Kitabı oku: «Street Smart»

Praise for Tara Taylor Quinn’s
WHERE THE ROAD ENDS

“Quinn smoothly blends women’s fiction with suspense and then adds a dash of romance to construct an emotionally intense, compelling story….”

—Booklist

“Tara Taylor Quinn takes readers on a journey…and brilliantly explores the emotions involved.”

—Romantic Times

“Quinn ties you up in knots emotionally as her wonderful voice explodes into the mainstream….”

—Reader to Reader

“One of the skills that has served Quinn best…has been her ability to explore edgier subjects.”

—Publishers Weekly

“With mesmerizing prose, Quinn takes the reader through the darkest of shadows, weaving danger and intrigue into every step, until at last emerging into a dazzling world of new possibility and metamorphosis…. Where the Road Ends comes very highly recommended.”

—Wordweaving

“Emotionally complex and powerful novel… Moving and deep, this book has much to say about priorities and love…. Look for a great future for this author.”

—Huntress Reviews

Dear Reader,

I’m still celebrating your response to my debut for MIRA Books. Where the Road Ends was out last summer, and I can hardly believe it’s time for another release.

I bring you Street Smart with a bit of trepidation and a whole lot of heart. The trepidation comes from your expectations, which I don’t want, ever, to disappoint. This is not like any other book I’ve written. It explores topics I have not explored before and never thought I would. And yet, as with every single story I tell, it comes from within me. My work seems to happen on its own, almost in spite of me. The people, their lives come from somewhere deep inside. How they get there, I don’t question. What to do with them, I don’t ask. I sit. I think and feel. I type. And I give them—my characters—to you.

I offer you Street Smart with my very best wishes.

Tara Taylor Quinn

I love to hear from readers. You can reach me at P.O. Box 15065, Scottsdale, AZ 85267 or check out my Web site: www.tarataylorquinn.com.

Street Smart
Tara Taylor Quinn

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To the coolest girls I know—

Patricia Potter, Carol Prescott, Lynn Kerstan and Mary Strand. I’m a lot smarter because of the four of you. And looking forward to how much smarter I’m going to get!

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

1

She pushed as hard as she could. Pushed until her insides felt as though they were ripping away from her bones. There was supposed to be time in between. Time to breathe. To maintain sanity. Instead, one wave of mind-altering pain followed another.

How long she’d been lying there, Francesca Witting had no idea. She’d lost track of time during the night. It was all a blur to her now. Pain. Despair. Determination.

And fear.

Something was wrong. She didn’t have to see the worried expressions on the faces of the medical personnel as they examined her, measured, watched screens, to know that. If her instincts weren’t insistent enough, her body was telling her that this son of hers was not coming into the world as nature had intended. He wasn’t helping enough. Or she wasn’t. Instead of sliding down the birth canal, he was tearing her apart from the inside out.

Terrified, she rode the pains, accepted them, for they meant she was still alive—and that maybe he was.

Most of the time speech flew around her, over her. Tense, staccato words—orders she couldn’t understand. In a language she knew only peripherally.

Francesca was used to being alone. Was in Italy now, alone, by her own choice.

She’d just never thought she’d die this way.

Never thought she’d die without seeing Autumn again. Without knowing that her runaway half sister who’d been missing for more than two years was safe and well.

People she’d never seen before—and didn’t really see now—came and went from the little gray-walled room. Touching her. Mostly she couldn’t feel them. The searing pain from within left no room for other sensation. When she could focus, she saw them, all moving quickly in their green scrubs, their hair covered, their features serious. Intensely engaged. Most were wearing thin plastic gloves. Or pushing fingers into them. Or peeling them off.

Few paid attention to the American woman’s face. Their concern was lower down, inside the tented sheet, on the miracle that was becoming a tragedy.

Francesca’s legs had been spread in stirrups beneath that sheet for so long the position felt permanent. A lot more permanent than her life, or the tiny life that she prayed was still alive, struggling inside her.

“Aahh.” She heard the wail, but didn’t immediately identify it as her own. As she’d been doing for hours, she stared at a green light ticking off seconds on a monitor to one side of her left knee.

For the past hours she’d alternated between sweating and getting chills from wet skin touched by the room’s cool air.

A nurse adjusted the IV connected to her right hand. Probably because the excruciating pain in her lower abdomen was on the downward slope of its current wave, Francesca was aware as the IV needle moved beneath her skin. It hurt.

Another nurse, a fairly young one, stepped up to Francesca’s shoulder, offering her ice chips and indistinguishable Italian words in a kind voice. The woman’s mouth was pinched, her eyes carefully guarded.

Francesca barely had the energy to shake her head. If she had to swallow, she’d choke. Gripping the bed-sheet with clenched fists, she turned her head on the soaking-wet pillow they’d changed more than once. Her short damp hair stuck to the side of her face.

