The Mercedes had a regular license, but the one on the BMW said JINA. "Is that the way you spell your name?" I asked her. "I thought it was Gina-G-I-N-A."

"They named me Gina. I didn't like it. When I have something I don't like, I change it."

"Who's Zia Peppina?" I wanted to know.

"Me. Auntie Pepper, you capisce? When I was a little girl, I was a chubby, happy child-always running, getting into mischief. With my red hair, they used to call me Peppina. Little Pepper. But when I got older, when I got to be myself, they stopped calling me that baby name. I only let Scotty call me that because he's special to me."

"People call you Jina now?"

"No," the redhead said, "now they call me Strega."

The side door slammed behind me and I was alone.

I drove too fast getting out of her neighborhood, cold speed inside me, rushing around like cocaine. Even the twenty-five grand in my coat couldn't keep out the chill. Strega. I knew what the word meant-a witch-bitch you could lust after or run from. You could be in the middle of a desert and her shadow would make you cold. And I had taken her money.

44

I SLOWED the Plymouth into a quiet, mechanical cruise when I hit the Inter-Boro. A dark, twisting piece of highway, paved with potholes. Abandoned cars lined the roadside, stripped to the bone. I lit a smoke, watched the tiny red dot in the windshield, feeling the tremor in my hands on the wheel. Not knowing if I was sad or scared.

The blues make a rough blanket, like the ones they give you in the orphanage. But they keep out the cold. I shoved a cassette into the tape player without looking, waiting for the dark streets to take hold of me and pull me in, waiting to get back to myself. When I heard the guitar intro I recognized the next song, but I sat and listened to the first call-and-answer of "Married Woman Blues" like the fool I was.

Did you ever love a married woman?

The kind so good that she just has to be true.

Did you ever love a married woman?

The kind so good that she just has to be true.

That means true to her husband, boy,

And not a damn thing left for you.

That wasn't Strega. She wasn't good and she wasn't true-at least not to her husband. I popped the cassette, played with the radio until I got some oldies station. Ron Holden and the Thunderbirds singing "Love You So." I hated that song from the first time I'd heard it. When I was in reform school a girl I thought I knew wrote me a letter with the lyrics to that song. She told me it was a poem she wrote for me. I never showed it to anyone-I burned the letter so nobody would find it, but I memorized the words. One day I heard it on the radio while we were out in the yard and I knew the truth.

I never had to explain things like that to Flood. She knew-she was raised in the same places I was.

There was too much prison in this case-too much past.

I tried another cassette-Robert Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail" came through the speakers. Chasing me down the road.

45

BY THE next morning, the magnum was back in my office and all but five thousand of the money was stashed with Max. I told him most of what happened the night before-enough so he could find the redhead if things didn't work out. I couldn't take Max with me on this trip-he was the wrong color.

I took Atlantic Avenue east through Brooklyn, but this time I rolled right on past the Inter-Boro entrance, past the neighborhood called City Line and into South Ozone Park. In this part of Queens, everybody's got territory marked off-the gangsters have their social clubs, the Haitians have their restaurants, and the illegal aliens have their basements. When you get near J.F.K. Airport, you move into the free-fire zone-the airport is too rich a prize for anyone to hold it all.

I pulled into the open front of a double-width garage. A faded sign over the door said "Ajax Speed Shop." A fat guy sat on a cut-down oil drum just inside the door, a magazine on his lap. His hair was motorcycle-club-length; he had a red bandanna tied around his forehead. He was wearing a denim jacket with the arms cut off, jeans, and heavy work boots. His arms bulged, not all from fat. He'd been a body-builder once; now he was slightly gone to seed.

A candy-apple-red Camaro stood over to my right, its monster rear tires filling the rear tubs under the fenders. The garage specialized in outlaw street racers-guys who made a living drag racing away from the legal strips. The back of the joint was dark.

I didn't wait for the fat guy. "Bobby around?" I asked.

"What do you need, man?" he wanted to know, his voice still neutral.

"I want to try a nitrous bottle. Bobby told me he could fix me up.

"For this?" he wanted to know, looking at the Plymouth 's faded four doors. Street racers use nitrous oxide-laughing gas-for short power-bursts. You need a pressurized tank, a switch to kick it in, and enough cojones to pull the trigger. They're not illegal, but you want to fix things up so your opponent won't know you're carrying extra horses. The Plymouth didn't look like his idea of a good candidate-or maybe it was the driver.

I pulled the lever under the dash and the hood was released-it popped forward, pivoting at the front end. The fat guy went around to the passenger side as I got out, and we lifted the entire front end forward together. The whole front-end assembly was Fiberglas-you could move it with two fingers.

The fat guy looked into the engine bay, nodding his head.

"Three eighty-three?" he wanted to know.

"Four forty," I told him, "with another sixty over."

He nodded sagely. It was making sense to him now. One four barrel?" he asked-meaning, Why just one carburetor for so many cubic inches?

"It's built for torque-got to idle nice and quiet."

"Yeah," he said, still nodding. The Plymouth wasn't for show-just the opposite. He walked around the car, peering underneath, noting that the dual exhausts never reached the bumper. The rear undercarriage puzzled him for a minute. "It looks like an I.R.S. Jag?"

"Home-built," I told him. Independent rear suspension was better for handling, but it wouldn't stand up to tire-burning starts-drag racers never used it.

And that was his next question. "Whatta you run with this…thirty-tromp?"

You can race from a standing start or side-by-side at a steady speed and then take off on the signal. Thirty-tromp is when each driver carries a passenger-you reach thirty miles an hour, make sure the front ends are lined up, and the passenger in the left-hand car screams "Go!" out the window and both cars stomp the gas. First car to the spot you marked off is the winner.

"Twenty's okay," I told him. "It hooks up okay once you're rolling."

"You want the nitrous bottle in the trunk?"

"Where else?" I asked him. I opened the trunk to let him look inside.

"Motherfucker! Is that a fuel cell?"

"Fifty-gallon, dual electric pumps," I told him. The kid who built it would have been proud.

The fat guy's suspicions were gone-he was in heaven. "Man, you couldn't run this more than one time-it's a fake-out supreme! Where do you race?"

"Wherever," I said, "as long as they have the money."

"What do you duel for?"

"A grand-minimum," I said.

The fat guy scratched his head. He was used to guys spending thousands and thousands to build a car and then racing for fifty-dollar bills. Guys who put a good piece of their money into the outside of their cars-like the Camaro sitting there. He'd heard about guys who treated the whole thing like a business-no ego, all for the bucks-but he'd never seen one before. "I'll get Bobby for you," he said, "wait here."