the little old Morris slowly through the streets of North Las Vegas, through these little tract-house-and-apartment-complex suburbs west of Nellis Air Force Base, that adults laughed and pointed and honked their car horns, and children shouted and ran madly after the car.

It couldn't be helped. He had to wear feathers today.

Traffic was light this morning. He looked around, noting palm trees throwing long shadows across quiet sidewalks. The residents he saw seemed to be mostly Air Force personnel, and student types who probably went to the Clark County Community College behind him on Cheyenne.

This was his third pass along this section of Cheyenne, and this time he made himself turn right on Civic Center—though he instantly pulled over and put the car into neutral so that he could check his figuring one more time.

He unfolded the AAA map and with a dirty fingernail traced the pencil outline he'd drawn on it.

Yes, there was no mistake, the outline did still look to him like a stylized, angular bird; he thought it was probably a crow or a raven. Usually he traced out patterns that were implicit in the tracks of roads and rivers and boundaries, but this bird pattern was imposed over all such.

The points of the angles were streets with names like Moonlight and Moonmist and Mare. The high point of the bird's tail was a couple of streets called Starlight and Moonlight alongside the 95 out toward the Indian Springs Air Force Base, and the tip of the beak was three streets called Moonglow, Enchanting, and Stargazer at the east edge of town on Lake Mead Boulevard. The diagonal straight line between those two points would contain the point that was the eye of the bird, and sure enough, he had found an intense cluster of streets at the right point, about two thirds down the line toward the tip of the beak—a whole tract with streets named Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Comet, Sun, and Venus.

That tract was now only a block ahead of him.

Venus was obviously the street his mother would live on.

He tromped the clutch and muscled the car back into gear and started forward again. At Venus he turned left.

Along Venus Avenue he saw a lot of two-story apartments and duplexes. He drove slowly down the center of the right lane, lugging in first gear, squinting in the already hot breeze that was blowing in through the rolled-down windows.

How was he to know which place would be his mother's? Would there be clues in the kind of plants out front, the paint, the—

The street number. One of the duplexes had four weathered wooden numbers bolted to the street-facing white stucco wall. The numbers were 1515, but Snayheever read them as letters:

ISIS.

Isis, the Egyptian goddess of the moon.

He had found her house—but he drove on past, tramping the little steel gas pedal and grinding the stick shift into second, for he couldn't approach her today.

If he made contact on this here particular Sunday, it would be like—like a king bringing along his army to visit another king. Snayheever was too powerful today; he'd be perceived as imperious rather than how he wanted to be perceived, which was … as supplicating, as humble. He might, it was true, have to do something a little heavy-handed in order to get her attention, but he wouldn't be so presumptuous as to use … protocol. And right now the moon was still half a hair on the new side; she'd still be in the weak half of her cycle. And of course she was always weaker in the daytime and only really herself at night. That was why she slept during the day.

Tomorrow night, Monday, the second of April, the moon would be precisely at its half phase. He had discovered that valuable fact only an hour ago, in a newspaper.

He would approach her then.

Crane sat up in the sleeping bag on the motel room floor and tried to shake dream images out of his head.

A rusty lance head and a gold cup. Where had Crane seen them before? Hanging on wires over a chair, long ago, in a—a place that had been home? The memory made his plastic eye ache, and he wasn't sorry that he couldn't trace it. In this last, disjointed fragment of dream the two objects had been set out, with apparent reverence, on a green felt cloth draped over a wooden crate. The light on them was red and blue and golden, as if filtered through stained glass.

Crane's mouth was dry now, though somehow he thought he could taste … what, a dry white wine. A Chardonnay?

The air conditioner was roaring, and the room was cold. There was white light beyond the curtains, but Crane had no idea what time it might be. This was Las Vegas, after all; it could be midnight, and the light outside could all be artificial.

He sighed and rubbed his face with trembling hands.

Again.

He had dreamed about the game on the lake again.

And he had been so exhausted this time—having gone forty-eight hours without sleep—that he had not been able to recoil awake when one of the two vast faces below him in the night had opened its canyon of a mouth and sucked him downward like a wisp of smoke.

He felt the inside of the sleeping bag now, and was glad to find that he had not lost control of his bladder during that part of the dream.

He had spiraled down helplessly through the moonlit abyss of the mouth and down the throat into darkness, and then he was deep under the water of the lake.

Things moved far below him, vast figures that he couldn't see, and that had no real form anyway—but the vibrations of them shook images loose in his mind, as earthquakes in succession might wring chords out of a piano and thus remotely express themselves:

… he saw his real father, weary and old, dressed in a red ermine robe and a hat like a horizontal figure-8, sitting at a table on the wavy edge of a cliff, and on the table was a round collection of coin stacks, and a knife, and a bloody lump that might have been an eyeball;

… and he saw his real father's '47 Buick, as shiny and new as he remembered it, being pulled along the glistening pavement of a rainy street by two harnessed creatures that had the bodies of horses and the heads of men;

… and he saw his foster-sister, Diana, crowned with a tiara like a crescent moon embracing a sun disk, dressed in papal-looking robes and attended by dogs that howled at the moon;

… and between the leafy arms of an oval wreath he saw himself, naked, frozen in a moment of running with one leg bent, while around the outside of the wreath stood an angel, a bull, a lion, and an eagle; and then the perspective changed and the figure that was himself was upside-down, hanging by the straight leg while gravity folded the other;

… and he saw dozens of other figures: Arky Mavranos, walking away across the desert, carrying a bundle of swords as long as stretcher-poles; old Ozzie standing on a sandy hill and leaning on a single sword; Crane's dead wife, Susan, hanging what seemed to be a basketful of hubcaps on a branch of a dead tree …

… and he saw a bodiless, winged cherub's head, pierced through and through with two metallic-looking batons.

The cherub's one eye was staring straight into Crane's one eye, and he screamed and tried to run, but his muscles wouldn't work; he couldn't turn away or even close his eyes. There was nearly no light, and he couldn't breathe; he and the cherub head were far underwater, hidden from the sun and the moon and the stars and the figure that danced on the far cliffs, and he moaned in fear that the thing would open its mouth and speak, for he knew he would have to do what it said.

The dream had become trivial and stiflingly repetitious after that. He had seemed to be in a wide, airless, natural underground pool, trying to find a well up which he could swim to the surface, and there were a lot of wells, but every time he made his way kicking and paddling and bubbling up to the surface of one of them, he found that he was in someone's house—a cigarette would be trailing smoke from an ashtray, or fresh clothes would be draped over a chair and the shower would be running—and, alarmed at the thought of being caught in someone else's place, he had, over and over again, submerged himself and let the air out of his lungs and kicked back down into the darkness of the common pool that underlay all the individual wells. Eventually the hopeless repetition had left him awake, staring up at the white plastic smoke-alarm on the flocked motel ceiling.

The last dream house had been the one where the lance head and the cup lay in a pool of color-stained sunlight on green felt. Without even needing to touch them, he had known that they weren't really there, didn't belong there, and were there even in this illusory form only because there was not, today, any place where they belonged.

Now Crane looked at the digital clock on the bedside table. 2:38 P.M. And there was a note on the table, held down against the air conditioner breeze by a Coors can.

He and Ozzie and Mavranos had checked into this motel at about six-thirty this morning, he recalled now. It was a little ten-unit place somewhere out past the Gold Coast on the wrong side of I-15, he remembered, and a "credit card imprint" had been necessary to get a room. Crane had two Visas in his wallet, one for Scott Crane and one for Susan Iverson-Crane, and Ozzie had made him use Susan's, to avoid being traced by anyone looking up the name Crane, Scott.

Crane and Mavranos had let the old man have the bed, and had dragged in a couple of sleeping bags from the Suburban for themselves.

Crane wriggled out of his sleeping bag now and stood up, wincing at the hot pain in his bandaged leg.

Something was wrong. What?

He tried to remember all the events of the last forty-eight hours. Gardena, he thought, and Baker, with that weird kid who played Go Fish, and the beer I sneaked in the car … Whiskey Pete's, and the beer and bourbon I got on the way to the men's room … that pickup truck, the man with the hair and the voice, and his friend Max with the gun … the streets around the downtown area, and a dozen goddamn grocery stores, not one of which employed anyone named Diana …

None of it was particularly reassuring, but neither did any of it seem to call for the degree of dread that was speeding his heartbeat and chilling his face. He felt as though he had overlooked something, failed to think of something, and now someone who had depended on him was … frightened, alone with bad people, being hurt.

Caused by me.

He picked up the note. It was in ball-point ink on a piece of a grocery bag.

Archy and I have gone to check out a casino or two, it read. Seemed like you could use more sleep. Be back around four.—Oz.

Crane looked at the telephone, and after a moment he realized that his open hand was hovering over the instrument. What is it? he asked himself uneasily. Do you want to call somebody, or are you waiting for a call?

His mouth was dry, and his heart was pounding.

Outside, a white Porsche pulled into the motel parking lot.

Al Funo stepped out of the car and stared around quizzically at the row of windows and doors, each door a different bright color. Poor old Crane, he thought. This is where he stays when he's in Vegas?

He tucked his sunglasses up into his styled sandy-colored hair as he walked across the lot toward the office. He knew he was going to have to approach Crane a bit more carefully this time. The bullet through the windshield, or something, had apparently spooked him into some elementary caution, and if Funo hadn't gone to the extra trouble of using a jewelery store's ID number to get the details of Crane's credit file from TRW, he'd never have learned about the Iverson-Crane Visa card.

Bells on strings clanged as he pushed open the office door and stepped into the air-conditioned dimness. The floor was shiny green linoleum, and aside from a standing rack of pamphlets and coupon books for tourists, a green vinyl couch was the only furniture.

Just not any class at all, Funo thought sadly.

When a white-haired woman appeared from the little office in the back, he smiled at her with genuine affection. "Hi, I'd like a room, please—probably just for one night."

As he was filling out the form she handed him, he said, "A friend of mine is supposed to be staying here, too—Crane, Scott Crane? We had to drive out separate; I couldn't get the extra day off work."

"Sure," said the old woman. "Crane. Fortyish guy, with two buddies, one with a mustache and the other real old. They're in six, but they just a little bit ago drove off."

"In his red pickup?"

"No, it was a big blue thing, like a cross between a station wagon and a Jeep." She yawned. "I could put you next to them, in five or seven."

"Hey, that'd be great, thanks. Heh-heh, listen, don't tell them I'm here, okay? I want to surprise them."

She shrugged.

Funo gave her his MasterCard rather than his American Express because he knew she would call it in; that's how he had found Crane after all. This was becoming expensive, in both money spent and work time lost. He wondered if there was some way to make it pay, to get it out of the category of auto-assignment. He thought about the gray Jag, and the telephone number that he had got with the registration data on the Jag's Nevada license plate number. That fat man driving it had been after something. And he had seemed to have money—but what did he want?

When Funo signed the draft, he noticed the date: 4/1/90. April Fool's Day.

It upset him. It seemed to mock what he was doing, make him seem insignificant.

He gazed at the old woman until she looked up, and then he gave her a wink and his best boyish smile.

She just stared at him, as if he were a stain on the wall, a stain that might resemble a person if you squinted at it in a certain way.

He was glad he had already signed the voucher, for his hands were trembling now.

Mavranos drove out of the multilevel parking structure behind the Flamingo and steered the big Suburban along the broad driveway, past the taxi stand and the loading zone toward the Strip. He took it slow over the wide speed bumps, but still the car rattled as it crested the lines of raised asphalt, and the ice shook and swashed in the ice chest. The Strip was clear either way for a hundred yards when he got to the street, and he made his left turn as easily as he would have in some quiet Midwest suburb.

"What are the odds of that?" he asked Ozzie, forcing himself to squint intently and not smile. "Making a left so easy in front of the Flamingo?"

"Christ," wailed the old man, "you're looking for big statistical waves, okay? If you start watching for, I don't know, numbers on license plates, or two fat ladies wearing the same flowered shorts, you're—"

Mavranos laughed. "I'm kidding you, Oz! But I swear a couple of things back there signified."

They had watched a Craps table at the Flamingo for a while, had walked across the street to listen for patterns in the ringing and clattering of the slots at Caesars Palace, and then had written down a hundred consecutive numbers that came up on a Roulette wheel at the Mirage. Twice, once crossing the street west and once east, Mavranos had simultaneously heard a car horn honk and a dog bark and had looked up to catch hard sun glare off a windshield, so that for half a minute afterward he'd seen a dark red ball everywhere he looked, and at Caesars, three different strangers had whispered, "Seven," as they shouldered past him. He had eagerly asked Ozzie if he thought these coincidences might mean anything, and the old man had dismissed them all impatiently.

Now, stopped for a red light in the right-turn lane at the Flamingo Road traffic signal, Mavranos dug out of his pocket the penciled list of Roulette numbers and scanned them.

"Light's green," said Ozzie after a few moments.

"How I need a drink …" said Mavranos thoughtfully, taking his foot off the brake and turning the wheel but still staring at the list.

"Watch the road!" said Ozzie sharply. "You've got a beer between your knees, as usual, and frankly I think you drink way too much."

"No," said Mavranos, "I mean pi, you know, pi?

Ozzie was staring at him. "You want a pie? Instead of a drink? What the hell kind of pie? Can't you—"

Mavranos passed the list to the old man, eyed the traffic, and stepped on the gas pedal. "Here. Pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, you know? Radius times pi squared, you've heard that kind of talk. Pi's what they call an irrational number, three and an infinitely long string of numbers after the decimal point. Well, there's a sentence you memorize, a mnemonic thing, to remember the numbers that are pi, out to something like a dozen places. I read it in a Rudy Rucker book. It starts, 'How I need a drink …'—that's three, one, four, one, five, get it? Number of letters in each word. But I can't remember the rest of the mnemonic sentence."

They had crossed over I-15. Ozzie squinted through the dusty windshield and pointed. "That's our motel on the right, don't miss the driveway. Archimedes, I really am not following—"

"See where the Roulette numbers were three, one, four, fifteen in the middle there? Look at the paper, I can see where I'm going. What numbers come after that?"

"Uh … nine, twenty-six, five, thirty-five, eight …"

Mavranos turned into the lot, parked near their room, and turned off the engine.

"Yeah," he said, "I'm pretty sure that's pi. Well now that's got to signify, don't it? Goddamn Roulette wheel just spontaneously starts reciting off pi? I wonder what numbers the other tables were listing. The square root of two, I suppose, or the square root of minus one."

Ozzie pulled on the handle and pushed his door open, then stepped carefully down to the hot pavement. "I don't know," he said, frowning, when Mavranos had locked his own door and walked around the car, "I guess so, if those numbers are this pi business of yours … but it seems to me this isn't the thing you're looking for. This is something else; something else is going on here—"

A sporty-looking young man was taking an overnight bag out of the back seat of a white Porsche in the next parking space. He was studiedly looking away from them, so he didn't notice that Ozzie had stepped forward, and he hit the old man in the shin with his bag when he swung it out of the little car.

"Watch it," said Ozzie irritably.

The young man muttered and hurried to the door of number seven, rattling a key against the lock.

"Goddamn zombies, you got in this town," Ozzie remarked to Mavranos.

Mavranos wondered if their neighbor had heard the remark. A moment later the young man was inside his room and had slammed the door hard.

I guess he did hear it, Mavranos thought.

A wind was blowing southeast from the jagged Virgin Mountains, tossing the yellow brittlebrush flowers on the miles of canyonside and rippling the wide, deep blue waters of Lake Mead. Vacationers were awkwardly bumping the docks with their rented boats at the Mead Resort Circle, and gasoline made a volatile perfume on the breeze and rainbowed the surface of the water around the docks and slips.

Ray-Joe Pogue gunned his jet boat straight out across the water for a hundred yards, away from the waterfront grocery store and bait shop, but the wind-raised waves made the lake choppier out here, and after a few seconds of being slammed up and down on the tuck-and-roll upholstery of the seat, he took his foot off the gas and let the rented jet boat rock in the water under the empty blue sky.

In the sudden relative silence he squinted around at the wide-scattered islands and the far reaches of the Boulder Basin coastline. There were a lot of boats out on this Sunday afternoon, but he didn't imagine he'd have any problem finding a secluded shore where he could sink the head. The metal box had bounced off the seat beside him onto the floor, and he carefully picked it up and put it back and laid the coiled line on top of it.

The head in the metal box.

He had killed several people in his life, and it had never bothered him, and so he was surprised at how much it had hurt him to kill Max. He felt disoriented now, as if he were seriously hungover, and he felt uneasy whenever he looked at the box.

He had met Max in high school—at one time Max had been in love with Nardie, Pogue's Asian half-sister—and he and Max had for years been preparing for this summer, this election year, this once-every-two-decades changing of the king. Max was to have been his … who, Merlin, Lancelot, Gawain? But last night, after failing to find the mysterious bus vehicle on I-15, Pogue had ordered Max to pull over and get out of the pickup truck, and had then fired the 12-gauge shotgun into the man's back.

He shuddered now in the harsh sunlight, the wind cold on his face, and he didn't look at the box. He gripped the white plastic gunwale of the jet boat and stared out across the water.

He had had no choice. Ideally he should not have had to perform this old Phoenician Adonis ritual, but there were too many uncertainties right now. Some jack had got past him last night on the highway, and there had been something suspicious about those three guys, the pirate, the old man, and the retard, in that blue Suburban with all the ribbons and crap all over it. And he couldn't get a line on Nardie Dinh; for months now he hadn't picked up any of her dreams. How the hell could she not dream? Was there some drug that suppressed it?

He had to find her, and before Easter. As his half-sister she was the only one who could serve as the moon goddess, his queen. All the fertility gods and kings mated with women who were in some way their sisters—Tammuz and Belili, Osiris and Isis, even King Arthur and Morgan le Fay—and he had thought he had effectively broken her will during the month-long confinement in that parlor house outside Tonopah. The diet regimen he'd had her on, the blood rituals, the room with the twenty-two pictures—he had groomed her perfectly to assume the goddess-hood, and then, when he had thought she was the broken sleepwalker he wanted, she had knifed the house's madam and stolen a car and fled to Las Vegas. And now she wasn't even dreaming anymore.

He squinted across the waves at a rocky little island a couple of miles away, and then looked at his Lake Mead map, folded to show Boulder Basin. Deadman's Island, the place was called. That sounded appropriate.

He turned the wheel, then stepped on the gas. The acceleration pushed him back into the seat, and as he straightened out of the turn, the wind threw the high rooster tail of spray out ahead of him, and heavy drops of water stung his face and knocked his black hair down onto his forehead.

He dug out his comb as he steered one-handed, and he swept the hair back up where it belonged. From now until Easter, physical perfection was going to be absolutely essential.

The man who takes the throne can have no flaws.

He circled the island in a series of jackrabbit starts, and on the far side he found a little rocky beach with no picnickers on it. He got in fairly close and then threw over the cinder-block that was the anchor.

Reluctantly he picked up the box, then climbed over the gunwale and waded ashore through the cold water, holding the box high.

In ancient Alexandria, Phoenicians had enacted the annual death of Tammuz by throwing a papyrus head into the sea, and seven days later the summer current invariably left the head at Byblos, where they'd fish it out and celebrate the god's resurrection. It was during the interval when the head was in the sea that the location and identity and even the existence of the fertility god were in doubt.

These next two weeks, from this April Fool's Day until Easter, would be the tricky period this cycle, and Pogue was determined that it would be his own head—symbolically—that would be taken out of the water on Easter Sunday.

Max's poor severed head was wearing Pogue's Ray-Bans and had one of Pogue's ties knotted around the stump of its neck, and of course Max had shared Pogue's and Nardie's dietary restrictions, eating no red meat nor anything that had been cooked in an iron pan and drinking no alcohol. That was why Pogue had not been able to simply behead some random tourist for this. The head had to be the closest possible representation of Pogue's own.

