Cool Heat (29 page)

“It is. Thorp told us all about it.”

She turned to Rouse. “Is that the truth?” Rouse nodded that it was.

“How awesomely cool as shit is this?” Kora said, beaming as she checked the small weapon out. “Damn. Thanks, babe. This is, like, the coolest present ever. It’s so pretty. It’s like jewelry.”

“And it’s yours,” Leon said, beaming back at her. It was like he was giving the girl of his dreams an engagement ring to beat all engagement rings. “Careful, it’s loaded.”

“No way.”

“For sure.”

She pointed it at Rouse and for a moment, Sydney thought she was going to shoot the lawyer, who looked like he also expected a bullet in the face.

“We need him,” Sydney cautioned. “He’s going to be the only one who can close down the party, make the death of Thorp an accident that’ll be discovered long after you guys are gone.”

She watched as Kora backed off, glad she was smart enough to know they needed Rouse if all of them didn’t want to end up on the run from every law enforcement agency in the country.

“What’s the take?” Leon asked.

Kora turned to him. “Rouse says it’s about sixteen mil. Couple more in the jewelry and gold and bonds. All in nice cases. Like he was gonna be ready to run to the Caymans if it came to that. Which makes it easy for us.” She held up some of the jewelry from one of the four matching briefcases that were out on the big teak desk.

“Of course,” Leon said, waving his weapon at Marco, Sydney, and Rouse, “I could just kill all three of them and stage it like they killed each other.”

“No, sweetness,” Kora said. “We have a bargain and we’re going to keep it. And it’s important that this end is in good hands. Nobody’s going to believe that if I just up and vanish with the mystery man. Sydney will cover us. I know what she wants, and that makes us safe. I have no interest in becoming the most hunted couple since Bonnie and Clyde. Look how that turned out.”

“You’re right.”

“Besides, don’t you and Marco want to work together sometime in the future? You make a great team. Oh, and I want to thank Tricky Dick here. He was nice enough to sign his car over to me.” She waved the pink slip. “He’s such a sweetheart when you get to know him.”

Sydney said, “Listen to your lady. She’s smart. Rouse will tell the world when they find Thorp’s body that the fool went in to have a drunken conversation with George and George didn’t like what he had to say.”

Leon chuckled. “Alright, then, let’s get on out of here. We have a world waiting for us.”

Kora told him to take the briefcases to the car. When he came back, it was time to leave. Already, dawn threatened. The party next door was coming to its final moments. The poker game would soon end.

“Be careful driving with all that money in the trunk,” Sydney said. “And watch out for scorpions.”

“I will,” Kora assured her, smiling back at her like they were old chums.

The cute couple, Daisy and the masked man, left on whatever honeymoon awaited.

Moments later, Sydney, Rouse, and Marco watched on the monitor as a black Mercedes exited the garage and headed down the feeder road to Lakeshore Boulevard. Then Marco got a suitcase from Rouse’s bedroom and they spent an hour filling it with tapes, pictures, hard drives, and notebooks.

Sydney turned to Rouse. She explained to him how it was going to work.

Marco left with the suitcase.

“He’ll be back in an hour or so, when the suitcase is secure,” she explained. “Then you’re going to go over and end this party with apologies. You don’t know where Daisy and Thorp disappeared to. Everyone will smile knowingly and that will be that. You make a mistake, decide to do something stupid, everything we have on you will go public very fast. It will get ugly for you.”

He stared at her.

“When things settle, after Thorp’s tragic accident is discovered, you’ll cancel the deals you made, have a nice big funeral, and then you’ll do exactly what George Whittell did: Turn into Lake Tahoe’s greatest defender. No Taj Mahals, no Vegas North. One day, you’ll win awards.”

Rouse said, “You aren’t going to go to the FBI or any authority?”

“No. By the way, I hear you make a mean Hangtown fry just like they used to do in the old days. Really nasty food. Oysters, eggs, bacon. I think I’d like to try it. You have the ingredients?”

He nodded.

Sydney said, “Good. Go shut the party down. Then, when Marco comes back, we’ll have a nice brunch, talk some more about the future.”

