"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."

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.

She believed Karch. She had no reason to but she knew in her heart that he was telling the truth about what Max had said. She realized then that telling him, surprising him with the news that night, had set things into a terrible motion. In her mind she suddenly saw Max's crumpled body on the casino table. She had run to him and cradled his head in her arms. They'd had to pull her away from him.

"So you see," Karch suddenly said, "if there's anybody you should blame it's you, not me. You had the kid in your belly and you told him the news. What do you think about that, Cassie Black?"

She didn't answer. She gripped the wheel so tightly her knuckles glowed white in the dim light from the dash gauges. She felt a deep-rooted tremble go through her. It started in her chest and then made her shoulders shake. It moved like a wave down her arms until control of the wheel was in question. Finally, it passed. She tried to put thoughts about Max aside, to be dealt with later. Jodie was the important thing. She had to concentrate on Jodie.

"You know something?" Karch said. "Now that I understand what happened in that room with Max, the one thing I don't understand is what happened in the room with Hidalgo. I mean, why'd you do it?"

Cassie didn't understand why he asked such an obvious question.

"Why else? The money."

"But why put the guy down unless you had to and it didn't seem to me that – "

"What are you talking about? Hidalgo? Hidalgo's dead?"

"You should know that better than – "

"No! I don't know what you're talking about!"

"It looked pretty cold-blooded to me. Guy sitting there in bed in his underwear, defenseless, and you pop him like that."

As he spoke Cassie remembered her last moments in the room. Hidalgo was restless, waking up. She stood at the foot of the bed and raised the gun. She had been ready and willing to do what was necessary. To cross the final line. Had she done it, had she crossed, and then blocked it from her memory? Impossible.

"Karch, listen to me. If he's dead somebody else did it."

There was a pause and then Karch's voice came back.

"Sure. Whatever you say. It still doesn't change things. You're coming back here with the money and – "

"Karch?"

"What?"

"How do I know you even have her?"

He laughed in a fake way into the phone.

"That's just it. You don't."

"I need to talk to her. Before I come there, I need to know you have her. And that she's alive. Please, Karch."

"Oh, well, if you're going to be so polite about it…"

She listened. She thought she heard a horn honking and then Karch cursed at someone. She realized he was in a car and guessed it meant that he had pulled over and maybe cut someone off. She heard a rustling sound and then Karch's voice again, but not directed into the phone.

"Wake up, kid," he said. "Somebody wants to talk to you. Say hello."

Cassie heard her daughter's breathing before her voice. Then she spoke one word that went through Cassie's heart like a diamond-tipped drill.

"Mommy?"

Cassie involuntarily drew her breath in and held it. She tried to halt the torrent of tears she knew was waiting to come down. She opened her mouth and tried to respond to the first word her daughter had ever said to her. But before she could form a sound, Karch's rude and gruff laugh loudly filled the inside of the car.

"Out of the mouths of babes, right?" he said. "The Cleo by midnight, Cinderella, or your pumpkin gets smashed."

He killed the connection and Cassie was suddenly riding in silence and darkness. In the tunnel.

She thought about calling Karch back but knew that all that was to be said had been said. She gazed out the windshield at the WELCOME TO LAS VEGAS sign as it passed. She had lied to Karch. She was coming in right behind him. It would give her a time advantage – a few hours to get ready – but little else. She had no idea what it was she would be getting ready for.