The Taken

“O-kay,” Dennis said loudly, straightening as quickly as Hitchens. Kit just leaned back and crossed her legs. “So we’ve defined Nicole’s lifestyle as rockabilly. Boyfriends?”

“Plenty,” Kit answered, then looked at Hitchens. “All weirdoes.”

“And when did you last see her alive?”

“Twelve thirty. There’s a café attached to the motel. Just a hash house serving grease and caffeine to overtired truckers. She did a round there to attract our contact’s attention, as agreed, then crossed the gravel lot and went up the motel stairs.”

She’d dressed in conventional hooker wear, Kit remembered—too short, too low, too tight—and had shot Kit a pained grimace as she fought the skirt for movement, hating that such a junky item of clothing would even touch her body. Not yet knowing she would die in it.

“She didn’t take her camera with her? We didn’t find one at the scene.”

“She left it in my car. It’s hard to fit a Nikon D3 in a tube top, and she didn’t want to scare away our source. She took my notebook instead.”

The cops looked at each other.

“I could use it back,” Kit tried.

“Evidence,” Dennis replied, though there was a strange frown marring his brow.

Hitchens propped himself on the table so that he was looming over Kit. “All right, so Nicole entered the room alone, and you stayed in the car the whole time?”

“Didn’t take my eyes from that door.” Which meant the killer had been inside, lying in wait the whole time.

“We’ve confirmed with the motel manager that the place was being used as an unofficial whorehouse,” Hitchens said, looking through his notes. “The rooms were booked in blocks. One woman picks up all the keys. Then they’re returned in a single envelope placed in the drop box the next morning.”

“My research confirms the same.”

Head still lowered, Hitchens lifted his gaze. “Your research?”

“Well, I don’t just make up the stories that go in my newspaper, Detective Hitchens. I fact-check. Double-check. Then I find secondary confirmation and I check again. This was an ongoing operation. Truckers driving through the southern portion of the state, probably through Arizona via the new Hoover Dam bypass, would tweet about it online.”

“So you think it was a passion kill? Some trucker snapped when he found himself being interviewed rather than undressed?”

“No. We were supposed to be meeting a girl there, maybe a woman. And she had a list naming some of the most powerful men in this city as clients. I think one of the names on that list killed her.”

“I’m sorry,” Hitchens said, “but what would Vegas’s most powerful leaders want with street lays in a fleabag motel off a stretch of highway best known for being forgotten?”

Kit exhaled. “I don’t know.”

Dennis leaned forward. “Kit, can you think of anyone who might want to harm Nicole?”

“She was a reporter,” Hitchens remarked under his breath.

“But well-liked,” Kit countered. “I told you. Vivacious. Happy. Full of life.” And now she was dead. “But she was also stubborn, a total pit bull when something captured her curiosity. Even I thought there was a better way to do this thing, but Nicole wanted the list. And she wanted more than just names, she wanted proof.”

“And what did you want?”

Kit looked at Hitchens. “To know who this girl was.”

Why she was on the streets at such a young age. Why she’d ever consider selling her body for money. For Kit, it was always about the person more than the story. That’s why she was working for her family’s newspaper rather than running it. “I wanted to help her.”

Dennis looked at his partner. “If she was juvie, it could’ve been a pimp.”

“I worried about that,” Kit said, “but Nic just said I was weaving tales again. That my imagination was getting the best of me, and that if the girl was defying a pimp by meeting with us, then she must really be desperate.”

“But she didn’t come. And you waited a full hour before checking on Nicole?”

“She texted me after ten minutes, told me to stay put.”

“We’ll want to see that text,” Hitchens said.

But Dennis looked worried. “So is it fair to assume that whoever was with Nicole knew you were waiting in the car?”

Kit nodded, and told them about the figure that’d momentarily pushed aside the curtains.

“I’ll have forensics do a run on those panels,” said Dennis, standing. “Is there anything else you can think of?”

A rockabilly lifestyle, a sting involving truckers, young girls, possibly pimps. An anonymous woman who’d written the names of the city’s movers and shakers on a list that had drawn Nicole to her death. Was that all?

Wasn’t that enough?

Kit shook her head. “No.”

