Void Moon

12

KOVAL Road ran parallel to Las Vegas Boulevard and offered easy access to the parking garages behind the grand resorts fronting the always crowded boulevard, better known as the Strip. Cassie passed by the Koval Suites, the monthly apartment building where she and Max had once kept a safe house, and turned into the multilevel parking garage attached to the Flamingo Casino and Resort. The casino garage was centrally located to the casinos on the mid-Strip, the key being never to park at the target hotel. She parked Paltz's van on the roof of the eight-story garage because she knew there would be fewer cars up there and a lesser chance that her bound and gagged passenger would be discovered. She skipped the elevator in favor of the stairs down to the walkway leading into the casino.

Carrying her black bag over one shoulder and the gym bag down at her side, she went in the rear entrance of the Flamingo and walked through the casino to the front door, stopping briefly along the way in one of the lobby shops to buy a pack of cigarettes, in case she had to set off a fire alarm, and a souvenir pack of playing cards with which to pass the time while waiting for her mark to fall asleep. Once she stepped out the front doors, she crossed Las Vegas Boulevard and then walked the two blocks to the Cleopatra.

Cassie was carried past the reflecting pools on a moving sidewalk that delivered gamblers to the casino entrance. She noted that there was no automatic ride that took gamblers away from the casino after they were done losing their money.

The casino entry walls were lined with hieroglyphics that showed ancient Egyptian figures in headdresses playing cards and throwing dice. Cassie wondered if there was any historic precedent for these depictions but also realized that it was not a necessity because there was no historical precedent for anything about Las Vegas.

Farther past the drawings, the walls were dedicated to Cleo's Club – photographs of the big slots winners over the past year. Cassie noticed that many of the winners posed in front of their winning machines were smiling in a way that suggested they were hiding missing teeth. She wondered how many of the winners used the money to see a dentist and how many dumped it right back into the machines.

When she finally got to the casino floor, she paused and tried to take it all in without raising her face toward the cameras she knew were overhead. A visceral sense of dread took hold of her heart. Not for the job that was ahead this night. But for the memory of the last night she had been in the Cleopatra Casino. It was the night that all things in her life had changed with the permanency of death.

The casino looked no different to her. The same setup, the same interchangeable gamblers chasing desperate dreams. The cacophony of money and machines and human voices of joy and anguish was almost deafening. She composed herself and pressed on, weaving her way through a football field of crowded slot machines and blue felt gaming tables. She was also aware that every move she made was now being recorded from above and kept her head level, if not slightly turned down. She pulled the wide brim of her hat down tight over her brow. The drugstore glasses completed her camouflage. Her scalp was warm and damp under the wig but she knew she had hours to go before there would be any relief from it.

As she passed through the cards and dice gaming aisles she saw many men and a few women in the blue-blazer uniform of casino security. They seemed to be posted at every column and at the end of every row of dealers' tables. She saw signs leading to the lobby and followed. She glanced upward at one point but without raising her chin.

The ceiling rose in a three-story-high glass atrium above the gaming tables. When it first opened its doors seven years before, the Cleopatra had been called the "Crystal Cathedral of Casinos," a reference to its borrowing of the atrium and other design elements from a California house of God that was prominent on religious television programming. Below the partial glass ceiling iron standards stretched from wall to wall and held up banks of lights and cameras. The Cleopatra was like no other casino in Las Vegas in that it allowed natural light to enter the gaming room. It also made no effort to hide the cameras that watched over everything. Other casinos favored contained environments of artificial lighting and placement of cameras behind mirrored walls and ceiling globes, even though not a single player below doubted that every move that he or she made – as well as the money on the tables – was being closely watched.

Cassie's eyes were drawn upward to the balcony that extended like two joined arms out and above the crowded gaming tables. The hands of the arms formed a cup – the crow's nest from which a craggy-faced man looked down upon the gaming floor. He had white hair and wore a dark suit, not a blue blazer. She guessed he had to be one of the men in charge, maybe the man himself. She couldn't help but wonder if he had stood in the pulpit six years earlier on the last night she had been in the casino.

Once past the tables Cassie got to the lobby and went to the far end of the long desk, where she saw the sign for INVITED GUESTS AND VIPS. There was no one in line. She approached the counter and a woman wearing some sort of white tunic that was only vaguely Egyptian smiled at her.

"Hello," Cassie said. "There is supposed to be a package for me here. The name is Turcello."

"One moment."

The woman stepped away from the counter and retreated to a door behind her. Cassie felt her breathing slow as thief's paranoia rose in her chest. If this was all a setup, then now would be the time for the men in blue blazers to come back through that door to get her.

But it was the woman in the tunic who came back out. She carried a large manila envelope bearing the Cleopatra symbol – a line drawing of a woman's face in profile, wearing a headdress of a rising serpent – and handed it to her with a smile.

"Thank you very much," she said.

"No, thank you," Cassie said.

She carried the envelope without looking at it to a nearby alcove of pay phones. There was no one using any of them. She went to the phone in the corner and huddled close to it, using her back to shield what she was doing from the view of any person or camera.

