Street Smart

Praise for Tara Taylor Quinn’s

WHERE THE ROAD ENDS

“Quinn smoothly blends women’s fiction with suspense and then adds a dash of romance to construct an emotionally intense, compelling story….”

—Booklist

“Tara Taylor Quinn takes readers on a journey…and brilliantly explores the emotions involved.”

—Romantic Times

“Quinn ties you up in knots emotionally as her wonderful voice explodes into the mainstream….”

—Reader to Reader

“One of the skills that has served Quinn best…has been her ability to explore edgier subjects.”

—Publishers Weekly

“With mesmerizing prose, Quinn takes the reader through the darkest of shadows, weaving danger and intrigue into every step, until at last emerging into a dazzling world of new possibility and metamorphosis…. Where the Road Ends comes very highly recommended.”

—Wordweaving

“Emotionally complex and powerful novel… Moving and deep, this book has much to say about priorities and love…. Look for a great future for this author.”

—Huntress Reviews

Dear Reader,

I’m still celebrating your response to my debut for MIRA Books. Where the Road Ends was out last summer, and I can hardly believe it’s time for another release.

I bring you Street Smart with a bit of trepidation and a whole lot of heart. The trepidation comes from your expectations, which I don’t want, ever, to disappoint. This is not like any other book I’ve written. It explores topics I have not explored before and never thought I would. And yet, as with every single story I tell, it comes from within me. My work seems to happen on its own, almost in spite of me. The people, their lives come from somewhere deep inside. How they get there, I don’t question. What to do with them, I don’t ask. I sit. I think and feel. I type. And I give them—my characters—to you.

I offer you Street Smart with my very best wishes.

Tara Taylor Quinn

I love to hear from readers. You can reach me at P.O. Box 15065, Scottsdale, AZ 85267 or check out my Web site: www.tarataylorquinn.com.

Street Smart

Tara Taylor Quinn

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To the coolest girls I know—

Patricia Potter, Carol Prescott, Lynn Kerstan and Mary Strand. I’m a lot smarter because of the four of you. And looking forward to how much smarter I’m going to get!

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

1

She pushed as hard as she could. Pushed until her insides felt as though they were ripping away from her bones. There was supposed to be time in between. Time to breathe. To maintain sanity. Instead, one wave of mind-altering pain followed another.

How long she’d been lying there, Francesca Witting had no idea. She’d lost track of time during the night. It was all a blur to her now. Pain. Despair. Determination.

And fear.

Something was wrong. She didn’t have to see the worried expressions on the faces of the medical personnel as they examined her, measured, watched screens, to know that. If her instincts weren’t insistent enough, her body was telling her that this son of hers was not coming into the world as nature had intended. He wasn’t helping enough. Or she wasn’t. Instead of sliding down the birth canal, he was tearing her apart from the inside out.

Terrified, she rode the pains, accepted them, for they meant she was still alive—and that maybe he was.

Most of the time speech flew around her, over her. Tense, staccato words—orders she couldn’t understand. In a language she knew only peripherally.

Francesca was used to being alone. Was in Italy now, alone, by her own choice.

She’d just never thought she’d die this way.

Never thought she’d die without seeing Autumn again. Without knowing that her runaway half sister who’d been missing for more than two years was safe and well.

People she’d never seen before—and didn’t really see now—came and went from the little gray-walled room. Touching her. Mostly she couldn’t feel them. The searing pain from within left no room for other sensation. When she could focus, she saw them, all moving quickly in their green scrubs, their hair covered, their features serious. Intensely engaged. Most were wearing thin plastic gloves. Or pushing fingers into them. Or peeling them off.

Few paid attention to the American woman’s face. Their concern was lower down, inside the tented sheet, on the miracle that was becoming a tragedy.

Francesca’s legs had been spread in stirrups beneath that sheet for so long the position felt permanent. A lot more permanent than her life, or the tiny life that she prayed was still alive, struggling inside her.

“Aahh.” She heard the wail, but didn’t immediately identify it as her own. As she’d been doing for hours, she stared at a green light ticking off seconds on a monitor to one side of her left knee.

For the past hours she’d alternated between sweating and getting chills from wet skin touched by the room’s cool air.

A nurse adjusted the IV connected to her right hand. Probably because the excruciating pain in her lower abdomen was on the downward slope of its current wave, Francesca was aware as the IV needle moved beneath her skin. It hurt.

Another nurse, a fairly young one, stepped up to Francesca’s shoulder, offering her ice chips and indistinguishable Italian words in a kind voice. The woman’s mouth was pinched, her eyes carefully guarded.

Francesca barely had the energy to shake her head. If she had to swallow, she’d choke. Gripping the bed-sheet with clenched fists, she turned her head on the soaking-wet pillow they’d changed more than once. Her short damp hair stuck to the side of her face.

