Dangerous Women

Dangerous Women

Stories of Crime, Mystery, and Mayhem

by

Robb T. White

Published by

CLASS ACT BOOKS

121 Berry Hill Lane

Port Townsend, Washington 98368

www.classactbooks.com

Copyright  2017 by Robb T. White

Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-946523-22-8

Credits

Cover Artist: Mallory York

Editor: Anita York

Copy Editor: Mallory York

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

For Carrie and Tessa, with love

Acknowledgements

A Pack of Lies was first published in Flash Fiction Offensive in 2012. My Gypsy Girl from Bluefield was first published in Yellow Mama in 2013. Trophy Wife was published in A Twist of Noir in 2010. Her Ticket to Heaven was a print publication in The Literary Hatchet in 2013. Finding Sandy Biggers in an abbreviated form, was published in Short-story-me on 20 April 2014 as Ghost Drops. Finally, an appreciative thanks to Shane and Amanda Swift.

"I have an idea that the phrase ‘weaker sex’ was coined by some woman to disarm some man she was preparing to overwhelm."

Ogden Nash

Baby Frontanetta Runs in Circles

Feb. 4, the first ring: Chevrolet Center, Youngstown.

Regina Baby Frontanetta’s career as a strawweight didn’t last long. She was the perfect size for the division, according to her brother Gennaro, because she never had to struggle to make weight like so many other girls who gained and lost according to their menstrual cycles or yo-yo dieting. Gennaro was also her trainer, manager, cornerman, and cutman. He bragged he had helped train Kelly The Ghost Pavlik at the South Side Gym—or so he said.

Baby won her first three bouts before taking a last-second call from Krisztina Belinszky’s manager to fill in at the Chevy Center’s undercard when the number-eight contender broke her hand in a domestic abuse incident with her live-in boyfriend. The Hungarian was strawweight champion until she lost the title to Nanaka Takemitsu of Japan last year.

The hometown crowd exploded with cries of Ba-by! Ba-by! Ba-by! when she was spotted leaving the dressing room with Gennaro and a bucket man behind her. She smiled prettily when she trotted out to the center of the ring. She was the slender, pretty, blonde cheerleader in everyone’s high school, except that she was a grown woman wearing 8-ounce padded gloves and possessed of a formidable, if—in her case—not exactly lethal, skill.

The Hungarian was obviously quicker, her hands much faster. Some loudmouth up front shouted: Baby, you got to get off first! The crowd loved the double entendre and picked it up as a chant until even the cheap seats in the bleachers were stomping and their call echoed down to the squared circle, where Baby was finding herself overmatched and in for the fight of her life.

After the first round, Belinszky, known for foot skill and patience, heeded the advice from her corner and went for the kill. Baby kept walking into her opponent’s straight, stiff jab, which might have looked soft from ringside but was possessed of real snap at the end of it.

Baby’s eyes began to swell by the end of round two and her face turned bright red by the end of the third round. She heard Gennaro’s advice to Move sideways, sideways! while he applied the eye iron, but every time she did, there was that jaw-rocking jab. Her frustration showed in a head butt, hip thrusts, and cuffing her opponent. When the referee had to warn her again, he took a point away, which made the crowd howl and seethe with anger. By the fourth round, desperate, out of gas, Baby launched uppercuts and haymakers she was telegraphing from Market Street. In broken English, the Hungarian taunted her: Dat all you got? Dat all you got? The ringside crowd boiled with rage for their hometown girl taking a drubbing.

The four-rounder ended with both fighters throwing punches after the bell. The ref had to separate them and pushed them to their corners. When the scorecards were tallied and turned over to the ring announcer, the referee held both women’s gloves in his hands and waited. Baby heard the unanimous decision and jerked her hand free before he could raise Krisztina’s in victory. Disgusted with herself, she headed for her corner while the crowd roared more abuse at the Hungarian, who was too busy to notice or care, being kissed on both cheeks by her manager.

You won on aggression points. Gennaro said it in her ear in a low voice but it didn’t help.

Fuck off, Gennaro, Baby said. Even my hair hurts.

Hey, that’s boxing, Gennaro said with a shrug.

He put the robe over her shoulders. She pulled it up to cover her bruised face and climbed out of the ring while he held the rope for her.