But there was more, of course. There was Nicole’s family and friends to inform. There were visits to make and a funeral to plan.

“Do you still have this list of names your contact gave you?”

Kit nodded at Dennis. She could print another copy. “So you believe me?”

“It’s an angle,” he said. “But even without that list, you girls were playing with fire.”

It wasn’t the first time they’d done so, and maybe that was the problem. They’d thought their journalism credentials could protect them from anything. “We’re a great team.”

And before she’d realized she’d spoken as if Nic were still alive, Hitchens said, “Then maybe you shouldn’t have left her alone in that room.”

“Brian,” Dennis said.

But Kit lowered her head, knowing he was right. And, somehow, she was going to have to live with that.

CHAPTER THREE

In the dream, Grif was driving through the desert, waiting for Vegas to rise out of the inky darkness like a neon mirage, just as he had fifty years earlier. Evie was straining forward next to him, as if she could force the car faster with the weight and heat of her body, like she could bend the entire world to her will with her curves alone. She’d always been like that. Taken the not-inconsequential gifts God had given her—beauty, jets, guile—and parlayed them into bigger game than her Iowa roots allowed. More than what her simple family had expected of and for her. Certainly more than what Grif could give.

He felt it when she finally shifted, turning to him, though he didn’t dare look back. “Your love should have saved me.”

“I know.”

“You weren’t strong enough.”

Grif kept his eyes on the narrow, snaking road. “I know that, too.”

“Are you strong enough now?”

Was he? He had a strong title, Centurion, and a strong job, helping others. And even if Centurions were the lowest celestials on the totem pole, he was still an angel. That had to count for something.

But would he be having these dreams if he were truly strong? No. He’d have already healed from the trauma of his death and moved on into Paradise. Tightening his hands on the wheel of his dream ’fifty-six Chevy Bel Air, Grif sighed. Incubation was supposed to have pulled these flashbacks from his mind. Yet they regularly reached up in the guise of a dream or an unintended thought and coldcocked him, like a fighter sprung early from his corner. And in that brief, flashing moment, even in the Everlast, Grif remembered, and felt, it all.

“I don’t have to be strong,” he finally said, refusing to dwell on it. “I’m dead.”

And that’s how he got through his days. His job was to escort Takes to the Everlast, that’s all. Didn’t matter if their deaths had been accidental, if they’d been murdered, or if they’d severed the rip cord themselves. It wasn’t his responsibility to figure out how they’d gotten that way. Not anymore.

Evie laughed beside him, like she could read his thoughts.

“Yet you still help people. Never could break you of that soft habit, could I? All the time, helping others instead of just keeping your head down and doing for us. And look where it got you. Look where it got me.”

He finally did turn to her, and she was just as pretty as he remembered. Eyebrows plucked into perfection above irises of dipped chocolate, blond hair styled into waves so flawless they were severe. But she was also angry. “I don’t know where it got you,” he said.

He’d never seen her in the Everlast. She’d probably bypassed it, went straight into Paradise. That’s what the pure angels did, right? And that’s what she’d been to him. His angel. His Evie.

His wife.

But right now she was his conscience.

“Yes, you do,” she said accusingly, just as Grif knew she would. He’d had this dream before. And what Evie didn’t say, but what still rose in the dark between them, was that if he hadn’t died, he could have saved her. And that was really why it was so hard to look at her: all that beauty and life and energy straining forward in anticipation of a future that would never come.

He scrambled for an answer, trying to think of something that would make it better—

“Hey, man.”

Coming to with a hard snort, Grif squinted, and tried to focus. Darkness, layers of it, crowded in and he shook his head. He had no idea where he was. Then the marching band took up again in his skull, and he remembered.

“Hey,” the voice said again. “Over here.”

Bleary-eyed, wiping drool from his chin, Grif turned his head. Dark lumps rose from the ground in uneven mounds, and a brick wall speared up at his back. The sky rose darkly behind that.

“Where am I?” he rasped.

“Man, and I thought I was wasted.”

The voice found form in the face of a shaggy-haired man who sat up among the lumps on the ground, plastic shifting around him as he peered, too closely, at Grif. The man’s breath kept Grif from doing the same. He recoiled. The pounding in his head throbbed.

