The Given

by Vicki Pettersson

  “And I offed the old bird, it was as easy as you said. I think she knew what I was going to do, but she laid down on the floor and practically pulled the trigger for me.”

  Yes. Fifty years of guilt would do that to you.

  “But,” he said again.

  “But then I left Larry to clean up while I readied the car, and the other woman, the Craig girl, got away.” Thus the sweating, the fidgeting, the lost breath when every damned thing should be under control.

  Clenching his teeth together so hard that one of his crowns began to ache, the man shook his head. Goddamn Justin. He was going to make him ask. “How did she get away?”

  “Griffin Shaw.”

  Shaw. “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Larry said it was the same man who busted up that drug ring six months ago. The same one who stopped the kiddie sex ring before that.” There’d been photos in the Las Vegas Tribune, and the man had shown them to Justin. He always read the Tribune, hard copy only. It was what had alerted him to Shaw’s return to the valley in the first place.

  “Besides,” Justin was saying, voice hollowed like he was in a tunnel. “Who else dresses like that?”

  The man stood, pushing from his desk and crossing to the window that overlooked a wide, cool lawn that should never exist in the desert. He couldn’t see it in the dark, but he could feel it, cold and vast, like life itself. Dropping his forehead against the icy pane, he decided to break his own rule. He was the one asking questions now.

  “And why didn’t Larry kill them both?” Because Shaw had dropped off their radar in recent months. They’d tracked the Craig woman, but never once had their surveillance shown Shaw at her side.

  “She shot at him.”

  A chill arrowed through the man’s chest. “Barbara did?”

  Justin made a face. “No, Craig. Apparently she carries a gun.” He gave the man a hard look. “You forgot to put that in your report.”

  The man didn’t apologize. Instead he thought about the revolver in his bottom desk drawer. He thought about shooting Justin, and then finding Larry and finishing what Craig had not. If he wasn’t so sure he’d need them later, he might have done it. No one would object. After all, he made up the rules around here.

  What he needed to do now was figure out what to do next. First Barbara McCoy had returned to the valley. Now Griffin Shaw. And they’d been on a collision course tonight, which couldn’t be a coincidence.

  No . . . the man had seen too much, and knew too much of this couple’s respective pasts, to believe in coincidence. He was willing to bet these two were looking for the same thing he was, though he’d been at it for fifty years.

  “Bringing old ghosts to life,” he muttered, his breath going white against the cold windowpane.

  “What?” Justin asked, not knowing he shouldn’t be asking questions anymore. Not aware that he could already be dead.

  “I said that those two are bringing the past back with them.”

  And this time he was going to take his share of it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  So where was the perfect place to be when you weren’t sure where to go but knew only that you didn’t want to be found?

  Vegas, baby.

  Part of it was the tourists, yes; the thousands of nameless faces moving and shifting throughout the city made it easy to hide. Sensory overload took care of the rest—flashing lights and LED signs, music and horns and PA systems blasting outdoors—noises normally reserved for airports and hospitals and train stations, all desperate to stimulate ADD in the calmest of souls, at least long enough to separate them from their money.

  Ignoring it all, Kit and Grif strolled across the cavernous floor of the Desert Dream, the city’s largest casino. It was past midnight, but the foot traffic was as thick as at the Rockefeller Center at Christmas. Kit nervously eyed the smoky-black domes of the ceiling security cams anyway, then ducked her head as they passed the raised stand bearing not one but two security guards. Yet even Kit’s and Grif’s retro clothing wasn’t enough to raise an eyebrow in this environment, and the in-house security was actually a blessing. It meant there was less chance of running into any city police.

  In fact, Grif and she could likely spend a whole weekend in the cavernous building and never run into the same employee twice. Slot machines, pit games, bars, lounge entertainment—visits with wild tigers and dolphins—and strange combinations thereof, there was no end to the manufactured entertainment vying for their attention just in the Desert Dream alone. As long as they didn’t make a run on the blackjack tables, it was the perfect place for Kit and Grif to hide.

