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dark now with the interim lights flashing overhead, and that sense of pressure growing over them as they got deeper under the Hudson he focused on the cool gunmetal against his neck. Freezing actually, which made him think of his mother's grave, standing there in the snow with his father drunk and sobbing on the ground, his hair growing thick with ice.
    “What's your name?” she asked, sitting back, placing the .38 on the seat beside her. She poured herself another drink and turned so that she was casually facing the partition, her hair wafting in the breeze from the air- conditioner vents.
    He gave her the name of the fake ID he'd gotten the job under. It would hold up, at least for a while, depending on how hard she pushed it.
    “You've got nerve but that's not enough, you know.”
    “For what?”
    “For being one of my employees.”
    He caught her eyes again, astute as hell, but she wasn't onto him as a heister. She thought he was trying to show off to her, trying to impress her so he could get in her pants, marry her, share in her millions. “I'm just doing my job.”
    “But without the gloves and hat.”
    “I am wearing a tie,” Chase said.
    “I don't like it.”
    “Me neither. You can blame Moe.”
    A crisp smile twisted across her lips. “It's an old man's style.”
    “Yeah, like Jackie's aftershave.”
    “Yes. Our home is draped in ancient history. My father's, the men who've worked there who are dead or in prison now. The families that came before us. My father bought the estate from Jimmy ‘Toots’ Defazo, who was machine- gunned in the living room by his own consigliere. There are still some paintings in the halls of him. My father liked takingthe man's home. And his belongings. And his heritage, and then adding it to his own. My brother is trying to do the same thing. Like this incident, for instance. Jackie can get one of the other men to drive him into the city, but he won't allow that. It is, after all, why we have a chauffeur.”
    “Why doesn't he just take the Ferrari?” Chase asked.
    “It doesn't run.”
    “It does now. I gave it a tune- up.”
    “The car doesn't actually matter. He's afraid of it, I think. It's too much style for him to live up to. Did he get angry with you for touching it?”
    “Yeah, he tried to have two of his bodyguards break my appendages.”
    “But they failed,” she said.
    “Mostly.”
    She gave a slow tsk tsk tsk with a pursed bottom lip, making it sexy. “Be careful fooling with someone's conceit, even if it is broken. It's what people fear most. Being forced to face up to their own charade, having their weakness exposed. They'll die with their teeth in your throat before they allow that to happen.”
    Telling him this after cleaning his ear out with a gun barrel.
    “When I was a girl my father once took us to Asbury Park, before the renovations began, when it was nothing but a dead boardwalk in a mostly lifeless city. Autumn. But without the colors, or the leaves, oranything else, really, just the empty sand. It was very cold, a dark day, overcast, but with no wind. More than that it was bleak. You couldn't touch anything without getting covered with splinters. All the buildings creaked and complained. Broken glass everywhere. You could feel how motionless and lonely and corrupted the pier was, the ocean barely rippling. The birds already gone.”
    She took a sip, rattled the ice in tune to her own memory. “Jackie started crying as we looked out over the park, our backs to the water. He thought the corpses of drowned sailors were going to grab hold of his ankles between the slats of lumber. I believed our father was angry with us for some reason, even though he seemed in a happy mood. He'd invested in some property there as a tax write- off, and knew that in the years to come the city would rebuild itself and his interests would pay off in a big way. It was something for him to be proud of on every level. Outfoxing the IRS, contributing to the