Breathe.

“Yo, how’d you find this place? This is prime real estate. Usually nobody bothers me out here.”

“Ain’t gonna bother you,” Grif said, the words guttural, and scraping raw. Clearing his throat, he focused on bringing his senses back to life. That’s what was happening, after all. He was coming back to life.

His first observation was of the dark. That, and the chill. It was predawn, by Grif’s best guess, and nighttime in the desert was notoriously cold. He already knew from the bungled Take that it was winter but hadn’t noticed until now. Then he remembered it’d been late winter the last time he’d been in Vegas, too.

A cricket chirped, pricking his ears, and a breeze caught on the plastic bags around him, but the thumping headache was still rattling his brain’s pots and pans, making it hard to concentrate.

Breathe.

But he already was. The cold was only pressing in from the outside now, and his insides were beginning to thaw. He willed his hands to move, concentrating on touch as pins and needles shot into his limbs. He tried to sit up.

Never mind, he thought, barely able to lift his head. Though it wouldn’t be long. He was already feeling stronger, less panicked, so he settled back to wait. One thing he’d learned in his half-dozen years as a P.I. was when to act and when to sweat out a moment. Most people didn’t have the discipline to be still and wait. Grif didn’t have a problem with stillness or discipline.

The same obviously couldn’t be said for his companion. “You got some funky threads there, buddy. You first come around that corner, I thought to myself, Jimmy, ol’ boy, that man is straight up Dragnet. Like some old detective and shit.”

Two points for the wino. At least the man’s babble gave Grif another concrete detail to focus on. He was, indeed, wearing his favorite suit, the gray flannel with give in the sleeves, his white shirt, black tie. For some reason, that had a smile crawling up his face. Material things had no value in and of themselves, he knew that. There was no difference between a diamond and a brick in the Everlast. Only those things God had assigned value to could sustain a soul.

But this was the suit he’d died in, and though he’d worn it ever since, it hadn’t felt like this in the Everlast. The soft, clean cotton never caressed his skin like a lover’s touch while there. This sort of touch was a gift only the living possessed, though most never realized it.

“Missing your stingy brim, though,” Jimmy, still babbling, observed.

Grif perked up. Where was his hat?

Frowning, he looked up in time to spot a star hurtling across the sky. Grif followed the movement, eyes tickling so deeply in their sockets that he gasped, and for the first time in half a century, he sucked in raw ozone and earth instead of the silky cosmos.

And dust, he thought, choking. And decay, he realized, scenting the trash around him … fruit rinds, coffee grounds, half-finished meals that used to be animals. Human waste. The unwashed bum. No wonder the Pures would rather Fall than don flesh.

But then Grif covered his face with his palm, and was reintroduced to himself. The hotel soap he’d showered with fifty years earlier, the Sen-Sen he chewed after every meal, the faint whiff of coconut in his pomade, and beneath it all … flesh. Warm, gritty, and real.

And it was the flesh—the sinful flesh—that finally grounded him. No sooner did he have that thought than click. The radio found its signal.

For one brief moment his senses were amplified. He could scent the shadows. He could taste the night. Yet before he could reach out and touch anything, it was all whisked away, the protective blanket of the Everlast ripped entirely from beneath his chin. All that remained was its knowledge, buried in the coils of his gray matter.

Grif sat up, then rose unsteadily to his feet, bracing against the dirty brick wall for support. He had to figure out where he was.

“Yo, Dick Tracy!” Jimmy called, as Grif began walking away. “Buy me a brewski, right? I let you crash at my pad … least you could do!”

Grif had no idea what Jimmy was talking about, not until he rounded the corner and caught sight of pumps, a glowing storefront, and a dark-haired man standing cross-armed with his back to Grif. Ignoring the man for now, Grif looked up at the backlit sign. Gas station. Perfect.

On a hunch, Grif checked his pants pockets for his wallet. Opening it, he saw it, too, was as when he died. Same amount of money—and lucky for him he’d just cashed out at the casino cage—and the same photo of Evie that he carried with him everywhere. He took time to study that with his new-old eyes, then tucked it safely away, just like the dream.