They stayed in the dressing room for the main event, a heavyweight bout between a Chicago fighter and a Youngstowner named Tony Faselli. As soon as Raffi Djabourian, the Arab Stallion, was spotted walking toward the ring from the makeshift dressing room, he was lustily booed by the house. It wasn’t good-natured booing but ugly, anti-Muslim hatred. Youngstown’s once-thriving steel industry was built by tough Slavs, Irish, and Italian immigrants, but these were harsh and paranoid times. Raffi’s entourage consisted of the same spit-bucket man and the second who worked the corner for Baby’s fight.

After her shower, Baby reluctantly agreed to let Gennaro drive her to a bar in Austintown. He knew she would normally avoid places like the E-lite Bar, a girly place where secretaries met to gossip after work and ogle males cruising for hookups. Baby frequented downtown, working-class bars where a shot-and-beer was the preferred drink and men didn’t bother her.

What the hell is this place? Baby asked.

He set a drink in front of her. She stared at it.

It looks, she said, like the water from the hydrant in front of our old house on Drover Street.

It’s a Screaming Orgasm, Gennaro said. Vodka, Bailey’s Irish Cream, and Kahlua.

What happened to you, Gennaro? You used to be a man.

Hey, he said, with that familiar, irritating shrug, you have to roll with the times.

You mean you have to drink this to get laid, Baby replied. Just admit it, brother.

Whatever, Baby, honest to God. You’re pissed because you lost, he replied, applying that long-suffering sibling look that made Baby want to throw a punch at his face. Just admit that much, he repeated what she’d said back at her.

I lost big time because you’re a shitty cornerman, she said. What was that ‘stick and move sideways’ bullshit, anyhow?

Baby touched her puffed skin near the sockets and wondered if her left zygomatic arch was fractured. All her past confidence had drained away; nothing was left but the realization she was out of her depth in this sport.

She half-listened while Gennaro defended himself. It didn’t matter. She knew by the end of the second round that no amount of training or desire would ever put her in Belinszky’s class. The woman was a punching machine.

So, you see, like I was sayin’, you gotta… Hey, you ain’t heard a word I just said.

Gennaro, look… Baby began, not sure how to phrase it. I don’t want to talk about it.

He was her older brother, and he had the same crazy dream as she about being Youngstown’s first female Ghost—someone who heard thundering cheers just by stepping into a ring, having people stop you on the street to take a selfie. She and Gennaro were raised in an alcoholic family and had to accept charity from relatives; they knew what it was like to have classmates snicker when you walked down a hallway and feel the back of your neck burning with shame. She might as well get it over with.

I’m not wasting any more of my life on your pipe dream.

"My pipe dream?"

Let me finish, she said. I’m going to accept Leo Rolanda’s offer.

Come on! He’s just trying to get into your pants, Baby, Gennaro said.

It was probably true—but so what? The same could be said for nearly every male she had known or met who were between the ages of fifteen and seventy-five. That was one of the ideas that made Gennaro’s boxing brainstorm so attractive. Almost every woman on the planet had to face the fact that half the population was physically able to harm her by sheer size and strength alone. Baby had vowed early in adolescence no man was going to harm her—at least, not with impunity. Until she took up boxing, she carried a filleting knife on her person somewhere. Gennaro accused her of paranoia; she called it situational awareness.

I can’t believe this, Regina, Gennaro said.

Using her first name always signified deep disappointment.

I’m serious, she said. Leo says I...I have a talent for it.

It being assistant to a private investigator, not a make-the-coffee assistant but a private-eye trainee. The idea appealed to her; she was unfit by temperament for deskwork, even if such existed around Youngstown nowadays.

Gennaro snorted. He stared at her; then he held up one hand and made a circle with his fist and poked his finger through it, pantomiming a hump. One of Gennaro’s two ways of silent communication, the other being the middle digit hoisted like a distress flag whenever he was cut off in traffic or one of his lowlife friends came around asking for a loan or a favor.

Fine, make fun of me, Baby said. But I’m through with boxing.

Look, you’ll feel better in a couple of days. Every fighter loses but you gotta get back up on your feet.

In a couple days, the swelling would go down, but she’d still have the purple bruising around the eyes. She was a rare blonde, not a dyed one, with the kind of translucent skin of a Nordic blonde; her parents were often teased about the differences between their olive-skinned son and their fair-haired daughter. The family had roots in a village near Belluno close to the Swiss border.

The E-lite was dark, just a few older men occupying stools at this time of day. She was glad no one could see her raccoon eyes. On the street, she’d draw baleful stares and people would assume she was the victim of domestic violence. There’s a Youngstown joke that went back to the days of mobster Lenny Strollo: What do you say to a woman with two black eyes? Answer: Nothing. You’ve already told her twice.