His hands were shaking. He wanted to open the box and reknot the tie. Max had never learned how to tie one, and Pogue could remember a dozen occasions when Max had brought a tie to him, and Pogue had had to tie it around his own neck and then loosen it and pull it off over his head and give it to his friend.

When I knotted the tie for him this morning at dawn beside Boulder Highway, he thought now, that was the last time I'll ever do that chore for him.

He clenched his teeth and took a deep breath.

Christ, he told himself, never mind, get the box in the water and moor the line somewhere where no goddamn drunk tourists will find it during the next two weeks, and get the hell out of here.

He looked around among the rocks and the manzanita bushes for a good spot, and he noticed the flock of swallows out over the lake.

He assumed they were swallows. They had the individual darting flight patterns of those birds, certainly—but something was wrong about their wings. And there were other flocks, he now noticed, lots of them, further away. He shaded his eyes to look at the flying things.

Then his stomach went cold, and sweat sprang out on his forehead.

They were bats.

Bats, he thought dazedly—but bats don't ever come out during the day. What're they, crazy, rabid? Is something going on?

He looked away, to see where they might be headed, and he saw that the sky to the south, too, was peppered with the same jiggling dots.

They're coming here. To this little island, from goddamn everywhere.

He scrambled along the little shoreline to a cluster of rocks, and he tossed the gleaming box out over the water; it splashed in while he was tying the end of the line around a half-submerged rock.

And then shadows were whirling around his feet like spots before his eyes. The bats were circling low overhead, silent except for the clatter of their leather wings, and more were coming in from everywhere. The battering wind of their wings disarranged his hair.

He looked up in horror. The furry, toothy little faces flashing past, the bright round eyes were all staring at him.

Something was splashing furiously in the water now, and in panic he swung his head toward it.

The lake water was boiling where he had thrown the box in, and then, impossibly, the heavy box bobbed to the surface, spinning and glittering on the turbulence.

The lake is rejecting it, he thought dazedly. Is that a bunch of fish doing that, or has the water changed its density to keep from enclosing the head?

The clatter of the bats' wings was louder, closer, and he thought he could smell them, a smell like death.

Just run, he told himself.

They've beaten you here today.

Biting back bewildered sobs, he yanked the box back in to shore with one hand while shielding his face from the bats with the other, and then, with the shiny dripping box dangling from his fist, he blundered back down the beach and splashed out to the boat.

When he had tossed the box onto the seat, climbed in himself and in neutral gear deafeningly gunned the big car engine under the Plexiglas hood behind him, the bats seemed to circle higher; and when he spun the wheel and slammed the shift into gear and goosed the boat out across the water straight away from the island, they didn't follow, but broke away and dispersed across the sky.

He let the engine fall back to idle then, and sat panting and shaking in the suddenly becalmed boat as he watched the creatures scatter away, back to the mountain caves in which, on any sane day, they'd have lingered until sunset.

For the first time since the day in the school library when he had figured out the nature of this mystical western kingship, he wished he could break the regimen and drink—get really, thoroughly drunk.

Eventually he got the boat moving, as slowly as the erratic throttle would allow, back toward the marinas of the Lake Mead Resort. Tears and sweat slicked his classically handsome face.

I killed Max for nothing, he thought dully. The sacrifice was rejected, like Cain's.

How could that have happened? Did I disqualify myself by killing Max? No, worse things were done by the old kings. Should I have waited, or done it sooner? Is there already a king's head in Lake Mead, and there isn't psychic room for another?

By the time he got back to the rental dock he had shaken off the passion of loss and hopelessness.

I can still become the king, he told himself as he pulsed the engine and nudged the boat in toward the crowded dock. But I've got to find my damned half-sister—I've got to find Nardie Dinh.

The westering sun was intensifying the orange color of the motel curtains as Crane shuffled the flimsy little deck and dealt out onto the bed five cards each to himself and Ozzie and Mavranos. It was too early to start searching the supermarkets again, and Ozzie had forbidden fooling around with real cards, so Mavranos had fetched from the Suburban a kids' Crazy Eights deck he'd got at a Carl's Jr. hamburger restaurant.

Every card had a cheery, stylized picture of an animal on it, and as the game progressed and cards were discarded face up, Mavranos was amused by the selection of colorful, grinning birds and beasts tossed out across the motel bedspread.

"You know why nobody could play cards aboard the Ark, don't you?" he asked.

Crane rolled his eyes, but Ozzie looked up suspiciously. "No," the old man said, "why?"

Mavranos took a sip of beer. " 'Cause Noah was sitting on the deck." Dry summer thunder boomed, out over the McCullough Range to the south.

Oh, come on, thought Crane, it wasn't that funny.

CHAPTER 19: A Skinny Man Trying to Get Out

The micrometer looked like a monkey wrench for some insanely fastidious mechanic, and its gleaming precision seemed out of place amid the chip racks and adding machines and cigarette-burned desks of the cluttered casino office. Nardie Dinh dutifully held the tool up in the fluorescent light and read the number on the round metal sleeve.

"This one's right on, too," she told the frowning floorman as she loosened the ratchet knob at the base and freed the second of the pair of dice he had brought to her.

She held the translucent red cube close to her face and looked at the faint, tiny initials she had scratched into the one-dot face of the cube, and then she flipped it over and found the microscopic moon symbol she had delicately etched on the six-dot face. Both marks were, of course, exactly as she had scratched them in at midnight, when her shift as night manager of the Tiara Casino dice pit had begun.

She put down the red cube and the micrometer and absently wiped her hands. "They're good," she told the floorman shortly. "He's not switching in his own dice."

"How can he be rolling so many snake eyes then? The boxman says he's been rolling them the right way, bouncing them off the table's far wall every time."

Because, Dinh thought, tonight when I put my mark on the dice, I asked the Craps tables if I would succeed in my purpose, and snake eyes means Yes, if no others are involved.

"I don't know, Charlie," she said. Her latest coffee was still too hot to drink, so she held up the Styrofoam cup and inhaled the vivifying steam. "Is he betting the proposition two, or the Any Craps?"

Charlie the floorman shook his head. "No, he's losing, playing the Pass Line with dollar chips. But other people are starting to play those bets, and one of 'em could be a partner."

"It's got to be just chance," she told him, "but let's unwrap some fresh dice from the factory and I'll mark them and we can just retire all the dice that are out there now." And this time I won't ask the tables any question, she thought.

Charlie looked disconcerted. "All the dice?"

"That last lot might have been funny. I like to err on the side of safety."

He shrugged. "You're the boss."

When he had gone to get the boxes, she stood up from the desk and stretched. She had applied for this job because the Tiara was perhaps the last casino in town that still had the shift managers initial the dice, and she was so closely aligned with the moon that, with her moon mark on the dice, she had several times been able to get answers from the little cubes.

This was the first time the answer had been so evident as to excite attention, though. I suppose, she thought, if I were to ask them anything next week, when the moon is full, every pair of dice in the place would come up identical, over and over again.

She stretched again, lifting her elbows and massaging her narrow shoulders. Four hours since I parked the cab and got out of the uniform, she thought, and I still feel like I'm bent behind a steering wheel. I'll be glad when dawn rolls around and I can get out of here, drive down to placid Henderson.

For a day job, she had found a little insurance office in Henderson that needed a bookkeeper. She was generally at her most lethargic when the sun was up, so the automatic-pilot work of adding numbers was ideal, and in the insurance office, eighteen miles south of Las Vegas, she was not likely to be recognized by any of the people who knew her from her night jobs.

Which was just as well—they'd wonder when she ever slept. She frowned, remembering how unconsciousness had nearly caught her yesterday.

Yesterday at exactly dawn she had almost fainted in the cashier's cage while she'd been putting away the drop boxes for the next shift manager, and when the blurry dizziness had passed, she had hurried out onto the floor to the nearest table, where a desultory two-dollar Blackjack game was going on.

For a couple of minutes, like the fading figures on a switched-off computer screen, she had seen the Jack and Queen of Hearts showing up more often than they had any statistical right to, and she had known that a powerful Jack and a powerful Queen had just passed very close to each other somewhere out there in the streets of the city.

Dinh was determined that she herself was the one who would be wearing Isis's crown come Easter, and she wondered now what she might have to do to prevent this mysteriously powerful Queen from beating her to it. She didn't want to kill anyone except her stepbrother.

The sound of a key turning in a lock.

In the moment of waking up, Funo thought his own motel room door had been opened, and he snatched the pistol off the bedside table. Then he realized that he was alone in the room; the sound had come though the earphones he'd been wearing while he slept.

"I bet she moved," came a man's voice, faintly. He must have been facing away from the wall between the two rooms. "I bet when she got Scott's call, it spooked her into just pulling up stakes and moving to Ohio or somewhere."

Funo put down the gun, then sat up and began pulling on his pants, carefully so as not to dislodge the earphones. He looked at the little electric clock—seven in the morning.

"I … don't think so," said another man, his amplified voice louder. "I keep getting … impressions that aren't my own, little whiffs of worry and humor, and tastes, like yesterday I tasted a wine that I hadn't drunk. I have the feeling she's nearby."

"Well, probably one of those stores we hit was the right place, and they lied. Supermarkets probably have a policy against telling strangers the names of their employees. Especially strangers who look like they've been sleeping in their clothes."

"Nah," came the voice of a third man, who sounded much older, "we've met three wrong Dianas, haven't we? We'll find the right one yet. She didn't have the sense to at least work in one of the North Las Vegas places, so she must be in one of the ones down by the Strip. There can't be more than a couple. We'll find her tonight."

Funo zipped up his pants and, leaning as far as he could against the slack of the headphones wire, managed to grab a clean shirt from his bag.

"What if she's changed her name, then, Ozzie?" the first man's voice went on. "I bet she would have, from the things you told her about this town."

"Then we'll probably see her," said the old man in the next room. "And yes, I will be able to recognize her, even after a dozen years."

"You don't have to come, Arky," said the second man, who Funo guessed was Scott Crane. "I mean, we can take cabs. You've been looking tired, and cash ain't our problem."

"Me? What the hell do you mean by that? I ain't been tired. Nah, one more night. You guys might get into a fight, and you'd need me. I can track my odds today, and tonight mess with the slots in the market entrances while you guys go in and ask your question."

"One thing for sure," said Ozzie, "tomorrow we spring for a decent breakfast. One more of these dollar-ninety-nine specials is gonna burn its way right out through the front of my shirt. Boys, it's bedtime. You wanna talk, do it outside."

A loud bumping came over the phones now, and Funo realized that at least one of the men in the next room must intend to sleep on the floor. Funo glanced nervously at the wire that disappeared into the hole he'd drilled in the dry wall on his side, and he hoped whichever of them it was wouldn't notice the little hole on the other side.

After a few minutes he relaxed. All he could hear now was slow, even breathing.

He took off the earphones and stood up, buckling his belt, then took the telephone into the bathroom and punched in the number that went with the gray Jag.

The phone at the other end rang once, and then a tape-recorded voice recited the number back at him. Right after that came the beep.

"Uh," said Funo, rattled by the rudeness of it, "I know where the people you were looking for Saturday are in California. I mean, you were in California, looking for them. Scott Crane and Ozzie and Diana." He waited, but no one picked up the phone. "I'm going to call this number again in three hours, that's ten o'clock exactly, let's say, and then we can dicker about how much my services would be worth to you."

He hung up. That should do something.

As he went to the closet to select a shirt, he reflected that old Ozzie was right—a good breakfast was important. Maybe there was a Denny's nearby. He could buy a newspaper and sit at the counter and maybe get into a conversation with somebody.

Vaughan Trumbill had cleaned up the breakfast dishes and vacuumed the living room and hall, and now sat at the desk in his room, writing checks in Betsy's big old checkbook. At a quarter to ten he figured up the new balance and inked the number at the bottom of the current page; then he closed the book and put it in the drawer.

He crossed to the aquarium and allowed himself to net up a two-inch-long catfish; he held it carefully just behind the head and bit off the body. Chewing strongly, he lowered his hand into the water and uprooted an Amazon sword-plant, swirled it in the murky water to get the dirt off the roots, and then folded that into his mouth. The catfish head he wrapped in several sheets of Kleenex and tucked into the pocket of his white shirt as he continued to chew his snack.

Live snacks, though of necessity generally skimpy, were always the most satisfying.

The white walls of his room were uncluttered by any pictures, and his window looked out onto a flat expanse of gravel and a high gray cinder-block wall. As always, he stared around at the sterile simplicity before leaving the room, breathing the chilly, odorless air, imprinting it all in his mind—for the rest of Betsy Reculver's house was a clutter of bookcases and overstuffed furniture and framed photographs, and these days she used too much perfume.

LaShane came trotting up to him in the hall, and Trumbill absently patted the big Doberman on its narrow head. Before stepping into the living room, he automatically glanced at the television screens above the doorway to make sure that there was nobody in the back or side yards or the area around the front door.

Betsy Reculver was sitting on the couch in the living room, staring at her hands in her lap, and when he entered the room she glanced at him blankly. "Beany," she said, then went back to staring at her hands.

He nodded and sat down in the only chair in the room she would let him put his weight on. He dug the Kleenex-wrapped catfish head out of his pocket and unobtrusively dropped it into a nearby wastebasket. He didn't like having organic stuff in the wastebasket in his own room, even just for a little while.

He looked around the living room, remembering times when there'd been half a dozen men sitting around waiting for Betsy's orders. Trumbill had found her and started working for her in 1955, when he'd been twenty-six, newly home from having learned the truth about the world in Korea. Some of the men working for her—Abrams, Guillen—had been with her since before 1949, when she'd still been inhabiting the Georges Leon body.

That poor old Georges Leon body, which was now known as Doctor Leaky.

Eventually, during the sixties, when she'd been Ricky Leroy, she'd had to kill all of them.

Every one of them had eventually come to want the throne for himself, the immortality that could be had through assuming a succession of one's own children. Trumbill knew that she … he, it, Georges Leon, really … had considered killing him, too, before finally realizing the truth—that Trumbill was not interested in any life beyond the life of his own body.

A skinny man trying to get out.

He knew all about the skinny man. He had seen him many times in Korea, the skeleton in the ditch, all the juices leaked or evaporated away, with only the flimsiest leathery remnant of skin to cover the intolerable bones—all the substance lost, gone to nourish other life: bugs and plants and birds and dogs.

Emptied.

In Korea he had formed the resolution to fill himself, to contain as much of all that other organic life as possible, to bury the skeleton as far below the surface of his skin as he could. And Betsy had sworn that when he eventually died, she would make sure that he was sunk in a block of cement before burial, so that nothing should be lost, ever.

Reculver stood up now and walked to the bookcase and back. "Whew. I hope he doesn't choke of asthma before he can get to his fresh inhaler," she said irritably. "I didn't let him take one break since that call at seven."

"Any signs?"

"I had Beany in the Seven-Stud game the whole time, so as to see more cards. The goddamn Queen of Hearts kept showing up, so I think this Diana person is in town somehow. There'll be other women around, wanting Isis's crown, but she's the one with the advantage of actually being a physical child of the old Queen, that Issit woman you folded in '60. I wish to hell you'd got the baby, too, then."

There was nothing in that for Trumbill, so he just kept looking at her stolidly.

"And the Jack of Hearts showed up way too often, generally with the Four of Hearts."

"What's the Four?"

"It's—sort of an old-bachelor figure. I don't see it as a threat to me, but I wonder who the hell it is."

"Who's this jack, is the question." Trumbill shifted in the chair and wished he had brought another one of his tropical fish out with him. A cichlid would go down well right now. He hated bringing up awkward topics with Betsy lately; he wished she'd wear the Richard body more often, or even haul the Art Hanari one out of mothballs. "It's got to be the jack you sensed last night, doesn't it? That seemed like the big one, the one to worry about."

"It's a jack," she said shortly. "I can handle jacks. I'm the King."

"But—" Oh, Jesus, Trumbill thought, here I go. "But it sounds like it's as—as far outranking the other jacks as this Diana woman is outranking the other wanna-be Queens. Now, Diana has that advantage because she is the actual kid of Issit." Unobtrusively he took a deep breath. "Way back when you were in the Georges Leon body—didn't you have a second kid, besides Richard? A second biological son?"

Her lower lip was pouched out, and there were tears in her eyes when she looked at him. "No. Who told you that?"

"You did, Betsy, one time in the sixties when you were in Richard, Ricky Leroy. Remember? I don't mean to … hurt your feelings, but if this jack may be that kid, isn't it something you've got to think about?"

"I can't think. I've got to do everything by myself. I—"

Trumbill flexed his massive arms and legs and got out of the chair. "Time," he said when she looked at him in alarm. "Got to get the tape going."

"Time? Oh, that call. Sure, go ahead."

Trumbill had just got the tape recorder going when the phone rang. He picked it up before the answering machine could cut in.

"Yes?" He turned on the speakerphone so that Betsy could hear.

"This is the guy that called before, about Scott Crane, Ozzie, and Diana. I know where they are, I can get to them for you. Are you interested?"

"Yes," said Trumbill. "We'll pay you twenty thousand dollars, half when you tell us and half after we've determined that your information is valid."

"Uh … okay. That'll do. Where do you want to meet?"

Trumbill looked over at Betsy. "The Flamingo," she mouthed.

"The Flamingo," said Trumbill. "Two o'clock this afternoon. In the coffee shop, Lindy's Deli. I'll be at the Trumbill table."

He spelled the name and then hung up.

"I'm going with you," Betsy said.

"I don't think—"

"You don't want me to, is that it? Who is this guy you're meeting, anyway?"

"You know as much about it all as I do, Betsy." He thought about asking her to step into the Art Hanari body and give him a call, but he suspected that she was too agitated right now to agree to it. "Betsy, I don't mean to upset you, but it might help me to help you if I knew the name of the boy, your son who got away in '48."

"I don't remember," she said, and then she stuck her tongue out at him.

Funo arrived early, and walked around the hotel for a while. He picked up a pamphlet and read it on one of the couches by the registration desk and learned that the hotel had been founded by a gangster named Bugsy Siegel.

Ordinarily that would have fascinated him, and he might have made a mental note to read up on this Siegel character, but right now his nerves were too jangled. He shook another couple of Tic Tac mints out into his palm and popped them into his mouth, wishing he could get rid of the taste of vomit.

He had got talking to a man at breakfast, and the fellow had seemed very nice, very well educated—but then he had started talking in a direction Funo hadn't followed. Funo had bluffed, pretending to understand and agree, until it had dawned on him that the man believed Funo was a homosexual. Funo had excused himself and gone to the men's room, had rid himself in one of the stalls of every bit of the breakfast, and then had simply hurried out of the place and driven away. He'd have to mail the amount of his bill to Denny's. Ten times the amount of his bill. The waitress must think he was some kind of no-account. He'd go back in person, not mail the money, when she was working again, and he'd not only pay the skipped bill but give her some expensive piece of jewelry.

That'll take cash, he thought.

He knew that these people he was going to meet here today would want to handle Scott and Ozzie and Diana themselves; but he could point out that he was a professional, too. The fat man, assuming that's whom he had talked to on the phone, seemed to be in a position of authority here, not hired by Obstadt back in L.A., and he would probably welcome help from a competent workman.

He wondered how Obstadt's "guys in Vegas" were doing at trying to find Crane. He hoped they hadn't found out about the Iverson-Crane Visa card.

The Pacific Time Zone clock over the registration desk said a couple of minutes to two. He stood up and walked toward the escalator that would take him down to Lindy's Deli.

As soon as he stopped by the cash register and could look out across the rows of booths and quaint dark wood tables, Funo recognized the fat man's big old bald head poking up above one of the farther booths.

He grinned and strode over to the booth. The place smelled wonderfully of corned beef and coleslaw.

Trumbill was sitting with a very attractive older woman, and Funo bowed. "Hi, I'm Al Funo. I believe I spoke to … you, sir? On the phone earlier. I got your number by tracing the registration on your Jag."

"Sit down," said the fat man coldly. "Where are the people you mentioned?"

Funo winked at the old woman, as if sharing amusement at Trumbill's bad manners. "Aren't you going to introduce me to your lovely companion?"

