Void Moon (1999)

by Michael Connelly

  "They probably already have it by now, Vincent."

  "Maybe, maybe not. She killed the guy in his bed. Maybe they want to check the heat on it before they make any further moves. We have to get over there and be sure. Besides, even if they passed the money on, I want these people dealt with. Due diligence. You know the score."

  Grimaldi looked at his watch.

  "But I think we still have a shot at the money. Six hours into this and we've already got the whole story. You get over there and get the money. You have a line on the girl?"

  "Not yet. If she came in from L.A. that means she probably jumped parole. I could check to make sure but that would leave an official trail. I don't think you want that yet, Vincent."

  "I don't. So hold that as a last resort. Maybe you should start with Renfro, go from there."

  Karch nodded.

  "You have an address for him?"

  Grimaldi shook his head.

  "We got a cell phone number. The name and number was all Martin had. You'll have to trace it from there. Romero has it on a piece of paper in the office. Also written on there is the name of a guy I know over there in L.A. You need help with anything - tracing the number, anything - you call him and bring him in. There will be no official record with him. He's good people and has a lot of connections he'd be happy to share."

  "All right, Vincent."

  "Now you go grab a plane and you'll be on the ground by three at the latest and - "

  "I'm not flying, Vincent. I never fly."

  "Jack, time is of the essence here."

  "Then have your guy in L.A. handle it. I'm driving. I'll be there before five."

  "All right, fine. You drive. Maybe you could make another stop in the desert for me. You know, along the way."

  Karch just looked at him.

  "I've still got fat boy and Martin in a laundry basket on the loading dock."

  "It's just sitting down there?"

  "I've got Longo down there watching it. Nobody'll get near it."

  Karch shook his head.

  "Then have Long-O and Romer-O take care of it. I'm out of here, Vincent."

  Grimaldi pointed a finger at him.

  "All right, Jack, but I want to be kept informed this time. You understand me?"

  "Perfectly."

  "Then go get the money, Jack."

  Before heading in from the crow's nest Karch took one last look across the casino. He liked the view from up here. He nodded to himself and walked to the glass door.

  26

  CASSIE Black punched the buzzer on Leo Renfro's door at noon and almost doubled over when the simple action sent a charge of pain up through her sore arm. When Leo opened the door she pushed in past him with the briefcase. He checked the street and then turned back to her as he closed the door. He was holding a gun down at his side. She spoke before he could say a word, and before she saw the gun.

  "We've got a big problem, Leo. This thing was - why do you have that out?"

  "Not here. Don't talk at the front door. Come back to the office."

  "What, more feng shui bullshit?"

  "No, John Gotti. Who the fuck cares? Come on."

  He led her through the house once more to the rear office. He was wearing a white bathrobe and his hair was wet. Cassie assumed he had been swimming laps - which was late for him, unless he needed to do it to relieve stress.

  They stepped into the office and Cassie lifted the case with her right arm and banged it down on top of the desk.

  "Jesus Christ! Take it easy, would you? I've been going nuts here. Where the fuck you been?"

  "Flat on my ass on the living room floor."

  She pointed to the briefcase.

  "The fucking thing tried to electrocute me."

  "What?"

  "Built-in stun gun. I tried to open it and it was like getting hit by a bolt of lightning. It knocked me out cold, Leo. Three hours. Look at this."

  She leaned forward and used both hands to spread the hair on the top of her scalp apart. There was a surface cut and a swollen bump that looked painful.

  "I hit the corner of the table when I went down. I think that knocked me out more than the bolt."

  Leo's look of anger over her lack of communication was immediately replaced with a sincere look of surprise and concern.

  "Jesus, you sure you're all right? You better get that checked."

  "I feel like I have that baseball guy Nolan O'Brien's arm."

  "Ryan."

  "Whatever. It feels like it's dead. My elbow joint hurts worse than my head."

  "You've been lying on the floor of your house all this time?"

  "Just about. I got blood on my carpet."

  "Jesus. I thought you were dead. I've been going nuts here. I called Vegas and you know what I was told? My guy said something's screwy over there."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The guy disappeared. The mark. It's like he was never there. He's not in the room and his name's off the computer. No record of him at all."

  "Yeah? Well, that's not the worst of it. Take a look."

  She reached for the briefcase's latches but Leo quickly reached for her arms to stop her.

  "No, no, don't!"

  She shrugged him off.

  "It's okay, Leo. I got some heavy-duty rubber gloves - like the ones the guys who work on the power lines use. It took me almost an hour to work the picks with the gloves but then I got it open. I disconnected the battery. The case is safe but not what's in it. Look at this."

