The Given

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Try as he might, Grif still couldn’t bring himself to think of the woman he’d married as anyone other than Evelyn Shaw. Maybe it was because he’d spent so many years revering Evie and vilifying Barbara. The difference between the two women in his mind was insurmountable. Evie Shaw was a blossom, a woman who gave to the world simply by being in it. Barbara DiMartino was a taker, a black hole that absorbed and annihilated anything that got too close.

And Grif was an utter, pathetic fool.

Name aside, though, Grif had to admit that this woman certainly conducted herself like Evie. Forget the age that’d put spots on her hands and wrinkles on her face and neck. Her posture, when not feigning illness, was straight, but with an anticipatory forward bend. Evie had always leaned into life. Her brown eyes, wiped of moisture, were dark glittering orbs that missed nothing, and Grif had to admit that’d always been the case. He’d thought her clever. Turned out she was cagey as well.

There was also no arguing that despite their disparate appearances, Evie was more energetic and agile than he was right now. Because, for his part, Grif suddenly understood the meaning of “bone-tired.” It meant the world grew colder than you’d ever known it, starting from within. It meant mere instants of physical relief, and those only between breaths. It meant being forsaken by your own marrow. He could literally feel the muscles in his legs shrinking, atrophying, causing him to wobble as he tried to rise from his side of the car once they arrived at the mountain. He braced against it, and he knew.

The Fade was coming. His angelic side was dying, just as Sarge said it would, and Grif would be gone from the Surface before the night was through. He had accepted this at some point in their journey up the mountain, and now all there was left to do was climb.

“What time is it?” he asked, as Evie poked him in the back with the barrel of his own snubnose, forcing him around to the trunk of the car. Once again, it seemed he was doomed to die by a bullet from his own gun. At least now he knew why there’d only ever been four bullets in it. That’s how many were left when it’d been shoved back into its holster at his cooling ankle.

“What does it matter?” Evie retorted, fumbling with the trunk lock, because it didn’t to her. She had no knowledge of the celestial timetable he was on. She had never even given him a chance to explain about his Centurion status, or that he hadn’t lived the last half century as she had, but died and spent that time mourning her.

No, the only thing she’d openly wondered about was his appearance, how he’d managed to stay so young-looking and whether he’d give her the name of his plastic surgeon before he died.

Dying again, he finally decided as Evie rummaged in the trunk, would be a relief.

As she donned a long fur coat, Grif thought about goading Evie into shooting him, and speeding along the process, but knew that wasn’t what the Pures had in mind. Of course, they’d want there to be a cosmic lesson for him in all this. Besides, he knew from the time he’d spent carting traumatized souls into the Everlast that the best way to come to terms with the demise of your life was by facing it square on.

So he took the flashlight and shovel that Evie handed him, resigned to his role in fate’s plan, and they began picking their way up this slope of the Black Mountains. The bleak chill of the night was matched only by the brilliance of the stars in the sky. This far out from the obscuring neon of the city, they were diamonds piercing black velvet. It made Grif wonder why, if one sought treasure, they couldn’t just look up.

It also made him wonder whether Donel was up there, watching. Gloating. Maybe Sarge was already readying a place for him in incubation. Maybe now that he’d found Evie—now that the yearnings of his heart had proven a total farce—God would deign to see him this time around.

Dropping his head, Grif continued the uphill slog, prodded in the back by his own gun every time his feet lost purchase atop bramble and the porous black rock that gave the range its name. Another scuffle sounded off to the right as they climbed, causing Evie to jolt and stumble. She apparently saw no irony in clinging to Grif’s arm to right herself as she took aim into the darkness, before quickly swinging the barrel of his gun back up and into his side.

“Coyotes,” he muttered, the last of his celestial eyesight pulsing as he spotted a four-legged creature. Evie shivered and shoved him forward, in front of her. He could have shoved back, it wouldn’t take much, but forward was exactly where he wanted to be. He was so tired of living in the past.

He was suddenly so very tired of it all.

Finally, the bobbing beam of light found the hillside’s first crest. Darkness still lay on three sides, lousy with coyotes and treasure, but the entire Las Vegas Valley blazed on the fourth, the city lights knifing up into the sky. However, that wasn’t what caused Evie to halt, or to draw in a sharp breath, or to take one uncertain step back.

