The Given

by Vicki Pettersson

  And then Justin Allen spoke.

  “You still have no idea what’s going on, do you?” He looked at her with a secretive smile plastered across his face for at least the fifth time. It was getting tiresome.

  “Sure I do.” Kit blew out a shaking but resolute breath. “You’re working with Barbara DiMartino, who calls herself Barbara McCoy, to find diamonds that she’s coveted for fifty long years.”

  She had the satisfaction of watching Justin’s face fall, and his hard swallow of that stale breath made her realize she’d hit some sort of nerve.

  “Why would you say that?” he asked.

  “I told you. I saw you leave Barbara’s high-rise that night.” After fetching Gina Alessi from Sunset, dressing her like a doll, making it look like Barbara had died. They’d been buying time . . . but why?

  “You also shot at my partner,” he reminded her, knuckles going tight on the gun at his side.

  Kit refocused on his face. His eyes glittered in each streetlight they passed. He was anticipating something. And she was a part of it. “I also know that Barbara is still alive, and here you are again, a man who should be running scared just like Eric and Larry. So why aren’t you?”

  “I’m made of sterner stuff,” he said.

  “No doubt,” Kit replied, because it couldn’t hurt to appeal to his ego. “But that’s not it. You know something they didn’t, don’t you? Something worth sticking around for. Is it something you found out at Sunset? Larry was just muscle, Eric a computer grunt, but you were the Life Enrichment Coordinator. You didn’t just have access to financial information, you had access to the residents.”

  Their memories. Their stories.

  His only answer was silence, and Kit finally smiled. “Tell me, how long did it take you to contact Barbara after learning of the diamonds and the map from Gina?”

  Justin’s mouth thinned into a tight line, and he made a sharp left on Sinatra. They were headed to the south end of the Strip, angled in the direction of the Black Mountains.

  “Let me guess,” Kit went on, encouraged by his silence, forming that clue. “You snuck Gina out of Sunset and drove her to Barbara’s home on Saturday night. You then dressed her up in Barbara’s clothes, and waited for me to arrive. Barbara was setting me up.”

  She went crazy when I told her about you . . . she became obsessed.

  “Like I said,” Justin Allen huffed, shaking his head again. “You don’t have a clue what’s really going on.”

  Then she was close. Nobody had been reported missing at Sunset, so Barbara must have taken Gina’s place. Hiding in plain sight, as usual. And who there would know? The place was in upheaval right now, so who’d really look?

  Abruptly, they swung into an empty lot where a long industrial building stretched in the night like a frozen yawn. Kit’s heart leaped into her throat. Maybe he wasn’t taking her to the mountain at all. Maybe he was going to get rid of her here first, steal the map and dump her body inside one of these bays. Or a Dumpster. Nobody came here at night. There was no one for miles to hear her scream.

  Swallowing hard, Kit searched the car’s cabin for the plasma she’d seen earlier. She saw nothing, but what did that really mean? Maybe she didn’t have the ability to see the ethereal warning sign anymore. Or maybe, as Grif said, you just didn’t see it when death was coming for you.

  Carelessly, and, Kit noted, without looking for cross traffic, Justin whipped across two dark alleys in the industrial lot before he swerved one last time and his headlights speared the roll-up bay of an automotive store. For a moment, Kit just stared at the lone figure spotlighted there. What she saw was so unexpected, and so out of place, that her mind couldn’t make sense of the stark sight.

  What was Al Zicaro doing seated in his wheelchair in total darkness, alone in the night?

  The old man turned his head and squinted against the headlights. Bound and tied in place, Kit thought, shivering in the winter night with only a thin sweater to keep him warm.

  But then he lifted his hand to shield his eyes.

  And then he pushed from his wheelchair and strode to the passenger’s side of the car without even a hint of weakness or old age.

  Yanking the door open, Zicaro hemmed Kit in, and all the blood in her head fled to her toes. Justin chuckled beside her, his voice a razor in her ears. “Hiya, boss.”

