The Taken

“Here we are! Fleur Fontaine’s Beauty Boutique. The best pin-ups for pinups!”

Jesus, the way this woman could turn a simple sentence into bird chatter. He didn’t want to see her hurt or dying, but her constant need to look on the sunny side of every sullied coin made him want to punch a blue jay in the beak.

“You coming?” she said, poking her head back in the car when he didn’t move.

Grif stared straight ahead. “I ain’t hanging out in no beauty joint.”

“Aw, c’mon. I want to introduce you to Fleur.”

“I’m not going.” He should though. He was responsible for her being alive, which meant he was also responsible for keeping her that way. But since he was also responsible for her fated death, the reminder just made him cranky. He folded his arms over his chest.

“She moonlights as a burlesque dancer,” she said in the blue jay voice. “She can do things with tassels that will make your mouth water. I bet she’d show you if you asked nice.”

“You’re off your rocker, lady.”

Kit tilted her head. “Why are you mad?”

Why aren’t you? Grif thought, brows furrowing, which was when he realized he really was sore. “We’re supposed to be working a case.”

She shrugged. “Nothing to be done until Marin cross-checks those names. Come in where it’s warm.”

“What about Evelyn? You were supposed to help me find out what happened to her.”

“I will,” she said, but her softening expression, a mixture of pity and sympathy, hardened him further.

“When?”

“As soon as I don’t feel like Medusa.”

And at that, Grif climbed from the stupid, foreign, low-slung car and glared at her across the soft hood. “You’re supposed to be some modern-day woman, working hard for justice, doing a man’s job… but you’re going to stop to get your hair done?”

Kit tilted her head, then pursed her bottom lip so it looked like a soft pink pillow. Grif tore his gaze away. “Aw, Grif. You’re cranky again. Need a hug?”

“I’m a P.I.,” Grif replied through gritted teeth. “I need a lead.”

Kit fisted her hands on her bell-shaped hips, another part of her anatomy Grif was trying not to notice. Especially considering the subject matter. “Your Evelyn has been dead for fifty years, Grif. She isn’t gonna mind two more hours.”

But Grif damned well minded.

So he’d turned without another word, and left Kit calling after him on the cracked sidewalk. He wasn’t a patsy and he didn’t wait for women to tame their updos before working a case. Now, five blocks away-give or take five blocks-he was utterly lost. At least he had his map.

“That thing’s upside down, man,” said a young man in baggy pants.

“Mind your own business,” Grif snapped, and stared until the man scurried off. Then he flipped the map around. He needed a place to stay while slumming on the mudflat, and as sore as he was with Kit, with a rogue cop on her trail, she needed one as well. Problem was, fifty years gone meant most people his age were now dying of natural causes, and he hadn’t known all that many to begin with. Not in Vegas.

Though there was someone.

“Question is,” Grif muttered, squinting up at the street sign, “is the old wop still alive?”

Who’s the hottie?”

Fleur was standing at the plate-glass window when Kit entered the salon, and probably had been since Kit pulled her Duetto to a stop at the curb. It was earlier than normal business hours, so they had the place to themselves, the usual chatter and hum of hair dryers missing. Fleur held a steaming cup of coffee out to Kit, cradling a second in perfectly lacquered fingers, tips long and moon-shaped and as red as a stop sign. Her simple, scoop-necked dress matched, though its fishtail hem put Kit in mind of a bullfighter, appropriate as it spoke to Fleur’s Spanish heritage and it was how she faced every day-poised, engaged, and ready for anything.

“I don’t really know,” Kit said, and shook her head. Who was the man who’d saved her from death and, if her gut-check was right, rape? Who was this stranger who dressed like all her other rockabilly friends, in a fedora and loose-fitting suit, but one that fit him so authentically it could have been tailored for him?

Who was Griffin Shaw?

Fleur swung a hip, the bullfighter cape flaring, letting out a whistle as she turned away from the window. “Looks like Handsome and Exciting’s illegitimate love child.”

“More like Terse and Cryptic’s outlaw cousin,” Kit muttered, following.

Fleur raised a brow as she gestured to her chair. “Sounds like your type,” she said, though she didn’t say it like it was a good thing.

Kit made a face, but the tension left her as Fleur swiveled her around to face the mirror. Unfortunately, tension was the fundamental ingredient keeping her upright. Kit met her friend’s eyes in the mirror, and they both fell still. It was only the welling tears, but the mirror seemed like a water wall, reflecting all the grief Kit had dammed up just to keep moving.

“Nic loved this place,” she said, voice breaking.

She had, in fact, been the one to encourage Fleur to open it two years earlier. Fleur had been cutting and coloring their hair since junior high. She’d given Kit her first Middy haircut, and taught her how to do a proper Victory Roll. Making a living was incidental.

“I should pay my clients,” Fleur had protested, when approached by Nic and Kit with the idea of the salon. “They allow me to touch them in an intimate way. Lovers are allowed to touch a person’s hair and head. Parents and children. Other than that, it’s a social taboo.”

But Fleur’s passion for her art made it impossible not to think of her as an intimate friend. Even Marin softened under Fleur’s loving touch. Kit brought her aunt in after chemo turned the stubble from her once-blond hair to gray ash, and Fleur handled the new tufts like priceless china, saying each strand gleamed with wisdom and experience and strength. Marin sailed from her chair like she had wings of silver, and it was that intimacy and touch Kit needed today.

Too bad there wasn’t a way to explain that to Grif.

Leaning forward, Fleur wrapped her arms around Kit, so close to her neck that she tensed for a moment, remembering the violation of the night before. Then she relaxed, the embrace soothing her like a balm. “I didn’t want to bring it up first. You were besties. But, oh, I’m going to miss her.”

Kit rose at that, and they hugged hard. “Nic’s gone, and the whole world is worse for it.”

That was the real tragedy, the constant heartbreak that’d remained with Kit in the long night of her undreaming. So they wept in each other’s arms, in lieu of the friend they really wanted to hold, and while they did, Kit couldn’t help thinking it was their duty to fully embrace this life, if only because Nic no longer could.

And fight for her, too, Kit thought, pulling away and wiping at her face. She sniffled, and looked into Fleur’s no longer so-perfectly-powdered face. She sniffled again. “Nic would hate what I’ve done with my hair.”

Fleur pursed pinup lips. “Yes. She would.”

They laughed, without humor, before falling silent, each feeling the moment moving away, but neither wishing to leave Nic’s memory behind. But that was life, wasn’t it? It went on.

Or, sometimes, it was interrupted by Buddy Holly’s “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.”

Kit wiped her face as she pulled her cell from her leopard-print bag. Fleur leaned over her shoulder, and Kit caught the distaste on her friend’s face in the mirror. “Well, now the ringtone makes sense.”

Kit shook her head sadly as she sat again, silencing the call and erasing Paul’s accompanying picture at the same time. “I actually used to like that song.”

She’d picked it for him because it’d annoy him if he ever heard it, a virtual impossibility but a pleasing idea all the same. It also reminded her of the cool, gradual way he’d let Kit-and the rest of the world-know how important he planned to be. Only a few summers ago had they listened to it and other rockabilly songs in what Kit had begun thinking of as the beginning of the end of their relationship. They’d driven down the Strip in her convertible, the hot night whispering against their soft skin, smiling as they ignored the sweat because sweat was what they did back then.

But by Christmas everything had grown cold, and he was telling stories that rarely included her, and making