She tore open the envelope and dumped the contents on the marble counter under the phone. A black pager with a digital readout slid out of the envelope along with an electronic card key, a photograph and a note torn from a Cleopatra scratch pad. She quickly glanced at the pager and hooked it onto her belt. She then slipped the card key into the back pocket of her black jeans and looked at the note. Four lines were printed on it.

EUPHRATES PENTHOUSE

His: 2014

Yours: 2015

Return envelope with all contents to the VIP desk She studied the first line and felt a turning in her stomach. She leaned her head against the phone. The penthouse of the Euphrates Tower was familiar to her. It was the place where dreams and hopes had ended for her. It was one thing to come back to Vegas, another to return to the Cleo. But to go back to the penthouse… Cassie fought the urge to cut and run. She reminded herself of all that was at stake. She had gone too far to turn around at this point.

She tried to change her thoughts. She looked at the note again and picked up the card key. One key for two rooms meant she was holding a pass key. That explained the last line of instructions on the note. The key had to be returned because all pass keys probably had to be accounted for. If any investigation followed the crime she was about to commit, pass keys would be inventoried.

She slowly crumpled the note in one hand and looked at the photo. It showed a baccarat table where there was only one player: an obese man in a suit with a large stack of chips in front of him. Diego Hernandez. The photo had a date-and-time stamp on the corner – it had been taken that afternoon. It was obvious to Cassie that the photo had come from a casino surveillance camera. The pass key and the photo told Cassie that the spotter Leo's partners had was deeper inside than she had thought.

She committed the image of the fat man to memory and then put the photograph and the crumpled note back into the envelope. She folded it twice and shoved it into a zippered pocket on her backpack. She then headed back to the casino floor.

Without raising her head she scanned the table signs in the casino until she saw the one over the baccarat salon. She took the long way, skirting the edge of the gaming area until she came to the railing that ran along the perimeter of the baccarat salon. She put an elbow and an arm along the railing, nonchalantly leaned back against it and looked out across the casino. Her eyes encountered no one looking at her. She was cool. Slowly she turned, as if noticing the baccarat salon behind her for the first time, and shifted her position so that she was looking into the room.

He was still there. The mark. Diego Hernandez. The man was short but obese, the girth of his stomach making him appear to be sitting away from the table. He was overdressed in a baggy dark suit and tie. As Cassie watched, she noted that he played with an economy of physical movement, his eyes constantly scanning the table but his head not moving. On the table in front of him were several stacks of hundred-dollar chips. Cassie estimated that he had at least ten thousand dollars on the table.

Cassie watched a few deals but never held her eyes on Hernandez for more than a few seconds. At one point he suddenly looked up and out toward the railing. She quickly looked away. When she surreptitiously glanced back, his eyes were back on the table. He apparently had paid little mind to her.

She needed only one thing from Hernandez before going up to the penthouse. She focused her attention squarely on his hands as they moved chips and handled his cards. It took less than a minute for her to decide that he favored his left hand. The clincher was when the right cuff of his suit coat caught on the edge of the table's elbow pad and drew back to expose his watch. Cassie had what she needed. Hernandez was left-handed. She stepped away from the railing and proceeded, head down, in the direction of the elevator alcove of the Euphrates Tower.

As Cassie entered an elevator in the Euphrates Tower, she saw that a card key had to be inserted in the panel before the penthouse button could be engaged – a security measure that had been added since the last time she had been in the hotel. She pulled the pass card from her back pocket and engaged the button. She stayed close to the doors and averted the impulse to look up at the lighted numbers over them, assuming there was a camera somewhere above her. She looked at her watch and saw it was already almost nine o'clock. She needed a minimum of an hour in the room and knew she was now pushing it.

On the twentieth floor Cassie came out of the elevator alcove, looked both ways in the hall and found she might already be riding a piece of luck. There was no housekeeping cart in the hallway. It was apparently after VIP turndown service. The only thing in the hall was a room service table topped with a white tablecloth and the detritus of a candlelight dinner, including an empty champagne bottle floating upside down in a silver ice bucket.

She went to her right to find room 2015 but as she first passed by the door to room 2001 she gave it a wide berth, moving all the way to the left side of the hallway and averting her eyes from the door and the memory behind it. She said a silent prayer, calling on Max to be with her tonight.

The hallway was dimly lit by wall sconces to the left of every door. She found rooms 2014 and 2015 directly across from each other near the end of the hallway and the emergency exit. That was a good break. In case something went wrong, the stairs were right there. Cassie knocked on the door of room 2014 and also pushed the glowing button to the left of the door frame. She heard a soft chiming sound from the other side of the door and she waited.

As expected, no one answered the door. She took the card key out of her back pocket again, looked up and down the hall once more, and then used it to open the door.

As she stepped into the room she felt the immediate jangling of adrenaline coursing through her veins. It felt like a flooding river inside her, powerful enough to take anything in its path.