63

Leon felt strange as they tore down the highway, Kora driving. He’d taken more pills, but things weren’t right in his head and he wanted to get back to what he’d been feeling.

He thought about the dead client, the others, the whole deal that had taken place in Tahoe.

Suddenly, shockingly, he turned against everything that had happened.
I hate her,
Leon thought, glancing at Kora, at the woman he now thought had destroyed him.

He tried to fight the feelings. The change came over him with the force of a tsunami. It washed him away from the emotions he’d been feeling and brought him back to himself. The self he’d constructed so carefully over the years.

I have to kill the bitch.

It was a devastating notion. It happened so fast, this negative reversal of feelings, this conflict in his soul. It began within an hour of Tahoe, the sun coming up, the heat rising, his head swelling again. He took off the mask.

He felt confused. He grew angry and couldn’t understand it. Beautiful woman, millions, freedom. What was wrong?

As the distance away from Tahoe grew, the desert rolled under them mile after mile, hour after hour, and things began to change in the deepest regions of Leon’s brain. The change in topography, in circumstance, seemed to be having a profound effect upon him. For a short time, the strange high that had driven him over the past days looked like it would return. But then it began to dissipate. Like a man coming off an excess of partying.

His face resumed aching. His mindset deteriorated. The binge melted away in the hot sun, leaving behind growing distress.

It became conscious to him—the feeling, the angst—first in Virginia City. His face began to throb again while he was waiting outside a store for Kora to buy whatever crap she was shopping for. The feeling of being out of sorts—disconnected from his real self, his authenticity—continued to build from there as they ate up the long empty roads across the desolate Nevada desert toward Vegas. He didn’t want to go anywhere near Vegas, but Kora had insisted.

He glanced frequently at Kora as she drove. She appeared to be in a great mood, and that only irritated and bothered him all the more.

Leon realized with a poignant shock that everything that had happened to him since arriving in Tahoe was crazy. It simply couldn’t go on. He had lost himself. He was living in violation of all his principles, of his personal code. As if he’d been led by this whore and thief down a terribly wrong path.

The party of parties was truly over. What had happened in Tahoe, the whole insanity of it, now hit him full force.

He took more OxyContin, thinking maybe he’d get his good feelings back. He didn’t. Having a couple drinks at dinner didn’t either. The truth was right there, and it was a truth he couldn’t ignore. He had sinned against himself in a bad way. And now he had to purge himself of this whole sordid affair, reclaim his truth. And to do that, the first thing was to get rid of this crazy, wild child of a hooker he’d gotten himself involved with. Love had ruined him.

Leon lamented his fall with sickening awareness of how he’d been deceived by evil. He knew he was lost. Between Thorp and this hooker and those two back there, he’d completely relinquished his sense of self. He’d caved to pleasure, to consumption, to the rot of civilization. Like that goddamn wolf-dog of Cillo’s…you’re either one, or you’re the other.

That was Leon’s problem. He felt like a man out of control. The feeling grew stronger and stronger until he couldn’t stand it. He had to kill her and go back and fix things. Maybe it all was because of the blows to his head.

Go back,
he ordered himself.
Go back and kill the other three.
He didn’t care about the money. Being rich. Living on some damn beach. He wanted his dignity back. He was a hunter. Predation was his calling.

Get rid of the bitch now,
he thought. Like a rattlesnake shedding its skin, he had to shed her. No way in hell he could get his life back with this bitch telling him what to do every damn minute like he was her fucking lapdog. He couldn’t believe what he’d become in so short a period of time. From the minute he’d looked at her nude shots, he’d simply lost his mind.

Finally, as evening approached and they crested the mountain, in the distance, the lights of Vegas came into view. He asked her to pull off the road.

“You just took a leak twenty minutes ago,” she said.

“Pull off there. I need to stretch, and I want to remember this. Vegas out there, what’s behind us, and what we have together. Let’s stand out there for a minute on the top of this mountain and fix it in our memories. This is special.”

Leon, feeling at the end of it now, full of dark fury, took out the CD she’d been playing that Rouse had left in the slot:
From the Rockies to the Redwoods
. He was sick to death of it. Sick of it and this new thing, this new connection.

