At the curb he leaned against a light post and stared up and down the Strip, looking for the blue truck. The dry air was still, poised between the chill of the night and the furnace heat of the coming day. His hands weren't trembling, and he liked the idea of stopping for breakfast on the way out to Spider Joe's trailer, but he was afraid that Mavranos, if he showed up at all, wouldn't want to eat. Last night he didn't look as if he'd been eating much lately.
Mavranos might be driving through Barstow right now, heading back toward the tangle of the Orange County freeways. Crane hoped not.
The top of Vegas World across the street glowed yellow with the first sunlight, and looking back toward the east, Crane could see the tower of the Landmark Hotel silhouetted against the glare of the coming sun.
He looked up and down the broad street. No blue truck.
He sighed, suddenly feeling a lot older as he turned back toward the Troy and Cress parking lot. Take the car? he wondered. How long could Frits hold me for? I could call a taxi, but would the driver wait outside Spider Joe's trailer? Probably not, if things started flying around like they did at poor Joshua's card-reading parlor on Wednesday.
He got into Diana's car and started the engine. Find a car dealership and just buy yourself one, he thought. You've certainly got the cash.
But he didn't put it into gear yet. He looked around at the interior of the car, at Diana's country-and-western cassettes and an old hairbrush and a pack of Chesterfields on the console. Did Diana smoke them? Chesterfields had been Ozzie's brand, before he quit. Had the old man bought a pack, suspecting that it didn't matter anymore?
A shotgun blast, out in the desert—and then dust scattered across the sterile sand. Crane leaned his head against the rim of the steering wheel and, in the midst of the anonymous sleeping newlyweds, he finally cried for the killed foster-father who had found him so long ago and taken him in and made him his son.
After a while he became aware of the muttering racket of a big, badly muffled engine behind him, drowning the steady burr of the Mustang's V-8.
He looked up at the rearview mirror and smiled through his tears to see the blue bulk of the Suburban, with Mavranos's lean face glowering at him from behind the wheel.
He switched off the engine and got out of the car, and Mavranos opened the truck's passenger side door.
"That was eight hundred bucks you gave me last night," Mavranos said belligerently as Crane climbed in and pulled the door closed. "You got a lot more?"
"Yeah, Arky, I got"—Crane sniffed and wiped his eyes—"I don't know, twenty or thirty thousand, I think." He slapped his jacket pocket. "What I gave you was just my twenties. I can't lose lately, except at Lowball."
"Okay." Mavranos drove forward and then clanked the shift into reverse. "For helping you out here, I want all of it except for what we need for expenses. My family's gonna need it."
"Sure." Crane shrugged, "When we get a couple of hours free, I'll make a lot more for you."
Mavranos backed into a parking space and then shifted back to drive and spun the wheel to head out of the parking lot. "We likely to get killed on this errand today?"
Crane frowned. "Not likely to, I don't think. As soon as I mess with the cards, the fat man will know where I am, but we ought to be long gone by the time he'd get there, even if he's not in a hospital—and anyway, he apparently works for my father. He wants to keep me alive." He looked over his shoulder at the piled junk in the back of the truck. "You still got your .38 and the shotgun?"
"Yeah."
"I hope we do run into the fat man."
"Great. Well listen, before we drive out there, I want to stop by a Western Union, and send Wendy a big bundle."
"Oh, sure, man." Crane glanced at him. "Have you, uh, talked to her?"
"Yeah, last night—and I called her again just before I left to come here," Mavranos said. "Told her I wasn't gonna … quit, on anything I shouldn't quit on. She understood." His tired face was expressionless. "I believe she's proud of me."
"Well," said Crane, mystified, "that's good. Hey, take it quiet past these rooms; it's all newlyweds sleeping off their wedding night champagne."
Then he just winced and closed his eyes, for Mavranos swore harshly and leaned on the horn all the way out onto the street.
CHAPTER 36: Some Kind of Catholic Priest?
"That's the place," Crane said two hours later, leaning forward and pointing at the big rusty Two of Spades sign rippling in the heat waves ahead.
"Shit," said Mavranos. He tipped up his current can of Coors, and when it was empty, he tossed it over his shoulder into the back of the truck. "I thought you said you have a lot of money."
Crane had to agree that the trailer-and-shacks structure standing alone by the side of the desert highway didn't look affluent. "I don't think this guy's in it for the bucks," he said. He held out his palm with two shiny silver dollars on it. "This was all I was told to bring."
"Huh."
The two of them had hardly spoken during the drive out from town. Crane had spent most of the drive watching the traffic behind them, but he had not seen any gray Jaguar. Perhaps the fat man had died of a concussion from his gunshot wound, or couldn't track him when he was … avoiding Susan.
Mavranos slowed the truck now and signaled for a turn off the highway, and Crane peered at the odd little settlement that was their destination. A big old house trailer—shored up with wooden frameworks and patched and haphazardly painted several faded shades of green—seemed to be the original core of it, but a lot of corrugated iron-roofed sheds had been added onto the back, and there seemed to be pens and chicken coops attached to the side. Two pickup trucks from about 1957 sat in rusty ruin in the unpaved yard between the trailer and the highway, with a newer-looking Volkswagen van behind them. The whole place had clearly been baked and warped by decades of merciless sun.
"Chez Spider Joe," said Crane with false cheer.
"That guy was hosin' you," Mavranos said as he slowed almost to a halt and turned onto the dirt yard. "The one who told you about this place." The truck shook, and the tires made popping and grinding sounds as they revolved. "Hosin' you."
At last he switched the engine off, and Crane waited until the worst of the kicked-up dust had blown away and then levered the door open. The breeze was hot, but it cooled the sweat on his face.
Aside from the ticking of the engine and the slow chuff-chuff of their steps as he and Mavranos plodded toward the front porch, the only sound was the rackety whir of an air conditioner. Crane could feel attention being paid to them, and he realized that he had been feeling it for the last mile or so.
He stepped up and rapped on the screen door, beyond which yawned the dimness of some unlit room with a couch and a table visible in it.
"Hello?" he called nervously. "Uh … anybody home?"
He could see the blue-jeaned legs of someone sitting at a chair inside now, but a fast scraping sound from around the western corner of the trailer made him look in that direction.
And then from out of the trailer's shadow strode a thing that for one heart-freezing moment seemed to Crane to be a giant walking spider.
He and Mavranos both jumped down off the porch, but when Crane peered more closely at the figure that was now stopped in front of them, he saw that it was a man, with dozens of long metal antennas sprouting and bobbing from his belt, all the way around; they were all bent into different arcs, some brushing against the side of the trailer and some tracing lines in the dirt.