His watch was on and working. His piece strapped to his right calf. Lot of good that did me, Grif thought wryly, before frowning. Odd, though. His driver’s license was missing. He coulda sworn he’d had it on him when he died.

Grif didn’t know if the dark-haired man heard his sigh, or just sensed Grif behind him, but he turned suddenly, giving a startled curse when he saw Grif. “Where’d you come from?”

Grif hesitated, then jerked his head in the direction he’d come. “Checking on the local wildlife.”

“You mean Jimmy?” Worry replaced wariness. “He all right? They didn’t get to him, too, did they?”

“They?”

“You know,” the man said, in an accent that curled in the air like smoke. “The ones who chopped up the woman across the street.”

Grif glanced in the direction the man had been staring. In the background a wide sun was beginning its push over mountains wearing robes of dark purple. In the foreground was a truck stop, rigs idling white smoke in the cool morning air. And across from the closest of those was a sagging two-story motel with an even more depressing café riveted to its side. It was littered with yellow crime-scene tape, and what had to be a whole unit of patrol cars.

Grif hadn’t run very far.

“Jimmy’s fine,” he said, heading inside the station. It was brighter, more crowded than in his time and with a security camera straight out of a science-fiction movie, but still clearly a gas station.

“You a cop?” the man asked, following. He slipped behind the counter, pulled down the Luckies Grif pointed to, and tossed over a book of matches. “Or maybe a reporter?”

“A word-hack?” Grif made a face, tossing exact change onto the counter. Six bills for a pack of cigarettes. He couldn’t believe it. What was that? A 2,400 percent increase in fifty years? He’d consider quitting the habit if he thought he’d be here long enough to properly start again. “I’m gonna need a map. And some coffee for our friend out back.”

The cashier’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not from here, are you?”

Grif wondered if it was the map or his concern for Jimmy that gave it away, but considering the man’s dark eyes, skin, and curling accent, Grif didn’t think he had any room to comment. “A few years since I’ve been in Vegas.”

“Just passing through?”

Grif bent over the map. “Aren’t we all?”

The man shrugged, his attention back across the street now that Grif was no longer a mystery. “Coffee’s in the back. I’ll be outside if you need me.”

But Grif needed him even as the door shut behind him. “Who drew this? An amnesiac monkey?”

Because the map looked deliberately confusing. Red lines, yellow ones, blue. A big squiggly in the middle that meant blast-all. The topography made no sense. He couldn’t even locate the Marquis, the grand hotel where he’d died, and was considering popping out back and asking Jimmy exactly where they were when a tinny voice swept through the room.

“Griffin Shaw,” it boomed, causing the knobs where his wings had been torn from his body to pulse with pain. “Did you really tell one Melinda Childers that a rap on the head was the nicest thing her husband ever did for her?”

The voice had Grif jumping, not because he’d thought he was alone but because it was so familiar. “Frank?”

Whirling, he looked for the Pure who was in charge of the Centurions, but he saw no one.

“Up here.”

Grif turned back to the register.

“Up.”

Grif’s gaze rose to the security monitor behind the counter. Gone were the live shots of the building that’d divided the screen before. In their place was the Pure who appeared to each Centurion in the guise they most identified with authority. For Grif, that meant a sergeant in a detectives’ bullpen, something he’d long stopped questioning.

Glaring through blurred static, and a picture that rolled every few seconds, Sarge crossed his great arms and gave Grif a cold stare. His wings, as black as the rest of him, took up the whole of the screen, though Grif could still see the tips, currently gold-tipped with fury. Hard lines drew his mouth down like a thin hook, and his jaw clenched reflexively. He hadn’t seen Sarge this mad since Harvey brought home the wrong soul.

Frank leaned back, and the celestial camera—or whatever was allowing Grif to view him in the Everlast—pulled wide to reveal a desk that was as broad and imposing as the Pure behind it. “Childers?” Frank repeated, pointing to some papers on his desk.

Grif glanced outside to make sure the cashier wasn’t looking before he answered. “What is that? My folder?”