No, most remarkable were the two figures waiting for them beneath a natural black outcropping. Justin Allen, as massive as ever, looking much like one of the craggy formations around them . . . and Albert Zicaro at his side, standing of his own volition, a shovel propped in front of him like he was a developer breaking ground.

For the second time in an hour, the world shifted around Grif. Another trick, he realized, blinking hard. The world was chock-full of them.

But then Grif caught the uneasy smile on Evie’s face and recognized it as the one she wore when trying to work out anything, from a crossword puzzle to the handling of a nosy neighbor. She was plotting a course of action, taking inventory of her options. Whatever her thoughts as she studied Zicaro, Grif didn’t think she looked nearly as frightened as she should have. Then again, she was using him as a shield.

“Where?” was all Zicaro said.

Instead of answering, Evie just pulled her fur more closely around her shoulders. “You know, Sal always said there were only two durable things in this godforsaken valley. Bills and boulders. He spent the bills, or at least I spent them for him, and marked the graves of his enemies with headstones carved from the valley’s mountain ranges.”

Grif thought she was stalling again. Zicaro clearly did, too, because his face was shifting into a snarl, but Evie just reached out—gun still steady at Grif’s back—and guided his hand, forcing him to scan the hillside with the flashlight. She dismissed the foreground, the jutting outcropping, but jerked the beam back suddenly, a smile in her voice. “There.”

“Watch her,” Zicaro told Justin as he turned to scour the mountainside, and Justin—eyes trained on Evie like dual moons in the night—began edging toward her as Zicaro stumbled around behind him. Knowing she was outnumbered, Evie didn’t move. She couldn’t keep her gun trained at Grif’s back and on Justin—or Zicaro—at the same time. He had to hand it to the old girl, though. Instead of panicking, she fell even stiller, that strange expression fixed to her face.

“Here!” Zicaro finally called, a note of triumph causing his voice to tremble. Justin waved them forward with his gun. Despite his failing eyesight, Grif then spotted it, too, the giant slab of pink sandstone that was indigenous to this valley . . . but not to the Black Mountains.

“Red rock?” Zicaro guessed, looking over his shoulder, and Evie made an assenting noise in the back of her throat. And there was no way the giant slab of rock could have gotten all the way out to the Black Mountain range unless it’d been deliberately moved. Still native to the area, it would never bleach beneath the onslaught of the relentless summer sun, or erode beyond recognition from the violent spring winds or summer monsoons. It would ever sit there, unnoticed, the perfect way to mark drop zones . . . or buried treasure.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” Zicaro said, and was so giddy he bowed to Evie with an exaggerated flourish. Then he straightened and nodded at Justin. “Now shoot that bitch.”

Swallowing hard, Justin glanced from Zicaro to Evie and back again. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“You’re right.” Sighing, Zicaro pulled a gun from behind his back. “I’ll do it.”

And clearly not caring whom he struck, Zicaro fired three times in quick succession.

Click, click, click.

He looked down at his gun like it’d grown two heads. The confusion on his face was almost comical in the steady beam of Grif’s flashlight. Evie chuckled lightly behind Grif while Justin pivoted to flank Grif’s other side.

“See, Griffin?” Evie said, fur brushing his shoulder. “You’re not the only one who’s slow on the uptake.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Zicaro roared, tossing the gun aside. He glared at Justin with raw fury but still shivered in the small beam of light. “You’re throwing me over for that old broad?”

Evie lifted her chin. “I think the line is, ‘Et tu, Brutus?’ ”

“I don’t speak French,” Zicaro snarled. “Except for ‘fuck you.’ ”

“No, fuck you,” Evie said, and fired a shot between his legs.

Despite his waning powers, Grif did see the plasma then. It rolled in like a cosmic wave, a silvery supernatural tide, and there was enough of the luminous warning to mark them all for dead.

“You’d better be real clear on what you’re doing here, son,” Zicaro warned Justin, who bent to lift something off the desert floor.

“I’m not your son,” Justin muttered, and then threw the item at Zicaro’s feet. It was a pickax, one they’d obviously brought up with them. “And she promised me half.”

