The Given

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Kit rode in the passenger’s seat of Dennis’s car, with a known criminal at the wheel and a gun pointed at her middle. Yes, she was scared out of her mind; she was shaking, gaze darting from the locked doors to the streets and people just beyond them and back to Justin, who was sitting cool but smelled like old sweat and stale breath, too. He’d been cooling his heels for a long time, and was obviously pleased to be taking action.

Yet Kit had also just spent seven hours in jail, ordering her mind, parsing out possible fates for herself. None of them had included watching Dennis dumped in a dark corner of the jail’s side lot, being kidnapped in a police car, or being ferried into the deep heart of the cold Mojave. So she latched on to the thought that she was going to get out of this alive, that there was still time to find Grif and fulfill the prophecy and make some meaning of all this together.

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 caught 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.