Susan Johnson - Hot Streak

“You crazy?” the driver asked brusquely, jerking his head around to look at the slender blond man, white as his linen shirt.

“Not yet,” Egon said, his voice strangely raspy, as if there wasn't enough air in his lungs to force out the words.

“You know how far that is?” the cabbie asked, stretching his hirsute arm along the back of the seat and looking Egon over with critical appraisal. The tobacco-colored suit was expensive, as were the shoes, the two rings, the Bulgari watch. Maybe he did know how far it was.

Egon nodded wearily. He'd recognized the Neapolitan accent, confirmed with a brief glance-no meter-that he was in an illegal cab. A Neapolitan's disregard for the system was as natural as their ingrained privateering mentality. Egon relaxed fractionally. For money, this man would do anything. Sliding further into the corner of the seat, he stretched his legs out and said, “Seven-hundred kilometers, at least.”

“You got money?” It was more a statement now than a question.

Egon nodded again. The rough, low-class dialect brought back long-forgotten memories. Raising his heavy-lidded eyes, he replied quietly, “Enough.”

“Show me.” It was an eleven-hour drive and, surface appearances aside, Gennaro was a businessman.

Pulling crumpled currency from his jacket pockets, Egon tossed them into the front seat.

Gennaro's dark eyes widened. Mostly American. Large bills. He could exchange them on the black market for a good profit. Nice-next stop.

“Get your ass in gear. I'm in a hurry,” Egon ordered in a brutish Neapolitan slang he'd picked up when he was very young. He'd not only mastered the broad inflection of the Naples dialect that summer long ago, but Gianni had introduced him to spaghetti alle vongole at Zм Teresa and sex tableaux in waterfront taverns. Spaghetti alle vongole was still his favorite food, although it was best with the pungent smell of the bay invading your nostrils. For the rest… sex tableaux had long since failed to pique his jaded appetites, and beautiful young Gianni had died at twenty in a drug war.

Casting a swift glance back in the rearview mirror, Gennaro decided the rich man wasn't from Naples. Not with that pale, sculpted face, although the accent was pure Camora. Shooting the gears home, he stepped on the accelerator and snaked his way around the parked cars. When he reached the open road, he asked without turning, “Who taught you that?”

“Some friends,” Egon said, the inflection so perfectly Naples, Gennaro was startled anew.

“Are they still alive?” The answer would satisfy several more unasked questions.

“No.”

Drug smuggling, Gennaro understood with clarity. “Do you want to go on the coast road or on A-1,” he asked, a faint deference in his tone now. One never offended the Camora and lived long.

Egon felt for the kit in his breast pocket. He had four points left. Enough till Nice, and then some. “Whatever's fastest, and turn the radio down.” He was feeling better already, beginning to tune out, and the music was distracting. Reaching over, he rolled down the window. Warm evening air rushed against his face, fanning his silky hair back in ruffled waves. He could feel the tenseness leave his neck and shoulders, the heroin come to the fore again. Glancing out at the landscape, he took in Siumiciano's peaceful expanse. Flat and featureless, it fit his current mood. His mind began to withdraw to its own internal landscape, and he stared unfocusing for several minutes. But just as he began to forget, the music was interrupted by a sharp news report. The airport attack had already been attributed to Shakin Rifat. Egon stiffened. Had they been after him? Were they still after him? He began shaking again, the fresh surge of fear more powerful than the opiates.

I t was eight in the morning in Minneapolis. Margaret Rose Darian, known as Molly to everyone but the remotest stranger, flipped on the TV before she set her daughter's breakfast on the table. “Hurry, Carrie, your eggs are getting cold.” Hearing a muffled response from the direction of the bedroom, she poured the milk and slid the jam jar closer to the plate.

“Morning, Mom, and don't say anything until I explain,” her daughter said in a rush of words.

That snapped Molly's head around from the morning newscast. “Good God! When did you do that?”

“Last evening.”

“That's why you had a scarf on when you came in from Lucy's.” Her young daughter stood before her with pinkened earlobes and small pearl studs in her previously unblemished ears… looking too grown up. “You're too young.”

“I'm eight, almost nine,” Carrie replied matter-of-factly, dropping into her chair. “Amy's had pierced ears since she was four. And Tammy's had them since-”

“I know the list, honey, by heart. You couldn't wait-”

“I waited five years for you, Mom. Look at it that way,” she said, her huge, dark eyes watchful.

