The Taken. Vicki Pettersson

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СКАЧАТЬ closed his eyes, and the same loneliness that’d run him under when he sank through Nicole’s body wracked him again. Lowering his head, he shook it side to side. “I still remember things I shouldn’t. And the memories will be stronger if I stay on the Surface. Humanity … hurts.”

      Silence reigned for so long Grif could almost believe Frank was reconsidering. But when he looked up, the bum’s gaze was bleary, confused, and pinned on the coffee cup next to him. “What the hell is this? Where’s the sauce, man?”

      Grif bent, pocketed the folder, and turned to leave. But, just in case, he paused to mutter, “You forgot my damned hat.”

      “You forgot my damned beer!” Jimmy replied, but Grif was already walking. He was just out of the drunk’s view when he spotted it coming fast, like a soundless comet or a falling black star. It dropped directly to his side, sending a small puff of dust into the air, causing Grif to cough.

      Yeah, yeah, Grif thought, bending down. It’s all dust. We’re all dust. I get it.

      But he didn’t give Sarge the satisfaction of looking back or up, and he didn’t give thanks. Instead he dusted off his fedora, settled it atop his head, and kept walking.

      Somewhere out there was a woman with powerful blue eyes, a secretive smile, and curves that made him want to cry. A woman he was going to have to face in both this world and the next. A woman fated to die because of him.

      Again.

      Kit shouldn’t have been surprised at the sun’s ascendance in the sky, or by downtown’s early-morning bustle. Yet she stood at the bottom of the concrete stairway outside the station, shoulders slumped and limbs heavy, as astonished by the urban landscape as she’d be in a foreign country. It was startling that these people had dressed this morning—or not, in the case of the vagrant sprawled to her left—and bewildering that they could now think of coffee, or gambling, or work.

      And what the hell was there to laugh about, Kit wondered, anger flashing as a passing woman threw back her blond, perfectly coiffed head—neck white and pristine and unmarked by a butcher’s knife—loosing an inappropriate amount of joy into the world. Kit wanted to grab the sleeve of the blonde’s suit jacket, or maybe a handful of that carefully styled hair, and say, “My best friend was murdered last night. Why the hell are you still alive?”

      Why am I? she thought, tears welling.

      Why was anyone?

      Kit realized she was causing a scene, looking rumpled, dazed, and literally shaking in the sidewalk’s center. Swallowing hard, she wiped her eyes with her cardigan before beginning the long walk to the police lot where she’d parked the night before.

      It was still wintry this early in February, but Kit didn’t hurry. Her steps were as measured and precise as an army recruit’s. She even halted stiffly beneath the bald tubing of an old neon sign to stare into a refurbished café where lawyers and D.A.s and those who made their living off of other people’s vices were talking shop and swapping stories. Blue pendant lamps glowed like crystal jellyfish, and the scent of fresh bread and baking sugar rushed out to envelop her when the door was thrown wide.

      Kit frowned and stared. The café didn’t look inviting to her. Instead, it looked too hot, like a nuclear reactor. Like it would consume and destroy every bit of life that entered there.

      Or maybe she was just projecting.

      Hurrying the rest of the way to her car, she slammed the door on the sounds of downtown Vegas, and locked herself in the cocoon-like silence. The familiar squeak and scent of leather wrapped around her like a sumptuous throw. The perfume that’d been her latest flea market find, and that she’d been wearing the night before, tickled her nose. Slumping, Kit let her head fall. She should go straight home and sleep, but she didn’t dare start the car with her hands still shaking. Besides, sleep meant closing her eyes, and even blinking was a nightmare. She’d rather cling to the raw numbness of her fatigue. She preferred her overheated anger at the world.

      Swallowing hard, she dialed Paul’s number to see if he’d done any work on the list she’d given him in the station. He didn’t answer, no surprise, but it made her want to gore something with her red fingertips. Forget that it was not yet seven and there was nothing he could have done in three predawn hours. Forget, too, that he’d never been available when Kit needed him, anyway.

      But Nicole had. Kit glanced at the metaphorical elephant in the car, Nic’s camera, lying lens-up on the passenger’s seat, its wide, alien gaze locked on her. Nic loved that camera like Kit loved the Duetto, so much that her predominant memory of Nicole was in a one-eyed squint, shoulders hunched as she held the camera to her eye.

       “With my shots and your smarts, we’re sure to hit the major wires,” she’d said, pointing the camera up at the room where she’d die within the hour.

       “Sure you don’t want me in there with you?” Kit asked, staring at the window.

       “The girl was insistent. She wants me alone.”

       “I could hide under the bed.”

       Nicole raised her brows. “And where’s the first place you’d look? Besides, I’d blow any trust I’d built once you climbed out from beneath a stained mattress with old jizz caked on your kneecaps.”

       Kit made a face. “Get me a Brillo pad. I need to scrub that image from my brain.”

       “Well, do it from within this George Jetson cockpit. I’ll text you and have you come up when the girl and I have established a rapport. Until then … smile. I’m about to take the photo for your byline.”

       Nicole snapped a few shots of Kit in profile, the motel sagging like a battered woman in the background, then smiled as she studied the images. “God, I’m good.”

      She was. She could see everything through her lens. So well, Kit thought, that sometimes she was utterly blind without it.

      Kit slid her key in the ignition. She should go home. There was nothing outside the safety of this car but more bright sky and oblivious people and futile anger. But how was she to be alone with this grief? It wasn’t that she wanted someone’s shoulder to cry on—her sadness was heavy enough to knock two people over—but it’d be nice to see someone who’d known Nic alive and well, and who’d also feel the loss now that she was no longer either of those things.

      So despite the wrinkles in her dress, the bedraggled ends of her hair, and the shadows haunting her eyes, Kit went to work. She would crack soon, she felt it like an animal sensed an impending earthquake, and would have to be home by then. But not yet. Not now. Her grief still hadn’t entered the nuclear reactor’s core. But she knew from previous experience—her mother’s death, her father’s—that when it did, the world as she knew it would be flattened, every particle in her life rearranged, her personal universe blown away.

      If only there was a way to take a photo of that.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      The graveyard-shift waitress in the roadside café was bleary-eyed and slow. The short-order cook was uninspired, and more interested in the activity going on outside СКАЧАТЬ