The woman tried again, bringing a spoonful of chips to Francesca’s parched lips, her tone encouraging. With a breath she hoped would be deep enough to get her through the next seconds of pain, Francesca allowed the chips to rest against her closed lips. The ice was cold, on the left side of her bottom lip and the right side of her top. Very cold. Cold enough for her to feel. She thought about those cold spots. Concentrated on them. As hard as she could. Until nothing existed but those tiny sensations of cold.

In that split second of relief a vision of Antonio’s compelling face flashed before her eyes. His coal-black hair. Eyes that were almost black in color and yet so full of warmth—of intelligent compassion—that they drew her relentlessly.

Oh, God, Antonio. She hadn’t told him…Couldn’t. His life was elsewhere. Irrevocably tied to another woman. A disabled woman. But it seemed as if, somehow, he’d come here, to this place.

Her face aching with the smile that was attempting to force its way through tight cracked skin, Francesca blinked, hoping to bring his face into clearer focus. His face, with its permanent shadow of a beard that would be thick and full were it permitted to grow longer than twelve hours.

Had someone found out? Called him from halfway around the world? Because she was dying? Or his baby was?

Another pain rose to unbearable levels and she couldn’t hold on to his image.

Don’t leave, my love. Stay. Just for a few minutes.

Blinking the sweat and tears from her eyes, Francesca sought out her only remaining source of strength. Antonio’s smile. And saw, instead, a younger face in glaring light. A concerned gaze. A few escaped tendrils of brown hair sticking out from beneath a light green, tied-on cap. A female face.

She blinked again. The pain wasn’t subsiding at all.

“Antonio!” The word was a scream inside her mind. In the room, it sounded more like a harsh whisper.

Antonio.

Her biggest sin.

He was one of the few people who’d managed to penetrate the defenses she’d wrapped around herself after she’d left home and the stepfather who’d hit her and the mother who’d been too emotionally battered to help her. Defenses that had served her well as she became the determined Italian-American photojournalist who’d managed to make a name for herself with her pictures and accompanying text by the time she was thirty.

The nurse was leaning over her, placing her face so close to Francesca’s, Francesca could hardly breathe, let alone make out what the woman was trying to say.

Turning her head to the side as her lower stomach twisted inside out, ripping away from her spine, Francesca took one last breath.

“Antonio!”

His face was there again. Just his face this time. Floating above her.

And then everything was dark.

Gian was a popular name for Italian boys. But that wasn’t why the little guy’s mother named him that. Gian meant “God is gracious.” And that was the reason Francesca had bestowed the name on her little son. Because the powers that be had been gracious that morning two and a half months ago and preserved the life of the infant who’d been almost strangled by the umbilical cord in his mother’s womb.

Francesca was trying to be quiet so as to not wake her paternal grandmother. Sancia Witting, the current matriarch of an old Italian family that had immigrated to Italy from Wales centuries before, needed her afternoon siesta. Rolling up a dozen summer-weight sleepers Francesca stuffed them into the far corner of the second of two oversize dark green duffels on the double bed in Sancia’s guest room. Gian, who’d been asleep for more than an hour in his portable crib, wasn’t a concern. This son of hers could sleep through a minor hurricane, as he’d proved three weeks before when a debilitating storm had hit the coast of Naples, waking all within a hundred-mile radius. But not Gian.

His washcloth and hooded towels were next. The lotions and powders that left his little body so sweet-smelling already lay secure in a plastic bag in the other duffel, along with a week’s worth of disposable diapers padding all her cameras. This late-spring time out of time with her newborn son—and the grandmother she’d just met the month before—had been without doubt the most joyful she’d known since her father’s death almost twenty years before. But life was calling on her to begin moving again.

Actually, although she’d never admit as much to her overprotective grandmother, Francesca had done the calling herself. She’d left messages for a couple of magazine editors who were always eager for a Francesca Witting piece.

She’d had calls back from both. And now she and Gian were off to spend June in New York, Boston and San Diego before returning to Sacramento to introduce him to the grandmother who didn’t yet know he existed. Francesca had sold the piece she’d come to Italy to do almost a year before—an in-depth look at Italian people through their weathering of disasters. And she’d been asked to do a follow-up piece highlighting the similarities of their character and culture to Italians living in neighborhoods in America. This time she’d have a companion during her travels.

The little guy was sleeping so soundly he hadn’t moved since she’d put him down. She’d have to wake him soon or he’d be up all night. Gian’s favorite four rattles and a stuffed horse his great-grandmother had given him went in next, beside two pairs of soft-sided shoes.

In the many months since Francesca had left her home in Sacramento, she’d visited families in Sicily who’d lost loved ones in a train crash a couple of years before, those who were affected by Etna’s boiling lava spewing forth, and the parents of children who were killed when an earthquake leveled their school. A freelance photojournalist with enough money to follow her artistic inclinations rather than take one of the many job offers she’d received from national magazines and Reuters and newspapers all around the state of California, she’d done the story of her career.