“I could give you half!” Zicaro screamed, voice threading with plasma to spiral and spark in the icy night.

Justin screamed back. “After six years of watching your back, running con after con, always being promised a next time, and being told that the big one is still to come? That we’re going to make out, we’re going to be rich?”

Evie, still and imperturbable on Grif’s other side, only chuckled. “I just hate a man who can’t live up to his promises.”

“You think I believe that you’re gonna make good on all that now?” Justin’s laugh sawed harshly and he picked up a second pickax. He was about to hand it to Grif when a shadow moved along the perimeter. Plasma coiled around both the ax handle and one fleeting brown paw.

But Evie didn’t see the coyote or Justin’s hesitation. She was still focused on Zicaro, intent on opening that wound more, and rubbing in salt. “You gotta be generous with your people, Zicaro. Sal taught me that. Fear and greed are useful tools to curry loyalty, but nothing makes a man more steadfast than guaranteed green.”

Zicaro snarled. “Yeah, you were real generous with Gina, weren’t you?”

“Gina had it coming.”

“And what about Kit’s father?” Grif said, out of the blue. “What about me?”

Evie blinked, and for a moment she appeared genuinely surprised that he was still there. “Did I say you could speak?”

“No, Evie,” Grif said, equally coolly. “I believe what you said was, ‘Till death do us part.’ ”

“Well, then let’s get to it.” She kicked him in the heels, the barrel of the gun pressing into his back. “Start digging. You, too, Zicaro.”

“Fuck you,” Zicaro said again, and this time Evie didn’t even sigh, she just shot him in the leg. Zicaro hit the ground before the report had cleared from the air. His screams were cutting, but Grif could barely hear them through the buzzing in his ears. The cries were futile, in any case. No one would hear him up here. Besides, what Zicaro couldn’t see as he writhed in pain was the plasma purling around his legs, rising along his back, linking smooth silvery tendrils gently around his neck. “You fucking shot me!”

“Actually, I missed. I was going for the gut.” Evie turned her back on him and regarded Grif with narrowed eyes. Darkness made a puzzle out of her gaze, obscuring her features, wiping away the lines of age, and revealing only those parts of her face caught in the flashlight’s indirect beam. It made her look like she needed to be fitted back together. “As for you, Griffin, dear. Tell me something before you start digging. Before you die.”

“What do you want to know?” he asked flatly. Zicaro continued to writhe and moan. The stars kept their icy watch. The coyotes, two this time, moved in closer again.

“How’d you do it the first time?” she said, and narrowed her eyes when he only stared. “Was it a shovel? Bare hands? Did you have an ally? Did the coyotes help you?”

“I don’t know . . .” But Grif looked down at the pickax in Justin’s hands, and he did know. The buzzing grew loud in his ears again, but this time it had nothing to do with gunfire. Because the plasma was sliding from Zicaro to him in concentric circles, and it was forming a third link with the pink boulder and the treasure that lay beneath it. The treasure and the grave.

His grave.

“I mean, how the hell does a man survive being stabbed, having his skull caved in, and then getting buried in one of Sal’s graves?”

“You forgot being shot and betrayed by his wife,” he said, but Evie just shook her head. She didn’t care about that. She never had.

“It defies reason.” Her upper lip curled in disdain. “It stinks of a miracle.”

Grif felt something bubble up inside of him at that, and a snort escaped him before he could stop it. That, too, struck him as funny and he turned his head up to the night sky, as if howling at the moon. “Hear that?” he called out to the heavens, the Pure. “She thinks this is a miracle.”

Still laughing, he dropped his gaze and studied the bumpy landscape again. Shouldn’t he have some sort of recognition of the spot? Shouldn’t he be able to recognize the place where he’d been buried for more than fifty years?

But then Evie was directly in front of him. Something moved behind her, but it was gone from Grif’s periphery almost instantly, silent and swift. Whatever it was, it was of the earthly plane and of no concern to him anymore. However, Justin was watching the two of them closely, instinctively knowing there was something between them that he didn’t understand. Even Zicaro had stopped flailing on the ground long enough to observe their closeness, their marital intimacy.

“I don’t think I love you anymore,” Grif said flatly.

