Void Moon

43

KARCH unwound the telephone wire from around the two doorknobs and looked in on the girl. She was lying on her stomach at the end of the bed, her hands propping up her head as she fought to stay awake and watch cartoons.

"Everything okay in here, kid?"

"Where's my daddy?"

Karch looked at his watch.

"Soon… real soon."

He closed the door and wound the wire back around the knobs.

"More like where's the goddamn food," he said to himself.

He walked over to the phone and called Grimaldi's number. Again the call was answered immediately.

"Anything?" Karch asked.

"Not on this end."

"Did you call in that room service order?"

"As soon as we hung up."

"Vincent, your four-star kitchen isn't worth a shit. I'm fucking starving up here."

"It's busy down there. But I'll make another call."

"All right. And let me know the minute somebody has her."

"Will do."

"Oh, and Vincent?"

"What, Jack?"

"You better close a few craps tables down there. You don't want anybody getting hit."

"Jesus! Are you sure it has to be this way? Can't we just – "

"Vincent! Vincent! You don't want questions, right?"

"No, Jack."

"Then there is no other way. Synchronicity, Vincent. Call the pit chief. Close the tables."

He hung up and walked over to the window. He banged a fist on it, hoping to get a feel for the tension in the glass. He wondered if he shot the glass out first, to make it easier, if the Metro investigators would be able to tell that. Would they actually gather the glass and examine it? Probably not, he decided. Too much trouble, especially for what looked like an obvious murder-suicide.

He decided the plan would be to shoot the glass out and then immediately drop the bodies. The girl first and then the mother. A classic murder-suicide: distraught mother tosses her daughter, then jumps herself.

In the housekeeping station Cassie moved the room service table into a position directly below one of the panels of the drop ceiling. She then cleared the dirty dishes to one side of the table and climbed onto the other. The table was constructed with large wheels so that it would roll smoothly across the deep carpets in the penthouse suites. This made it unsteady as a platform. Cassie slowly stood up on it and reached to the ceiling. She pushed the panel up and to the side. She then gripped the tracks of the frame that held the panel and tested them against her weight. She was 110 pounds in her clothes, the gym bag another 20 or so. The tracks held secure. She tossed the gym bag up first, then grabbed the frame again and swung her legs up. She climbed into the utility crawl space between the false ceiling and the real one.

The crawl space was no more than four feet top to bottom. It was crowded with electrical conduits, water lines and the fire sprinkler pipes. But what took up the most room was the network of air-handling ducts for the heating and air-conditioning system. Twin return and delivery ducts ran the length of the hallway and branched off in smaller tributary lines that went to vents in each suite on the floor. The main ducts were three feet square and large enough to crawl through easily. The tributary lines were smaller but Cassie knew from experience that the air-return ducts were large enough for her to move through, provided she pushed her equipment bags in front of her. She also knew that if she could make it through, Jodie could as well.

Her plan had serious faults and difficulties. Noise would be a major factor. Any sound in the ventilation tunnels was magnified by the time it got to the room vents. She wasn't as much worried about her entry as she was her exit with Jodie. Keeping a five-and-a-half-year-old quiet in what was going to be a frightening situation would be difficult. She hoped the cartoons were still on the television and could be used as sound cover when they made their escape.

Another problem that Cassie knew for sure was ahead would be the removal of the vent cover once she got to the room where Jodie was being held. The cover would be screwed on from inside the room. The difficulty would be in accessing the screws. Her plan was to use a small pry bar from the gym bag to bend the vent slats. She would then reach out with a screwdriver and remove the screws that held the vent in place. This, she knew, would be laborious and time consuming. If she dropped the screwdriver or even one of the screws the resulting noise could bring Karch right to her.

Its success was predicated on her belief that Karch most likely had Jodie in the bedroom of the suite, while he was in the sitting room. But if she was wrong and Karch was keeping the girl close to him, then Cassie knew her chances of getting a shot at a rescue were infinitesimal.

Despite all of this she pressed on. She carefully moved into the crawl space and slid the panel back into place. Once again she put her penlight into her mouth and directed it along the main air-handling ducts until she found the bolted seam of two conjoining segments. She crawled that way, careful to keep her weight at all times on the framework of the drop ceiling.

Cassie started removing the bolts from the bracket that held the two segments of duct together. The work was difficult. Each of the eight bolts had been spot welded as an apparent security measure. It had been almost seven years since Cassie had been in this same crawl space – when she had set up the job Max then wouldn't let her do – but she still remembered and she knew the spot welds were new. It took all of her strength to break the weld on the first bolt and a half minute to remove it. The process instilled a feeling of panic in her. It was taking too long.

Cassie had just started working on the last bolt when she heard the chime from the service elevator in the housekeeping alcove. She put her wrench down and quickly crawled back to the panel she had climbed up through. She lifted it a crack and looked down just as the elevator opened and a room service waiter pushed a table out onto the landing.

As the elevator closed behind him the waiter slipped a leather check folder out of the inside pocket of his red uniform jacket. He opened it to double-check on his destination. Cassie was three feet above him and could easily read the notations on the check inside the folder.

