Crane grinned wildly at Mavranos. "You with me so far?"
"You poor fucked-up son of a bitch."
"And along with the severed-head Two of Wands, I had a strange King of Swords; it was an arm, with the hand holding a sword, poking up out of a body of water, like a weapon was being offered by somebody below the surface."
Mavranos just looked puzzled and irritated—and terribly tired. "And …?"
"And when I've dreamed about playing Assumption on Lake Mead, I see the Fool dancing on a cliff edge, but I also see—sense, really—a giant deep in the lake, and even though I can't see him, I know that he has only one eye."
"Orpheus, in Greek myths—they cut his head off, and it kept talking for a while, making prophecies and such stuff." Mavranos stood up. "Okay, okay. You've done scuba diving before?"
"Oh, sure. Last time I went, I shot a spear through my ankle." He was smiling when he said it, but a moment later he winced, remembering that fifteen-year-old Diana had called him then, as soon as he'd got home from the hospital.
"May as well go right now, I guess," Mavranos said. "I'm getting nowhere with my mystimatical cure."
Crane opened the door. " 'Maybe what you're waitin' for'll be twitchin' at the dance tonight!' " he said, quoting something Riff had said to Tony in West Side Story.
Mavranos smiled sourly as he slapped his jacket pocket for his keys. "You remember it killed Riff and Tony."
When he drove the Camaro under the 93 overpass, Vaughan Trumbill picked up the cellular telephone and punched redial.
Even with the seat levered all the way back, his belly kept getting brushed by the steering wheel, and the car still smelled of Betsy Reculver's flowery old-lady's perfume.
"Yeah, Vaughan," came Benet's squeaky voice over the phone.
"Bets—, uh, Benet—"
"From here on in just call me Georges."
Trumbill realized that he never had called him that, in any of the man's bodies. When Trumbill had first started to work for him, he was already in the Richard Leroy.
"Okay, Georges. They're heading out Fremont. Either they're going back to where that kid got shot, or they're going right on out Boulder Highway to the lake."
"Where the kid got shot." For some reason Georges's voice, even coming out of the Benet vocal cords, sounded stony. "Yeah, I remember that place. Some damned woman destroyed a nice Chevrolet of mine right there." For a moment the phone Trumbill held to his ear was silent, and all he could hear was the muffled roar of the Camaro's engine. "Okay," Georges went on, "if they stop there, take 'em when they get out away from the truck, it's good and private, and I don't see why they'd take guns out with them. You still got Moynihan's guys?"
Trumbill glanced at the rearview mirror. The florist's van was still there, a couple of cars behind him.
"Yes."
"Right, well, kill the mustache and dart Crane. But if they go on past there, toward the lake—Why would they be going to the lake? Rhetorical question, I don't need your guesses. I don't like it if that's where they're going." He sighed. "Catch them somewhere in the desert north of Henderson. Shoot a tire out or something and then just confront them."
"In the desert." Trumbill forced his mind away from the recollection of having only three days ago seen Death itself, the obscene skeleton under the skimpy dress of dried skin, capering in the desert south of town.
Confront them, he thought as he gunned the Camaro through the Desert Inn Road intersection and watched the dusty blue truck barrel steadily along on the bright highway ahead of him. I'm valuable to the old man, he thought, but when it gets down to the bone, I'm an expendable piece in his equation.
As I've always known I was.
He sighed heavily. "If they kill me out there," he said into the phone that was wedged under his pendulous jowl, "you won't forget your part of our old bargain."
He heard Georges sigh, too. "Packed tight in the center of a big cement cube within an hour of your death, Vaughan, don't worry. But I hardly think these guys will take you. Blood pressure, a sledge-hammer of a stroke, is what's going to take you out, my friend."
Trumbill smiled, his cold eyes still on the truck ahead. "Okay. I'll call you after."
He hung up the phone and returned his full attention to the blue truck.
CHAPTER 38: Not the Skinny Man
Neither Crane nor Mavranos spoke as the abandoned gas station swept past on their right.
That's where it all really started to go wrong, Crane thought. To think that we could have just killed Snayheever or broken his arms or something in Baker, if we'd known, if the goddamn cards had told Ozzie about it in the Los Angeles Poker casino. But instead here we are, Scat probably dead by now in the hospital, Oliver in some state home for orphans, Diana and Ozzie certainly dead, Arky and I not looking good at all—why couldn't Ozzie have seen it in the cards?
He hiked around in his seat and looked back. No Jaguar, he thought, but that green Camaro has been hanging around behind us for a while. Probably just tourists wanting to go see the dam—but if he doesn't pass us before long, I'll tell Arky to pull over and let him go on past.
Crane looked out at the scrubby, baking dirt receding away to the distant mountains under the cloudless sky, and he remembered driving along this highway on that early evening in '69, in a Cadillac convertible with—what had his name been? Newt—with Newt at the wheel, nervously explaining to Crane the rules of Assumption Poker. By that time Ozzie had probably already checked out of the Mint and had been gunning for home, to move Diana and all their stuff out of the house and tack the quit-claim up on the front door. It occurred to Crane now, for the first time, that Ozzie must have had the quit-claim ready in case the fact of Crane's terrible father ever became a threat to young Diana. Well, it hadn't become a threat, as it happened, Crane had made it a threat. Crane had almost certainly led the fat man to her.
He looked over his shoulder again. The Camaro was still several car lengths behind them, its chrome trim winking in the sun. And behind it was a van that, it seemed to him now, had been in that position for a while.
He popped open his seat belt and turned around, kneeling on the seat, to rummage in the back.
"Change your mind about the beer?" said Mavranos.
"I'm probably imagining things," said Crane as he found his .357 and Mavranos's .38 and wrapped them in a shirt, "but why don't you pull over and let that Camaro and that van pass us, if they want to." He sat back down in his seat and unwrapped the guns.
Mavranos's eyebrows went up when he looked at the items in Crane's lap. "Pull over where? This shoulder's just gravel. By the time I slowed up enough to pull off, they'd have either passed us already or come right up our tailpipe."
Crane was silent for a while, staring ahead; then he pointed. "There's a slant-in cutoff for a dirt road up there, see it? You could turn in to it without slowing down much, if we hang on. And then if they're bad guys, we should be able to leave them behind on the dirt road. Neither of them's sprung as high as this thing."