“Jesus,” I said, the wobble in my voice telling how nervous I was. “What’s up with him anyway?”
She did not answer but her foot pressed all the way down and we were off like a rocket. I closed my eyes and thought about praying. I repented my sins rapidly; I should not have left my husband even if he did behave like a bastard. I should not have called him a bastard. We went quicker and I thought even quicker: I should have taken the damn money, taken all the jewelry, gotten a good lawyer and sued the hell out of him. Instead I was going to end my days the victim of a madwoman whose red hair and crochet gloves should have given me due warning. I had ignored that gut instinct and now I was to pay the price.
“Hang on, my dear,” she said, taking a hand off the wheel to brush her hair out of her eyes. I held my breath. Two hands were better than one even if it was a no-win situation. I decided to close my eyes. No point in watching the Maserati compete with the Ducati and the Porsche and a rapidly approaching sixteen-wheeler for road ownership when it was all doomed to disaster anyway. I did like this car though, loved the smooth feel of the leather under my desperate clutching hand, the way my head fit on the perfectly adjusted headrest. I even liked, no, at this moment I loved the way the seat belt gripped my chest, though I’d probably have no tits left whenever it stopped. If it stopped. I hung on.
And then the Ducati roared past, the small green car disappeared, the road stopped being underneath us, and we were flying, a glorious dark blue bird, smooth as on a test drive, through the air into the depths below.
Somewhere, somehow, out of the corner of my eye before I shut out everything and fled into unconsciousness, I glimpsed the Ducati tearing up that stretch of the corniche road, its faceless leather-clad driver speeding away without so much as a glance our way. The Porsche was gone, the green car was gone, he was gone, and so, I believed were we. I did not feel it would be to a better place. But then, I didn’t have much time to think about anything.
4
Chad Prescott
The flight from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle to Nice’s C?te d’Azur was delayed. That was what Chad Prescott was told when he disembarked from his third flight in twenty-four hours, starting out in a small and very ancient Fokker biplane in a jungle airstrip in the Amazon that took him to Manaus, and from there, on a six-seater Lear to S?o Paulo. Which was where he had started out to begin with, several months ago.
It seemed longer than that, he thought wearily, taking a seat at the bar in the first-class lounge and downing a beer, his first in a long time. Well, his first cold beer. He’d had others but those he’d drunk in locations where refrigeration was erratic, if not completely unknown. He had the generator in his truck, of course, but that was used for medical situations, its energy not to be wasted on simply chilling a beer.
He ordered a ham-and-cheese sandwich. It came on a soggy roll but still tasted better than anything he recalled eating recently. There had never been much time to think of anything other than the job at hand.
Chad was what he’d always termed a “medical man.” Born in Chicago, where he later attended med school, to a French mother and a U.D. engineer father, who had died together in a train crash in Europe, he was used to international travel from childhood, to calling the place he happened to be at that moment, “home.” He was a surgeon specializing in facial reconstruction, which is what took him twice a year to South America, Africa, the Congo—you name it—and where he operated on children with cleft palates, or without noses, or whose jaws were malformed. Job satisfaction rated high on his list, especially when he saw the amazed joy on the young patients’ faces when they looked at the results in the mirror. He might not be able to give them beauty, but he gave them normality. It was enough.