The Given (9 page)

Justin fidgeted on his feet, which was rare. “Shit.”

And that said it all.

The man sighed and waited.

“My man . . . he screwed up.”

The man closed his eyes and waited some more. “First of all, we weren't seen on the way in. You were right. The party was a great distraction. We used the residents' parking garage to go up and back.”

“But.” Not a question. When someone overexplained, there was always a “but.”

“And I offed the old bird, it was as easy as you said. I think she knew what I was going to do, but she laid down on the floor and practically pulled the trigger for me.”

Yes. Fifty years of guilt would do that to you.

“But,” he said again.

“But then I left Larry to clean up while I readied the car, and the other woman, the Craig girl, got away.” Thus the sweating, the fidgeting, the lost breath when every damned thing should be under control.

Clenching his teeth together so hard that one of his crowns began to ache, the man shook his head. Goddamn Justin. He was going to make him ask. “
How
did she get away?”

“Griffin Shaw.”

Shaw. “You're sure it was him?”

“Larry said it was the same man who busted up that drug ring six months ago. The same one who stopped the kiddie sex ring before that.” There'd been photos in the
Las Vegas Tribune,
and the man had shown them to Justin. He always read the
Tribune,
hard copy only. It was what had alerted him to Shaw's return to the valley in the first place.

“Besides,” Justin was saying, voice hollowed like he was in a tunnel. “Who else dresses like that?”

The man stood, pushing from his desk and crossing to the window that overlooked a wide, cool lawn that should never exist in the desert. He couldn't see it in the dark, but he could feel it, cold and vast, like life itself. Dropping his forehead against the icy pane, he decided to break his own rule. He was the one asking questions now.

“And why didn't Larry kill them both?” Because Shaw had dropped off their radar in recent months. They'd tracked the Craig woman, but never once had their surveillance shown Shaw at her side.

“She shot at him.”

A chill arrowed through the man's chest. “Barbara did?”

Justin made a face. “No, Craig. Apparently she carries a gun.” He gave the man a hard look. “You forgot to put that in your report.”

The man didn't apologize. Instead he thought about the revolver in his bottom desk drawer. He thought about shooting Justin, and then finding Larry and finishing what Craig had not. If he wasn't so sure he'd need them later, he might have done it. No one would object. After all, he made up the rules around here.

What he needed to do now was figure out what to do
next
. First Barbara McCoy had returned to the valley. Now Griffin Shaw. And they'd been on a collision course tonight, which couldn't be a coincidence.

No . . . the man had seen too much, and knew too much of this couple's respective pasts, to believe in coincidence. He was willing to bet these two were looking for the same thing he was, though he'd been at it for fifty years.

“Bringing old ghosts to life,” he muttered, his breath going white against the cold windowpane.

“What?” Justin asked, not knowing he shouldn't be asking questions anymore. Not aware that he could already be dead.

“I said that those two are bringing the past back with them.”

And this time
he
was going to take his share of it.

CHAPTER FIVE

S
o where was the perfect place to be when you weren't sure where to go but knew only that you didn't want to be found?

Vegas, baby.

Part of it was the tourists, yes; the thousands of nameless faces moving and shifting throughout the city made it easy to hide. Sensory overload took care of the rest—flashing lights and LED signs, music and horns and PA systems blasting outdoors—noises normally reserved for airports and hospitals and train stations, all desperate to stimulate ADD in the calmest of souls, at least long enough to separate them from their money.

Ignoring it all, Kit and Grif strolled across the cavernous floor of the Desert Dream, the city's largest casino. It was past midnight, but the foot traffic was as thick as at the Rockefeller Center at Christmas. Kit nervously eyed the smoky-black domes of the ceiling security cams anyway, then ducked her head as they passed the raised stand bearing not one but two security guards. Yet even Kit's and Grif's retro clothing wasn't enough to raise an eyebrow in this environment, and the in-house security was actually a blessing. It meant there was less chance of running into any city police.

