Chapter Seventeen
Grif strode down the hospital corridor for the second time that day, though this time there was an urgency to his step that had been lacking before, one that had the few people he did pass at this late hour stepping quickly to the side. The pocket phone Kit had given him, the damned thing he never bothered to check, had been blinking for he didn’t know how long. And though the message had sat there for hours, the elapsed time did nothing to erase the urgency in Kit’s voice.
Marin’s been attacked. Come as soon as you can.
By the time he found his girl slumped on a cold plastic chair at the end of a long, bright hallway, her urgency had obviously burned away . . . yet something else had burned away with it. She turned her head, saw Grif coming, and instead of standing to greet him, simply sighed and put her head back in her hands.
“It was a warning,” she said, before he could sit or even ask. “The Russians, in retaliation for the article that ran this morning. At least, that’s what they told Marin. She said before that they moved fast when wronged. I should have listened.”
He knelt before her, hands on her knees. “What did they do, Kit?”
“They left a note. It said, ‘This is for shooting off your mouth. Next try shooting this.’ ” Her gaze was watery when she opened her eyes. “They had her hooked up to a load of krokodil, Grif.”
The memory of decaying flesh on a living body revisited him, and Grif wavered in his crouch. “Did they . . . ?”
Kit shook her head hard, cutting him off. “The drug didn’t touch her.”
“It was in the syringe, though?” he asked, and she managed a nod as footsteps fell behind him. Grif turned, then stood when he saw Dennis coming down the hall, a cup of steaming joe in each hand. When the hell did he get here?
Accepting the coffee, Kit answered the unvoiced question. “Dennis brought me in. He was there when I found her.”
Grif’s jaw tightened so much it hurt. “Good. Thank you.”
“Of course,” Dennis said, then jerked his head at the door across from them. “I’m going in. See if she can tell us anything more.”
“Thank you. For everything.” Kit put a hand on his arm.
Very slowly, Grif followed the touch with his gaze, angling up to settle on the man’s face. Silent, seething, he kept it there until Dennis nodded and left. Then he shifted and sat, only to find Kit giving him an equally aggressive look.
“Where were you?” she asked softly.
Grif drew back. There was something thin and metallic—and somehow wedge-shaped—in her voice. It rose up between them and put a bump in his chest that had his own words speeding up. “I delivered Jeannie to incubation. She’s safe and clean and out of pain.”
“And then?” Kit asked, not looking at him.
Grif licked his lips. “I still had time . . . or so I thought. So I asked Sarge about the Third, about Scratch in particular—” He saw Kit’s jaw tighten and hurried on. “You gave it your tears, even after I told you not to—”
“This isn’t about me. Where were you?”
He hesitated. “Sarge, well, he mentioned Evie—”
Kit sighed.
“And it was the first time he ever brought it up himself, so—”
“So you thought you’d stick around.”
“It wasn’t long. Two minutes, more or less.”
“A lot can happen in two minutes.”
“Kit, I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t know.” She shook her head. “But you left me alone.”
“I was doing my job,” he defended himself. “I was watching after the dead!”
“Maybe you should care a little more about the living,” she said, then held up a hand as he drew away. She shook her head, and he could see she wanted to take it back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“You’re sore—”
“I’m not mad, Grif. I’m hurt and I’m scared. Marin was attacked because it was her name in that byline and not mine.”
Of course. The article that’d run that morning, naming the Russians, reporting the drug.
“And, Grif, I was alone. I needed you.”
The damned hallway seemed to shift at that. Jesus, he thought, rubbing a hand over his face. What was wrong with him? “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” Exhaustion infused her sigh. “Just be here.”
Grif opened his mouth, but she pressed a finger to his lips.
“And I will be there for you, too. We’re a team, remember?” Grabbing his hand, she enfolded it in her own. “You don’t have to sneak off to the Everlast for answers to Evie’s death. Neither one of us has to be alone.”
Words rushed out of him like a flood. “Yeah, but things are different lately, Kit. I mention her name and you flinch. I don’t want to hurt you if you learn things about me that I can’t change. I’m trying to protect you. Don’t you see?”