  “Where exactly are we going?” Grif asked, eyes darting from face to face from beneath his lowered stingy-brim.

  Kit looked at her watch. “It’s just as early as it is late. That makes it the perfect time for Temptation.”

  Grif tripped over his own feet. “What?”

  Kit pointed to the glittering, cavernous red mouth of the hotel nightclub. Warm satisfaction momentarily dislodged the remainder of her fading shock when Grif winced. The club’s bassline throbbed all the way out onto the casino floor. Before he could come up with an alternative, Kit paid the cover. Grif was out of money for some reason, though he said he’d pay her back later, and she thought, Damned right, and sprung for bottle service as well. She knew that no matter how much he spent, the amount he’d died with in 1960 would return to his pocket at 4:10 sharp every morning. That was only a handful of hours away.

  A pretty but dead-eyed hostess led them directly across the dance floor and to an elevated “room” curtained off by black sheers and velvet ropes. By the time they were settled, Grif was grinding his teeth together so hard that Kit could almost hear it over the monotonous rap, though she pretended not to notice. Temptation was dark enough to be private, yet loud enough to prevent intimacy, and Kit needed each of those things for her first meeting with Grif in six months. A stiff drink wouldn’t hurt, either.

  “They’re up-charging by five thousand percent,” he grumbled as their personal server sauntered away. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he was more upset by that than by the headless body he’d found earlier that evening.

  “Tip not included,” Kit said, just to see if she could ruffle his feathers. Ha, ha.

  Grif slumped in his pleather seat and almost slid to the floor. “She plunked down an ice bucket and walked away. She’s not getting a tip.”

  “She plunked down an ice bucket, showed you her cleavage, and walked away,” Kit corrected, lifting her drink as he righted himself.

  “Why would you even bring that to my attention?” He shot her a look so jaded—so old and so new—that she blinked in the flashing strobes and wondered for a moment if she was seeing things. How many nights had she dreamed of just that look? She firmed herself against it by downing her entire first glass of overpriced vodka.

  “Because no woman actually wants to do that for free, and because it’s not her fault that they overcharge here. She’s not going to see any of it. She works for tips.”

  Grif grumbled and leaned forward, and Kit reclined farther into the curtained-off alcove and studied him from the shadows. Out of their element, still trying to find their footing in the aftermath of murder, and they were already bantering with ease. Forget the frenetic beat pushing at them from the multitudinous speakers, this was a true call-and-response pattern, one as easy and deliberate as a sexy blues phrase. It calmed her.

  And that made her down her second overpriced drink in one nervous gulp.

  “Tell me what happened tonight,” Grif said, light flashing across the angular planes of his face so that he appeared deconstructed. It made him easier to look at, and answer.

  “You mean the murder?” The scene flashed again, jumping out at her like it was a part of the choreographed light show. She’d seen a dead body. She’d shot at a killer. Blinking hard, Kit poured herself another drink.

  “I mean all of it.” How she’d hooked up with Barbara McCo
y. How she’d ended up in the suite on the night the woman was murdered. How she could even think of sitting and talking to a woman who hated him and his not-dead wife.

  Sipping now, Kit decided she’d tell him enough to assure his help, but she wouldn’t reveal all of her actions, her life, herself. Never that again.

  “I located Barbara McCoy about four months ago, though didn’t approach her immediately.”

  She let that sit between them, a loaded moment. Barbara had first popped up on Kit’s and Grif’s radar while they were investigating Grif’s murder in 1960. She’d become Barbara DiMartino not long after that by marrying Vegas’s most infamous mobster. Sal DiMartino was up there with the greats—Spilotro, Siegel, Lansky, and Berman. Names that were like royalty in Vegas. “I told her straight out that I was press, though she remained suspicious.”

  “Just suspicious?” Grif asked.

  She huffed at his knowing look. “Downright rude. Regarded me like I was a fly to be swatted, and looked more than willing to do it herself.”

  Kit could usually charm her way into a story with honest gregariousness or genuine interest or effusive charm. She didn’t often elicit a death glare from anyone . . . never mind from a woman close to her eighth decade.