She nodded, and Trumbill said, "This is Elizabeth Reculver."

That had been the name the car was registered to. "A p-p-pleasure," said Funo, keeping his smile but blushing at this recurrence of the stuttering he thought he had licked as a kid. Hastily he slid into the booth, next to her.

"Where are the people you mentioned?" Trumbill said.

"I know where they are," said Funo, "and that's what's important, because I'm in your employ, as it were. I've done a lot of this kind of work."

Trumbill was frowning at him. "This kind of work." The fat man leaned back and sighed. "The money is for the information, Alvin. After you give us that, you just take the money and go away."

Alvin? Like the chipmunk? And talking to him as if money meant more to him than people! Funo felt his face heating up again. "I d-d-don't—" Damn it, he thought. "I'm a professional, and I don't … appreciate—"

Reculver leaned forward.

"Don't, Vaughan," she said, looking the fat man straight in the eye. "I think we should listen to what young Al has to say. I think he could help us."

Suddenly the situation was clear to Funo. This ridiculous Trumbill person was in love with this woman! And resented the fact that she so clearly found Funo attractive.

After a pause, "Okay," said Trumbill, nodding. "Then I guess I should make a call, tell our other guys to put it on hold until they hear different. It looks like we may be doing it your way after all, Mr. Funo." He slid his bulk out of the booth and got to his feet.

Funo could be gracious. "I suspected you'd come to that conclusion, Mr. Trumbill."

Standing up, Trumbill could see the other tables, and he must have liked what he could see, for his nostrils flared and he licked his lips. "Why don't we have lunch while we talk?" he said. "Order me a Reuben's sandwich. Extra coleslaw and pickles. And a big V-8."

"Lunch sounds good to me," said Funo cheerfully. He was sure he could hold food down now. "Good talk with good people over good food, right?"

"Right," said Trumbill.

Trumbill strode off toward the exit, and Funo turned to Reculver, his heart beating fast. "I understand," he said softly, giving her his boyish smile.

The old woman smiled back at him a little uncertainly. "Understand what?"

"Your … feelings. Really."

"Good, I was hoping you did. Vaughan—that's Mr. Trumbill—sometimes he just …" She paused, for Funo had slid over next to her and was pressing his thigh against hers. "Uh, I think you should sit over there, back where you were."

Was she teasing him? Of course. The old hard-to-get routine! Ordinarily he'd have played along, done the winks and the short-but-intense glances, the witty double entendres, but today he needed a little reassurance.

He looked around. At the moment there wasn't anyone who could see them.

He curled his arm across her shoulders, and then with deliberate slowness lowered his mouth onto hers.

Her mouth opened—

—to cough out one harsh syllable of laughter: an awkward, embarrassed laugh, as if she had suddenly found herself in a profoundly distasteful situation and wasn't sure how to get out of it without giving offense, without making her revulsion evident. There had not been any slightest response in her lips or her body.

Funo felt as if he had tried to kiss an old man.

Then he was up and running, and by the time he burst out of one of the north doors onto the bright Strip sidewalk, he was crying.

He was long gone. Reculver walked back to the booth and sat down. In a few moments Trumbill came swinging and stamping back to the table. He looked at Betsy alone in the booth and raised his eyebrows.

"Gone to the head?" he asked.

"No, he—he ran away." She shook her head bewilderedly. "I … had him wrong, Vaughan. I thought he was just a, you know, small-time ambitious hood; Moynihan's guys get him out of here quiet, we shoot him up with sodium pentothal or something, and then we bury him in the desert when we've found out what he knows. But he … tried to kiss me! Sit down, will you? He tried to kiss me, and I guess I didn't react—properly."

Trumbill stared at her. His mouth kinked in a rare, ironic grin. "I guess you wouldn't."

"I wonder if we'll hear from him again."

He sat down. "If we do, you'd better tell him you were … on your period, but now you're okay again and you think he's sexy."

"I couldn't possibly do that."

Two men in shorts and flowered shirts hurried up to the table now, panting. "He got clean away, Mrs. Reculver. He was in a cab and gone by the time we got to the sidewalk. We were walking toward here, from by the kitchen, but then he just up and ran out."

"Yeah," said the other man nervously. "You didn't tell us to watch for him to just up and run out."

"I know," said Reculver, still distracted. "Get out of here, and next time be quicker."

"I better get back on the phone," said Trumbill, wearily getting up again, "and tell Moynihan we don't need his guys after all. Did you get a chance to order?"

"No. We should be heading back home."

Trumbill pursed his lips but didn't argue. There were the tropical fish at home.

CHAPTER 20: Isis, I Have Your Son

The sky was dark, but the white lights of the wedding chapels jumped and crawled in the cracks in Arky's windshield.

One beer, thought Crane as Arky gunned the old truck south on Las Vegas Boulevard and the full Coors cans bumped around in the ice chest. What conceivable harm could there be in having one beer? In this town people walk down the street with glasses of hard liquor; get a free drink in one casino, and you can take it right outside with you, leave the glass in the next place you go to and get another.

But it wouldn't be just one, he told himself. No matter how emphatically you swore and promised that it would. And if it's possible to save your life here, you've got to not let Dionysus get any better a grip on you than he's already got.

The World Series of Poker was due to start at the end of this month at Binion's Horseshoe, and if this was going to be like 1969, the Assumption games on the lake would take place before that, during Holy Week. Which was next week. Crane didn't have a plan, but if there was any way he could elude the death his real father had planned for him, he would have to stay sober.

But, he thought, Ozzie says I'm doomed—and if he's right, why should I die sober?

Okay, he told himself, maybe. But not tonight, okay? Just this one night you can do without a drink, can't you? If we find Diana, you want to be functioning at your best, don't you? Such as your best is.

"Watch for Charleston," said Ozzie from the back seat. "You're going to turn left."

"I know, Oz," said Mavranos wearily.

"Well," said the old man, "I don't want you missing it and then cutting capers in this traffic to get back."

"Cutting capers?" Mavranos said, sneaking a sip of his current beer. "Those fish eggs?"

Crane was laughing.

"What's so funny?" Mavranos demanded. "Oh—you mean those little birds people cook on New Year's. Capons."

"He means clowning around," Crane said.

"Why didn't he say so then. I don't know about cutting capers." He drove moodily for a while. "I know about cutting farts."

Even Ozzie was laughing now.

A neon sign over a liquor store read PHOTO IDS. Crane read it as one word, photoids. What would that be, he wondered, things like photons? False light? Faux light, as they'd say? Maybe the whole town was lit with such.

But suddenly Crane's heart was thumping and his palms were chilly. I should have done something, he found himself thinking. I've got to get home. His hands were on the upholstery of the seat, but for a moment he could feel a telephone; his right hand seemed to be hanging it up.

This isn't me, he realized; these aren't my thoughts and sensations.

"Diana's worried," he said tightly, "scared. Something she heard on the telephone just now. She's going home."

"Here's Charleston," Ozzie said, leaning forward over the seat and pointing.

Mavranos nodded. He angled into the left-turn lane and stopped in the middle of the intersection, waiting for a gap in the oncoming northbound traffic. The only sounds in the car were Crane's panting and the click-click, click-click of the turn indicator.

Crane could feel Diana walking quickly, stopping, talking urgently to someone. He stared at the headlights ahead of them moving slowly forward, and he wanted to get out of the car and run east, toward the next place on their list of supermarkets—what was it, Smith's.

"We'd better find her tonight," he said. "I think she's losing her job. If you could catch all the green lights between here and there …"

"I get it," Mavranos told him.

At last the light turned yellow and Mavranos was able to make the turn. He drove fast to Maryland Parkway and passed it, then turned right, into the expansive parking lot that was streaked and puddled with the white light spilling out from the wide open entrance of Smith's Food and Drug. Ozzie pushed open his door as soon as Mavranos had parked, but Crane turned around and grabbed the old man's shoulder. "Wait," Crane said. "I feel pavement under my shoes, her shoes. And warmer air. She's outside." The old man nodded and hastily pulled the door shut.

Mavranos started the car and backed out of the space, drawing an angry honk from a Volkswagen.

"Drive around," Ozzie said. "I'll know her." He was peering at a woman walking a child across the asphalt, then looking past her at another woman unlocking a car. "Is this the right place, the right store?"

"I … don't know," Crane said.

"She might be at some other store."

"—Yes."

Crane was staring around too, and Mavranos drove the car past the glaringly bright store entrance, past a closed GOLD BUYERS store, then turned right to loop around again.

"Is she still walking?" Mavranos's voice was harsh. "Is she in a car yet?"

Crane reached out with his mind, but couldn't sense anything now. "I don't know. Keep moving."

Lost her job, he thought. If we miss her now, we've missed her for good.

"Worthless windshield," he hissed, rolling down his window and sticking his head out. Everywhere cars seemed to be starting up, driving out of the lot, disappearing up or down the dark street.

"That's—" squeaked Ozzie. "No. Goddammit, my eyes aren't good enough for this! What the hell good am I?"

Crane squinted forward and around and back, trying to make his eyes focus better and still desperately trying to pick up mental impressions.

"Around by the front of the store again?" asked Mavranos.

"Uh," said Ozzie unhappily, "yes. No. Circle out here."

"Been already probably half a dozen women drive away," Mavranos said.

"Do as I say." The old man had already rolled down his window, and now he put his head outside, too. "Diana!" he yelled, his parroty old voice not carrying at all. Crane thought of how the old man had, though exhausted, tried to catch up with him in the Mint Hotel stairwell in '69, when Crane had left to play in the Assumption game, and now his eyes blurred with tears.

"Goddammit," Crane whispered, blinking them away. He made himself calm down and look carefully at each person in the lot.

Away from the store, closer to the Jack in the Box restaurant on the Maryland Parkway side of the lot, Crane saw a woman opening the door of a tan Mustang. She tossed back her blond hair and got in. An instant later the car's lights came on, and smoke blew out of the exhaust.

"That's her," he shouted at Mavranos, pointing, "that Mustang."

Mavranos spun the wheel and stepped on the gas, but the Mustang was already in the exit driveway, signaling for a right turn.

"You sensed it, did you?" panted Ozzie, pulling his head in.

"No, I—I recognized her."

"All the way over there? You haven't seen her since she was nine! That's probably not her at all! Arky, go back around—"

"I know it's her," Crane interrupted.

The Mustang had turned right onto the street, and as Mavranos sped to the exit, Crane wondered how sure he really was. At least I'm sober, he thought. If it's a mistake, it's a sober mistake.

Mavranos had turned right onto Maryland Parkway and accelerated after the Mustang, and in the next several seconds he changed lanes twice.

"I think Scott's right," he growled. "She's going like a scalded cat."

"Can you catch up, pull alongside?" asked Ozzie, his breath hot on Crane's neck. "If she saw me, she'd stop, if I waved her over."

"I'll be lucky to keep her in sight." For once Mavranos had both hands on the wheel. His beer can had fallen onto the floor, and rolled against the door with each abrupt lane change. "What do you want me to do if we get a cop behind us with his lights on?"

"Jesus," said Ozzie. "Just keep going."

"Look for my phase-change cancer cure in jail, huh?" No one answered him. The only sound was the on and off roaring of the engine as Mavranos's foot hopped from the gas to the brake and back.

By the time she pulled to a stop at the curb in front of the white duplex on Venus Avenue, the woman obviously knew she was being followed; she hopped out of the car and took off at a flat-out run toward the front door.

Crane leaned out his open window. "Diana!" he yelled. "It's Scott and Oz!"

She stopped then, stared at him and at Ozzie, who was leaning out of the back window and waving furiously, and then she sprinted back across the grass to the Suburban.

"Do you know where my son is?"

"No," said Crane. "Uh … sorry."

Ozzie had his door open and stepped carefully down to the sidewalk, carrying his aluminum cane. "Let's go inside," he said.

A pudgy young man with a scruffy beard was sitting on the worn living-room couch, his eyes closed and his hands waving as if he were conducting a symphony. "If we could all calm down!" he said loudly, on a rising note. "A tad of silence, if you please!"

Everyone did stop talking, and now stared at him. Ozzie was frowning at him angrily, his wrinkled lip quivering with contempt. Crane imagined Ozzie had caught the scent of the young man's cologne.

"Who are you?" the old man asked.

"My name is Hans. I'm Diana's life-partner, and I care for Scat as deeply as if he were my own son, but he's only fifteen minutes late." He widened his eyes and looked around. "Di, I'm sorry I even called you. I'm certain he'll be returning at any moment."

Crane looked at Diana, then looked away. She had grown into the beautiful woman he had always known she would become, tall and slim and goldenly blond, and there were twenty years of her life that he passionately wanted to know about, and if he and Ozzie were successful here tonight, he would never see her again.

Diana turned to the chubby little boy who was standing by the fireplace. "Oliver, where did you last see him? How did you lose him? Didn't I tell you to take care of your little brother?"

The boy rolled his eyes. "Which question do you want me to answer first?" he asked, nervously defiant. "Okay!" he said quickly when Diana took a step forward. "We rode our bikes to Hebert Park, and I got talking to some … older kids. They call me Bitin Dog," he added, glancing toward Mavranos and Crane.

"You ditched him again, didn't you?" said Diana.

"Sheesh! He'll be home in a minute, like Hans says."

"I suppose you've lost your job?" said Hans neutrally.

Diana ignored him and turned on Crane, who flinched. "Does this have anything to do with that stuff you told me on the phone Friday?"

"I—I don't know," Crane said. "So far I don't think so."

"How's your leg?"

"It's okay."

"Ozzie," she said, crossing to the old man and hugging him, "it's good to see you; it's just a bad time."

"I know, honey." Ozzie's spotted old hand patted her back. "Listen, as soon as he comes home, you've got to leave town, understand? Tonight. Pack as little as you can—I'll give you money—and then just go away, to some distant place, ditch your car as soon as you can and go on by bus, and give me a call and we'll figure a way to get more money to you. Western Union would be quick enough; you could have the money and be long gone within ten minutes of calling me. I'm sorry about your life here, but you must have known this wasn't smart, living here."

Her face was buried in the old man's shoulder, but Crane saw her nod. "Okay, Ozzie," she said, her voice muffled. "Wally, my husband, insisted on living here, and then after the divorce it just seemed too silly to leave."

"It's still silly," said Hans angrily, standing up. "What are you people talking about? We can't leave Vegas; I've got the screenplay deal with Mike. What have you—you fellows been telling her?"

Diana had stood back from the old man, and now Ozzie looked at Hans with widened eyes. "A screenplay deal? You know what, I think you'd better stay. You can meet another woman to be life-partners with."

Crane glanced at the little boy, who was calmly scuffing the carpet with the sole of his tennis shoe. The idea of leaving town, leaving these friends who called him Bitin Dog, didn't seem to bother him. Crane wondered what the boy's father, Wally, was like.

Hans bit back a quick response, then said loftily, "I have confidence in myself—something I think some people around here should work on."

Mavranos grinned at him through his unkempt mustache. "I can see you've done real well with it."

Diana waved her hands. "Don't fight. I always knew we didn't belong here, and all I really own is the stereo anyway. Oliver, throw some clothes in your sausage bag, underwear and socks and shirts, and your toothbrush and your retainer."

The telephone rang. Hans waved dramatically for silence and turned toward it.

"No," said Mavranos sharply. "Let the lady get it. Scott, you listen in."

Diana looked at Mavranos as if he'd slapped her, but she let Crane walk her to the phone on the kitchen counter.

"Hello?" she said when she'd picked it up.

"Isis," said a nervous young man's voice on the other end, "I have your son."

CHAPTER 21: Old Images Out of the Ruins

"My name's not Isis, you've got a wrong number—"

Mavranos and Ozzie were both nodding at her. You are Isis, both of them mouthed.

"You are so Isis," said the caller. He giggled. "I've seen your face, Mother. On the Queen of Hearts card and in the lines on my maps. Otherwise, what would—would—be the pointing go?"

Crane beckoned to Ozzie and Mavranos, and as they hurried to the open kitchen, he wrote with a pencil on the white Formica counter.

NUT IN BAKER, he wrote. MAPS, GO FISH.

Maybe we can help in this, he thought excitedly. Maybe we can rescue her son for her. For Diana, I can stay sober.

"Mother, I need to talk to you," said the caller. "I'm at a telephone right now, as you might say, but I'll be going to my Las Vegas box, which doesn't have a phone, which is where your son is, with tape holding him in a chair. It's a Skinner box, like the bowling pigeons. It's out of town on Boulder Highway past Sunset Road, go till you see a gas station on your right that's boarded up, and there's a dirt road that goes behind it. My box is, can't see it from the road, just."

"Is my son all right?"

"Scat, he tells me. His real name is Aristarchus. He's fine, I didn't tape his nose. I won't hurt him if you'll come and talk to me tonight; if you don't, I'll cut his head off and talk to you later." He chuckled. "A man tried to sink a head in Lake Mead yesterday, can you imagine? The lake made the bats chase him away."

"I'll come and talk to you," Diana said hastily. Her phone-clutching hand was against Crane's cheek, and her fingers were cold.

"I know," the caller went on, "exactly how long it takes to drive from your Isis temple, where you are, to the box, so don't talk to police. If police are in our picture, I'll kill Aristarchus. But you won't call them, and we can talk. You're bothered, by this, and that's arctic should be. I don't mean to—to get you bothered, but I had to do something to make sure you'd talk to me. At least I didn't visit you yesterday, right? It was my day yesterday, and that would have been rude, visiting you with my feathers on."

Crane scribbled, HUSBAND. Above it he wrote, BRINGING YOUR.

Diana nodded. "I—I don't—I have to bring my husband. If he can't come, he won't let me see you ever."

There was a long pause, and Crane wondered if he'd ruined everything, if the young man would now simply hang up. Then, "My father's with you?" said the voice on the phone.

Crane bared his teeth in indecision, then shrugged and nodded.

"Yes."

"Sure. You both leave right now. The clock has begun to tick." There was a distant rattle, then the dial tone.

Diana hung up. "Let's go, Scott," she said.

"Right," said Crane, tense with an excitement that was almost joy, in spite of the evident fear that had bleached and leaned Diana's face. To Mavranos he said, "You guys can follow us, but way back. We're going to take a dirt road by a boarded-up gas station out of town on Boulder Highway, past something called Sunset Road, on the right. I'll have the .357 under my shirt."

"You're crazy," yelled Hans, "I'm calling the police! You always call the police with a kidnapping; they're trained—"

Ozzie's lined old face was twisted, as if he faced a painfully bright light. "This guy knew who Scott was, Diana, and he knows who you are: the Queen of Hearts, Isis, her daughter at least. He might just be able to know it, too, if you called the cops. Anyway, the police would make you stay in town for a while. And I really think you'll be killed if you stay. Your sons, too."

"What's this, supernatural?" Hans squalled. "You think she's Isis, the Egyptian goddess? Give me that phone."

"I'm the parent," Diana said forcefully to him. "It's my decision. I'm going, and the police won't be called. And we've got to go now."

Hans was shaking his head and taking deep, whooping breaths. "Okay! Okay! You're the parent, it's your decision. But I'll go with you, then, at least. I am your husband, practically, and I can certainly speak more effectively than this bum."

At the door Diana turned. "No. You're nothing like a husband."

Ozzie pointed at the fat little boy. "Oliver there should come along with Archimedes and me."

Hans forced a shout of laughter. "Archimedes? Have you got Plato out in the car, too? Let him do the talking."

"Wait here," Diana told him. "I'll call you when I know anything."

Ignoring Hans's continuing protests, the five of them hurried out to the cars.

Al Funo's teeth were chattering, and his face was puffy and streaked with tears, but he wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his silk shirt when he saw people hurry out of the duplex down the block.

There's Scott Crane, he thought, with a woman who must be the famous Diana. Mr. Mustache is giving Crane something from the other vehicle, and now Crane and Diana are in the Mustang. And Mr. Mustache and Ozzie and some kid are getting into the other vehicle. What a ridiculous, Jeepy-looking thing!

