'I remember.'
A long pause of uneasy silence and sad memories went by. Cassie looked out at the pool. She remembered swimming with Max one night after they thought Leo was asleep. Then the pool light came on and they were naked.
She finally looked back at Leo.
He had opened the file on the desk. There was a quarter-inch-thick stack of hundred-dollar bills in the file along with a page of neatly printed but indecipherable notes torn from a yellow legal pad. One of Leo's precautions. He always kept notes in a coded language that only he knew. He was studying the notes on the yellow paper.
'Now, where do I begin?' he said to himself.
'How about with the reason you said I won't like this one.'
Leo leaned back in his chair and studied her for a long moment.
'Well,' Cassie finally said, 'are you going to tell me or is it written in the stars somewhere for me to read?'
He ignored the jab.
'This is the deal. It's in Las Vegas, which I already warned you about. It's a lot of cash, I am told. But it's a contract job and – '
'With who?'
'Some people. That's all you need to know. Everybody has a part. Nobody knows everybody else. Not even me. We got a guy watching the mark right now and he's just a voice on the phone that tells me things. I have no idea who he is. He knows me by phone but he doesn't know about you. See? It's safest that way. Different players hold different pieces of the same puzzle. Only nobody sees the whole puzzle, just the piece they hold.'
'That's fine, Leo, but I'm not talking about the bit players. You know who it is you're setting this up for, right?'
'Yeah, I know them. I've done business with them in the past. They're good people. In fact, they're investors.'
He pointed to the wall of champagne cases.
'Okay,' Cassie said. 'As long as you vouch for them. What else won't I like about this?'
'What else? The big what else is that it's the Cleo.'
'Jesus Christ!'
'I know, I know.'
He raised his hands as if surrendering in an argument. He then leaned back in his chair and took off his glasses. He put one of the ear hooks in the corner of his mouth and let the glasses dangle.
'Leo, you expect me to go back into that place, let alone Las Vegas, after what happened?'
'I know.'
'I'm never going to set foot in that goddamn place again.'
'I know.'
She got up and stood with her face just inches from one of the sliders. She looked out at the pool again. The vacuum was still moving. Back and forth, back and forth. It reminded her of her own existence.
Leo put his glasses back on and spoke to her in a calming and measured tone.
'Now can I say something?'
She gestured for him to go on though she still didn't look at him.
'Okay, let's remember something here. You called me, I didn't call you. You asked me to set up a job. You said you wanted it big and you wanted it soon. And you wanted it to be cash. Have I got all of that right?'
He waited for an answer but she didn't say anything.
'I'll take your silence as a yes. Well, Cass, this is that job.'
She turned to face him.
'But I didn't say – '
He held up his hand, silencing her.
'Let me finish. All I'm saying is that I brought this to you for consideration. You don't want it, fine. I'll make some calls and I'll go with someone else. But, girl, you were the best I ever knew of on the hot prowl. You are a true artist, if ever I knew one. Even Max would have admitted that. He was the teacher but the student got smarter. So when these guys came to me and told me about this thing, I started thinking it was you all the way. But, hey, I'm not forcing you to do anything. Something else will come down the pipe and I'll call you then. I don't know when that will be, but you'll still be first on my list. You will always be first, Cassie. Always.'
She slowly came back to her chair and sat down.
'You're the artist, Leo. A great bullshit artist. That speech is your way of saying I should do it, isn't it?'
'I didn't say that.'
'You don't have to. It's just that, Leo, you believe in your stars and your I-Ching coins and all your other things. The one thing I have to believe is that that place, that night… that there was just a ghost or something in the mix. A jinx. And it was either on us or on that place. For six years I've been saying that it wasn't us, that it was that place. And now you… you want me to go back there.'
Leo folded the file closed. Cassie watched the stack of money disappear.
'I only want you to do what you want to do. But I have to make some calls now, Cass. I need to set this up with somebody else tonight because the job has to be tomorrow night. The mark's supposed to check out Thursday morning.'
Cassie nodded and felt this awful sense that if she passed on this job there wouldn't be another. She didn't know if this was because Leo wouldn't trust her or because of something else. It was just a premonition. Her mind flashed on the scene of a beach and the surf coming up and wiping out letters drawn in the sand. They were gone before Cassie could read them but she knew what they spelled. Take the job.
'What's my end if I do it?'
Leo looked at her and hesitated.
'You sure you want to know?'
She nodded. He opened the file again and slid the yellow page out from beneath the stack of currency. He spoke while looking down at his notes.
'Okay, this is the deal. We get the first hundred off the top and forty points on the rest. They've been watching this guy. They think he's got about five hundred K, all cash. In a briefcase. That pans out, that comes to two-sixty for us. I'd cut it sixty/forty, you on the big end. Better than a hundred and a half for you. I don't know if it's enough to disappear on permanently but it's a fucking A start and not bad for a night's work.'
He looked up at her.
'Not bad for them, either,' she said. 'Two-forty for doing nothing.'
'Not nothing. They found the mark. That's most important. They also have somebody on the inside who will make things very easy for you.'
He paused for a moment to let the money and the details sink in.
'You interested now?'
Cassie thought a moment.
'You don't know when the next one will be coming, do you?'
'Never do. Right now, this one's all I got. But to be honest, I wouldn't count on the next one being this kind of money. Probably take two, three jobs to put this kind of bread together. This is the big one. This is the one you want.'
He leaned back in his chair, looked over his glasses at her and waited. She knew he had played it just right. He'd let her run out with the line but now was slowly reeling it back in. She was hooked and she knew it. A job with a potential payoff of more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars didn't come along often. The most she and Max had ever pulled on a caper was sixty thousand dollars they took off an assistant to the sultan of Brunei. It was pocket change to the sultan but she and Max had celebrated until dawn at the Aces and Eights Club in North Vegas.
'All right,' she finally said. 'I'm interested. Let's talk about it.'
