Cassie moved back into the bedroom and surveyed the bed. She visualized what she had seen through the peephole when Hernandez had opened the door. The briefcase had been attached to his right hand. She came around the right side of the bed and gently pressed her hands down on the rumpled bedcovers, careful to stay away from formations created by Hernandez's body. She didn't breathe as she did this. It was the closest she had ever come to a mark. It was too close and every one of her senses was focused on the bed and the huge body that snored beneath the covers.

Her hand eventually came down on something flat and hard and she knew she had found the briefcase. She slowly began lifting the bedspread until she had uncovered the case and the handcuff link to Hernandez's right wrist.

Realizing she needed the keys to remove the case, she went back to the closet and reopened the safe. As she did this she noticed that she had left the gun sitting on top of the safe. She grabbed it, opened the safe and carefully removed the keys. In the green vision of the goggles she studied them. There were four keys and Cassie had had enough experience with handcuffs to know the little key with a round barrel went to the handcuffs. She detached it from the others so that she could work with it without causing the others to jangle and left the closet once more for the bedroom.

Hernandez hadn't moved. Cassie put the gun down on the bed and silently worked the key into the cuff attached to the steel handle of the case. She turned it and the cuff came open with a metallic clicking sound. She started to remove it just as Hernandez, possibly alerted by the sound, began to stir.

Cassie quietly removed the handcuff and straightened up, taking the briefcase off the bed. She reached down and grabbed the gun. Hernandez let out a sigh and started kicking his legs beneath the covers. He was waking up.

Cassie raised the gun. She told herself she could do it if she had to. She could blame it on the bad timing of a phone call, on the void moon or on simple fate. It didn't matter. But she could do what she needed to do. She held the gun straight out and pointed it dead center at the moving mass on the bed.

THE first thing Jack Karch noticed as he walked through the Cleopatra Casino was that the crow's nest was empty. He knew Vincent Grimaldi wouldn't be up there right now because he knew exactly where Grimaldi was. But the custom and practice of the casino since the day it opened had been always to have somebody up in the nest. That was twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If it wasn't Grimaldi, then it was usually somebody else. Karch knew it was all imagery. Sleight of hand. The illusion of security created security. But right now nobody was watching from above and that told him the thing Vincent had called him in to handle was big and important. This realization juiced Karch's blood a lot better than the twenty-two-ounce cup of 7 -Eleven coffee he had gulped down on the drive.

As he cut between the gaming tables and weaved around drunken, all-night gamblers who crossed blindly into his path, Karch kept his eyes on the door behind the pulpit, half expecting someone to come hustling out of security, maybe adjusting his collar or his tie as he took his position. But nobody ever came and Karch finally dropped his eyes when he got to the Euphrates Tower elevator alcove.

The alcove was empty except for one woman who was holding her plastic change cup and waiting. She looked at Karch's severe face and then turned away, putting her free hand over the top of her cup as if guarding its contents. He casually stepped over to the sand jar beneath the call button and brought his foot up onto the edge of it, bending over as if he were about to tie his shoe. He did this so his back was to the woman. Instead of tying his shoe he dipped his finger into the black sand, which had been freshly cleaned of cigarette butts and smoothed. He cut his finger through the sand until it found what he knew would be there. He withdrew the card key and straightened up just as an elevator chimed its arrival.

After following the woman into the elevator, he blew the dust off the card key and used it to engage the PH button after the woman had pushed the six button. Standing next to her Karch could glimpse between her splayed fingers and into her cup. It was about half full of nickels. She was the smallest of the small-timers and either didn't want him to know it or she actually thought there was something suspicious about him. She was about his age, with big hair. He guessed she had come to Las Vegas from somewhere in the south. She stood with her face cast downward but he knew she was keeping an eye on his reflection in the polished wood veneer of the door. Karch knew he had the kind of face that made people wary. His nose and chin were sharply drawn, his skin was always sallow despite a life beneath the desert sun, and his hair was as black as a limousine. These features all took a backseat to his eyes. They were the color of puddle ice and looked just as dead.

Karch reached into his pocket and pulled out his smokes. Holding the four fingers of his right hand together as a blind to the reflection, he shook two cigarettes out, palming one while passing the second to his left hand. He half expected her to protest the very sight of a cigarette but she said nothing. He then expertly performed the ear-to-mouth trick his father had taught him so many years ago. Holding the second cigarette at the end of all four fingers and the thumb of his left hand, he created the illusion of pushing the cigarette into his ear and then using his right hand to pull it out of his mouth and into place between his lips.

He watched her reflection and could tell she had seen the gag. She turned slightly as if she was about to say something but then caught herself. The door opened and she stepped out on six. As she turned to the left to leave the alcove and the elevator doors began to close, Karch called out to her.

"Made you look."

He then laughed to himself as the doors closed on his vision of the woman turning back toward him.

"Next time take your nickels to Branson," he said after the elevator began its ascent again.

Karch shook his head. The Cleo had once had such promise. Now it was the destination of the nickel-and-dimers, a place where the carpets were worn thin and the pool was crowded with men wearing sandals and black socks. One more time he wondered what he was doing, how and why he had ever sold out to Vincent Grimaldi.

Ten seconds later he stepped out on the twentieth floor. He stepped into the hallway and found it empty except for a room service cart somebody had shoved into the hallway. It smelled rancid as Karch walked around it and headed down the hallway to the right.

He looked up at the first door he passed and saw it was 2001. He remembered that room from a long time before. It was in that room that he had made his first play to Vincent Grimaldi. It seemed to Karch to have been so long ago and so the memory annoyed him. How far had he come since then? Not far, he knew. Not far at all. Perhaps he, too, was a nickel-and-dimer in a nickel-and-dime palace. His thoughts jumped to the empty pulpit down in the casino and he imagined what the view of the gaming room was like from there.

He came to room 2014 and used the card key to open the door.

As he stepped in he saw Vincent Grimaldi standing at the floor-to-ceiling window of the suite's sitting room. He seemed to be staring out across the city toward the expanse of desert lying before the chocolate-brown mountains that edged the horizon. It was a clear, bright day out there.

Grimaldi apparently had not heard Karch's entry and did not turn around. Karch came down the entrance hallway and into the suite. He noticed the bedroom doors were closed. The place smelled of old cigars, disinfectant and something else. He tried to place it and then his heart moved up a gear. Burned gunpowder. Maybe Vincent really needed him this time.