Vicki Pettersson - The Given

“I’ve been with Al for six years now,” Justin said tightly.

“Yep, and this was our best con yet. Still, if tonight goes well, I’ll never have to work another.”

Zicaro chuckled, but broke off when he caught the disgust flashing across Kit’s face. He sobered immediately, his eyes going rock-hard in the sculpted crags of his face. “Hey! You’re the one to blame for my inability to make an honest living in this town!”

Instinct had Kit treading lightly. His eyes were wild and wide, his voice too loud and deep. “Me?”

“You . . . your family. Same thing,” he said, spittle flying from his mouth. “Do you know that the honorable Dean S. Wilson refused to grant me a letter of recommendation after giving me the boot? Thirty-one years of chasing down leads for your paper and not even a handshake on my way out the door.

“Meanwhile, all that time, I had to sit by and watch—no, document— the escapades of the notorious and the immoral in this town. Forced to write about the DiMartinos and the Salernos while they literally got away with murder.” He sneered again. “Making money for the Craigs and their newspaper while they laughed at my stories and my methods. Yet they took credit for all my work, right before throwing me out on the street.”

Was this what it was like to grow old? Kit wondered, drawing back in her seat as she looked at him. Did everyone harbor such great regret or obsession over the past?

“But I’m not sitting on the sidelines anymore, am I? Let some other sucker chase down bylines. The disappearance of the mob created a void, the whole town was thrown into disarray. But where there’s chaos, there’s opportunity.” He ran his tongue across his teeth again. “First time out, I ran a scam right out of the DiMartino playbook. A shakedown of one of his own men, no less. Dug out some of my old stories and did the same with his buddies once DiMartino was no longer around to protect them. Made more money in a year than I did in five years writing for your grandfather.”

Yet he’d still lived at Sunset, humbly, for years. “But you don’t spend it.”

“Because spending isn’t the point. Possession is the point. Besides, you gotta stay inconspicuous if you want to keep your ear to the ground. If I hadn’t, I would’ve missed the biggest opportunity of my lifetime.”

“Gina Alessi,” Justin said, clearly having heard this story before. Kit looked back and forth between the two men, pressed between evil and more evil.

“That’s right. She moved into Sunset fifteen years back, right after I did. Said her name was Angelica, but I know faces. My mind is like a pitbull’s mouth. Once it seizes on to something it wants, it doesn’t let go.”

So he went back through his files, every story he’d written from the time he started at the Trib in 1957, and finally struck gold with the story about a little girl’s kidnapping and a photo of the nanny who’d allowed it.”Gina was on the run, but I never let on that I knew it. I just played rummy with her, asked her to sit with me at lunch. Only later, after I had her trust, did I mention I used to be a reporter.”

But he never mentioned the DiMartinos or the kidnapping that took place more than thirty years before. He didn’t want to spook her.

“That’s why she asked my father to send you the map fourteen years ago. She thought you were a friend, she knew you could figure it out, but she fled after my father’s murder. She knew that Barbara and Ray would be searching for her.”

Zicaro inclined his head. “Ray came by that very night. I heard him ransacking her room. The next day everything in it was gone. I stayed put, hoping Gina would come back or try to contact me again, but she never did.” Zicaro nodded, then abruptly stopped. “It would all be over by now if your father had just sent me both parts of that map.”

But he’d sent it to Marin instead.

“You’re a good reporter, Craig. I’ll give you that much,” Zicaro said, but his voice was cold, and it didn’t sound like a compliment. “You almost figured it out on your own.”

“So you joined Grif and me. To see what we knew.”

“And because I needed someone to do the legwork. People work for me now, understand? Not the other way around.” He settled back as they raced forward on a road that felt like it was lengthening, as if retreating into the past. “Now. Let’s go beat Barbara to those diamonds.”

The Centurion charged with ferrying Grif’s soul to heaven on that cold night back in 1960 had been an old cowboy named Deacon. A farmhand who’d frozen to death in a Montana blizzard, he was hard to rattle and didn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t the same way, which was why he’d allowed Grif to watch the events that played out immediately after his death, saying it was like sitting in a theater, “watching an old flicker.”

So Grif had watched Sal DiMartino burst into his hotel’s most exclusive bungalow, somehow alerted that his nephew was there. He made a strangled sound when he saw Tommy, an echo of his cracking heart, and immediately began mourning his nephew with large tears and cursing Grif with the same.

Of course, Deacon had been reprimanded upon his arrival back in the Everlast, with traumatized Grif in tow like a roped calf. A hushed meeting took place the very next instant, when Sarge and another Pure from the Host discussed what best to do with Grif’s illicit knowledge. He hadn’t known this was unusual at the time—he’d only been dead for a few minutes—but he forgot it soon enough anyway. Incubation took care of that, along with all his earthly memories.

Problem was, emotion imprinted on a soul. So when Grif emerged from the Tube, his past whitewashed into nonexistence, his soul should have been relieved of its heavy burden. But Deacon’s actions had stamped horror and sorrow on Grif’s spirit, so while Grif’s memory was gone, the emotional fallout remained.

That was why, now that the truth had been laid bare, he could recall the way Evie had groveled before Sal DiMartino, spinning up a lie so intricate right there on the spot that Grif had trouble not believing it now.

“Thank God you’re here! The lies this man has told!” she wailed, pointing at Grif’s body. “The things he has done!”

Of course, Sal believed her. The evidence was right there. Two men dead, each slain by the other, and Evie, just a woman, delicate in a red wiggle dress, unable to lift a glittering hand to stop either of them.

Yet she’d been strong enough to heft a clay vase over her head and bring it crashing down on Grif’s head.

“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.