In fact, Grif and she could likely spend a whole weekend in the cavernous building and never run into the same employee twice. Slot machines, pit games, bars, lounge entertainment—visits with wild tigers and dolphins—and strange combinations thereof, there was no end to the manufactured entertainment vying for their attention just in the Desert Dream alone. As long as they didn't make a run on the blackjack tables, it was the perfect place for Kit and Grif to hide.

“Where exactly are we going?” Grif asked, eyes darting from face to face from beneath his lowered stingy-brim.

Kit looked at her watch. “It's just as early as it is late. That makes it the perfect time for Temptation.”

Grif tripped over his own feet. “What?”

Kit pointed to the glittering, cavernous red mouth of the hotel nightclub. Warm satisfaction momentarily dislodged the remainder of her fading shock when Grif winced. The club's bassline throbbed all the way out onto the casino floor. Before he could come up with an alternative, Kit paid the cover. Grif was out of money for some reason, though he said he'd pay her back later, and she thought, Damned right, and sprung for bottle service as well. She knew that no matter how much he spent, the amount he'd died with in 1960 would return to his pocket at 4:10 sharp every morning. That was only a handful of hours away.

A pretty but dead-eyed hostess led them directly across the dance floor and to an elevated “room” curtained off by black sheers and velvet ropes. By the time they were settled, Grif was grinding his teeth together so hard that Kit could almost hear it over the monotonous rap, though she pretended not to notice. Temptation was dark enough to be private, yet loud enough to prevent intimacy, and Kit needed each of those things for her first meeting with Grif in six months. A stiff drink wouldn't hurt, either.

“They're up-charging by five thousand percent,” he grumbled as their personal server sauntered away. If she didn't know better, she'd say he was more upset by that than by the headless body he'd found earlier that evening.

“Tip not included,” Kit said, just to see if she could ruffle his feathers. Ha, ha.

Grif slumped in his pleather seat and almost slid to the floor. “She plunked down an ice bucket and walked away. She's not getting a tip.”

“She plunked down an ice bucket, showed you her cleavage, and walked away,” Kit corrected, lifting her drink as he righted himself.

“Why would you even bring that to my attention?” He shot her a look so jaded—so old and so new—that she blinked in the flashing strobes and wondered for a moment if she was seeing things. How many nights had she dreamed of just that look? She firmed herself against it by downing her entire first glass of overpriced vodka.

“Because no woman actually wants to do that for free, and because it's not her fault that they overcharge here. She's not going to see any of it. She works for
tips.
”

Grif grumbled and leaned forward, and Kit reclined farther into the curtained-off alcove and studied him from the shadows. Out of their element, still trying to find their footing in the aftermath of murder, and they were already bantering with ease. Forget the frenetic beat pushing at them from the multitudinous speakers, this was a true call-and-response pattern, one as easy and deliberate as a sexy blues phrase. It calmed her.

And
that
made her down her second overpriced drink in one nervous gulp.

“Tell me what happened tonight,” Grif said, light flashing across the angular planes of his face so that he appeared deconstructed. It made him easier to look at, and answer.

“You mean the murder?” The scene flashed again, jumping out at her like it was a part of the choreographed light show. She'd seen a dead body. She'd shot at a killer. Blinking hard, Kit poured herself another drink.

“I mean all of it.” How she'd hooked up with Barbara McCoy. How she'd ended up in the suite on the night the woman was murdered. How she could even think of sitting and talking to a woman who hated him and his not-dead wife.

Sipping now, Kit decided she'd tell him enough to assure his help, but she wouldn't reveal all of her actions, her life, herself. Never that again.

“I located Barbara McCoy about four months ago, though didn't approach her immediately.”

She let that sit between them, a loaded moment. Barbara had first popped up on Kit's and Grif's radar while they were investigating Grif's murder in 1960. She'd become Barbara DiMartino not long after that by marrying Vegas's most infamous mobster. Sal DiMartino was up there with the greats—Spilotro, Siegel, Lansky, and Berman. Names that were like royalty in Vegas. “I told her straight out that I was press, though she remained suspicious.”