It sure does scoot, though, he admitted to himself. I doubt that anyone less than a professional driver could have kept up with them the way I did, from that supermarket. I'm glad I noticed that they were chasing the Mustang and not trying to shake me, before I got a chance to pull alongside and shoot them. If I had, I'd never have got a chance to meet Diana.

And she's an attractive woman. I have no problem with that. I'm not one of these guys who feel threatened by attractive women.

He started his engine and patted the wheel. And I can keep up with them this time, too, he thought. This Porsche can outperform anything. You don't find unimportant people driving Porsches.

Diana was driving, her blond hair fluttering in the night wind coming in through the driver's side window. "Nut," she said expressionlessly. "Baker. Maps. Go Fish." She glanced at him. "Who is this guy, and how did he find my son?"

"Well, his name's"—Crane impatiently snapped his fingers twice—"Snayheever, Dondi Snayheever. I think he's crazy. We met him in Baker, and he talks like—like a nut. He's one of the people who've been … waked up, motivated, galvanized, by all the stuff that's going on here right now, with the heavy Easter about to come 'round again, the game on the lake probably due to start up again next week, for the first time in twenty-one years. He's not the only one we met, coming across the desert, and they're probably coming in from other directions, too. In Baker he was talking about you—that is, the Queen of Hearts. He had a bunch of maps that he thought would lead him to you. We stole a couple, but I guess one of them did the trick for him."

"You didn't lead him to me?"

"No. We just arrived in time to help answer the phone. We've been looking for you in every supermarket in town since Saturday night. Barely found you tonight. I recognized you."

A rushing streetlight highlighted the planes of her face for a moment. "So is this all actually true?" she demanded angrily. "All this supernatural shit?"

Crane thought of the thing that seemed to be the ghost of his dead wife. "I think it must be."

"God." She took a deep breath and let it out. "I guess I didn't ever really believe all of Ozzie's warnings."

"Don't feel bad. I didn't either."

"What do you mean, don't feel bad? You sound like that crazy man on the phone: 'I know this must bother you.' My son's life is in danger because I didn't do exactly what that old man said."

"Diana, my wife died because I didn't listen to him. I didn't mean to sound flip."

She glanced at him for a moment. "I know. I'm sorry. I sensed it, when she died. I meant to call you, but I didn't know what to say, and then it was—it seemed too late."

"I would have pretended she was fine. I fooled everybody, even myself eventually."

"So what are we going to do here?"

"Jesus, I don't know. I think he does just want to talk to you, but he might just as likely want to kill you. I don't think he's got anything against your kid—Scat?"

"Nickname for Scott. He's named after you."

He remembered the way she'd written Scott on the crayon portrait of him she'd done when she was eight years old—with one bar through the T's, which she had thought was very sporty—and there were tears in his eyes. "Diana, I swear to you we'll get you and your kids out of this."

She didn't answer, just kept her eyes on the cars ahead. She did reach over and squeeze his hand.

It was the first time they'd touched in two decades.

Waiting for a fare in front of the Four Queens on Fremont, Nardie Dinh fainted at the wheel of her cab. She was unconscious for only a moment, fortunately not long enough for any dreams to illuminate her unconscious mind and pinpoint her location for her brother, but her cab had rolled forward and clanked the bumper of the cab ahead.

She opened the car door and stepped dizzily out onto the noisy, crowded, ripplingly lit pavement, hoping that if she fainted again, the pain of the fall might wake her up, and she fumbled a little plastic bottle out of her shirt pocket and chewed up two crosstops, amphetamine capsules.

The driver of the other cab was standing by her front bumper. He had been cursing until he saw that the negligent driver was a pretty young Asian woman, and now he was just gruff.

"Just a minute," she told him. "I'll be back in a minute."

She hurried in through the open doors of the casino and blundered through the chilly tobacco-scented dimness until she found a Blackjack table. The dealer was using a multiple deck, and two of the hands on the red felt table showed a Jack of Hearts next to a Queen of Hearts.

"Shit," she whispered, really frightened for the first time since escaping from DuLac's.

Dondi Snayheever waited in his idling car in the parking lot of the abandoned gas station until there were no headlights very close in either direction, and then he switched off his own lights and drove very slowly off the cracked old concrete and up the dirt road.

His father had bought this land sometime in the early fifties, and might still own it. The old man had said that the place had strong vibrations, that it would be a good place for the boy to learn, that the cards would be livelier here.

His father. His father was coming to see him, for the first time in nine years. With his mother!

Snayheever didn't seem to be able to hold on to any one feeling about his father. Over the years since 1981 he had sometimes missed the old man so badly that he had returned to the Baker box, crawled inside, and then just shouted for him until he was hoarse, thinking that he might that way turn back time, so that his father would not have disappeared yet; at other times he wanted to kill him for having left his son to deal with an incomprehensible world all alone.

The little car lurched over the top of the low hill, and he could see his plywood box off to the left among a stand of yucca.

It occurred to him that young Aristarchus here was his brother. Snayheever was treating him a little harshly, for a brother. He'd have to lift the kid up and put a cushion on the chair under him.

Outside town the glow of the Mustang's headlights on the rushing highway ahead of them was the only light besides the faint silvery glow thrown by the half-moon.

I should have got the kids out of town, at least, Diana thought, as soon as I got off the phone with Scott on Friday night. Anything, like Moses' mother putting her baby son in a boat and just letting the river take him, rather than let them stay for this. That's what a good mother would have done. At least Oliver is with his grandfather in the truck a hundred yards back.

"Closed gas station up ahead," said Scott.

"I see it."

She slowed and signaled for a right turn—and then she saw something out of the corner of her eye, and gunned the engine and yanked the wheel around, and the car spun out in the roadside gravel and came to a halt on the shoulder, rocking on the abused shocks, pointing back the way they'd come. The engine was quiet—stalled.

"What is it?" Scott whispered urgently. His hand was under his shirt, on the grip of the revolver.

"A car—" Dust from the spinout swirled outside the windows of the rocking car, but she could see well enough to know that it had been a hallucination. "I must be going crazy. I thought I saw a car leave the road real fast and blow up—right over there." She pointed at a half-demolished cinder-block wall on the south end of the gas station lot.

Crane squinted in the direction she was pointing, and for just an instant he saw a blooming yellow fireball, curdling black at the edges, rising into the sky, in perfect silence—then it was gone, leaving nothing but a dark blur in his vision.

"I saw it too, for a second—" he began. Then he paused, his mouth still open.

He had seen it through his right eye. The plastic eye.

"What's the matter? What was it?"

"I don't know," he said, opening his door and stepping out onto the highway pavement. The broken cinder-block wall at the south end of the lot was weathered and cracked, surrounded by windblown trash, and didn't seem to have been even approached by anyone for decades.

Diana had got out, too, and was standing on the curb. The night wind blew the stirred-up dust away across the desert.

Crane looked at her and shrugged. "Maybe it was something that happened here a long time ago, and the Jack and Queen of Hearts arriving together stirred old images out of the ruins."

"Well, let's get back in the car, the dirt road is—"

The flat, hard pop of an outdoor gunshot interrupted her, and Crane heard the whine of a ricochet off the asphalt a dozen yards to his right.

He hurried around the car, grabbed Diana and pulled her back to the highway side, and forced her down into a crouch behind the fender.

"My father first!" came a call from the crest of a low hill behind the station. "My mother wait in the car, for just a minute. Everything's fine! Everything's fine!"

Well, I guess you got a gun, Crane thought, echoing what Snayheever had told them in Baker two days ago.

"Okay," Crane whispered. "Ozzie and Arky are parked back there; you can just see the car with its headlights out, see it? If you hear another shot, run back and get them. They'll have some ideas."

"But you're not this guy's father! Won't he see that right away?"

"It's dark," Crane said, "and he's crazy. If I can get close to him and he's not actually pointing his gun at your kid, I'll kill him. I imagine he'll have the gun pointed at me."

"So you'll be killed."

"Maybe not. Anyway, I'm dead already, ask Ozzie."

He stood up and limped slowly around the car. Diana had turned off the Mustang's headlights, so the moon was the only light, but its radiance was bright enough to show the dilapidated station and the lot and the dirt road that curled away behind it to the top of the hill.

"Scott."

He looked back. Diana was standing up behind the car, and now she hurried to him and hugged him tightly. "I love you," she said. "Come back safe."

"Two little lovebirds," sang Snayheever up on the hill, "sittin' in a tree, kay-eye-ess-ess-eye-en-gee."

"Christ," Diana whispered, "get my son away from that man."

"I will," Crane told her as he started forward again. "Get back behind the car and stay there."

Crane was sweating as he limped up the dusty, hummocky road, and the breeze not only chilled him but seemed to sting, as if he'd rubbed Ben-Gay all over himself. His bad leg stung and ached. Why hadn't he got a beer from Mavranos as well as the gun?

He wondered how much he might happen to resemble Snayheever's father. Would the crazy young man simply shoot him from a distance when he saw that Crane was the wrong man?

Was Snayheever's finger tightening on the trigger right now?

Crane flinched, but kept limping up the hill.

He tried to imagine being shot, in the frail hope that picturing it would enable him to face it and not stop right where he was and turn around and go hopping and sliding and whimpering back down to the car.

A punch like a hammer, and then you're down, he thought, and the place where you've been hit feels numb and hot and loose.

It didn't help. Each second was a hard choice between going on and running back to the precious penumbra of the car body.

If he kills you, he told himself, you'll just be joining Susan. But the only image of Susan that he could conjure up right now was of the thing that had been convulsing in his closet as he had climbed out of his broken bedroom window on Friday night.

You're going to die anyway, he thought desperately, for having stupidly played in that Assumption game. This way you die trying to save Diana's son's life. Purposeful instead of pointless.

But the death by Assumption won't happen tonight. If you run away, you can have breakfast tomorrow, a good breakfast with a big Bloody Mary in a nice place, with Ozzie. Would the old man hold it against me that I turned back here?

Yes, thought Crane, despairingly and almost angrily, he would.

He began taking longer strides, snarling at the pain in his stabbed thigh.

"Dad!" called Snayheever.

Crane rocked to a halt and looked up through sweat-stung eyes, but couldn't see him. "Yes, son?"

"You changed. You did the trick they're all excited about; you got the cards to get you a new body!" The young man's laugh was shrill with excitement. "Are you a brother of mine now, too?"

Crane couldn't apply logic to it, so he just called, "That's right!" and kept limping up the road.

"That was a gunshot," said Mavranos, staring ahead through a rubbed-clean spot of the Suburban's windshield.

"Yes," agreed Ozzie, "but Scott walked up the hill openly enough. Is Diana still by the car?"

"Yeah, crouched behind it. How long you want to wait before we drive up?"

"I don't know."

From the back seat came the sneezy puff of a beer can being opened.

Mavranos glanced back, then leaned back over the seat and took the can from young Oliver. "Thanks, kid—but from now on I'm the only one to touch the beers, okay?"

"I drink beer," said Oliver defensively. "Give me a gun—I'm small, I can sneak around and waste this motherfucker."

"Watch your mouth, Oliver," said Ozzie sternly without looking away from the Mustang.

"Call me Bitin Dog." The boy seemed feverishly excited by the night's events. "Really, I got the kid into this, ditching him, and I can get him out."

"Just sit, Oliver," said Mavranos impatiently. "And if you get out of this car, I'll catch you and whup your butt like I would a little kid, okay? Right here beside the road where everybody'll see."

A white sports car had driven past them, and now its brake lights glowed as it pulled in behind the Mustang.

"Who the hell's that?" asked Ozzie.

"Stranger, probably, thinks Diana needs help. I hope she can get rid of him."

"Be ready to get over there fast."

Diana half hoped this new car was police, but when she saw the well-dressed young stranger get out and start walking toward her, she bit her lip and pretended to be looking at the lug nuts on her wheel.

She smiled up at him. "I don't need any help, thank you. My husband left a long time ago, looking for a phone. He should be back with a tow truck in a second."

"You shouldn't be crouched in the road like that, Diana," the stranger said. "A car could easily hit you. And if I know Scott, I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts he's gone off to find a Poker game."

Diana stood up slowly, unable to take a deep breath. This must be a partner of the crazy man up the hill.

"You and I can be friends, can't we?" the young man asked. He was smiling, but his face was puffy and blotchy in the moonlight.

"Sure," she said eagerly. Apparently this man was crazy, too. Humor these people, she told herself.

He exhaled as if in relief and put his arm around her shoulders. She forced herself not to recoil, to maintain whatever sort of smile was tensing her cheek muscles.

"Tell me the truth," he said. "Do you find me attractive?"

Oh, God, she thought. "Of course, I do," she said. He didn't move—his head was still cocked down, listening. Apparently what she'd said had not been enough. "I"—she went on helplessly—"I can't imagine any woman not finding you attractive." What are you doing, Scott? she thought. Have you got Scat? Kill the nut up there and then come down here and kill this one.

The man chuckled. "There are some weird women in this town, Diana, I kid you not. Scott can take your car back to town, can't he? What say you and I get in my Porsche and go have dinner? Las Vegas can be a very romantic town"—he squeezed her shoulders—"if you have the maturity, the self-confidence, to let yourself be open to new experiences."

"I thought you … people … wanted to talk to me, both of you, I mean. What about my son?"

"You have a son? That's good, I like women who've had some experience of life. I—"

"Do you know why I'm here?"

"Car trouble, I assume. Probably something simple, something Scott doesn't have the mechanical aptitude to deal with. After dinner we can—"

Diana squirmed out of his half embrace and backed two steps across the pavement. "You're just some guy? You're not involved in this?"

"I want to be involved," he said earnestly. "Let me help you. I'm a good man in a crisis—"

Diana was sobbing with fury. "Get the fuck away from me, you piece of shit! Haul your worthless little ass back to that jerk-off car and crank it out of here. Go!"

He was backing away. "D-D-Diana, I don't tolerate—"

She opened the Mustang's passenger door and got in and slammed it. "Clear off, queer bait," she said.

He ran back to his car, started it, and then sped past her so closely that she braced herself against the impact of a crash. Then he had narrowly hurtled past, and his white car was just twin red spots dwindling in the rearview mirror.

"I ought to kill you, Dad."

Crane's sweaty face was cold in the hilltop breeze, and he was panting, largely from the effort of having climbed up here to the crest. "You don't know the whole story," he said. He wanted to look back down the hill toward where Diana waited, but he made himself smile confidently into Snayheever's eyes and peripherally focus his attention on the little automatic in the young man's fist.

"Have I seen your body before, this new one?"

"I don't think so," said Crane, grateful that his sweaty hair was down across his forehead, and that he had been out in the parking lot of The Mad Greek during most of Saturday's Go Fish game.

For ten full seconds Snayheever kept the gun pointed at him, while the wind hissed in the sparse, dry brush, and then he turned and pointed it away across the desert. "Let's go to the box. I'm glad you're here, is what the truth is. I need to know more about my mother before I talk to her."

Crane knew he should pull out his own gun and shoot the young man right now—and his hand wavered up toward his flapping shirttail—but then Snayheever had swung the muzzle of his automatic back into line, aimed at Crane's solar plexus.

The moment was gone.

"After you, Dad," said the young man.

Raging inwardly at his own indecisiveness, Crane shrugged and plodded forward.

The box proved to be a low plywood shack. Crane had to stoop to enter. There was a skylight, and inside by filtered moonlight he saw a little boy sitting in a chair. Duct tape gleamed on his mouth, and on his wrists where they were held against the chair's rear legs. The boy's eyes were wide.

Crane looked back at Snayheever, who had come in right behind him. Snayheever had the gun pointed halfway between Scat and Crane.

Not yet, Crane thought. Wait till it's pointed away, or at least fully at me.

Trying to seem relaxed, he looked around at the shack's interior. A box in one corner was covered with a flannelly-looking cloth, and, startled by it, he looked up at the skylight. It was stained glass, though now it shone only in a spectrum of grays. He had dreamed of this place yesterday. In the dream there had been a cup and a lance head on the cloth-draped box.

"Yup," said Snayheever, nodding jerkily. "Yesterday I was caretaker. On Holy Saturday you all get to fight over who gets to hold them during the next cycle."

Snayheever was shaking and frowning. Crane mentally rehearsed pulling out the .357 and aiming it and firing it.

"This is your fault, this shaking," Snayheever said. "Tardive dyskinesia, from too much Thorazine they gave me." He pointed the wobbling gun at the boy in the chair. "Mother's here now, and I don't really need any brothers. In my head sometimes my eyes roll up with this, and then Aristarchus would get loose and kill me, so not to share the mother."

The boy in the chair was wide-eyed now, humming shrilly behind the tape and tugging his bound wrists against the chair legs.

Crane couldn't shoot Snayheever now, not with the gun pointed at Scat; the shock of a bullet's impact would probably make Snayheever pull the trigger.

The blood was singing in Crane's ears as he opened his mouth and spoke. "Look what I brought," he said softly.

Snayheever swung the gun toward him, and Crane reached up and yanked the .357 out of his belt.

The little automatic went off, and as Crane fired his own gun he felt that hot punch in his side, above the point of his hip-bone; cocking the revolver for another shot, he jumped sideways and knocked the chair over and went to his knees beside it, blocking Scat from any more shots.

His ears were ringing from the blast of the .357, and he'd nearly been blinded by the muzzle flash, but he could see Snayheever groping for the automatic, which was spinning now on a moonlit patch of the floor.

Crane swung the revolver back over his shoulder and then slammed it down, hard, onto the back of Snayheever's head.

The revolver nearly sprained Crane's unbraced wrist when it fired again, and as he tumbled forward across Snayheever's body, he was showered with gleaming shards of broken glass.

Crane sat up, grabbed Snayheever's gun with his left hand, and flung it up through the shot-out skylight. Then he climbed to his feet, bracing himself on the altar box.

Snayheever was apparently unconscious. Crane tucked the hot revolver back into his belt and, shivering violently, dug his hand into his pocket to get out his jackknife.

The Suburban was already parked right behind the Mustang when Crane and the boy crested the top of the hill, and Mavranos was halfway up from the highway side, running in a low crouch with his .38 glinting in his hand. Ozzie was hugging Diana, perhaps holding her back, beside the Mustang.

"It's okay!" Crane yelled hoarsely. He swayed, his right hand pressed against his side. "It's me, with the kid!"

Then Mavranos had sprinted the rest of the way up the hill and was beside him, panting.

"Damn, Pogo," Mavranos gasped, "are you shot?"

"Yes," said Crane through clenched teeth. "Let's get out of here before we deal with it. The nut's back there in a shed, knocked out. I don't think we have to go back and kill him, do you?"

"Nah, nah, let's just get out of here like you say. Diana and her kids can be in Provo or somewhere by dawn. You okay, kid?"

Scat just nodded.

"Your mom's down there, go say hi."

The boy peered down the hill, then saw Diana's Mustang and took off at a run.

"Carefully, kid!" Mavranos yelled after him. He bent and pulled Crane's blood-sopping shirt away from his side. "Aw, this ain't so bad, man. Just grooved you, didn't even touch the muscle layer, and the bleeding's no more than what you'd get from a good cut, no arterial spurting. I can bandage this; it's nothing compared to what you did to your leg."

Crane let his shoulders slump. "Good. You do that, when we get away from here." During the hasty, agonizing walk from the box to the hill crest he had been imagining passing out from loss of blood, and then at best waking up in a hospital bed, his body picadored with drains and IV tubes and a colostomy bag.

"Arky," he said weakly, "when we get down there, I'm going to drink one of your beers, very fast, and then another one very slow."

Mavranos laughed. "I'll join you. And if old Ozzie objects, I'll sit on him."

Mavranos had his arm under Crane's shoulders and was taking his weight as they shuffled down the dirt road. Crane could see Diana break away from Ozzie and come running across the gas station lot, past the wrecked cinder-block wall.

