"I'll just leave 'em here. In fact, if I could just go to sleep on this couch—"
"Sleep later, and right now bring them into the kitchen. I am in this for my health."
Crane just stared at the note on the back of the photograph of Lady Issit while Mavranos shuffled the photographs from the other envelopes around on the kitchen table and read the notes attached to them.
"So who are these people?" he asked. He looked up, then snapped his fingers at Crane. "Hmm? What's this … category you're a part of?"
Crane blinked and looked up. "Oh, they're—a couple of 'em I recognize. Poker players. One of them was in a game with me in '69, in a houseboat on Lake Mead. He won a big pot, what in this game is called the Assumption. He—" Crane sighed. "He took money for the hand. So did I. These others were probably at one of the other lake games that week, and I bet they won some Assumptions, too."
Crane looked back at the note on the picture of Lady Issit. For the dozenth time he read, "Diana Smith—possibly living with Ozzie Smith—address unknown—urgently FOLD." He realized that his heart was pounding and his palms were damp. "I've, uh, got to get in touch with somebody," he said.
"You can use the phone."
"I don't know where she is. And I don't know anybody that would."
"I got no Ouija board, Pogo."
Urgently FOLD.
He thought of the awed care with which he had held her during the long drive back from Las Vegas in 1960, and of the portrait she'd done of him, and he tried to remember what each of them had said the last time they'd talked, when she'd called him after he'd put the fishing spear through his ankle. When she'd been fifteen.
He'd dreamed that she got married. He wondered if she had children. She'd be thirty now, so she probably did. Maybe her psychic link was with the children now, and no longer with him.
Mavranos had got up and slouched back into the living room; now Crane heard him say, quietly, "Blue van just pulled up, and three guys got out of it; they're heading for your place."
What's in the pot is gone, Ozzie had always said. It ain't yours anymore. You might win it, but until you do, you gotta regard it as spent, not chase it.
"Up on your porch now," Mavranos said.
Of course, when the antes or blinds have been high, so high that it's as much as you're worth to stay in a dozen hands, why then you gotta play looser.
"Lights on in your living room," Arky said. "Kitchen now. Spare bedroom. Real bedroom, too, probably, but I can't see it from here."
And if the antes have been so big that guys are staying just because of it, sometimes you can bet everything you've got and win with a damn poor hand.
Crane turned the photograph over and looked at the pregnant woman. Then he got up and walked into the living room and stood beside Mavranos. Crane watched the silhouettes moving in his house. One was obviously the fat man. He must have met the van somewhere nearby. "I've got to get in there," he said.
"No way tonight—and these guys'll probably watch the place for a couple of days. What's in there that we can't get somewhere else?"
"The phone."
"Shit, I told you you could use mine."
"It's gotta be that one."
"Yeah? Tell me why." He was still staring out the window. Crane looked at Mavranos's lean silhouette, the narrowed eyes glinting in reflected streetlight glow. The man looked like a pirate.
Can I trust him? Crane wondered. He's obviously got some sort of stake in this situation, but I'll swear he's a loner, not associated with any of these—these murky thrones and powers and assassins. We've been sociable neighbors for a while, and he always got along with Susan. And God, it would be wonderful to have an ally. "Okay," Crane said slowly. "If we both tell the other guy everything we know—I mean, that he knows—himself—about this stuff—"
Mavranos was grinning at him. "You mean we lay our cards on the table."
"That's it." Crane held out his right hand.
Mavranos enveloped it in his own calloused, scarred right hand and shook it firmly twice. "Okay."
Eighteen hours later Crane was crawling on his hands and knees across the floor of his own living room toward the telephone, his right eyelid stinging and his cheek saltily wet.
The intruders had turned off the lights when they had left, but the blinds were raised, and the traffic and neon signs and streetlights of Main Street gave the room a flickering twilight glow in the middle of this Friday night.
Ten minutes earlier Mavranos had driven his car up to the curb in front of Crane's house and had got out and walked up to the front door, to attract the attention of anyone who might be watching the place. After knocking and getting no response, he had gone back to his car, leaned in through the open window, and honked the horn three times—two shorts and one long.
Crane had been in the alley behind the house.
At the first of the short blasts Crane pushed his way through his dilapidated back fence; the second honk blared as he was sprinting across his dark, unkempt back lawn, and when the third began, he punched a leather-gloved hand through his bedroom window, brushed the glass splinters away from the bottom edge of the frame, and dived through and scrambled across the bed.
By the time the horn stopped he was standing beside the bed. The air was warm, almost hot; the heater had been running all night and all day and half the night again, and of course the stove was on.
He took off Arky's work glove and tossed it onto the floor.
The bedroom had been ransacked. The blankets and sheets had been torn off the bed, and the mattress had been slashed, and the bureau drawers had been dumped out on the floor.
He walked down the hall to the bathroom, stepping carefully in the darkness and bracing his hands on the walls, for the floor was an obstacle course of scattered magazines and books and clothes. The bathroom was completely dark, and he groped through the litter of boxes and bottles that had been spilled out of the medicine cabinet into the sink.
He hadn't been able to stop yawning, and his palms were damp.
Among the litter in the sink he had come across the rubber bulb and the bottle of saline solution, and he'd shrugged. As long as you're here, he thought.
Working by touch, he poured some of the solution into the coffee mug that was miraculously still on the sink. He reached a finger up to his face and pushed inward on the side of his right eye. With a sort of inner sploosh the plastic hemisphere came loose from the Teflon ring that was attached to two of the muscles in his eye socket. The medial rectus, he remembered, and the lateral rectus. He'd had the ring put in about 1980. Before that he'd had a glass eye, and once a month he'd had to go to the eye man to have it taken out and cleaned. Now it was a task to be done every day at home, like cleaning contact lenses.
He carefully put the artificial eye into the mug and then used the bulb to suck up some of the saline solution and begin squirting it into the cavity of his empty eye socket.
He hadn't done it this morning, so he squirted it out thoroughly. Irrigating the cavity, his doctor always called it.
Finally he couldn't pretend any longer that he hadn't finished. What had he come in here for?
Oh, he thought. Right. Rubbing alcohol and a sterile pad and a roll of sterile gauze bandage. He replaced his artificial eye, yawned again, then began groping through the darkness. He didn't seem able to take a deep breath.
I bet they cut it, he thought now, crawling across the living-room floor and blinking the excess solution out of his eye. I bet they did. He was dragging along the bandages and the bottle of rubbing alcohol, wrapped in a shirt from the laundry hamper.