“Just suspicious?” Grif asked.

She huffed at his knowing look. “Downright rude. Regarded me like I was a fly to be swatted, and looked more than willing to do it herself.”

Kit could usually charm her way into a story with honest gregariousness or genuine interest or effusive charm. She didn't often elicit a death glare from anyone . . . never mind from a woman close to her eighth decade.

“She finally agreed to meet me in person seven weeks ago. Said she'd had time to suss me out.”

“How?”

“Given her background? I was afraid to ask.”

So they'd met at the Bootlegger Bistro, the successful offshoot of a downtown restaurant that'd been serving Italian-style family fare since 1947. Those recipes and the bistro had moved to the south end of the Strip since then, but the interior paid homage to Vegas's golden era. “Barbara was seated in the back of the room in a booth all by herself. I knew she was waiting for me, but she watched everyone. The singer crooning Sinatra. The waitstaff, who were wary of her. The bartender. The women.”

Especially the women.

In fact, she'd taken one look at Kit, narrowed her eyes and licked her over-dyed lips, drew in a deep breath of smoke from the mother-of-pearl cigarette holder cocked in her right hand. “You're not like the other girls, are you?”

“What do you mean?” Kit asked politely, removing her gloves. She'd been especially careful in dressing for the occasion. After all, this woman had actually lived—had thrived—in the era Kit most revered.

“Because you can't wrap these girls in fur.” She waved her hand in the air and sent ash scattering. “Bacon, maybe, but not fur.”

Kit clenched her jaw but couldn't risk calling the woman on it and running her off.

“She was bitter,” Kit told Grif, because she knew he'd been wondering about Barbara for so long. He knew that she thought he'd deserved to die fifty years earlier, and she hadn't changed her mind in the ensuing years. Not that Kit could tell. “She smoked. Said she was dying of emphysema. Said that her neck was draped in pearls, but what she really needed was a pair of good lungs.”

“Why, so she could continue spewing more of her filth?”

That's exactly what Kit had thought, though she didn't say it then or now. “You know, it's not rare to see someone surrounded by so many things still so indelibly unhappy, but it felt like it was more than that. Like she had greater regrets. Things that were so far in her past that she knew she'd never be able to touch them again.”

Grif nodded briefly, not looking at her. Of course, he'd know about that. He swallowed hard. “Did you ask her anything about, you know . . . me?”

Kit wanted to say that it—
he—
wasn't why they'd met, though again, she wasn't ready to share that with Grif. He was just an interloper here, right? A footnote in her past.

“No,” she said, and watched Grif's jaw turned to granite. “Not the first time.”

His eyes brightened at that, and though braced for it, Kit felt an old emotion break through her shock. One that hardened in an instant, giving her purchase and making her feel like flint. He was still obsessed with the past, she thought, shaking her head. Still so consumed with it that he couldn't see her sitting right in front of him.

Maybe it's the lack of light, Kit thought wryly, sipping at her drink.

“So you met more than once.” It wasn't a question. How else would she have ended up at Barbara's home?

“Not willingly. She was just so obstinate. One of those people who answered every question with one of her own. I wasn't going to say anything about you but . . .”

“But?” He had the nerve to look hopeful.

“But she was just so damned nasty,” she said, and it was true. Kit hadn't done it for him. She didn't owe Griffin Shaw a thing, and something of her anger must have rolled across her face, because he leaned back like he was giving her space. Not wanting to let on that she needed it, Kit just shrugged. “So I decided to give her a jolt. I spit it out, just to see the look on her face.”

“Griffin Shaw is still alive,” Kit had said then, and watched as Barbara McCoy choked on her martini olive. Kit hid her smile behind her old-fashioned. She was actually matching Barbara drink for drink, a woman's duel, unspoken as all duels between women are. And now she was winning.

When the choking had subsided and Barbara had wiped her chin and fortified herself with another sip, Kit added, “So is his wife, Evie.”