The Given

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 understand 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.

“You been betrayed, son,” Deacon said, spitting tobacco from the side of his mouth as he patted Grif on the shoulder. “I’m sorry to be the one to show you this . . . but you’ll forget it soon enough, anyway.”

But Deacon didn’t remember how painful it was to be alive, and the Pure had never known. Therefore, watching Sal and Evie plotting what to do with Grif’s mortal body, the same way they might discuss burying the family dog, was really what had driven him for the past fifty years.

Who killed Griffin Shaw?

Well, he had that answer now . . . and it chased him back into consciousness.

Tucked into the passenger’s seat of Kit’s beloved car, ankles and wrists cuffed, Grif could only stare as the woman he’d sought for more than fifty years, the one he thought he’d known so well, drove out of the city and into the dark heart of the desert.

“Oh, stop looking at me that way,” Evie suddenly snapped, without even glancing over. “I hate it when you get that lost puppy-dog look on your face.”

Just like burying the family dog.

“How’d you do it?” Evie finally asked, and he didn’t have to ask what she meant. She had watched him take his last breath. She’d watched him bleed out on that cold marble floor. Grif had a memory—also courtesy of Deacon—of Sal ordering his men around. They’d carried Tommy out of the bungalow with excruciating care. Grif was wrapped in the oriental rug, and at the last minute Sal threw in the doll that Tommy had shoved in Grif’s face.

“Leave it!” Sal had ordered, when Evie tried to reach for it.

If there was any moment that Evie’s smooth, lying facade had faltered, that was it. “But—”

“I said leave it. Let the kiddie molester be buried with his toys.”

And with the city’s most powerful don’s eyes on her, Evie had no choice but to leave the doll with Grif.

Remembering it all, Grif laughed lightly now. “You came so close . . . those diamonds in the doll, that doll in your grasp. You could have had it all . . . but you were just so damned greedy.”

“That’s right, Griffin. I wanted it all . . . but who was going to give it to me? You?” Her laugh was a bark of incredulity, a slap in the face. “You with your big plans and your fancy words and your empty promises.”

“I never lied to you,” Grif said.

“You promised me treasure, and all I got was fool’s gold!”

Her words stole the breath from his body. Grif fought not to cringe, but he couldn’t help the way his eyes dropped to the ring, his wedding band, still hanging from her neck. At least he knew now why he had never worn it in the Everlast. Evie had slipped it from his finger before his final breath.

“Oh, did you want this back?” Evie asked, catching the direction of his stare. She lifted his ring with her free hand, and yanked the chain from her neck. Then she threw it across the car so that it clattered into the footwell at his feet. “I was going to hock it along with mine, but I figured I should at least get something from that fucking marriage.”

“I loved you,” Grif said, unable to help himself.

For some reason, that infuriated Evie. She shivered, though she couldn’t be cold. Her anger scorched. “Love doesn’t pay the bills, Griffin!” she yelled back. “Love doesn’t give you any of the things that make this life comfortable or worth living, but you fucking got me, didn’t you?”

“Got you?” He blinked.

“You had style and that mystery about you. Big P.I. about town. Shit-hot in your fedora, gazing at me with those big blues. All the girls wanted you, and I deserved what everyone else wanted. Well . . . I sure got it that time. And it almost cost me my future.”

Cost her her future?

Evie shrugged, oblivious to the irony. “Still, you were useful. You taught me the lengths people would go to for someone they loved. It wasn’t until I met you that I truly understood Sal and Theresa.”

The DiMartinos.

Evie’s mouth thinned, her gaze gone distant as she recalled the first man she’d lost. “Theresa knew she was dying even in ’fifty-five but she was determined to hang on to her love with Sal. Still hell-bent on protecting him, even from beyond the grave. I mean . . . can you imagine loving someone that much?”

Grif just thought, Fifty years.

“She declared social war on me, and Vegas was a small town back then. You remember.” She huffed, still indignant. “When the wife of the most notorious don in Vegas shows you the door, you go, but I swore the day I wiped the desert’s dust from my feet that I would circle back ’round. And next time? She’d never see me coming.”

“Barbara.” It was the name of the woman whose photo he’d never seen. Whom he thought he’d never met.