#2001 Leave in hallway. – V. Grimaldi Seeing the note was one more confirmation of Vincent Grimaldi's involvement. It also gave Cassie an idea for a new plan.

The knock on the door startled Karch from his reverie at the window.

"Room service," a voice called from the hallway.

He turned and stared at the door and waited but there was no second knock or sound. He picked the. 25 up off the desk and cautiously approached the door. Before putting his eye to the peephole he put his ear to the jamb and listened. He heard nothing.

He looked out through the convex view of the peephole. He saw a room service table sitting in the hallway. It was covered with a white tablecloth and was set for two. A small vase of cut flowers was placed at the center. He saw no one else in the hallway. He continued to watch and wait, just in case the room service waiter was waiting by the elevator alcove. Karch had no idea what Grimaldi would have instructed and if his instructions would have made the waiter curious.

After thirty seconds he opened the door, looked both ways in the empty hallway, and then down at the table. He realized there were no plates on the table. He lifted the tablecloth and looked underneath. There was a warming oven built in below the table. Satisfied, Karch pulled the table into the suite. The table was difficult to move and he made a mental note to tell Grimaldi the carpets were too thick in the rooms. He kicked the door closed and pushed the cart toward the bedroom doors, putting the. 25 down on the entrance table as he went by.

After opening the doors he pushed the cart into the room and beside the bed.

"Come and get it," he said to the girl.

"I'm not hungry," she said.

Karch gave her a look and said, "Suit yourself. I'm starved."

He flipped up the end of the tablecloth and opened the plate warmer. A blast of warm air greeted him. There were two dishes with aluminum covers sitting on a shelf. He pulled the first plate out and was holding it with both hands when he realized it was burning him. He quickly brought it up and put it down on the table.

"FFFFFUUUUCCKKKK, that's hot!"

He shook his hands out and bent down to look under the shelf. There were three cans of Sterno flaming directly below the aluminum shelf where the plate had been.

"Fuckers!"

He looked at the girl to make sure she wasn't finding humor in what had happened. She was just staring at him, a note of fear on her face.

"I know, I talk dirty. I gotta put some water on this."

As soon as Cassie heard the water running in the bathroom she crawled out from beneath the other end of the room service table. Kneeling on the floor next to the table, she took a quick look around to see if Karch had left a weapon nearby. He hadn't.

"Hey!"

She turned to Jodie and quickly leaned over the bed. She had her ears trained on the sound of the water. The bathroom door was open and she could see Karch's back in a mirror reflection. She knew as soon as the water went off she had to be out of sight.

"Jodie, I'm here to take you away from that man," she whispered quickly.

"Good, I want – "

Cassie put her finger across the girl's lips.

"Whisper, whisper, so he won't hear. Do you want to go with me?"

The girl was a fast learner. She nodded.

"Okay, then you have to do what I tell you, okay?"

Jodie nodded again.

Karch pulled his hands out of the cold water and looked at them. Both his thumbs and index fingers had red marks. He cursed again. He felt like going down to the hotel kitchen and grabbing whoever was responsible and holding his head down on a hot stove. He went into a short reverie in which he envisioned doing it, then realized the person whose head he was holding over the stove was Vincent Grimaldi. Karch looked at himself in the mirror and smiled. He was sure there was something a shrink could do with that.

He turned the water off and went back out to the bedroom. The girl was now standing at the other end of the table and looking under the tablecloth. Karch came over quickly and, realizing the. 25 was in the other room, brought his hand inside his jacket to his Sig. He didn't want to draw it in front of the girl if he could help it.

"What are you looking at?"

"Nothing."

He pulled her aside and then whipped up the tablecloth, ready with his other hand to pull the Sig. There was nothing underneath on this side.

"Looking for a place to hide, huh?"

"No, just looking."

Karch grabbed one of the napkins off the top and went back around to the plate warmer. He used the napkin to take the second plate out.

"So let's see what we've got," he said.

Still using the napkin he removed the cover from the first plate. It contained a New York strip steak in a pool of still sizzling butter next to a pile of mashed potatoes. The steak was rare and bloody juices were mixing with the hot butter.

"Gross," Jodie said.

"What are you talking about? This is a goddamn thing of beauty. Now let's see what you got."

He removed the other cover revealing a large bowl of rigatoni with meat sauce.

"That's not Spaghetti-Os."

"You're right. But what do you care? You're not hungry, remember?"

He walked over to the bed and took the pillowcase off one of the pillows. He folded it to quarter-size and then put it in his open palm. He used the napkin to push the hot steak plate onto the pillowcase and then put a set of utensils into his shirt pocket.

"Tell you what, I'm going to eat out there and leave you with your cartoons in here. Eat, don't eat, I don't care, kid. Doesn't bother me one way or the other."

"Fine, I won't, then."

"Good. Just don't burn yourself on that plate."

He carried his food out to the desk, then went back to the bedroom for his Coke and the salt shaker. After he left he tied the doorknobs again with the phone wire. He then went over to the entrance table and brought the. 25 back to the desk. He started sawing through the steak and putting large hot chunks of it into his mouth.

"This is fucking good," he said with his mouth full.