Vicki Pettersson - The Given

In retrospect, Grif could admit that it’d worked. He’d been so busy using body language to convince some newly dead sap to follow him into oblivion that he didn’t have time to consider how their deaths, time and again, made him feel.

Most memorable from those first few decades were the Takes he’d been assigned in France, a society that, as a whole, continued to baffle Grif to this day. Broadly speaking, they were resistant to change, and had extreme and unyielding opinions regarding what constituted the joie de vivre, the dual starting points always being family and France. These stubborn traits seemed to double immediately upon death. Try pulling a soul that nationalistic away from his home and family and terroir, even after death .

Yet what struck Grif most about the French was each person’s heartfelt reluctance to leave not only their bodies and loved ones behind, but to be forced to abandon the raw minutiae of life itself.

“But the frommage ,” lamented one Frenchman, staring back at the Surface with sad, hangdog eyes, even though he was perched on the cusp of the Universe. He’d been decapitated while riding his motorcycle through the Alps, so Grif didn’t understand his complaint. He no longer had a mouth to savor said cheese with anyway.

“But I will not be able to feel the sea breeze upon my face,” complained another Take, a woman who had, ironically, drowned. “If there is no Riviera waiting for me in heaven, then I want no part of it!”

Grif had been pressed for time that day—he had another Take within the hour in Corsica—and told her that if that’s the way she felt he’d go ahead and let her sink to the bottom of the sea. She stoically said au revoir. Sarge had forced him to double back for her anyway.

So it was with those experiences coloring his view that he gazed up at the tricolor atop the Paris Hotel with more than a little trepidation. He tried passing the look off as boredom when he caught Zicaro watching.

“I don’t get this place,” he grumbled, carefully avoiding eye contact with the doormen as he wheeled Zicaro through the front entrance.

“They’re trying to make it feel like Pair-ee,” said Zicaro, inhaling the casino air deeply, and gagging on air-freshener instead of smoke.

“Not this place,” Grif said, though that was exactly what he meant, but he gestured back to the long bank of doors and the Strip behind them. “The whole damned street. Paris is over here, old Rome is over there. Venice is down the block, and a mountain village is spraying water all over the corner of Flamingo Boulevard. They’ve gone and mashed it all together and none of it looks like it’s supposed to. It tries to look like everything but ends up looking like nothing at all.”

“Sure it does,” Zicaro argued, taking another deep breath and sighing contentedly. “It looks big and shiny and fun.”

“It’s not fun to me,” Grif grumbled as machines clanged on every side of him, making him hunch his shoulders.

“Because you’re boring,” Zicaro scoffed, as they rolled past the craps tables. “That’s your squeaky-clean midwestern upbringing rearing its head.”

Grif cut his eyes at Zicaro. “You did do your homework, didn’t you?”

“Absolutely. Though one look at you and it’s clear you’re corn-fed.”

“Then why were you always trying to intimate that I was made?” Grif said, tone curt. “If you’d really done your homework, you’d know that I would never cotton to working for the boys.”

“Oh, I knew that.” Zicaro waved his hand in the air, scoffing as Grif stopped in place. The couple walking behind them cursed, then swerved, nearly hitting Grif with a plastic drinking cup. “But poke enough bears and you’re bound to rouse at least one growl.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t rouse more than that,” Grif grumbled as he resumed pushing the chair.

The old man shrugged. “Why do you think I threw in the stories about aliens falling through hidden portals?” And this time, when Grif stopped to stare at him, Zicaro’s face widened into a grin so large it almost erased the wrinkles.

“Why, Loony Uncle Al,” Grif said, tilting his head. “I think you just said something incredibly sane.”

“Finally.” Zicaro pointed at a sign that read PROMENADE. “Someone who appreciates my genius.”

The Promenade of the Paris Hotel was linked to Bally’s, its sister property that had held court on the corner of Flamingo Boulevard for more than forty years. While Grif stood by his censure of the themed casinos, they were something to see. Everything on the glittering main drag had been produced by minds that believed anything was possible. It was an ode to excess, and since Vegas averaged a hundred thousand new visitors a day, despite any complaint Grif lodged about shopping malls with painted ceilings made to ape the outdoors or neon that strong-armed nighttime skylines into burning like midday, the general public seemed to enjoy it. It was a world meant to turn everything on its head.

So it was fitting that, as they wheeled into the replica of a Parisian street corner, he and Zicaro would do the same.

“Follow my lead, right?” he said, as the Parisian street scene engulfed them.

“I don’t know,” Zicaro replied, undaunted. “Hard to do when you’re pushing me in front of you.”

Grif spotted Justin and the two orderlies. They were taking up the whole of a park bench, lounging beneath a faux evergreen, and sharing, it seemed, what was left of a warm baguette.

A snort rose from Zicaro’s wheelchair as he spotted the trio, too. “Yeah, that helps them blend.”

Though warm enough indoors to remove his coat, Grif kept it buttoned, and felt Justin’s coal-dark gaze on his right pocket as they approached. He was clearly remembering the gun Grif had pulled on him the day before.

The wheelchair bumped over the faux cobblestones, a jarring journey that the three men evidently found amusing. When they came to a stop, Larry, no longer wearing his name tag, flanked Grif’s left. The other man, Eric, took up the right.

“Where’s Ms. Craig?” Justin asked, squared in front of them all.

“We figured you got well enough acquainted with her on the phone last night,” Grif replied drily.

“That we did,” Justin said, motioning Grif to the bench. “Sit.”

It wasn’t a question.

Grif just tucked his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels as he glanced around. Spotting a cocktail waitress on her way back to the casino, he beckoned her over.

“Can we get a few of those?” Grif asked, nodding at her full tray.

The cocktail waitress gave them all a bored look. “You can have them all. My ‘customers’ put in an order and then left without tipping me.”

“Well, that ain’t right,” Larry said, taking a drink from the tray. Justin and Eric followed suit. “Tip the girl, Griffin Shaw.”

“Sure.” Grif pulled out his wallet. “Might as well make it a party.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” said Justin, accepting his drink and toasting Grif. “We’ll celebrate you returning our flash drives.”

Grif nodded at Zicaro, and the old man pulled the flash drives from his sweater pocket. “So now what?” he asked, handing them over.

“Now you walk out of here with us,” Justin said, tucking the drives into the pocket of his leather jacket. “And then we take you to an undisclosed location where we can kill you.”

“That’s an interesting proposition,” Grif said, nodding like he was considering it.

“Or we could just play some craps,” Zicaro tried, angling his drinking glass up as if in toast.

The large man just looked at it for a moment before slapping it out of Zicaro’s hand. It shattered musically across the glossy cobblestone.