Evie just jerked the pickax from Justin’s hands and forced it into Grif’s. “Go dig up my fucking diamonds.”

What did it matter? Plasma was already winding up the ax’s handle, interweaving with his grip. He lifted his other hand, wondering if he could touch it, but just as his fingertip disappeared into the phosphorescent mist, his celestial eyesight snapped out, and the plasma disappeared with it.

So this is it, Grif thought, and realized that this was how it was supposed to end all along. A full circle back to the grave that held his old bones, now gone as gritty and porous as the rock that marked them. He decided that he’d go ahead and dig out Evie’s treasure for her. Then he’d climb back inside his grave and curl up into a past he should have never left. Dust to dust.

Grif trudged over to the grave. Zicaro had ceased writhing atop it and had picked up the pickax Justin had thrown him as well. Zicaro was injured, and Grif was starting the Fade, but they’d do what they could to live a little longer. Survival, it seemed, was the strongest instinct of all.

For a time, the only sound was that of their pickaxes striking the black earth. The volcanic rock was harder than the sandstone that burst from the desert floor farther north, but softer than the caliche plaguing most of the valley. Grif had to admit, Sal had picked a great place to bury him.

After the top layer was dislodged, the digging became easier. His wound and age caused Zicaro to flag, but he pressed on, clearly intent on seeing the diamonds he was likely to die for. Eighteen inches straight down now. It wouldn’t be long.

“Go wide,” Zicaro suddenly said, grunting as he cut away more of the dense earth. “They’re going to want us to make room for three.”

Evie heard him and cocked her weapon. “No talking!”

“Unless Justin here has changed his mind about that as well.”

“You heard the woman, Zicaro,” Grif grunted, sweating and focused. “No talking.”

“Fine. Just thought you’d want to know what’s gonna happen to your dearest treasure.”

The vicious heat in Zicaro’s words couldn’t keep Grif from freezing. He swiveled slowly to look at the old man and, locating him, still saw only darkness.

“She’s in the car,” Zicaro sneered. “Hog-tied . . . or at least zip-tied.”

Justin was suddenly there, squatting next to the hole, his gun level with Grif’s gaze. “Shut up and dig, Al.”

Zicaro thought about it for a moment before throwing down his pickax. He looked resolute, like he knew he wasn’t going to be able to figure a way out of this one. No sense in making it easy on his killers. “Make me,” he said, crossing his arms.

A howl rose on the wind as if in response, ripping the silence of the night. Zicaro jumped, and whirled in time to catch the moving silhouette of a lone coyote trotting along the ridge above them. Backlit, it lay opaque and flat against the far-off wink of the city lights.

Cursing, Evie shot at it.

Grif’s ears rang again with the report and he dropped his ax, clutching his skull with both hands. The throb in his head pulsed from the center of his brain now, sending concentric ripples of pain to batter his skull. His stomach began to ache in the left side, too, and he realized he’d felt both of these injuries before. They were the ones that’d killed him the first time around.

A blow across his face—Justin’s way of getting his attention—brought him back to the present. It wasn’t much more than a slap, but it knocked his fedora from his head and gave the throb an extra kick. “Pick up your ax and—”

And Evie screamed behind him. Justin began to turn, but the dark shape that’d sprung from the desert floor was already in flight. Evie hit the volcanic floor on her back, the gun going off as she grunted under her attacker’s weight. Meanwhile, Grif did as Justin said. He picked up his ax and, using every ounce of strength left to him, lit up the left side of the crouching man’s face.

Yet he’d also lost his equilibrium, and momentum sent him headlong into his own old grave.

The move saved him. Justin recovered quickly, and shot at the first thing that moved. Zicaro grunted once, fell atop Grif, and didn’t move again. Justin then trained the gun between Grif’s eyes, but behind him was a figure haloed in moonlight. Her hands were bound by zip ties . . . but there was still enough room to grip a shovel. With one solid thwack, she sent Justin sailing into the grave as well. Grif’s body was now trapped beneath two still men, and a third—his own aged bones—lay beneath him.

For a moment, there was only his labored breath to break the silence. The wind settled. The coyotes fell still. The city was just a far-off glittering thing.