Sarge just stared. Like Anas, he had no pupils, though instead of her hot open flame, the rounds of his eyes held mist swirling over black marble. “And you told Simon Abernathy he wouldn’t have gotten dusted if he’d stuck to shilling fish and chips on his side of the pond?”

“He was an illegal.”

“Shaw.” Sarge threw down his pen. “You are a Centurion! You are greeting people in the most vulnerable moments of their afterlife. Don’t you remember what that was like?”

“Sure I do,” Grif said, tapping out one of his smokes. He lit it behind a cupped palm, and exhaled before meeting Frank’s restlessly churning eyes. “Though the part right before that gets a little fuzzy.”

Frank narrowed his gaze. “We’re not having this conversation again.”

“Good.” Because Grif had been murdered. No amount of yapping would convince him to forgive it. And, for some reason, he couldn’t forget. “Then maybe we can talk about what the hell I’m doing on this mudflat. In flesh.”

“You have sensitivity issues, Shaw.”

Despite those, or maybe because of them, Grif just blew out a stream of smoke. “Maybe I could put on a dress. Sing a little show tune?”

Frank just stared back at him from the video screen. With his angelic nature hidden behind this familiar guise, it was easy to forget he was created in and of Paradise. Yet, unlike some of the other Pures, Frank didn’t seem to resent the Centurions. Sure, they were celestial misfits; no longer mortal, not truly angelic. But Centurions had still been created in God’s image, they remained His beloved children, and Frank said it was his job to see those souls at peace.

Admittedly, Grif didn’t always make it easy.

“That it?” he asked, when Frank just kept eyeballing him. “You knocked me back to the mud just to talk about my bedside manner?”

“No, smartass.” Frank’s curse was cause enough to raise a brow. “You barred yourself from the Everlast when you did this.”

And Nicole Rockwell’s corpse replaced Frank on the screen. Grif shot a nervous glance out the window, but the cashier was still staring across the street, giving a play-by-play to whomever he was talking to on his cell.

“Come on,” Grif protested. “I was nice to the working girl.”

Sarge’s words were just a voice-over. “She wasn’t a hooker, Grif.”

Grif sighed. “Yeah. That’s what she said.”

“It’s not what she said, Shaw. It’s what she did.”

And the image fluttered, shifted, and then there was Grif, entering the motel room just as Nicole Rockwell spotted her dead body and began screaming.

“Damn,” Grif whispered under his breath.

It looked more incriminating, more premeditated, from a distance. There was no sound, but he couldn’t fault the picture. Especially after he’d resuscitated Nicole’s body, and she made him turn away so she could dress.

“The girl wanted some privacy,” Grif objected, having seen enough.

“No … she wanted this.”

And Grif watched, slack-jawed, as Rockwell scribbled something on the Moleskine he’d seen lying on the dresser. When his image finally turned away from the window and back to her, she made sure her head was on straight, literally, and that her body was blocking the notebook.

Grif cursed again. “She tricked me.”

“You let her trick you.” Frank’s wide face reappeared on the screen.

“I wasn’t thinking straight!” Grif protested, then finally got the nerve to say what was really bothering him. “You sent me to Vegas. Vegas!”

Frank’s face remained impassive. “It was mandatory. Doing Surface time in the city where you died—”

“Was murdered,” Grif corrected.

“Is part of your rehabilitation and healing process.”

“I’m fine,” Grif muttered.

“Then what are you still doing here?” Frank asked, gesturing at his office in the Everlast.

“You mean here?” Grif motioned around the gas station on the Surface.

The swirling eyes narrowed. “You want to see the rest?”

The rest? Grif frowned. What was left?

But Sarge was shaking his head, and Grif suddenly found he couldn’t hold the stare. He might be slow on the uptake, but he was catching up fast now. His actions had changed something on the Surface. They’d altered fate somehow, and whatever his interference had allowed—whatever Nicole Rockwell had written in that notebook—was big enough to gain a Pure’s attention. No, he didn’t want to see.

But Sarge showed him anyway. The static blurred with a wave of his hand, and there was the same dingy hotel room but a new scene. Another woman and her john entering, freezing when they spotted Nicole’s corpse on the bed. Grif was already gone, of course, and the woman fled screaming, but the man looked around … then pocketed the notebook.