Last Call (Last Call 1)

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.