“Ridiculous,” he repeated.
“Better belt up,” she said. “We might be in for a bumpy ride.”
As Tommy buckled the safety harness across his chest, Del drove speedily but warily from the shadow of the bakery and across the front parking lot. Clearly, she expected the Art Deco van to bullet out of the night and crash into them.
A debris-clogged storm drain had allowed a small lake to form at the exit from the lot. Leaves and paper litter swirled across the choppy surface.
Del slowed and turned right into the street, through the dirty water. Theirs was the only vehicle in sight.
“Where did it go?” Del Payne wondered. “Why the hell isn’t it following us?”
Tommy checked his luminous wristwatch. Eleven minutes after one o’clock.
Del said, “I don’t like this.”
Ticktock.
Half a mile from the New World Saigon Bakery, in the stolen Honda, Tommy broke a three-block silence. “Where did you learn to hot-wire a car?”
“My mom taught me.”
“Your mom.”
“She’s cool.”
“The one who likes speed, races stock cars and motorcycles.”
“Yep. That’s the one. The only mom I’ve got.”
“What is she—a getaway driver for the mob?”
“In her youth, she was a ballet dancer.”
“Of course. All ballet dancers can hot-wire a car.”
“Not all of them,” Del disagreed. “After she was a ballet dancer, she married Daddy.”
“And what does he do?”
Checking the rear-view mirror for any sign of a pursuer, Del said, “Daddy plays poker with the angels.”
“You’re losing me again.”
“He died when I was ten.”
Tommy regretted the sarcastic tone he had adopted. He felt coarse and insensitive. Chastened, he said, “I’m sorry. That’s tough. Only ten.”
“Mom shot him.”
Numbly, he said, “Your mother the ballerina.”
“Ex-ballerina by then.”
“She shot him?”
“Well, he asked her to.”
Tommy nodded, feeling stupid for having regretted his sarcasm. He slipped comfortably back into it: “Of course, he did.”
“She couldn’t refuse.”
“It’s a marital obligation in your religion, is it? To kill one’s spouse upon request?”
“He was dying of cancer,” Del said.
Tommy felt chastened again. “Jesus, I’m sorry.”
“Pancreatic cancer, one of the most vicious.”
“You poor kid.”
They were no longer in an industrial district. The broad avenue was lined with commercial enterprises. Beauty salons. Video stores. Discount electronics and discount furniture and discount glassware stores. Except for an occasional 7-Eleven or twenty-four-hour-a-day coffee shop, the businesses were closed and dark.
Del said, “When the pain got so bad Daddy couldn’t concentrate on the cards any more, he was ready to go. He loved cards, and without them, he just didn’t feel he had any purpose.”
“Cards?”
“I told you—Daddy was a professional poker player.”
“No, you said he now plays poker with the angels.”
“Well, why would he be playing poker with them if he wasn’t a professional poker player?”
“Point taken,” Tommy said, because sometimes he was smart enough to know when he had been defeated.
“Daddy travelled all over the country, playing in high stakes games, most illegal, though he played a lot of legal games in Vegas too. In fact, he twice won the World Championship of Poker. Mom and I went with him everywhere, so by the time I was ten, I’d seen most of this country three times or more.”
Wishing he could just keep his mouth shut but too fascinated to resist, Tommy said, “So your mother shot him, huh?”
“He was in the hospital, pretty bad by then, and he knew he was never getting out.”
“She shot him right there in the hospital?”
“She put the muzzle of the gun against his chest, positioned it very carefully right over his heart, and Daddy told her he loved her more than any man had ever loved a woman before, and she said she loved him and would see him on the Other Side, and then she pulled the trigger, and he died instantly.”
Aghast, Tommy said, “You weren’t there at the time, were you?”
“Heavens, no. What kind of person do you think Mom is? She’d never have put me through something like that.”
“I’m sorry. I should have—”
“She told me all about it an hour later, before the cops came by the house to arrest her, and she gave me the expended cartridge from the round that killed him.”