He hooked the phone in the crook of his neck and picked the passports off the seat next to him. He opened one and looked at the photo of the woman he was now talking to on the phone.
'Jane and Jodie Davis,' he said. 'Isn't that nice? Whoever made these up for Leo did a really fine job. Too bad you didn't get the chance to try 'em out.'
Cassie was silent.
Karch kept sticking in needles.
'I guess when that For Sale sign went up you knew you were in trouble. Jodie told me the family was moving to Pawis, as she calls it, in a month. I bet that sure as hell shook you up and put a clock on your plan. You went to Leo for a job. And he put you into the Cleo again. Now here we are.'
'What do you want me to do, Karch? I have the money. Let's talk about the money and get this over with.'
'Where are you?'
'Where do you think, L.A.'
'That's bad. I guess that means you didn't get my little message until it was too late for Agent Kibble. Too bad. That'll be a big pair of shoes to fill at the parole office.'
Karch started laughing as he pulled into the exit lane for Tropicana Boulevard. He would be at the Cleo in ten minutes.
'You're sick, you know that, Karch? Thelma Kibble never did anything to you.'
'Honey, let me tell you something. Half the people I take out never did anything to me. Neither did Jodie Shaw – or should I say, Jodie Davis. I don't give a fuck, you understand?'
'You're a psychopath.'
'Exactly. So this is what you do. You listening? You bring that money back to Vegas as fast as you can. I don't care if you are flying or driving, but you get back here to the Cleo with it by midnight tonight. Back to the scene of the crime.'
He checked the dash clock.
'Four hours. That gives you plenty of time. When you get here you call me again and I'll have someone bring you up to me.'
'Karch, you – '
'Shut up! I'm not finished. I better hear from you by midnight or the Shaws will have to go back to High Desert to see if some other convict's got a bun in the oven they want to give away.'
'I didn't want to give her away!'
Karch held the phone away from his ear.
'I had no choice! I wasn't going to raise my daughter in a – '
'Yeah, yeah, same difference. You and Max must've thought along the same lines.'
There was silence on the line for a long time.
'What are you talking about? You killed him. I know it was you up there that night.'
'I was up there, but you got the rest wrong, lady. But I gotta tell you I didn't even know for sure what happened until today. Until I found out about the girl.'
He paused and she said nothing.
'You want me to go on?'
He waited again. Finally, in a small voice, she told him to go on.
'See, I was in the bed like I was asleep. I let him go through the room and then go out into the second room, the living room. I then got up, got my gun from under the pillow and went out there. I confronted him. I had the gun and he didn't have shit. What else could he do but get down on the ground like I told him. But he didn't do it. I told him again and he just looked at me. Then he said something that's taken me all this time to figure out. Because, see, I didn't know about the baby, about you and him and what you told him that night before he went up to do the job.'
40
CASSIE hated driving through the desert at night. It was like being in a tunnel with no end. What Karch was saying only made it worse. Tears began clouding her vision of the road in the lights of her car. She swallowed and tried to calm her voice.
'What did he say?' she said. 'Tell me what he said.'
She had the call on speaker. Karch's voice came to her out of the dark. Disembodied and carrying a slight echo, it sounded as though he was all around her and even inside her head.
'He said 'Not again. Better none, than one in stir.' Then he turned and ran right through that window. And I never knew what he meant until I found out from Kibble today what he knew that night. You told him he was a father, that you and him, you know. So he knew right then if he went with me he'd be in jail when that little kid was born and grew up. And that happened to him, remember? He grew up with an old man in stir. And he didn't want that for anybody.'
He stopped talking and Cassie had nothing to say. She wished she could just hang up, pull off the road and walk blindly into the desert night. She wouldn't care what was waiting out there in the darkness.
She believed Karch. She had no reason to but she knew in her heart that he was telling the truth about what Max had said. She realized then that telling him, surprising him with the news that night, had set things into a terrible motion. In her mind she suddenly saw Max's crumpled body on the casino table. She had run to him and cradled his head in her arms. They'd had to pull her away from him.
'So you see,' Karch suddenly said, 'if there's anybody you should blame it's you, not me. You had the kid in your belly and you told him the news. What do you think about that, Cassie Black?'
She didn't answer. She gripped the wheel so tightly her knuckles glowed white in the dim light from the dash gauges. She felt a deep-rooted tremble go through her. It started in her chest and then made her shoulders shake. It moved like a wave down her arms until control of the wheel was in question. Finally, it passed. She tried to put thoughts about Max aside, to be dealt with later. Jodie was the important thing. She had to concentrate on Jodie.
'You know something?' Karch said. 'Now that I understand what happened in that room with Max, the one thing I don't understand is what happened in the room with Hidalgo. I mean, why'd you do it?'
Cassie didn't understand why he asked such an obvious question.
'Why else? The money.'
'But why put the guy down unless you had to and it didn't seem to me that – '
'What are you talking about? Hidalgo? Hidalgo's dead?'
'You should know that better than – '
'No! I don't know what you're talking about!'
'It looked pretty cold-blooded to me. Guy sitting there in bed in his underwear, defenseless, and you pop him like that.'
As he spoke Cassie remembered her last moments in the room. Hidalgo was restless, waking up. She stood at the foot of the bed and raised the gun. She had been ready and willing to do what was necessary. To cross the final line. Had she done it, had she crossed, and then blocked it from her memory? Impossible.
'Karch, listen to me. If he's dead somebody else did it.'
There was a pause and then Karch's voice came back.
'Sure. Whatever you say. It still doesn't change things. You're coming back here with the money and – '
'Karch?'
'What?'
'How do I know you even have her?'
He laughed in a fake way into the phone.
'That's just it. You don't.'
'I need to talk to her. Before I come there, I need to know you have her. And that she's alive. Please, Karch.'
