Tara Quinn - Street Smart

“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.

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.”