Chapter Eight
Meadows Village wasn’t far, yet rush hour was just beginning, and traffic was bad at every turn. Grif took the time to fill Kit in on what’d happened at the bar. Or at least what he knew of it. He’d been as surprised as she was to learn that Scratch could inhabit the living through their negative emotions as well as their addictions. He’d have to talk to Sarge about it, but it made sense in theory.
“The fraction of the Host that turned against God was one-third of all angels. That’s why the fallen are called the Third. They were immediately banished from God’s presence, and cast into a place it would never be felt again.”
“The Garden of Eden,” Kit said.
Grif nodded. “Now the Eternal Forest. They’re reluctant inhabitants, but they’re a part of it, too. Both are withered and decayed, completely lifeless.”
“Except when they possess the living.”
Except, Grif now realized, when the living somehow gave up possession of themselves.
“And so the people who die and end up in the Forest? They’re the same?”
“They’re the only source of energy, entertainment, and power that the Third possess.” Grif pursed his lips tight. “But don’t feel too bad for them. Nothing good or pure can exist when blotted entirely from God’s presence.”
He waited, but Kit remained silent as a violent shudder worked its way down her spine. Her beautiful lips were pressed tightly together, too. She was trying to keep from crying.
“It’s the Forest, Kit,” Grif said softly. “Not a walk in the park. You felt how cold his breath was. Magnify it fivefold. Shelter and food? Nonexistent. Same with water, though the Third despise it anyway. Water is a symbol of life—of baptism and rebirth—and nothing that truly lives can exist in the Forest.”
“It sounds . . .” Her voice trailed off as she tried to let the Forest bloom in her own imagination. Few humans, though, had a place in their minds for this kind of madness. “Hopeless.”
“Hope is a gift from God,” Grif said softly. “The Third rose up in mutiny against God, and humans do it on a case-by-case basis. The perversion of free will, God’s greatest gift, lands you there. The Forest is those perversions made manifest.”
“And what about me, Grif?” She glanced over, and there were tears in her eyes. “It said it wanted me, but I can’t imagine living in a place without hope or love.”
“Of course you can’t.” Grif wanted to comfort her, but there was little he could do while she was driving. “You’re made of those two things, with a healthy dash of grit thrown in just to spice things up.”
She didn’t look comforted. “It can touch me. It wants to possess me.”
“It . . . imprinted on you somehow.” Grif shook his head.
“Like what? Some evil baby chick?” Her nerves were getting the best of her, and she jerked the wheel. Grif reached out, and held it in place.
“You were the first person it has seen in, well, God knows how long. The first who wasn’t evil or dirty or doomed. Or Lost. It said you were bright, and light—”
Kit shuddered, and Grif felt helpless. He opened his mouth, but Kit was already pushing past the moment. “How did you destroy it?”
“I don’t know how to destroy an angel.” But he was damned well going to try to find out. “It’s only banished.”
“So how did you banish it? What was in that bottle?”
“Love,” he finally answered. He glanced over when she only stared. “It’s more toxic to them even than water. In fact, if it were to wash over Scratch like the baptism they so hate, I bet then you could destroy it.”
Kit tilted her head. “How did you bottle love?”
Grif shrugged. “After we found Scratch possessing Jeap, and I knew it was targeting the Lost, I also knew it’d be back. So I harvested some tears.”
Goggling, Kit missed the car braking in front of her, and had to come to a hard stop behind it. While they waited for a green light, she turned to him. “Because tears are made of water?”
“Because tears are made of water filled with emotion. Infused with heartfelt memory. Love is only between mankind and God, Kit. It’s poisonous to beings that were created, not born. They’ve never felt it.”
“Even the Pure still in heaven?” A horn honked behind Kit, but she waited for Grif’s answering nod before driving. “So the human element in the tears that banished Scratch . . .”
“And the Pure element that cured Brunk.”
Kit was silent for a long minute. “They were yours?”
Grif tried to keep his shrug nonchalant. “Where else was I going to get something so precious on such short notice?”
“But it said it knows you now, Grif.” Her tone said he’d better not try to evade.
“It’s not a possession thing, okay? Not like Brunk. It only gained knowledge of the emotional memory responsible for those tears.” Grif braced himself for the inevitable, and uncomfortable, questions by looking away. What do you love so much that it makes you cry? Or whom?
Yet they never came. Glancing back, Grif wondered why, then remembered Kit’s earlier hurt. What do you think it feels like to know the man I love spends most of his waking hours thinking of another woman? “So that’s why you let Dennis intercept when Scratch tried to reach me.” Though muted, there was still a note of accusation in her voice.
“Dennis didn’t intercept,” Grif said, immediately defensive. “I let him run a pick.”
Kit blew out an annoyed breath. “You know I don’t understand your stupid baseball analogies.”