Lousy men—they’d never change. At least the ones she seemed to attract.

What are you thinking about?

He must have seen her touching the skin around her eyes, an old tic from her insecure teenage years when she worried her breasts weren’t developing as fast as other girls. Italian girls had a reputation for developing too quickly. She remembered her more advanced classmates strutting down the hallways, popping gum, and looking sassy. A few always got sent home to change into something that showed less cleavage. She knew some of those girls. Many never finished high school. Overweight by their mid-twenties, already looking like their mothers, sagging boobs and droopy asses, not to mention a squalling brat or two by the hand. That was never going to be her fate, she vowed. She’d fought bulimia and kept it at bay except for some periods of binge-eating when she was really stressed, although no one in her family except Gennaro even suspected she had an eating disorder.

So what is Mister Ace Private Eye Leo Rolanda think he’s going to have you do?

He mentioned a few things to me, she said blandly and imitated his famous shoulder shrug. It wasn’t that she wanted to jinx it, exactly, but she was excited at the prospect of doing something adventurous without boxing’s downside—and getting paid for it. Boxing’s allure once had that in spades, but following cheating spouses to sleazy motels didn’t come with signs of punch-drunk syndrome in your forties.

OK, Miss I-Can-Do-Anything-I-Please. Follow your dreams. Go ahead! Make a fool of yourself.

She thought that odd considering nine thousand people had just seen her get waxed on every score card.

Let’s go home, Gennaro, she said.

He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t have to say it.

Stay here and drown your sorrows then, she said. She snatched the car keys off the table before he could react. I’ve got things to do.

Hey, how am I supposed to get home if you take the rape van?

She’d nicknamed it the moment Gennaro drove it home with her portion of the cash spent for it. They had to share the dinged-up white van that once belonged to a chimney cleaning outfit. You could still see the outline of the decal on the side where a man in a top hat holding a broom looked as if he were about to burst into song. Never mind all those naked orphan boys smoked alive inside those narrow chimneys in Charles Dickens’ London.

Use your dago charm, she said, and gave him her winning smile. She gestured toward a row of somber, younger males lined up on stools in front of their beers waiting for the ladies to show.

She drove home and decided to take another shower before calling Leo at his office. He was a night owl who often slept on a cot in his office. She let the icy spray numb her face and arms where she had warded off Belinszky’s flurries. A flashback of herself being pummeled in the corner made her wince. She turned the knob to full hot and endured the pain from her stiffening muscles under the blast.

Leo Rolanda didn’t sound enthusiastic when she told him she’d reconsidered his offer to go to work for Rolanda Investigative Services, the fancy title done in elegant scrollwork across the plate glass of his storefront office on Market Street near the I-680 overpass. He was surrounded by furniture stores going out of business, nail-trimming salons and hair stylists catering to African-Americans, a couple of competing, seedy gentlemen’s clubs, boarded-up windows, and a quick-stop gas station across the street.

She was puzzled by his response. It hadn’t been a week since he’d last pleaded with her to come work for him. Maybe, she thought, he’d heard about her dismal performance in the ring. People avoided losers.

Come on, Leo, you’re acting like I made this up, she said.

No, no, no, Regina! I do want you to come to work. I do. You got the wrong idea. You caught me unawares, you know? Come on down in the morning and we can talk about it.

She imagined him sitting back in his executive chair, biting his fingernails while talking on the phone. He had her on speaker; she heard the tinny echo of her voice bounce back.

We’re still talking the same money, right? You know, the figure you mentioned to me last week?

With Leo, you had to be wary.

Sure, sure, come on down in the morning and we’ll discuss salary, he said.

The prick. If he had any ideas about her working as an intern—for free—she’d disabuse him of that notion fast. Don’t play me, Leo, she said.

No, no, Baby, I would never do that! You know me. Let’s talk in the morning. I’ve got a case on right now.

He made it sound like a case of urgent diarrhea, but he probably meant he had a bet on the Cavs, playing without LeBron, and was anxious about the score. Gennaro had left the radio on the sports channel in the van and the announcer said the Cavs were down by 5 at the half.

She put her cell phone in the charger and tidied up the living room before heading upstairs to bed. She popped two Tylenol for the pain. She and her brother shared the house as well as the vehicle. Neither made much money since their parents died in a car crash on Route 11 driving home in a blizzard on a February night nine years ago. A mile before the exit, some amphetamine-laced driver of a semi jack-knifed and crushed her parents in their Ford. By the time the jaws of life freed them, there wasn’t much left to bury. The punctured gas tank exploded while they were trapped inside.