It was while she was visiting Milan, where she’d documented people whose loved ones had died in a plane that had crashed into the top floors of a thirty-story building two years earlier, that Antonio Gillespie, her former boyfriend, had arrived on business from Sacramento. His father-in-law was a retailer with upscale shops all over the states. Antonio, who was second in command, had come to finalize a deal with one of Milan’s top designers. And to take a break from the wife he’d described as more of a child than a woman since the car accident that had left her brain-damaged and paralyzed.

Francesca hadn’t been able to stay angry with him for having kept the woman a secret during the two years she’d known him, hadn’t been able to hold on to feelings of betrayal, because she’d understood. Especially now, glancing over at her tiny son who gave himself as completely to his sleep as he did his play. Her heart was open wide and filled with forgiveness. Gian’s father was an admirable man who could not heartlessly send the woman who’d once been his life partner to an institution, in spite of the instant and undeniably rich attachment he and Francesca had shared since she’d first interviewed him for a story she’d done on the debilitating impact of fashion in America. This was the man she’d tell Gian about when he grew up and asked questions about the father he didn’t know.

Folding, stuffing, Francesca remembered that last scene in Sacramento. Another retailer had told her that Antonio was married, that the company she’d thought his own actually belonged to his father-in-law. He hadn’t tried to deny it. To lie. And in the end, after she’d heard the heart-wrenchingly sad story of a fairy tale gone wrong, she hadn’t been angry. Just devastated. And had left the States to get over him. He’d known that. But he’d been as lonely as she….

The sound of dishes rattling in the kitchen across the small villa brought Francesca back to the task at hand. Her grandmother Sancia was up from her siesta and would be expecting Francesca to join her for an afternoon snack. And she still had all her own clothes to pack into the other half of the second duffel.

Although she’d spent more than nine months in Italy before she’d contacted her father’s mother, introducing herself to the grandmother she’d never known, Sancia was probably the real reason Francesca had come to this country. Looking back, she could recognize the quest that had driven her halfway around the world at a time when her mother had needed her at home.

Nothing in life had made sense anymore. Nothing, other than her career, had made her happy. She’d begun to question her basic beliefs, her decisions and motivations, even her ability to offer compassionate stories to the world.

So she’d come to Italy with some half-formed hope that she might find what she was missing among the people of her father’s land. That the culture, the values, the heart and soul of Italy would give her what she could not seem to provide for herself. A solid sense of self. Of direction.

Almost a year later, contemplating her trip home, she wasn’t sure they’d produced anything quite so significant. But these long months had given her Gian.

And he’d given life meaning.

Finished packing, she went to wake her son.

Five weeks later.

God, it was sweltering. Carrying a single duffel filled mostly with cameras she hadn’t used in more than a month, Francesca climbed the steps of Lucky Seven, an extended-stay motel off the Strip, to the room she’d just rented. Las Vegas in July was hell.

She’d forgotten that.

Just as she’d forgotten anything of value in taking pictures. She hadn’t picked up a camera since that last day in Italy, when she’d packed them in the bottom of a bag. Nor did she intend to.

She’d buried any meaning her life held in a little old cemetery a couple of miles from Sancia Witting’s home.

The phone was ringing as she pushed her way through the door of her two-room suite.

“Hello?”

A cursory glance told her the room was clean.

“This is José at the front desk, Ms. Witting.”

“Yes?” What was he bothering her for? She was tired. Hot. Lacking even an ounce of the capacity it would take to be civil to other human beings.

“I have that number you asked for. The one for the used-car dealer.”

She wasn’t planning to be in town for more than a week. But she had to get a car now that she was back in the States—she’d sold her Mustang before she’d left for Italy—and figured that, rather than paying for a rental, she’d buy one here. She’d drive Autumn back to Sacramento when they returned together.

“That was quick,” she told José now, duffel still on her shoulder as she scribbled the number on the envelope he’d given her downstairs with her receipt.

“My friend’s at work tonight. He’ll be there all weekend, too.”

“Great, thanks,” she said, conjuring up enough energy to say a pleasant goodbye and get off the phone. Car-shopping on a Friday night in Vegas. Just what she wanted to do.

But then, she thought, dropping her duffel on the bed, there was nothing in the entire universe that Francesca Witting wanted to do. Except not think about that crib with the too-still infant. That Italian cemetery.

And she wanted to follow up on the phone call her mother had received that week from her younger sister. A runaway, Autumn had been missing for more than two years. Earlier this week, she’d been in Las Vegas. Francesca was going to find her.

And get Autumn’s ass home where it belonged.

“Luke, have a seat.”

He’d rather stand. But he sat in one of the lushly upholstered high-backed chairs across from his boss and mentor’s oversize mahogany desk. The chairs were gold now. The year before they’d been maroon.

Luke preferred the maroon.

“How’s your mother?” Amadeo asked.

Fingers steepled at his lips, Luke shrugged. Luke Everson didn’t talk about his mother. Amadeo Esposito knew that.

