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“About Cratty,” she said.
He gave her a little nod. “Yes?”
“Nothing firm, nothing provable.”
“Same here,” he said.
“Whoa.” She nodded back. Their gazes locked. “I feel better.”
“Me, too, Iz.” He took her hand.
She took a deep breath, then said something that would humiliate Big Vince if he heard her say it. “My dad is…over fifty, Pat. He’s gone through a lot. Please remind whoever’s in charge of this Cratty thing. If it’s dangerous…”
“Understood.”
She was grateful to her core that he did understand. Suddenly it was the best thing in the world that the man she was attracted to was a cop. She was a cop’s daughter, and she wanted to be a cop. It was the only world she knew—no matter how dangerous or strange.
Pat had had to go back to the station. The physician on duty refused to release Izzy until she could prove that someone was going to stay with her for the next twenty-four hours.
She thought about staying with Aunt Clara, but their place in Queens was always pure bedlam. There would be endless calls between Clara and Big Vince, and a lot of yelling. Yes, she did love her big, noisy Italian family, but she needed some quiet tonight.
When she called Aunt Clara and the phone was busy, she took that as a sign not to pursue it. Then Yolanda arrived, telling her that her shift was over and she could take her home with her. “That okay?” Yolanda asked her excitedly. “I’d come to your house but Tria is working tonight so I need to watch Chango.”
Izzy raised a brow. She was fairly certain that chango meant “monkey” in Spanish. She rethought her decision. Except that Clara had five children, two dogs and several very noisy finches.
One night won’t kill me, she thought, making her decision.
“Okay. Thanks so much,” Izzy said.
“Bueno,” Yolanda said, clapping her hands. “Now, let’s go see your father before we go.”
Finally. Izzy had been begging them for hours to take her to him.
The doctor agreed to prepare Izzy’s discharge papers on condition that she sit in a wheelchair while Yolanda did the steering. Bouncing along, radiant in her helpfulness, Yolanda wheeled Izzy to an elevator.
They went up to another floor and Yolanda breezed her straight down a corridor, hung a left and paused on the threshold of a dimly lit room.
“Officer DeMarco? It’s us!” Yolanda sang out.
“Izzy?” her father croaked from the nearest bed.
“Yes.” Izzy began to rise from the chair. Yolanda clamped a hand on her shoulder and forced her to stay seated. She wheeled her into the room and around the side of the bed. “How are you, Daddy?” she asked softly.
“Everyone keeps asking me that. I’m fine.” Big Vince sounded exasperated and hoarse.
“It’s because they don’t want you to sue them,” Yolanda informed him. “If they let you out but you were still messed up, you’d have a case.”
“That so,” he said politely. He turned to Izzy. “How you doing, princess?”
Big Vince had not called Izzy “princess” in years. And she had not called him “Daddy” in years. It was as if those two softer people had been buried with her mother.
She said, “I’m okay.”
Yolanda cleared her throat. “I need a Diet Dr Pepper. I’ll check on you later, Izzy.”
She smiled gratefully. “Thanks.”
Yolanda left. Without taking his gaze from her face, Big Vince grunted. “This from falling?” he asked her, hand hovering above her temple.
Before she could answer he said in a rush, “Izzy, I have to tell you something.” His eyes got watery; his mouth pulled up in a smile. “Your mother saved my life.”
Izzy blinked. “What?”
He nodded eagerly, sitting up and grabbing her hands. “She looked down from heaven and warned me to hit the ground. The shooter was aiming right at us. I heard her voice in my head. If she hadn’t warned me, I would be dead.”
Izzy was stunned. She said slowly, “Did you really hear her voice? It was Ma?”
“Yes,” he said, seizing a couple of sheets of tissue from the box on the end table. He wiped his three-cornered Italian eyes. “I heard her loud and clear.”
His face was literally glowing.
“Your mother is still with us, baby. She hasn’t left us. And she saved my life today.” The tough Big Vince exterior cracked a little more. “My Anna Maria is back. ”
Izzy stared at him. “It’s a miracle,” he whispered.
She reeled. The nightmare…all this time, had it been in preparation for this day, this danger? Was her mother really with them? She looked up, around, joyful and a little anxious, half expecting to see her mother’s ghostly apparition floating in the room.
“Did you tell Gino about all this yet?” she asked, not sure what else to say.
“His phone was turned off. Maybe he’s at Mass. I left a message for him to call me back.”
He held her hands and began to weep.
“Your mother,” he sobbed. “Your sainted mother.”
She didn’t know what to say.
Upon her discharge, the doctor informed Izzy that she was anemic, gave her a prescription for iron pills and sent her home to bed.
“And have a steak,” he told her.
Yolanda’s roommate, Tria, picked them up at the curb in a beat-up, old, pale green Chevy station wagon. McDonald’s wrappers and yellowed copies of The Star littered the floor. Izzy sat in front and Yolanda wrapped herself around the chubby-cheeked baby who was strapped into an infant car seat in the back.
They didn’t live far away, which was to say that they lived in a bad part of town. It wasn’t the projects, but it was close. They parked on the street, behind a broken-down truck and a low-rider guarded by a boy of about eleven wearing a black bandana over his hair. Tria sprang Chango—whose real name was Calvin—from car seat prison. As they walked toward the entrance of a twelve-story brick apartment building, Yolanda got quiet, as if she were embarrassed that she had brought Izzy here. Maybe in the enthusiasm of inviting Izzy to recuperate at her place, she had forgotten that her new place wasn’t half as nice as her old place.