It had been a long time since good Catholic girl Regina Frontanetta said her prayers. She once recited the Hail Mary backwards on a classmate’s bet. After her parents’ death, she felt God had betrayed her. Her anger smoldered under the surface. Baby didn’t let things go easily.

Let this be the right decision, she thought. That would do as a prayer.

Lying in bed, propped on her mother’s favorite pillow, she imagined herself backing Belinszky into the ropes with a right-left-right combination that doubled her over the top rope and left her hanging there like some washerwoman’s laundry.

Take that, bitch, she mumbled before her sore eyes closed in black dreamless sleep.

~ * ~

Gennaro was downstairs at the kitchen table when she came down. He was bent over his coffee, both mitts surrounding the mug as though it wanted to escape.

Well, look what the cat drug in, she said.

Shut up, Gennaro said.

Don’t blame me for your hangover, Baby said. She made herself a cup from their new Keurig. She’d used a third of her purse from the last fight to buy it.

A habitual night owl, he looked worse than usual.

How long did it take you to get some chick to give you a ride home?

God, I don’t know. It was late—early. I got in around three or four, I think, he said.

You and your date stop off for a nightcap at her place?

None of your business. I was just being polite, he said, but she detected the corners of his lips curl in the smirk of the conquering male.

Do the letters S, and T, and D mean anything to you, idiot?

You’re jealous because I’m attractive to the opposite sex.

Despite his late-night drinking in clubs and snack-food dieting, Gennaro still had the physique he admired in the mirror when he was a linebacker for Cardinal Mooney. She wondered if, maybe, the bloom wasn’t off the rose in her case. Men and women didn’t age differently but there was that old stereotype that said they did with women getting the disadvantage there, too. Gennaro, chauvinist pig through and through, truly believed women lost their looks after twenty-five. Her mother used to tell her during puberty she had better trap a good husband before she lost her looks. Baby laughed at her mother’s old-fashioned upbringing in a mostly Italian-American neighborhood. Now she was wondered if keeping marriage at arm’s length was such a good idea.

I need the rape van, she told Gennaro.

I’ll drive you, he said. I got things to do today.

She didn’t say anything. Gennaro’s relationships with women rarely lasted beyond a couple months. His record was two years. Her problem, he liked to say, was that she expected too much from men and that was why she couldn’t keep a man longer than three weeks.

You’re right about that, Gennaro, she’d replied. I expect men to have integrity.

~ * ~

She declined Leo’s offer of coffee. I’ve had my morning coffee already, she said.

You want to be an investigator like me… he said while pouring himself what he claimed was his fifth cup of the day, …you’re gonna need to learn to run on this stuff.

What if I’m on a stakeout, she asked, and I have to go find a place to pee because of all the coffee I’ve been drinking?

You’re right about that, kiddo, Leo said. My bladder won’t forgive me. I have to use a bathroom every hour like clockwork.

She knew Leo from way back. He liked the bottle, too, and if anything, his liver was more likely to be red-lining than his bladder.

They got down to business and Leo gave her forms to fill out.

Beneath the W2 form she found a questionnaire.

Leo, what is this?

It’s a standardized personality instrument, Leo said. It will help me assess your fitness for certain kinds of tasks in this line of work.

Better not be any sex questions in there.

He threw his hands into the air. Come on, Baby. You know me better than that.

The trouble was, he was right: she did know him, and she didn’t trust him as far as she lift him from that swivel chair, much less throw him.

Leo outlined in a vague way the kinds of cases he handled, the types of clients he dealt with, and described the things she would be expected to do. He painted a rosy picture of his career, unlike the sleazy image TV gave private eyes. He gave her examples, such as finding missing children, bringing runaways home to their families, catching scam artists, locating deadbeat dads, protecting people—especially women, he emphasized to her with a knowing look—from stalkers. Baby thought she saw a tear well up in the man’s eyes as he spoke: St. Leo of Youngstown.

I’m not making your coffee, she said, when he finished his reminiscence.

I would never ask you to, Miss High and Mighty, he said.

What about the technology involved? Baby asked him. You haven’t said anything about equipment.

She’d used the library to google the kinds of devices private investigators often worked, with like various directional mics, databases like Tracers, Skipsmasher, SkipMax, IRB, and several others, not to mention the cellular phone-tracking technology and eavesdropping devices.

