Crane could hear sirens—not out front yet, but not too many blocks away. He glanced at the body on the pavement. Dizzy with nausea, he wondered if it was dying, and what Lieutenant Frits would have to say to him about this.
"The hand is up for bid," he said, hearing the pleading tone in his voice.
Doctor Leaky blinked around. "I'll go two, Scotto," he said, laboriously pushing forward two flat pennies.
"And I don't bid," Crane yelled, "so it's yours!" He tucked the gun into his pocket and snatched up Doctor Leaky's hand and the four cards the old man had bought. Then he had scrambled to his feet, broad-jumped over the unconscious body, and was sprinting across the expanse of hot asphalt toward Mavranos's blue truck.
The police were right out front; he could hear the change in the echoes of the sirens and even the wheeze of the shock absorbers and thump of tires as they turned into the driveway.
The blue truck was rolling, turning to be able to leave through the side of the parking lot away from Flamingo Road, and Mavranos had opened the passenger side door.
Crane was running flat-out, his legs pumping furiously to stay under his full-tilt torso, but he knew the police cars would turn into the lot before he would reach the truck.
He heard a squeal of tires, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the taxi lunge forward and crash head-on into the first police car. He was aware that the taxi's doors were immediately flung open, but now he was level with the truck and had to scuff around, flailingly keeping his balance, to get to the open door.
He clawed his way in, crawling across the seat with his legs still kicking outside. "Out the back!" he yelled.
But Mavranos had pulled the steering wheel around the other way now, as if trying to make a figure-8. "Gotta pick up the girls," he said loudly over the battering racket of the engine.
Centrifugal force was pulling Crane out of the truck, and the playing cards crumpled in his hand as he dug his fingers into the upholstery. "Girls?" he shouted as his feet banged the swinging door, trying to get a purchase on anything.
Then, though the truck had not even slowed down, the back door was yanked open and a couple of people piled in back. Crane heard the gas pedal whomp down onto the floorboard, and the four-barrel carburetor kicked the truck hard forward.
As Crane's right foot finally found the door frame and pushed him inside, he was aware that Mavranos had made an abrupt U-turn into some kind of roofed entrance. When he sat up and pulled the door closed, he saw that they were in the Flamingo parking structure, driving slowly up the first ramp, hardly a hundred yards from where they had left the crashed police car.
"Oh, Arky," Crane whispered breathlessly, "this is a dangerous move."
Mavranos was frowning, and his face gleamed with sweat. "Shit, Pogo, tell me something I don't know. But if we tried to drive away on the Strip, they'd have radioed ahead and caught us within a block."
Mavranos swung the truck around the first bend, onto the second-floor ramp of the parking structure. Crane could hear sirens, but none of them were echoing as if they were in here too.
"Jesus, make it work," he whispered, clutching the dashboard with one sweaty hand. "Make them not think about looking in here."
"Turning in here was the best move," came a woman's voice from the back seat, and Crane turned around.
It was a young Asian woman in a cabdriver's uniform who had spoken; there was a branching pattern of blood running down her face from her forehead, but Crane was staring now at her companion.
And his heart was thumping harder now than it had when he'd been running. "Diana?"
Her nose was bleeding, and she was pinching it shut. "Yeah," she said thickly. "Hi, Scott. It's good to see you, Arky."
"Well, I'm lovin' life now," growled Mavranos.
To his own surprise, Crane felt even more frightened than he had a few moments ago. He had once played in a $500 buy-in Hold 'Em tournament—he had been too drunk to get all the rules straight before he started playing, and so he had not been expecting the option of being able to buy in again after going broke; and when he did go broke, and the re-buy was offered to him, he took it eagerly, happily paying out another $500. But the blinds and limits had been steadily increasing, and the minimum bet was now $150, and he realized belatedly that the expense of making the full investment again had only enabled him to play one more hand.
He couldn't remember now whether or not he had won that next hand.
"You two were in the cab that hit the cop car," Crane said.
"Right," said the Asian woman. "And I guess I'm surely committed to this," she said to Diana. "I left my cab there, and they saw us run. I can't claim you were holding a gun on me."
Mavranos had turned onto the third uphill ramp now. Still, there were no parking stalls empty, and the rumble of the exhaust filled the low-ceilinged space.
"Ozzie said you were dead," said Crane to Diana. "He said they blew you up."
"They nearly did. They did kill my poor boyfriend." Diana gave Crane a hard stare. "How is Ozzie?"
"I'm sorry. He's dead."
"Your fault?"
Crane thought about it bleakly. "Yes."
"Ah."
Her face was blank, but tears were running down her cheeks now to mix with the blood on her chin. Nobody spoke while Mavranos slowly turned the truck up onto the fourth level.
At last Crane recognized the young woman who had apparently been driving the cab. "I know you, don't I?" he said. "You drove me away from that shooting by Binion's. Your name was …?"
"Nardie Dinh." She was blotting her forehead with a handkerchief. "Incidentally I take back my advice that you kill yourself. You're everybody's best hope now, such as you are, and I find myself on your side."
Crane looked around at the three people who were in the laboring truck with him. "We're a side?" His voice sounded brittle and hollowly cheerful in his ears. "And I'm the leader, am I? What's your opinion of your leader, Diana?"
Her face was still blank. "I'm in a state of suspended admiration."
Mavranos turned the wheel and swung the truck into an empty stall, the tires echoingly squeaking on the glossy cement floor. "We're gonna have to get some paint up here," he said, "and paint this thing some other color." He turned off the engine. "What you got there, Scott? Something worth all that … furor?"
"Yeah." Crane opened his fist and straightened out the eight crumpled cards. "My father's real body."
CHAPTER 45: No Use Taking Half a Dose
Crane paid for two adjoining rooms in the Flamingo, and he bought two souvenir decks of playing cards in the gift shop before leading the way upstairs.
On one of the beds in the room that was to be his and Mavranos's, Crane broke the seals on the decks and scattered the cards face up across the bedspread.
Mavranos had carried the ice chest up, and Dinh called room service for six Cokes.
"What are you doing?" she asked Crane when she had hung up.
Crane was tentatively arranging the cards. "Trying to figure out how to stack a cold deck for a very complicated Poker game." He had separated out the eight cards that had been Doctor Leaky's hand: the Six and Eight of Hearts, the Knight of Clubs, and the Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, and King of Spades. "I wish my—my father's body had drawn a better hand. Consisted of a better hand. This has to win, and in thirteen-handed Assumption a King-high Flush isn't that great."
"Somebody's going to play with Flamingo cards?" Mavranos asked, sipping a Coors. Diana stood by the window, looking down at the pool.