And still, without fail, every time he saw Luke he asked.

Glancing beyond Luke’s left shoulder, Amadeo gave a slight nod, dismissing the two “companions” who were never more than a few feet away. Their feet moved soundlessly on the plush maroon carpet that had recently replaced last year’s golden brown. Maroon and gold were Esposito’s colors. Always had been.

When the heavy wood door clicked shut behind them, Amadeo met Luke’s gaze, his dark eyes narrowed. “You want to tell me what’s going on at the Bonaparte?”

A lesser man might have been intimidated. Most men who came in contact with the owner and CEO of Biamonte Industries—a conglomerate that owned a tenth of Las Vegas—were intimidated. Italian-born Esposito, while having no Mafia affiliations or connections, was a very rich and sometimes ruthless man who knew how to use his money to get what he wanted.

Amadeo Esposito did many things Luke wouldn’t have done—or would’ve done differently.

But Luke had known the man all his life. He’d seen Amadeo cry at his daughter’s funeral fifteen years before. And then again at his wife’s.

Amadeo had cried with Luke at Luke’s father’s funeral three years before.

“There’ve been too many big wins.” Luke told Amadeo what he already knew.

The Bonaparte, one of the Strip’s newest and most elite casino-hotels, was Luke’s personal responsibility.

Esposito waited. He was not a patient man, something Luke had never respected about him.

Leaning forward, Luke rested his forearms across his knees. “There’s no apparent pattern,” he reported. “The winners come from all over. All ages. An eighty-year-old woman from a retirement village in Phoenix, a twenty-two-year-old Wall Street wannabe and everything in between. They hail from no particular part of the country, come at no particular time, stay in no particular hotel, frequent no particular casinos, stay no particular length of time. For some, this is their first time in Vegas. Others are veterans. FaceIt found nothing.” Luke named the high-tech surveillance technology that, in conjunction with an Internet security database system, was capable of identifying casino cheaters, card counters and those associated with them.

Esposito’s face tightened.

“With the new digital-recording system, plus the incident-reporting and risk-management software, we’ve been able to call up every aspect of each case individually. We’ve tracked tape from each dealer down to every single time a drawer opens—and there’s absolutely nothing.”

“What about dealers?” Esposito demanded. “New technology only means that crooks find new ways to get around it. We’re only as good as the people who work for us.”

Luke shook his head. “Everyone checks out,” he said. “I talked to Jackson, and he vouched for all of them, as well.”

Arnold Jackson was not only the best dealer they had, he was the closest thing Luke Everson had to a personal friend. He was as much a part of the family as Luke himself—and one of the handful of people Esposito trusted.

His tanned face creased in a frown beneath dark silver hair, Amadeo leaned forward. “There is one pattern,” he said, his voice lowered to the decibel of dangerous. “All the wins are at the Bonaparte.”

The back of his neck aching, Luke shook his head. “It’s beginning to look like there are at least two others.” Luke named them both—well-known strip resorts—listing the dates and exact amounts of the wins in question. “And there’s no pattern in the locations,” he added. “One’s new, one’s been around for years. One is independently owned, one’s part of a corporation.

“And none have any relationship, either past or current, with Biamonte Industries,” he said, summing up what they already knew. He added, “I’ve been working with the security directors to run a check on all current and past employees to look for someone in common to all three—or even to two of us. Nothing significant has turned up.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence.”

Sighing, Luke sat back, running a hand through his blond hair. “I’ve viewed and reviewed the tapes. Didn’t even come up with a case of enlarged pores.” Luke wondered how many of the gamblers they caught counting cards every year knew that something as innocuous as their skin could give them away.

Amadeo didn’t reply for several moments. Moments that would’ve seemed endless had Luke not been fully aware of the older man’s habit of focusing silently when he had something to ponder.

“There is one pattern here.” Esposito’s usually nonexistent Italian accent slipped into his speech.

Raised brows were Luke’s only response.

“No two wins took place at the same time.”

“Anything else would just be stupid,” Luke said.

Nodding slowly, Amadeo said, “And it would also allow a person or persons to be at those tables, as a bystander, guiding the potential winners and waiting in the wings to collect a share of the take.”

In Luke’s opinion, Esposito had underestimated his ex-marine officer protégé.

Luke elaborated. “The operation would have to be large enough to hire a different player for every win. We have two thousand cameras out there, Amadeo, with a several-yard radius around every table. There isn’t a single instance of anyone in the vicinity sharing even a slight resemblance with those in the vicinity of the other wins.”

“So maybe we’re dealing with a damn good makeup artist,” the older man shot back, sitting up straight. “For God’s sake, man, this is Las Vegas, home of illusion.”

“And home of the people who can spot illusion with eyes half shut.”

“You’ve had the films studied by someone who’d know?”

Luke replied with a slow nod. “Three.”

“Carson Bova.” Esposito named the city’s best.

“Of course.”

