Chapter Twelve
If Ray DiMartino were a zoo animal, he’d be a meerkat—slender, with a tapered face and dark, shining eyes. And the Masquerade Gentlemen’s Club, Grif decided, as he sat with Ray in the owner’s booth, would be his natural habitat. Music and lights pulsed, no matter the time of day, and female dancers—made up, dolled up, trussed up—flirted boldly, sliding and gliding to show off every curve of flesh, no imagination necessary.
Yet despite the club’s sweaty, red-faced, sexual pulse, it still felt lifeless to Grif. It was as if everyone knew they were just acting, desperation pulling each of them back into a twisted childhood where pretend was the only thing that was real.
Grif supposed that’s why Kit didn’t mind when he came here alone. She called the place dull, uninspired, and sexually jejune. Whatever that meant. She’d been here once, wearing a dress that’d completely covered yet accentuated her femininity and managing to simultaneously blend in and stand out. Grif recalled her looking like an exotic bird amid a forest of green foliage.
Ray remembered, too.
“How’s that pretty lady of yours doin’, Shaw?” the man said, sprawling in the red leather booth like he was wearing it. He didn’t wait for Grif to answer. “Shoulda brought her in. She was going to talk to me about incorporating some new moves into some of the girls’ routines.”
Ray was never going to see any of Kit’s moves. Not if Grif had anything to say about it. “She’s at a burlesque show with her girlfriends,” Grif answered truthfully. She’d left the message on his cell phone an hour earlier.
“All tease and no tit, huh?” Ray shook his head, as blind to subtlety and nuance as to the way Grif’s fist curled on the table, and sighed. “Ah, well. To each his own.”
“Crying over lost customers, Ray?”
Cupping his palms around a cigarette, Ray scoffed. “We’re in a recession, didn’t you hear? Times are never so good as when they’re bad.”
And wasn’t that a sad societal statement, Grif thought, looking around.
“Got some new girls,” Ray said. “In case you want to play while the Kit-Kat is away.” He wriggled his brows knowingly.
“You know why I’m here, Ray.”
Pursing his mouth like the cigarette had gone sour, Ray looked away. A woman writhed on the center platform, but he watched her like one of those newfangled reality shows this generation was so crazy about—like it was happening to someone else far away. “Still digging up old bones?”
“You said you were going to help.” Grif had given the man four months to get back to him, four months to go through his mobster father’s belongings and scrape up a name or two that might help Grif discover who’d killed him more than fifty years earlier. But Ray had none of his father’s enterprise. Whereas the old man had virtually run this town from the underground, Ray sat out in the open, showing his white belly.
“Came up empty.” Ray shrugged his shoulders, no big deal. He’d rather risk nothing and gain the same. “Anything Pops mighta had was either lost or thrown out as trash.” He paused, making a face. “Unless that bitch, Barbara, took it with her when she fled to California. God knows she took everything else.”
Yes, Barbara DiMartino. Old Sal DiMartino’s second wife. Grif had never known her—she’d come along after he’d been dusted—but for some reason she knew him. And for some reason, Ray had reported, she hated Evie and him both.
Barbara said that both Shaws got exactly what was coming to them.
“No word from her, then?” Grif asked, reminding Ray of their previous conversation. “You still don’t know where she might be?”
Ray flicked his fingers, scattering ash on the floor. It disappeared unnoticed. “She remarried damned quick after moving to Cali, and probably again after that. She wasn’t one to mourn too long over a cold grave, if you know what I mean. Not when there was still plenty of the living to cash in on. Don’t matter. Like I toldja before, we didn’t get along. I don’t ever expect to hear from her again.”
Turning away, Grif rubbed his chin with the back of his hand, fighting not to punch something. This Barbara was the best potential lead he’d had. She’d hated him at the time of his death, and Grif wanted to know why. “Maybe you can help me with something else, then. I’ve been remembering some things about that day.”
Ray swiveled his head, staring Grif square in the face. “What do you mean, ‘remembering’?”
Grif cursed inwardly at the slip. He was doing that more and more these days. The longer he remained on this mudflat, the more the past and present got mixed up in his mind. Borrowing Ray’s nonchalance, he shrugged the look away. “You know, just bits and pieces I heard over the years. Thought maybe you could confirm or deny.”
“Confirm what?” Because they both knew that’s what Grif really wanted.
“That there were two guys, not one, who attacked Griffin and Evelyn Shaw in their bungalow that night at the Marquis.”
Ray shrugged. “Man, I didn’t hear that they were attacked at all.”
No, he’d heard that Grif had killed Evie, left her to die, and disappeared. “Trust me,” Grif muttered. “They were attacked. And I believe at least two men died that night. Shaw and one of his attackers.”