You mean guns? Leo asked her, horrified at the prospect she wanted to carry a firearm.

No, the spy stuff, the gadgetry, she said.

Never mind that, Leo told her. That’s mostly TV horseshit. That cell phone in your purse will do seventy percent of your work and the laptop over there will handle another twenty percent.

That leaves ten for—what exactly?

Something you’re going to need to work on, Leo said. He looked at her. She thought he was going to make a stupid comment about the egg-plant bruising beneath her eyes.

You’ve got to talk to clients and other people without pissing them off, Regina, he said. Can you do that?

She felt she could. Gennaro had built her up so much after her first three wins she was beginning to feel like Ronda Rousey. After last night, she felt like her after the Holm fight: a fighter in need of a good jab.

She asked Leo about getting her license soon. He waved it away as if a fly had magically popped up in front of his face. He hadn’t shaved this morning and she wondered if he had spent another all-nighter on the fold-up cot he kept in the corner. It was a dismal office: water-stained corkboard ceiling panels, one royal-blue wall opposite a salmon-pink wall covered with photos of a smiling Leo and Youngstown celebrities like wild-haired James Traficant before he went to prison, Pavlik’s homecoming after his middleweight title bout, Ray Boom Boom Mancini, some dinner theater people she didn’t recognize, and a few males in sparkling jackets that looked as if they had stepped out of posters from the swing bands of the fifties.

Getting an investigator’s license in Ohio is a joke, he said, noting her eyes boxing the walls of his establishment. If you’re not legally brain dead, insane, or did time for a felony, you won’t have a problem. We’ll work on that later.

They haggled over money. At one point, she got up to leave his office.

See, see! Leo exclaimed, as if he’d just hit the lotto. That’s exactly what I’m talkin’ about.

What do you mean?

You can’t storm off and give people the finger like that, Leo said. This business requires finesse.

He must have stolen that line from Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, she thought.

Leo, she said, if you want me to work for you, you have to pay me a living wage. It’s that simple. She stood at the doorway with one hand still on the knob.

You sound just like that pig-headed brother of yours, Leo said.

She opened the door.

Okay, okay, I give up, Leo said. Your figure, not mine. You start tomorrow. Take those client files with you and look them over.

Leo drove a Caddy Escalade, read stock reports as well as the Vegas sports books over the Internet, and lived in a gated community in Austintown. Yet he kept a shabby office and drove a junker to work. Leo knew how to pinch a nickel until it screamed.

She tried out a smile on him as she picked up the file folders from his desk.

I still think you ought to work on reduced wages while you’re learning the ropes, he said. He was bitter about being bested.

That’s funny, Leo, she said. She held her smile the whole time, Because a minute ago you told me my size and ‘being a half-pint girl,’ in your words, is ideal for some cases.

Learning the ropes—Leo’s phrase stuck in her craw. She’d had enough of learning the ropes in her brief prizefighting career and now another kind of learning loomed—but what kind exactly? Leo didn’t or couldn’t say. She suspected some of his lifestyle was supported by his gambling and some probably came from clients paying him off the books.

Leo’s father had been tight with the Youngstown mafia, but every Italian-American growing up in Youngstown made the same claim. Still, a lot of them were true. In Leo’s case, there was not much doubt. His father had been blown to smithereens in his own driveway back in the seventies in what the papers called a Youngstown tune-up.

Heading into a bitter wind barreling down from Lake Erie fifty miles north, she wondered what had changed. The mafia was gone except for some aged bookies. The union leg-breakers were gone. Even James Traficant, rogue congressman from Mahoning Valley…undone a few years ago by his own antique tractor when it rolled over on him.

Crime nowadays was associated with young black males in gangs and drugs, like everywhere else. In the first year of the nineteenth century, a man named John Young bought the future city of Youngstown for $16,000 from the Connecticut Land Company and platted the town. She wondered what he’d think of the town now.

She hugged the thin coat closer to her neck. She hurried past Jiggles, a lowbrow joint with no pretensions to class: a yard-sale sign out front on the sidewalk of a cinderblock structure a child could have designed.

Too many buildings reminded her of windowless Jehovah’s Witness churches, where faithful Witnesses slapped up the building in a mandatory three days’ time and cut corners by leaving out windows. It made break-ins by inner-city thieves more challenging. Every shop and business at this end of Market had burglar bars or metal-folding doors after closing. Downtown was full of these strip joints with names like Adam’s Eden and Eve’s Apple. On Market Street where a police substation had been now stood a transvestite club called Venus Envy. She saw another had replaced the Li Wah restaurant where her family used to dine. The new owners had torn down the fascia board where old George Kung had depicted the zodiac creatures. Now only the dog and the dragon were left as companions in scabby flaked paint—bad luck, for they were enemies in the Chinese calendar.