Barbara McCoy back in 1955 . . . Barbara DiMartino later, when she had the man and the power she’d always coveted. But for two short years in between?

Evelyn Shaw. His wife. His Evie.

“Sal didn’t recognize you when you were . . . when we were . . .”

“Married to you?” she finally finished for him, then scoffed. “Of course, he did. I wanted him to. While his wife lay useless in her sickbed, he needed to see what another man had, and what he was missing.”

Evie—Barbara—needed to lurk in the front of his mind so that he would want her—and only her—when Theresa was finally gone.

And when Grif was gone, too.

“Wait . . . are you only now getting all this?” She looked astounded, eyes flaring before she blinked. Then, heedless of the road before her, she threw back her head and roared. Driving one-handed, she clutched her belly and wiped her eyes. Finally, when the laughter had died in all but Grif’s head, she scoffed. “And you call yourself a P.I.”

Not anymore he didn’t, Grif thought, and turned away.

A coyote.

Kit heard its howl on the cold night wind as soon as Justin silenced the engine, and she leaned forward to glance past the windshield and up at the sky. A full moon, too.

“It’s an omen,” Kit whispered, and her voice sounded displaced in the dark, so that even she felt shivers race up her spine. Zicaro and Justin ignored her, but she was trapped and weaponless. Talking was the only defense she had.

“The Paiutes who originally settled this territory called coyotes the ‘trickster gods.’ They told stories of their playfulness and humor, but also their mischievousness. It was said that they represented the earth, its need for balance, and that coyotes could sense it when someone had laid a trap. Basically, if the coyote howls, it bodes ill for those intent on mischief or injury.”

“Would you shut up?” Justin finally snapped. His jaw had been getting tighter and tighter as he tried to ignore her, staring at some app on his smart phone instead. “We’re not interested in your fairy tales. No one believes that shit anymore, anyway.”

But if he weren’t interested, Kit reasoned with a stiff shrug, then he wouldn’t be reacting so poorly.

“Maybe not,” she sniffed, “but even the sound of them should worry you. It’s winter and they’re desperate.”

“Coyotes don’t attack people,” Justin said.

“But they’ve been edging closer to town lately. Reports have them toppling garbage cans and snatching domesticated pets from backyards. We just did a story on it.”

“So they’re hungry?” Justin asked, finally glancing up from the phone.

“Very,” answered Kit confidently.

“Then we’ll let you lead the way,” Justin said with a smile, causing Zicaro to chuckle. Yet, despite his words, neither man made an effort to move from the car.

Kit looked back and forth from one to the other, then barked out her own short laugh when neither of them would meet her eye. “You have no idea where it is, do you?”

They’d found access to the Black Mountains from the southeast side, but had stopped the car only halfway to the top. They should have been up there digging, but something had them stumped.

“Sal DiMartino left markers,” Zicaro finally admitted, “but only his closest lieutenants knew what they looked like.”

Kit thought about that for a moment, then scoffed as realization dawned. “You need Barbara. That’s why we’re waiting here in the dark.”

They’d let Barbara find the exact site, and then they’d ambush her, taking the contents of the grave for themselves.

“How do you even know she’s coming?” Kit asked.

“Because I’ve studied Barbara DiMartino for years. I know her better than anyone else. I know what she’ll do probably before she even does.”

“We also put a tracer on that pretty little car of yours,” Justin said, and smiled as he held up his smart phone. It revealed a moving red dot along with their green one. The red was growing closer by the second.

“How did she get my—” But Kit’s question stuttered off and curled into the darkness.

Grif. He’d finally found Barbara . . . and just like Al Zicaro, she’d been ready for him.

“Close now,” Justin interrupted, watching his screen.

“How close?” Zicaro asked, leaning over Kit.

“No more than five.” Justin clicked his phone off. “We should go up.”

“Five minutes in this cold? That’s plenty of time for the coyotes to get to us,” Kit tried, but Justin was already out of the car, and Kit heard the trunk open just as Zicaro leaned close to her face.

“You mean your trickster gods?” He grinned as he grabbed hold of Kit’s arm with one hand and pulled out a zip tie with the other. “Don’t worry. We’ll be careful of the earth’s balance. We’re still going to pull those diamonds from this desert floor, of course, but we brought along another little doll to replace it.”