The third had left him and Evie to bleed out on a cold marble floor.
“Man, I was just a kid,” Ray said, shaking his head, but Grif already knew that. He remembered Ray as a seven-year-old brat running dice in the back of his father’s liquor store. Now fifty-seven, Ray was so mistrustful of his memory, and eyesight, that he believed Grif only greatly resembled the man he once knew.
“You’re not being very helpful here, Ray,” Grif said. And why was that? They’d parted last time with an agreement between them, if not an alliance. Had he come across something in his father’s files to change that? Or, like a bored zoo animal, had he simply lost interest?
“Look, I’ve told you what I know, all right? I run a strip club. I ain’t in the Life. Those days died with my pops.” Disappointment flashed across Ray’s gaze, erased with the next strobe of light and forgotten in the following pulsing beat.
“You’re right,” Grif said, blowing out a breath. Ray’s father had been the most influential, feared mobster in this town when feared, influential mobsters were damned near celebrities. And Ray? Well . . . Ray was Ray. “It was a long time ago. I’m sorry.”
Looking away, Ray jerked one shoulder, but Grif could see he was still steamed.
“How ’bout these folks, then?” Changing the subject, he reached into his pocket. “Know them?”
“Shit, man.” Ray glanced down, then quickly away. “Why you asking me about the Kolyadenkos?”
“A case I’m working on. A new one,” he clarified, and jerked his head at the couple in the photo. Ray’s dad was gone, but there was always someone to take a mobster’s place. “We think they’re getting kids hooked on this new drug, but we don’t know why or how.”
Ray picked up the photo, then whistled quietly under his breath. “Not surprised. They call her the Viper, you know? On account that she’s so deadly.”
Grif blinked a few times, feeling suddenly like he was playing catch-up. “She?”
“Yeah, man . . . wait.” He chuckled, then allowed the sound to bloom into a full, rounded laugh. “You think this guy, Sergei, is running the action? Oh, man . . . you’re as out of the loop as the heat.”
“You mean . . . Yulyia?” Grif frowned, looked at the photo again, anew, trying to wrap his mind around this new information. “She took over when her husband got sick?”
Ray reached for his beer. “That was just an excuse to amp up the action. She’s always run that crew, though up until recently only those close to the Kolyadenkos knew it. She’s gotten bolder lately, though. Like I said, striking fast, hard. Remember that killing atop the tower last year?”
“Yes,” Grif lied.
“They say that was the Viper. Pinned the guy up there and let him spin—or ordered it. Sergei is just a front. He looks every bit the Russian general, but make no mistake. Mrs. K calls the shots.”
Grif sat silent for a bit, drinking his beer, reordering his thoughts.
“I thought you were out of the loop, Ray,” he finally said. “How do you know all this?”
“ ’Cause the only way to stay out of the loop is to know where not to step.” He pointed at Grif. “Something you obviously haven’t learned.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Besides, a babe like that comes on the scene, everyone notes it.”
Grif looked around the room at all the girls nobody really noted. Sidelong, he glanced back at Ray. “Marco Baptista note it?”
Ray’s face shuttered the same way it had when Grif had asked about his own dark past. “No habla Español, man.”
“C’mon. You can’t stay out of the loop, and not know this guy, Ray.”
“Yeah, I know him.” Ray jerked his chin. “I know enough not to talk about him.”
Grif just waited.
Pulling a face, Ray cursed. It took another minute after that, but he finally looked at Grif. “There is a story.”
Grif settled back. “I like stories.”
And Ray had a doozy. It went back eight years, though that didn’t dilute the telling. There was a gorgeous woman involved, and worlds were upended because of her. Not a new story, no, but in this telling it was Marco Baptista’s world that got the shake, right when he was running a drug operation to rival the kingpins of old.
There wasn’t a woman Baptista couldn’t bag, Ray said, either by enticement or by force, though one look at the long-limbed blonde who’d stridden in to buy a cache of hash, and he wanted her to come to him by her own neediness and will. On her knees, he said. Begging and desperate, as he deserved.
“That’s how Yulyia Kolyadenko got into the neighborhood.” Ray leaned forward, relishing the telling despite himself. “She sat across from Baptista in his own restaurant, eating Cuban pork and drinking rum he’d smuggled from the homeland, and got him to talk.”
Yulyia learned who the players were in Vegas, which cops to press on vice, and what attorneys and judges turned a blind eye in exchange for a pocketful of green.
“Baptista thought he was bragging to secure a righteous lay,” Ray said, nodding. “He thought someone who was newly arrived to this country would find his tales exciting and very New World and shit. That she’d look up to him for guidance, and feel a little knee-scraping gratitude.”
