The Taken

Somewhere out there was a woman with powerful blue eyes, a secretive smile, and curves that made him want to cry. A woman he was going to have to face in both this world and the next. A woman fated to die because of him.

Again.

Kit shouldn’t have been surprised at the sun’s ascendance in the sky, or by downtown’s early-morning bustle. Yet she stood at the bottom of the concrete stairway outside the station, shoulders slumped and limbs heavy, as astonished by the urban landscape as she’d be in a foreign country. It was startling that these people had dressed this morning—or not, in the case of the vagrant sprawled to her left—and bewildering that they could now think of coffee, or gambling, or work.

And what the hell was there to laugh about, Kit wondered, anger flashing as a passing woman threw back her blond, perfectly coiffed head—neck white and pristine and unmarked by a butcher’s knife—loosing an inappropriate amount of joy into the world. Kit wanted to grab the sleeve of the blonde’s suit jacket, or maybe a handful of that carefully styled hair, and say, “My best friend was murdered last night. Why the hell are you still alive?”

Why am I? she thought, tears welling.

Why was anyone?

Kit realized she was causing a scene, looking rumpled, dazed, and literally shaking in the sidewalk’s center. Swallowing hard, she wiped her eyes with her cardigan before beginning the long walk to the police lot where she’d parked the night before.

It was still wintry this early in February, but Kit didn’t hurry. Her steps were as measured and precise as an army recruit’s. She even halted stiffly beneath the bald tubing of an old neon sign to stare into a refurbished café where lawyers and D.A.s and those who made their living off of other people’s vices were talking shop and swapping stories. Blue pendant lamps glowed like crystal jellyfish, and the scent of fresh bread and baking sugar rushed out to envelop her when the door was thrown wide.

Kit frowned and stared. The café didn’t look inviting to her. Instead, it looked too hot, like a nuclear reactor. Like it would consume and destroy every bit of life that entered there.

Or maybe she was just projecting.

Hurrying the rest of the way to her car, she slammed the door on the sounds of downtown Vegas, and locked herself in the cocoon-like silence. The familiar squeak and scent of leather wrapped around her like a sumptuous throw. The perfume that’d been her latest flea market find, and that she’d been wearing the night before, tickled her nose. Slumping, Kit let her head fall. She should go straight home and sleep, but she didn’t dare start the car with her hands still shaking. Besides, sleep meant closing her eyes, and even blinking was a nightmare. She’d rather cling to the raw numbness of her fatigue. She preferred her overheated anger at the world.

Swallowing hard, she dialed Paul’s number to see if he’d done any work on the list she’d given him in the station. He didn’t answer, no surprise, but it made her want to gore something with her red fingertips. Forget that it was not yet seven and there was nothing he could have done in three predawn hours. Forget, too, that he’d never been available when Kit needed him, anyway.

But Nicole had. Kit glanced at the metaphorical elephant in the car, Nic’s camera, lying lens-up on the passenger’s seat, its wide, alien gaze locked on her. Nic loved that camera like Kit loved the Duetto, so much that her predominant memory of Nicole was in a one-eyed squint, shoulders hunched as she held the camera to her eye.

“With my shots and your smarts, we’re sure to hit the major wires,” she’d said, pointing the camera up at the room where she’d die within the hour.

“Sure you don’t want me in there with you?” Kit asked, staring at the window.

“The girl was insistent. She wants me alone.”

“I could hide under the bed.”

Nicole raised her brows. “And where’s the first place you’d look? Besides, I’d blow any trust I’d built once you climbed out from beneath a stained mattress with old jizz caked on your kneecaps.”

Kit made a face. “Get me a Brillo pad. I need to scrub that image from my brain.”

“Well, do it from within this George Jetson cockpit. I’ll text you and have you come up when the girl and I have established a rapport. Until then … smile. I’m about to take the photo for your byline.”

Nicole snapped a few shots of Kit in profile, the motel sagging like a battered woman in the background, then smiled as she studied the images. “God, I’m good.”

She was. She could see everything through her lens. So well, Kit thought, that sometimes she was utterly blind without it.

Kit slid her key in the ignition. She should go home. There was nothing outside the safety of this car but more bright sky and oblivious people and futile anger. But how was she to be alone with this grief? It wasn’t that she wanted someone’s shoulder to cry on—her sadness was heavy enough to knock two people over—but it’d be nice to see someone who’d known Nic alive and well, and who’d also feel the loss now that she was no longer either of those things.

So despite the wrinkles in her dress, the bedraggled ends of her hair, and the shadows haunting her eyes, Kit went to work. She would crack soon, she felt it like an animal sensed an impending earthquake, and would have to be home by then. But not yet. Not now. Her grief still hadn’t entered the nuclear reactor’s core. But she knew from previous experience—her mother’s death, her father’s—that when it did, the world as she knew it would be flattened, every particle in her life rearranged, her personal universe blown away.