The woman tried again, bringing a spoonful of chips to Francesca’s parched lips, her tone encouraging. With a breath she hoped would be deep enough to get her through the next seconds of pain, Francesca allowed the chips to rest against her closed lips. The ice was cold, on the left side of her bottom lip and the right side of her top. Very cold. Cold enough for her to feel. She thought about those cold spots. Concentrated on them. As hard as she could. Until nothing existed but those tiny sensations of cold.

In that split second of relief a vision of Antonio’s compelling face flashed before her eyes. His coal-black hair. Eyes that were almost black in color and yet so full of warmth—of intelligent compassion—that they drew her relentlessly.

Oh, God, Antonio. She hadn’t told him…Couldn’t. His life was elsewhere. Irrevocably tied to another woman. A disabled woman. But it seemed as if, somehow, he’d come here, to this place.

Her face aching with the smile that was attempting to force its way through tight cracked skin, Francesca blinked, hoping to bring his face into clearer focus. His face, with its permanent shadow of a beard that would be thick and full were it permitted to grow longer than twelve hours.

Had someone found out? Called him from halfway around the world? Because she was dying? Or his baby was?

Another pain rose to unbearable levels and she couldn’t hold on to his image.

Don’t leave, my love. Stay. Just for a few minutes.

Blinking the sweat and tears from her eyes, Francesca sought out her only remaining source of strength. Antonio’s smile. And saw, instead, a younger face in glaring light. A concerned gaze. A few escaped tendrils of brown hair sticking out from beneath a light green, tied-on cap. A female face.

She blinked again. The pain wasn’t subsiding at all.

“Antonio!” The word was a scream inside her mind. In the room, it sounded more like a harsh whisper.

Antonio.

Her biggest sin.

He was one of the few people who’d managed to penetrate the defenses she’d wrapped around herself after she’d left home and the stepfather who’d hit her and the mother who’d been too emotionally battered to help her. Defenses that had served her well as she became the determined Italian-American photojournalist who’d managed to make a name for herself with her pictures and accompanying text by the time she was thirty.

The nurse was leaning over her, placing her face so close to Francesca’s, Francesca could hardly breathe, let alone make out what the woman was trying to say.

Turning her head to the side as her lower stomach twisted inside out, ripping away from her spine, Francesca took one last breath.

“Antonio!”

His face was there again. Just his face this time. Floating above her.

And then everything was dark.

Gian was a popular name for Italian boys. But that wasn’t why the little guy’s mother named him that. Gian meant “God is gracious.” And that was the reason Francesca had bestowed the name on her little son. Because the powers that be had been gracious that morning two and a half months ago and preserved the life of the infant who’d been almost strangled by the umbilical cord in his mother’s womb.

Francesca was trying to be quiet so as to not wake her paternal grandmother. Sancia Witting, the current matriarch of an old Italian family that had immigrated to Italy from Wales centuries before, needed her afternoon siesta. Rolling up a dozen summer-weight sleepers Francesca stuffed them into the far corner of the second of two oversize dark green duffels on the double bed in Sancia’s guest room. Gian, who’d been asleep for more than an hour in his portable crib, wasn’t a concern. This son of hers could sleep through a minor hurricane, as he’d proved three weeks before when a debilitating storm had hit the coast of Naples, waking all within a hundred-mile radius. But not Gian.

His washcloth and hooded towels were next. The lotions and powders that left his little body so sweet-smelling already lay secure in a plastic bag in the other duffel, along with a week’s worth of disposable diapers padding all her cameras. This late-spring time out of time with her newborn son—and the grandmother she’d just met the month before—had been without doubt the most joyful she’d known since her father’s death almost twenty years before. But life was calling on her to begin moving again.

Actually, although she’d never admit as much to her overprotective grandmother, Francesca had done the calling herself. She’d left messages for a couple of magazine editors who were always eager for a Francesca Witting piece.

She’d had calls back from both. And now she and Gian were off to spend June in New York, Boston and San Diego before returning to Sacramento to introduce him to the grandmother who didn’t yet know he existed. Francesca had sold the piece she’d come to Italy to do almost a year before—an in-depth look at Italian people through their weathering of disasters. And she’d been asked to do a follow-up piece highlighting the similarities of their character and culture to Italians living in neighborhoods in America. This time she’d have a companion during her travels.

The little guy was sleeping so soundly he hadn’t moved since she’d put him down. She’d have to wake him soon or he’d be up all night. Gian’s favorite four rattles and a stuffed horse his great-grandmother had given him went in next, beside two pairs of soft-sided shoes.

In the many months since Francesca had left her home in Sacramento, she’d visited families in Sicily who’d lost loved ones in a train crash a couple of years before, those who were affected by Etna’s boiling lava spewing forth, and the parents of children who were killed when an earthquake leveled their school. A freelance photojournalist with enough money to follow her artistic inclinations rather than take one of the many job offers she’d received from national magazines and Reuters and newspapers all around the state of California, she’d done the story of her career.

