Vicki Pettersson - The Given

“Ugh.” Kit made a face.

“But Barbara didn’t think so,” Grif muttered, closing his eyes to better see the picture that was beginning to emerge.

“Now you’re using your noggin’,” Zicaro said, tapping on his own head and poking himself in the ear. “She was on a cold rant the night she came to see me. Going on and on about Gina. Said she was back in town and that she had one of the diamonds all these years.”

“And Barbara wanted it.”

“No,” Zicaro said simply. “Barbara was after the other two.”

“So why’d she come to you?” Dennis asked.

“Because of one of my old stories. Of a map that’s still out there,” Zicaro said, licking his lips and leaning forward. “It supposedly shows the location of the diamonds. A literal buried treasure. Anyone wanna take a guess as to who she thought had that map?”

“Shit,” Kit whispered, head whipping to Grif.

“Ol’ Griffin Shaw,” Dennis said, aping the way Justin and Larry had so knowingly said his name earlier that day.

Zicaro toasted Grif, and then drained the rest of his gin. “Good ol’ Griffin Shaw.”

Justin called exactly four minutes after the appointed time, and the man—who’d been pacing his room, nearly ready to howl at the full moon—answered immediately.

“The cop’s name is Dennis Carlisle,” Justin said without being asked. It was a good sign. He still knew how things worked. Despite the events out at Sunset, he was still aligned with the man’s greater plans. “He’s a longtime friend of Craig’s, and was a detective up until a few months ago.”

So he had some skills. “Demoted?” the man asked, wondering why a detective would end up pounding the streets again.

Justin made a dissenting sound, and the man could practically see Justin’s giant head swiveling on his neck like a big slab of meat. “Voluntary. He was shot six months back, made some sort of miraculous recovery—”

“I remember,” the man murmured, squinting out the window at the cold night, trying to pull the details from the vast stores of his mind.

“He was investigating the Baptista-Kolyadenko drug war. Apparently took a bullet for Craig.”

“Invested, then.”

“Not likely to turn on her,” Justin confirmed.

The man stopped pacing and closed his eyes, feeling suddenly old. Life was so much simpler back when the boys were running this town. It was easier to tell who to push and where. Men, even cops, could be as easily bought as killed, and the whole town had been smaller. More controllable. Too bad he’d never had any control back then.

He opened his eyes, realizing that he really did prefer things as they were today.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. You stay with them. Did you put the tracker on Craig’s car?”

“While they were at dinner,” Justin confirmed.

“Okay, so lay off. Don’t approach them—”

“But—”

“ Don’t fucking approach them.” His voice hardened, like he’d been through fire and was changed at the cellular level. He was certainly a different man than he’d been fifty years prior, that was for sure.

“We can’t go at them directly,” he explained, as he resumed his pacing. Walking, moving around, helped him think. “They’re smart, and there’s a bunch of them working on this now.”

“And the Sunset operation?” Justin asked hopefully. The long-running scam had earned them both a fine amount of money.

“Blown.” And he’d put a lot of time into that one. Those vulnerable trust funds had been ripe pickings for someone who knew how to hide his tracks. And this man did. “It doesn’t matter. If we’re patient and we stay with them, they’ll do all the legwork for us.”

Craig and Shaw would lead them directly to the diamonds.

“Got it?” the man asked Justin. He was going to have to go soon. It was late, and he did need some sleep.

“Yeah,” Justin answered, but there was a note of uncertainty in his voice.

“What?” the man said coolly.

“It’s just that . . .” Justin hesitated, and this time the man could see the dolt scratching the side of that big melon head. “She’s not happy.”

She. She?

“She,” the man said through clenched teeth, “is dead!”

The past, he thought, had chased him long enough, but now it was dying all around him. And she was a part of that.

“All right, all right,” Justin said, and the man fought the urge to put his fist through his bedroom wall. He was not going to let some twenty-first-century meathead make him lose out on his biggest racket yet. Unfortunately he needed Justin’s eyes and ears right now.

The man blew out a long breath, pushing out an anger that’d been building for decades, wondering if Justin felt its singe on the other side of the line.

“All right, then,” he finally said. “Got a pen? Because I’ve got a plan.”

And with Justin’s pen scratching in the background, the man laid out exactly what was going to happen to Kit Craig and Griffin Shaw next.

After saying good-bye to Dennis, they all returned to Marin’s town house. Kit’s aunt might be unwilling to play hostess to their ragtag bunch, but she certainly wouldn’t turn her niece away when she needed a place to stay. Thus, Kit took the large guest room, which left Grif to bunk up with Zicaro in the study. The old geezer claimed his side of the pullout bed by dropping his drawers and falling into the cacophonous sleep of a well-sated man. Yet even without Zicaro’s lusty snores, Grif wouldn’t have been able to find sleep. He’d just learned that he’d been murdered for diamonds, for money. Worse, for a map that he didn’t even possess. Besides, for him slumber meant dreaming of the woman who was only a few steps away in the next room.

He shouldn’t go in there—she’d made that clear after he’d left that lone feather on her pillow months earlier—but he also knew he wouldn’t rest until he saw her one more time that night. It reassured him that she was safe. His actions thus far had altered her fate enough to have the telling plasma release its lustrous, silvery hold from around her ankles for now, but he couldn’t be sure that her original destiny—to die only one day from now—wasn’t still true.

Kit was already asleep when he slipped into her room. She had one hand resting upon her forehead, like she’d fallen in a faint, the other arm draped across her middle. Wishing neither to startle her nor to leave, Grif slipped across the room and tucked himself into the corner armchair to watch her sleep. Moonlight slipped through the crack in the drapes, lighting her furrowed brow, and he wished he still had the right to reach over and smooth it. If only there were a way to reassure her, as he couldn’t when she was awake, that everything would be okay.

“I’m here, Kit.” He risked the whisper. “And this time I’m going to stick.”

Because along with the knowledge that he’d likely been murdered over a grab for diamonds, he’d come to realize something else in the past twenty-four hours. He loved this woman with all that was left of him. Enough, he thought, to make a shrine of his blood and bone for her. To dedicate this life to seeing her safe. Even from him.

Grif watched the steady rise and fall of her chest, ears pricked to the evenness of her breath. The movies and books got it all wrong. Virgin brides and dashing suitors. A romance made special just because it was the emotion’s initial bloom. First love was a slice of life, yes, but it was more of a soft, wispy petal than the root of the thing. Mature love was what really curled a man’s toes. Finding a person you could graft yourself to and be better and stronger for it. That’s what allowed you to find purchase on this great mudflat.