But what Kolyadenko found was a blueprint to the city more detailed than the tattoos webbing Marco’s body. Without giving up a single kiss from her glossed lips, she overtook giant swaths of the city’s drug trade with new, stronger product, and huevos most men didn’t possess.
And Marco, Grif thought, shaking his head, blustering and full of macho Latino id, never even saw her coming.
“He fell for it hook, line, and sinker,” Ray confirmed, stubbing out his own cigarette. “He never respected women before, but man, he despises them now.”
Not all of them, Grif thought, memory winging back to the humble house held up by an altar and faith, scented with spice. “He lives with his grandmother, you know.”
“Yeah, and have you seen her teeth?” Ray asked, miming gums. Miming fists. Then he shrugged. “Ack, well. Women make men do crazy things.”
He gestured around the room where men traded bills for sins of the flesh. Yeah, Grif thought wryly. They were all being strong-armed.
“Thanks, Ray.” Pocketing the photo, Grif rose to leave. It was a good story, but it was clearly all he was going to get tonight.
“Hold on, man.” Ray held out a hand, just short of touching Grif. “About your grandpops . . . there might be a guy.”
Grif waited.
Ray shrugged. “Old Al Zicaro is still around.”
Grif squinted, recalling the name. “The newshound?”
He remembered Zicaro vaguely from his first lifetime, accusatory headlines that’d blared like horns while Grif had been working to find Sal DiMartino’s niece. Grif had even caught a few choice arrows flung in his direction, though Zicaro had never been able to do more than intimate that Grif was made. Because he wasn’t. He was just there to collect a paycheck for finding little Mary Margaret.
But the memory of those last weeks bum-rushed him now. Zicaro had been young and eager, always waving that pad and pen, jaw flapping a mile a minute. Grif suddenly recalled wanting to punch that motor mouth on more than one occasion.
“He’s gotta be in his seventies now, but the bastard always had a mind like a steel trap.” Ray’s lip curled, remembering Zicaro with the same fondness Grif did, and he added, “Of course, you’re betting on him playing with a full deck in the first place. That bum ran stories about spaceships filling the desert sky right next to beefed-up mobsters whacking everything in sight. He saw a conspiracy in everything, but verified nothing. Ask me, it made him crazy.”
Grif would take crazy over nothing. “Know where I can find him?”
To Grif’s surprise, Ray did. “Sunset Retirement Community, last I heard,” he answered immediately. “The Trib did a piece on him a while back, honoring his years of—get this—service to the community. The piece said he was still chasing down stories, but he’s using the retirement home’s copier to print them, and he hand-delivers them to the other residents’ doors every morning. Like I said, nutso.”
Grif agreed, but just shoved his hands into his pockets. “Thanks, Ray.”
Ray shrugged. “I wish I could help you more. I really do. Your grandpops was a good man, always took time for me, and not everyone did that. Not everyone really . . . saw me.” Ray frowned a little at that, then shook it off. “Anyway, if what you say is true, and someone whacked Old Man Shaw and his pretty little wife . . . well, I hope you find ’em.”
Grif thanked him again, then exited the club into a night still heated by the runaway sun. The doorman motioned a cab forward from the queue, but Grif waved them both away. Hoofing it helped him think, and the night held a nice enough breeze that he could do so comfortably for miles. Besides, despite the neon’s nightly onslaught, desert pockets and darkness still bloomed here and there in the industrial district. So Grif put his hands in his pockets, tucked his head low, and headed into it. There was something else he wanted to try as well. And it was best if he did so alone.
Grif waited until he was sure the darkness had covered his tracks, and was far enough from Masquerade to know he hadn’t been followed. He reemerged from the desert scrub onto a lost side street, where streetlamps pocked the deserted sky like unwilling sentries, half of those busted. Pausing beneath the faux awning of a closed pawnshop, he glanced around once more, celestial vision pulsing, looking for heat, making sure he was alone.
Once satisfied, he lifted the fedora from his head, studied it, and flipped on the switch hidden in the lining of the brim. A light flashed. Nestling the hat back atop his head, he decided Kit’s gift was kitschy, insulting, and damned annoying.
Question was, did it work?
Taking a step forward caused the brim to emit a short, shrill beep. A series of increasingly urgent trills allowed Grif to ascertain that that pawn shop’s front faced south. He swiveled that way, and was trying to figure out how to adjust the volume, when a voice popped up behind him.
“Bro, why is your hat beeping?”
Jolting, Grif jerked the hat from his head as he turned. It began beeping madly in response and he fumbled for the off switch. Glancing back up, he mumbled, “What the hell are you doing here?”