Grif just shook his head. “Look, I’m the one who got rid of Scratch.” At least for now, he thought. “Besides, it just wanted to scare you. You’re the best person I know. No way are you ever destined for the Forest.”
“Well, I’m scared, okay? It knew things about me. It called me ‘the girl who loves the truth.’ ”
“One of your enemies told it,” Grif guessed. “Someone who ended up in the Forest instead of the Everlast. Someone it could torture for information once it . . . saw you.”
Because while it’d been surprised that Kit could see it the first time, it was ready for her the second. And aggressive, Grif thought, swallowing hard.
You are just some choice bit of beauty that I have not yet broken.
Kit, busy blowing her Betty bangs from her forehead, didn’t notice the shudder that rocked Grif in his seat. “I’d like to think I don’t have enemies terrible enough to warrant an eternity of torture in the Forest.”
“Chambers?” Grif reminded her, causing a wince. Bringing down that local kingpin, a man who’d tried to kill them both, was the first case they’d worked together. Chambers had died terribly . . . though not as terribly as he’d lived. That’s what landed a soul in the Eternal Forest.
“I wouldn’t even wish Scratch on him,” Kit said solemnly.
Grif didn’t say it as they drove on, but neither would he.
Where the hell are we?” Grif asked, taking a deep breath. They needed to change the subject, and regroup. Someone in the valley was feeding young kids a drug that had skin falling from their bones. As a distraction from soul-stealing angels, it was a good one.
“There is no hell, remember?” Kit muttered, knowing what he was doing, but allowing it all the same. “Though if there were, you wouldn’t be too far off. Meadows Village is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Vegas. It used to be the first place newcomers wanted to live, but now it’s the last. It’s located in Naked City.”
“Oh, sure,” Grif said, the old memory revisiting slowly. “I’ve been to Naked City.”
Silence filled the car. It was the briefest of pauses, but it’d been happening more and more lately. Grif would mention something he’d seen or done, because the memory was somehow closer now that he was back on the Surface. Sometimes he could even smell the old scents, as light as the pressed powder Evie used to use on her skin. Other times he could hear the East Coast accents trailing behind trouble boys walking the casino floor, even though he knew they were long gone.
And sometimes the places Grif recognized on this second go-round were less real than those dogged memories; the casinos and restaurants and mom-and-pop hash houses seemed like shells to him, more fragile somehow now that the original owners were gone. But it was the natural order of things, and tucking the past away was how the living could go on.
Thing was, despite Kit’s love for all things of his era, she could never really know what came before. Maybe the silence that kept rising between them meant she was beginning to understand that. But how to keep her from worrying over it?
Have you ever dreamed about me?
“When?” she asked now, shaking him from his thoughts.
“When what?” Grif cleared his throat, his mind. “You mean when was I here? Just over fifty years ago, I guess,” he said, beginning slowly. “Evie and I had just met. I’d finished up the case that’d brought me to Vegas, and she had a girlfriend, Jane, who lived in Naked City. She worked the center bar at the Jolly Trolley.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of that.” Kit gave a small laugh, getting into the telling. She was a sucker for nostalgia and thinking of her city’s heyday always made her dreamy. “It was supposed to have the best steak in town.”
“Dollar ninety-nine,” Grif confirmed. He and Evie had eaten there right after visiting Jane, though he didn’t mention that now.
“So Jane was a showgirl?” Kit guessed, and Grif nodded, because that’s how Naked City had gotten its name. The women, mostly single, lived there like a coterie of hens, due to the location’s proximity to their jobs on the Strip. They also had a habit of sunbathing topless in groups on the buildings’ roofs to avoid tan lines, which could cost them their jobs.
“Well, the place took a spectacular swan-dive from famous to infamous in the years since you were last there,” Kit said, and Grif was glad to hear her voice was back to normal, though her driving was still lousy. He cringed as she zigzagged between two cars and a delivery truck ambling on the two-lane road. “Those women would be sunbathing on our finest crack houses today, and Naked City now references prostitution, not chorus lines.”
Grif shook his head. “Evie would be so disappointed.”
This time the silence rose between them like a wall.
“We’re here,” Kit said softly, as they turned into a lot that sagged and tilted. Grif caught her wrist as she shoved the gear into park.
“Baby—” he began.
Though her smile was more of a wince, she closed her other hand over his own. “I know.”
And she let the tension, the past—the worry over Evie and Grif’s misplaced dreams—roll from her shoulders just like that. She gave his hand a squeeze, took a deep breath, then got out of the car.
A single patrol car was already parked sideways at the Shangri-La apartment complex, along with Dennis, who’d somehow managed to arrive first. Kit headed his way, but Grif held back to observe events from the Duetto’s bumper. A curious crowd was already beginning to gather on the sidewalk . . . though not so curious that they wouldn’t take note of a vintage convertible sports car in a neighborhood littered with vehicles that looked like tuna cans on inner tubes.
