Criminal Karma Read Online Free Page B

bar.
    “Don’t encourage him,” I said.
    “Shall I charge this to your room?” she said, holding the leather folder poised between us.
    “Sure, sweetheart, why not,” Reggie said, reaching out to take the check. He scrawled a name and room number, added 25 percent, and handed the folder back to Tawny.
    “Why thank you, Mr. Delmonte,” she said, her eyes lighting up when she saw the tip. “You’re on the fourth floor, huh?”
    “Yeah,” Reggie growled, “I’ll be home later if you want to come up.”
    Tawny’s jolly face got serious. She looked plainer and older without the smile. “You mean it?” she said.
    Reggie winked and nodded. Cryptic. Her smile came back but it was sad. “You’re just kidding,” she said.
    Reggie gave the slightest of shrugs, shoulders going up a quarter inch and then back down, as if to say, “I made the offer.”
    “Oh, you!” Tawny said and walked away with a little extra swish, glancing back once over her shoulder.
    “Did you make that name up?” I asked.
    “No! Thad be too risky. Old codger was leaving as I came in. I snuck a peek at the check on his table and got his name and room number. He went out the front with his old lady and got in a limo while you were ripping off the key card.”
    Over at the register, the waitress was looking closely at the check.
    “What if Tawny notices your name is the same as the old guy’s?” I said, looking around to see if there was anyone between us and the nearest exit, thinking that I was going to leave Reggie at a rest stop in the desert if he fucked up this score.
    “Shift changed right after he left. She just came on.” Smug.
    “Yeah, well, here she comes again,” I said. Tawny was walking across the floral rug toward us, check in hand, funny look on her face. Halfway to our table, another customer tugged on her sleeve, asking a question. She spoke with the man briefly, then continued on toward us.
    “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Delmonte,” she said to Reggie, her manner hovering between apology and coquetry, “but I can’t tell if that is a seven or a nine on your room number.”
    “Nine,” Reggie said.
    “That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t sure,” she said. “Sorry to bother you.”
    “No bother, babe,” Reggie said, gruff but genial.
    He looked at me as she walked back to the counter. “See? No sweat.”
    “Maybe not,” I said, “but it was still a stupid chance to take for a twenty-five-dollar bar bill when there’s a couple hundred grand on the table.”
    I couldn’t blame him too much. Both of us were as full of larceny as a slot machine is of quarters.
    We rode up to the fifth floor in an elevator lined with mahogany and padded brocade. The elevator floor was covered with a carpet that had the word FRIDAY woven into the wool pile. They changed the carpet each day for the benefit of travelers who had lost their place in the continuum of time.
    Coming out of the elevator alcove, we stepped onto a carpeted walkway that went continuously around all four sides of the atrium, numbered doors on one side, railing on the other. At the corners, hallways led to the wings of the gigantic hotel. Standing at the railing, looking down five stories, we had a clear view of the entrance and front desk. The lobby and lounge were crowded with miniature people, and the murmur and clatter of their self-absorbed oblivion rose up to us like faithless prayers to an empty heaven.
    Tawny was clearing a table in the bar, looking girlish in the distance. Glancing up the way people do when they sense someone watching them,she saw us and waved, stretching her arm up high and waggling her hand. Reggie gave her a little salute.
    I left him at the railing to watch the entrance and started down the wide hallway that led to 589, heavy black bag hanging from my shoulder. Anyone who has ever read the numbers on a lottery ticket over and over, feeling the realization that they have actually won spreading like an orgasm through