Across from him was a kid with scrawny semitransparent shoulders and jagged wings glistening with dew from the Everlast, feathery tips trailing off into smoky wisps. They were ruffled, but still magnificent. Good thing, too, Grif thought, eyeing the Centurion. It kept the focus off the kid’s parachute pants and Members Only jacket. Not for the first time did Grif give thanks that he hadn’t been offed in the eighties.
“I’m slumming, G-man.” The kid, Jesse, gave him a sidelong grin. “Why else would I be on the mudflat?”
Grif cut his eyes to the wavering form of a woman, wingless, next to him.
“Oh, this is Mei.” Jesse jerked his head at his Take. “She’s newly dead.”
“I can see that.”
She was also compact, Asian, and wearing sensible black heels and a crisp pantsuit. Must have been working late when she’d been bumped. Grif didn’t know how she’d died—death wounds never showed in the ether—but she was lucky no matter the method. Dressed like that she could spend eternity with a little dignity.
“Good to meet you, Mr. Shaw,” said Mei.
“You know my name,” Grif said evenly, before turning a dead-eyed stare back on Jesse. “Why does she know my name?”
But Mei was the one who stepped forward and answered. “We’ve been speaking of you, Mr. Shaw.”
He glanced at her, but busied himself lighting a cigarette. “You’re pretty calm for someone who’s just been slugged.”
As she and Jesse were still pounding mud, she’d been killed within the hour, and probably half that, since her etheric form hadn’t yet begun the Fade. If Jesse didn’t see her back before it faded altogether, she’d disappear entirely, and ghosts were almost impossible to find, even for a Centurion.
But Jesse didn’t seem worried. “Mei’s a psychologist. Or she was, until one of her clients decided she was a whack quack.”
“It was that a*shole, Collins. I just know it.” Her professional demeanor dropped for a moment and she shook her head. “He’s a narcissistic manic with a coke problem and mommy issues. I should have buried him in his eval.”
“So how’s it going, homes?” Jesse turned to Grif, deliberately using the eighties slang Grif hated. The first time Jesse had said it, Grif thought he’d meant “Holmes,” as in Sherlock.
“Naw, it means you’re my homie,” Jesse had said, punching his biceps, and bouncing backward before Grif could return the punch. “My brothah. My friend.”
But Grif wasn’t any of those things, so as he lit a stick, he told the other Centurion the same thing he’d told Luis earlier in the day. “Don’t call me that.”
Kids these days, Grif thought, shifting the now-silent hat on his head. No respect for their elders.
“Whatever, dawg. I’m just the messenger.” Jesse fluttered his wings, enjoying the play on words.
Grif flicked ash. “You’re molting, messenger.”
Jesse made a face. “Sarge wants you back in the Everlast, bro.”
“Sarge is fine with me here. He gave me a Take. In fact,” Grif said, crossing his arms, “I’m helping find the Lost.”
Mei’s long hair swayed as she took a step forward. “Sympathizing isn’t the same thing as helping, Mr. Shaw.”
Freezing, Grif shifted his eyes to her. “Charming bedside manner, Doc. Can’t imagine why a client would wanna dust you.”
“Ouch, Grif. Mei’s just trying to help.”
Flicking his stick aside, Grif shoved his hands into his pockets. “Didn’t ask for it.”
“I told her about you because Sarge says that the longer you stay on the mud, the more you’re going to remember, and—”
“You been talking about me with Sarge, too?” Grif interrupted sharply. “Gee, homie, you’ve been talking about me a lot lately.”
Jesse just shrugged. He knew Grif couldn’t touch him in his etheric state. Not while Grif wore flesh. “It’s not just me, bro. It’s everyone. Your return to flesh and the Surface is the most interesting thing to happen since the Fall. Manny is even laying odds that you get offed twice. Courtney thinks you’re just biding your time till you die of natural causes. Or are they unnatural, if you’re technically already dead?”
Grif didn’t want to know what the over/under was on the former, and he ignored the latter. Tilting his head, he asked, “You really want to help me, Jesse? Tell me what you know about the Third. In particular, about banishing them from the Surface.”
“You can’t banish the Third,” Jesse scoffed. “Technically, they aren’t really here.”
“They are. I saw one. It told me they could possess souls that weren’t in possession of themselves. It said they can even possess those who give themselves over to negative emotions.”
“Sure, but that’s not real possession. They’re like Mei and me here. We’re talking to you now—”
“We’re influencing your mood,” Mei added, voice detached and clipped.
“Yeah, and mood is how they getcha,” Grif said.
