And I'd be in jail, at least for a while. Maybe a long time. What the hell kind of story could I tell the police?
I've got to kill him. Right here. Right now.
"Mavranos," Trumbill called now. "I can cure your cancer. You can … go back to your family … a healthy man. Decades." He inhaled loudly enough for the men up on the bank to hear. "Trank darts—in rifle. Shoot Crane."
Crane turned and looked at the rifle that lay a yard from Mavranos's feet, and then he looked up and met Mavranos's gaze.
Crane didn't think Mavranos could get the rifle up before he could raise the revolver and shoot him—but he realized that he was physically incapable of shooting Arky. He slowly opened his hand and let the revolver clank to the dirt.
"Do what you gotta do, Arky," he said.
Mavranos nodded slowly. "I'm thinking of Wendy, and the girls," he said.
Slowly he stepped over to where the rifle lay on the ground, and then he kicked it away, toward the truck's front tire.
"Wendy saved you."
Crane exhaled and nodded, then turned back to Trumbill and swallowed hard as he crouched down to retrieve the revolver.
"Okay," moaned Trumbill. His face was pale and gleaming with sweat in the harsh sunlight, and his pudgy hands were fists. "Last request! Call this number … tell him where my … body is. Three-eight-two—"
"No," said Crane, shakily raising the mirror-bright gun. "I don't know what kind of magic he could do with your corpse." He blinked tears out of his eyes but spoke steadily. "Best you rot out here, feed the birds and the bugs."
"No-o-o-o-o!" Somehow in spite of his terrible wound, Trumbill was roaring down there, and the fearful, jarring noise seemed to fill the desert and shake the remote sky. "Not the skinny man, not the skinny man, not the—"
Crane thought of Ozzie and of Diana, both killed by this man.
And he pulled the trigger.
Bam.
"—Skinny ma-a-a-a-an—"
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
Click.
The hot air of the flat desert gave back no echoes from the shots. Crane lowered the emptied gun and stared, astonished, at the red-spattered body sprawled motionless in the sand of the dry stream bed.
Then the dirt surface of the road was under Crane's face, between his spread hands, and he was spasmodically vomiting up the dregs of the Coke he'd had for breakfast.
When he was able to roll away to the side, spitting and gasping, he saw through his tears that Mavranos had opened the back of the truck and was lugging the jack to the flat tire.
"I can do this, Pogo," Mavranos called. "Why don't you see if you can't push that Camaro into the wash. I've got a couple of tarps we can throw over it and weight down with rocks. No harm if this goes undetected for a while, and I don't think the boys in that van are gonna make any calls."
Crane nodded and got wearily to his feet.
Fifteen minutes later they were driving slowly back along the dirt road toward the highway, Mavranos absently cursing the damage that he imagined had been done to the truck's suspension. Crane rocked in the passenger seat and stared out at the broken stones of the desert, trying to feel a grim satisfaction at having avenged Ozzie, or to feel pride in having competently shot the fat man, or to feel anything besides the remembered horror of pulling that sweat-slick trigger again and again and again.
After they had got back onto the highway and were again rolling south toward the lake, he looked at his right hand, and for a moment he hoped that his father would succeed in taking this body away from him.
CHAPTER 39: Combination of the Two
"This don't look much like Vegas," Mavranos said as he steered the shaky, dusty truck through the quiet streets of Boulder City. Somehow the radio was playing what Crane thought was the best rock song ever recorded, Big Brother and the Holding Company's "Combination of the Two."
Today Crane felt as though he'd lost the right, the ability, to participate in it.
He blinked and looked around at the complacent Spanish-style houses and the green lawns. "Hmm? Oh—no, it's not anything like it." His voice sounded oddly flat in his head. He was making an effort to talk normally, to talk as he would have if he had not just … killed a man. "This is the only place in Nevada where gambling's not legal," he went on doggedly. "In fact, hard liquor only became legal here in '69."
"No gambling at all?"
"Nope." He grinned stiffly and shook his head. " 'Cept for a—a certain Poker game on a houseboat once every twenty years or so."
And that starts up tomorrow night, he thought. And when this latest series of games is done, come Holy Saturday, he'll assume this old body of mine, unless I've stopped him somehow.
On the radio Janis Joplin was wailing, but not for him.
"Huh," said Mavranos. "Nothing to do me any good. Maybe I can get in a game of penny-lagging."
Crane glanced at Mavranos, feeling oppressed now about him, too. Mavranos was definitely thinner and paler than he had been when they'd driven out from Los Angeles, and now he was never without the bandanna tied up tight around his throat. I wonder, Crane thought, if Trumbill could, possibly, have cured Arky's cancer. Surely that was just a desperate bluff.
"Left up ahead there, on Lakeshore Road," Crane said.
"We're not going to the dam?"
"No. The nearest marinas and beaches are up the west shore of the lake. That's where we can rent scuba gear and a boat. At the dam all you can do is look."
"I wanted to see the dam."
"We'll go see it later, okay?" said Crane shortly. "Later in the week. You can buy a T-shirt and everything."
"It's one of the seven man-made wonders of the world."
"Yeah? What are the others?"
"I don't know. Montezooma's Revenge at Knott's Berry Farm's one, I think."
"We'll get you a T-shirt there, too, on the way home."
Their laughter was brief and tense. Mavranos finished his beer and popped another. Poor dead Janis Joplin howled on out of the speakers that were hung on adhesive tape from the roof struts behind the front seat.
At a dive shop near the Government Dock Crane rented a new outfit of U.S. Divers scuba gear and a full wet suit with hood and boots and a gear bag to carry it all in. They rented a speedboat at the Lake Mead Resort Circle, and by noon they were gunning out across the blue face of the lake under the empty blue sky.
After a few minutes they had left behind the water-skiers and had got out to where the wind was raising random choppy waves, and Crane pulled back on the Morris throttle, reversing the engine and bringing the boat to an uneven, rocking halt. Mavranos had been hanging on to the dashboard bar during the bouncy, spray-flinging ride, and now he took off his Greek fisherman's cap, whacked it against his knee, and put it on again.
"You through shakin' us up?" he asked in the sudden quiet. "I'm gonna step back to the ice chest, but not if you're gonna bounce me right out."
"Yeah, I'll take it easy."
They were alone out on the water under the arching, cloudless sky, but Crane had to focus his eye to stop seeing the fat man's body jumping and bursting as the bullets hit, and he yawned so that his ears would pop and he would blessedly hear only the wind and the idling engine.
Well, he thought, here I am. What do I do now, just jump in?
A little red fishing boat rocked on the water a hundred yards away, and the man in it seemed to be looking at them. Crane wondered if their crashing arrival out here had scared off all the fish.