"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.