“Follow up on the payout.” There was no mistaking his words as anything but an order. “I want to get inside the personal finances of every single winner. I want evidence of increase equal to the full win.”

Technically it couldn’t be done.

But Luke nodded. He already had someone on it.

“And run another check on every single one of our security staff.”

Already done. But he didn’t bother telling his boss that. Amadeo needed to be the one giving the orders. Luke stood, his polished black shoes sinking into the carpet.

“How’s the baby thing going?” Esposito asked, his voice, his whole demeanor, softer and more compassionate as he asked the question.

It was this side of the man that Luke trusted. His godfather, whom he honored and cared about. He still couldn’t stand Amadeo in his business life.

“I filled out the paperwork,” he replied. Amadeo Esposito had given Luke this chance—hooked him up with an agency in town that specialized in finding children for families who didn’t qualify for regular adoptions. Luke hadn’t even known such a place existed.

Coming around his desk, Amadeo stood mere inches from Luke, his eyes warm and personal. “What’s the next step?”

Luke glanced at his watch. He was on the clock. Had work to do. “A series of checks into everything from my medical history to grades in elementary school, by the sound of things,” he muttered, stepping toward the door.

“Luke?”

He turned back.

“You’ll have your son.”

Anticipation filled Luke’s chest, but only for a brief instant. Still, after he’d passed Amadeo’s current thugs in the outer office, he couldn’t help a satisfied nod.

If Amadeo said he’d get his son, he would.

2

She had her car—a “used though still in excellent condition” Grand Cherokee. A single woman on her own didn’t need anything so big, but Francesca didn’t know how much stuff Autumn had accumulated in the two years she’d been gone. A shopping cart full?

Her half sister had called her mother from a pay phone. For anonymity? Or because that phone on the street was her home phone?

Just before eight on Saturday morning, Francesca drove slowly down the Strip, only minimally distracted by the visual cacophony of fantasyland elite mixed with the gutteresque. The opulent signs and landscaping stood beside parking lots filled with potholes and garishly lighted marquees advertising souvenir mugs for ninety-nine cents, beer and three T-shirts for twelve dollars.

Already older couples strolled the sidewalks hand in hand, stepping aside periodically as the occasional man hurried from one casino to the next, exuding an air of desperation—and the desperate hope of someone who’s broken free.

Did they ever eat, those occasional men? Francesca wondered. Or did they live on anticipation and the free cocktails offered so readily at the blackjack tables?

Traffic wasn’t too bad, but she moved slowly, taking in as many loitering places as she could. Autumn had made that call just a few blocks from here.

Spring Mountain Road. Sands Avenue. The streets followed one after another, just as her map had indicated they would. It all had a “Twilight Zone” feel to Francesca, not only unfamiliar but completely outside the bounds of reality. Was this surrealistic place her sister’s stamping ground?

The thought of her beautiful now-seventeen-year-old sister living somewhere on these streets was just too painful to hold on to. Francesca glanced once more at the written directions and highlighted map on the console at her right elbow. The police had said there was nothing they could do with the phone lead. There’d been nothing to trace. Francesca understood that runaways were a dime a dozen in their fine city. And the police had a hell of a lot more to do than Francesca did.

She could sit by that pay phone booth all day every day for the next year if that was what it took to get a lead on her sister’s whereabouts. Sit there holding the camera she’d unpacked that morning and tossed in the back seat just so she’d look as though she had some purpose, something to do.

One more intersection and she had to turn right. And then take an immediate left. She’d been in the city a little more than twelve hours. Long enough to buy the car and get some much-needed sleep—via the help of potent prescription sleeping pills given to her by a sympathetic Italian doctor who’d been unable to ease her pain. He’d offered the escape of powerful drugs instead.

There were nights when Francesca cried out of sheer gratitude to him.

Her first impulse was to ignore the ringing of the cell phone plugged into the car’s power outlet. But there was only one person who’d be calling. And as much as she didn’t want to talk…

“Hi, Mom,” she said, without looking at the caller ID on the phone’s display.

“What did you find?”

She should’ve kept her number private.

“It’s barely past dawn, Mom,” she said, her eyes filling with tears for the sad woman who, living all alone, had aged ten years in the one Francesca had been away. After the death of her first husband, Francesca’s father, Kay Stevens’s life had gone inexorably downhill. The sudden heart-attack death eighteen months before of the bastard who’d been her second husband—Autumn’s father—should’ve made things at least more bearable.

But it hadn’t.

“You don’t sleep a lot,” Kay said softly, but with the barest hint of the steel she’d instilled in her older daughter sometime before her second husband had come on the scene and attempted to beat it out of both of them. “In the three weeks you were home, you never slept more than four hours a night. Something happened in Italy. I know it did. Why won’t you tell me about it?”

A bus stop caught Francesca’s eye—an uncomfortable-looking bench with a couple of panels overhead, to block out rain, maybe. It certainly didn’t offer much shade.

No one was sleeping on it. Had Autumn ever?

