"You sure this will work?" Grimaldi said.
"It is called synchronicity, VinCENT," Karch said angrily. "Have you ever heard the word? It will all fit together and you will have the money back. That is what you want, isn't it?"
"Yes, Jack, it's what I want."
"All right then, we're in business. Better get things going. I'm almost there."
He closed the phone and put it on the seat next to him. He checked the girl again and saw she was still out. He turned the light off just as the phone started to ring. He quickly grabbed it and opened it up before it woke the girl.
"What's wrong now, Vincent? You can't find synchronicity in your dictionary?"
"Who is Vincent?"
It was Cassie Black. Karch smiled, realizing he should have known it would not be Grimaldi because he didn't have the number.
"Cassidy Black," he said quickly, hoping to cover. "It's about time you checked in. Those were some nice moves you made today. But I think that if maybe we had been on my turf then things might have turned out – "
"Where is she?"
Her voice was a steely wire. Karch paused, his smile still fixed on his face. The moment was delicious. He had control and he was going to win this one.
"She's with me and she's doing fine. And that's exactly how she'll stay as long as you do exactly what I tell you to do. Do you understand that?"
"Listen to me, Karch. If that little girl gets hurt in any way… then it won't go by, you understand. I will make it my life's work to fuck you up. Do you understand that?"
Karch didn't answer for a while. He opened his window a half inch and got out a cigarette. He lit it off the dash lighter.
"Are you there, Karch?"
"Oh, I'm here. I'm just thinking to myself how ironic this is. I mean, I think it's irony – I never was very good in English class. Is it ironic when somebody whose plan it was to abduct a child complains about that very same child being snatched by somebody else first? Is that irony?"
Karch waited for her to answer but nothing came over the line. His smile broadened. He knew he was cutting her right to the bone. And the truth was always the best and sharpest knife to use for such a procedure.
"So tell me something, Cassie Black, what were you doing living in L.A.? Selling cars or watching the girl? And who was it you were going to take to Tahiti with you, seeing that Max can't exactly make the trip?"
He waited but there was only more silence on the open line.
"The way I figure it, I probably got to her maybe a half hour or an hour before you. So save the righteous indignation. I don't buy it."
He thought maybe he could hear her crying but wasn't sure. He felt some kind of strange closeness to her. Maybe it was from knowing her plan, from knowing what her secret dream was. It felt wonderful to be so intimately knowledgeable of the very thing another being lived for. It was almost like love.
"That's right," he said quietly. "I know all about you and your little plan. Keep an eye on the girl and wait out your parole – what did you have, a year or so to go? Then grab her and head off to paradise – Tahiti, the place you and Max had that wonderful, wonderful time so long ago. By the way, I have something of yours – and I don't mean the girl."
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.