an elderly, hook-nosed little man wearing a straw fedora sitting low behind the wheel. "Excuse me," he said again in Italian, beckoning toward Johnny. There was a shadowy figure beside him, riding shotgun. "Mi potrebbe aiutare?"
Can you help me? the old man was asking.
The Boy Scout in Johnny straightened, and took an automatic step forward. "Si." Then he froze, spooked. Riding shotgun. There was a shadowy figure riding shotgun in a black sedan driven by an old Italian in a hat.
Dread washed over him like a cold sweat. Hadn't retired reporter Stan warned him of how protective Cosimo was of his granddaughters? What if the Carusos had discovered his identity and wanted to rub him out as they'd rubbed out his father?
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. The desperate prayer whispered inside of him, the remnant of a thousand hours in catechism class.
The old man's arm extended out the side window.
Johnny lurched back, expecting... what? Then he saw the man held one of the cemetery maps, not a gun.
"Sinatra." He shook the stapled papers as if to make his point understood. "My wife wants to see where Frank is buried," the man said in Italian.
Where Frank is buried. Frank Sinatra.
Of course that's what the wife wanted, Johnny thought, as the dread leeched out of him. To the Italian Geritol set, Frankie's grave would be both Mecca and Graceland rolled into one.
The last of the anxiety drained away, leaving Johnny still shaky yet more certain of one thing.
Jesus. God. Holy Mary, I'm in bigger trouble than I thought.
Revisiting his father's burial place hadn't eased one damn thing, he acknowledged as he walked his still-stiff body forward to direct the elderly couple. It had only made his problem more clear to him. If he didn't get a handle on these - panic attacks, there was no point in pretending they were anything else - he was going to be seeing demons in Disney characters. And drive himself right over the edge of sanity.
Johnny brooded over the truth of that through dusk and moonlight. As his hotel room clock edged past midnight - he tried to yank the damn thing from the wall, but then found out that even five-star hotels welded their property into the plaster - and closer to his personal witching hour of 1 a.m., he couldn't stand his own company any longer.
At 12:50, instead of crawling out of his skin, he made a call.
" 'Lo?" Tea sounded warm and sleepy, and in his mind's eye he saw her perfect skin flushed, the exact shade of those apricot roses she'd dropped to the ground just minutes before the feel of her lips on his had blown off the top of his head.
"How are you?"
"Johnny?" she breathed his name in a way that made him think she was only half-awake. "Johnny, is that you?"
"In the flesh."
"Not flesh." Sheets rustled. "Phone."
"Such a stickler for details," he scolded.
He heard the squeak of bedsprings. "What do you need?" she asked.
Release. Relief. Sleep. "I was thinking about you." And he hoped talking to her would distract him from the dark turn his thoughts always took at this time of night.
"You finished your business?" she asked, her voice still husky with sleep.
"Mm-hmm." He wondered what she was wearing. Flannel? Silk? Skin? In his mind's eye her dark hair tumbled across her naked shoulders and waved over her breasts, playing peekaboo with her - raspberry-, mocha-, peach-colored? - nipples. "Business all done," he murmured.
"I don't even know what it is you do."
Distracted by the fantasy, he opened his mouth. "I'm a - " Gambler. Like my father before me, I'm a gambler.
The thought popped that naked-Tea bubble hovering in his mind. Like his father before him, he mused, scrubbing his hand over his face. Was that why he hadn't been sleeping since his last birthday? Was he afraid that following in his father's footsteps meant he was also destined to die at the age of thirty-three?
But he wasn't a wiseguy. And his father hadn't been one either, damn it. Sixteen years ago, his father had said he'd left all that behind and Johnny believed him.
Or he only wanted to.
"Johnny? Are you there?"
He wrenched his thoughts from that shadowy path. His phone call to Tea was supposed to give him a rest from all that. He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. "I'm here," he said, then remembered her question. "I'm a... money manager."
She made