  She unlatched the case and opened it. It was lined side to side with stacks of hundred-dollar bills bundled in cellophane and marked with a " 50 " in thick black ink. She watched as Leo's mouth dropped open and then a look of dismay crossed his face. They both knew that seeing a case full of cash of high denomination was not immediate cause for celebration. It was not the pot of gold at the end of every thief's rainbow. Rather, it was cause for concern and suspicion. Like a trial attorney who never asks a question of a witness that he doesn't already know the answer to, professional thieves never steal blind, taking something they do not know the consequences for stealing. Legal consequences are not the issue. The concern is over consequences of a more serious kind.

  It was a good ten seconds before Leo managed to speak.

  "Fuck . . ."

  "Yeah . . ."

  "Fuck . . ."

  "I know . . ."

  "You count this?"

  Cassie nodded.

  "I counted the bricks. There are fifty of them. If that fifty on each one means what it looks like it means, then you're looking at two-and-a-half million in cash. He didn't win this money, Leo. He came to Vegas with it."

  "Hold on, hold on a minute. Let's think about this for a minute."

  Cassie started unconsciously massaging her sore elbow.

  "What is there to think about? They don't pay you at the cashier's cage in fifty-thousand-dollar bricks wrapped in plastic. He didn't win this money in Vegas. Period, Leo. He brought it with him. It's a payoff of some kind. Maybe drugs. Maybe something else. But we took it - I took it - before it was delivered. I mean this guy, the mark, he was just an errand boy. He didn't even have a key to the case on him. He was just going to deliver it and probably didn't even know what was in it himself."

  "He didn't have a key?"

  "Leo, have you heard anything I've said? I got knocked on my ass trying to open this with picks. Would I do that if I had the guy's key?"

  "Sorry, sorry, I forgot, okay?"

  "I took the guy's keys. He had a key that opened the cuffs but none to the briefcase."

  Leo dropped into his chair as Cassie put her backpack on the desk and started digging through it. She took out four rubber-banded stacks of hundreds and put them down.

  "This is what he won. A hundred and a quarter. And half of the info you got from the spotter or your partners was for shit."

  She snaked her hand back into the bag. She brought out the wallet she had taken off the bed table in r
oom 2014 and tossed it to him.

  "Guy's name isn't Hernandez and he isn't from Texas."

  Leo opened the wallet and looked at the Florida driver's license behind the plastic window.

  "Manuel Hidalgo," he said. "Miami."

  "He's got business cards in there. He's a lawyer for something called the Buena Suerte Group."

  Leo shook his head in the negative but he did it too quickly. More like he was trying to shake the information off than deny knowledge of it. Cassie didn't say anything at first. She put her palms flat on the desk and leaned down, looking at him with a face that said she saw the move and wanted to know what he knew. Leo glanced out at his pool and Cassie followed his eyes. She could see the hose of the automatic vacuum moving slowly on the surface, the vacuum somewhere down below.

  He looked back at her.

  "I didn't know a fucking thing about this, Cass, I swear."

  "I believe you about the money, Leo. What about Buena Suerte? Tell me what you know."

  "It's big money. Cubans from Miami."

  "Legit money?"

  Leo hiked his shoulders in a gesture that suggested the answer could go either way.

  "They're trying to buy the Cleo," he said.

  Cassie dropped heavily into the chair opposite Leo.

  "It was a payoff on the license. I stole a fucking payoff. "

  "Let's just think about this."

  "You keep saying that, Leo."

  She laid her injured arm across her body.

  "Well, what else are we going to do? We have to think this out."

  "Who were these people you did this for? You wouldn't tell me before. But you have to tell me now."

  Leo nodded but then stood up. He went to the sliding door and opened it, then moved out by the pool. He stood at the edge and looked down at the vacuum gliding silently along the bottom. Cassie came up behind him. As he spoke he never took his eyes off the water.

  "They're from Vegas by way of Chicago."

  "Chicago. You mean the Outfit, Leo?"

  Leo didn't answer but in his silence was the answer.

  "How the hell did you get involved with the Outfit, Leo? Tell me."

  Leo started walking along the edge of the pool, his hands deep in the pockets of his robe.

  "Look, first of all, I'm smart enough to know not to intentionally get involved with the Outfit, okay? Give me a little fucking credit, okay? I didn't have a choice in the matter."

  "Okay, Leo, I understand. Tell me the story."

  "It started about a year ago. I met these guys. I was at Santa Anita and saw Carl Lennertz over there, you remember him, right?"

  Cassie nodded. Lennertz was a scout, always had an eye out for what he called a good book - a score. He sold tips to Leo, usually collecting a flat fee or ten percent of the gross taken out of Leo's end. Cassie had met him once or twice with Leo and Max several years before.