Staring down a teen already eyeing the rims, Grif leaned against the hood. Kit was right. The neighborhood couldn’t have gotten any more run-down if someone dropped a bomb on it. And the Shangri-La was damned well the same complex Jane had lived in all those years ago. Its white facade had been re-stuccoed in a nauseating pastel pink, and green doors popped along the top railing like dark bruises. Fifty years ago, a tidy row of rose bushes had burst with blooms along the ground level, proudly attended by all the pretty residents. But nothing thrived here now, Grif thought, eyeing the chipped tile of the in-ground pool in the front courtyard. Algae had stained the rim to match the complex’s doors.
“What they looking for this time?” A kid, small for his age, and barely into double digits, sidled up to Grif. He was dark-skinned, but not exactly African-American. He had a rat-a-tat accent, too, so likely had roots someplace south of the border. Someplace warm. But he shivered now, alert with nerves, as he waited for Grif’s answer.
“Get home, kid.” Grif crossed his arms as he watched the officers begin their door-to-doors. “It’s not safe around here.”
“No shit it’s not safe around here, pendejo. It’s my ’hood.”
Grif did a double-take at the kid’s language, then asked, “Know it well?”
Motioning with his arms, the kid tilted his head. “Man, what’d I just say?”
Yeah, the kid was street all right, and after the day he’d had, Grif couldn’t help but wonder where this soul would be in another fifty years. Not in Naked City, that was for sure. This wasn’t a place that sustained life.
“What’s your name?”
“Oye,” the boy shot back. “I’m the one asking the questions around here.”
Unblinking, Grif lifted an eyebrow.
The boy, either unused to being seen, or too used to being watched, fidgeted, jerking on his jeans. Poor kid. Didn’t even have a belt to his name. “It’s Luis, man. Why you wanna know?”
“We’re looking for a couple of junkies, Luis. A man and a woman.”
Luis just motioned behind him, at the block of mismatched homes leaning and tilting in varying degrees of disrepair. Chain-linked fences surrounded some, while others sported crumbling front porches. Grif spotted a rusting tricycle among the weeds of a yard penning in a wide-shouldered dog, but all signs of real life, a real neighborhood, were gone.
Grif thought back to Brunk’s tearful confession. “The man is named Tim. The woman’s Jeannie.”
The kid tucked his hands into his baggy front pockets, echoing Grif’s body language. “They like you?”
“What do you mean?”
“White-bread.” Then, with a sly look, he added, “And not too bright.”
Grif jerked his head. “They do drugs. That sound bright to you?”
Now Luis’s gaze darkened, and the face that’d just begun to open shuttered completely. “Drugs don’t mean you’re stupid.”
“You’re right,” Grif said quickly, as Luis turned to walk away. “Wait.”
Luis just waved him off.
“Here,” Grif called out. “For your trouble.”
The twenty was gone from his hand almost before the kid had turned around. Didn’t have to offer it up twice, Grif thought, as Luis tucked the bill away, looking around.
“I think the people we’re looking for are probably . . . light.” Brunk was white, not that he’d have noted whom he was hanging with, as long as they had drugs. Yet Jeap had described himself as being different, too. “And they stay with Tim’s mother, it’s her place. She, uh, likes to play bingo.”
That was all Grif had to offer, other than the twenty, yet to his surprise the kid’s face lit. “Oh, esa loca? She plays keno, too, but she don’t like anyone to know, cuz that’s stupid.”
Grif straightened from his slump. “You know her?”
“Everybody knows Crazy Lettie. But she don’t live there.” The kid pointed in the opposite direction of the Shangri-La, at a weed-choked doublewide with dingy sheets curtaining the small windows. “She stays there.”
And Grif immediately knew Luis was telling the truth. A silvery shimmer of wafer-thin plasma glided into the trailer through cracks in the windows and under the doorframe, twining between the cinder blocks it was mounted on.
“Kit!”
One thing about his girl. Even when annoyed with him, she listened. She turned, saw where he was pointing, and whirled back around without even questioning it.
“Dennis!” she called. “It’s not the apartments! It’s over here! The house!”
Dennis, in turn, listened to Kit. The urgency in her voice had the detective running, and the uniformed officers following in a quick jog. Though able to enter the home in a safety sweep, they made a show of rapping loudly on the peeling wooden door first.
“So do I get some kind of reward or something?” Luis asked, drawing Grif’s attention away from the officers clustered on the sagging stoop. Kit stayed back, lingering on the property’s periphery.
Grif ignored the outstretched hand. The second twenty wasn’t going to be as easy. “You see anyone coming or going from that place?”
“I see everything, maricon.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“It means ‘sir’ in Spanish,” the kid said, eyes sparkling.
