Michael Connelly - Void Moon

As he cut between the gaming tables and weaved around drunken, all-night gamblers who crossed blindly into his path, Karch kept his eyes on the door behind the pulpit, half expecting someone to come hustling out of security, maybe adjusting his collar or his tie as he took his position. But nobody ever came and Karch finally dropped his eyes when he got to the Euphrates Tower elevator alcove.

The alcove was empty except for one woman who was holding her plastic change cup and waiting. She looked at Karch's severe face and then turned away, putting her free hand over the top of her cup as if guarding its contents. He casually stepped over to the sand jar beneath the call button and brought his foot up onto the edge of it, bending over as if he were about to tie his shoe. He did this so his back was to the woman. Instead of tying his shoe he dipped his finger into the black sand, which had been freshly cleaned of cigarette butts and smoothed. He cut his finger through the sand until it found what he knew would be there. He withdrew the card key and straightened up just as an elevator chimed its arrival.

After following the woman into the elevator, he blew the dust off the card key and used it to engage the PH button after the woman had pushed the six button. Standing next to her Karch could glimpse between her splayed fingers and into her cup. It was about half full of nickels. She was the smallest of the small-timers and either didn't want him to know it or she actually thought there was something suspicious about him. She was about his age, with big hair. He guessed she had come to Las Vegas from somewhere in the south. She stood with her face cast downward but he knew she was keeping an eye on his reflection in the polished wood veneer of the door. Karch knew he had the kind of face that made people wary. His nose and chin were sharply drawn, his skin was always sallow despite a life beneath the desert sun, and his hair was as black as a limousine. These features all took a backseat to his eyes. They were the color of puddle ice and looked just as dead.

Karch reached into his pocket and pulled out his smokes. Holding the four fingers of his right hand together as a blind to the reflection, he shook two cigarettes out, palming one while passing the second to his left hand. He half expected her to protest the very sight of a cigarette but she said nothing. He then expertly performed the ear-to-mouth trick his father had taught him so many years ago. Holding the second cigarette at the end of all four fingers and the thumb of his left hand, he created the illusion of pushing the cigarette into his ear and then using his right hand to pull it out of his mouth and into place between his lips.

He watched her reflection and could tell she had seen the gag. She turned slightly as if she was about to say something but then caught herself. The door opened and she stepped out on six. As she turned to the left to leave the alcove and the elevator doors began to close, Karch called out to her.

"Made you look."

He then laughed to himself as the doors closed on his vision of the woman turning back toward him.

"Next time take your nickels to Branson," he said after the elevator began its ascent again.

Karch shook his head. The Cleo had once had such promise. Now it was the destination of the nickel-and-dimers, a place where the carpets were worn thin and the pool was crowded with men wearing sandals and black socks. One more time he wondered what he was doing, how and why he had ever sold out to Vincent Grimaldi.

Ten seconds later he stepped out on the twentieth floor. He stepped into the hallway and found it empty except for a room service cart somebody had shoved into the hallway. It smelled rancid as Karch walked around it and headed down the hallway to the right.

He looked up at the first door he passed and saw it was 2001. He remembered that room from a long time before. It was in that room that he had made his first play to Vincent Grimaldi. It seemed to Karch to have been so long ago and so the memory annoyed him. How far had he come since then? Not far, he knew. Not far at all. Perhaps he, too, was a nickel-and-dimer in a nickel-and-dime palace. His thoughts jumped to the empty pulpit down in the casino and he imagined what the view of the gaming room was like from there.

He came to room 2014 and used the card key to open the door.

As he stepped in he saw Vincent Grimaldi standing at the floor-to-ceiling window of the suite's sitting room. He seemed to be staring out across the city toward the expanse of desert lying before the chocolate-brown mountains that edged the horizon. It was a clear, bright day out there.

Grimaldi apparently had not heard Karch's entry and did not turn around. Karch came down the entrance hallway and into the suite. He noticed the bedroom doors were closed. The place smelled of old cigars, disinfectant and something else. He tried to place it and then his heart moved up a gear. Burned gunpowder. Maybe Vincent really needed him this time.

"Vincent?"

Grimaldi turned away from the window. He was a short man with a harsh and overtanned, V -shaped face with skin that looked as though it had been stretched too tight across the cheekbones. His iron-gray hair was slicked back perfectly and he wore an impeccable Hugo Boss suit. He always dressed as though the casino and hotel he ran was the Mirage. But he was the mirage. The Cleopatra was second tier, moving toward the third. Its location on the Strip was the only thing stopping that for the moment. But there was no doubt that Grimaldi was the captain of an old river barge in a sea of new luxury liners with names like Bellagio, Mandalay Bay and the Venetian.

"Jack! I didn't hear you. Where you been?"

Karch ignored the question. He looked at his watch. It was 8:10, only forty minutes since he had gotten Grimaldi's page with the 911 emergency code added at the end. Forty minutes wasn't bad, especially in light of Grimaldi's refusal to tell him what the problem was over the phone.

"What's up?"

"What's up is that we have a big fucking problem here."

He stepped over and held his hand out for the card key Karch still held in his hand. Karch gave him the key and thought about lighting his cigarette but decided to wait.

"You indicated that on the phone, Vincent. Now I'm here. What am I supposed to do, guess what the problem is or are you finally going to tell me?"

"No, Jack, I'll show you. Check it out."

He pointed to the bedroom door with his chin. It was a typical gesture with Grimaldi, who always employed an economy of physical movement as well as words.

Karch looked at him a moment, awaiting further explanation, but none came. He turned and went to the bedroom door. He opened it and stepped into the room.

The bedroom was dark save for a slice of sunlight that cut through the inch-wide break in the closed curtains. The light cut diagonally across the bed, where the body of an overweight man lay face up. The dead man's right eye was gone, obliterated when a bullet was fired almost point blank through the socket and into his brain. The wood headboard and wall behind the bed were splattered with blood and whitish-gray brain matter. Six inches above the headboard there was a bullet hole in the wall.

Karch came around the front of the bed and looked down, studying the corpse. The dead man was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of pale blue boxer shorts. Karch saw that a pair of handcuffs had been attached to his right wrist – both cuffs around the same wrist. Also on the bed, a handgun was lying between the dead man's legs. Karch bent down and studied it. It was a Smith amp; Wesson 9 mm with a satin finish.

Grimaldi came to the bedroom doorway but didn't come in.

"Who found him?" Karch asked, his eyes still on the corpse.

"Me."