"Here comes Diana," Crane said, for the moment too happy to take a deep breath. "I saved her son."

"And got a battle wound," agreed Mavranos. "Maybe I should let her patch you up."

Headlights were approaching on the highway from the south, and they slowed as they approached the two vehicles parked on the west shoulder. Crane made his eye focus on it; he hoped it wasn't police.

No, it was just a white sports car, a Porsche.

A white Porsche.

No, he thought even as his heart began pounding, no, you see white Porsches everywhere—hell, there was one parked in the slot next to ours at the motel.

There was one parked in the slot next to ours at the motel.

"Get down!" he yelled at the top of his lungs, ignoring the pain in his side. "Everybody get down on the ground! Oz! Get 'em down!"

He shook off Mavranos's arm and drew the .357 and tried to aim it at the white car, which had stopped on the far shoulder.

Mavranos had pulled his own revolver out of his belt. "What?" he asked sharply. "That white car?"

"Yes!"

Can't shoot, Crane thought. What if it's just some Good Samaritan? And at this range with this two-inch barrel you'd be as likely to hit Ozzie or Diana.

"Everybody get down!" he screamed again.

Nobody was obeying him. Scat was still running down the sloping dirt road, and Diana was still running up to meet him, and Ozzie was hunching along at what must have been his top speed, far behind her. The fat kid had got out of the Suburban and was standing beside it.

A hollow pop rang across the highway in the same instant that the Porsche's driver's side window flared with a wink of yellow light.

Halfway down the hill road, Scat dived forward into the dirt and slid for a yard, face down. Then he didn't move.

Diana's scream filled the desert, and almost seemed to drown the roars of Crane's .357 and Mavranos's .38 as they emptied their guns at the receding white car, which didn't even wobble as it gathered speed.

CHAPTER 22: Alligator Blood

Diana was the first to reach Scat—but when she got to where her son lay she paused, then just knelt beside him with her hands half raised.

As Crane hopped and scrambled and sweated down the hill, Mavranos ran on ahead, and Crane saw him look down at the boy and reel back.

When Crane finally made his way down to where the boy lay, he saw why.

Scat's head seemed to have been shot straight through. His right temple was toward the night sky, and it was an exploded bloody ruin—the right eye was far too exposed, and the ear seemed half torn off. The boy was breathing in gasps that sprayed blood out across the moonlit dirt.

Diana looked up at Crane. "Hospital, quick—in the back of the truck. How are we going to carry him?"

Crane's heart was thumping hugely in his chest. "Arky, get a blanket—we can carry him in a blanket."

Mavranos's face was stiff as he stared down at the boy, and Crane remembered that the man had children of his own.

"Arky!" Crane said sharply. "A blanket!"

Mavranos blinked and nodded, and then sprinted down the road toward his truck.

Diana was panting and blinking around. "Who shot him?"

Crane was dreading this. "A guy across the road, in a white Porsche. I think he—"

"Jesus Christ, he was talking to me!" Diana was sobbing now, nearly hysterical. "The guy in the white car, when I was waiting down there! I told him to fuck off, and he came back and shot at me!"

"Diana, he—"

"He was aiming at me, this is my fault!" Her trembling hand hovered over the boy's blood-glittering head, and then tentatively stroked his shoulder, "I did this."

The boy's right arm began jerking, and Crane thought the harsh, wet breathing must be just about to stop forever.

"No, Diana," Crane said, knowing that he was buying her sanity at the high price of having her hate him forever. A minute ago, he thought bleakly, I was a hero. She loved me. She still does right now, and will for another second and a half. "Listen to me. No. The man was shooting at me. He shot at me in L.A. last Thursday. I … guess he … followed us out here."

When she looked up at him, her eyes were wide, with white showing all around the irises. "Yeah," she said softly, "he knew our names, yours and mine." She bared her teeth in a big smile. "Your friends don't aim so good, do they?"

Crane could think of nothing to say, and after a moment she looked back down at her son.

Mavranos came puffing up with a blanket then, and they spread it out on the dirt and began the tense job of gently lifting the boy onto it.

In the emergency room at Desert Springs Hospital on Flamingo Road, the doctors quickly got the boy onto a gurney and rolled him away into the surgery. Crane's wound was bandaged and taped, and then he and Diana filled out forms on the counter of the glassed-in cashier's office.

They were standing side by side, but they didn't speak to each other. When the paper work was done, Diana went to a pay phone to call Hans, and Crane walked over to where Ozzie sat on one of the waiting-room couches.

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

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

"Sure, black."

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

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

He had given up trying to talk to her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Could you come with me, please?"

Crane got up again and followed the man to a small room down the hall. The officer pulled the door closed, and Crane looked around. The anonymity of the room—a couch, a couple of chairs, soft light from a lamp beside a telephone on a table—seemed incongruous in a hospital. It occurred to him that he'd be more comfortable talking in a corner of some white hallway, interrupted frequently by hurrying doctors and nurses pushing IV-hung gurneys.

"Can I see some identification, please?"

Crane dug out his wallet and handed the man his California driver's license.

"Do sit down," the officer told him. Crane reluctantly lowered himself into one of the chairs. "This Santa Ana address is current?"

"Yes," Crane said.

The officer wrote down the numbers and handed the card back. "I'm doing the drive-by shooting report," he said. "Why don't you tell me what happened out there?"

Crane told the man exactly what had occurred, starting with Snayheever's phone call—though, as Ozzie had insisted during the high-speed drive to the hospital, he implied that they had driven out from Los Angeles to visit Diana purely for social reasons, and he didn't mention having been shot at in Los Angeles on Thursday, nor having met Snayheever in Baker. He said Snayheever had told him his name tonight. Halfway through the story the officer called in on his hand-held radio to have a police car sent out to where Crane had left Snayheever unconscious and probably shot.

"I think the man who shot her son is staying at our motel," Crane said. "The guy who was in the room next to ours drives a white Porsche, and my foster father called him a zombie the other day, and he seemed to get pissed—and then tonight, out where all this happened, a guy in a white Porsche, probably the same guy, tried to pick up on Diana and she told him to get lost. Rudely. He might have been shooting at her or at the old man."

"Okay." The officer wrote on his clipboard. "The detectives will check that out." He looked at Crane incuriously. "The revolver you shot at the kidnapper with—where is it?"

"In the car, outside."

"Is it yours?"

"Yes."

"Registered to you?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Where will you be staying?"

"God, I don't know. The Circus Circus, I guess."

"Do that, and let us know your room number as soon as you're checked in."

" 'Kay."

The man clicked his ball-point pen and tucked it away in his shirt pocket. "For the time being we'll be considering this two possibly-related events. I've got the names and addresses of the other witnesses, and they say they'll be staying at the Circus Circus, too; the detectives will probably be talking to all of you tomorrow."

Crane blinked at him. "That's it?"

"For tonight. Stay here; the doctor will be in soon with the other family members." The officer tucked the clipboard under his arm and left the room, pulling the door shut.

Crane leaned back in the chair and exhaled. That had been easy; he had been afraid that he'd automatically be jailed for shooting at somebody, or at least have the gun confiscated. I guess I look like an innocent person, he thought.

But goddammit, I am an innocent person! The only thing I've ever done wrong was play Assumption twenty-one years ago!

He thought of the bourbon and beer at Whiskey Pete's on Saturday night, then thrust the thought away impatiently.

The door opened again, and Ozzie and Diana shuffled in, followed by the young doctor. Crane found himself resenting the man's perfectly combed black hair. Nobody sat down, so Crane stood up and leaned against the wall.

"I'm Dr. Bandholtz," the doctor said. "Of course you all know that the boy has been shot. The bullet broke the ring of bone around the eye, and the bone of the temple back to the ear. It bled a lot, the head is a very vascular area, but there was no serious loss of blood. I think we can save the eye and rebuild the orbit."

"Will there," whispered Diana, "be any brain damage?" Bandholtz sighed and ran the fingers of one hand through his hair, mussing it up.

"There is probably some brain damage," he said, "but eighty-five percent of the brain is ordinarily never used, and the functions of damaged areas are often assumed by other areas. The problem we'll have is swelling of the brain; that's bad because there's no room for it to swell, without cutting off the blood supply. We've got him on steroids to fight that, thirty milligrams of IV Decadron tonight and then four milligrams every six hours after that. Also we're giving him Mannitol, that's a diuretic, to shrink the tissues. Some doctors would use barbiturates to forcibly shut down the brain function during this, but I feel that's still an experimental procedure, and I'm not going to do it."

"When will he regain consciousness?" Diana asked.

"That's difficult to say. In effect, the computer has been turned off while it tries to heal itself. The brain is—is sort of like an ice-cream sundae. The cherry on top is the cortex, the part that makes us human, with thinking and consciousness and all. Under it are the peanuts and chocolate and so on, that govern other functions, and, below that, the ice-cream itself is the maintenance level, the part that handles breathing and heartbeat and so on. The cherry is the first to shut down in a trauma like this—and so far it's the only part that has shut down."

Crane dully supposed that the man had chosen a trivial, happy metaphor to allay some of their shock and worry. He looked at Ozzie and Diana, and considered his own feelings, and decided that it had only made everything even more disorienting.

Diana glanced blankly at Ozzie, then back at the doctor. "Is he in a coma?"

"That is a word that describes this, yes," Bandholtz said, "but he's young, and getting state-of-the-art care. Listen, he won't regain consciousness tonight. You'll want to be alert when you see him tomorrow, so go home now. I can give you a sedative, if you think—"

"No," she said. "I'll be fine. Before we go, I'd like to see him." She glanced toward Crane. "Alone."

"Okay," the doctor said, "very briefly. You understand he's on life support systems—there's what's called a triple lumen catheter inserted under his collar bone to make sure the blood pressure in the lungs doesn't rise, and—"

"I just want to see him."

"Right, I'll take you to him. You two gentlemen can go back to the waiting room."

Ozzie sat next to Crane in the truck, Diana in the seat behind them. Whenever traffic let him, Crane angled his head to see her in the rearview mirror; she was squinting steadily out the side window, the passing lights alternately lighting and shading her profile.

She finally spoke when he had made the right-hand turn onto the Strip under the red and gold lights of the Barbary Coast.

"Even if they'd somehow agree to fly Scat to an out-of-town hospital," she said thoughtfully, "he'd be easily traceable—and I'd go with him, and the bad guys would know I would."

Ozzie took a breath as if to argue, then just exhaled and nodded.

"True."

The Flamingo was a rippling glare of fire-colored light on their right, but suddenly real orange flames and luminously billowing smoke flared beyond the traffic ahead of them, and Crane swore and lifted his foot from the gas pedal.

"It's the volcano out in front of the Mirage," Diana said. "Every twenty minutes it goes off. The locals are getting used to it, not that many of these people are locals." She yawned. Crane knew that kind of yawn—a sign of long-sustained tension, not of boredom. "I have to stay in town," she said, "and I won't be too hard for them to find, even if I visit the hospital in disguise. I need an edge. I need some … power here, some weaponry."

"We've got guns," said Crane, "we can help—"

"Maybe I'll want your help, and maybe I won't," she told him. "And I'll take a gun. But what I mean, what I need is—is this kind of power." In the rearview mirror Crane saw her wave at the gigantic casinos around them. "Certain people want me killed because I'm some kind of a threat to them, I'm the Queen of Hearts, right? I'm the flesh-and-blood daughter of my mother, who was somebody they felt they had to kill."

Ozzie started to speak, but she silenced him by tapping his shoulder with the backs of her fingers. "I want to learn how to be an active threat," she said, "not just a passive one. I want to be the target that comes alive and starts shooting back. I want to become this Isis—with whatever powers Isis has, whatever it is they're afraid of."

They were directly across from the blazing Mirage volcano now, and Crane glanced to his left at the crowds of people standing along the railing beyond the sidewalk. His window was rolled down, and he could hear the roar of the flames over the crowd sounds, and even from way over here he thought he could feel the heat.

He considered what Diana had said. This is all yours, Ozzie, he thought. I'm out of my depth here.

For nearly a minute Ozzie just frowned at the traffic ahead.

Then he said thoughtfully, "Christ. Move all-in. You've been getting penalized like a player in a tournament who oversleeps and automatically gets all the antes and blind bets deducted from his absentee buy-in, and those involuntary bets have—have cost you, horribly. Now you're awake, though you're under the gun with a Jack and a Four down and a Queen showing. But they're suited." He shifted around on the front seat. "Could you fish me a beer out of the ice chest there, honey? It's okay," he added to Crane, "the Four of Hearts is allowed to drink. The Jack's still not, though."

After Diana had opened a can for him and handed it across the back of the seat, the old man took a deep sip. "Yeah," he went on. "You've paid the blind, this latest involuntary bet, and now maybe the only thing you can do is move all-in, shove your whole pile of chips out there right now."

The old man's chasing the white line again, thought Crane. Toward a game where they're likely to kill us all.

"They won't expect alligator blood," Ozzie went on, "in somebody who's been playing like such a rock."

Crane remembered the term alligator blood—it was how old Johnny Moss had described the toughness of real Poker players. As far as Crane knew, Moss was still winning tournaments at Binion's Horseshoe, and by now Moss must be … as old as Ozzie.

"So what are the chips?" Diana asked. "And how do I push them in?"

"Uh … you ought to consult the Queen," said Ozzie, "but she's dead. That was your mother." The old man sipped his beer with a hand that he was visibly forcing to be steady. "Her … ghost will probably be rousing up lately, with this unholy Holy Week almost on us, and the moon is at the half and filling now, so she and you should be getting more powerful. And there will be other women in town now, trying for the queenhood, but you're the daughter, you're already standing where they want to be. They're wanting to find you and get you out of the picture and then stand there instead. You're the one the real Queen of Hearts would … give an audience to."

Crane was stopped at a traffic light next to Caesars Palace, and he stared at the crowds of pedestrians crossing the street toward the torches and imperious statues above the casino's entrance temple.

"So what do I do?" Diana asked. "Consult a Ouija board? Take acid and meet her in a hallucination?"

"No, no. I'm pretty sure anything like that would just make you conspicuous, let your rivals know right where you are. And stay away from playing cards or any gambling. In fact, stay away from Scott—he's to the King what you are to the Queen, and when the two of you are together, it probably shines like a road flare."

"No problem," said Diana.

Crane stared ahead through the cracked, neon-streaked windshield and didn't respond, but his lips were pulled back from his clenched teeth. I stabbed my leg, he thought, to be able to warn you about all this, three whole days ago. If you'd run then, Scat would be fine. I walked up that hill. I got the nut to turn his gun away from your son, onto me.

"Water, fresh water," Ozzie was saying now. "It's associated with the moon goddess. I think if you could bathe in the fresh, wild water of this place, and try to … think to her, your mother, Lady Issit, you might get something."

"Bathe," said Diana doubtfully. "But Ozzie, I bathed in the water of this place just this afternoon, and nothing happened. I've been bathing in this water every day for eight years!"

"No, you haven't. Don't you read the papers? They're having a water war in Nevada these days. Las vegas is Spanish for 'the meadows,' it's in an artesian basin, but even in the forties the wells had begun to run dry, sink-holes started to appear, as the water table dropped. It was only in eighty-two that the city got access to Lake Mead water, and now that's not enough, and they're after the water in central Nevada—Railroad Valley, Ely, Pioche. Las Vegas is supposed to take no more from those places than rainfall puts back, but the city has applied for the right to take more, what they call mining the aquifers."

Crane thought about his vision of the vast entities deep in the psychic water table. He wondered if it, too, was low around here, depleted by some unimaginable use.

"The bad king," Ozzie went on, "has almost certainly encouraged all this. He doesn't want any wild goddess power under the ground. He wants tamed water to serve as the counterweight. Don't you go near Lake Mead before talking to your mother."

Construction was going on at the Holiday Casino to the right. Crane frowned at the big neon-lit replica of a riverboat. The massive, balconied structure was facing north now, and he distinctly remembered it as having faced west the last time he'd paid attention to it. Was it revolving?

"Like," Diana said slowly, "a well? Rain?" In the rearview mirror the right side of her face was whitened by the electrically glaring words HOLIDAY CASINO emblazoned across the towering paddle wheel.

Crane thought about how this road had looked when he had driven out here with his real father, so long ago. The Frontier had been a casual ranch-style place, the El Rancho Vegas up ahead had been a little Spanish-looking inn, and the Flamingo had stood in solitary grandeur far away in the darkness to the south.

"Or the ice cubes in drinks that have been sitting around since the forties," he told Diana.

CHAPTER 23: Go Ahead and Shape It into a Pig

The carousel bar at the Circus Circus was on the second level, which was really a wide railed balcony that ran around the entire circumference of the vast casino, so that the banks of clanging slot machines were visible in the darkness below. The casino was, in fact, hollow; overhead, beyond wide-strung nets in the middle distance, acrobats in tight, sequined suits swung across the firmament on trapezes under the remote light-hung ceiling.

The bar itself was slowly rotating, and as Crane followed Diana out onto the moving floor of it, hurrying a little to get through the gate at the same time as she did and not have to wait for the next gate to orbit around, he remembered wondering if the Holiday Casino was slowly turning in place.

Mavranos was sitting at a booth with young Oliver. Diana slid in next to her son and hugged him, and Crane looked away from Oliver's expression of disdain.

"They think he'll make it," she said.

Mavranos raised his eyebrows at Crane, who shrugged helplessly.

"I'm going to take Diana and Oliver to registration and get them a room," said Ozzie, putting his hand on Diana's shoulder. "Let's go, honey."

She stood up, pulling Oliver after her, and followed the old man to the central barstools, where he apparently told her to wait for him.

Ozzie hobbled back to the booth, where Crane had now sat down across from Mavranos. "She doesn't really blame you," Ozzie said quietly. "She loves you, but naturally she loves the kid more, and right now she's not thinking very far."

"Thanks, Ozzie. I love her, too. And you."

The old man nodded. "Check into a room together, and use Arky's name if you can. I'll be in touch with you boys if there's any way you can help."

Ozzie turned and made his way back to where Diana and the boy waited, and together the three of them got off the turning surface and soon disappeared into the surging, chattering crowds.

Mavranos swirled a half-drunk glass of beer. "You still want those two beers?"

Crane shivered. He did want them, the two he'd mentioned back on the hilltop when the world was good, but he wanted about six others first. Why on earth shouldn't he get drunk now?

Let the pay phones start ringing, he thought. I'll almost certainly never see Diana again now, and Susan—the thing I'll be able to mistake for Susan, if I'm good and drunk—has probably gotten pretty solid by now.

But Ozzie had said that Diana still loved him, and that he'd call if Crane could be of any help. If he'd been drinking, he would only be bringing Dionysus to her.

But I can't be of any help.

The carousel had turned halfway around now. He was facing away from the brightly colored shops of the second level, off across the clanging abyss. "Sure," he said.

Mavranos shrugged and waved at a passing cocktail waitress, and a few moments later two cold bottles of Budweiser stood, frosty and dark, on the table in front of Crane.

Mavranos had ordered another Coors for himself, and took a sip. "How'd it go?" he asked. "I thought you'd be in jail by now."

Crane described his brief interview with the police officer. "I guess it was clearly self-defense," he said in conclusion. "He did tell me to let them know where I'll be staying."

"Huh. Listen, you should have heard young Bitin Dog on the drive here."

"Bitin Dog?" said Crane absently. "Oh, yeah, Oliver. What did he say?"

Mavranos squinted at Crane and wondered how to explain it.

The boy had smelled of beer, and Mavranos had realized that he must have got right into the ice chest as soon as Mavranos had grabbed the .38 and gone sprinting for the dirt road. That seemed an odd urgency, considering that his little brother was in danger over the hill, but Mavranos had felt that this wasn't the time, nor was it his job, to yell at the kid about having sneaked a beer.

But when Mavranos had started Diana's Mustang and turned north on Boulder Highway, watching the lights of his Suburban recede away very fast ahead, the boy had laughed softly.

Mavranos had given him a sharp glance. "Something funny happen out here that I missed, Oliver?"