  The world is such a dangerous place,” Evie repeated, her fingertips tightening in Grif’s hair. He was still on his knees, bowed over as if for absolution, and he was suddenly so damned tired. He wanted to shut his eyes and curl up right here until . . . well, until it was time to die. Because Evie was right. He would leave this dangerous place now via his own wings . . . if only it weren’t for Kit.

  Evie’s fingers moved down to his neck, her palms on either side of his cheeks. How many times had she held his face like this before? Too many to count. It was the way she had held him when he grumbled about a long day, or when she wanted him to listen to what she really had to say. The familiarity must have struck her, too, because when he finally looked up, she was no longer soft-gazed or staring at him with furrowed brow; no longer looking right through him, but studying him with sincere appraisal.

  Evie leaned forward and continued to caress Grif’s cheeks with her thumbs. Her eyes darted as her fingertips played over his stubble, taking in his features like a sponge, and Grif did the same. He truly saw her then, he knew her beneath this new flesh, and for that, if nothing else, he sent up a prayer of thanksgiving before his gaze finally fell to the thin gold chain swinging lightly around her neck. It took him another moment to recognize the charm hanging from it. It kept disappearing into the shadows as it swung, glinting and falling back, leaving and returning again.

  A ring. One that was inscribed with both of their initials, the slanting font also marking the date they were married. Grif reached up, needing to see it, and stilled it with his fingertips. This time, though, when the table lamp caught its edge, a memory sliced through his mind like a hot blade, the back of his head throbbing, then the sound of a vase crashing to the floor. He shook his head and refocused. Ignoring the chain, he slipped the ring over the fourth finger of his left hand. So that’s what happened to his wedding ring. He hadn’t seen it since . . .

  The ring notched into place with a finality that spiraled up his arm and swerved back down to drop into his belly. A wave of nausea rose to his throat, and the throbbing of his skull again clouded his mind. The sound of Evie’s long-ago scream whipped through him, acting as a battering ram against his brain.

  He saw again the moment Evie fell to the floor. He even felt the blood splash on his cheek as she landed, saw it dotting his forearm like end points on a map.

  A map . . .

  But no, he was still stuck in the past.

  Evie’s dark eyes were again pinned to his, but in a face taut with youth and filled with tears, and once more he heard her say, “Damn it, Griffin. No . . .”

  Blood pooled in the cupping shell of his ear, obscuring her words. Still insistent, desperate to be heard, she reached out and curled her fingertips around his left hand.

  “Griffin . . .” she said, squeezing tight. He remembered feeling that.

  And this time he also remembered her using her bloody fingertips to slip that cherished ring off his hand.

  Grif’s eyes followed Evie as she pushed to her palms and then her knees, fingers glinting with glittering polish and his blood. She was talking again, but Grif was having a hard time making out what else she said beyond his name, and she paused abruptly as if she knew it. Then, leaning close to his blood-filled ear, she pinned that hard gaze on his, and enunciated her words so that there could be no mistake. “Griffin, dear . . . why do you have to make everything so goddamned hard?”

  Grif could only shift his eyes as she reached for the doll with the diamonds tucked neatly into its face. She stared at it for a moment, greed curling the corners of her lips, then pressed it tightly to her chest, like a little girl. She c
aught him watching.

  “What?” she said, giving him the sly smile he thought he loved so much. “You’re good at hard, I’ll give you that. But hard isn’t the life I’m looking for.”

  Pocketing his ring, she began to rise just as a voice rang over the cold courtyard outside. “Tommy!”

  Fear swept over Evie’s face, blanching it, but she bit her lip, stilling it again as she made a quick calculation. Glancing from Tommy’s lifeless body back to Grif’s, she cursed beneath her breath, placed the doll back on the floor, facedown, then reached behind him. What the hell was she doing, he thought, feeling her fumble at his pant leg. She was going for his ankle, he thought. She was going for his . . .

  He must have whimpered.

  “Shhh,” she said, and they locked gazes as she wrestled with the gun at his ankle. “Don’t talk anymore, Griffin. Just die already.”