She turned the corner at Timmy O’Reilly’s Auto Parts and Salvage and headed for the van. The wind was colder now and fat flakes of snow started to drop from the pewter sky like parade confetti.

If it is a parade, she thought, it must be the Losers’ Parade and I’m the grand marshal.

This whole thing, this private-eye, do-it-yourself, start-over thing—was it a colossal mistake like her abortive boxing career? She had doubts, of course, but she had something that Gennaro and a lot of others who had short-changed her in the past, or like Leo, dismissed her as just a girl, never understood. As kids, Gennaro used to talk her into doing things, taking chances, but he never realized she took those risks because she didn’t have fear. Not the kind of fear normal people had, anyway. Hers was more like the fear of a base jumper about to leap off a tower or a cliff. Light as bamboo, she had a lion’s heart. If there was anything to this private-eye business that held a challenge for her, she was determined to go into it with both eyes—a little swollen right now—opened wide for whatever was waiting in the tall grass to pounce.

~ * ~

Feb. 9, the second ring: Millcreek Recreational Park.

Less than a week on the job and she was having more than second thoughts, although Leo turned out to be a good mentor, which did surprise her.

Her surveillance was going into day three and there was nothing to report so far. Leo was too cheap to rent a real RV, so she had to make do inside this cramped, moldy camper he borrowed from someone—probably one of his professional gambling pals. The Coleman stove didn’t work, for one thing; for another, she wasn’t used to being out in the dark woods like Gretel minus her brother where the sounds of night were so different from the city. The darkness beyond the RV park was on a par with an underground salt mine beneath Lake Erie.

Baby was sure Leo had not given her the full scoop on this case, and that more than anything troubled her. All he said was that it involved a property settlement in a divorce for the wife, which was vague enough. She had eyes on her target, a rough-looking customer with tattoos and a long ponytail; he also had a distinctive name—Clifford Bodycomb.

Leo, however, splurged on the Zeiss field glasses, which she kept trained on Bodycomb’s camper, specifically his windows which were catty-corner to her camper’s, about two hundred yards away. So far, nothing. He came and went on short jaunts, mostly errands; she followed.

Bodycomb didn’t have a routine; he didn’t seem to be meeting anyone, either. But he was definitely a phone zombie. Whenever he left his camper, he was talking on his cell or into a Bluetooth headphone clamped to his ear, so she knew he was in constant communication with other people. Christ Almighty, Baby, Leo complained when she handed him her first report; you ain’t writing a novel. Just give me time and places. I don’t need all this other shit—who cares whether it ‘rained a light drizzle at three in the morning’?

Boredom all day. She thought about cutting corners and getting more sleep at night, chilly and uncomfortable as the camper’s pull-out recliner was. But she stayed faithful to the job and didn’t sleep more than two hours through the first two nights.

Then, out of nowhere, some action finally.

Bodycomb left his camper at eight o’clock and jumped into his Chevy pickup. Stop calling the guy the ‘target,’ too. You ain’t gonna shoot him, are you? Baby stayed behind him all the way in the rape van, which half-share she agreed to buy from Gennaro. He grumbled and whined about being left without wheels, even though he made no effort to look for a legitimate job. Still, it was only right to buy him out. Leo looked at her as if she’d asked him to pay for a Brazilian butt lift when she expected the use of his car for surveillance. Nobody touches my ride, he growled.

Bodycomb drove recklessly, no matter what the weather or the roads were like, and he switched lanes without signaling, took corners too fast, and cut other cars off at intersections. Red lights seemed to be more suggestions than commands.

White trash asshole, Baby muttered trying to observe the rules of the road and keep up with his restored Plymouth Road Runner Hemi. She broke a few traffic laws herself to keep pace with him.

He made stops in mostly black Youngstown, the Southside ghetto, before swinging eastward toward the worst high-crime sections of the city, where he did the same thing in more stops, each house a notch lower, socioeconomically speaking, in terms of appearance and general run-down condition. The last stop was a house surrounded by similar houses except they were boarded up or left derelict to the elements. Bodycomb went into and out of houses without time to have more than a drink in any one of them. Baby thought