“True. They can possess bodies for short periods, but they can’t displace the resident souls.”
Grif thought about that. So even if Scratch did get into Kit, it wouldn’t be forever. But it didn’t take forever to make someone go mad.
“What about water?” he asked.
“They can’t stand it.”
“I know that, Jesse,” Grif said through clenched teeth. “Can I use it to get rid of a fallen angel if one of them is possessing a human body?”
“I suppose. Being dunked would be a sort of reverse baptism for a fallen angel. It’d kill them rather than save them. But like I said, they won’t go near the stuff. Why you asking, bro?” Jesse asked, eyes narrowing.
“No reason,” Grif said quickly. He didn’t need Jesse reporting the query to Sarge. If Frank even thought Kit was in danger, he’d force Grif to leave her side for sure. Turning to pace, he caught Mei giving him a cool sidelong stare. “What?”
Mei only lifted her pointed chin. “Please, Mr. Shaw. Don’t waste the short time we have together with unnecessary defensive emotion. I’m here to help.”
Grif looked back at Jesse. “You brought me a shrink?”
This time—etheric state or not—the young Centurion did step back. “C’mon, homes. I want to help you solve your life’s, and death’s, greatest mystery.” Jesse splayed his fingers wide and whispered dramatically, “Who killed Griffin Shaw?”
Grif felt a vein begin to pulse in his head, and turned back to Mei. “I don’t need your help.”
“And Katherine?”
“The name is Kit,” he said quickly, because what he really wanted to say was Go pound sand, but he didn’t talk that way to ladies.
“Maybe you should reconsider whether you’re good for Kit,” Mei said evenly.
Maybe he should reconsider the way he talked to ladies. “You know you can’t charge me by the hour for this, right?”
“Kit is going to age, Mr. Shaw. Did you ever think about that?”
“No,” he lied.
Mei smiled tightly. “Well, maybe you should. She’s twenty-nine now, but her mortal clock is ticking. Soon she’ll be thirty-three, same as you when you died. Soon after that she’ll be fifty-four. A cougar.” The smile widened. “You’ll be her boy toy.”
Grif thought of the changes he’d seen between now and his first go-round on the Surface. Men married older women now. Shoot, men married men now. “It won’t matter.”
“Of course it will. You, Griffin Shaw, are a stopwatch while Katherine Craig is an hourglass. You should quit her now. Let her live the life she was meant to live, with someone from her time and era. Sure, it’ll pain her in the short term, but she’ll eventually heal, find some mortal man to wed and have babies with, and they’ll grow old together. Just as God intended.”
Grif stared at Mei for so long the silence almost snapped. Then he turned to Jesse. Seeing the look in his eyes, the other Centurion held up his hands. “Don’t shoot the messenger, bro.”
That’s exactly what Grif did. His ankle piece was in his hand so quickly it surprised even him, and he blasted a hole through Jesse’s semitransparent body before anyone else spoke. Mei was newly dead enough that she actually screeched, and cowered behind Jesse’s frayed wings. Jesse just stared at his belly, then whirled to regard the new hole in the brick wall behind him. “You shot me!” he yelled, also incensed.
“And I’ll do it again, you meddlesome little pansy!” Grif waved the snub-nose in their direction. “Get out of here, both of ya!”
But Jesse didn’t know when to stop.
“Know what your problem is?” he yelled, hands on hips, parachute pants flaring wide.
Grif shot him again.
Jesse didn’t flinch this time, pointing at Grif instead. “You’re straddling worlds, bro!”
“I ain’t your bro.” Grif aimed.
“Oh, save your bullets,” Jesse scoffed, fully recovered now. “You don’t belong to the Everlast or on the mudflat anymore. You don’t belong anywhere.”
“Get out of here, Jesse,” Grif said in a low voice. “Cuz you and I aren’t always gonna be on opposite sides of the great divide.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Jesse waved him off, turning away. “See if I ever help you again.”
He turned his back on Grif and pulled open the pawnshop door, motioning for Mei to follow him into the yawning maw of the Universe. Recovered from her mortal scare, she paused to regard Grif with a hard, cold eye.
“Jesse told me that the longer you wear flesh, the more you remember. Be wary of that, Mr. Shaw. Memories are stronger than we think. You’ll want to find out who killed you, do it quickly, and leave.”
“Why should I?” he huffed.
“For the woman you love, of course,” she said, and Grif wasn’t sure if she meant Evie or Kit. Mei knew it and smiled. “Katherine Craig is totally alive in the moment, Mr. Shaw. But you are completely lost in the past.” And with a swish of her dark hair, she followed Jesse through the doorway, into the cosmos, and Grif was again alone.