She parked and got out.

This is the place,
Leon thought. No traffic coming into Vegas from this way on a Sunday night. Throw her body down into the canyon. Be years before anyone would stumble on the bleached bones. If ever.

When he got out of the car, Kora was already up on the overhang waiting. She said, “It is a cool view. Like being on some weird planet. Like we landed in a spaceship and that’s the galactic empire’s capital city or something. Come here, Leon.”

A man like me cannot have a partner, for there are not partners adequate, none that understand.

He was a loner for a reason. He was a professional, not some lapdog for a hooker who had him wait on her while she went on a fucking shopping spree, buying crappy Indian jewelry. Fuck all that.

Still yapping away, she continued. “Come here, Leon. Stand with me. Our moment of my liberation.”

It’ll be your liberation, alright. And mine.

She turned, saying, “It’s really spectacular. Come here, sweet love. What are you doing?”

He made his way toward her, the whore yammering away. The woman just could not shut the fuck up.

She stood in the brilliant effusive glow of the great neon metropolis, sin city, the drugged desert flower. A slut like all the rest of them. Only this one was the greatest threat he’d ever faced. She would destroy him. He had no defenses against the sexual force that she possessed.

This was just wrong and it was all her fault. From the moment he’d seen her pictures and hung around to meet her, it went wrong.

Leon the Professional walked up to Kora North, and as he did so, his hand slipped under his shirt, his fingers wrapped around the butt of his weapon as he considered where to put the first bullet. He had to blow that beautiful face away. Wipe it out. Wipe out every corrupting thing about her.

This is how it has to be, Leon told himself.

He said, “Great view, sweets.”

As he began to pull the automatic from behind his leg, Kora smiled at him. Such a beautiful, evil face.

Then, as he was raising his weapon to end the life of this danger, this evil destroyer, he saw something in her hand.

Small.

He had forgotten.

Next thing, he heard a bang and saw a flash. A flash that was partially obscured by the bright glow of the midnight sun that was Vegas behind her.

The bullet from the Derringer slammed into his chest with shocking force. And he thought with bewilderment,
The bitch shot me with my present!

The icy smile stayed on her face, and the words that came out of her mouth slapped him as he sank slowly, stunned, to his knees, his weapon slipping from his fingers.

Kora said, “You nasty little scorpion. You were going to shoot the one you love, you psycho piece of trash.”

He rolled over. He felt her take his wallet and keys. The bitch was robbing him!

She pushed him over the edge of the hill. And, as he toppled over, he heard her say, with a great sense of release, of vindictive triumphant, “Bye, dude. Thanks for this beautiful gun. I love it. You like to quote movies, big shot, well I got one from
The Godfather
for you. Like Michael Corleone said, ‘If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone
.
’”

***

Kora North stood holding the Derringer and waiting to see how she would react to having just killed her psychopath partner. She remembered that night when he was unconscious and she’d held the gun to his head and wondered. Now she knew.

What she felt was neither joy nor some form of misery. It was just a kind of curiosity and a little amazement at how easy life could be snuffed out when bringing it into being was such a labor. Just as Booth had killed Lincoln.

She thought of how Leon came into this world and how he’d just left. Nine months after getting screwed by some jerk, a woman had carried this cold-blooded bastard in her womb. Then had to let him suck the milk from her breasts. Had to clean his dirty-diapered ass. And what did she give to the world? A killer.

Wow, Kora thought. How crazy is this life and death thing?

Kora walked back to the car, put her CD back on, turned it up high, and was about to drive off to Vegas. But there was something she had to do, and it took her a moment before she realized what it was. One thing Kora’s alcoholic mother had taught her, maybe the only thing, was the idea of gratitude. People who take things for granted, who don’t show gratitude when you do something for them, are the worst. Always be grateful.

That damn cop had come through for her. She owed Sydney Jesup and that cute badass boyfriend of hers.

She took out her cell phone and texted a message. Then she headed off, hammering down the twisting black ribbon road in her beautiful Mercedes, trunk full of millions, the future looking very bright ahead.