  “She finally agreed to meet me in person seven weeks ago. Said she’d had time to suss me out.”

  “How?”

  “Given her background? I was afraid to ask.”

  So they’d met at the Bootlegger Bistro, the successful offshoot of a downtown restaurant that’d been serving Italian-style family fare since 1947. Those recipes and the bistro had moved to the south end of the Strip since then, but the interior paid homage to Vegas’s golden era. “Barbara was seated in the back of the room in a booth all by herself. I knew she was waiting for me, but she watched everyone. The singer crooning Sinatra. The waitstaff, who were wary of her. The bartender. The women.”

  Especially the women.

  In fact, she’d taken one look at Kit, narrowed her eyes and licked her over-dyed lips, drew in a deep breath of smoke from the mother-of-pearl cigarette holder cocked in her right hand. “You’re not like the other girls, are you?”

  “What do you mean?” Kit asked politely, removing her gloves. She’d been especially careful in dressing for the occasion. After all, this woman had actually lived—had thrived—in the era Kit most revered.

  “Because you can’t wrap these girls in fur.” She waved her hand in the air and sent ash scattering. “Bacon, maybe, but not fur.”

  Kit clenched her jaw but couldn’t risk calling the woman on it and running her off.

  “She was bitter,” Kit told Grif, because she knew he’d been wondering about Barbara for so long. He knew that she thought he’d deserved to die fifty years earlier, and she hadn’t changed her mind in the ensuing years. Not that Kit could tell. “She smoked. Said she was dying of emphysema. Said that her neck was draped in pearls, but what she really needed was a pair of good lungs.”

  “Why, so she could continue spewing more of her filth?”

  That’s exactly what Kit had thought, though she didn’t say it then or now. “You know, it’s not rare to see someone surrounded by so many things still so indelibly unhappy, but it felt like it was more than that. Like she had greater regrets. Things that were so far in her past that she knew she’d never be able to touch them again.”

  Grif nodded briefly, not looking at her. Of course, he’d know about that. He swallowed hard. “Did you ask her anything about, you know . . . me?”

  Kit wanted to say that it—he—wasn’t why they’d met, though again, she wasn’t ready to share that with Grif. He was just an interloper here, right? A footnote in her past.

  “No,” she said, and watched Grif’s jaw turned to granite. “Not the first time.”

  His eyes brightened at that, and though braced for it, Kit felt an old emotion break through her shock. One that hardened in an instant, giving her purchase and making her feel like flint. He was still obsessed with the past, she thought, shaking her head. Still so consumed with it that he couldn’t see her sitting right in front of him.

  Maybe it’s the lack of light, Kit thought wryly, sipping at her drink.

  “So you met more than once.” It wasn’t a question. How else would she have ended up at Barbara’s home?

  “Not willingly. She was just so obstinate. One of those people who answered every question with one of her own. I wasn’t going to say anything about you but . . .”

  “But?” He had the nerve to look hopeful.

  “But she was just so damned nasty,” she said, and it was true. Kit hadn’t done it for him. She didn’t owe Griffin Shaw a thing, and something of her anger must have rolled across her face, because he leaned back like he was giving her space. Not wanting to let on that she needed it, Kit just shrugged. “So I decided to give her a jolt. I spit it out, just to see the look on her face.”

  “Griffin Shaw is still alive,” Kit had said then, and watched as Barbara McCoy choked on her martini olive. Kit hid her smile behind her old-fashioned. She was actually matching Barbara drink for drink, a woman’s duel, unspoken as all duels between women are. And now she was winning.

  When the choking had subsided and Barbara had wiped her chin and fortified herself with another sip, Kit added, “So is his wife, Evie.”

  “Well, I knew that,” Barbara snapped, splashing gin. “But no way is Shaw still alive. No way in hell.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I spit on his corpse myself.”

  And she threw back her head and laughed like it was the funniest thing she’d ever said or heard. Laughed like it fed her soul. The sound sawed through the air, and Kit realized she was wrong. This woman wasn’t just bitter. She was vile.

