"You people stole from the wrong people. And she shot the wrong man."
Paltz dropped his mouth open but then quickly recovered.
"I don't know what the fuck you're – I didn't steal anything. I – "
"You helped and that makes you just as guilty. You understand that?"
Paltz closed his eyes and when he spoke his voice was a desperate whine.
"I'm sorry. I didn't know. Please, I need a break here."
Karch looked past him at the surrounding scrub land. His eyes lingered again on the Joshua tree and then moved on. The desert was truly beautiful in its desolation.
"You know why I come out here?"
"Yes."
Karch almost laughed.
"No, I mean to this place. This specific spot."
"No."
"Because thirty years ago when they charted this place and started selling lots to the suckers they had the whole place graded so it would look like it was ready to go, that they'd start building your house as soon as they got your money. It was part of the scam and it worked real well."
Paltz nodded as though he found the story interesting.
"My old man bought a lot…"
"That's why you come out, huh?"
Paltz's conversational tone was forced and desperate. Karch ignored the question.
"Thirty years is a long time. The ground's pretty hard again but you go anywhere else out here and start digging and you got about a foot of top sand and then after that it's like digging through solid rock. People think it's like digging at the beach. But it isn't close. The earth below the top sand hasn't been touched in a couple million years. The fucking shovel bounces off it."
He looked at Paltz.
"So I like it here. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's still hard work but you got about three feet of earth you can deal with. That's all you really need."
Karch offered a knowing smile. Paltz suddenly took off as Karch knew he probably would. He ran around the sales office and then past the Joshua tree, attempting to use them as a blind. This also was not new to Karch. He stepped away from the Lincoln and calmly walked out to the left of the office to improve his angle. As he moved he unsnapped the silencer from the Sig because it was no longer needed and would affect his accuracy. He trained on the range with the gun without the silencer.
Paltz was about thirty yards away, moving right to left, his feet kicking up little clouds of sand and dust as he desperately ran in a zigzag pattern. Karch dropped the silencer into his coat pocket and stopped. He spread his feet, raised the Sig in a standard two-handed range grip and traced Paltz's movement. He aimed carefully and fired once, leading the target by about two feet. He lowered the weapon and watched as Paltz's arms started to windmill and he went down face first into the sand. Karch knew he had hit him in the back, maybe even the spine. He waited for movement and after a few moments he saw Paltz kicking in the sand and rolling over. But it was clear he wasn't getting up.
Karch looked around for the ejected shell and found it in the sand. It was still hot to the touch when he picked it up and put it in his pocket. He went back to the Lincoln and used the key remote to pop the trunk. He took his jacket off and folded it over the bumper, then reached in for his jumpsuit. He stepped into the legs and worked his arms into the sleeves and then pulled the zipper up to his neck. The jumpsuit was baggy and black, chosen for night work.
He then reached in for his shovel and headed over to the spot where Paltz had fallen. There was a bloom of maroon blood at the center of Paltz's back. His face was caked with sand and dirt. Blood was on his lips and teeth. It meant the bullet had ripped through a lung. He was breathing quickly and hoarsely. He wasn't trying to speak.
"All right, that's enough," Karch said.
He leaned down and tucked the muzzle of the Sig under Paltz's left ear. With his other hand he held the shovel by its neck and positioned the blade so that it would block the blow-back of blood. He fired one shot into Paltz's brain and watched him go still. The shell ejected from the Sig clanked off the shovel and fell into the sand. Karch picked it up and put it in his pocket.
Karch opened the front of the jumpsuit, put the Sig back into his holster and looked up at the sky. He didn't like doing this during the day. It wasn't just being in a black jumpsuit under the desert sun. Sometimes when things backed up at McCarran the airliners were put into low holding patterns out this way.
He started digging anyway, hoping that wouldn't happen and wondering if this would be the time of coincidence, when his spade would strike bone already in the ground.
24
KARCH stood in front of the practice mirror adjusting the tie on his fresh suit. It was a Hollyvogue that had belonged to his father, with Art Deco spirals on it. He was wearing it with the two-tone gabardine Hollywood jacket and pleated pants he had picked up at Valentino's in downtown.
His pager sounded and he picked it up off the bureau. He recognized the call-back number as Vincent Grimaldi's. He deleted it, hooked the pager on his belt and finished adjusting his tie. He wasn't going to call Grimaldi back. He planned to drop by in person to inform him of the progress he had made.
When he was done with the tie he went back to the bureau for his guns. He holstered the Sig and snapped the safety strap over it. He then picked up the little. 25 popper. It was a Beretta he could fit in his palm. He turned back to the mirror and held his hands loosely at his sides, the. 25 hidden in his right hand. He made a few moves and gestures, always sure to keep the pistol hidden from view. David's right hand, he thought. David's right hand.
He then went on to practice the finish, moving his apparently empty hands as if in conversation and then suddenly producing the gun pointed right at himself in the mirror. When he had practiced this enough he put the little gun back into the black silk magician's pocket that he'd had a downtown tailor sew onto the inside rear belt line of his pants – every pair of pants he owned. He then held his hands palms out to the mirror and then brought them together as if in prayer. He bowed his head and backed away from the mirror, end of show.
On his way to the garage Karch stopped in the kitchen and took a mason jar out of one of the cabinets. He took the top off and dropped the two bullet shells from the desert into it with the others. He then held the jar up and looked at it. It was almost half full of shells. He shook the jar and listened to the shells rattle inside. He then put it back in the cabinet and took out a box of Honeycombs cereal. He was famished. He hadn't eaten all day and the physical exertion in the desert had sapped his strength. He started eating the cereal right out of the box, handfuls at a time, careful not to get any crumbs on his clothes.
He stepped into the garage, which had been illegally converted into an office, and sat down behind his desk. He didn't need an office in a commercial building like most private investigators. Most of his work – on the legitimate side – came in from out of state on the phone. His specialty was missing persons cases. He paid the two detectives who ran Metro's missing persons unit five hundred dollars a month to refer clients to him. As a matter of policy, Metro could not act on a routine report of a missing adult until forty-eight hours had elapsed since the time of the report. This practice had originated because most missing people were missing on purpose and often turned up on their own a day or so after supposedly disappearing. In Las Vegas this was most often the case. People came on vacation or for conventions and cut loose in a city designed to knock down inhibitions. They shacked up with strippers and hookers, they lost their money and were too embarrassed to go home, they won lots of money and didn't want to go home. There were endless reasons and that was why the police had a wait-and-see attitude.
However, the forty-eight-hour policy and the reasons behind it did not placate the concerned and sometimes hysterical loved ones of the supposedly missing. That was where Karch and a legion of other private investigators came in. By paying off the cops in the MPU, Karch made sure his name and number were often suggested to people who reported missing persons and didn't want to wait the required forty-eight hours before a search was begun.