“Yet here you are,” Tony pointed out. “Snooping around. Stirring the pot all over again.”
He put up his hands at Grif’s hard look, then reached forward for the pack of sticks in the middle of the giant coffee table.
“Grandkid?” Grif asked, jerking his head at the world’s largest ceramic ashtray.
“Would I have anything this ugly in my house otherwise?” Tony lit up, tossed the pack over to Grif. “Listen, I’m not poking at old pains, or telling you to forgive and forget. I mean, look at me.” He waved around the room as if it was an extension of his body. “My kids call this place a glass fishbowl. Say I should start charging people to stand out on the green and gawk at me like I’m in an aquarium. My plaque would read, ‘Dago, in his natural habitat.’ ” He shook his head, his cigarette shaking between knuckles that’d outgrown their fingers. “They tell me the past is over. That it’s a new world. But I know what I know.”
“And what’s that, Tony?”
He pointed his fingers at Grif, smoke trailing behind. “It ain’t ever over. You can’t have no future if you don’t have no past, and the past ain’t never done with you.” He leaned back, nodding to himself. “At the end of your life, all you have is what you know.”
Grif was well past the end of his life, and he knew things Tony couldn’t even imagine. But he was right about fingering old pains. Grif wouldn’t be here if he’d been able to just let it go. Then again, he thought, looking around at the museum Tony called a home, neither would Tony.
They both dragged on their smokes, neither of them looking at the other, comfortable enough until Tony said, “You really do look good, Grif.”
Grif snorted. “Keep drinking, Tony.”
But, as he said, despite his failing eyesight and obsession with fine Italian wine, Tony knew what Tony knew. “So what do you want with me? You’re not here just to bring me gifts, or fill my ashtray.”
“I’m back to find out who did it.” Grif lifted a brow. “I could use a little help.”
Tony looked down. Shook his head. “Like you said, Grif. It was a long time ago.”
Grif felt his jaw tighten, stubborn as flint. “Doesn’t make it right.”
Tony laughed mirthlessly. “Lots of things weren’t ever made right. They won’t ever be right again, either. I mean, can you believe this country? You can bust your balls your entire life and have nothing to show at the end of it. Even this town has lost its entrepreneurial shine. And the government called
Tony looked at him, but Grif wasn’t interested in his self-pity. “There has to be someone.”
“There ain’t.” He flicked ash.
“What about the old family?”
Tony licked his lips warily. “What about them?”
“They owe me.”
Tony scoffed, voice gone gritty. “What, for saving their dear little Mary Margaret? Let me tell you what happened to that sweet, spoiled little schoolgirl. She took off that Catholic school uniform and it wasn’t long before everything else followed. Took it upon herself to sully the family name and pushed her papa into an early grave.”
“That’s disappointing.” Grif meant it. She’d been a cute kid.
“You always were a softie for the females, Grif.” Tony blew out a stream of death, and stubbed out his smoke. “First Evie. Then Mary Margaret.”
The frown came on slowly, but sank and hardened in his face. “What do you mean, ‘first Evie’?”
Tony stiffened, and leaned back, his face carefully blank. “I just mean she was a bit wild before you reined her in. Couldn’t do no wrong in your eyes. That’s all.”
No, Grif thought, studying Tony’s poker face, there was more. But whatever he knew, whatever he
Tony held up his hands. “All right. Don’t bust a gut.”
But Grif’s blood was up, and suddenly he couldn’t catch his breath. Without warning, a jutting pain knifed his skull, an arrow behind his eyeballs, and it wasn’t just his renegade pulse, his unnatural breath, his unsanctioned life. It was more. It was his past busting in, reminding him he was dead. Walking, breathing, drinking, smoking-thinking and feeling-all without any mortal coil to reinforce his existence. There was a consciousness and a body, but it was flimsy, as if he lacked a spine. Very simply, there was nothing to hold it all up.
“Hey. You all right, Shaw?”
No. His mind was burning.
Tony’s voice, worried now, crackled. “I got a white-glove service. The doc comes right to your door. You want I should call them?”
Grif’s silence smoldered.
“I really think you need a doctor.”
Grif pressed the heel of his hand to his head, like he could snuff the heat that way. What he needed was to get off this mudflat. Get back to the Everlast where the cool plasmic balm could soothe his mental ache. Where he could forget about dying and concentrate on being dead.
Grif waited until his body stopped constricting around him to open his eyes. Breathing deeply, he looked at Tony-whose skin looked loose and lived-in and comfortable-and said, “Look, I don’t have anyone else. I have no leads, I don’t know anyone here. I don’t even have a place to stay. To use your words, Tony, all I have is what I know. Right here,” and he punched his own chest so hard that even Tony jumped. Grif’s headache momentarily fell into second place in the race for pain, but like a stubborn heartbeat, it sped up again.
Tony said nothing for a long while. He just stared with his gray furrowed brow and for a moment Grif saw his pain, too. Fear lay inside him like a sleeping dragon. That was the real monster that guarded this house. “So what is it that you know, then?”
“Evie died because of me.” As soon as Grif said the words aloud, his skull tried to constrict around his brain. He pushed back and the pressure actually dulled. “What I don’t know is why.”
Tony turned his head and gazed out the window. The golf course stretched before him like a green lake, the sky spun out beyond that, but Tony only stared. The fish, Grif thought, staring back out from the fishbowl. “I have a guest room,” he finally said. “It’s kinda girly, but…”
Grif raised his brows.
Tony looked him straight in the eye, and gave him the death stare that had earned him his nickname. “I’m going to need some more of this Sangiovese.”
Grif leaned back with a sigh, picked up his own glass, and let the fine wine pave a cool path through his core. When his agitated heartbeat had settled and his vision was steady, he nodded, then said, “So, backing up. Who told you, all those years ago, that I was dead?”
The hair appointment put her at ease. By the time Kit was back on the curb, the strain behind her eyes from trying not to cry was gone, and the hunch in her shoulders had been massaged away by Fleur’s magic fingers. They’d also decided, impulsively, that a fresh look would go a long way to bolstering her energy, so instead of a mere trim, Fleur added a white stripe to the right side of Kit’s Bettie bangs, pin-curling it to the left so that it rose over her forehead like a cresting wave. It was a look Nic had adored, her favorite go-to do when out for a tiki convention or car show.
“There,” Fleur had said, pinning a matching white flower behind Kit’s ear-one she’d crafted herself. “Now you’re undercover.”
She was put back together at least, Kit thought, catching a movement from the corner of her eye as she slid her key into the car lock. She looked over just as Grif materialized from the alley, sudden and smooth, like some battle-scarred tomcat who’d seen it all. Relief rushed Kit. She hadn’t been sure if he would come back.
Stepping up onto the curb, she squared on him, and spent a moment studying his face. His hair was short and razored, but what peeked from beneath his fedora was rust-colored and matched the stubble along his chin. The wide build and bull’s neck spoke to an easy masculinity hidden beneath the heavy trench, and the gruff scowl put Kit in mind of scar tissue, as if a hard expression could keep any hard thing from touching him.
Was that right? Did nothing touch this man?
