"I want you to humor me on something when you're over there."

"Fine. What?"

"Promise me."

"I'm not going to promise you anything until I know what you're talking about. What is it, Leo?"

"Okay, this is it. Whatever you do, no matter what happens, don't be in that guy's room between three twenty-two and three thirty-eight in the morning. Okay? That's Wednesday night going into Thursday morning. Write it down if you think you'll forget."

Cassie felt a bemused, questioning smile come across her face.

"What are you talking about?"

"It's a void moon."

"A void moon…"

"This is my astrological calendar, okay? I work with those books I showed you in the office and I chart things, including the moon."

"Okay, so you chart the moon. What's a void moon?"

"It's an astrological situation, okay? See, when the moon is moving from one house to another up there in the constellations, it sometimes is in no house at all. When that happens it means it is 'void of course' until it finally gets into a house. It's a void moon. And like I said, on Wednesday night going into Thursday morning there's a void moon for those, what, sixteen minutes. It's hanging out there between Cancer and Leo. It's void of course from three twenty-two until three thirty-eight. I worked it all out here."

He closed the calendar and held it up to her as if it were something sacred.

"And so?"

"And so it's a bad luck time, Cass. Anything can happen under a void moon. Anything wrong. Just don't make your move during that time."

Cassie studied him for a moment and registered his look as completely sincere. Leo had always been a true believer in whatever it was he chose to believe in.

"It's going to be tough," she said. "It all depends on when the guy goes down. I need to go two hours into the sleep pattern. At least two hours to be sure."

"Then go in after the void. I'm not fucking around here, Cass. You know Lincoln, McKinley and Kennedy were all inaugurated during a void moon? All three of them and look what happened to them. Clinton, too, and he might as well've been shot, what happened with him."

He nodded very somberly and held the calendar up again as if it were proof of something itself. To Cassie there was something endearing about his fervent belief. Maybe it was because she wasn't sure she believed in anything anymore.

"I mean it," Leo said. "You can look this stuff up going back as far as you want."

Cassie took a step toward the table and reached for the book. But as Leo offered it, she pulled her hand back. She wanted to ask something but wasn't sure she wanted the answer.

Leo read her. He somberly nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "I looked it up. That night six years ago with Max, he had a void moon, too."

She just looked at him.

"Remember what you said before about there being a jinx? It was the void moon, Cass. That was the jinx."

At the door Leo wished her good luck and said he would see her after the job was completed. Cassie hesitated on the front steps. The discussion of the void moon and Max had put a somber veneer over everything now. She rolled her shoulders as if catching a chill.

"What is it?" Leo asked.

She shook her head as if to dismiss the question and then asked her own.

"Leo, do you think about Max?"

Leo didn't answer at first. He stepped through the open door and looked up at the night sky. The moon was pale and hung like an egg in the sky.

"It will be full in a couple days. Nice and bright."

He continued to stare for a moment and then looked down at Cassie.

"Not a single day goes by that I don't think about him," he said. "Not a day."

Cassie nodded.

"I still miss him a lot, Leo."

"Me, too, Cass. So you be careful over there. I don't want to lose you that way, too."

BY noon on Wednesday, after making a few last stops for paint and supplies, Cassie Black was crossing the desert, the sun gleaming off the silver skin of the Porsche and heat waves rising off the pavement in front of her. Though the highway was reasonably clear and she was driving a car capable of cruising smoothly at 110 mph or better, she kept the Porsche at a steady two miles under the limit. It was tantamount to holding a thoroughbred race horse at a canter but she had good reason. The moment she had left Los Angeles County she was in violation of her parole. Drawing a traffic stop from the highway patrol could result in her immediate incarceration.

As soon as she crossed the county line she knew that the stakes were high and her life was now at risk. Any interaction with law enforcement would probably result in her returning to lockdown. She had been paroled five years into a seven-to-twelve-year sentence for manslaughter. If she got hooked up she'd be returned to prison for a minimum two years but probably even longer.

She put a Lucinda Williams compact disc in the car stereo and listened to it over and over during the drive. The music rarely skipped badly on the smooth freeways. She liked the outlaw spirit of the songs, the sense of yearning and searching for something the singer put in every song. One of them made Cassie cry each time it came up on the disc. It was about a lost lover who had gone back to Lake Charles to die.

Did an angel whisper in your ear hold you close and take away all your fear in those long, last moments For Cassie the question posed in the song was a ghost that haunted her all the time. She hoped an angel had come to Max.

The sharp-edged outlines of the casino resorts were visible ahead by three and she felt an unmistakable mix of excitement and trepidation. For many years she had believed she would never again see the place where she had grown up, where she had met and lived with Max. She had comfortably reconciled that and put Las Vegas behind her. Returning now made her think of pain and regrets and ghosts. But she also couldn't help but marvel at the genius of the place. If ever something had been made out of nothing, Las Vegas no doubt was it.

As she cruised the Strip she found the changes made in her absence to be remarkable. On every block there rose a new resort, a new testament to greed and excess. She drove by a faux New York skyline, the colossal MGM Grand and the new Bellagio. She saw re-creations of the Eiffel Tower and Venice 's Piazza San Marco. They were places and things she had never seen. But now here they were on the Las Vegas Strip. She remembered something Max had once said. "Everything and everybody will eventually come to Las Vegas. It will take away any reason to go anywhere else."

Then they went to islands and they knew there was at least one place that couldn't be counterfeited or corrupted.

She came to the Cleopatra and her attention was immediately drawn to the side-by-side Tigris and Euphrates Towers. Her eyes drew along the mirrored glass of the top floor of the Euphrates Tower and held momentarily on one window.

Her eyes dropped to the rising triangular form of the glass atrium that covered the sprawling casino twenty floors below. The reflection of the sun was as sharp as a diamond on the side of the mirrored glass uprising. The complex was set almost a hundred yards off the Strip and the entrance drive took the visitor past a series of reflecting pools at graduated levels and from which fountains rose in a choreographed water dance. Set in the reflecting pools were pure white statues of children at play – all under the benevolent eye of Cleopatra, who sat in a throne at the edge of the highest pool. Behind her, an Egyptian motif was integrated into the modern design of the sand-colored exterior of the hotel and casino.

Cassie drove by and waited with the traffic to turn onto Flamingo and head out into the industrial warrens on the west side of the city. She couldn't help but think about Max. About their times here. About the end. She had not expected such biting pain and regret upon her return. The landscape of Las Vegas was always changing, reinventing itself. She had not expected a place that was essentially just a facade to have such a nostalgic resonance. But it was there and it burned. She had not been with another man since Max and she was sure she never would be. Perhaps, she thought, this pain was all she would ever have. That she should embrace it. But then she remembered there was more. There was the plan out on the horizon.