The entrance was coated with graffiti. The elevator reeked of booze, marijuana and pee. As they rode it to the ninth floor, Yolanda’s perfume wafted toward Izzy and she was grateful for the sweet vanilla scent.
They entered the tiny one-bedroom apartment. Posters of movie stars had been tacked up on the cracked pale-green walls with pushpins. There was a broken-down, green corduroy couch, a pile of books, the top of which read Medical Assistant Test Preparation. A sliver-size kitchen was fairly clean, the counter dotted with baby food jars, bottles and a container of powdered formula.
Incongruous in the extreme, an enormous state-of-the-art high-definition TV sat about three feet from the couch. It took up over half of the entire room.
Yolanda saw Izzy looking at it and said, “Flaco gave that to me.” Flaco was her evil ex-boyfriend.
“Girl, you told me you bought that thing,” Tria said accusingly. “What, he give you that when you moved out? He probably stole it.”
Yolanda looked stricken. Izzy said, “Well, it’s a very nice TV.”
“Unless it’s stolen. Then it is not nice,” Tria insisted.
Izzy really didn’t want to know any more sordid details, so she excused herself, called her father from the bedroom and assured him that all was well. He sounded tired and she didn’t stay on long.
Gino called and she said, “I’m okay.”
“Aunt Clara’s upset that you aren’t staying with her,” he informed her. “She wants to call you and tell you so. I told her they’ve got you on drugs. That may buy you some time.”
“You’re a saint.”
“Working on it,” he replied. “I’ll get the boys to pray for you.”
“Make sure they’re getting A’s in praying.”
“Our permanent records are very accurate.”
He hung up.
“We’ve got it all worked out,” Yolanda told her.
It was like a teenager overnight. Izzy was supposed to take the double bed in the bedroom. The sheets, which featured angels with big eyes, were clean. Yolanda would sleep on the couch until Tria came home around five in the morning or so. Izzy wasn’t sure what Tria did, and she didn’t ask. When Tria got home, Yolanda would move from the couch to a pile of cushions on the floor. Izzy wanted to object, but didn’t. Her head hurt and she was exhausted.
While Yolanda fussed over the baby, Tria said to Izzy, “You have whatever you want in the fridge, honey. We got some leftovers from the Roy Rogers down the street.”
“Thank you,” Izzy said politely. She thought with fleeting longing of the baked ziti she had made last night, with plans to microwave the leftovers tonight. At least her appetite was back.
She accepted an oversize T-shirt that read ¡Suave! beneath a faded picture of Marc Anthony and put it on, got into bed and closed her eyes. Through the closed door, she could hear Calvin fussing and crying.
About an hour into it, she got out her cell and called her aunt’s house. The phone was still busy.
Calvin keened like a banshee.
Finally she got up and walked into the living room. Yolanda was jostling the baby on her lap while she watched TV and talked on the phone. She saw Izzy and smiled.
“Hold on a sec,” she said to the person on the other end.
“Hey,” Izzy said. “I’m thinking of going to my house.”
“Oh? No, no,” Yolanda told her. “Look, I’m talking to Jax. He lives across the hall. I’ll go over there with Chango. It’ll get quiet.” She wrinkled her nose in a moue of apology. “Okay?”
Before Izzy could reply, Yolanda disconnected, zapped the TV with the remote and said to Izzy in a motherly tone, “Now, please, mami, go back to bed. I’ll check on you in a little bit.”
Izzy complied, shuffling back into the bedroom. Her head was hurting again and she exhaled deeply as she lay down. The ticking of a clock grew louder in her ears as she settled in. She could feel herself begin to doze.
Allez! Vite!
Izzy’s eyes flew open at the sound of a male voice in her room.
“Yolanda, is your friend over?” she called. Maybe he had mistaken the bedroom for the bathroom or—
Isabelle!
She knew that voice. It was the man who had appeared in her dream—the second man, the one with the wild hair tumbling over his shoulders and the golden ring. The one whom she had answered, in French.
She started fumbling for the light, but she was in a strange room and she didn’t know where it was.
C’est moi, Jean-Marc de Devereaux des Ombres.
His voice was insistent, urgent. But it was inside her head. In her mind. Experimentally, she touched her head, feeling for headphones. Patting the pillow. “Who are you?” she demanded again, squinting into the darkness. “Where are you?”
A friend. Trust me. They’re looking for you.
I’ve gone crazy, she thought. But as she looked around again, she said hopefully, “Ma?”
No, I’m not Marianne. But I speak for her. I speak for Maison des Flammes…the House of the Flames. They’re searching for you. I’ll do all I can to protect you.
Suddenly a violent pain blossomed behind her eyes. With a gasp, she pressed her fingertips against the bridge of her nose. It was so bad that she doubled over, losing her balance, and tumbled on her knees to the floor.
“Did you do that?” she yelled.
Shh. Lower your voice. They don’t know where you are. But they’re closing in.
Holding on to her bed, she got to her feet. Rubbing her forehead, she saw a rectangle of light around the venetian blinds. She stood to the side of it, then lifted the corner of the dark blue curtain and spied out onto the street below.
Her heart turned to ice.
The man in the long black coat stood across the street. He was smoking; she saw the glow of his cigarette against the dark outline of his head. He was not looking at her window; his gaze was focused a floor or two above it. But he was searching, scanning. She felt the familiar irrational dread at the sight of him.
She murmured, “Is that you or a friend of yours?”
Is someone outside?
“Yes,” she said.
Get out! Get out immediately! Don’t let him see you or you are dead!
“Okay, wait. Time out,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”
Maintenant! Vite!
“I have to get dressed—”