“There’s nothing to tell.” The response drained her, but not nearly as much as the truth would have.

As much as she craved her mother’s nurturing hand, she just didn’t have the capacity to talk about the year in Italy that had changed her life forever. Not her brief time in Milan with Antonio. Not the long, slow and frightening birth of her son. And most especially not the moment she’d reached into his crib that last afternoon at Sancia’s, not the autopsy, nor the grandmother she’d left behind.

Nor did she believe her mother any longer had the wherewithal to offer a nurturing hand.

“I think you should at least try to call Antonio,” her mother said again—a suggestion she’d made many times in the month since Francesca’s return. “Let him know you’re back in town.”

“No,” she said, as she had every single time. “I went to Italy because I found out he’d been married the entire two years I dated him. Why on earth would I look him up on my return?” Other than these reminders from her mother, she didn’t think about the man who’d fathered her child. Not anymore. He’d been buried right along with the rest of her heart.

“You said his wife was brain-damaged from that accident….”

“Which doesn’t make him any less obligated. Any less married. And if we’re going to continue to discuss this, I’m hanging up.”

Kay’s sigh was heavy. “Will you call me as soon as you get to the phone booth? Let me know what you find?”

“Unless Autumn left a calling card or some graffiti on the side of the booth, a vacant piece of property owned by Sprint isn’t going to tell us much.”

“I just thought there might be some homeless person around who’d know—” Kay broke off. Into the silence that followed, she muttered, “I know, I’m being presumptuous.” For a brief moment she sounded again like the confident and capable college professor Francesca had known during the first ten years of her life. “This initial phase is your job. Mine comes when we get her home.”

She’d find her sister. Francesca couldn’t think any further than that. If life required more than one step at a time, she’d be paralyzed.

Inching past a red sign with white blinking lights—at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning—proclaiming Welcome to the Candlelight Wedding Chapel, and then, next to it, a big hot-dog placard, Francesca had to wonder if it was an all-in-one deal—nuptials and a wedding supper without leaving the parking lot.

“I’ll hang up now,” her mother said after another pause. “Call me as soon as you know anything.”

“I will, Mom.” I told you I would.

“Anything,” Kay repeated. “Anything at all. I think—”

Francesca’s thumb flipped to the off button just before she dropped the phone back to the console. If asked, she could always say they got disconnected.

Circus Circus was offering free chips and salsa with the purchase of a drink. Francesca made her turn, paying more attention as she got closer to her destination. The phone booth, only a few blocks from the Lucky Seven, could have been reached through backstreets if Francesca had known how to navigate them. With all the construction going on around and behind the Strip—another new casino, road repair, a golf course apparently being shoved in somehow—she hadn’t bothered to try.

Another block, and there was the phone. Right in front of a billboard advertising the Striptease Gentlemen’s Club.

And across the street, a McDonald’s—an old-fashioned rendition of the famous hamburger joint with the ground-to-ground golden arches that were hardly seen anymore. A return to yesteryear? A sign that things were going to be okay again?

Shaking her head, she turned off the engine and settled in, staring at the corner across the street. She knew there was no going back. Ever. Not for her.

And not for Autumn. Her sister had been gone for two years. No matter where she’d been, what she’d been doing, there were bound to be irrevocable changes.

Francesca understood that.

She wasn’t sure her mother did.

Fifty-five-year-old Sheila Miller, blackjack dealer extraordinaire, sat at the kitchen table in her little breakfast nook Sunday morning, phone in hand. She’d dialed three times.

And just as often, pushed the disconnect button.

She had to call. If anyone would know who was behind the recent series of big wins at the tables, Arnold Jackson would.

Stomach growling, Sheila gave a cursory glance at the mass of notes and bills strewn across her table where breakfast would’ve been if she weren’t so desperate to lose weight. No matter how she looked at it, she was in deep shit.

With sweaty fingers, Sheila slowly pushed in the numbers she knew by heart.

Her friend and co-worker, Angie Madden, had asked all up and down the Strip for information on the wins. It had to be an inside scam, but no one was talking. That would make sense if Sheila’d been the one asking. She was the straitlaced fuddy-duddy among them. But not Angie. She’d been the queen of scam for years—someone another scammer would trust—or want to brag to.

The home Angie owned didn’t come from her ten-year-old divorce the way most people thought. It had been purchased, instead, with money she’d slowly siphoned off her table—and from the cut she took helping others do the same. She’d developed a solid reputation among the old-timers. Most of them had either used her help or were friends with someone who had. They didn’t take a lot. And only when they were really in a bind. The well would dry up if they got too greedy.

Most times the take wasn’t much at all by casino-loss standards—an electric bill here, an engagement ring there. More often than anything else, it covered the huge medical deductible on their health plan.

The silver-haired Angie Madden had helped more dealers on the Strip than Sheila could count, and not a single one of them was talking.

Just Sheila’s luck. The first time in thirty years she wanted to know about the seedier side of a blackjack dealer’s life, and she was coming up empty.