  "Well, he was with these two guys and he made the introductions. They were just two guys who hung around the track and were looking to back a move here and there. They said they were venture capitalists."

  "And you just took them at their word."

  A truck with a bad muffler system roared by on the nearby freeway and Leo didn't answer the question until the noise had abated.

  "I had no reason to doubt them and they were with Carl and he's good people. Besides, at the time things were drying up and I was scratching bottom. I needed setup money and here were these two guys. So I set up a meeting for later and we got together and I asked them to, you know, back me up on a couple things I had on my desk. They said sure, no problem."

  He stepped to the side of the pool where a surface net at the end of a ten-foot pole was hooked to a fence. He took it down and used it to skim a dead hummingbird out of the pool.

  "Poor things, I don't think they can see water or something. They dive right in. This is the third one this week."

  He shook his head.

  "Dead hummingbirds are bad luck, you know."

  He flicked the dead bird over the fence into a neighbor's yard. Cassie wondered if maybe the three dead hummingbirds were really just the same one that the neighbor kept throwing back over the fence and into the pool. She didn't say anything. She wanted Leo to get back to the story.

  Leo hooked the net back in place on the fence and came back around to Cassie.

  "So that's how it started. I took sixty-five bones off them against a hundred when the jobs were paid out. I was thinking six weeks tops. One was diamonds and that's always quick. And the other was a warehouse - Italian furniture. I had somebody lined up in Pennsylvania on that and was probably looking at six weeks tops on the turnaround. My end was going to be about two and I'd owe these guys one. Not bad. Most of the money I needed from them was for the data. The people I was working with had their own equipment."

  He was wandering, telling too many details about the plans and not what happened.

  "You can skip all of this, Leo. Just read me the last page."

  "The last page is that both jobs went to shit. The data on the diamonds was bullshit. A rip-off. I paid forty for it and the guy disappeared. And then the furniture turned out to have been made down in Mexicali. It was counterfeit designer stuff and the made-in-Italy tags were as bogus as most of the tits you see in this town. I didn't know it till I got the truck all the way to Philadelphia and my buyer took a look. Shit, what a fucking mess. I just had them abandon the truck on the side of a road in Trenton."

  He paused as if trying to remember some other detail, then waved a hand in a resigned, dismissive gesture.

  "And so that was it. I owed these guys a hundred grand and I didn't have it. I explained the situation to them and they were about as sympathetic as a night-court judge to a hooker. But when it was all said and done I thought I had bought some time. Only they just said that and turned right around and sold my fucking paper to another party."

  Cassie nodded. She could finish the story herself now.

  "These two new guys come around and say they represent the new holder of the paper now," Leo said. "They make it real clear that the new holder is the Outfit without actually having to say it. Know what I mean? They tell me that we have to work out a payment schedule. I ended up paying two grand a week just on the interest. Just to stay afloat. It was killing me. I still owed the hundred but I was never going to get out from under. Never. Until one day they show up with a proposition."

  "What was it?"

  "They told me about this job."

  He pointed through the open slider at the briefcase sitting on the desk inside.

  "They told me to set it up with their guy in Vegas and that if I did it, then they'd burn my paper and still give me a cut on the caper."

  Leo shook his head. He walked over to the table and chairs near the shallow end and sat down. He reached over to a hand crank on the umbrella pole. He started turning it and the umbrella opened like a flower. Cassie came over and sat down. She cupped her left elbow in her right hand.

  "So they obviously knew what was in the case," she said.

  "Maybe."

  "No maybes. They knew. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been so fucking magnanimous with you. When are they coming for it?"

  "I don't know. I'm waiting on a call."

  "Did they give you a name?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "A name, Leo. Whoever bought your paper."

  "Yeah, Turcello. Same name that was on the package at the desk for you. He's supposedly the guy who picked up the pieces after Joey Marks went down."

  Cassie looked away. She didn't know the name Turcello but she knew who Joey Marks had been. He had been the Outfit's brutal point man in Las Vegas - one in a long line of vicious enforcers. His real name was Joseph Marconi but he was universally known as Joey Marks because of the keepsakes he left on those of his victims he allowed to live. Cassie remembered how she and Max had spent a year living in fear of Marks, who wanted a piece of their action. After she was in High Desert she
picked up a newspaper one day and read about how Marks had been killed in his limousine during a bizarre shoot-out with the FBI and police in a bank parking lot in Las Vegas. She had celebrated after reading the story - which in prison amounted to sipping a paper cup of applejack she'd bought with a pack of cigarettes.