Ozzie had walked away, shaking the coins in the vanilla wafers box. Scott followed him.
"She ditched the baby, or Venus would have been behind the moon," Ozzie said. "And the moon's still up and Venus is down, so the kid's still around somewhere, alive."
For an hour, while Scott grew more and more impatient and embarrassed, the two of them walked up and down Las Vegas Boulevard as Ozzie kept shaking the box and looking into it.
And to his own chagrin Scott was not surprised when they heard an infant's sobbing from behind a row of bushes on the south side of the Sands.
"Careful," Ozzie said instantly. The old man's hand was inside his jacket, and Scott knew he was holding the butt of the Smith & Wesson .38.
"Here." Ozzie turned to Scott and passed the gun to him. "Keep it out of sight unless you see somebody coming at me."
It was only a few steps to the bushes, and Ozzie came back with a baby, wrapped in a light-colored blanket, in his arms.
"Back to the car," Ozzie said tensely, "and don't watch us, look around."
The baby had stopped crying and was sucking on one of the old man's fingers. Scott walked behind Ozzie, swinging his head from side to side and occasionally walking backward to monitor all 360 degrees. He wasn't doubting his foster father now.
It took only five minutes to get back to the car. Ozzie opened the passenger-side door and took the gun, and then Scott got in and Ozzie handed him the baby—
—and for a moment Scott not only could feel the baby in his arms but could also feel the pale blanket surrounding him, and could feel protective arms sheltering him. Something in his mind or his soul had for years been unconnected, flapping loose in the psychic breezes, and was now finally connected, and Scott was sharing the baby's sensations—and he knew she was sharing his.
In his mind he could feel a personality that consisted of nothing but fright and bewilderment. You're all right now, he thought. We'll take care of you now; we're taking you home.
The link he shared with the infant was fading, but he did catch a faint surge of relief and hope and gratitude.
Ozzie was behind the wheel, starting the car. "You okay?" he asked, glancing at Scott.
"Uh," Scott said dizzily. The link was gone now, or had receded below the level at which he could sense it, but he was still so shaken by it that he wasn't sure he would not start crying, or laughing, or trembling uncontrollably. "Sure," he managed to say. "I just … never held a newborn baby before."
The old man stared at him for another moment before clanking the car into gear and steering out onto the street. "I hadn't thought of that," he said, alternately looking ahead and peering at the rearview mirror. "That's … something I hadn't … considered." He gave Scott a brief, worried glance. "You going to be okay?"
Ask her, Scott thought. "Sure," he said.
On the long drive home Ozzie had alternately driven very fast and very slow, all the while asking Scott what headlights he could see behind them. When they got back to the familiar streets of Santa Ana, the old man wasted a full hour driving around in circles, lights off and lights on, before at last pulling up to the curb in front of the house.
Diana had been passed off as another illegitimate child of Ozzie's cousin's. The nonexistent cousin was getting quite a reputation.
Now Scott Crane parked the Torino in front of Chick Hurzer's bungalow on Washington Street, and after he turned off the engine and lights, he just sat in the dark car for a few minutes. For the first time in thirteen weeks he was thinking about a different loss than the loss of his wife.
Ozzie and Diana and Scott.
They'd been a family, his family, in that old house. Scott had fed Diana, had helped teach her to read, had admired the crayon drawings she had brought home from first and second grades. She had done a drawing of him as a Christmas present in 1968. Once she had broken her arm falling off the jungle gym on the playground, and once some neighborhood kid had thrown a rock at her forehead, and she'd got a concussion; both times he had been miles away but had known about it, and had gone looking for her.
I never should have gone to the game on the lake, he thought as he impatiently blinked back tears—and Ozzie never should have left me.
He opened the door and got out. Clear your mind for the cards, he told himself.
CHAPTER 8: Just Back from the Dead
Two hundred and seventy-two miles to the northeast, Vaughan Trumbill and Ricky Leroy sat panting on a couch in the houseboat lounge. The two men stared at the scrawny, wet, naked body of Doctor Leaky, which they'd just dragged out of the bathroom.
Trumbill, whose bulk took up more than a third of the couch, wiped his huge bald head with a silk handkerchief. He had taken off his shirt, and his gross, pear-shaped torso was a coiled rainbow of tattoos. "The bathroom light and the fan and the water pump," he said, speaking loudly to be heard over the roar of the generator. "I think he died about the same time the battery did."
"Be glad he didn't drown," said Leroy. "You'd have to empty his lungs again, like out at Temple Basin two years ago." He stood up and stretched. "He'll probably be up at around the same time the battery is. I'm already in a cab from the airport. Half hour, say."
The body on the carpet twitched.
"See?" said Leroy, getting to his feet. "He senses me already." He fetched a towel from the bathroom and tossed it over the old man's scarred, featureless pelvis; then he crouched and prodded Doctor Leaky's cheek and brow. "I hope he didn't fall on the same side of his face as last time. They rebuilt his skull with coral."
Trumbill's eyebrows were raised. "Coral? Like—like seashells, coral reefs, sort of coral?"
"Right. I hear they've got some kind of porous ceramic they use now. Nah, the old jug doesn't seem to have any chips floating loose." He stood up.
"I wish you'd stay away long enough sometime for him to die for good."
"It'd take a while; there're some good protections on that body. And—"
"I know, cryogenics and cloning."
"They're getting closer every day … and this … jug of my own personal DNA is still unbroken."
The naked old body yawned, rubbed its eyes, and sat up. The towel fell away.
"Looking like shit, though," observed Trumbill.
"Welcome back, Doctor," said Leroy wearily.
"They get in all right?" asked Doctor Leaky.
"Everybody's fine, Doctor."
"Good kid," said the naked old man. He peered at the two men on the couch and scratched the white hair on his sunken chest. "One time on the lake—this must have been, oh, 'forty-seven, I hadn't got the Buick yet—or—no, right, 'forty-seven—he got a hook in his finger, and—" He gave each of them a piercing stare. "Do you think he cried?" He waved off any replies they might have had. "Not a bit! Even when I had to push the—the part that, the barb, the barb, not even when I pushed it through so I could clip it off. Clip it off." He squeezed imaginary clippers in the air, and then he stared from Trumbill to Leroy. "Didn't … even … cry."
Leroy was frowning in embarrassment. "Go to your room, you old fool. And put your towel back on. I don't need to be reminded."
Crane got out of the car and carried his plastic 7-Eleven bag across the sidewalk and up the stepping-stones to Chick Hurzer's front door. The lawn and shrubbery looked cared for. That was good; Chick's car dealership must at least be making enough money for him to hire gardeners.