Arnold answered on the fourth ring, his voice more gravelly than usual.

She paused long enough to swallow. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

“Who is this?”

Feeling the heat come up her face, Sheila stared at the floor. Though Arnold had only been around a few years, he’d quickly become known as the most sought-after bachelor among the dealers. He was smart. Good-looking. And completely true-blue honest.

Which was what made Sheila crazy for him in a way she hadn’t been crazy for a man since the end of her disastrous first marriage thirty years before.

She might be attracted to Arnold, but she wasn’t ready to deal with that. She still had ten pounds to lose.

“Oh, sorry.” She tried for a chuckle and ended up with a cough that probably made her sound as embarrassed as she was. “It’s Sheila Miller. We served together on the dealers’ continuing education committee last year.”

It had been shortly after the holidays. She’d been good and fat then.

“Sheila. Yes, I remember. You were the one who came up with the final justification that clinched our funding.”

He had a good memory. That probably meant he remembered the fat, too.

“I was just calling to find out what you know about this series of big wins. My friends and I are getting concerned. Until we know who’s behind them we’re all suspect. I figured you’d make it your business to find out, especially since most of them are happening at the Bonaparte.”

“All I know is that they’re happening,” the man said. She heard some rustling, wondered if he was getting out of bed. If he slept in the nude. Or if he’d just snuggled deeper beneath the covers.

Alone?

“I’ve been at this job for thirty years,” Sheila told him, folding back the corner of her most recent financial analysis—the one that had kept her up most of the night. If she didn’t figure out who was behind this scam—and get in on it—she was going to lose everything. “And not once in all that time was a series of wins this big ever a coincidence.”

So it had been stupid to use her entire life savings to buy some land outside the city and contract to build a little house on it. She’d thought she could afford it. And after thirty years of sucking up rich jerks’ smoke and developing varicose veins standing at a blackjack table, she deserved something more for herself.

“I’m not happy about the situation,” Arnold said. “As you said, whether it’s an inside job or not, it makes us all look bad.”

And every single night when she came home there were more messages from her builder letting her know about additional expenses. Permit fees and truss calcs and engineering expenses. She’d borrowed—twice—against the condo she’d bought twenty years before, hit up every friend and almost-friend she knew.

“At the Bonaparte they’re running extra security checks on all of us,” Arnold continued.

Shit. Just what she needed. If the Bonaparte was running checks, so would all the casinos. Her debt was going to turn up and she’d be a prime suspect. Double shit. How could she get in on the scam, assuming she found the source, if she was a prime suspect at the same time?

Sweat trickled between her breasts, gathering uncomfortably at the under-wire of her D-cup bra beneath the white blouse she wore to work.

For years she’d watched the others run scams with absolutely no accountability. But the moment I even think about it, they’re suddenly running extra security checks.

Her rotten luck.

Which was why she was a fifty-five-year-old, slightly plump single dealer in Las Vegas with the reputation of being straitlaced and definitely not up for a game.

“You want to have dinner tomorrow night?” What the hell. She was in debt. She was fat. If the wins were an inside job, Jackson would eventually find out. And for the first time in thirty years, she had the hots for a guy.

“I’m working tomorrow night.”

Yeah, well, it was as good excuse as any. At least the man was nice enough to preserve her pride.

Hanging up the phone, Sheila went over to the counter to cut up some fruit.

Sunday night, when the darkness had grown to the point that the strangers she approached on the street corner could no longer see the picture she had to show them, Francesca gave up for another day. Gave up, but couldn’t go back to the Lucky Seven as she had the previous two nights. The black spots on the walls were beginning to take on the image of climbing bugs. She had to keep getting up to make sure they hadn’t really moved, that she didn’t have to kill them. And she was wearing socks at all times in case the stains on the carpet were from something gross.

Socks in 105° F temperature.

How she ended up at the Bonaparte, Las Vegas’s newest casino, and touted as the most opulent, Francesca didn’t know. It was a fantasyland. And she needed to escape.

She’d been in the casino almost an hour, no longer aware of all the loud and unfamiliar sounds consuming her brain. She’d found a nickel video slot she was slowly beginning to figure out as she continued to spend two dollars and twenty-five cents with each push of the button. She still wasn’t sure how she kept racking up credits, but she knew now that when the genie said “yes!” three times in a row, that was a good thing.

Bells rang around her. A recorded voice periodically called out “Wheel of Fortune!” not too far away. She was pretty sure she kept hearing Alex Trebek call out his famous “Let’s play Jeopardy.” Another slot machine based on a TV show?

“Cocktails?” asked a waitress whose breasts were falling out of the purple piece of fabric that was supposed to be a top. It was the fourth time she’d been around.

Instead of politely declining as she had previously, Francesca requested a bottle of water and was relieved when the scantily clad woman responded cheerfully as though the request was quite normal.