“Grif?” Kit finally said, voice thick with worry that he wouldn’t answer.

Exhausted, in pain from injuries both old and new, Grif closed his eyes . . . and smiled into the cold night sky. “Hey, doll. Think you can give me a hand?”

He heard a click. Grif’s eyes shot open and he saw that two women suddenly loomed above him, and the second one had a gun planted at Kit’s temple.

“My husband,” Evie told Kit. “Always loved his five-shooter best.”

And she had already fired four times.

Neither Grif nor Kit spoke, causing Evie to laugh, a harsh ring of satisfaction in the cold night. “In fact, I’d say he was downright passionate about this gun. Same as with his lousy job as a P.I. Same with me. Every damned thing Griffin has ever done, he’s done with great passion.”

“That’s not a bad thing,” Kit said. Her voice was stiff, but with a gun pressed against her skull, it was brave of her to speak at all.

“I agree. Passion can be the most powerful emotion in the world when properly directed. I tried to explain this to Justin once, when we first agreed to work together. I even explained the etymological root of the word, passus. It’s Latin. It means . . .”

“To suffer,” Kit finished for her. Evie blinked at Kit, who looked back, effectively turning her face directly into the gun. “Justin already explained all this to me, so you can save your fucking breath.”

Evie’s jigsaw expression reordered itself into a cold, firm mask. “Fine. No point in wasting time speaking to the dead, anyway. Though I do need to thank you. I still hadn’t figured out a way to get rid of Justin after the three of you were buried.”

“So that’s how you’ve lived the whole of your life?” Kit asked disdainfully. “Using men up, then burying them when you’re done?”

“It’s worked wonderfully.”

“I think the men might disagree.”

Grif was still too stunned at seeing these two women together, engaging, to speak at all. Weakness, too, turned him into a mere bystander, gaping as Evie turned fully to Kit, straightening in her fur.

“Yes, well, if it were left to the men in my life, I’d have spent the whole of it scrubbing other people’s toilets as my mother did, or thrusting snot-nosed brats from my body, having to reshape myself, my life, into whatever form they chose. This is a world led by men, dear. Problem is, if you follow them you’ll always be led into some form of destitution.”

“Yet you had a man who would’ve followed you anywhere,” Kit said.

Evie bristled, a shiver moving through her, ruffling her fur. “Fine. In retrospect, I can admit that Grif was different.” She didn’t look at him. “A true gentleman. Astonishingly loyal, a first for me. A man for whom the word ‘lover’ was created. I always thought of him as some sort of love savant. Capable of more of it than most, though that didn’t mean he still wasn’t stupid.”

“That kind of love isn’t stupid,” Kit fumed. “It’s fucking regal.”

Evie shook her head. “Trust me, girl. Time and again I’ve seen a woman grow mightier with age, strengthened by the hours she’s spent forced to her knees by a man. Wash his floor, bear his children, suck his cock. Meanwhile, those same men depend on their physical strength to get by. They think it’ll always be there, and when it finally begins to weaken, when they finally realize how dependent they’ve become on the women who run their worlds, they’re actually surprised . . . and as needy as suckling newborns.”

“You preyed on that,” Kit said.

“I learned early on that a man will give you everything if only you know what he values. You become that thing, an ingénue, a victim, a savior, but always hold a little back. It’s the small dignity you keep for yourself that will let you rise up and, in time, take it all. As I have.”

“And yet,” Kit said mildly, “what would your life be like if instead of just taking you’d even once attempted to give?”

The night went silent. For a moment, it was so still that it seemed they’d all turned to stone, as immutable and timeless as the surrounding terrain. Then Evie just tucked the gun inside Kit’s ear, and squeezed the trigger.

Click.

Grif chuckled darkly. “Four rounds, Evie. You used the fifth on me fifty years ago, remember?”

Kit made a sound then, one that the coyotes surrounding them would recognize and appreciate. Before Evie could even blink, Kit sent a dual-fisted hammer punch right through the center of her startled face. Evie hit the black ground, and this time she didn’t move again. Kit, breathing hard, her hair whipping in the cold wind, turned back to Grif, who was still lying in his own grave.

“I can’t believe you married that bitch.”