It was while she was visiting Milan, where she’d documented people whose loved ones had died in a plane that had crashed into the top floors of a thirty-story building two years earlier, that Antonio Gillespie, her former boyfriend, had arrived on business from Sacramento. His father-in-law was a retailer with upscale shops all over the states. Antonio, who was second in command, had come to finalize a deal with one of Milan’s top designers. And to take a break from the wife he’d described as more of a child than a woman since the car accident that had left her brain-damaged and paralyzed.

Francesca hadn’t been able to stay angry with him for having kept the woman a secret during the two years she’d known him, hadn’t been able to hold on to feelings of betrayal, because she’d understood. Especially now, glancing over at her tiny son who gave himself as completely to his sleep as he did his play. Her heart was open wide and filled with forgiveness. Gian’s father was an admirable man who could not heartlessly send the woman who’d once been his life partner to an institution, in spite of the instant and undeniably rich attachment he and Francesca had shared since she’d first interviewed him for a story she’d done on the debilitating impact of fashion in America. This was the man she’d tell Gian about when he grew up and asked questions about the father he didn’t know.

Folding, stuffing, Francesca remembered that last scene in Sacramento. Another retailer had told her that Antonio was married, that the company she’d thought his own actually belonged to his father-in-law. He hadn’t tried to deny it. To lie. And in the end, after she’d heard the heart-wrenchingly sad story of a fairy tale gone wrong, she hadn’t been angry. Just devastated. And had left the States to get over him. He’d known that. But he’d been as lonely as she….

The sound of dishes rattling in the kitchen across the small villa brought Francesca back to the task at hand. Her grandmother Sancia was up from her siesta and would be expecting Francesca to join her for an afternoon snack. And she still had all her own clothes to pack into the other half of the second duffel.

Although she’d spent more than nine months in Italy before she’d contacted her father’s mother, introducing herself to the grandmother she’d never known, Sancia was probably the real reason Francesca had come to this country. Looking back, she could recognize the quest that had driven her halfway around the world at a time when her mother had needed her at home.

Nothing in life had made sense anymore. Nothing, other than her career, had made her happy. She’d begun to question her basic beliefs, her decisions and motivations, even her ability to offer compassionate stories to the world.

So she’d come to Italy with some half-formed hope that she might find what she was missing among the people of her father’s land. That the culture, the values, the heart and soul of Italy would give her what she could not seem to provide for herself. A solid sense of self. Of direction.

Almost a year later, contemplating her trip home, she wasn’t sure they’d produced anything quite so significant. But these long months had given her Gian.

And he’d given life meaning.

Finished packing, she went to wake her son.

Five weeks later.

God, it was sweltering. Carrying a single duffel filled mostly with cameras she hadn’t used in more than a month, Francesca climbed the steps of Lucky Seven, an extended-stay motel off the Strip, to the room she’d just rented. Las Vegas in July was hell.

She’d forgotten that.

Just as she’d forgotten anything of value in taking pictures. She hadn’t picked up a camera since that last day in Italy, when she’d packed them in the bottom of a bag. Nor did she intend to.

She’d buried any meaning her life held in a little old cemetery a couple of miles from Sancia Witting’s home.

The phone was ringing as she pushed her way through the door of her two-room suite.

“Hello?”

A cursory glance told her the room was clean.

“This is José at the front desk, Ms. Witting.”

“Yes?” What was he bothering her for? She was tired. Hot. Lacking even an ounce of the capacity it would take to be civil to other human beings.

“I have that number you asked for. The one for the used-car dealer.”

She wasn’t planning to be in town for more than a week. But she had to get a car now that she was back in the States—she’d sold her Mustang before she’d left for Italy—and figured that, rather than paying for a rental, she’d buy one here. She’d drive Autumn back to Sacramento when they returned together.

“That was quick,” she told José now, duffel still on her shoulder as she scribbled the number on the envelope he’d given her downstairs with her receipt.

“My friend’s at work tonight. He’ll be there all weekend, too.”

“Great, thanks,” she said, conjuring up enough energy to say a pleasant goodbye and get off the phone. Car-shopping on a Friday night in Vegas. Just what she wanted to do.

But then, she thought, dropping her duffel on the bed, there was nothing in the entire universe that Francesca Witting wanted to do. Except not think about that crib with the too-still infant. That Italian cemetery.

And she wanted to follow up on the phone call her mother had received that week from her younger sister. A runaway, Autumn had been missing for more than two years. Earlier this week, she’d been in Las Vegas. Francesca was going to find her.

And get Autumn’s ass home where it belonged.

“Luke, have a seat.”