Wondering how much the water would cost in a place that had marble casements for its slot machines, Francesca pushed the button again and jumped back, heart pounding, as a siren went off and a light on top of the machine started to flash.

Great. Her first time gambling, first time in a casino, and she’d screwed up the machine.

Could you go to jail for that?

Of course not, she immediately answered herself, fighting back her automatic sense of gloom and doom. But you didn’t have to be in Las Vegas for more than a couple of hours to know that the city took its security seriously.

In the two seconds it took her to consider slipping away, a distinguished-looking man, wearing a three-piece navy suit with a navy-and-white-striped tie that had to be real silk, was by her side, blocking her escape.

“Congratulations!” he said, sticking a card into the machine after which the alarming noise immediately ceased. “Eighteen thousand coins. Not a bad win!”

Eighteen thousand coins? How much was that in nickel land?

“Someone will be here shortly to take care of this for you.”

His voice was pleasant, reassuring, though his smile was as empty as her heart.

“Take care of it?” she asked, wishing now that she’d stopped back at the motel to change out of the tight skirt and skimpy top and knee-high black leather boots she’d worn that day as an attempt to blend into her corner.

“Any win above a thousand coins is paid by an attendant,” he explained.

Francesca was still trying to figure out how much money eighteen thousand nickels really was.

She kept coming up with nine hundred dollars. But that couldn’t be right. She’d only been playing nickels.

“I’m Luke Everson,” the man said, his smile a bit more genuine. “I’m the head of security here. If you have any problems, don’t hesitate to let us know.”

“Problems?” Had she just won nine hundred dollars?

“You looked scared to death when that machine went off.”

“It was a siren.” And the genie hadn’t even said “yes” once.

“I take it you haven’t done this much before.”

He’s not much older than I am. He’d seemed so much older at first. “Uh, no, this is a first.”

“Is it your first time at the Bonaparte, as well?” The conversation was routine, uninvolved, as though she were one of a million of the same cloned human being.

She nodded.

“Well then, I’m glad we’ve given you such a warm welcome. I hope you’ll be back to visit us often.”

There was nothing personal about the invitation. Nothing personal about his manner. Despite his blond good looks, the man somehow managed to exude absolutely nothing. Did he have that much control, or was he just as empty inside as she was?

Either way, his reticence put her more at ease than she’d been in a month.

“Thanks,” she said. Relaxing against the high back of her stool, she glanced up at him. “Did I just win nine hundred dollars?”

“Yes,” he said, grinning down at her in a way that left her confused. He was empty. So was she. This wasn’t supposed to have happened. “And I have to tell you,” he added, “you’ve got to be the least excited winner I’ve ever seen. Doesn’t make for great PR, you know?”

She might have apologized if people hadn’t descended on them. The waitress with her water—turned out it was free—and the attendant with her money. Before she noticed, Luke Everson, head of security, was gone.

And she’d won nine hundred dollars. As she headed out into the brightly lit night with her money she wondered if the stack of bills in her shoulder bag meant her luck was changing. Did this mean she’d find Autumn tomorrow?

Or had she just wasted what little luck was coming her way?

If so, she wanted to give the money back.

All those steps to climb. Autumn Stevens started up the six flights of concrete steps Sunday night, viewing the task as good exercise. She had to. If she allowed even one second of negative thought, she’d never make it up them at all.

And she had to get up there. Her bathroom was in the apartment on the sixth floor and she had to puke. Praying she’d make it in time, dying at the thought of having to clean up her own barf again, especially through six flights of open stairs, she tried to calm her stomach as she lifted one foot and then the other.

As always, calming thoughts rested on her big sister. Francesca was her knight in shining armor, never mind that she wasn’t a man. She was strong. Resilient. She could do anything. Or at least, that was how Autumn had viewed her when she was younger.

Hadn’t Francesca proved her knighthood by getting away from the bastard who’d fathered Autumn—and then proceeded to beat the crap out of all three of the women in his care?

Bile rose to her throat and Autumn quickly switched focus. Last she’d heard, Francesca was in Italy. Antonio had told her. Back when she’d thought him dear and sweet. When she’d felt certain there’d never been a kinder man. Or one more in love.

With the same woman Autumn adored above all others. Her big sister.

God, she missed Cesca. It had been the worst part of leaving the hellhole she’d grown up in—missing her sister’s occasional visits.

If she wasn’t such a chickenshit she’d ask Antonio if he knew of a way to contact her, if she was allowed to do so. Life looked pretty damned hopeless at the moment, but Cesca would know what to do.

Autumn reached the fifth flight. Had to stop for a second to swallow. Rub her stomach. Calm herself. As soon as she got upstairs, she’d be alone, in her own space, with no need to keep up appearances or tell half truths. No need to lie.

She started up the last flight with the contents of her stomach still in place. There was no point in calling Cesca; Autumn wouldn’t tell her anything.

She couldn’t.

Not if she wanted to live.

And so far, in spite of everything, that was the choice she’d made.

And continued to make…