  And she pulled the piece from its holster, pointed it at his chest, and screamed, “Help! Oh, my God! Help me!”

  Then she fired.

  And then he was dead, wrapped in the wings of his Centurion.

  “Why?” Evie rasped now, as he blinked himself back to the present, thinking the same thing. Gasping, he dropped the ring like it burned. “Why do you always have to make everything so goddamned hard?”

  And just as she had fifty years earlier, she blindsided him with something else that was harder and denser than his skull, and rapped him soundly over the head with it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Though her mind had once again been set reeling by Zicaro’s appearance—his health and vigor—Kit was already figuring it out. After all, if anyone could piece together a fifty-year-old mystery, it was the old stringer sitting next to her. A man who’d always been obsessed with the made and the powerful in the Las Vegas Valley.

  “My dear, you look so confused.” He smiled, running his tongue over yellowed teeth. Kit wasn’t sure she’d ever seen anyone looking so healthy in her life. “And you call yourself an investigative reporter.”

  His snort, and Justin’s answering one, had her clenching her teeth. “When did you start working with Barbara DiMartino?”

  “With her?” Zicaro’s barked laughter was like a slap in the small confines of the car. “I’m not working with her. She shows up out of the blue last year with questions about a story I first broke decades ago. A fairy tale about diamonds in the desert.” His eyes twinkled just as brightly while he explained how those questions got him to thinking again about the last time she’d lived in town, and about the letter he’d sent Marin regarding Kit’s father.

  He was supposed to take care of Gina, I got the map. Apparently, you received something as well.

  So when Barbara showed back up in the valley this year, the cagey old newshound went on point.

  “But what about the scam at Sunset? The insurance fraud? The trust-fund thefts?”

  “Just a grift I’ve been running.” He shrugged and grinned. Even his smile was stronger. “One of many. Isn’t that right, Justin?”

  Justin just nodded, and kept his eyes straight ahead. He was more relaxed and more reserved now that his boss was with them.

  “I’m actually sorry to see this one end. The Sunset scam was almost beautiful in its simplicity. All I needed was one person in sales and another in accounting to oversee things.” Larry and Eric, who were not headed to Sheboygan. “Justin here is the only one who ever knew who I was, and that I was watching over everything from the inside.”

  “I’ve been with Al for six years now,” Justin said tightly.

  “Yep, and this was our best con yet. Still, if tonight goes well, I’ll never have to work another.”

  Zicaro chuckled, but broke off when he caught the disgust flashing across Kit’s face. He sobered immediately, his eyes going rock-hard in the sculpted crags of his face. “Hey! You’re the one to blame for my inability to make an honest living in this town!”

  Instinct had Kit treading lightly. His eyes were wild and wide, his voice too loud and deep. “Me?”

  “You . . . your family. Same thing,” he said, spittle flying from his mouth. “Do you know that the honorable Dean S. Wilson refused to grant me a letter of recommendation after giving me the boot? Thirty-one years of chasing down leads for your paper and not even a handshake on my way out the door.

  “Meanwhile, all that time, I had to sit by and watch—no, document—the escapades of the notorious and the immoral in this town. Forced to write about the DiMartinos and the Salernos while they literally got away with murder.” He sneered again. “Making money for the Craigs and their newspaper while they laughed at my stories and my methods. Yet they took credit for all my work, right before throwing me out on the street.”

  Was this what it was like to grow old? Kit wondered, drawing back in her seat as she looked at him. Did everyone harbor such great regret or obsession over the past?

  “But I’m not sitting on the sidelines anymore, am I? Let some other sucker chase down bylines. The disappearance of the mob created a void, the whole town was thrown into disarray. But where there’s chaos, there’s opportunity.” He ran his tongue across his teeth again. “First time out, I ran a scam right out of the DiMartino playbook. A shakedown of one of his own men, no less. Dug out some of my old stories and did the same with his buddies once DiMartino was no longer around to protect them. Made more money in a year than I did in five years writing for your grandfather.”