  “But now you’re digging up really old corpses,” Barbara said, flaring her eyes. “And you don’t want to do that. Trust me, the boys may not run this town anymore, but they still guard their secrets carefully.”

  Kit couldn’t help herself. She was shaking so badly, and she wanted to shake Barbara, too. “But this was no secret. We already know you hated him.”

  “We?”

  “Grif and me,” Kit said, because they were still united in this at least. A broken heart was one thing; darkness and cruelty and obsession that fed on itself for decades was quite another.

  Barbara leaned incrementally closer, her gaze running over Kit’s face like darting fish. Finally her nostrils flared and she pulled back, giving Kit a brand-new head-to-toe appraisal. She took her time studying Kit’s vintage swing coat and scarf. She traced the outline of her cat’s-eye glasses with cold regard, upper lip curling as she took in the matching black eyeliner. She tried on another laugh, but this one didn’t flow as freely. “Why, you got that sheen in your eyes, my girl.”

  “What sheen?”

  “That hazy-dazy look of love. Don’t tell me . . . you and Shaw?”

  Kit’s mouth firmed into a thin line, saying nothing. Barbara was picturing Grif near the same age as her, an octogenarian battling gout and the ability to stand to his full height. Yet Grif was eternally thirty-three, stronger than this woman could ever imagine, and with wings that rose well above any doorframe to boot.

  He also wouldn’t stop until his murderer and his wife were found, though she didn’t tell Barbara that. “He just wants to find Evie Shaw. Truthfully? He wants nothing to do with you.”

  And neither did Kit. Not anymore. This woman’s mind was as toxic as stagnant water. No matter what information might be stewing inside of it, the attached lethal tongue could only spread disease.

  “Why?” Barbara finally asked.

  “Why what?” Kit replied coolly.

  “Why does he want to find Evelyn?”

  Because he needed closure, but Kit wasn’t going to give Barbara any ammo for that shotgun mouth. So she just shrugged.

  “And why do you?” Barbara said, flashing her a knowing look.

  Kit flinched before she could
stop herself, but it was plain to them both. She wanted to see how she fared against the infamous Evelyn Shaw.

  “We just want to know who killed him . . .” She blushed, correcting herself when Barbara’s eyes narrowed. “Who tried to kill him—them both—fifty years ago.”

  Barbara huffed and shook her head, so that her hair spread in a cloud. “What does it matter? It was a long time ago.”

  “It always matters!” Kit slammed her palm on the table, causing her drink to topple, and they both jumped. She rarely lost her temper, not in public, not with informants, but this woman’s sewer brain and toxic-waste mouth made her feel dirty. “Those two people were driven apart because of what happened that night and there’s been a lot of pain as a result. Grif lost . . . years of his memory and life, most of which he’ll never get back.”

  “Most?” Barbara said, voice oily with interest.

  “He remembers her,” Kit said, because as much as it pained her to say it, Grif and Evie’s relationship seemed to affect Barbara even more adversely. Kit couldn’t help but rub a little salt into that old wound. “So despite your wishes, your words, and someone’s terrible actions long ago, they are both alive today, and he means to find her. And I’m going to help.”But Barbara was staring off into the distance. “What words?”

  “Huh?” Kit paused as she reached for her bag.

  “What words?” Impatient, she waved her cigarette holder at Kit. Kit dodged, but Barbara didn’t notice that, either. “What wishes are you talking about? What words?”

  Kit tilted her head. “You reportedly told one of my sources that you hated Griffin and Evelyn Shaw. You said, and I quote, ‘The past doesn’t matter, and they mattered even less. Both Shaws got what was coming to them.’ ”

  Barbara stared at Kit for a long moment. “And you’re sure it’s really him? That he’s still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  Barbara huffed. “Then I guess I was wrong about that.”

  Shocked silence wrapped around Kit, a blanket of burrs and thorns. She shouldn’t say anything, it would only put the power back into Barbara’s hands, but she couldn’t help it. How could anyone hate Griffin Shaw that much? “Why do you hate them so much?”