“Don’t try to shield me from your feelings, Grif.” She shook her head. “Because that’s what really makes me feel alone.”
Grif drew back, dumbfounded. Was that what he’d been doing?
“Kit?”
They both looked up.
Dennis was peering from Marin’s room. Grif wondered how long he’d been standing there, and how much he’d heard. “She’s asking for you.”
Kit gave a jerky nod, and rose. Grif re-sighted on Dennis as she disappeared.
You, Griffin Shaw, are a stopwatch while Katherine Craig is an hourglass.
Grif shook the reminder—the bullshit reminder—away, and stood. “Was it really the Russians?”
Tucking his thumbs into his pockets, Dennis shrugged. “Looks that way. They retaliate quick when wronged.”
“That’s what Kit said.” Ray had said it, too, though Grif hadn’t taken him seriously. Especially the rap about Yulyia Kolyadenko . . . the “Viper.” But it suddenly seemed Grif hadn’t taken anything seriously enough. He jerked his head toward the door. “She get a look at them?”
Dennis shook his head. “Snuck up behind her when she was leaving the building. Same with the guy in the guard box. Bump on the head. Coulda been worse.”
Yes, Grif thought. It could have been Kit.
I needed you.
They stood in the sterile silence for a bit, the aromas of cleaning supplies and bitter coffee pervasive in the air around them. Grif realized the same scents had been present in the ER earlier in the day, with Jeannie, but he hadn’t noted them as much then.
What else, he wondered, looking at Dennis, had been right in front of him that he hadn’t noted?
“Did you know her dad?” he asked suddenly.
Surprise lit Dennis’s face, but he shook his head. “Before my time. Knew of him, though. Asked some of the other guys on the force about him.”
Bet you did, Grif thought, clenching a fist.
“He married blue blood, but the man was blue-collar all the way. Straight-up patrolman. Never wanted off the streets. Helped the rookies, had the respect of his squad, his lieutenant. Cared about the job like it was a part of his family, too, and cared about his family more than anything.”
They were silent for a long moment.
“You know she was institutionalized for a time, after his death.”
Grif frowned. “What do you know about it?”
“Same as you, probably.” Dennis shook his head. “She doesn’t like to talk about it, and you’d never think it, right? Not with her ‘nothing’s gonna get me down’ attitude. She’s got some steel in her, though, and even that didn’t affect her for long. Reinvented herself, her family, and her dreams. Shit, her makeup might as well be armor. For all the crinoline and hair flowers and glamour, she’s one strong woman.”
Grif looked at him, and in the uninspired acrid hallway, they took size of each other—how fast was he? How strong? How motivated?
Grif thought angel wings and experience trumped whatever this buck with a badge and a growing crush on his girl might have, though he still had to fight the impulse to punch first and think later. But he didn’t, and for all those same reasons. Dennis might wrong Grif, but he’d never harm Kit.
“I like you, Shaw, which is why I’m going to give you some free advice.”
“Let’s hope it’s worth more than that.”
“There’s plenty of pain to be had in this lifetime. Doing this job has taught me that much.” Dennis gave his head a small shake. “You don’t have to go looking for any more.”
“You don’t know what I’m looking for.” Or who, he didn’t add. Although Kit did, and maybe that was the problem.
Shrugging, Dennis began backing down the hallway. “Just do the right thing by her.”
“Or you will, I suppose?” Grif asked, voice raised.
“Hey.” Still walking, Dennis put up his hands. “Someone should be there for her when it counts, right?”
Grif’s hands clenched in his pockets, and he wished he’d gone for the punch. He’d forgotten how many ways there were to clobber a man. And though Dennis was just that—a man, and not an angel like Grif—he was one from Kit’s time. One whose life was also hourglass-shaped, and not an endlessly ticking clock like Grif’s.
Quit her now. 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.
“Push off,” he muttered, watching Dennis disappear around the corner, not sure if he was talking to Dennis, or Mei, or both.
As for Grif, he felt like he’d just been shaken awake. Scratch had hijacked Trey Brunk’s body in order to get to Kit. Jesse had visited with Mei in order to plant doubt in Grif’s mind. And here on the Surface, Dennis was suddenly on point.
