The Taken

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.

You caused it, Shaw. Katherine Craig is fated to die because of you.

He looked away, gazing out the window at where Craig had been parked, her tiny foreign car dark, her wide- eyed face white, as she stared up at the window where her friend had just died. Directly at him, he remembered.

“More coffee?”

Grif nodded at the waitress, silent. He couldn’t taste it but he needed the warmth.

Yet the coffee didn’t ground him this time, and it sloshed onto the Formica as he tried to lift it. It was hot enough to burn his new flesh, and should have caused him to hiss, but he didn’t. The waitress noticed it, too. He looked back at her and noted a faint silvery outline to her silhouette.

Plasma. He knew what it was, though it was usually gone by the time he arrived for his Takes. This was a shimmering thread, but growing dark at the edges.

You can still see death coming.

So blunted mortal senses, but a celestial sense for death.

“You need to get that mole checked,” he said before she could comment on his burn. “It’s not too late, but it will be in another year.”

The waitress’s eyes widened, but he said nothing more, and she scurried away. Sarge was probably stomping around the Everlast, muttering about sensitivity. So what. Those were the facts. Facts were bricks. Now she could do something about it.

Grif, however, needed more facts, more bricks between him and this… this…

Woman. Katherine.

Case.

Straightening, Grif flipped past the rap sheet until he came to the last page of the report, hoping to find an address… which he did. Right across the top of her autopsy report, dated two days from now. She would die at home, he saw, but most people did. Although they didn’t usually die from multiple stab wounds-she’d suffer thirty- two in all. He shouldn’t be surprised. Murderers were like superstitious ballplayers. They rarely deviated from a play that had worked well before.

Grif hadn’t looked too closely at the placement of Rockwell’s wounds, but the coroner’s notes showed Craig’s deepest, deadliest cuts would be precise and controlled, no breaks in the incisions, no hesitation on the killer’s part as he stole her life. So Craig’s murderer wasn’t just skilled with a knife, he’d probably killed even before Rockwell. Could he be ex-military? A hired killer? A butcher?

You are not a P.I. anymore. You’re not even human!

Grif gave Sarge’s voice a mental shove and kept reading, saw that there were no lacerations on the finger or hands, meaning Craig would succumb easily to attack. So maybe it’ll be fast then, Grif thought, then caught himself. How pansy was it that he didn’t know if he wanted that more for her or for himself?

Facts, Grif thought, as he started to sweat. He needed bricks. Reason and instinct. Mortar. He needed a wall if he was going to get through this.

I need the Everlast, he thought desperately, reaching for his coffee. But as he lifted the cup, one last word on the autopsy report caught his attention, and the cosmic freeze he’d felt when relearning how to breathe wrapped its cold fingers around his throat again.

Rape.

So not like Nicole Rockwell, after all.

The grease and coffee rebelled in his new stomach, and Grif bumped the table as he rose. Throwing too many bills onto the tabletop, he then stumbled out into the crisp, bright morning, the last of Katherine Craig’s life. He immediately turned his gaze directly into the fiery sun. How?

How did Sarge expect him to do this? How was he supposed to watch a killer, a rapist, come to this smiling woman’s home, and do nothing to stop it?

Take away a Centurion’s wings, and all they’re left with is an intimate acquaintance with death.

“I can’t,” he said aloud, earning a look from a bleary-eyed woman just stepping from her room. Not a hint of