If only there was a way to take a photo of that.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_0abc419a-c6da-5efb-891f-1488e1f17b42)

The graveyard-shift waitress in the roadside café was bleary-eyed and slow. The short-order cook was uninspired, and more interested in the activity going on outside the attached motel where Rockwell had died. And the vinyl booth was ripped in so many places it was impossible to sit comfortably. But the coffee was hot, melting the last of Grif’s cosmic thaw, though he wouldn’t have wished the runny eggs and burned toast for anyone’s first meal back on the Surface—or their last.

Yet it didn’t matter much to Grif. He couldn’t taste it. The Everlast must have somehow flash-fried his senses. He couldn’t feel the fork in his hand, either—not the way he should, at least. His eyesight was clearer, but after the Technicolor wonder of the Everlast, it was small comfort. Yet his nose worked well enough that he was thankful not to be in Jimmy’s trash pile any longer, so he supposed that was something.

But his hearing was hollow and tinny, probably about right for an eighty-four-year-old man.

You’re not human.

No shit, he thought, moving his shoulders. The blades still ached where Anas had ripped the wings from his back.

Yet when he finally looked up from his empty plate, the headache dogging him was gone, and he almost felt a part of the world. So, belching lightly, he got down to the business of locating Ms. Craig.

The map alone didn’t help; Sarge had been right about that. But a journey was rarely a straight shot from point A to point B. It was the landmarks and details that made all the difference. The bent street sign and the shifty-eyed man leaning against it. The car parked in the wrong direction on a residential street.

The intricate brick face on the Strip-side bungalow where he’d died.

Yeah, details he remembered.

Fortunately, the waitress wasn’t so comatose that she couldn’t point out the diner’s location, south of Sunrise Mountain just off of Boulder Highway. Outside the window, self-storage units rose like tombstones from each side of the street, and trailer parks squatted behind those. So he knew where he was but still not where he was going.

Vegas’s streets hadn’t changed that much, he thought, squinting at the black-and-white grid. Though there were certainly more of them. And the place sprawled like it could go on forever. He remembered a time when the Boys tried to pay their entertainers in real estate. The talent had laughed and held out their hand for hard coin instead. Who, they said, would want to own land in this glorified litter box?

But according to this map, people did, and there was only one reason Grif could figure the population would sprawl all the way from the Sheep Mountains to the Black: to get away from other people.

The infamous Las Vegas Strip was clearly marked and the major streets leading from it jumped out at him like old friends at a surprise party—Trop, Flamingo, Sahara—but that wouldn’t help him find one lone woman.

So he put the map aside for now and pulled out the folder Sarge had left him.

There, still stapled inside was the Polaroid of Katherine Craig. His case. Before Grif could flip the thing over, his gaze caught on the whites of her teeth, a single dimple, and crinkles around smoky eyes. It took a moment before he could shake off the image and focus on the page behind it. Once he did, he found the information he sought.

Katherine Craig, age 29, born in Las Vegas to Shirley and Martin Craig, both deceased. Mother was a homemaker, died of cancer when Katherine was 12. Father was a police officer, killed on-duty while responding to a robbery when she was 16.

So one parent passed directly through the Gates, Grif thought, sipping at his cooling coffee. The other was dumped into incubation a few years later. Shirley Craig would definitely be waiting in Paradise, though her husband might still be in the Tube, depending on how long it took to get over the trauma of his death. Katherine was going to end up doing time there as well, so it was entirely plausible that if she healed quickly and her father did not, they’d emerge at the same time.

“Some family reunion,” Grif muttered, and kept reading.

Marital status, divorced from one Paul Raggio. Schooling, private and then UNLV. Occupation: interned in the Sterling Hotel’s advertising department, demoted for insubordination. Moved to guest services, same hotel, but fired a month later for insulting a guest. Has since worked as a reporter for her family-owned newspaper, the Las Vegas Tribune. A business constantly on the edge of bankruptcy.

So the girl was a native Las Vegan, had a mouth and possibly a temper on her, and a documented history of getting herself in touchy situations. Yet even as Grif thought it, he knew he was projecting. It was easier on him to believe that she and Nicole Rockwell had forged a head-on with death, but Sarge had made it clear Craig’s twisted fate was Grif’s doing. Besides—mouth, temper, and occupation aside—no one deserved murder.

So there you have it, Grif thought, leaning back. A nosy divorcee who lost both her parents young, and was destined to die in the same city she was born. Those were the facts, and facts were bricks Grif could lay side by side and atop one another until a pattern emerged and a wall was built. Intelligence and instinct were mortar binding it all together, and with enough of both, he would insulate himself from the emotion that was useless in good detective work.

It would be debilitating to someone who could see death coming.

Facts were a damn sight better than a good sense of direction, Grif thought, and—feeling like he had a big enough wall built up now—he went ahead and flipped the photo back over.

Why the hell was she smiling like that? he wondered, his newfound breath lost to the visual kidney punch. Her mouth was blown so wide that the soft insides showed at the corners, like another grin was building in there. As if her laughter tumbled. Like joy was a living thing.