Michael Connelly - Void Moon

Karch dropped to his knees and hovered over him.

"You think you beat me? Huh? Huh? You think you won?"

Leo could only answer with his smile. Karch knew it said Fuck You! He raised the gun and pressed the muzzle into Renfro's bloody mouth.

"You didn't win."

He leaned back and turned his face away. He pulled the trigger. The shot blew out the back of Renfro's head and killed him instantly.

Karch pulled the weapon away and studied the dead man's face. His eyes were open and somehow he still had the smile.

"Fuck you. You didn't beat me."

He leaned back on his heels and looked around himself. He saw a drop of blood spatter on the white instep of one of his two-tone Lite Tread spectator shoes. He used his thumb to wipe it off and then wiped his thumb on Leo's shirt.

He stood up and looked around the office. He sighed loudly. He knew he had a long night of searching ahead. He had to find the money. He had to find Cassie Black.

ON Friday morning Cassie Black arrived at the dealership at ten and checked with Ray Morales to see what was what. He had taken her calls while she had been out the last few days. Ray said all was quiet but that he had a prospect coming in to test-drive a new Boxster at three. He had just been given a development deal at Warner Brothers that ran into seven figures. Ray had gotten it out of the Hollywood Reporter and expected it to be an easy sale. She thanked him for thinking of her with the prospect and was about to head to her office when he stopped her.

"You okay, kid?" he asked.

"Sure, why?"

"I don't know. You don't look like you've been sleeping much lately."

Cassie brought her right hand up and cupped her left elbow, which still ached from the briefcase jolt.

"I know," she said. "Just been thinking about things. Sometimes it keeps me awake."

"What things?"

"I don't know. Just things. I'll be in my office if you need me."

She left him then and went to the sanctuary of her tiny office. She dropped her backpack into the foot well of the desk and sat down. She put her elbows up on the blotter and ran her hands through her hair. She felt like screaming I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE! But she tried to put her anxieties aside by reminding herself that one way or another her life would be changing very soon.

She picked up the phone to check her voice mail, even though on Tuesday she had left a generic outgoing message saying she would be off work for a few days and referring calls to Ray Morales until she got back. Four messages had been left for her anyway. One was from a body shop reporting a set of customized chrome wheels for a ' 58 Speedster she had sold were now ready. The second call was from one of Ray's prospects – a producer at Fox – from the week before. He wasn't calling about the car he had test-driven. He was just calling to tell her he had liked her style and wanted to know if she was interested in going with him to a premiere of a friend's picture the following week. Cassie didn't bother writing down the guy's private cell phone number.

"If you liked my style, why didn't you buy the car?" she said into the phone.

The third message was from Leo. There was an agitation in his voice she had not heard before. The message had come in at 12:10 A.M. that morning. She listened to it three times.

"Hey, it's me. What's wrong with your cell phone? I couldn't get through. Anyway, I just got back from my drop. I have those things you wanted but there's something else, something wrong. Somebody got the address somehow and dropped me something there. An ace of hearts from the Flamingo. I don't know what it means but it means something. Call me when you get this. Use all precautions and keep your head down. Oh, and erase this, okay?"

Cassie hit the three button on the phone, erasing Leo's recording before she went on to the fourth message. The last call had come in at seven-thirty that morning and it was a hang-up call. There had been no background noise, just a few seconds of someone breathing and then the hang-up. She wondered if it had been Leo.

She hung up the phone, reached down to the floor and pulled her backpack up onto her lap. She first dug through it until she found her cell phone. It had been turned off. She remembered doing it the night before after hanging up on Leo and deciding she didn't want him calling back.

She turned the phone on now and put it down on the desk. She then continued digging through the bag until she found the box containing the deck of cards she had bought in the gift shop at the Flamingo. She quickly opened it, turned the deck face up and started going through the cards one at a time looking for the ace of hearts. The closer she got to the bottom of the deck the greater the dread that was building inside her. When she reached the last card without seeing the ace of hearts she cursed out loud and threw the deck across the small office. It hit the Tahiti poster and then cards exploded in all directions, coming down on the floor and the desk.

"Goddammit!"

She buried her face in her palms as she tried to figure out what to do. She snatched up the phone to call Leo but then thought better of it. Use all precautions. She thought of using her cell phone but dismissed that, too. She opened the desk drawer and grabbed a handful of change from a tray meant for pens and pencils and got up.

She opened the door and almost walked right into Ray Morales, who had apparently come to see what the commotion was about.

"Excuse me," she said, making a move to go around him.

Ray looked past her into the office and saw the playing cards all over the place.

"What, you playing fifty-two pickup in there?"

"More like fifty-one."

"What?"

"I'll be back in a few minutes, Ray. I have to take a walk."

He silently watched her cross the showroom and go out the glass door.

Cassie walked a block down to the Cinerama Dome, where she knew there was a pay phone out front. She dialed Leo's cell phone number from memory and listened to ten unanswered rings before hanging up. Now questioning everything, she dialed it again in case she had messed up the first time. This time it went twelve rings before she hung up. The dread that had begun to rise in her while she looked through the cards had now gone several notches up the ladder to the level of panic.

She tried to calm herself by trying to think of reasons the call to Leo would go unanswered. The cell phone and Leo were attached like Siamese twins. If the phone had not been turned on, she knew her call would have been diverted to a message. She wouldn't have gotten the continuous ringing. So the phone was on but not being answered. The question was why.

The pool, she suddenly remembered. Leo swam laps in the morning. He'd have taken the phone out to the table next to the pool, but if he was in the middle of his laps he wouldn't hear it, not with the water sloshing around him and the freeway noise as well.

The explanation calmed her a bit. She called Leo's number once more and again it went unanswered. She put the phone back on its hook and decided to go back to the dealership. She would come back and try calling again in a half hour or forty-five minutes. She remembered Leo once told her he swam three miles a day. She had no idea how long that would take but figured that a half hour should be enough time.

Five minutes later she walked back into the dealership showroom and saw Ray and a man who wore a porkpie hat looking at the silver Carrera with the whale tail spoiler. Ray saw her and signaled her over with his fingers.

"Cassie, this is Mr. Lankford. He wants to buy a car."

The customer turned and smiled with embarrassment.

"Well, I want to look at a car. I mean, drive it. Then we'll see."

He put his hand out.