It’s all part of a greater plan, Grif realized, as he began to pace. And he’d bet the house that Sarge was behind it. Who else knew the things that rattled around inside Grif’s head and chest? Or the guilt that haunted him like a ghost?
You might find you have more in common with Jeap Yang than you think, he’d told Grif. Some guys spend their entire lives searching for a place to settle . . .
But that wasn’t true. Grif’d found Kit in this lifetime. Saved her, even. And, in turn, she grounded him. Made him feel found, not lost.
Grif thought about that a moment longer, then nodded once to himself, before he reached for Marin’s door. Sarge and Mei and even Dennis might be convinced Grif should let Kit go, but that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, he’d put away the things that haunted him, at least for a while, just as Kit had done all those years ago after her father’s murder. He’d be fully present in this life, at Kit’s side, and there for her in the same way she was there for him.
Ironically, to do that, he needed to go. Now.
“I’m coming with you,” Kit said, when he pulled her back into the hall.
Grif shook his head, and slipped a hand around the back of her neck. “Remember how you said you needed me? Well, I heard you, I did. But Marin needs you like that right now. And I think I’ve got another way to help you both.”
“How?”
By focusing on solving Jeap’s, Jeannie’s, and Tim’s deaths. Proving there was a place for Grif, and no one else, at Kit’s side. By solving this attack on Marin. By caring, as Kit said, about the living, and starting now.
Starting, he corrected as he bussed her cheek in farewell, with the Russians.
As always, when tragedy struck her life, and she didn’t know what else to do, Kit got to work. Even though she left the hospital later that afternoon, it was just for a quick stop home to shower and change before returning to Marin’s private room. Dennis had pulled some strings, and a cot had been set up for her in the corner. Marin would have protested, saying she didn’t want or need Kit to be put out, but Dennis had pulled more than one string, and the drugs forcing her aunt to rest took care of that as well.
Kit shut the door, set down her belongings, and stood by her dozing aunt, who was lost in a sleep additionally fueled by fatigue and stress. It seemed a lifetime ago that Kit had found Marin slumped outside the newspaper’s building, but time was like that, a trickster when it came to fielding regrets. Shaking off the memory of that poisoned needle scraping against her aunt’s soft arm, she bent and kissed the sleeping woman’s forehead.
Then she got to work.
Using Marin’s food tray, Kit set up her laptop so that she was facing her aunt, both so she could remain bedside and so the light would be less likely to disturb her aunt. At first, the silence of the room pressed at her ears like leaded earmuffs. Kit always had music going at home—Wanda Jackson or Imelda May, or, if she really needed a wake-me-up, the HorrorPops—but she soon settled into the quietude of the room and sunk into her own mind.
Sipping from her travel mug, she brought her computer humming to life. The hard drive in Marin’s office was what she really needed, but this little baby had cloud connection to that, and was updated constantly by both Marin and Kit. Its last date of entry was that morning.
So Marin had been updating her files at the same time Grif had been battling a fallen angel, and Kit had been feeding that same creature the information in her tears.
A shudder played at her spine, and Kit swallowed hard. Grif had freely admitted he had no idea what to do about Scratch, but whatever the answer was, surely they could find it together. And though it’d been hard to talk openly with Grif about Evie, she was glad she had. She felt closer to him now that they’d addressed the invisible elephant in the room, and facing it was another thing she was determined they’d do together. Then, maybe, Grif would be free to forget the past.
Refocusing, Kit typed in the password that only Marin and she knew, gaining access to the family archives, and a lengthy menu popped onto the screen. The family archives were not high-tech, just an orderly collection of disorderly anecdotes, thoughts, and half-baked reports on happenings in the Las Vegas Valley, but that was part of their appeal. The information in these files couldn’t be googled or keyword-searched or cached on the Web. Much of it wasn’t even substantiated, which was why it’d ended up on Marin’s hard drive instead of hard print.
Yet Kit’s family had long known that coupling salacious, outlandish, or even just eyebrow-raising bits of gossip with known information—then adding in a reporter’s well-honed instinct—could unearth something even better than cold, hard facts. It provided possibility. Nuance.