The boy had frowned then. "My name—"

"Bitin Dog, I heard."

Oliver relaxed. "Something funny?" he said. "I don't know. Maybe it's funny that a kid could grow up in one night."

"Who did that? You?"

"Sure. My friends told me that life and death are all in the cards, and if somebody close to you dies, you just shrug and keep playing. I didn't figure they were right, until now."

Mavranos remembered the evening one of his daughters had been arrested in a local record store for shoplifting. She'd been fifteen, and when he went to the store to pick her up, she had been defiant, as if nothing now had remained for her but a life of crime, and she'd better start working on getting the attitude right.

So Mavranos spoke gently now. "You aren't responsible for this. You ditched him tonight when you were playing, okay, that's bad, but this isn't your fault—"

"What's done is done."

Mavranos was getting impatient. "Who are these friends of yours? These the great guys that named you Barfin' Dog?"

"Your name is Archimedes!" Oliver shot back. "You think that's not a—a shitty name?" He took a few deep breaths, and again the strange calm descended on him. "But yeah, sort of. People were already calling me that, but tonight they made it my club name. It's my persona, if you've ever heard that word. They ride around in white El Camino pickups, but they bust off the El and the C from the logo on the fender, so it says 'amino.' They call themselves the Amino Acids."

"They've all got cars? How old are these kids?"

"They're not kids, they—"

Abruptly the boy had stopped talking, and when Mavranos looked over at him, he had seemed at first to be struggling not to cry. Then his eyes opened and rolled back, and Mavranos thought he'd have to follow Crane to the hospital, for Oliver seemed to be having a fit. A moment later, though, the boy was relaxed and staring sullenly ahead.

"You okay, boy?" Mavranos asked nervously.

"I'm not a boy."

They had not spoken again until Ozzie and Diana and Crane had joined them at the carousel bar.

Mavranos described the conversation to Crane as the bar slowly turned, and he was absently curious about Crane's not having yet touched either of his beers.

"Your sister's got a weird kid," Mavranos concluded. "It was a little boy talking, but it was as if part of him had dried out, kissed off childhood and become an adult by default, like I've read they can remove a gland from some kinds of larvae, and they go into a cocoon way before they should, and the adult butterfly that eventually crawls out is stunted and horrible."

Crane was thinking about this Amino Acids club and the "all in the cards" remark, and he decided he ought to get word of this to Ozzie.

Mavranos pointed at Crane's two bottles. "You gonna drink those beers?"

Crane picked one up and sniffed it; then he sighed. "No," he said. "You can have them."

Mavranos picked one up and tilted it to his mouth—then choked and put it down again. Foam was running down his neck into his collar and surging up out of the bottle neck and puddling on the table.

Mavranos coughed, then looked around in embarrassment. "I must have got some cigarette ash in it somehow. Ashes'll make 'em foam up like that."

Crane nodded, but he suspected that Susan was responsible, angered by Crane's rudeness. He had rebuffed her here, asking for the beers and then changing his mind and passing them on to a friend. "Let me buy you a Coors, Arky," he said, forcing himself to sound unconcerned. "I don't think you're going to have any luck with the other one there either."

Getting a room with cash proved to be no problem, and after Mavranos had unlocked the room door, Crane crossed to the telephone. He called the Metro police and was referred to a Detective Frits, who noted the room number.

"Oh, Mr. Crane," Frits added, "a team of officers went out Boulder Highway and found that shed. They say there's blood and broken glass and a chair with cut duct tape on it and a gun out in the sand, but there's nobody there. Car tracks behind the shed indicate he might have driven away in a very small car."

"I saw the car," said Crane quickly. "I forgot to mention it. It's a boxy little thing like a British Volkswagen, called a Morris. Covered with dust, impossible to tell the color."

"Ah. That'll help, thank you."

After Crane had hung up the phone, Mavranos opened the hall door. "I'm going out on the town, Pogo," he said. "You got your key, right?"

"Right. Have fun."

"Night like this," Mavranos said dully, "how could I not?" He left, closing the door behind him and rattling the knob to be sure it had locked.

Crane looked around the room. The carpet and chairs were bright red, and the walls were striped red and pink and blue. He turned off the light.

In the merciful near darkness he got undressed, and crawled into the window-side bed, wondering if he'd be able to sleep. He had become a night person during these last hundred hours or so, but in this town it wasn't supposed to matter.

He did manage to doze, but some hours later he opened his eyes—and tensed, sweat suddenly springing out all over him.

A rat, almost big enough to look like a possum, was clinging to the shade of the lamp across the room. Very slowly, its free paw turning and its head ducking and then coming up again so that the eyes glinted in the light from a slit between the drawn curtains, the rat was eating a big insect, one of those white beetles known as potato bugs or Jerusalem crickets, which the Spanish call ninos de la tierra, children of the earth. The bug, too, was moving slowly, waving its long, thick, jointed legs in the air. No sound was being made.

Crane just stared, his heart pounding, all judgment suspended.

For perhaps ten minutes he lay, stiff as a statue and hardly breathing, and watched the rat consume the beetle; and then the rat began to stop moving. First its head stopped its slow bobbing, and then the long tail, which had been flexing out in the air, curled around the body and disappeared. The bug was gone, and the rat's forepaws folded and then there was no motion from the lumpy darkness on the lampshade.

Moving as agonizingly slowly as had the animal combatants, Crane reached out and turned on the small bedside lamp next to his head.

In the sudden yellow light he saw that the dark mass on the lampshade was nothing but his shirt, tossed there carelessly when he had taken off his clothes.

Mavranos, he saw, had not yet returned. Crane got out of bed and walked over to the lamp. For a while he started at the shirt, and then he carefully lifted it away from the lampshade and tossed it into a corner.

Still suspending judgement, he got back into bed, closed his eyes, and waited for sleep to take him.

"I've seen her boyfriend going in and out," Trumbill said patiently, "but so far she hasn't showed."

He was sitting in a chair by the aluminum-frame window, wearing only a pair of baggy white shorts. Aside from the chair, there was nothing inside the stark apartment but a TV table, a telephone, two whirring fans, a Styrofoam ice chest, and the litter of used-up Ban roll-on antiperspirant tubes around the legs of the chair; he was rubbing a new tube over the vividly tattooed skin of his enormous belly.

He had hastily rented this apartment at dawn, and though the landlord had managed to hook up a phone, the air conditioner wasn't working; in spite of the antiperspirants, Trumbill was losing precious moisture.

"I'll keep on them about the air conditioner," said Betsy Reculver, who was standing behind him, "but you've got to stay here. We can't lose her, the way you lost Sc—lost Crane, in California." The cheap carpeting did nothing to muffle the quacking echoes of her voice.

Without looking away from the window, Trumbill held out the tube of Ban. "Do my back?"

"Forget it." He could hear the revulsion in her voice.

Trumbill shrugged and resumed rubbing it over his densely illustrated flesh, still looking out through the half-opened curtains at the white duplex across the street.

He wished he were at home doing the chores or raking his gravel garden, or driving the old Leon body somewhere in the air-conditioned Jaguar, but he could see that this had to be done. This was clearly the Diana they'd been trying to find. The police report had linked the Diana who lived at the duplex's address with Scott and Ozzie Crane, and, as Betsy had been quick to notice, the address was Isis on Venus.

"You didn't use it all?" said Betsy.

For a moment he thought she had reconsidered doing his back, but she was standing by the table and had picked up a fist-size blob of the pink Semtex.

"All of it would take out half the street," he told her. "The two golf ball-size ones I stuck in the basement grates will do fine—even with them, I won't be sitting by this window when I do it; I'll be around the corner in the hall."

"It looks like—like marzipan candy."

"Go ahead and shape it into a pig; it can't go off without a blasting cap. You could probably safely eat it."

She shivered and put it down. A moment later she said, "I suppose you like this decor."

Trumbill spared a glance around at the bare yellow walls and the flocked ceiling. "Painted white, and a lot cooler, it'd be all right."

"What have you got against … livelier things?"

I love them, Betsy, he thought. I just want them all to be within the boundaries of my skin. "Don't you have to go meet Newt?"

"Not till this afternoon—but very well, I'll leave you alone." He heard her footsteps scuff across the carpet toward the door. "But I'll call you every fifteen minutes or so," she added.

"You don't have to," he said, but she was already out the door and closing it behind her.

That meant she'd be on the phone with him more often than not throughout the day—unless Diana were to show. He sighed and stared at the duplex and reached into the ice chest for one of the strips of raw lamb.

The noon sun through the window glowed hot red in a prism paperweight on Detective Frits's disordered desk, but of course the office was chilly. Crane, perched in a swiveling office chair across from Frits, wished he had worn a jacket. His cup of coffee still steamed on the edge of the desk, but it was nearly gone, and he didn't want to finish it yet.

Crane had told Frits the same story he'd told the Metro officer last night, and now the detective was leafing through a notebook, apparently at random. His curly brown hair was disordered and receding from his high forehead, and when Crane first shook hands with him he had thought the tall, skinny detective had probably been a rock musician in his not-long-ago youth.

Crane's thoughts were far away from the little office and the gangly detective.

Move all-in.

Crane wasn't sure whether his hallucination last night, the vision of the rat eating the beetle, had been mild delirium tremens or not—but either way, he had decided to stay sober.

This morning, as he and Mavranos had been walking to the Circus Circus coffee shop to get some breakfast, a middle-aged woman had pushed a baby stroller into their path and asked Crane to heal her little boy by touching him. To get rid of her, Crane had sheepishly touched the boy's forehead—whatever was the matter with the child, he didn't improve visibly—but later, over his fried eggs and bacon, it occurred to Crane that she might not simply have been crazy. She might have sensed what sort of … crown prince he was.

And it occurred to him that in spite of the fact that he had taken the money for the Assumption hand in '69, Diana might not be the only one who could become the target that shoots back—who, in Ozzie's phrase, could move all-in. Maybe the way to survive was to challenge his real father on the old man's own terms.

Frits had stopped now at one page in his notebook and looked up. "So the three of you just decided to come visit your foster-sister."

Crane blinked and forced himself to pay attention to this. "Right."

"And Mavranos is your next-door neighbor, back in Santa Ana."

"Right. He's got cancer, and he hadn't ever been to Vegas."

"Your foster-father lives where?"

"I don't know," Crane said, shaking his head and smiling apologetically. "We happened to run into him on Balboa Island." He shrugged. "It was all very spur of the moment."

"Most trips here are." Frits sighed and flipped back through his notebook.

Crane nodded and reached for his coffee now with a steady hand, and he didn't let his relief show in his face or his breathing or any visible pulse.

Frits looked up, and from his smile Crane thought he was going to make another remark about spontaneous trips to Las Vegas.

"Why did you yell, 'Everybody down,' when the Porsche stopped?"

"It was obvious to me," said Crane instantly, buying the virtue of an apparently unconsidered reply at the expense of committing himself to a random beginning, "that he wasn't just a Good Samaritan, pulling over to help. There were two vehicles parked on our side, after all, head-to-head like we had jumper cables, and four adults and a couple of kids visible." He had it now. "Clearly we didn't need help. I figured he had to be a partner of the kidnapper, a lookout who'd been watching from a distance and came up fast when Arky drove up in the Suburban and got out with a gun."

"And then, in fact, he did shoot the boy."

"Right," Crane agreed. He remembered what he had told the officer last night, so he added, "But after Diana told us about the Porsche guy trying to pick up on her, and him sounding like the guy Ozzie had called a zombie the day before, it didn't seem like he was a partner of the kidnapper after all." He shook his head. "Might as well have been, the way it worked out."

Frits stared at him. Crane stared back, at first blankly and then with a faint quizzical smile, as he would have at someone taking a long time to fold or call a bluff.

"I could have you arrested," Frits said.

"For what?" Crane asked quickly, not having to fake alarm. "Shooting at the crazy kidnapper? Or after the Porsche?"

"After the Porsche, say." For a moment Frits continued to stare at him. Crane just stared back, a little more wide-eyed than before. "Where do you know Alfred Funo from?" Frits asked.

Crane exhaled. "I suppose that's the name of the guy registered next to us at the motel? I've never heard the name before. How would I know him? Does he live in Orange County?"

"L.A. County."

"I've never heard the man's name. I never saw the car before yesterday, unless it passed me on the freeway sometime."

After three more long seconds Frits looked back down at his papers. "You're staying at the Circus Circus?"

"Right. The room's under Mavranos's name."

"Okay." Frits sat back and smiled. "We'll be in touch. Thanks for coming in."

Crane leaned forward with a concerned frown on his face. "Look, maybe this is standard procedure, this … threatening attitude, these insinuations, but if you really think I'm involved in this thing, I wish you'd just say so, so I could explain whatever it is you've got wrong. I don't—"

Frits had been nodding sympathetically, and now he held up his hand, and Crane stopped talking. "Thanks for coming in," Frits said.

Crane hesitated, then put the coffee cup down on the desk. "Uh … thank you." He got up out of the chair and let himself out of the office.

Mavranos was waiting in the truck. "Didn't take long," he said as Crane climbed in and pulled the door closed. "Were Diana and Ozzie in there?"

"No," Crane said, "I guess he talked to them earlier. I wish Ozzie hadn't swooped everybody away before we got a chance to discuss the story a little. 'Happened to meet Ozzie in Balboa and then just dropped everything and drove straight to Vegas!' How did that detective act with you?"

"Like it was a—a formality." The Suburban shook as he started the engine. "Just had me recite it all. Why, did he lean on you?"

"Yeah, some."

"Huh. Well, at least you're still at large."

Mavranos swung the blue truck across the parking lot toward the exit onto the Strip. "Listen, I'm gonna try the Sports Book at Caesars—they've got one airplane-hangar-size room that must have a hundred TV screens on the wall, and the effects of what's on the screens go rippling across the people that're watching, like wind over a wheatfield. I might find a clue there. You want to come along, or should I drop you somewhere?"

"Yeah, you can drop me off—at the next card-reading parlor you see."

Mavranos glanced at him curiously. "I thought Ozzie said you were supposed to stay away from that kind of thing."

Crane rubbed his face, wondering if he looked as exhausted as he felt. "That's if I'm just going to run and hope to hide. If I want to … do anything, I think I've got to turn and face … it, them, whatever it is."

Mavranos sighed and touched the bandanna under his jaw. " 'Because there were no graves in Egypt,' " he said quietly, almost to himself, " 'hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?' "

"Your man Eliot?"

"Exodus. Lots of good stuff in the Bible, Pogo."

Crane shook his head, "Ozzie told me not to start any long books."

CHAPTER 24: Fragments of the Book of Thoth

By early afternoon Betsy Reculver had called Trumbill a dozen times, asking if Diana had shown up yet, or if Crane had, and complaining about everything from pains in her joints to the bad card readings she was getting in her solitaire games.

During this latest call, after cautioning him yet again not to let Diana Ryan get away from him, he heard over the phone the bong of her doorbell, followed by LaShane's barking.

"Is that Newt already?" asked Trumbill.

"Let me haul my weary old bones to where I can see the screens." He heard her breathe harder, and the reception on the portable telephone faded as she walked through a doorway.

Trumbill reflected that it would be a relief when the new game was over and done with and the soul of Georges Leon had a batch of fresh bodies to animate, all the ones that had been conceived and paid for in 1969.

The guy must miss his balls, Trumbill thought. Twenty years is a long gestation period if you need the kids, especially when you've got to conceive more before you can get at the original lot.

It's a weird way to be this king, he thought.

Trumbill gathered that in the past the Fisher Kings would just have children, not kill their children's minds and steal their bodies—and that such a King would reign over a fertile green land and not a sterile desert—and that he would share his power with a Queen—and that he would deal face-to-face with the vast old entities that were known as Archetypes or gods, not through the formal, at-a-distance mediation of the terrible cards.

He heard Reculver grunt in surprise.

"My God, Vaughan," she said, "it's that guy, Al Funo! And he's a mess—all unshaven and shaky-looking." Over the line Trumbill heard the click of Reculver's intercom. "Yes?"

Then he heard Funo's voice, tinnily filtered to him through two speakers. "Mrs. Reculver, I need to talk to you."

"Make an appointment," said Trumbill. "Figure a place where we can meet him."

"Uh," said Reculver, speaking loudly into the intercom, "we can meet you … at Lindy's again, at the Flamingo—"

"I need to talk to you now!" came Funo's voice.

"No," said Trumbill instantly.

The intercom clicked off. "Vaughan, he'll leave if I don't talk to him! And he's the only lead we've got to Diana! She won't go back to the apartment you're watching; she's not that stupid; it's a waste of time you sitting there like a damn toad! I've got to do everything, don't I?"

"Betsy, get into Hanari, will you? This Funo guy is a nut—"

"He's starting to leave—" Trumbill heard a clunk, and realized that she had put the phone down on the table by the front door. Again there was the click of the intercom. "Very well," Trumbill heard her say, "come in then." He heard the snap of the dead bolt being switched back.

In the bare apartment overlooking Venus Avenue, Trumbill had stood up, his multicolored belly swinging in front of the window. "Get a gun, at least!" He shouted into the telephone. "Damn you, Betsy, get a gun!"

Then over the telephone line he heard LaShane barking, followed by the unmistakable bam of a close gunshot. A moment later he heard a second shot. The dog stopped barking.

"Shit," Trumbill muttered, staring impatiently out at the duplex across the street and holding the telephone receiver tight. "Betsy?" he yelled. "Betsy, are you all right? Answer me quick or I'm calling 911!" He knew that if she could hear him, she'd get on the line and order him not to do that.

All he could hear over the phone was the vague background sigh of an open line.

"Betsy!" he shouted again. Outside the window glass the empty street yawned at him. "Betsy, what's happened?"

He threw down the tube of Ban and switched off the two fans so that he could better hear any sounds from Betsy's end of the line.

Finally there was a click as though someone had picked up an extension, and then a young woman's voice said, "Five-five-five three-eight-one-zero, this is the Operator with an emergency interrupt from Richard Leroy at five-five-five three-five-nine-three. Will you release the line?"

"Yes," he said through clenched teeth.

There came another click, and then a man's shrill voice: "Vaughan, this is me, I'm in Richard." Richard was panting. "J-Jesus, he shot me!" He paused to cough, and Trumbill was glad he hadn't called from the asthmatic Beany body. "Funo did. I bled to death right on the doorstep, no more than ten seconds after he shot me and ran off." For a moment Trumbill just heard him panting; then Richard went on, "Merde, Vaughan, the Reculver body's lying half in and half out of the front door over there!"

"Where are you?"

"In Richard here? I don't know, some hallway with a telephone—the college library, I suppose, I only saw it for a second, long enough to get to a phone. I'm seeing only through Beany right now. In Beany I'm hailing a cab in front of the Flamingo; that'll get me home quicker than walking to my car here on campus. Damn, I hope nobody called in a shots-fired report, or notices the poor body!"

"Will old Newt have the sense to drag it in?"

"Newt. Good thought. He might; he's owed me his soul for thirty years; he wouldn't want to be associated with any police stuff. Of course, if he sees it from the street, he might just drive on."

Trumbill sighed heavily. "I think I should stay here."

"Yes, of course, I was babbling when I said Diana wouldn't show up there. Stay there and kill her; I can't have any Queen of Hearts running around while I'm down to three bodies. I'll work through Richard and Beany."

Trumbill knew that the old man wouldn't want to take the Art Hanari body out yet; it was his showpiece, just as the Richard one had been, the last time. He would want to have the Hanari perfectly rested and beautiful to host this series of Assumption games.

Abruptly Richard's voice shouted, "Renaissance Drive, corner of Tropicana and Eastern!" The line went dead.

Trumbill realized that the last shout had been an involuntary echo of old Beany's, hollering directions at a cabdriver out in front of the Flamingo, relayed to Trumbill through Richard at the university library.