Molly laughed, an abrupt, spontaneous helplessness at her daughter's curious logic.

Feeling a little braver, Carrie added, “I promise not to wear really long, dangly earrings until I'm older.”

“The way your peer group's going, that'll be next week,” Molly said with a heartfelt sigh, not in the mood for discipline. Her blue eyes took on a sudden maternal directness. “But I want your word of honor, on one thing.”

“Sure, Mom.” Carrie was magnanimous in her victory.

“I don't want to see three earrings on each ear. Never. Understand, Munchkin?”

“Promise.” A radiant smile shone back at her.

Molly sighed one more time, a reflex action to their somewhat disparate notions of childhood. Did every eight-year-old girl in America have holes in her ears, a closet full of designer clothes, and the knowledge that rockabilly didn't mean what rockabilly used to mean? One glance at the clock reminded her that the riddles of the universe would have to wait. In the tone that all mothers acquire after watching children dawdle through three thousand and nineteen mealtimes, Molly admonished, “Now eat. You're going to be-” Her sentence was interrupted by a news bulletin flashing across the TV in stark black letters.

TERRORIST ATTACK! it proclaimed, and then the announcer's face replaced the clamoring headline. “Terrorist attack at the Rome airport!” The newsman's voice was excited. “Only minutes ago, four gunmen opened fire on passengers at the air terminal. We don't have all the details, but twelve people are known dead, two of them children. The death toll could-”

Molly switched the set off. “Lord, it's happening all the time. No one's safe.” Regret and resentment blended oddly in her voice.

“We are in Minneapolis,” Carrie replied with the calm innocence of insulated youth. “No terrorists have ever killed anyone in Minneapolis. Do I have time for hot chocolate?” And with that, terrorist attacks were dismissed from Carrie's mind.

“'Fraid not, dear. Are you sure your ears aren't infected? They look pinkish.”

“They're fine. Relax, Mom. Lucy says if they begin to throb, to take a Tylenol.”

“A professional opinion is always appreciated,” Molly said dryly, “but if they're not paler by this evening, I'm taking you to the clinic for a second opinion. Lucy's not my idea of trustworthy expertise.”

“Okay, okay,” Carrie mumbled with a mouthful of muffin and jam. “You're the boss.”

“I don't want to be the boss,” Molly replied on a quiet exhalation. “I just want us to get along. And I don't want problems… like your ears falling off,” she went on, slipping her arms into an Irish tweed jacket in an unusual lavender tone. “I don't want you looking like an eighteen-year-old starlet when you're eight either. And why the hell do terrorists keep killing innocent people?”

“I think they don't have land or food or something.”

“It was a rhetorical question,” Molly murmured half to herself as she searched through her purse for her car keys which were misplaced again. “Have you seen the car keys?”

“On the counter in the bathroom.”

“In the bathroom?”

“Face it, Mom, you're not organized.”

“Don't get smart, kid, at eight o'clock in the morning or I'll-”

“What, Mom?” Carrie teased.

“Just eat now,” she muttered. Intimidating threats were not part of her repertoire with her daughter. She loved her too much. “I'm leaving in five minutes, and if you're not ready you'll have to take the bus to school.”

“Mommmmm!” It was a long, drawn-out wail. “Don't be cruel.”

Molly paused in the doorway, remembering the unwritten code apropos bus riding. No one ever rode the bus unless every other possible option for transportation to school had been wrung dry and discarded. Inadvertently, she'd struck a raw nerve of childhood protocol. “Don't panic, I'll wait. I'm the owner, right? I can come in when I want. But hurry,” she reminded her daughter. Owner or not, if she didn't put in long hours every day her fledgling business, which seemed to be creeping into the black after two precarious years, could just as easily go under. That would make her ex-husband Bart happy as hell. And she'd resist that happening with the last breath in her body.

Her high heels clicked on the parquet floor as she walked down the hall to the bathroom to get her car keys. There shouldn't be people like Bart, she thought, her long-legged stride causing her blond shoulder-length hair to sway gently from side to side. There shouldn't be hunters and victims. There shouldn't be terrorists killing innocent children. It was so damned Machiavellian. So barbaric. Hadn't civilization progressed at all? Oh, damn, she silently swore, glancing out the terrace door next to her bedroom, the rain still hadn't let up. Her hair would frizz up like crazy again.