Negative space.
And that’s what Kit needed to unearth more regarding Sergei Kolyadenko and his merry mob of Russians. The attack on Marin wouldn’t stop that. In fact, after her aunt was settled in her hospital room, and the strangers taking blood and tests and statements had all gone away, Marin made Kit promise to pursue this story through to the end. “Don’t let them get away with this!” Marin snapped, glaring at the IV in her arm. “I’d go after them myself if these quacks would just cut me loose.”
“Auntie,” Kit said quietly. “They had a syringe filled with addictive poison taped to your forearm.”
Marin just stared, gaze stubborn and hard, hands knotting within Kit’s own. They were fragile against Kit’s, almost brittle, and not at all the way they appeared when flying across computer keys, or pointing and waving about in the air as she gave orders. Marin’s personality was so forceful that she appeared physically stronger than she was, and Kit suddenly realized that despite the cancer, it was her aunt, and not Grif, whom she most often considered immortal.
Which made the attack all the more shocking. Marin simply couldn’t, shouldn’t, be touched.
“Dangerous shit,” Marin had agreed, nodding with vigor. Her hair was flattened on one side, giving her a tilted look, but the resolve remained. “That’s why we must get it off our streets.”
Kit, refusing to be guilted into anything, shook her head.
“I’d die if anything had happened to you,” she said, heaving the plate of guilt back Marin’s way.
“You thought you would die once before,” Marin pointed out. “And you didn’t.”
Kit shook her head and pulled her hands away. “Let someone else do it. It’s not worth it to me. You’re all I have left.”
“It’s always worth it, Katherine. And I’m not all you have left.” Marin reached out, surprising Kit with her speed, and again with that strength. “You still have you. You always have you.”
And how could Kit argue with that?
Besides, Kit also had three dead addicts, all teens, an aunt who’d been threatened because of Kit’s investigation into those deaths, and a mystery woman who disguised herself as an over-aged Katy Perry while spreading disease and death all over the city. Kit’s city. Finding this woman, she knew, was key.
So she pulled up the file photo on Yulyia Kolyadenko, and studied it. Fifty years from now, people would probably look back on this snapshot in the same way Kit viewed those from the midcentury years. They’d think this woman glamorous, classic, and chic. Who knew, she might even be those things . . . though she might be the opposite of them, too. Either way, Yulyia was stunning.
Yet there was a hardness there as well, Kit thought, studying the jawline, the lips, the eyes. Skepticism shellacked the clear blue gaze, a look that said she’d seen and survived more than her share of trouble. There was an almost brittle curve to her sharp mouth, like life was one big laugh and the joke, comrade, was on you. She was not kind, either, Kit decided. There was a lifelessness to her artifice that Kit had always considered a shortcoming in a woman. She was so perfectly groomed she might as well be a prop or a doll.
Question was, was she a weapon in some man’s arsenal meant to control Vegas’s drug-fueled underworld? Would she wear cheap leather? Multicolored wigs? Hang out with junkies in the city’s dankest holes?
Kit’s gaze settled on those thumbnail-size diamonds. “No way.”
And she didn’t think the man the files described as proud and imperious, Sergei, would ask or allow it of his wife, either.
Another woman, then. Kit scrolled through the digital files, eyeing the slim Slavic faces of those with known ties to the Kolyadenkos’ bratva. It would have to be someone close, trusted, and with an investment in seeing the Russians pick off Marielito progeny—or as close as they could get—one by one. Kit paused on a photo of a woman named Anna Vaganova, mentally imposing a brightly colored wig on her delicate features. Yet Kit also couldn’t discount the power of coercion, and that turned the woman she was seeking back into the proverbial needle in the haystack.
Leaning back, Kit blew the bangs from her forehead, because that was the most likely answer. The krokodil itself was like a neon arrow flashing in the Russians’ direction, so why not send a native English-speaker to do your dirty work?
Yet Jeannie Holmes said the woman who fed them the krokodil recipe had a clunky accent. “I have new drug to try. You weel love eet to death,” Kit attempted and winced.
Talk about clunky. As easy as an Eastern European accent was to identify, it was almost impossibly hard to mimic.
