The Last Call

PROLOGUE

The concrete-walled room had not seen daylight in eighty years. Its only visitors were the occasional mouse or dung beetle which died of thirst or hunger shortly after happening along. There was a growing collection of the bones and husks of such spread around in little dried piles. The room’s furnishings-which consisted of little more than a small card table and a turn-of-the-century rocking chair-had been perfectly preserved in the dry, North Texas climate, and the room’s only permanent occupant, seated in the rocking chair, grinned vacantly in the dark, waiting to greet the first interloper to come along.

The occupant was a skeleton, little more than fine clothing over crumbling, desiccated flesh and protruding bone. Had the skeleton still retained its meat and had blood still coursed through its now empty spaces, it would have been surprised at the sudden present that shushed through the inky blackness overhead and landed on its lap, cracking its pelvis and sending decades of dust flying.

The present, a leather physician’s bag, itself an antique, was partially open. The bag landed upside down and its contents spilled out onto the dust-laden trousers and slapped down onto the concrete floor with a dull thud.

Perhaps if the occupant still had eyes with which to see and a light to see by, it would have seen the denominations of the bills in each deck of a hundred, and perhaps after a lifetime spent in earnest chasing after just such, it would have grinned even wider, if old corpses could.

Instead it accepted the gift from above silently and began again to mark time in the dark as it had done for decades.

Outside, above, lightning flashed and thunder boomed.

Inside, the dust that had for a brief moment stirred, slowly settled back down.