The shifting faces were replacing each other more and more slowly, and finally it was the old man who lay on the stony ground, the crown no longer visible.
Crane braced himself in the sand with one hand and hesitantly touched the blood-spattered white hair with the other, but this had been a corpse for a long time, since at least 1949.
At last Crane lifted his head and began crawling on his hands and knees to where Ozzie lay sprawled and bloody and motionless on the gravelly dirt.
Peripherally he was aware that the fat man had bent to pick up the revolver and was now plodding slowly away, back through the doorway toward where the highway and the parked Jaguar waited; and then Crane noticed the figure that was now crouched over Ozzie's body.
It was the dried-out Susan, her starvation smile turned on Crane like a bright light through a poisoned fish tank. Her mad leaping had shredded the leathery skin from her, and now she was a sexless skeleton draped only with the most tenuous shreds of organic stuff.
Crane realized that this was no longer drink, Dionysus. This was indifferent Death. This was nobody's ally.
And it had taken Ozzie. Crane couldn't look at the old man's devastated chest; he stared instead at the old, wrinkled hands that had held and discarded and drawn so many cards and now held nothing at all.
Death slowly reached out and touched Ozzie's forehead with a skeletal finger—and Ozzie's body collapsed into gray dust, leaving only the crumpled, pitiful old-man's-suit, and an instant later a hot gust of wind blinded Crane with sand and whirled the clothing and the dust away, over the ruined walls and across the desert's miles-wide face.
The sudden wind had rolled Crane over onto his back, and after it had gone scouring away toward the mountains, he sat up and blinked sand out of his eyes. The animated skeleton was gone, and except for the corpse of Richard Leroy, Crane was alone in the desolate ruins.
The sun was hot on his head; his ludicrous cap had been blown away. He got laboriously to his feet and looked around at the broken walls.
You think your old man's nuts, don't you? he remembered Ozzie saying, on that night in 1960 when they had driven out here to find Diana; and he remembered Ozzie scuffling desperately after him down the stairwell of the Mint Hotel, crying and pleading, when Crane had left to play on the lake in 1969; and he remembered how fragile and dapper the old man had looked on Sunday morning—only four days ago!—when he and Arky had met him on Balboa Island.
Go back to your Louis L'Amour novels and your Kaywoodie pipes, Crane had told him yesterday. But the old man had not, after all, been willing to go gentle into that good night, to roll with the dying of the light.
Was Crane willing to, now?
He looked at some dark spots spattered on the stone wall. They were probably Ozzie's blood.
No, not now. He started limping back toward the highway.
CHAPTER 33: I've Got a Present for Scott, Too
Diana strode along the railed second-floor cement walkway in the gold light of early evening, looking at the numbers on the apartment doors she passed. There was a pool in the courtyard below, and the air smelled of chlorine.
She had alternately dozed and worried for most of the day on a grassy hill at Clark County Community College, using the balled-up old baby blanket as a pillow. Often in the past she had thought it would be nice to get some time away from Scat and Oliver, but now that she had it she could hardly make herself think of anything but them. Had Ozzie got Oliver to Helen Sully's house in Searchlight? Diana had called Helen's number, but there was no answer there. Had Funo or somebody followed Ozzie and killed him and her son? Had some player in this terrible mess gone to the hospital and killed Scat since her last call?
Ever since the explosion she had been insisting to herself that the boys were safer away from her—but the very sight of bright sunlight on green trees made her nauseous with guilt, and she simply couldn't permit herself to think about Scat waking up alone in the hospital, or dying alone in the hospital, or about Oliver alone among strangers and supposing that she was dead.
She stopped in front of apartment 27 now, and she made herself breathe deeply and remember her purpose. She had been here only once before, at night, and didn't remember the layout very well, but according to the mailbox downstairs this was Michael Stikeleather's place.
She knocked, and after a few moments she saw the light through the peep-hole darken; then she heard the chain rattle out of its channel and the door was pulled open.
Aging surfer boy, she thought when Mike grinned at her in pleased surprise, in the middle of the desert.
Stikeleather was wearing sky blue slacks and a white shirt open halfway down to show his curly blond chest hair. The shirt was untucked—to conceal a potbelly, she assumed.
"I know who it is!" he said happily, holding up one hand. "It's …" His face suddenly fell as he visibly remembered, and he frowned responsibly. "You're Hans's girl friend. I was sorry to read about that. He was good people, Hans was. Hey, come on in."
Diana walked into the living room, which was lit by modernistic track lights. Aluminum-framed pastels of pretty women and tigers hung on the tan walls, and a black, glass-doored stereo stood in the far corner by a low tan couch.
"Your name was …?" said Mike.
"Doreen," Diana told him.
"Right, right, Doreen. Doreeen. Can I get you a drink?"
"Sure, anything cold."
Mike winked and nodded and stepped into the fluorescent-lit kitchen alcove. Diana could hear him open the freezer and bang an ice tray against a counter. "Do you feel able to talk about it?" he called.
Diana sat down on the couch. "Sure," she said loudly. Six copies of Penthouse magazine were fanned out on the glass-topped coffee table.
Mike walked back into the room with two tall glasses. "Seven and Seven," he said, handing one to her and joining her on the couch. "In the papers the police said it was a bomb."
Diana took a long sip of the drink. "I don't think so," she said. "He was trying to make PCP in the back room, had a lot of … ether and stuff. I think he blew himself up with it."
Mike's arm was lying along the back of the couch behind her shoulders, and now he patted her head. "Ah, that's a goddamn shame. I guess the police figure a bomb is better for the tourist business than a dope factory, hah?" He laughed, then remembered to frown. "Shit, angel dust—he should have told me, I could have got him all he wanted."
"He always said you were reliable." Diana made herself look into Mike's blue eyes. "He said if I ever needed help, I should come to you."
Clearly this was going the way Mike had hoped it would. His hand was kneading the point of her shoulder now, and his round, tanned face was closer to hers. His breath smelled sharply of Binaca; he must have had one of the little bottles stashed in the kitchen.
"I understand, Doreen. You need a place to stay?"
She stared down into her drink. "That, yeah—and I want somebody to go to his funeral with me tomorrow morning."
Specifically a dope dealer, she thought, if things work out the way I hope they will.
"You got it," he said softly.
He might have been about to kiss her, but she smiled and leaned back, away from him. "And can I use your phone to call my kid? He's staying with a friend; it's here in Nevada, a local call."
"Oh, sure, Doreen, phone's on the kitchen counter there." Diana stood up and crossed to the telephone. As she punched in Helen Sully's number, she noted that Stikeleather didn't leave the room.