He’d rather stand. But he sat in one of the lushly upholstered high-backed chairs across from his boss and mentor’s oversize mahogany desk. The chairs were gold now. The year before they’d been maroon.

Luke preferred the maroon.

“How’s your mother?” Amadeo asked.

Fingers steepled at his lips, Luke shrugged. Luke Everson didn’t talk about his mother. Amadeo Esposito knew that.

And still, without fail, every time he saw Luke he asked.

Glancing beyond Luke’s left shoulder, Amadeo gave a slight nod, dismissing the two “companions” who were never more than a few feet away. Their feet moved soundlessly on the plush maroon carpet that had recently replaced last year’s golden brown. Maroon and gold were Esposito’s colors. Always had been.

When the heavy wood door clicked shut behind them, Amadeo met Luke’s gaze, his dark eyes narrowed. “You want to tell me what’s going on at the Bonaparte?”

A lesser man might have been intimidated. Most men who came in contact with the owner and CEO of Biamonte Industries—a conglomerate that owned a tenth of Las Vegas—were intimidated. Italian-born Esposito, while having no Mafia affiliations or connections, was a very rich and sometimes ruthless man who knew how to use his money to get what he wanted.

Amadeo Esposito did many things Luke wouldn’t have done—or would’ve done differently.

But Luke had known the man all his life. He’d seen Amadeo cry at his daughter’s funeral fifteen years before. And then again at his wife’s.

Amadeo had cried with Luke at Luke’s father’s funeral three years before.

“There’ve been too many big wins.” Luke told Amadeo what he already knew.

The Bonaparte, one of the Strip’s newest and most elite casino-hotels, was Luke’s personal responsibility.

Esposito waited. He was not a patient man, something Luke had never respected about him.

Leaning forward, Luke rested his forearms across his knees. “There’s no apparent pattern,” he reported. “The winners come from all over. All ages. An eighty-year-old woman from a retirement village in Phoenix, a twenty-two-year-old Wall Street wannabe and everything in between. They hail from no particular part of the country, come at no particular time, stay in no particular hotel, frequent no particular casinos, stay no particular length of time. For some, this is their first time in Vegas. Others are veterans. FaceIt found nothing.” Luke named the high-tech surveillance technology that, in conjunction with an Internet security database system, was capable of identifying casino cheaters, card counters and those associated with them.

Esposito’s face tightened.

“With the new digital-recording system, plus the incident-reporting and risk-management software, we’ve been able to call up every aspect of each case individually. We’ve tracked tape from each dealer down to every single time a drawer opens—and there’s absolutely nothing.”

“What about dealers?” Esposito demanded. “New technology only means that crooks find new ways to get around it. We’re only as good as the people who work for us.”

Luke shook his head. “Everyone checks out,” he said. “I talked to Jackson, and he vouched for all of them, as well.”

Arnold Jackson was not only the best dealer they had, he was the closest thing Luke Everson had to a personal friend. He was as much a part of the family as Luke himself—and one of the handful of people Esposito trusted.

His tanned face creased in a frown beneath dark silver hair, Amadeo leaned forward. “There is one pattern,” he said, his voice lowered to the decibel of dangerous. “All the wins are at the Bonaparte.”

The back of his neck aching, Luke shook his head. “It’s beginning to look like there are at least two others.” Luke named them both—well-known strip resorts—listing the dates and exact amounts of the wins in question. “And there’s no pattern in the locations,” he added. “One’s new, one’s been around for years. One is independently owned, one’s part of a corporation.

“And none have any relationship, either past or current, with Biamonte Industries,” he said, summing up what they already knew. He added, “I’ve been working with the security directors to run a check on all current and past employees to look for someone in common to all three—or even to two of us. Nothing significant has turned up.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence.”

Sighing, Luke sat back, running a hand through his blond hair. “I’ve viewed and reviewed the tapes. Didn’t even come up with a case of enlarged pores.” Luke wondered how many of the gamblers they caught counting cards every year knew that something as innocuous as their skin could give them away.

Amadeo didn’t reply for several moments. Moments that would’ve seemed endless had Luke not been fully aware of the older man’s habit of focusing silently when he had something to ponder.

“There is one pattern here.” Esposito’s usually nonexistent Italian accent slipped into his speech.

Raised brows were Luke’s only response.

“No two wins took place at the same time.”

“Anything else would just be stupid,” Luke said.

Nodding slowly, Amadeo said, “And it would also allow a person or persons to be at those tables, as a bystander, guiding the potential winners and waiting in the wings to collect a share of the take.”

In Luke’s opinion, Esposito had underestimated his ex-marine officer protégé.

Luke elaborated. “The operation would have to be large enough to hire a different player for every win. We have two thousand cameras out there, Amadeo, with a several-yard radius around every table. There isn’t a single instance of anyone in the vicinity sharing even a slight resemblance with those in the vicinity of the other wins.”

“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.”