The Given

by Vicki Pettersson

  “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 admitt
ed, “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.”

  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.