Figured curtains were drawn across the windows of the room, and though there were some fluorescent tubes glowing around the bookshelves and display cases along the back wall, a black iron lamp on the big round table cast most of the light after Crane had stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

A slim white-bearded man put a book aside and stood up, and Crane saw that he was wearing a satiny blue robe. He's going hard for the atmosphere at least, thought Crane nervously.

"Can I help you, sir?" the man asked.

"Uh, I hope so," said Crane. "I need to have a card reading done." The chilly air smelled faintly of carpet freshener and incense, and reminded him that his breath probably smelled of onions. Mavranos had insisted on stopping for cheeseburgers, though once they'd arrived, Mavranos had eaten only a few bites of his.

"Very well." If the man smelled the onions, he was at least not remarking on it. "Do sit down at the table here, please. My name is Joshua."

"Scott Crane." Joshua's hand was limp and cold, and after two shakes Crane let go of it.

The old man opened the office door to hang a plastic Do Not Disturb sign on the knob, then resumed his seat on the north side of the table as Crane sat down in the comfortable leather armchair across from him. The glass-topped table was wide enough so that if they'd been playing chess, he'd have had to get half out of his chair to move the farther pieces.

"A standard reading," said the old man, "that is, a Ten-Card Spread with the twenty-two Major Arcana cards, is fifty dollars."

"Is there a—a more thorough reading?"

"Yes, Mr. Crane. I could do a full Seventy-eight Card Horseshoe Spread. That takes a good deal longer, but it is more insightful. I ask a hundred dollars for that."

"Let's go with the Horseshoe." Crane dug a hundred-dollar bill out of his pocket and laid it on the glass. Crane reflected that anyone watching would probably expect the old man to lay down a bill of his own and then deal out a hand of Head-Up Poker, but Joshua's long-white fingers whisked the hundred away.

Joshua was now unfolding a large square of purple silk from around what proved to be a polished wooden box. "Have you had Tarot readings before?"

"I … don't think so. Not really. Can't you do the—the procedure with regular playing cards?"

"In a crude way, yes." Joshua smiled as he opened the box and lifted out a deck of oversize cards with plaid-pattern backs. "But it's so imprecise that I wouldn't take money for it or recommend it for any serious questions. The Tarot is the original instrument, of which playing cards are a simplified, truncated form made for games." He wasn't smiling as he looked at Crane and added, "This isn't a game."

"I wouldn't be here if I thought it was." Crane leaned back in the chair, concealing his nervousness. This would be only the third time he'd been exposed to the Tarot deck, and the first time the cards would be speaking to him, responding to a question from him, and he wasn't looking forward to it. "How does it work? I mean, how do the cards … know about me?"

"I'd be lying if I told you I knew for sure." Joshua had spread the cards out face down across the unfolded silk and was gently scattering them around with both hands. "Some people think it's out-and-out magic, and I've got a foolish little booklet that will tell you that vibration rays from your fingers somehow combine with the oxygen in the room to direct which cards you touch." He had gathered them up into a deck again and tapped the edges flush. "The fact is, they do work."

He steepled his fingers under his chin, leaving the squared-up deck in front of him. "They may be the surviving fragments of the Book of Thoth," Joshua said, "supposedly composed by the god Thoth, handed down fugitively from the earliest Egyptian kingdoms. Iamblichus, the fourth-century Syrian, claimed that the mystery cults of Osiris locked initiates into a room on the walls of which were painted twenty-two powerfully affecting symbolic pictures—and there are twenty-two cards in the Major Arcana, the suitless picture cards that have been dropped from your modern playing deck. Whatever it is that the cards represent, they … resonate, strongly, with elements in the human psyche, the way a struck tuning fork can make a glass across the room vibrate. I think that, in some micro or macro way, there's sentience behind them; they're aware of us."

Then they'll probably recognize me, thought Crane. Climb up on my knee, Sonny Boy.

He wiped his palms down the sides of his pants.

"Now," said Joshua, "I want you to empty your mind of everything except the question you've come to ask. This is serious, so take it seriously."

Clear your mind for the cards, Crane thought. He nodded and breathed deeply.

"What is your question?" asked Joshua.

Crane suppressed a hopeless smile, and when he spoke, his voice was level. "How do I take over my father's job?"

Joshua nodded acknowledgment. "Can you shuffle cards?" he asked, pushing the deck toward Crane.

"Yes."

Crane cut the deck and gave the cards seven fast riffle shuffles, instinctively squaring the cards flat against the table so as not to flash a glimpse of the bottom one. He pushed the deck back to Joshua. "Cut?"

"No."

The old man quickly dealt the cards out into two piles, one twice as big as the other; the bigger pile was then dealt out the same way, and then the bigger of these piles was divvied up in the same two for one ratio …

Eventually he had six uneven stacks, and he picked up the westernmost stack and began laying it out on the table in a vertical pattern.

The first card was the Page of Cups, a picture of a young man in Renaissance-looking clothes standing in front of a stylized ocean and holding a chalice from which a fish head was peeking out.

Crane relaxed with relief and disappointment. The drawing was a nineteenth-century-style line drawing, and was not one of the vividly colored quattrocento paintings that his father had used. Probably nothing will happen with this deck, he thought.

The faint snap the card made as it touched the silk was followed by the patter of raindrops on the window beyond the curtains.

When there are gray skies, thought Crane.

The next card was the Emperor, an old king on a throne, with his legs awkwardly crossed as if because of some injury.

Close thunder shook the window, and from out on the street came the screech and slam of a car accident. The rain was heavier, hissing on the pavement outside.

Joshua looked up, startled, but dealt the third card.

It was the Fool, a young man dancing at the edge of a precipice while a dog snapped at his heels.

The rest of the cards abruptly flew out of Joshua's hand and sprayed at Crane, who ducked as they whistled and clattered past him. One had ticked against the surface of his plastic eye, and for one shocked moment Crane was a little boy again, stunned with injury and unbearable betrayal.

But he forced himself to think, to remember who he was and why he was here.

The cards, he told himself harshly, remember? Don't cry, you're not five years old now. You came to consult the cards.

I guess any Tarot deck will work after all, he thought.

His heart was pounding.

He thought, But I don't like, or understand, the answer.

Crane let out his breath and straightened up, hearing the cards continue to rattle on the carpet behind him. He carefully hiked around in his chair. The cards were shaking back and forth across the carpet as though the building were in the grip of a big earthquake.

Outside, the rain was thrashing down.

Joshua had pushed his own chair back and got to his feet. "Get out of here," he whispered to Crane. His face was white. "I don't want to know who you are. Just … get out of here right now."

Crane was breathing fast, and his hands were nearly clawed with craving for a drink, but he shook his head.

"I," he said carefully, "still need an answer to my question."

The old man made an unhappy, keening sound. "Isn't it obvious I can't help you? My God—" He paused.

Crane was suddenly sure the man had been about to say something like, Even so-and-so couldn't help you!

"Who?" Crane demanded. "Who is it that can?"

"Go see the Pope, I don't know. I'm calling the police if you don't—"

"You do know someone who can handle a no-limit game of this. Tell me who it is."

"I swear to you, I don't, and I'm calling the police—"

"Fine," said Crane, grinning broadly and standing up. "If you don't tell me who it is, I'll come back here—no, I'll find out where you live and go there—and I'll"—What would scare the old man?—"I'll play Solitaire stark naked on your front porch with a deck of these goddamn things, I'll"—he was shouting now—"I'll bring a dozen dead bodies and play Assumption with them, and we'll use Communion hosts as chips. I'll be the goddamn one-eyed Jack and play for my eye!"

He reached up to his face and popped out his false eye and held it out toward the old man in a trembling fist.

Joshua had collapsed back into his chair during Crane's outburst and was now crying. For a few moments neither man spoke.

"It doesn't matter anyway," Joshua sobbed finally. "There isn't any way I could dare stay in Las Vegas now, after doing that reading, that partial reading." His blue robe was twisted around his torso, ridiculous and pathetic. "Damn you, and I'll have to get some other job. I can't possibly ever read cards again. They know my face now. Why in God's name did you come to me?"

"Luck of the draw," said Crane, forcing himself not to care about this old man right now. He popped his false eye back into the socket and walked to the window. "Who is it?"

Joshua sniffed and stood up. "Please, if there's any humanity in you … what was your name?"

"Crane, Scott Crane."

"If there's any human compassion in you, Scott, don't tell him who sent you." He wiped his eyes on a baggy sleeve. "I don't know his real name; he's called Spider Joe. He apparently lives in a trailer out on Rancho, the Tonopah Highway. It's on the right side of the road, two hours outside of town: a trailer and some shacks, with a big Two of Spades sign out front."

The cards had stopped spinning on the carpet now, and Joshua knelt and was gingerly picking them up with the silk cloth, being careful not to touch them. "Would you do me one other favor, Scott?" he asked querulously. When Crane nodded, the old man went on, "Take these cards, my cards, out of here with you—and take your hundred-dollar bill back, too. No, I couldn't possibly use it, and even if I burned it, it might call some more psychic attention to me."

Crane had pulled back the curtain to watch the rainy street, and now he shrugged and nodded. "Okay."

Joshua wearily unzipped his blue satin robe and took it off. Under it he was wearing shorts and a Lacoste polo shirt; he looked fit, as though he exercised conscientiously, and Crane was suddenly sure that his real name was something more mundane than Joshua.

"I've heard that you've got to cross his palm with silver," the old man said tiredly. "Get two silver dollars, real silver. He claims it keeps things from seeing him, blinds the eyes of the dead; it's related to the old practice of putting coins on a dead man's eyes." He threw Crane's bill onto the table next to the bundle of cards, and Crane leaned over to pick it all up.

He stuffed the bill and the cards into the pockets of his jacket. "I'll see him today," he said.

"No." Joshua had walked behind a cash register by the bookshelves, and with a series of muted clicks the fluorescent lights began to go out. "He wouldn't do anything while this same sun is up. It's got to be a new day. Everything is too … waked up today."

Crane saw that tears were still running down the old man's cheeks. "How about a—a different hundred-dollar bill?" Crane asked awkwardly.

"I couldn't touch any of your money." The old man was pulling bills out of the cash register and seemed to be shielding them from Crane's very sight. "Could you leave now? Don't you think you've done enough?"

Crane's eye fixed on a shelf displaying "Floral Remedies" and unhappily he wondered what maladies flowers might need remedies for. He nodded, abashed, and started toward the door, but after a couple of steps he paused and then turned around. "Look," he said harshly, "did you think there was no … teeth to this stuff? I mean, you do this for a living. Did it for a living. Was it all just a tea party for old ladies and college girls? Didn't you know there's monsters out there?"

"I certainly do now," the old man said. "And I think you're one of them."

Crane looked around in the dimness at the innocuous paintings and books and jars of herbs. "I sure hope," he said, and he walked out of the spoiled card-reading parlor and into the hammering rain.

Though his day was two days gone, Snayheever was wearing his feathered Indian headdress again. The feathers were drooping in the rain.

He was sitting on the wet grass of the narrow parklike area along the Strip side of the Mirage—in front of him, beyond the railing where even in the rain the dark silhouettes of tourists jostled each other and hefted video cameras, the choppy water of the lagoon stretched to the foot of the volcano—and though the night wind was laden with the smells of car exhaust and damp clothing, he felt as if he were far underwater. When the wind blew the wet feathers across his vision, they looked like fronds and sea fans.

It kept back the pain of his ruined hand. When he had regained consciousness last night, lying on the plywood floor of the Boulder Highway box, he had looked at his right hand and just wept. The bullet had simply blown it apart, and one finger was gone, lost. He had tried to drive the old Morris back to Las Vegas, but it was too difficult to reach across with his left hand to work the stick shift, and anyway, he couldn't see clearly—every approaching pair of headlights was doubled, and two moons hung in the sky. Eventually he abandoned the car on the shoulder and walked back to town.

It had been a long walk. As his vision began to come back into focus, the pain in his exploded hand had grown to a red-hot throbbing, and so he'd forced his mind back down into the blurriness of the fading concussion.

He had felt like a swimmer letting air bubble out of his lungs in order to sink, and he had dimly realized that it was something like his identity, his personality, his will, that he was surrendering, but he had never treasured those things anyway.

And other people had never seemed to him to be really alive, but now they were diminished to angular mobiles jerking in some unimportant wind, all pretense of three dimensions abandoned. He now knew that people had seemed to have physical depth and volume only because they always faced him, and changed the appearance of their surfaces as he moved.

Now that the people weren't a distraction, he was able to see the gods.

Walking down the rainy Strip sidewalk this evening, feeling as though he were swimming and using his clumsily bandaged hand as a flipper, he had seen them, and the irrelevance of apparent size made them seem at one moment to dwarf the tall casinos as they strode past, and at the next to mimic the hood ornaments on passing cars.

In the open entry of the Imperial Palace he had seen the Magician sitting at a green felt table on which were a stack of coins, a cup, and an eyeball; and, on stilt-long legs of which the knees were the thickest part, mummied Death had walked down the center of the street, throwing a faint shudder through the crowds of stick figures; and the Hanged Man had swayed in the darkening sky over the Flamingo, the upside-down face placid as it stared down at Snayheever.

The silhouettes in front of him were growing agitated now, and Snayheever got to his feet. Flames had begun to billow from the top of the volcano.

But suddenly it wasn't the Mirage volcano. It was the Tower, tall and vast and so old that its stones were eroded like a natural outcrop of the earth, and a dazzling bolt of lightning lashed down out of the sky to hammer at the breaking crenellations of its battlements; huge chunks of masonry turned in the air as they fell in slow motion, and a robed figure that could only be the Emperor fell with them.

Snayheever turned and swam away into the relative dimness of the casinos along the Strip.

CHAPTER 25: And You've Saved Yourself for Me

Out over the desert the thunderclouds gathered like vast tall ships, and the hard rain lifted hazes of dust and then filled the stream beds and washes with rushing brown water. The long, curving line of I-15 darkened and soon shone with the headlights that moved along it like slow tracer bullets.

On Fremont Street the wet cars glistened with reflected neon rainbows, and the children who waited for their parents on the carpeted sidewalks huddled in the casino doorways. The hiss of the rain was the dominant sound—it muffled the rattle and rapid-fire clang of the slot machines, and though the strikers in front of Binion's Horseshoe kept on walking back and forth with their signs, the shouting of the young woman picketer was less strident without her electric megaphone.

Inside the casinos there was only the occasional whiff of wet hair to let people know it was raining outside, but at the Blackjack tables face cards were being turned up about half the time, and actively played Roulette tables were hard to find, owing to the number of wheels that had been shut down for testing because they came up with the zero and double zero more often than they should, and a number of elderly slot machine players had to be led out in tears, complaining that the machines were glaring at them.

Traffic was heavy south of Fremont Street—buses and old VW bugs and new Rolls-Royces and a procession of white Chevrolet El Caminos—and there were lines of people in gowns and tuxedoes standing patiently in the white-lit rain outside the wedding chapels. The big casinos to the south, the Sands and Caesars Palace and the Mirage and the Flamingo, were flares of lurid color in the wet night.

On the roof of the towering pink and white edifice that was the Circus Circus, in among cables and conduits, below the forest of antennas and satellite dishes, Diana clutched her robe to herself and shivered as the rain drummed and rattled around her.

The city, spread out below her in all its palaces and incandescent arteries, seemed as far away as the dark clouds overhead; the distant moon, not even visible now, seemed closer.

She had called the hospital an hour ago, and Dr. Bandholtz had told her that Scat's condition was a little worse.

The boy had already been connected to a catheter that was inserted under his collarbone and somehow threaded through a vein and then through the "right heart" and lodged in the pulmonary artery—it was to make sure the blood pressure in the lungs didn't rise, for the lungs would not be able to absorb oxygen if it did—but now he was breathing through an "endotrachial tube" taped into his mouth. If his breathing didn't stabilize soon, they were going to put him on an IMV, which she gathered was some very serious kind of ventilator.

After getting off the phone with the hospital, she had called her own apartment number.

And she had sighed with relief and frustration when Hans had answered. At least he was still alive.

"Hans," she'd told him, "you've got to get out of there; it's not safe."

"Diana," he had said, "I trust the police."

She had waited wearily for him to tell her that if she had let the police handle the kidnapping last night, Scat would not be dying in the hospital. He had told her that when she'd called last night, and she had hung up on him, and she knew she'd do the same if he said it again.

He didn't. "Besides," he said, "your foster-brother shot the guy, right?"

"No, don't you listen? The man who shot Scat is somebody else, and he knows where I live, and he's probably still in town. Get out of that apartment.

"If you're evicting me," Hans said pompously, "I am entitled to at least thirty days' notice."

"These people won't give you thirty seconds' notice, you idiot!" She reflected that Hans was guilty of what Ozzie had used to call felony stupid. "I'll call the cops and tell them about your dope plants, and—"

"Have you visited Scat today?" he interrupted angrily.

Quietly she said, "… No."

"Hmm, somehow I had thought not. Are you going to tonight?"

"I don't know."

"I see. Why don't you consult a Ouija board," he said, his voice quavering with the weight of his sarcasm, "to see if it would be safe?"

"Get out of there!" she yelled. She had hung up on him then.

If it would be safe.

Alfred Funo, she thought now as the rain clattered in the puddles around her bare feet. Someday I hope to be able to deal with Mr. Alfred Funo.

Funo had vacated the motel before the police arrived there last night, but his exit seemed to have been hasty, and they had found a couple of 9-millimeter bullets under the bed. Diana was in no doubt that Funo was the man who had shot her son.

And there were others out there: this Snayheever creature, and the fat man in the Jaguar, and, according to Ozzie, dozens of others.

Bathe in the fresh, wild water of this place, Ozzie had told her.

Her wet skirt, shoes, blouse, and underwear were draped over a taut cable on a big air-conditioning unit, and now she opened her robe and let it fall behind her and stood naked in the thrashing rain.

Mother, she thought, looking up at the sky. Mother, hear your daughter. I need your help.

A minute passed, during which all that happened was that the rain abated a little and the air got colder. The puddles around her feet were fizzing and bubbling, as if she were bathing in soda water. She shivered and clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering.

What am I doing? she asked herself suddenly. I'll be arrested out here. None of this is true.

She turned toward where her clothes hung in the darkness, then paused.

Ozzie believes it, she thought. You owe him a lot; can't you make yourself believe it, too, just for a few minutes?

And what other chance have you and your children got?

What do I believe, anyway? That I'm able to find a man to share my life with? That Scat is okay, really? That Oliver is actually a normal boy? That I am able to have the one thing I need like flowers need sunlight, a family that's something more than a pathetic caricature of a family? What reason have you ever had for believing any of that?

I will try believing this, she thought as tears trickled into the cold rainwater on her face. I am the daughter of the moon goddess. I am that. And I can call her.

Again she looked up into the cloudy sky. The rain suddenly came down even harder than before and stung her face and shoulders and breasts, but now, even when the gusting wind made her step back to keep her balance, she wasn't cold. Her heart was pounding, and her outstretched fingers tingled, and the twenty-nine-story abyss beyond the roof edge, which had made her nervous when she had first forced the roof door and stepped out here, was exhilarating.

For a moment an old, old reflex made her wish her foster-brother Scott could be out here experiencing this with her, but she forced the thought away.

Mother. She tried to throw the thought up into the sky like a spear. They want to kill me, now. Help me fight them.

Dimly through the rushing dark clouds above her she glimpsed for a moment a crescent glowing in the sky.

The clouds seemed now to be huge wings, or capes, and under the hiss of the rain she thought she could hear music, a chorus of thousands of voices, faint only because of titanic distance.

Another hard gust of wind made a horizontal spray of the rain, and all at once she was sure that she wasn't alone on the rooftop.

She braced herself against the taut cable, for the gust had made the tar-paper surface of the roof seem to sway like the deck of a ship. And then her nostrils flared to the impossible briny smell of the sea, and the booming thunder sounded like tall waves crashing against cliffs.