  Yet he’d still lived at Sunset, humbly, for years. “But you don’t spend it.”

  “Because spending isn’t the point. Possession is the point. Besides, you gotta stay inconspicuous if you want to keep your ear to the ground. If I hadn’t, I would’ve missed the biggest opportunity of my lifetime.”

  “Gina Alessi,” Justin said, clearly having heard this story before. Kit looked back and forth between the two men, pressed between evil and more evil.

  “That’s right. She moved into Sunset fifteen years back, right after I did. Said her name was Angelica, but I know faces. My mind is like a pitbull’s mouth. Once it seizes on to something it wants, it doesn’t let go.”

  So he went back through his files, every story he’d written from the time he started at the Trib in 1957, and finally struck gold with the story about a little girl’s kidnapping and a photo of the nanny who’d allowed it.”Gina was on the run, but I never let on that I knew it. I just played rummy with her, asked her to sit with me at lunch. Only later, after I had her trust, did I mention I used to be a reporter.”

  But he never mentioned the DiMartinos or the kidnapping that took place more than thirty years before. He didn’t want to spook her.

  “That’s why she asked my father to send you the map fourteen years ago. She thought you were a friend, she knew you could figure it out, but she fled after my father’s murder. She knew that Barbara and Ray would be searching for her.”

  Zicaro inclined his head. “Ray came by that very night. I heard him ransacking her room. The next day everything in it was gone. I stayed put, hoping Gina would come back or try to contact me again, but she never did.” Zicaro nodded, then abruptly stopped. “It would all be over by now if your father had just sent me both parts of that map.”

  But he’d sent it to Marin instead.

  “You’re a good reporter, Craig. I’ll give you that much,” Zicaro said, but his voice was cold, and it didn’t sound like a compliment. “You almost figured it out on your own.”

  “So you joined Grif and me. To see what we knew.”

  “And because I needed someone to do the legwork. People work for me now, understand? Not the other way around.” He settled back as they raced forward on a road that felt like it was lengthening, as if retreating into the past. “Now. Let’s go beat Barbara to those diamonds.”

  The Centurion charged with ferrying Grif’s soul to heaven on that cold night back in 1960 had been an old cowboy named Deacon. A farmhand who’d frozen to death in a Montana blizzard, he was hard to rattle and didn’t unde
rstand why everyone else wasn’t the same way, which was why he’d allowed Grif to watch the events that played out immediately after his death, saying it was like sitting in a theater, “watching an old flicker.”

  So Grif had watched Sal DiMartino burst into his hotel’s most exclusive bungalow, somehow alerted that his nephew was there. He made a strangled sound when he saw Tommy, an echo of his cracking heart, and immediately began mourning his nephew with large tears and cursing Grif with the same.

  Of course, Deacon had been reprimanded upon his arrival back in the Everlast, with traumatized Grif in tow like a roped calf. A hushed meeting took place the very next instant, when Sarge and another Pure from the Host discussed what best to do with Grif’s illicit knowledge. He hadn’t known this was unusual at the time—he’d only been dead for a few minutes—but he forgot it soon enough anyway. Incubation took care of that, along with all his earthly memories.

  Problem was, emotion imprinted on a soul. So when Grif emerged from the Tube, his past whitewashed into nonexistence, his soul should have been relieved of its heavy burden. But Deacon’s actions had stamped horror and sorrow on Grif’s spirit, so while Grif’s memory was gone, the emotional fallout remained.

  That was why, now that the truth had been laid bare, he could recall the way Evie had groveled before Sal DiMartino, spinning up a lie so intricate right there on the spot that Grif had trouble not believing it now.

  “Thank God you’re here! The lies this man has told!” she wailed, pointing at Grif’s body. “The things he has done!”

  Of course, Sal believed her. The evidence was right there. Two men dead, each slain by the other, and Evie, just a woman, delicate in a red wiggle dress, unable to lift a glittering hand to stop either of them.

  Yet she’d been strong enough to heft a clay vase over her head and bring it crashing down on Grif’s head.