Michael Connelly - Void Moon

His pager sounded and he picked it up off the bureau. He recognized the call-back number as Vincent Grimaldi's. He deleted it, hooked the pager on his belt and finished adjusting his tie. He wasn't going to call Grimaldi back. He planned to drop by in person to inform him of the progress he had made.

When he was done with the tie he went back to the bureau for his guns. He holstered the Sig and snapped the safety strap over it. He then picked up the little. 25 popper. It was a Beretta he could fit in his palm. He turned back to the mirror and held his hands loosely at his sides, the. 25 hidden in his right hand. He made a few moves and gestures, always sure to keep the pistol hidden from view. David's right hand, he thought. David's right hand.

He then went on to practice the finish, moving his apparently empty hands as if in conversation and then suddenly producing the gun pointed right at himself in the mirror. When he had practiced this enough he put the little gun back into the black silk magician's pocket that he'd had a downtown tailor sew onto the inside rear belt line of his pants – every pair of pants he owned. He then held his hands palms out to the mirror and then brought them together as if in prayer. He bowed his head and backed away from the mirror, end of show.

On his way to the garage Karch stopped in the kitchen and took a mason jar out of one of the cabinets. He took the top off and dropped the two bullet shells from the desert into it with the others. He then held the jar up and looked at it. It was almost half full of shells. He shook the jar and listened to the shells rattle inside. He then put it back in the cabinet and took out a box of Honeycombs cereal. He was famished. He hadn't eaten all day and the physical exertion in the desert had sapped his strength. He started eating the cereal right out of the box, handfuls at a time, careful not to get any crumbs on his clothes.

He stepped into the garage, which had been illegally converted into an office, and sat down behind his desk. He didn't need an office in a commercial building like most private investigators. Most of his work – on the legitimate side – came in from out of state on the phone. His specialty was missing persons cases. He paid the two detectives who ran Metro's missing persons unit five hundred dollars a month to refer clients to him. As a matter of policy, Metro could not act on a routine report of a missing adult until forty-eight hours had elapsed since the time of the report. This practice had originated because most missing people were missing on purpose and often turned up on their own a day or so after supposedly disappearing. In Las Vegas this was most often the case. People came on vacation or for conventions and cut loose in a city designed to knock down inhibitions. They shacked up with strippers and hookers, they lost their money and were too embarrassed to go home, they won lots of money and didn't want to go home. There were endless reasons and that was why the police had a wait-and-see attitude.

However, the forty-eight-hour policy and the reasons behind it did not placate the concerned and sometimes hysterical loved ones of the supposedly missing. That was where Karch and a legion of other private investigators came in. By paying off the cops in the MPU, Karch made sure his name and number were often suggested to people who reported missing persons and didn't want to wait the required forty-eight hours before a search was begun.

The five hundred Karch deposited each month into a bank account the two cops had access to was a bargain. He drew as many as a dozen calls a month on missing persons cases. He charged four hundred dollars a day plus expenses, with a two-day minimum. He often located the supposedly missing person inside an hour with a simple credit card trace but he never told the clients that. He just had them wire payment to his bank account before he revealed their loved one's location. To Karch it was all another form of sleight of hand. Keep things in motion with misdirection. Never reveal what is in your palm.

His office was a shrine to a Las Vegas long gone by. The walls were a collage of photographs of entertainers from the fifties and sixties. There were numerous shots of Frank and Dean and Sammy, some individual and some as a group. There were photos of dancers and framed fight cards.

There were postcards depicting casino resorts that no longer existed. There was a framed collection of gambling chips – one from every casino that opened its doors in the fifties. There was a large blowup photo of the Sands crumbling to the ground after being dynamited to make way for the new era of Las Vegas. Many of the photos were autographed and inscribed, but not to Jack Karch. They were inscribed to "The Amazing Karch!" – his father.

At center on the wall Karch faced while seated at his desk was the largest frame on any of the walls. It was a blowup photo of the huge neon-gilded headliner sign that had stood outside the Sands. It said Now Appearing FRANK SINATRA

JOEY BISHOP

THE AMAZING KARCH!

Karch looked at the photo across from him for a long moment before getting down to work. He had been nine years old when he saw his father's name on the big sign. His father took him with him one night to watch the show from the side of the stage. He was standing there watching his father perform an illusion called The Art of the Cape when he was tapped on the shoulder and looked up to see Frank Sinatra. The man who was the living embodiment of Las Vegas faked a punch off his chin and asked with a smile if he had an exclamation point at the end of his name, too. It was the most indelible memory of his childhood. That and what happened to his father a few years later at Circus, Circus.

Karch looked away from the photo and checked the message machine on the desk. He had three waiting messages. He hit the playback button and picked up a pencil, ready to take notes. The first message was from a woman named Marion Rutter from Atlanta who wanted to hire Karch to look for her husband, Clyde, who hadn't come home from a kitchenware convention in Las Vegas. She was very worried and wanted someone to start looking for Clyde right away. Karch wrote down her name and number but wouldn't be calling back because for the moment he was booked.

The next two messages were both from Vincent Grimaldi. He sounded annoyed. He demanded that Karch check in with him right away.

Karch erased the messages and leaned back in his padded leather desk chair. He grabbed another handful of cereal and studied the two stacks of cash on his desk while he ate. He had gone to Jersey Paltz's apartment after the desert and used the dead man's keys to go in, open the strongbox he found in a closet and take the money. One stack was $ 8,000 in one-hundred-dollar bills. The other stack was $4,480 in twenties. Karch figured the $ 8,000 belonged to Grimaldi. Minus the $ 550 Karch had accumulated so far in expenses – $ 500 to Cannon for the Flamingo video trail and $ 50 to Iverson for the plate run. Make it an even $ 600 to cover gas and other incidentals, he decided. The other stack Karch was going to keep free and clear. It had not been part of the caper at the Cleo. It had apparently been Paltz's own savings.

He put what was his into one of the desk drawers, which he then locked with a key. He took out a preprinted and generic invoice form and wrote out a receipt for the $ 7,400 he would be returning to Grimaldi. He did not put his name anywhere on the form. When he was finished he folded the money inside the receipt and put it in an envelope he then slid into the inside pocket of his coat.

He sat motionless at the desk for a few moments wondering if he should have deducted more money to cover the trip he knew he would be making to Los Angeles. He finally decided against it and got up and came around the desk to the row of file cabinets beneath the blowup photo of the Sands going down. He unlocked a drawer with a key, looked through the files until he found the one he wanted and then went back to the desk with it.