“How do you say ‘bullshit’ in Spanish?”
“Mierda,” the kid answered, relishing the word. “Now do I get a reward?”
“Yes. The prize of knowing you just saved two lives.”
“Shit, man.” The kid kicked at the ground with the worn toe of his sneaker right at the same time one of the officers kicked in the door, and said the exact same thing. The three of them disappeared inside, and a moment later the youngest came out retching.
“Or maybe not,” Grif muttered, and studied the grounds around the trailer for signs of a Centurion, wondering who got the Take. Unsurprisingly, he saw nothing. If someone was dead inside, the Centurion had whisked them away before mortals arrived. “You said you see everything in this neighborhood, Luis. How many people are in that trailer?”
“Far as I know, just two. Loca Lettie can play the slots for two, sometimes three days at a time. Her tweeker son got here just after she left and hasn’t been out since.”
Kid really did have the lay of the land. “How long ago?”
“Yesterday.”
“Time enough to die,” Grif muttered, turning back in Kit’s direction.
“Shit, coño. You already been here long enough to die.” Luis’s gaze darted to the left, over Grif’s shoulder, then back just as quickly, as if he didn’t want to be caught looking.
Grif shifted to find a man watching the action from the far side of a yard surrounded by a chain-link fence. No, Grif thought. Not a yard. Some sort of business butting up against the neighborhood. The man held a cigarette in one hand, and was idly stroking the muscular head of a pit bull with the other. Grif wondered exactly what kind of business he was in. Five other men lingered behind him, watching darkly, and calling to one another in soft voices across the small lot as they lounged in the fractured sunbeams of late afternoon.
“That him?” Grif asked, turning back to Luis.
The kid thrust out his bony chest, but Grif saw the knowledge, and fear, skitter across his gaze. “That who?”
“The one who runs this ’hood?” Grif guessed. Why else house a business on the backside of this societal abyss?
“You don’t want to know who that is,” Luis answered, eyes hard.
Grif smirked. “Does the guy I don’t wanna know got a name?”
Luis just looked at him.
“I thought you said you knew everyone in Naked City, Luis. Don’t tell me you don’t know a hot dog like that.”
“I know enough not to be talking about him with the Five-Oh.”
“Fine. Then you can stay here and watch the car while I go ask him myself,” Grif said, turning away.
“Screw that.”
“Another bill in it for you.”
“I don’t need your money,” Luis called out, almost sounding tough.
“Mierda,” Grif said, and crossed the street. He halted in the middle of it, though, a bright movement catching his attention from the corner of his eye. Kit, he saw, had just finished a quick exchange with Dennis, and was headed Grif’s way. Actually, he thought, frowning as she zeroed in on him, she wasn’t just headed toward Grif. She was striding.
No, Grif amended, right before she reached him. She was barreling.
Slamming her palms into his chest, she sent him flying backward two full feet. To Grif’s surprise, and Luis’s hooting delight, she rammed him again, and would have done so a third time if he didn’t reach out and grab her wrists.
“Why did he do that?” Kit asked, jerking free. Her fists were clenched at her sides, and her eyes were filled with tears, but she didn’t wipe them away as she continued to stare him down with that accusatory gaze.
“They’re dead?”
“Why, Grif?” she asked again, confirming it.
“I don’t think Brunk knew—”
“Not him,” she said, with an impatient growl. “I mean it. Scratch. That fallen angel.” She spat the word out, made it sound like a curse. “Why did it taunt us about these two if it was already too late?”
The truth wasn’t much of an answer, but it was all Grif had. “Because that’s its job. That’s what it does.”
“Its job?” Kit echoed disbelievingly, and Grif had to admit it sounded lame.
Grif tried again. “It wanted you to feel this—”
“No! It’s more than that,” she said, pointing back to the trailer. “It could have led us here sooner, and I’d have felt exactly the same. Why did it have to wait until they were dead? Is it really that cruel?”
Worse, Grif thought, but said, “You know who else didn’t stop Tim’s death? His mother. She’s out pouring her paycheck into a one-armed bandit while he’s rotting on her floor. You know who else didn’t stop it, Kit?”
She looked at him, jaw clenching reflexively, but didn’t answer.
“Tim didn’t stop it. He did this to himself. Angels, even the fallen ones, aren’t responsible for every damned action.”
Kit looked away, then huffed, exhaling the last of her righteousness. “Well, Tim isn’t here, so I can’t kick his ass about it.”
“But I am.” Grif shoved his hands into his pockets.
She lifted her chin. “Sorry.”
“Yes, I can tell.” He put one hand on her ramrod-straight back, and steered her around until she was facing the other end of the street and could easily view the men clustered there. “There’s someone else who didn’t stop it, either . . . and I think we should go make his acquaintance.”