Salt spray stung her eyes, and when she was able to blink around again, she saw, numbly and with a violent shiver, that she was on a ship—she was leaning on a wooden railing, and the forecastle ladder was a few yards ahead of her across the planks of the deck. Breakers crashed on rocks somewhere out in the darkness.

It happened when I thought of a ship, she told herself frantically. Something really is going on here, but it's dressing itself with my imagination.

Again she could see the glowing crescent above her, but now she saw that it wasn't the moon—and it couldn't have been when she'd seen it a few moments ago, for she remembered that the moon was at its half phase tonight. The crescent was on the crown of a tall woman standing up there on the high forecastle deck. The woman was robed, and her face was strong and beautiful but without any trace of humanity in the open eyes.

The chorus was louder now, perhaps on the shore out in the darkness, and the sounds in the sky were clearly the rushing of wings.

When Diana's forehead touched the wet planks of the deck, she realized that she had fallen to her hands and knees.

For she had realized in the deepest, oldest core of her mind that this was the goddess. This was Isis, who in ancient Egypt had restored the murdered and dismembered sun-god Osiris, who was her brother and husband; this was Ishtar, who in Babylonia had rescued Tammuz from the underworld; she was Artemis, twin sister of Apollo, and she was also both Pallas Athena, the goddess of virginity, and Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth.

To her the Greeks had sacrificed a maiden before sailing to Troy; she had restored life to her son Horus, slain by the bite of a scorpion; and though wild animals were sacred to her, she was the huntress of the gods.

This was Persephone, the maiden of the spring and the lover of Adonis, who had been stolen away to the underworld by the king of the dead.

Then the awe had washed through Diana, or had been broken for her, and again she was aware of herself as a woman named Diana Ryan, resident of a city called Las Vegas.

She stood up, carefully, on the shifting deck.

The woman on the higher deck was looking into her eyes, and Diana realized that the woman loved her, had loved her as an infant and had continued to love her during these thirty years of their separation.

Mother! Diana thought, and started forward. The deck planks were bumpily slick under her bare soles.

But now there were figures between herself and the ladder, facing her and blocking her way. She squinted through the spray at the nearest one—and, suddenly and completely, she felt the night's cold.

It was Wally Ryan, her ex-husband, who had died in the car crash two years ago. His eyes, under his rain-plastered hair, were placid and blank—but it was clear that he would not let her pass.

Next to him stood Hans, his scanty beard dark with rain. Oh, no, she thought, is he a ghost, too? Did they kill him trying to get me? But I talked to him less than an hour ago!

There were a couple of other figures, too, but she didn't look at their faces.

She looked up at the woman, who seemed to be staring down at her with love and pity.

Diana stepped back. The booming of surf was louder. The half-heard song of the distant chorusing voices had taken on a threatening monotony.

They're not ghosts, she thought. That's not what this is about. Hans isn't dead. These are images of the men who have been my lovers.

The men I've lived with are keeping me from going to my mother.

As she'd been able to do in dreams that had begun to dissolve into wakefulness, Diana tried to will the phantoms away—but they stayed where they were, as apparently solid as the deck and the railing. This was her own imagination, but she wasn't in control.

Why? she thought unhappily. Was I supposed to have stayed a virgin all these years?

She squinted up through the rain into the eyes of the goddess, and she tried to believe that the answer was no. For a length of time that might have been no more than a minute, while the figures in front of her didn't move except to sway with the rocking deck, and the rain rattled like chips of clay on the deck all around her, she went on trying to believe that the answer was no.

Eventually she gave up.

Mentally she tried to convey the idea that it wasn't fair, that she was a person living in this world, not some other world.

Then, looking down at her own bare feet on the deck, she tried to remember, for her mother, what each of the circumstances had been.

And she couldn't remember.

Mother, she thought, looking up again in despair, is there no way for me to reach you?

And then a concept flashed into her mind, abstract and free of any words or images. As it faded, she tried to hold words up to it to define it for herself—Token? she thought; relic, link, talisman, keepsake? Something from some time when we were together?

Then it was gone, and all she had left were the remembered words she had tried to fit to it.

Lightning flared out over the lights of the city, and the following boom was thunder, not surf. She was on the roof of the Circus Circus, alone and shivering in the rain.

She stood for several minutes, looking into the sky; then she reluctantly got back into her sopping clothes and shuffled away toward the roof door.

Nardie Dinh had felt it coming, the terribly close approach of the moon, which was not yet her own mother.

Luckily she hadn't had a fare. She had spun the cab's wheel and cut across two wet lanes of the Strip, drawing angry honks from the cars behind her, and stomped the cab to a halt at a red curb by the Hacienda Camperland south of Tropicana Avenue.

Even as she was switching off the engine, she lost consciousness.

And she dreamed. In the dream she was back in the long, high-ceilinged room in the parlor house near Tonopah, and though the twenty-two pictures on the walls seemed to be moving in their frames, she didn't look at them.

The walls boomed and creaked around her, as if all the girls in the little rooms around this one were busy with enormous clients, minotaurs and satyrs instead of mere businessmen and truck drivers. She sat down on the carpeted floor and made herself breathe evenly, quietly; hoping that, even in a dream, her brother's ruling would still apply—that his half-sister was to be a prisoner in the midst of this carnal focus but was not to participate in any way.

The pictures were making sounds now. She could hear faint laughter and screaming and martial music. Their frames were rattling against the plaster walls.

Then there was another rattling, the knob of the door in front of her. With her hands and feet she scuffed herself backward until she was stopped by the wall opposite the door. Above her, she remembered, hung the picture of the Fool.

The door swung open, and her brother stepped into the room.

His black hair was oiled and swept back in a ducktail, but incongruously he wore a floor-length sable robe. In his right hand he carried a tall gold cross with a looped top, the Egyptian ankh.

"Dreaming at last, my sweet little Asian sister," said Ray-Joe Pogue in his affectedly mellifluous voice. His lean face was twisted into a smile, and he walked slowly toward her. The pictures banged violently against the walls as he passed them. "And you've saved yourself for me."

"Not for you," she managed to say, loudly enough to be heard over all the racket. Wake up, she told herself urgently. Push your forehead into the horn ring, open the car door, listen for calls from the dispatcher.

"And right here in town, eh?" he said. "South of me, down by the Marina and the Tropicana. I'm on my way. You and I have got a lot of lost time to make up for. Without the female half of the magic, I've been running into obstacles. I had to kill Max, and then Lake Mead wouldn't take his head. I think the lake might take it from you, or from the two of us once we've coupled. Shall we go see?"

She stood up slowly, dragging her back against the wall, and even when she felt the shaking edge of the Fool's frame against her shoulders, she kept pushing.

The picture came loose from its nail and fell, and for an instant she saw her brother's mouth drop open in dismay—and when the picture hit the floor, the sound it made wasn't that of wood hitting carpet.

It was the sound of a car horn, and when she lifted her head from the steering wheel the blaring honk stopped, and she sat back, gasping in the driver's seat of her parked taxicab, and watched the windshield wipers sweep away the hard spattering of the rain. With a trembling hand she reached out and twisted the key in the ignition.

The engine started right up, and she put it in gear and carefully pulled out into the traffic.

Escaped it that time, she thought shakily, but now he knows I'm in town. I'll get on the 15 north right now, and get off somewhere up around Fremont Street.

Her face was chilly with sweat.

If I knew how to pray, she thought, I'd say a prayer for the soul of poor old Max, who once loved me, may he nevertheless burn in hell forever.

In the back seat of his newly bought '71 Dodge, parked on a dark side street, Al Funo stretched out and tried to get comfortable. The previous owners had apparently had a dog that liked to travel in the car but hated to take baths.

He had sold his Porsche to a car dealer on Charleston in order to buy classy gifts for Diana and Scott. The two long black jewelry boxes—two solid gold rope necklaces that had cost him nearly a thousand dollars each—were wrapped up in his jacket on the front seat.

He had had to buy gifts for his friends, to clear up any misunderstandings—but he was still angry at the car dealer, who had called the Porsche 924 "just a glorified Volkswagen," and had given Funo only thirty-five hundred dollars for it. This Dodge had cost him a thousand, leaving him at the end of the day with only about five hundred dollars. And he didn't want to use a credit card if he could help it; the police would almost certainly know who he was by now, and if he used a card, he'd be leaving a trail.

He would have to get out of town as soon as possible. In addition to the police, Vaughan Trumbill would be after him … and Funo could feel a tension in the air, as if someone were leaning harder and harder against a plate glass window, or as if a fever were rising somewhere, with convulsions and hallucinations. Something was going to happen here, and it would probably involve the fat man and Scott and Diana, and Funo wanted to be safely back in L.A. in one of his alternate identities when it broke.

He rolled over on the narrow seat and tried to ignore the drumming of the rain on the roof. Better get some sleep, he told himself, if you're going to go make up with Diana tomorrow.

CHAPTER 26: Thanks a Million, Diana!

At dawn Diana ordered up a pot of coffee from the Circus Circus's room service. Oliver was still asleep in the bed, but she carried her steaming cup to the phone and dialed the number of Ozzie's room.

"Mph. Hello?" His old voice was scratchy. "Diana?"

"Yes," she said. "I—"

"Where are you calling from? Did you go to the hospital yesterday? I told you to stay away—"

She pressed her lips together. "No, I didn't go. I chickened out. Scat wouldn't have known I was there anyway, of course, but I still feel like—like I'm deserting him. Oz, listen, I"—she laughed uncomfortably—"took a shower in the rain last night, and I believe I saw my mother. I got the idea that I couldn't approach her, couldn't talk to her, because I'm not a virgin."

Oliver was awake now, she noticed. The boy rolled his eyes and mimed gagging himself with his forefinger.

Ozzie said, "Give me a minute." She heard the old man put the phone down, and then faintly she heard water running. After a while he came back on. "I wish you were still a virgin," he said grumpily. "The young men you—never mind. Okay, that may be true, I think it might be important that the daughter of the moon be a virgin. But you are still her actual biological daughter; there may be some way to … symbolically get your virginity back, you know? Was there any hint of hope?"

"Well, there was a thought, right at the end, after I asked her if there was a way for me to reach her. It was an idea, something like 'relic,' or 'link.' Something from when I was with her, back thirty years ago. I've been thinking about this most of the night; and I think if I could get some thing that belonged to her, to the Lady Issit, connecting me with her, I could reach her."

"God, I don't know how you'd do that. I suppose if you could find out where she came from or something—"

"Oz, that old baby blanket you brought me home in, when you and Scott came out here in 1960—was that something you had brought with you in the car, or did you find me in it?"

"Yes!" said the old man excitedly. "Yes, you were wrapped up in it, when I found you there behind the bushes! Do you still have it?"

"Well, not on me. But I think I know where it is at home. I'm going to send Oliver to your room. If I don't get killed getting the blanket this morning, I'll have you paged in the—the lobby of the Riviera, that's right across the street, at ten this morning. If I ask for Oliver Crane, you'll know I'm all right; if it's for Ozzie Smith, you'll know they've got me, and I'll want you to take my boy Oliver to the house of a friend of mine in Searchlight. Her name's Helen Sully, she's in the book, I used to work with her. Helen Sully, write it down, okay? She'll be happy to put him up; she's got a lot of kids of her own." Despite her resolve to be cool and businesslike about all this, there were tears on her cheeks and her voice quavered when she went on. "Have Scott do everything he can to protect Scat, even die; it's his fault my boy got shot."

Oliver had sat up in bed, but his expression was one of languid impatience. "I don't want to go somewhere with the old man," he began, but his mother silenced him with a wave.

"No, Diana," Ozzie was saying, his voice shaky, "I'll go, they won't care about me—"

"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 said 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 dry wall. "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.

A moment later Ozzie blinked and rubbed his eyes, wondering if he had suffered a concussion when the car door hit him, for he seemed to be seeing double—next to the little boy crouched on the walkway, and half overlapping him, was a semi-transparent duplicate image of the boy.

Then, though young Oliver didn't move, the duplicate image stood up, turned away, and stepped into invisibility.

Ozzie was having trouble breathing, and when he breathed out sharply, he realized that his nose was bleeding. There must be blood all down the front of his shirt.

He finally hobbled his way to Oliver, who was kneeling now. Ozzie knelt beside him. The boy's face was red and twisted with violent sobbing, and when Ozzie put his arms around him, he clung to the old man as if he were the only other person in the world.

In the laundry room of the apartment building on the other side of Sun Avenue, Diana braced herself against a washing machine and waited for her breathing and heartbeat to slow down.

She was too stunned by the almighty slam that had shaken the street under her feet to cry, but in her head was nothing but an endlessly repeating wail of Hans, Hans, Hans …

At last she was able to breathe through her nose, and she straightened up. Mostly because she found herself facing a washing machine, she fished three quarters out of her pocket, laid them in the holes in the machine's handle, and pushed it in.

The machine went on with a clunk, and she could hear water running inside the thing. The still air smelled of bleach and detergent.

Hans, you damned, arrogant, posing fool, she thought—you didn't deserve a whole lot, but you deserved better than this.

She forced herself not to remember the times, in bed but also cooking dinner or out with Scat and Oliver on a holiday, when he had been thoughtful and tender and humorous.

"Was that a bomb?" came a woman's voice behind her.

Diana turned around. A white-haired woman pushing an aluminum walker was angling in through the door, kicking along in front of her a plastic basket full of clothes.

Diana knew she should say something, seem curious. "I don't know," she said. "Uh … it sounded like one."

"I wish I could go look. I was shoving this stuff down the breezeway, and boom, I see all this shit go flying into the air! Probably it was a dope factory."

"A dope factory."

"PCP," the old woman said. "Could you put my clothes in here? It kills me to bend over."

"Sure." Diana stuffed the yellow blanket into her tight hip pocket, then hauled the clothes out of the basket and dumped them into a washer.

"They need chemicals like ether and stuff to make their PCP, and they gotta cook it. And since they're dopers, they get careless. Boom!" The old woman looked at the other machine, which was spinning its empty drum. "Honey, these machines are for tenants only."

"I just moved in." Diana dug a twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket. "I don't have a car yet. Could I pay somebody here to drive me to work? It's just—just over at the college."

The old woman eyed the bill. "I can drive you, if you can wait for my stuff to get done, and if you don't mind being seen in a beat-up ten-year-old Plymouth,"

"I don't mind the car, but could we go now?"

"What about your clothes?"

Diana waved at a wooden shelf on the white wall. "I'm sure the next person to use the machine will just put 'em aside."

"I'm sure." The old woman took the twenty. "Okay, if you'll fish my stuff out again and carry it all back to my apartment for me. I can do mine later, I guess."

"Great," said Diana. Her elbows and knees had begun shaking, and she knew she was going to break down crying very soon, and she didn't want it to happen while she was still anywhere near this tract of unlucky celestial bodies.

Crane was about to leave his room at the Circus Circus when the telephone rang.

He had left a note for Mavranos, who was off somewhere chasing his statistical phase-change, and had tucked the .357 into his belt and zipped up his nylon jacket, and now he paused with his hand on the doorknob and stared at the ringing phone.

Ozzie or Arky, he thought. Even Diana doesn't know we're here. If it's Arky, he'll want me to go help him in some fool way, and I've got to get out to Spider Joe's trailer. Of course, if it's Ozzie, he might have some news about Diana, some way I can help her, some way I can maybe at least fractionally redeem myself with her.

For Diana, he thought as he started back toward the phone, I'll put Spider Joe off for another day.

He picked up the phone. "Hello?"

At first he couldn't tell who it was—only that it was someone sobbing.

"What?" said Crane uneasily. "Speak!"

"It's Ozzie, son," came the old man's voice, choked with tears. "I'm at the police station again, and they want you to come down, too. And Archimedes."

"Why? Quick!"

"She's dead, Scott." The old man sniffed. "Diana's dead. She went back to her apartment to get something, and they blew her up. I was there, I saw it—I would have followed her in, but I had Oliver with me—oh God, what good have I been to either one of you?"

Diana was dead.

All the tension and hope went out of Crane, and when he spoke, it was with the gentle relaxation of total despair. "You've … been a good father, Ozzie. Everybody dies, but nobody gets a father better than you've been to both of us. She loved you, and I love you, and we both always knew you loved us." He sighed, and then yawned. "Oz—go home now. Go back to the things you said you liked, your Louis L'Amour novels and your Kaywoodie pipes." Go gentle into that good night, he thought; rest easy with the dying of the light.

The telephone receiver was fatiguingly heavy, but Crane hung it up without a sound.

For a while he sat on the bed, hardly thinking at all. He knew that the police wanted to talk to him and would eventually knock on his door, but he had no impulse either to seek them out or to avoid them.

The telephone was ringing again. He let it ring.

He had read that the weight of the air at sea level was fourteen pounds per square inch. Vaguely he wondered if he would be able to stand up against that, or even keep from falling backward across the bed.

Eventually a smell broke through to him. A morning smell, he knew what it was—hot coffee.

He turned his head toward the bedside table—and then started violently.

A steaming coffee cup stood there beside the clock, a white McDonald's "Good Morning" cup like the ones he and Susan had somehow acquired half a dozen of.

He stood up and left the room.

The police might come looking for him at the carousel bar, so he took the elevator all the way down to the ground floor and walked out the front doors of the Circus Circus, across the broad parking lot to where a giant white stone ape waved at the traffic coursing south on the brightly sunlit expanse of Las Vegas Boulevard. He flagged a cab and asked to be taken to the Flamingo.

When it dropped him off, he walked slowly across the crowded sidewalk and up the steps and through the brass-framed glass doors into the casino, then threaded his way through the sudden carpeted dimness between the slot machines and the Blackjack tables to the bar at the back.

"A shot of Wild Turkey," he told the waitress who eventually strode over to his corner table, "and a Bud chaser. Oh, and could I have a telephone brought over to this table? I'm expecting a call."

The bar was nearly empty at this early morning hour, and was brightly enough lit so that the casino floor beyond the open arch was a darkness full of meaningless clanging and flashing lights.

"Honey, I can bring you a phone, but you better call whoever it is. We got a lot of lines—the odds are bad on you getting any call."

Crane just nodded and waved.

He leaned back and looked nervously around at the framed pictures on the walls. My dad's place, he thought. I wonder if he still comes back here, if he still has a hidey-hole for things that might hurt him. If so, it might be anywhere. It couldn't be in the same place, that hole in the stucco under the front steps; those steps are gone, along with the Champagne Tower and Siegel's rose garden and the front lawn. Maybe he does still come back—maybe he'll come back here sometime in this very body of mine, once he's taken it.

Crane thought about his father, who had taken him as a little boy on fishing trips out on Lake Mead, and had taught him about the tides of cards; and who had then hurt Crane, and gone out of his life forever.

The shot and the beer arrived with the telephone, and after Crane paid the waitress, he just stared for a while at the three objects on the dark tabletop.

So much for the target that shoots back, he thought. So much for moving all-in. I'm about to step out of cover empty-handed; fold after calling all but the last terrible raise.

What was it Ozzie said?

They blew her up.

I suppose, Crane thought, that the reason I didn't feel her death through our old psychic link was that she didn't feel it either. Instantaneous destruction—what's to convey?

He lifted the shot glass and stared at the amber whiskey. I could just not do this, he thought; I could put this glass down and get a cab to the police station. Call the raise, and keep on living.

For what?

I didn't share her pain, because there wasn't any. But maybe I'm sharing her death.

He drained the shot glass in one long sip, feeling the rich, good burn of the stuff warm his throat and his stomach. Then he drank half of the icy Budweiser and sat back in the canvas chair, blinking and blank-eyed and waiting.

The telephone in front of him rang, and he lifted the receiver to his ear.

"Hi, Susan," he said. He inhaled, glanced indifferently around the bar for some delaying factor and found none, and exhaled. "Can you forgive me?"

And in the lobby and casino and restaurants of the Riviera, over the babble of the guests and the gamblers and the ceaseless rattling of chips, the disembodied public-address voice called, "Paging Oliver Crane; paging Oliver Crane," for a while, and then gave up on that and went on to other announcements and summonings.