Kit scrolled back to Yulyia Kolyadenko’s photo again. Maybe Jeannie had it backward? What if this mysterious woman wasn’t trying to hide her Russian accent? What if she was trying to put it on?
Like the earrings, it wasn’t something Grif or Marin—or someone willing to inject lighter fluid into their veins—would pay heed to, but Kit did. A woman who was particular about the things she put in and on her body could spot a fellow acolyte, regardless of time period, age, and ethnicity.
“I voodn’t be caught ded een cheep hoop earring,” Kit tried again, channeling Yulyia . . . badly. Yet Kit smiled anyway, then switched to her own voice. “So what about a woman from your rival Cuban gang, then? Could that be the source of our mysterious Bella?”
Frustrated, Kit switched screens to locate her own private files, but caught her breath when an archived photo jumped out at her. The pain she’d managed to shunt aside all night ambushed her as Grif’s face—the sprouting stubble and hard lines and probing stare that Kit loved so much—gazed back at her in black-and-white . . . though, of course, he wasn’t really looking at her at all.
At the time this photo was taken, Kit didn’t even exist.
But the woman his arm was draped loosely around had not only existed, she’d been his entire life. The same hand cupping that slim waist sported a thin gold wedding band, and there was an answering diamond on her finger, a chip of a thing that, though not large, winked in the photographer’s flash like a taunt. Kit wondered why Grif’s wedding band never reappeared on his body at four A.M., same as everything else he’d died in. Obvious answer? He hadn’t been wearing it when he died, though he swore he had. So had someone removed it just before that? Had he simply forgotten to don it earlier?
Kit took her gaze off the diamond, and moved it up to the woman’s open, direct stare.
The monochrome tones did nothing to diminish Evelyn Shaw’s peaches-and-cream complexion, and cheekbones as high as the Rockies sat beneath eyes that shone with amusement and mystery. Her clothing was business casual for the day—a tidy, if sexier, Jackie Kennedy—though Kit knew Evelyn Shaw hadn’t had a job—at least not at the time this photo was taken, just before her and Grif’s deaths. This was obviously a special occasion, and Kit’s gaze briefly dropped to the accompanying tagline.
Yes, it was the week Grif had brought little Mary Margaret DiMartino back home to her family. Her kingpin uncle, Sal, was in the foreground with arms splayed wide, and he was the real focus of the photo, while Grif vainly attempted to skirt the press’s view. Kit’s eyes shifted again to Evie.
She wasn’t shying away from anything. She was in a lean-legged stride halfway between both men, head tilted toward the blazing-hot photographer’s bulb. Unlike Grif, his wife clearly relished having her photo taken, and she wore the same knowing, closed-mouth smile in every photo. Kit frowned, wondering exactly what Evie knew. That Grif loved her? That he always would?
That Kit had to rival her for his love?
“You’re obsessing,” Kit muttered, reminding herself to be careful. She had to keep her feelings, especially regarding this woman, under control. If there was any danger of slipping into negativity, this old love epitomizing everything Kit had ever wanted—the era, the lean looks, the man—would be the trigger.
Kit could easily see herself losing control then, burning up inside, just like Jeannie, and without ever touching an invasive drug.
Learn her secrets.
Fleur’s voice visited Kit in memory.
I bet if you look close enough, you’ll find she wasn’t so damned perfect.
What the hell, Kit thought, copying and pasting the photo of Grif and Evelyn into a new file. Ignoring this dead, now near-mythic woman hadn’t worked. Grif couldn’t move on while fixated on the past, so Kit began compiling an action list, beginning with calling on Mary Margaret again to see if she might be up for a private visit with Kit. She’d find out for herself just what hold Evelyn Shaw had over Grif. What magic she possessed from beyond the grave that even Kit—flesh and blood and here—couldn’t seem to break through.
“And then what?” Kit muttered, fingers falling still over the keys.
“Then you ruin his every loving memory of her . . . just for fun.”
Kit’s hands fell still, and she looked up to find a fallen angel sitting up in her aunt’s hospital bed, wearing Marin’s flesh along with its own knowing smile, and watching her with a darkly glittering gaze.